My grandparents on my mother’s side were Geordies from the North East of England, born and bred, but on my father’s side were born in the Austro-Hungarian empire. My grandfather from Hungary and my grandmother from Austria, just off the Danube – Rembrandtstrasse – just a short walk from the University. Cultured and deeply integrated. Distantly related to the Freuds.
My father was in Austria, in hiding, when the Nazis marched in 1938, and witnessed where the people thronged the streets, full of praise for the unification by their Austrian hero coming home, with his German troops in their smart uniforms.
The authorities wasted little time getting their equivalent of ICE agents out onto the streets searching for the undocumented. If they found them, they were detained and deported. Nobody quite knew to where, but my father knew enough to know it wasn’t a good idea to be caught. Later, he calculated that between Austria and Hungary that the Nazis and their proxies, installed into power under the Third Reich, murdered 19 of his relatives including his brother, killed by Hungarian ultra nationalists, the kind of Hungarian equivalent of the Proud Boys but State-sanctioned… most of the others are documented in the extermination camps records.
When in Vienna, in these turbulent times, he was on a tram and the Austrian equivalent of ICE were going through the tram demanding to see proof of ID. They started to surround and harass a woman who obviously had none, or perhaps had papers that would identify her as someone deemed un-Austrian. Like the people in Minnesota who are outraged at the attacks on their friends and neighbours, without planning to, my father started berating, shouting at the officials for their bullying tactics. It caused such a commotion that it resulted in the officials throwing both him and the woman off the tram which sped away, preventing the arrest of both. The upshot was two lives saved from almost certain death.
By 1945 it was calculated that Hitler’s equivalent of making Germany great again had cost the lives of two thirds of all Europe’s Jews. Certainly none the occupants of bourgeois RembrandtStrasse ever returned from detention. Those properties in those streets known locally as the Jewish quarter, stood eerily empty for decades before the authorities repossessed them. Nobody asked the difficult questions when obeying orders and providing papers about where these people had gone.
To obtain a house in Poland during the early forties only required you to report where a Jewish family lived and, hey presto, the house could become yours. If you’ve ever wondered how so many good catholics live in Poland in houses with a Star of David carved into their architecture… this might well provide an awkward explanation.
Perhaps, like canaries in the coal mine, it takes someone from mixed heritage, like me, to see the patterns of repression and totalitarian authoritarianism a little sooner, before they become fully fascist and genocidal, and probably to see them a little more keenly. But to me, the patterns of conduct Trump and his closest officials in high office represent exactly the same kinds of low life who emerged in charge of affairs under the Third Reich: swaggering, bullying narcissistic sociopaths with a keen nose for corrupt opportunity and power.
A strong moral compass is not really innate in humanity. It has to be nurtured and valued above the temptations to yield to evil, to cross by on the other side, to turn a blind eye… to say nothing on a tram when racist nationalists are helping to shape the climate that will one day soon deliver full-on fascism.
Rather than calling it the butterfly effect let’s relabel it the moth effect: What started as one disgruntled, indifferent antisemite (which anyway went with the populist grain), a former corporal who had survived WW1 carrying a bitter grudge against the ways of the world in the 1920s, took quite a while to gather the head of steam it did. Hitler’s first attempt at insurrection failed. His second attempt, however, was delivered through the ballot box. He assured Chamberlain as late as 1938 that Britain had nothing to worry about. His bombs were pounding London only a matter of months later and the allies were flattening Berlin five struggling years later still. The new liberal pluralistic order that emerged after the war broadly held the peace in Europe for many decades to come. The chaos that broke up Yugoslavia was the first warning salvo that the emotional weight of nationalism and the resentments bred there could trump stable systems. Brexit was the next.
It’s not hyperbolic to say we badly need to heed Churchill’s concerns about the rise of the Third Reich now. There really is no time left for further procrastination. Putin poses a powerful threat to democratic norms – as did Stalin before him – but Trump and the reactionary nationalist forces he represents pose an equally alarming danger to democratic norms. It can’t be fixed by waiting it out. The cognitive impairment that is definitional clinical narcissism and the madness of it is on full display. His desire to own Greenland as a piece of real estate was prefigured when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, his geriatric will to power* openly announced for all to read, almost as a provocation: ‘try to stop me’.
Well, we must.
Editor’s comment:
* A concept of the philosopher, Nietzsche:
“The will to power is everywhere you look and once revealed, so blindingly obvious that you will wonder how you didn’t notice it before. Power needs opposition in order to make itself felt, rebellions must be quelled, dissenting opinions stifled, opponents defeated, enemies disarmed, and critics humiliated so that the good feelings that arise from the successful discharge of one’s strength can be felt. “
https://thestandupphilosophers.co.uk/explained-what-is-the-will-to-power/
