How reading Hitler’s deliberations with his generals might make you lose it with sociopathic scammers

When we moved into this neighborhood, an older man stopped by to welcome us, and we thought that was sweet. But, pretty quickly, it became clear that his agenda was warning us against the lesbian couple who lived across from him. He told us that “some people around here” were doing things “forbidden by the Bible.” I became very animated about my need to unpack this box in exactly the right way and said something about being really busy. But he went on spouting fundagelical (and false) talking points about homosexuality and Christianity, and put the cherry on the top by telling me, condescendingly, that he was an expert on the Bible, and willing to help me with it. That happened to be a point in my life when my ancient Greek was crappy, but manageable for the work I was doing (I couldn’t sit down and read Scripture in Greek because both my vocabulary and grammar sucked, but I could follow the arguments about translation in interesting ways), but I was furious. I said something along the lines of, “Oh, really, do you read Hebrew and Greek?” And he said, “No.” And I said something like, “Oh, well, I read Greek, but I’m always looking for someone who reads Hebrew.” He left. Chagrined.

I considered it a win.

As it happens, our son became really good friends with the son of the couple he hated, and so we learned that that bigot harassed that couple a lot.

He shares one of our last names, and lately we’ve been getting a lot of calls for him. We checked, and they’re scams. We don’t really know where he is (he might have moved, since the house seems to have had some remodelling), and we don’t really care. We had three choices: ignore the calls (it’s landline, so we can’t block), tell them they have the wrong people, or, what I did, since I spent much of today reading Hitler’s deliberations with his generals. I spent a day reading about how a guy who believed that what he wanted for himself and people like him merited the killing of 355 million people, so I was pretty much done with sociopaths who think they can make a buck this way.

I lost it, and called back one of the numbers and told the guy who answered the phone that I hope he spends every day of his life dealing with people like him, and that, when he’s old and vulnerable, he is the prey of people like him.

I was so enraged that I was completely incoherent and almost certainly ineffectual, and it was all in service of a bigot, but I’m still proud about it.

And, fyi, the numbers all seem to be 844 area code.

Rough draft of the intro for the Hitler and Rhetoric book

[Much of this is elsewhere on this blog. I’m curious if I’m still having the problem of being too heady and academic.]

Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor who spent 1938-1945 in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler. Yet, Neimoller had once been a vocal supporter of Hitler, who believed that Hitler would best enact the conservative nationalist politics that he and Niemoller shared. Niemoller was a little worried about whether Hitler would support the churches as much as Niemoller wanted (under the Democratic Socialists, the power of the Lutheran and Catholic churches had been weakened, as the SD believed in a separation of church and state), but Neimoller thought he could outwit Hitler, get the conservative social agenda he wanted, disempower the socialists, and all without harm coming to the church. He was wrong.

After the war, Niemoller famously said about his experience:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]

Niemoller was persuaded that Hitler would be a good leader, or, at least, better than the Socialists. After the war, Niemoller was persuaded that his support for Hitler had been a mistake. What persuaded him either time?

Christopher Browning studied the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and its role in Nazi genocide, narrating how a group of ordinary men could move from being appalled at the killing of unarmed noncombatants to doing so effectively, calculatedly, and enthusiastically. German generals held captive by the British were wiretapped, and often talked about how and why they supported Hitler, many of whom had been opposed to him. In 1950, Milton Mayer went to visit the small German town from which his family had emigrated and talked to the people living there, writing a book about his conversations with ten of them, all of whom to some degree justified not only their actions during the Nazi regime, but the regime itself—even those who had at points or in ways resisted it. Melita Maschmann’s autobiographical Account Rendered, published in 1963, describes how she reconciled her Hitler Youth activities, which included confiscating property and helping to send people to camps, with her sense that National Socialism was idealistic and good. Robert Citino’s The Wehrmacht Retreats, David Stone’s Shattered Genius, and Ian Kershaw’s The End all describe how so many members of the German military elite not only reconciled themselves to working for Hitler, but to following orders that they believed (often correctly) meant disaster and defeat. Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement gives a depressing number of examples of major figures and media outlets that persuaded others and were persuaded themselves that Hitler was a rational, reasonable, peace-loving political figure whose intermittent eliminationist and expansionist rhetoric could be dismissed. Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland similarly describes American figures who were persuaded that Hitler wouldn’t start another war; accounts of the 1936 Olymplic Games, hosted by the Nazis, emphasize that Nazi efforts were successful, and most visitors went away believing that accounts of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination were overstated. Biographers of Hitler all have discussions of his great rhetorical successes at various moments, enthusiastic crowds, listeners converted to followers, and individuals who walked out of meetings with him completely won over. Soldiers freezing to death in a Russian winter wrote home about how they still had faith in Hitler’s ability to save them; pastors and priests who believed that they were fighting to prevent the extermination of Christianity from Germany still preached faith in Hitler, blaming his bad advisors; ordinary Germans facing the corruption and sadism of the Nazi government and the life-threatening consequences of Hitler’s policies similarly protection their commitment to Hitler and bemoaned the “little Hitlers” below him who were, they said, the source of the problems. The atrocities of Nazism required active participation, support, and at least acquiescence on the part of the majority of Germans—the people shooting, arresting, boycotting, humiliating, and betraying victims of Nazism were not some tiny portion of the population, and those actions required that large numbers walk by. Some people were persuaded to do those things, and some people were persuaded to walk past.

After the war, what stunned the world was that Germans had been persuaded to acts of irrationality and cruelty previously unimaginable. Understanding what happened in Germany requires understanding persuasion. And understanding persuasion means not thinking of it as a speaker who casts a spell over an audience and immediately persuades them to be entirely different. Rhetoric, which Aristotle defined as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, isn’t just about what a rhetor (a speaker or author) consciously decides to do to manipulate a passive audience. What the case of Hitler shows very clearly is that we are persuaded by many things, not all of them words spoken by a person consciously trying to change our beliefs. Rhetoric helps us understand our own experience, and the most powerful kind of persuasion is self-persuasion. What a rhetor like Hitler does is give us what scholars of rhetoric call “topoi” (essentially talking points) and strategies such that we feel comfortable and perhaps deeply convinced that a course of action is or was the right one. Rhetoric is about justification as much as motivation. That isn’t how people normally think about persuasion and rhetoric, and, paradoxically, that’s why we don’t see when we’ve been persuaded of a bad argument—because we’re wrong about how persuasion works.

This book is about Hitler, and yet not about Hitler. It’s really about persuasion, and why we shouldn’t imagine persuasion as a magically-gifted speaker who seduces people into new beliefs and actions they will regret in the morning. It’s never just one speaker, it’s never just speech, it’s never even just discourse, the beliefs and actions aren’t necessarily very new, and people don’t always really regret them in the morning.

[1] There are various versions. This one is from here: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392

Table of Contents for Hitler and Rhetoric coursepack

Table of contents for the Rhetoric and Hitler course.

This coursepack is in addition to the required texts.

Required texts: Hitler, Mein Kampf (required)

Gregor, How to Read Hitler (recommended)

Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (required)

                                    The Third Reich in Power (recommended)

Ullrich, Hitler (required)

coursepack at Jenn’s (required)

Jasinski, Sourcebook (available as an e-book through the UT   Library)

 

Syllabus

Rhetoric and Hitler: an introduction

Kenneth Buke, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”

O’Shaughnessy, from Selling Hitler

McElligott, from Rethinking Weimar Germany

Hitler, March 23, 1933 speech

Sample papers

“Advice on Wrting”

Hitler, speech to the NSDAP 9/13, 1937

—. speech, 8/22/39

—. interview with Johst

—. speech, 1/27/32

Tourish and Vatcha, “Charismatic Leadership and Corporate Cultism at Enron: The Elimination of Dissent, the Promotion of Conformity and Organizational Collapse”

Entry on interpellation

Hitler, speech 4/28/39

Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (480-83)

Kershaw, from The End (386-400)

Hitler, speech 7/13/34

Longerich, selection from Holocaust (Nazi evolution on genocide)

Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk 12-16, 422-426

Entry on inoculation

Selection from Tapping Hitler’s Generals (30-62)

Kershaw, from Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (197-206)

Selection from Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (166-173)

“Dog whistle politics”

Selections from Shirer’s radio broadcasts

Selection from Snyder’s Black Earth

Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (75-79)

Selection from Spicer’s Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust

Hitler, speech 4/12/22

“Dissociation” from Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric

Selection from Encyclopedia of Rhetoric

Selection from Eichmann in Jerusalem

Selection from Eichmann Interrogated

Selection from Hitler and His Generals

Selection from Ordinary Men

Louis Goldblatt’s testimony before the Committee on National Defense Migration

Letter to Mr. Monk

Thomas Mann, “That Man is My Brother”

“Masculinity and Nationalism”

“Art of Masculine Victimhood”

Hitler, speech 6/22/41

selection from Longerich’s Hitler

selection from Maschmann’s Account Rendered

 

Niemoller and the “atheists are bad because Nazis were atheist” argument

A lot of people love to quote Martin Niemoller, thinking he was a poet who wrote a poem that functions as a metaphor for complying with evil.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

There are various versions of it, some of which begin with the Nazis coming for communists first, and some with the Nazis coming for the Jews first. But, it wasn’t actually a poem. It was something that Neimoller said in lectures, because it wasn’t metaphorical—it was his narrative of what actually happened to him, and how he actually responded. And his whole point was that he was okay with what the Nazis did as long as he thought their policies didn’t hurt him. It was only when he ended up in jail that the problem with Nazis wasn’t their outcomes (which he liked till they hurt him), but their way. Their process was one to which he should always have objected, but he didn’t because he liked the outcome. Till he didn’t, and then he realized the process had been wrong all along.

Those processes were ones that could be used to hurt him, and so he should have paid attention to them.

I think that’s where we are. I think a lot of people are okay with Trump’s processes because they like the outcomes and they don’t realize those processes could hurt them. Niemoller realized, once he was in jail, that the ends don’t justify the means—because the means remain.

Here’s what Hitler promised: I will protect the in-group. I will institute a government that is not about fairness across groups; my policies will be entirely about promoting and protecting the in-group. That is a way  of determining policy: the government should protect and support people like me, and it’s not my business if official policy is something I would be outraged if applied to me.

Hitler said (and had always said), there are true Germans, and the German government should protect and promote their interests. That’s an argument (I will protect true Germans), and a way of arguing (laws should be applied differently depending on identity).

That second level is the one Neimoller bungled: he was fine with how the Nazis treated people until and unless it hit people like him (the Christian churches in Germany never objected to the treatment of Jews—they only mildly objected to the treatment of converted Jews; in other words, they only protected am in-group). Niemoller accepted the premised that, as long as your in-group is okay, the government is okay. Let’s think of that as the “argument from in-group/out-group” level. People might support Nazism because it seemed to support their in-group, and the hostile actions were against an out-group.[1] The way that Nazis operated—laws should be applied differently for in- versus out-group—was bad, but Niemoller was okay with it till he was a victim of that way.

This is what is important about Niemoller: his way of thinking was wrong. He was wrong because he was fine with a set of policies that applied to people that he didn’t want applied to him.

In other words, Niemoller was fine with other groups being treated in a way he would not want to be treated. It isn’t about what you’re doing; it’s about how you’re doing something. Are you treating others as you would think fair were you treated that way?

There’s a guy. He said in-group/out-group membership didn’t count. He said fairness across groups matters. Niemoller’s mistake was ignoring what that guy said, and that’s the point of his quote. People shouldn’t judge the actions of another (or a government) on the basis of whether we are harmed or benefitted at this moment, but whether we would think those actions just if applied across groups.

Hitler said (and all demagogues say), “I am you. You and I need to expel/exterminate this group that wants to exterminate us. Because they want to exterminate us, anything we do is justified.”

What Hitler did (and, to be blunt, all authoritarian demagogues do) is equivocate on the construction of that in-group. In-groups are often defined in the negative—we are this because we are not that. We take pride in not being that (to give a personal example, ELCA taking pride in not being Missouri Synod). In a culture of demagoguery, there is an out-group (Jews, communists) and any violence against that out-group is justified because they are toxic to the body politic. You demonstrate your commitment to the in-group by how much hate you express about the out-group.

When Hitler was coming to power, Niemoller was a conservative Lutheran pastor who thought the Nazis might be useful allies in regaining some of the ground lost under the socialist democrats, both in terms of the power of the church (especially Protestant) in material and cultural ways. He thought he was in Hitler’s in-group. And he thought that because there was so much rhetoric that said that there were only two sides: you could be an atheistic communist, or you could be Nazi. Hitler never argued against the many parties in the middle (including Democratic Socialists, who were not atheist, nor fascist, nor communist).

The socialists had been in favor of a separation of church and state, and so allowed secular public education, and Niemoller (and other religious figures) were worried about possibly additionally losing the substantial amount of money they got from the state. He believed, correctly, that the Nazis would not allow for the separation of church and state (whoops on how he read that belief), that they would insist on religion in the classroom, that they would have a government with an openly religious mission, and he thought he could work with them on the money issue. As far as cultural issues, Niemoller’s politics were far closer to the Nazis’ than to the socialists. He believed, correctly, that the Nazis would reinstate conservative policies regarding homosexuality, abortion, birth control, women’s rights, and religious intolerance. Niemoller was pretty typical in that regard. What that means, and this is important, is that Niemoller and people like him, because they weren’t willing to deal with a mild cutting back on their privileges, actively supported a regime that would eventually exterminate them.

And they did it because they were so obsessed with getting certain policy points–abolition of homosexuality, abortion, and birth control; a judicial system that (they thought) would promote their political agenda; financial benefits for the churches; protection of rabidly religious education—that they were willing to overlook how those policy goals would be attained.

But it’s the how that matters. Not just how policy was attained, but how people reasoned.

There is a talking point now that Nazis were atheists, and therefore atheists are bad, so, as long as we keep atheists out of office, we could never have a Holocaust. Hitler talked a lot about God, almost certainly sincerely, and, while he had some higher-level supporters who espoused atheism, most of the higher-ups were some kind of theist (even if neo-pagan), and, overwhelmingly, supporters of the regime were avowed Christian. Nazism was openly genocidal from 1939, and the genocides were not some kind of secret activity on the part of a few people. Genocide was the official and open policy of the Wehrmacht—the orders were to kill everyone who might be a political or ideological threat, and that “threat” was determined racially. People who identified as Christian stood by the side of a ditch and laughed as blood spurted from the layers of people they were killing. Had all the Christians refused to engage in genocide, the war would have ended in 1939. They didn’t. The Nazi regime was a Christian regime because most of the people enacting Nazi policies were Christian.

People who want to argue that being Christian makes someone a better person (really bad theology) and that, therefore, we should only have Christian judges and politicians, try to use Nazi Germany as an example as to why leaders should be Christian. The Nazi regime was atheist, they say, and it was bad, therefore regimes should be Christian. Not everyone in the Nazi regime was atheist, however, and most of the people who voted for, supported, and enacted Nazi policies were Christian. But, that argument is that Hitler’s entourage had a disproportionate number of atheists, and therefore atheists are dangerous. Or, Hitler’s entourage had a disproportionate number of non-Christians, and therefore this is proof that a predominantly Christian government is safe.

Here’s the problem with how people tend to argue (and it’s the problem Niemoller was trying to point to): it isn’t what you argue; it’s how you argue. For a long time, all he cared about was what people were arguing, and then he suddenly realized that what mattered was how they argued.

Milton Mayer’s troubling book They Thought They Were Free describes ten people who submitted to Nazism cheerfully, and who continued to believe that Hitler was good (but had bad advisors). It has a brilliant explanation as to why they continued to believe in Hitler, and one part of the explanation is that people tend to think in the short term as to whether they are, in this moment, better, and not whether the way they got the things they like is a good way. Mayer says that they believed “Adolf Hitler was good—in my friends’ view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending on the individual’s assessment of his strategy” (69-70). In other words, he was good for Germany until things started to go bad, but Hitler’s strategy was bad from the beginning—his was of deliberating, his plans for world domination, his racist policies. It’s as though they thought that drinking arsenic was great till the moment it killed someone—they didn’t acknowledge that the way Hitler ruled was always going to end up in an unwinnable war, racial extermination, and a devastated Germany.

There are a lot of ways to assess an argument; here I want to mention three. First, it’s a good argument because it’s made by someone you thinking is good. Second, it’s a good argument because it confirms your beliefs, and so it intuitively feels right. Third, it’s a good argument because the way it’s argued would be, you think, a good way to argue even if you didn’t like the outcome.[2] There is a similar division in terms of thinking about politics: you can decide that a policy is good because it’s advocated by someone you like; or it’s good because you’re benefitting from it here and now; or it’s good because the way it was argued and enacted and applied would be, you think, good even if you didn’t benefit from it.

The argument that Nazism was atheist fits into the first and second categories, but not the third. It is probably made by people you like, and it gets you a conclusion you like (Christians are good and Nazis are bad). But the way it’s argued—if you consistently applied that logic—would lead to your endorsing Nazi policies.

I say, “Kale is bad because I threw up after eating it.” If I sincerely believed that was a good way to argue, then I’d be willing to stop consuming anything that made me throw up. [In rhetorical terms, the enthymeme has a major premise I’ll support in other circumstances.] But, what if I threw up after drinking tequila? If I’m going to stick with the premise established in regard to kale, then I’d also conclude that tequila is bad (personally, I’d support that conclusion), in which case my argument about kale is logical. But, what if I ever want to drink tequila again (and, really, I’d say you should think about that), then my conclusion about tequila has a different premise from my argument about tequila.

In other words, the major premise of my stance about kale (things that make me throw up should be avoided) is not one I hold consistently, so it isn’t actually helping me make decisions about what to consume. It’s only helping me rationalize decisions I make for other reasons.

If I like tequila (really, why would you do that?), I’ll find lots of reasons to exempt it from the “it makes you throw up” argument I’m willing to make for kale. And that’s the important point, if I’m not willing to reason across kale and tequila, then I don’t have a logical argument. I’m just looking for reasons to hate kale and like tequila (don’t—don’t do that).

If my way of making decisions is to protect my commitments, then I will start with a premise (kale is bad), and I will just look for datapoints to support that premise. And here’s what’s important for thinking about how people reason—I will feel that I am logical in my feelings about kale since I can find lots of evidence to support my claim. You can find lots of evidence to support any claim, after all. What you can’t find (and this is where Infowars and conspiracy theories get it wrong), is evidence that you apply with consistent premises. But that’s a different pot. Here’s the point I’m making: if I’m not actually willing to apply my reasoning about kale to other things that make me throw up, then I’m not being logical; I’m just neck-deep in the swamp of confirmation bias.

It might be true that kale is bad, but kale being bad doesn’t confirm my way of reasoning. What I mean by that is that it might be true that Nazis are bad political leaders (they are), but that doesn’t mean that Christians are good political leaders. Nazis weren’t bad because some of the Nazi leaders were atheists; Nazis were bad because they were entitled authoritarian racist fascist militarist German exceptionalists who rejected any notions of universal human rights. The Nazi way of reasoning never changed, but its outcomes did—what Mayer shows is that, when that way got people what they wanted, it seemed good; when it didn’t it got bad. They didn’t see that the bad was the inevitable consequence of the apparently good.  The Nazi way of reasoning initially seemed good to Niemoller, because it got him what he wanted. But it wasn’t a good way, because it got him in jail. And then he saw it was bad—it was bad all along, but he didn’t see it till he was in jail.[3]

What the Nazis should teach us is that our group succeeding is not a good reason to support a politician—we should support politicians who advocate policies we would support regardless of whether they benefit us personally. And we shouldn’t just judge an argument as to whether it gets a conclusion we like; we should think about whether we would consider it a good way of arguing for everyone.

And that’s where the “Atheists are bad because the Nazis were bad” gets awful. That argument assumes that you can and should take disproportionate representation of some group in a bad power structure as proof that the group as a whole is evil. Nazis were evil, you reason, and a disproportionate were atheist, and so all atheists are dangerous. So, if that’s a good way to argue, then if a disproportionate number of leaders of Pol Pot’s revolution were left-handed, we should consider left-handed people evil. Or, if a disproportionate number of people in Lenin’s group were Jews, then Jews are bad.

And that is exactly how Nazis did (and do) argue. So, if you think that the presence of atheists in the Nazi regime is proof that Nazism is essentially atheist (regardless of the religious affiliations of the people who enacted Nazi policies) then you’re a Nazi. Lenin’s group had a disproportionate number of Jews, so, your logic says the Nazis were logical to say all Jews are essentially bad. That’s how you reason.

I’m not saying that you think Jews are essentially bad. I’m saying you’re Niemoller. Niemoller didn’t think Protestants should be jailed. But he didn’t like communists or socialists or Jews. And he knew that the Nazis would violate laws and act in authoritarian ways to exterminate out-groups. For a long time, he was only concerned with the outcome of their policies, and not the way they enacted their policies. Hitler was a liar, and had always been a liar, but, when Hitler told a lie Niemoller liked, Hitler’s way of arguing or administering didn’t matter. It was only when Niemoller ended up in jail that he realized Hitler’s way was wrong, and it had always been wrong.

The way matters. If you think that atheists can’t be trusted because leading Nazis were disproportionately atheist, then you think the Nazis were right about the Jews. Or, in other words, you aren’t really thinking.

[1] And here I have to stop and explain that sociologists use the in-group/out-group distinction in a very specific and useful way. People often use “in-group” to mean people in power, but sociologists use it to mean the group you’re in. So, while pitbull owners is not a politically central group, it’s an in-group for people who believe that owning a pitbull is an important part of their identity.

[2] I am in an intermittent state of rage as to how scholars in rhetoric talk about Aristotle’s ethos/pathos/logos—it’s read in light of logical positivists logic/emotion binary. If you read what Aristotle says about politics and ethics, however, I think you end up with something much more like what I’m saying here.

[3] I’d also say it matters because all scams—ethical or monetary—rely on getting people to ignore major premises. If you want to scam someone, you get them to reason the wrong premises. Someone sells you a bad car on the grounds that he’s a nice guy; someone gets you to vote for her on the grounds that she is like you; someone persuades you to buy property on the grounds that he’s sold other property that made money. Those are all arguments that rely on major premises that are obviously invalid.

Peter declared, “Even if everyone else deserts you, I will never desert you.”

Listening to the exchange with Peter in “Matthaus Passion,” and the exchange with Peter makes me a little weepy.

This is the script (from here)

Recitative [Tenor. Bass I. Bass II]
Violino I/II, Viola, Continuo Evangelist (T), Peter (B.I), Jesus (B.II)
Evangelist:
Petrus aber antwortete und sprach zu ihm:
But Peter answered and said to him:
Peter:
Wenn sie auch alle sich an dir ärgerten,
Even if everybody else is offended because of you,`
so will ich doch mich nimmermehr ärgern.
yet I shall never be offended.
Evangelist:
Jesus sprach zu ihm:
Jesus said to him:
Jesus:
Wahrlich, ich sage dir: In dieser Nacht,
Truly, I say to you: this night,
ehe der Hahn krähet, wirst du mich dreimal verleugnen.
before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.
Evangelist:
Petrus sprach zu ihm:
Peter said to him:
Peter:
Und wenn ich mit dir sterben müßte,
Even if I had to die with you,
so will ich dich nicht verleugnen.
I shall not deny you.
Evangelist:
Desgleichen sagten auch alle Jünger.
The same said all his disciples.

Other translations are here. 

As many of you know, I’ve been reading a lot about the Holocaust, and especially the era when Hitler was able to put into place the culture, processes, and propaganda that would enable the Holocaust. Hitler’s serial genocides didn’t begin in 1941, but in 1933, when the people who could have stopped the processes being put in place chose not to because they liked the short-term outcome they were getting (triumphing over socialists, a conservative political agenda, a rhetoric that openly promoted nationalism and ethnocentrism, and rabidly anti-immigration rhetoric, as well as the open equation of the national identity with one ethnic/political group). The military liked the new open militarism, and lots of people liked the rhetoric that said that Germany had never been wrong in its previous invasion that had had disastrous outcomes in terms of economics and prestige.

And I see so many people now condemn Hitler as though they would have resisted. And, of course, I like to think I would have resisted. Timothy Snyder’s powerful Black Earth ends with a moving description of various people who resisted, and we want to see ourselves as someone like that.

And so did Peter.

I think we’re all Peter. Peter did eventually resist, of course—he got a second chance. I think he resisted later because he knew that resistance was hard, because he hadn’t resisted before. Peter’s problem when Jesus first told him that Peter would not resist was that he thought resistance was easy. We underestimate what resistance means, and we overestimate our ability to resist because we forget how oppression happens.

Hitler didn’t start out saying that he intended to expel and/or exterminate all the inferior races/identities (Jews, Romas, Sintis, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, leftists), nor that he intended to restrict the churches, start another world war, and engage in serial genocides, but he did. He claimed he intended the opposite, that he would respect all religions, work for economic stability, and maintain peace. He would, he said, never start a war. (And, as it happens, he continued to insist on that–he never admitted that his aggressions were aggressions, always insisting he was forced into military action by other countries refusing to go along with his plans or that they were about to attack.) Hitler’s rhetoric was one of national entitlement, and he was clear in Mein Kampf what that meant—Germany was entitled to military domination, European hegemony, its own way of narrating history, the expulsion of Judaism and Bolshevism (which he saw as the same) from Europe, and a kind of Aryan colonialism in Europe. When 1933 rolled around, he continued to argue for the same policies, but, through a careful use of dog whistles, made it seem as though he had become more reasonable.

In other words, Hitler said to people, “I am a completely different person from who I have always been,” and people accepted it.

They accepted it because they had a conversion narrative about how a person who has always been and behaved a certain way would suddenly behave a new way. Thus, they said, you can ignore everything he has always been and said. Because they were getting the political agenda they had always wanted.

So, even though they had every reason to think his intentions weren’t good, they didn’t worry about the processes he was putting in place—they liked the short-term outcome. They liked the political agenda. They ignored the process.

People often quote Martin Niemoller.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

When I first came across this quote, I thought it was metaphorical. But it wasn’t. It’s exactly what Niemoller did. Neimoller, a Lutheran pastor, really didn’t object when socialists, unionists, and Jews were arrested. He continued to try to work with the Nazis. The Nazis, whose religious beliefs are complicated (since Hitler lied like a rug, it’s hard to say what his beliefs were, other than that he genuinely believed himself to be chosen by the Almighty to cleanse the world), clearly wanted something along the lines of a state church (in an odd way, they were theocrats), and therefore intended to undermine the power of other sources of power, but they did so slowly. Just as Hitler made a pact with the USSR that he fully intended to abrogate, so he made promises to the Catholic and Lutheran churches he fully intended to violate. And, so, those churches chose to ignore his history of being a liar in favor of believing that he wasn’t lying to them, and they did so because, at first, he came through with his promises to them.

When liars lie in ways that benefit the in-group, we think they are on our side, and can therefore be trusted. That Hitler also delivered a passionate and loyal group of voters, and that his base would enable others to get their policy agenda passed (such as restricting birth control, banning homosexuality, enhancing the military) just simply meant that people were willing to overlook how he was getting those policies through—his demonizing of democracy in favor of some kind of authoritarian understanding of “true” people, his insistence that the judiciary follow his policy agenda (rather than worry about whether judges were fair, deeply knowledgeable, or respected), his equation of dissent with disloyalty, his throttling of the Reichstag.

Niemoller was a conservative anti-Semite who genuinely didn’t care when groups he disliked were silenced and imprisoned. He didn’t mind that they were silenced because he was okay with the outcome, and didn’t pay attention to the process. He only realized he should have cared when the same processes and logic were used to silence and then imprison him.

We are told that Jesus’ disciples wanted to fight when he was arrested, so perhaps, like many people, Peter was willing to engage in a big, public battle. But his courage failed in the little moments—in the moment that would have meant he would have been arrested without drama, without spectacle. No one would have known. Bravery isn’t about the big moments; it’s about the little ones.

Niemoller, a conservative anti-Semite, later realized that he should have been brave on behalf of people he found dangerous and very other. Peter realized he should have been brave in the private moment, when there was danger to him and no public display of his bravery.

When we imagine a movie moment in which we are brave, and there is an audience approving of us, we are not imagining how people enable tragedy.

Persuasion happens

Recently, I heard a really good discussion by a couple of people who do and promote a lot of good research on how people think. And one of them said, “We used to believe that you could change peoples’ minds by presenting them with research, but research shows that isn’t the case, so I don’t believe that anymore.”

He didn’t appear to notice the irony.

A lot of research on persuasion isn’t very good, in that it shows something that Augustine talks about—people are not likely to believe completely different things from listening to one speech. And people in a study who are presented with new information don’t change their minds because they shouldn’t—for all they know, since they know it’s a study, the information is deliberately false. Even the better research on persuasion shows that a lot of people don’t change their minds on issues associated with in-group loyalty on the basis of one argument.   (The one exception is if they are presented with information that the in-group supports a particular position—then they are likely to get their position in line with the in-group.)

But, as in the case above, people do change their minds. Philip Tetlock shows that even authoritarians change their minds—they just deny they did. It’s hard for authoritarians and naïve realists to admit they’ve changed their minds because admitting that they were wrong means admitting that their whole model of judgment is wrong.

And research does have an impact on that process of changing our minds. The short essays in How I Changed My Mind About Evolution have a common theme: people realized that the anti-evolution rhetoric they’d been taught depended on a misrepresentation of evolution. The inoculation technique  —presenting people with a weak version of an argument they will later hear or read—backfired because the authors in that book realized it was a weaker version.

Inoculation is, it seems to me, a particularly unethical strategy when it comes to religious issues, since it’s a violation of Christ’s requirement that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. And, unhappily, it often results in people rejecting religion rather than rejecting the narrow and bigoted religious ideology that can only survive by misrepresenting its opposition.

For inoculation to be effective, it has to be coupled with either demonization/pathologizing of out-groups (out-group views are so spiritually dangerous or intellectually infectious that you can’t even let yourself listen) or insistence on pure in-group loyalty. If inoculation is promoted in a culture that also emphasizes victimization—the in-group is in danger of being exterminated, and so listening to the out-group is treasonous—then people might not realize they’re being presented with a weak version of out-group arguments.

Inoculation (coupled with demonization/pathologizing of the out-group) isn’t specific to reactionary politics, although, because of “conservatives”’ privileging of in-group loyalty , it tends to work better with people who vote conservative, but one can see it everywhere on the spectrum of political arguments.

Non-conservatives unintentionally enhance the effectiveness of inoculation through various practices: 1) repeating misrepresentation of out-group belief systems (no, conservative Christians are not hypocritical because they cite Hebrew Bible rules about sex and yet reject the rules about shellfish)—just stop that); 2) not knowing the best arguments for the positions we oppose (for instance, not only are there instances of people stopping crimes by having a gun, but gun bans have a complicated consequence ; 3) treating all out-group members as identical; 4) relying on sources that misrepresent their own sources (Blue State, dailykos, and Mother Jones—I’m looking at you).

Projection is also important in persuasion, and one aspect of projection that works well for various in-group enclaves is to condemn others for being in an enclave. Really effective propaganda machines appear to offer both sides, by presenting the audience with the desired political outcome, and then a more extreme version (so segregationists like Boutwell could claim to be reasonable because he didn’t support violence — keep in mind that that stance worked, so that people presented Boutwell’s implacable opposition to integration was reasonable, and King’s position was unwise) All factional media insists that we are getting our information from objective sources; they only consume factional media. And, that we are consuming media that engages in inoculation means we don’t think we are in a bubble. We think we are listening to the other side.

People are persuaded by research. They are persuaded by research they consider valid and that they are persuaded represents the consensus of responsible experts on the subject.

All of those terms–research, validity, consensus, responsible experts–are vexed, and heavily influenced by in-group favoritism, but persuasion happens.

We are all persuaded. The worst thing about our current political situation is that there is so much discourse that says “I have become persuaded that persuasion is impossible, and so we must stop trying to persuade others.”

No. When people are persuaded that persuasion is impossible, they are preparing themselves for violence.

[The image is of Nazis enjoying humiliating Jews on Austria abandoning democracy and joining Germany.]

“Charisma Isn’t Leadership, and Other Lessons We Can Learn from Trump the Businessman”

“One can only hold the masses by habit or force” (Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talks, 335, 24th-25th February 1942).

What I want to suggest in this talk is that charismatic leadership is a tempting way to solve the problem of institutional compliance in a culture of outcomes-based ethics—that is, if the dominant mantra is survival of the fittest, might makes right, or some other system that says a process/action was ethical if it led to success (such as any version of what is generally inaccurately called “Darwinism”).  I argue that charismatic leadership, especially as imagined in current popular management discourse, is an attempt to ground compliance to institutional norms in normative agreement rather than legitimacy, tradition, or coercion (none of which are possible in an outcomes-based ethical system, such as is assumed in social Darwinism, the magic of the market, or the just world model). Because institutions grounded in such a system don’t have access to compliance arguments grounded in fairness, and coercion is expensive, charismatic leadership (which its emphasis on agency by proxy) appears a sensible rhetoric. Further, as imagined in current popular management discourse, charismatic leadership when coupled with the current dominant lay political theory, can easily create the conditions under which fascism seems the most sensible governmental system. Basically, my argument is: the combination of management rhetoric’s promotion of charismatic leadership as the ideal model, lay political theory about disagreement and deliberation being unnecessary, and the fantasy that all we need in government is a good businessman means that fascism will appeal to a lot of Americans.

I’ll begin with something not particularly controversial among political scientists/theorists: for an institution to be stable, people within that institution need to obey the laws. Why shouldn’t all of us in this room take all these chairs home and sell them on e-bay?

It’s conventional to characterize the various mobilizing ideas (that is, the ideas that mobilize you not to steal chairs) as:

What matters for these purposes is that the top three are often characterized as systems grounded in legitimacy, and the bottom three are grounded in authoritarianism (of various degrees).[1]

My first claim is that a culture of outcome-based ethics makes grounding any institution in legitimacy virtually impossible, leaving such institutions or cultures reliant on some version of authoritarianism, perhaps even fascism. I’ll argue that charismatic leadership is an attempt to square the circle, and get the kind of compliance that comes from ideal normative agreement by reframing blind obedience.

By outcome-based ethics, I mean any ethical system that says that triumph is the measure—that is, success is sufficient proof that success was merited (what social psychologists call the just world model). A culture or institution in which triumph is the measure of merit (the ends justify the means, might makes right, the proof is in the pudding, survival of the fittest) will not value setting ethical standards that apply across groups.  Fairness across groups is explicitly rejected in those moral systems as giving aid to people who don’t deserve it, as makers carrying the takers, or, at best, as unnecessary. Outcome-based ethics are generally profoundly individualistic—at most, they advise fairness within one’s in-group, but even that is shaky.

Corporations have yet another rhetorical/motivational problem. Increasingly, employees are expected to behave with more than mere compliance—to work more than 40 hours a week, to sacrifice health and homelife, more than they will be compensated. The ideal employee gives more to the corporation than she gets back in monetary compensation—the ideal employee values loyalty more than is fiscally rational. But this is not a symmetric relationship—the corporation is not expected to value loyalty to employees more than its fiscal bottom line. Business pundits generally justify businesses cracking open pension funds, closing down, firing people, minimizing benefits, and other practices on the grounds that a business should make decisions on purely economic grounds; but businesses don’t want employees reasoning the same way.

Look at it this way. Imagine a corporation that says that the best employee is the one who bills the most hours or sells the most units, regardless of whether the job really required that many hours or the customer needed that many units. If the incentives are such that anything short of breaking the law and getting caught is allowed, then on what grounds can the corporation say “When it comes to clients, all you should worry about is maximizing your profit, but don’t treat the organization that way”?

Were the “it’s okay to see everyone else as an opportunity to maximize your profit” a consistently applied ethic, the question wouldn’t be whether it’s right or wrong for us to steal the chairs and sell them on e-bay (whether we would want our possessions to be treated that way—an issue of fairness), but the possible profits, the likelihood of getting caught, the relative costs and benefits. If it’s okay to falsify your timesheet in order to get more money out of customers, on what grounds is it not okay to falsify your expenses in order to get more money out of your corporation?

It’s the same problem with a culture—if maximizing your share of goods is the major ethical dictum, then on what grounds should you obey the law? Only if you’re likely to get caught, if obeying the law directly benefits you, or if the costs of disobeying are higher than the benefits of law-breaking. Needless to say, that ends up being a chaotic culture.

There are two closely-related ways that cultures of outcome-based ethics can try to restrain the damage inherent to that ethical system: first, appeal to in-group/out-group ethics, mobilizing in-group identification to create loyalty to the in-group (so we won’t steal the chairs because A&M is our in-group, and we feel that stealing would be disloyal to that group—in other words, and this is the important part, replace the cultural strength provided by fairness with the power of in-group loyalty); second, get that in-group loyalty attached to a particular person (in other words, charismatic leadership).

For in-group loyalty to trump the message to maximize self-interest it has to be really powerful. The ideology has to promote

    • “the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;”

That is, the ideology has to say that looking out for yourself is really looking out for your group and vice versa. So, instead of it being an individualistic social Darwinism (if you succeed it’s proof that you deserved the success) but group-based. Instead of it being your right as an individual to dominate others, it has to be:

    • “the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.”

It’s possible sometimes to get that level of commitment to a group—that’s what both political parties try to do at their conventions, with mixed success—but it’s unlikely for a corporation to be able to get people to identify with the corporation (especially in a world in which a dominant message is that employers don’t have to be loyal to employees past the point of profitability). Thus, the strategy more likely to work is to get identification with the leader of the corporation or with individual managers.

And so we’re extremely likely to have that strategy promoted through two other mobilizing passions:

    • “the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
    • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;”

This structure isn’t an invitation for everyone in the corporation to contribute to decision-making; it isn’t one in which all employees are asked to do whatever they think is the right thing to do—it’s hoping for a system in which people believe so much in the leader that they do whatever s/he says, and that they try to please the leader at all times by doing more than is required.

As such, it’s a kind of distortion of Kant’s ideal normative agreement—since all deliberation is handed over to the natural chiefs, then all the “perfect information” an individual needs for making their decisions is what the chieftain has decided is the correct course of action.

There are many disturbing moments in Adolf Eichmann’s interrogation and trial, and one that rattled one of the judges which is especially relevant to this argument is when, having boasted (and bemoaned) that he had the obedience of a corpse, he also claimed that he had also always lived by the Kantian notion that, as Eichmann said, “the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws” (Arendt 136). Carsten Lausten and Rasmus Ugilt explain Eichmann’s argument. For Eichmann,

“there existed no difference between the Fuhrer’s will and the moral law or, in more general terms, between legality and morality. He could thus recognize his subjection to Hitler’s will as an unproblematic act. He had personally sworn him the oath of allegiance, and this included an obligation toward his word of command (Arendt 1992, 149). The Fuhrer’s word was given immediately and imperatively. It had the power of the law (Gesetzkraft) and hence was not to be doubted (Arendt 1992, 148).” 
(167)

This is often discussed as Eichmann’s distortion of the Kantian principle but Arendt notes that it wasn’t his alone. Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal attorney, had defined “the categorical imperative in the Third Reich” as “Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve it” (qtd. in Arendt 136). And, in fact, during the Nuremberg trials, other Nazis invoked Kant to defend the ethics of their action (or, more accurately, the ethics of their refusal to accept responsibility); but it was the “Kant” of Hans Frank, one in which the will of the chieftain is entirely integrated into the deliberations of individuals. It’s the “leadership principle” (or “Fuhrer principle”). It’s fascism.

And here I want to point out how charismatic leadership is described in much management discourse. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management (Ed. Nigel Nicholson, Pino G. Audia, and Madan M. Pillutla. Vol. 11: Organizational Behavior. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. p40-41) says there are three stages in charismatic leadership.

“The first stage concerns the leader’s sensitivity to the environment. Charismatic leaders can be distinguished from non-charismatic leaders in this stage by their heightened sensitivity to deficiencies and poorly exploited opportunities in the status quo.”

“Stage two of the leadership process concerns the act of formulating future goals or directions. Charismatic leaders are distinguished by a sense of strategic vision versus rational or purely tactical goals. Here the word vision refers to an idealized, highly aspirational goal that the leader wants the organization to achieve in the future. In articulating the vision, the charismatic leader’s verbal messages construct reality such that only the positive features of the future vision and the negative features of the status quo are emphasized. The status quo is usually presented as intolerable, and the vision is presented in clear specific terms as the most attractive and attainable alternative. Charismatic leaders’ use of rhetoric, high energy, persistence, unconventional and risky behavior, heroic deeds, and personal sacrifices all serve to articulate their own high motivation and enthusiasm, which then become contagious among their followers.”

“In the third and final stage of the leadership process – aligning followers’ actions to realize goals – leaders in general build in followers a sense of trust in their abilities and clearly demonstrate the tactics and behaviors required to achieve the organization’s goals. Charismatic leaders accomplish this by building TRUST through personal example and RISK TAKING and through unconventional expertise. They also engage in exemplary acts that are perceived by followers as involving great personal risk, cost, and energy.”

I want to emphasize that a leader who is charismatic is not necessarily someone engaged in charismatic leadership—charismatic leadership is a very specific kind of relationship between leader and follower. It is a method of policy determination that allows agency by proxy for the followers (they are agents only insofar as they identify with the leader).

Whether it’s good for businesses is much more up for argument than one might think from airport bookstores, but that isn’t really my point. My argument is that the shift to charismatic leadership is necessitated by the problem of how to motivate people when fairness across groups is precluded by the dominance of outcomes-based ethics, especially in a context of deliberately asymmetric ethical responsibilities (that is, the corporation wants loyalty from employees, but is neither promising nor delivering loyalty to them). And the result is a kind of leadership that crosses over into several of the characteristics of fascism.

Again, whether that’s good, bad, or even necessary for business isn’t my point. The problem for democracy arises when the dominance of this semi-authoritarian soft fascism gets entangled with the dominant lay political theory.

Unhappily, at least for theorists of democratic deliberation, a large number of Americans (perhaps most):

“want to distance themselves from government not because of a system defect but because many people are simply averse to political conflict and many others believe political conflict is unnecessary and an indication that something is wrong with government procedures. People believe that Americans all have the same basic goals, and they are consequently turned off by political debate and deal making that presuppose an absence of consensus. People believe these activities would be unnecessary if decision makers were in tune with the (consensual) public interest rather than with cacophonous special interests.” (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 7)

At the base of this belief is that there is no such thing as legitimate political disagreement—the true course of action is obvious, and there is a kind of “normal American” whose interests politicians should be protecting. They don’t because they are influenced by “special interests”—“special interests” being “any interests other than mine.”

So, for instance, descendants of immigrants, who believe that America benefitted by immigration policies that allowed their ancestors in don’t want those same policies now—immigration policies that helped them were the right choice then; the same immigration policies, helping people exactly like their ancestors, are special interest.

This view delegitimates the interests of any group proposing alternate policies; it thereby delegitimates democracy itself. This view—that the interests of one group (my group) are the only legitimate ones—is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) advocating a one-party state. It is also implicitly eliminationist—the people who are claiming to have different interests don’t count, shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and should probably be expelled. Any system of government (or political thought) that relies on the sense that there is one kind of citizen whose desires are the only legitimate basis of public policy has at least one foot on the ladder of extermination.

In short, a large number of people believe that they are living in Kant’s ideal normative agreement, in which the only view that matters is theirs and the people like them, and they imagine that “people like them” all agree on the best government policies. It isn’t that they are motivated by hate for others, but simply that their common sense suggests to them that they are normal, they know what they want, and that the government should be organized to give normal people what they want most—if not all—of the time.”

And, of course, it doesn’t because that isn’t really how big institutions of any kind work (for one thing, “normal” people actually want very different things). The problem is that when it doesn’t, when policies are compromises, constrained, or have benefits that aren’t immediately obvious, instead of concluding that it’s actually complicated to come up with a good policy, people feel betrayed by their government because their narrative is that the obvious course has been ignored in favor of special interests—Real Americans aren’t getting what we deserve because not-Real Americans have corrupted the government. Real Americans are getting screwed over by non-American influences. Or, in other words, such people’s reaction to politics is based in

    • “the belief that one’s group is a victim,”
    • “dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of class conflict, and alien influences;”

Whether the implicit authoritarianism and proto-fascism of charismatic leadership is good, bad, necessary, or just a fad in business management isn’t my point. My point is that that model of leadership is, as Weber famously said, fraught and dangerous, and it is profoundly anti-democratic. Businesses don’t have to be democratic, so this model isn’t necessarily a problem in business.

But, it’s when the model is moved over to government that we have serious problems. And the fantasy that we should hand our government over to someone who has good decision-making capabilities, and that such a capability is demonstrated by being rich (as long as he’s in-group)[1]

There are four sets of ideologies at play here: 1) outcome-based ethics, but a group-based version (if the in-group succeeds, that’s proof that the in-group was entitled to success, and anything that enables that success is ethical); 2) management rhetoric about charismatic leadership; and 3) lay political theory that says we should empower someone who gets what “normal Americans” want; 4) the assumption that government needs a successful (in-group) businessman to lead it.

At that point, we can add up what political passions we have ready to be mobilized, and it’s (in bold)

    • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
    • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
    • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
    • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
    • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
    • the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
    • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
    • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

So, the combination of management rhetoric’s promotion of charismatic leadership as the ideal model, lay political theory about disagreement and deliberation being unnecessary, and the fantasy that all we need in government is a good businessman means that fascism will appeal to a lot of Americans.

As  you can see, though, there are a lot of things missing. While there is a lot of media promoting these bolded notions, and major politicians running on the basis of those passions, we’re okay as long as there isn’t media claiming that the in-group is in danger of extermination, that exclusionary violence on the in-group is legitimate, that we are facing an overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions. In February of 1942, Hitler boasted to his tablemates:

“It’s enough for me to send for Lorenz and inform him of my point of view, and I know that next day all the German newspapers will broadcast my ideas. [….] With such collaborators at my side, I can make a sheer about-turn, as I did on 22nd June last, without anyone’s moving a muscle. And that’s a thing that’s possible in no country but ours.”(Hitler’s Table Talk, 22nd-23rd February 1942 (p 332).

Ruh roh.

[1] I have to point out that, if you look at that list, you see Aristotle’s three kinds of persuasion—deliberative, epideictic, and judicial—but let’s set that aside. Ideal normative agreement is unlikely under most conditions, since it assumes that disagreement is an illusion, and that everyone always already actually agrees, but it does get the deepest and most powerful levels of commitment. I’ll come back to this point, though.

Excerpts from William Shirer’s This is Berlin (1999)

William Shirer was a correspondent in Germany in 1939 and 1940. Below are some excerpts from his broadcasts.

9/19/38. “Isn’t it wonderful,” I’ve been told a hundred times today by scores of people who did not hide their sense of relief. “Isn’t it wonderful. There’s to be no war. We’re going to have peace.”

[….] Not only National Socialist Party members, but others. They all felt that Chancellor Hitler had brought them undoubtedly the greatest victory of his career. “And mind you,” a German newspaperman said to me tonight. “It’s a bloodless victory.”

[….] “Like the occupation of the Rhine. Like the Anschluss with Austria. Done peacefully, without war.” I’ve heard these phrases a dozen times today. (15)

4/23/39.  [His perception of what the majority of Germans believe]

First, that Great Britain, backed by Daladier, Stalin and Roosevelt, is forging an encirclement of German designed to crush the Reich.

Secondly, that Hitler is right if, profiting by the lessons of 1914, he desires to break that encirclement before it is successfully completed.

Thirdly, that eastern and south-eastern Europe is a natural part of Germany’s Lebensraum—or space necessary for its existence—and that neither Britain nor anyone else, including America, has any right to interfere with Germany’s action there.

Fourthly, that Hitler, whether they like him or not, will get what he wants in eastern Europe, and get it—as he got Czechoslovakia at Munich—without a war.

Fifthly, that there will therefore be no war, and that they—the German people at any rate—do not want war. And that war can only come if the “encirclement powers”, jealous of Germany’s success, attack the Reich, in which case they will gladly fight, and this time, they say, Germany will win.

And sixthly, the mass of the German people, whatever they thought of Hitler before, or even though they still do not like many aspects of the regime, do feel that he has outsmarted the “foreign tyrants”, as they call them, who were trying to keep Germany down, and that he has restored it to its proper place in the world. And that without a single shot being fired, nor the life of one German soldier sacrificed. (42)

10/6/39. At a press conference in the Wilhelmstrasse tonight, one skeptical newspaperman asked how the Western Powers would be assured that Herr Hitler had no further demands, since that had been said before. The answer was that only now are the real foundations for a lasting peace in the interests of all there. (107)

10/8/39. Germany waits—and I must say waits hopefully—for the answer of Paris and London to what the Nazis consider was a very generous peace offer from Herr Hitler. (108)

11/19/39. [T]he papers keep repeating what Great Britain would do to Germany and Germans in case of victory. In a front-page editorial this morning the Volkischer Beobachter, official Nazi organ, tells its readers that England’s aim is not only the destruction of Germany, but the enslavement of the German people. (139)

12/30/39. Herr Hitler tells people in this New Year’s proclamation that what he terms “the Jewish international capitalism in league with the reactionaries” is really responsible for this war. Says he, and I quote, “The German people did not want this war. I tried up to the last minute to keep peace with England…But the Jewish and reactionary warmongers waited for this minute to carry out their plans to destroy Germany. These war-gentlemen wanted the war, and now they’ll get it.” (173)

1/9/40. Dr. Robert Ley, one of the most important members of the Nazi regime, states it clearly in the Angriff tonight. Says he: “We know that this war is an ideological struggle against world Jewry. England is allied with the Jews against Germany. How low must the English people have fallen to have had as war ministers a parasitical and profiteering Jew of the worst kind… England is spiritually, politically and economically at one with the Jews…For us, England and the Jews remain the common foe…Germany has won the first battle. Hore-Belisha has fallen.” (181-2)

2/25-26/40. The Montag, for instance, headlines the speech GERMANY WILL BREAK THE TERROR OF THE WORLD PLUTOCRACY. A struggle of Germany to free itself from the terror of Britain and France. A struggle against world-plutocracy and the world-Jews for freedom. That’s the way this war is being presented to the people of Germany. (204)

4/9/40. The German government, to use the term of an official proclamation issued in Berlin, has “taken over the protection and Denmark and Norway for the duration of the war.” (237) [The official propaganda was that England was about to invade them.]

The German occupation of Norway and Denmark, which the German newspapers tell us was done to safeguard their freedom and security…(239)

4/10/40. To give you an idea of the state of mind in Berlin today, let me cite the German press. Its front-pages glorify today’s achievements of the German army and tell the readers that Germany today, as the Nachtausgabe says, has merely taken steps “to safeguard the freedom and security of Norway and Denmark”. The same paper blames England and France for what happened. The Borsen Zeitung says, “England goes cold-bloodedly over the dead bodies of the small peoples. Germany protects the weak states from the English highway robbers.” And the same paper concludes, “Norway ought to see the righteousness of Germany’s action which was taken to ensure the freedom of the Norwegian people.” (241)

5/6/40. The German press continues to devote most of its headlines to warning that the British are about to spread war by aggressive action in the Mediterranean, in the Balkans, even in Spain. Observers here still wonder what is back of this press campaign, remembering that we had a very similar one in regard to Scandinavia six weeks ago. (263)

5/10/40. At a hastily convoked press conference at the Foreign Office at 8 a.m., Herr von Ribbentrop read to us the memorandum in which Germany explains why she marched into the two Low Countries. The argument, summed up, is that Britain and France were about to attack Germany through the two little countries, and that Germany therefore deems it necessary to send in its own troops to safeguard the neutrality of Belgium and Holland. The memorandum also blames the two countries for not having maintained a really neutral attitude. Belgium, for instance, is blamed for having built its fortifications against Germany, not against France, though it would seem that the Belgians this morning should be glad they did. (268)

5/15/40. Dr. Ley, one of Herr Hitler’s chief lieutenants, writes in the Angriff tonight: “Hitler brought Germany to reason and made us happy. We’re convinced we will now bring Europe to reason and make it happy. That’s his God-given mission.” (277)

6/1/40. Press attacks on France continue. Said a German radio commentator: “There can be no peace in Europe until the Negro-ized and Jew-ized people of the plutocrat Reynaud are taught with a sharp sword that no crime goes unpunished.” (306)

6/2/40. As to the invasion of Holland and Belgium, most Germans you meet believe the justification given by the government and the army—namely, that the Allies would have attacked if the Germans hadn’t beaten them to it. Thus the German move is always referred to in the press as the “counter-thrust”. Exactly the same explanation was given for the Norwegian campaign and, I think, accepted by the great majority of people. One must remember that when Germany went into Poland last September, the official communiques described it as a “counter-attack”. (309)

7/19/40. In other words, Hitler offers peace to Britain. On what terms, he does not say. But one thing is evident. The German people will now follow him as never before, for they will say: He offered England peace and no strings attached to it. He said he saw no reason for going on with the war. If the war goes on, it’s England’s fault. That’s what the German people will say. (355)

8/1/40. Nearly every day now one or the other of the German newspapers gives us a glimpse into the New Europe which the Third Reich is now planning for this continent as soon as the war is over. Today Dr. Ernst Timm, writing in the Borsen Zeitung, gives us a further glimpse.

The last result of nationalism in Europe, he says, was the union of all Germans in one nation. The next phase in Europe will be known by what he terms “European Responsibility”, a responsibility, he adds, which has been taken over by Germany. He finds three points in his new conception of Europe.

    1. Only a nation in Europe which is conscious of its European responsibility has a right to take part in the new reconstruction. A people like the French, which he says has become mixed with Negroes and Jews, has no right to European leadership.
    2. Only peoples who through their greatness and their life-force are capable of European contributions have the right to self-responsible action.
    3. The European leader-peoples, as he puts it, carry the responsibility not only for their own national fate, but also for that of the smaller peoples who are placed in their Lebensraum—or living space. (367)