The past year had a sense of being a turning point. Of the world being launched upon some kind of destructive course and careening full speed toward as yet unknown disaster. In this respect it is similar to the year 1933, when the foundations of the subsequent momentous events in world history were laid but the events themselves were yet to take shape.
Barack Obama recently remarked on this by mentioning Vienna in the interwar period, when cultural efflorescence and scientific discovery seemed destined to go on forever. “And then 60 million people died. An entire world was plunged into chaos,” he said.
The year 1933 started with Hitler being appointed German chancellor in late January. In the subsequent election in March his National Socialist Party failed to win a majority; nonetheless, his narrative portrayed the Nazi movement as relentlessly sweeping the country and he went on governing as though he had a full popular mandate.
Trump, a minority president, likewise began his first year with a shift in the narrative and destruction of the truth, claiming record crowds at his inauguration, an unprecedented margin of victory and voter fraud. Lies of Goebbelsian proportions have since multiplied and became even more brazen.
Trump’s rhetoric of making the country great again – by ridding it of foreigners – and outright racism of his policies have been noted repeatedly as having been in some ways parallel to early Hitler’s – at least in their mean-spiritedness as well as dehumanization of various groups of outsiders. Like Hitler Trump is positioning the United States in opposition to other nations – painting a picture of a hostile world in which everyone is out to take advantage of the United States. This is surely consonant with Germany’s chip-on-the-shoulder resentments in the post-World War I years.
Hitler moved swiftly to assert his personal power, ban other parties and trade unions, replace the police apparatus with his thugs and set up concentration camps for his opponents, Dachau outside Munich being the first one. Trump has been slower on the uptake, even though he has been laying foundations for the persecution of dissent with his unending barrage of “fake news” tweets and attacks on the Democrats. A purge of law enforcement agencies, starting with the FBI and the Department of Justice, has been openly called for by his surrogates.
What Trump has done just as promptly as Hitler was to sour the tone if the national discourse. We no longer blink an eye when Dreamers are callously betrayed, families are separated and children’s health care programs are sacrificed for the benefit of tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations. Foreign dictators are embraced, including bloody butchers and aggressors. Insults have become the language of politics. Hatred is suddenly ok. Words like coup d’etat, conspiracy and treason are being bandied about with remarkable ease. Thanks to Trump, the United States has become meaner, more self-centered, evil. And it has been in a virtual civil war which Trump seems to encourage with his tweets.
As to concentration camps, America already has Guantanamo as well as a huge network of private prisons ready to hold big-mouth liberals.
Both Hitler and Trump came to power with an image of truculent clowns, like something out of a Stephen King novel. In their first year they put everyone on notice that they are way worse than that and should be taken dead seriously.
A series of seemingly unconnected events taking place in 1933 were to click over the next six years to lead to a global conflagration. They included the rise of fascist parties and governments around Europe: in Austria, Portugal, Romania and Norway, to name but a few. It was the year when Japan left the League of Nations.
In 1933 the Soviet Union fully partook in the epidemic of crimes against humanity that ran parallel with Germany’s. The Bolshevik neo-slaveholding GULAG system became legitimized with the opening of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, purges and show trials began in earnest (including the persecution of gay men who were charged with spying). The first half of 1933 marked the worst months of the genocidal Holodomor in Ukraine and man-made famine in other parts of the USSR.
On the positive side, however, it was the year when the foundations of the defeat of fascism and the post-World War II global political and economic system were laid as well – except no one knew that it was happening, least of all the protagonists themselves. FDR moved into the White House in March 1933 and later in the year Churchill spoke in Parliament warning Britain of the dangers of Hitler’s rearmament.
Even faced with an unprecedented economic calamity Roosevelt didn’t move away from the democratic principles on which the United States was built and didn’t restrict private property. However, he greatly extended social democracy and began building an economic safety net, which has since become a hallmark of every civilized country in the world. It is notable that the institutions that he created and which have been the bedrock of global prosperity and peace over the past seventy five years are being rapidly dismantled by Trump and his appointees in various departments of the Federal government. The tax reform hastily passed and signed into law as 2017 was nearing the end has been designed to knock the financial underpinnings from under liberal state government as well.
We’re currently seeing the methods and ideologies of trumpism – or putinism, which is very much the same thing – being adopted by aspiring authoritarians the world over. Including Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, Netanyahu in Israel, the governments in Poland and Hungary, the resurgent right wing parties around Europe and Brexiters in the UK. As 2017 draws to a close, there is a sense of the world being on the brink of something nasty, of a number of dark years lying ahead.
The spread of 1933-style authoritarianism comes at a bad time. We’re facing a slew of problems that didn’t exist a century ago: overpopulation, ungovernability, accelerating climate change, the refugee crisis and turmoil in the Muslim world. There are more arms in the world, and they are more sophisticated, including AI killing robots that are being rapidly perfected. Rather than helping to solve those problems, technology gives rise to a bunch of new ones, ranging from pervasive surveillance to hacking to job-killing automation.
The near and medium-term future looks bleak but perhaps unbeknownst to us forces that will stand in the way of this dark wave are taking shape as well, the way they did back in 1933.
