We not only repeat history, we copy it
I’m told that studying history is a good way to avoid repeating it. But, as a whole, it’s not working out that way. Studying history has done little to prevent us from repeating the worst things we’re capable of. America in 2022, for example, looks distressingly like Germany in the 1930s.
Some of the political pathogens that sickened Germany back then have yet to fully metastasize here. But the symptoms of our infection are not subtle.
Granted, I’ve long been stuck on this subject. But now I’m not just watching the news, I’m listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The book, of course, is the history of Germany’s 20th-century bout of insanity and a blunt reminder of what can happen in a year. William Shirer, the author, was a journalist then covering Adolph Hitler’s clawing, body-by-body, to power. He stayed for the subsequent dismantling of just about the entirety of German morality. When Shirer got back to Germany after the war, he gained access to the documents with which Nazis efficiently recorded the minute details of their barbarities.
Those courts also “increasingly severe restrictions… on the availability of contraceptives and on access to legal abortion.” The restrictions, an academic study noted, evolved into “special courts” empowered to impose the death penalty on women and providers involved in terminating an unwanted pregnancy.
America in 2022? Within six months of taking office in January, 1933, Hitler stripped away civil rights (starting with restrictions on speech). When he couldn’t overturn a law, he just ignored it. The legislature was neutered and replaced with toadies within two months of his coming to power. Before the year was out, he purged independent thinkers from the professions and civil service, demonized and then banned other political parties, outlawed several religions, banned books, quit international cooperative organizations and treaties, kicked “perverts” out of the armed forces, censored scientists and their investigations, directed the largest chunks of national wealth to the military and, staging great oratorical rallies, merged his very person with German exceptionalism.
Per immigration and inclusion, he regarded “the forcible amalgamation of one people with another alien people not only as a worthless political aim but in the long run as a danger to… a nation.”
Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
Copying history. Needless to say, many of today’s elected, appointed, and self-appointed leaders don’t ignore such history. They take notes.
After watching election after election, outrageous proposal after outrage, alarm after culture war after Supreme Court ruling, I’m not sure that they know what they’re doing. I’ve never had much faith in humankind’s abilities to conspire in any numbers. This doleful cycle of woe, of course, could just be a case of lust for power and money – not history – repeating itself.
In 1929, Hitler put it this way: “If men wish to live, then they are forced to kill others. The entire struggle for survival is a conquest of the means of existence, which in turn results in the elimination of others from these same sources of subsistence.”
I suspect that best explains the mindset of the American leaders and judges currently disenfranchising certain classes of voters, obliterating truth, compromising health care, banning thought, fabricating enemies and criminalizing natural behaviors. It is a short bridge from competing to competition without limits.
The solution, in any case, is to vote. But I must add that, in 1932, Adolph Hitler lost an election, claimed victory anyway, and never held another.