Capitalism and Nazism

The next time someone tells you the Nazis were anti-capitalist, show them this.
by Corey Robin

From Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy.

Commenters on my blog claim the graph tells us nothing about the Nazis and capitalism; it only tells us that the economy improved under the Nazis. As it did in the United States under FDR. So maybe the graph plotting capital’s return under Nazism just shows general improvement in the economy in the 1930s, an improvement widely shared throughout the industrial world?

Luckily, Suresh Naidu, the kick-ass economist at Columbia, supplied me with the following graphs.

This first one, which comes from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, compares the share of national income that went to capital in the US and in Germany between 1929 and 1938. Suresh tells me that the share roughly tracks capital’s rate of return.

Long story short: capital was doing better under the Nazis than under FDR. Not because of overall increases in economic performance in one country versus another, but because of the economic policies of the regime. Or so Suresh tells me. (Usually academics are supposed to acknowledge their debts to their friends and readers but own all errors as their own: in this case, I’m blaming everything on Suresh.)

The second graph — which comes from this fascinating article by Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Betting on Hitler: The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany” — tracks the stock market’s performance in Britain, US, France, and Germany, from January 1930 to November 1933. As you can see, in the early months that Hitler came to power, Germany’s stock market performance was quite strong, outstripping all the others; it’s not until July that it even crosses paths with Britain’s, the second best performer.
voth-43-21

From Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Betting on Hitler:
The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany”

On Twitter, Justin Paulson brought this fascinating article from theJournal of Economic Perspectives to my attention. It’s called “The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party.” Apparently, the first use of the word “privatization” (or “reprivatization”) in English occurred in the 1930s, in the context of explaining economic policy in the Third Reich. Indeed, the English word was formulated as a translation of the German word “Reprivatisierung,” which had itself been newly minted under the Third Reich.

After I sent him this article, Phil Mirowski also sent me this piece by Germà Bell, “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in the 1930s,” from the Economic History Review. This article also has some fascinating findings. From the abstract:

In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s.

Source: Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/capitalism-and-nazism/

Ernst Nolte’s Revenge

Conflations of Bolshevism and Nazism are the order of the day. Ernst Nolte would be pleased.
by Daniel Lazare

A Jobbik rally in Hungary in 2012. Ivádi László

Our new issue, “Rank and File,” is out now. To celebrate its release, new subscriptions are discounted.

Ernst Nolte, the Hitler apologist who gave liberal German historians a collective coronary in the 1980s, died this summer in Berlin aged ninety-three.

For a while, Nolte seemed to be the big loser in the famous Historikerstreit, or historians’ dispute, that set German intellectual life ablaze for a few months beginning in June 1986. Ostracized for his thinly veiled efforts to excuse Nazi war crimes, he retreated into a kind of internal exile, ignored by his colleagues and forgotten by the press.

His chief opponent, the social theorist Jürgen Habermas, meanwhile emerged as the hero of the day, the very model of a public intellectual who defends democracy when not holding forth in the lecture hall. It’s not often that the Left emerges victorious, but this was one occasion when it did.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the victory celebration: it began to fade. Nolte was partially rehabilitated fourteen years later when the Deutschland Foundation, which is close to the right wing of the ruling Christian Democrats, gave him its Konrad Adenauer Prize for literature and Horst Möller, director of the respected Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, seized on the opportunity to praise him for a “life’s work of high rank” and to defend him against “hate-filled and defamatory” efforts to stifle free debate.

Rather than a hero, it seemed that Habermas was now an intellectual bully of sorts. Meanwhile, a watered-down version of Nolte’s thesis has become increasingly dominant thanks to such popular historians as Yale’s Timothy Snyder, author of the bestselling Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a historian of the gulag.

The neo-Nolteans have been careful to avoid the “causal nexus” that got Nolte in such trouble, the idea that Nazism was an understandable response to Bolshevik atrocities, although one that happened to go overboard. Instead, they skirt causation altogether by arguing that Nazism and Communism interacted in some unspecified way so as to drive one another to unexpected heights.

As Snyder put it in Bloodlands, they shared a “belligerent complicity” and therefore “goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have.” This is not exactly what Nolte said. But it’s close enough since his basic goal was to shift the blame for Nazism onto others, a goal that has been fully achieved in the current ideological climate in which no one is supposed to notice the neo-Nazi militias ranging across the Ukraine or the SS veterans’ parades that are an annual occurrence in the Baltics. Nolte’s death is therefore an occasion to revisit the Historikerstreit to examine what it accomplished, where it went wrong, and why Habermas and his co-thinkers allowed victory to slip through their grasp.

Nolte started the ball rolling with an article in the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on the theme of Nazism as a response to a Communist threat:

Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Was the Gulag Archipelago not primary to Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the “racial murder” of National Socialism?

Nazi mass murders were thus a copy of a Soviet original. As the English historian Richard J. Evans points out, rhetoric like this had been on the upswing since the Christian Democrats wrested control from the center-left Social Democrats in 1982. Franz Josef Strauss, the right-wing Bavarian politician, had taken advantage of the conservative shift to urge Germans to “walk tall” and “emerge from the shadow of the Third Reich” while the FAZ was increasingly opening its pages to the radical right. But as bad as a few far-right cranks might be, an article by a respected academic historian like Nolte — his 1963 study, Fascism in Its Epoch, was internationally known — was worse since it was a sign that the historical profession as a whole was shifting into the “revisionist” camp.

Habermas, a product of the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School, therefore mounted a counterattack not only on Nolte but on other right-wing historians as well. He sailed into the historian Andreas Hillgruber for writing that the German military in 1944–45 was engaged in “desperate and sacrificial efforts . . . to protect the German population in the East from the orgies of revenge by the Red Army.”

He upbraided Michael Stürmer, an academic historian who served as an official adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, for calling for a more patriotic version of German history. And he attacked Nolte not only for suggesting that Bolshevism was the prime mover, but for arguing that a letter that Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization, wrote in September 1939 stating that Jews the world over sided with Great Britain “could lay a foundation for the thesis that Hitler would have been justified in treating the German Jews as prisoners of war.”

Nolte didn’t say the letter did lay a foundation, merely that it could. Nonetheless, his statement was an affront because it violated what, since the 1960s and ’70s, had been the first rule of West German politics, which is that the Nazis were entirely responsible for their actions and that Germans should not shift the blame onto others, least of all the Jews.

Yet Nolte was now clearly out to “relativize” the Nazis by arguing that they were not the only ones at fault. The upshot would have been a return to the “good Nazi” rhetoric of the late 1940s and early ’50s when Hollywood turned out admiring biopics of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Adenauer assured the Bundesrat that the percentage of accused Nazi war criminals “who are really guilty is so extraordinarily small that the honor of the former German Wehrmacht is not compromised.”

It would have, that is, if Habermas and his co-thinkers had let Nolte get away with it. But they didn’t. Rather, they were able to fend off the assault by pointing out that after years of soul-searching and political debate, it was impossible to turn back the clock. “After Auschwitz we can create our national self-understanding solely by appropriating the better traditions of our critically examined history,” Habermas wrote in the liberal weekly Die Zeit. “Otherwise we cannot respect ourselves and cannot expect respect from others.”

Germans must confront the past ruthlessly and unsparingly if they were to have any future as a liberal society. The point was so obvious, so compelling, so indisputable that there was never really any doubt that the argument would carry the day.

But if that’s the case, why was it subsequently undone? Why was Nolte able to regain his footing to a degree while Habermas seemed to visibly deflate?

The answer has to do with the remedy Habermas put forth. While Germans must wrestle with the past, the ultimate solution, he said, was for West Germany to tie itself ever more securely to the liberal west. As he put it a few weeks into the great debate:

The unconditional opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West is the greatest intellectual achievement of our postwar period; my generation should be especially proud of this . . . The only patriotism that will not estrange us from the West is a constitutional patriotism. Unfortunately, it took Auschwitz to make possible . . . binding universalist constitutional principles anchored in conviction.

As sensible as this may seem, there was a problem. If the West is synonymous with liberalism, does that mean that the East is the opposite — intrinsically illiberal and threatening? If so, then perhaps Nolte’s argument that an “Asiatic” bacillus was at the root of it all was not off base.

Moreover, Habermas’s belief in Western liberalism was one of those assumptions that first had to be proved. The Historikerstreit, for example, was essentially an aftershock from the Bitburg furor a year earlier when Helmut Kohl prevailed on Ronald Reagan to lay a wreath at a German military cemetery containing the remains of some forty-nine members of the Waffen-SS. As Habermas wrote in the liberal weekly Die Zeit, the visit was intended to accomplish three things:

The aura of the military cemetery was supposed to waken national sentiment and thereby a “historical consciousness”; the juxtaposition of hills of corpses in the concentration camp and the SS graves in the cemetery of honor, the sequence of Bergen-Belsen in the morning and Bitburg in the afternoon implicitly disputed the singularity of the Nazi crimes and shaking hands with the veteran generals in the presence of the US president was, finally, a demonstration that we had really always stood on the right side in the fight against Bolshevism.

Quite correct. But Reagan was hardly an innocent victim of German wiles. After all, he was a hardened Cold Warrior who, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, had worked hand-in-glove with the FBI to purge Hollywood of Communist influence and, decades later, would resist visiting a German concentration camp on the grounds that unpleasant memories should remain undisturbed. “I don’t think we ought to focus on the past,” he reportedly said. “I want to focus on the future. I want to put that history behind me.” His sentiments were captured in remarks a few months earlier about Americans who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in 1936–39 to defend the Spanish republic: “I would say that the individuals that went over there were, in the opinions of most Americans, fighting on the wrong side.”

The right side was that of Franco. If Hitler had concentrated his fire on the Soviets instead of attacking Britain and France, the right side would presumably have been that of the Nazis. The United States thus stood for the sort of willful forgetfulness and accommodation with fascism that Habermas found so dangerous, yet he embraced it regardless. The result was to tie him hand and foot to the new “hyperpower” as it headed off in an increasingly militaristic direction with the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989–91.

Thus, Habermas supported Operation Desert Storm in 1991 even though, as Perry Anderson noted in the New Left Review, the war was essentially a defense of Saudi oil interests. He endorsed the 1999 NATO air campaign in the Balkans even though the United States was plainly seeking to back Serbia into a corner by presenting it with an ultimatum — the notorious Rambouillet Accords — that it knew it couldn’t accept. He backed the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and only balked at supporting the 2003 Iraq War when Bush and Blair failed to get UN Security Council approval. He championed the European Union and a single currency and was thus flummoxed when an over-extended EU began coming apart at the seams in response to the 2008 financial meltdown, Syriza, Brexit, and the refugee crisis.

The effect has been to paint himself into a corner. Habermas is still everyone’s favorite public intellectual, the recipient of innumerable awards and the subject of gushing profiles in publications like the Nation. But the impression otherwise is of a man adrift. This is especially the case with the European Union, increasingly the object of Habermas’s most fervent hopes.

As he freely confesses, the idea of a Germany that is both powerful and united fills German center-leftists like himself with dread. It means a return to pre-1914 days when Germany was “too weak to dominate the continent, but too strong to bring itself into line,” to quote the historian Ludwig Dehios. Just as liberal redemption lies in the West, the solution to a Germany that is both too big and too small lies in a greater Europe that is increasingly integrated.

“By embedding itself in Europe, Germany was able to develop a liberal self-understanding for the first time,” Habermas wrote recently, the same thing he said thirty years earlier about integration into the US-led international order.

Indeed, he went even farther. Rather than a sovereign Germany, his hope was for Germany to cede aspects of sovereignty to the European Union without the union taking them on itself. The state would fade away at both the national and EU level, not under socialism but amid the greatest wave of speculative mania in capitalist history. This was no less utopian than the notion of finding liberal redemption in the arms of an increasingly illiberal west, which is why it was inevitable that his hopes would eventually crash and burn.

Which brings us to yet another reason why the Historikerstreit would eventually fall short. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has observed, Habermas has an issue with capitalism: he doesn’t want to hear about it. Just as he sees the European Union as a device that technocrats can manage provided they have the proper “democratic roots,” he sees Nazism as a largely national problem that Germans can manage provided they dissolve themselves into some larger liberal entity. As admirable as the call for Germany to take responsibility may be, the effect is to play down certain ideological and economic aspects.

One of the curious things about the Historikerstreit, for instance, is why Habermas and his allies failed to challenge the Cold War caricature of Soviet history that was the centerpiece of Nolte’s argument. Both sides took it as a given that the Soviet experience was one big bloodbath from beginning to end — the only question is whether it planted the idea of mass extermination in Hitler’s head or whether he thought it up on his own.

After six months of controversy, it was left to an outsider, an ex-Marxist named Richard Löwenthal, to note in a letter to the FAZ that while the revolution and civil war of 1917–1921 were certainly bloody, there were no “acts of annihilation” until Stalin’s disastrous collectivization campaign in 1929–1933 and the purges in 1936–38. Since this was long after Nazi ideology had taken shape, the idea of a causal connection was spurious on its face.

So why didn’t Habermas point out the obvious? No doubt because he was unwilling to part ways with a US consensus that the Soviet Union was all bad all of the time except for a brief period of dispensation during World War II.

Similarly, his depiction of Nazism as essentially a German problem had the unintended consequence of letting other nations off the hook. So what if aging veterans parading about in their Waffen-SS uniforms were a regular occurrence in the Baltic republics? Since the Balts are not Germans, they can’t be Nazis — can they? What did it matter if statues of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera were proliferating across the Ukraine or if Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán was attempting to rehabilitate Miklos Horthy, the Axis supporter who oversaw the deportation and annihilation of some four hundred thousand Jews? Since only Germans were responsible for Nazi atrocities, the others got a free pass.

Habermas’s blind spot with regard to capitalism led to him to deemphasize Nazism as a response to the international economic crisis of 1929–1933 and hence left his followers unprepared for the impact that another great capitalist crisis would have in 2008. Where Nazism began in Germany before radiating outwards, ultra-nationalism the second time around began seemingly everywhere except Germany before invading in the form of Alternative for Germany, a self-confessed “völkisch” party that is now a rising force at the polls. Instead of spreading outwards, it began in outlying countries before flowing back in. But the effect is the same: a right-wing radicalization of German bourgeois society that Habermas thought he had headed off at the pass some three decades earlier.

Ultimately, the Historikerstreit was a very center-left affair — decorous, academic, conducted within the narrowest ideological confines. It resembles the Dreyfus affair in the sense of public intellectuals rallying to defend the republic against authoritarians trying to hijack it for the Right. But otherwise it was very weak tea.

Instead of J’Accuse-style broadsides, it featured the tepid prose of the graduate seminar. Instead of riots and threats of coup d’état, it generated a flurry of excited newspaper articles and letters to the editor. While it beat back the Right for a moment, in the end all it succeeded in creating was a Maginot Line that the far right has found all too easy to march around.

Somewhere Ernst Nolte is no doubt enjoying a good chuckle.

10.18.16
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy.

Source: Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/ernst-nolte-stalin-hitler-fascism-historikerstreit/

Muere, a los 93 años, el polémico historiador alemán Ernst Nolte

El intelectual avivó con su obra el debate sobre los crímenes del nazismo al tratar de justificarlos. Hoy su obra es fundamental para el ideario de los grupos ultraderechistas que toman fuerza en Alemania.

El historiador Ernst Nolte - AFP

ABC - ABC_Cultura Berlín18/08/2016 18:33h - Actualizado: 19/08/2016 00:43h.
Guardado en: Cultura - Temas: Holocausto , Berlin , Crímenes de guerra , Fascismo

El historiador Ernst Nolte, uno de los principales intelectuales revisionistas de Alemania, ha fallecido en Berlín a los 93 años, según han informado fuentes de su familia. A lo largo de su carrera publicó obras de gran relevancia como «La guerra civil europea», «El fascismo en su época» o «La crisis del sistema liberal y los movimientos fascistas», algunas de ellas muy polémicas. Gran parte de su fama como historiador se debe a su papel en la llamada «Historikerstreit» (disputa de los historiadores) que se desató con su ensayo publicado en el diario «Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung» el 6 de junio de 1986, titulado «El pasado que no quiere pasar».

Nolte defendió en su obra que el nazismo fue la respuesta lógica al bolchevismo

Una de las principales tesis de la obra de Nolte es que el fascismo surgió en Europa como oposición a la modernidad. Además adoptó muchas posturas polémicas con la intención de justificar de algún modo los crímenes del nazismo. En el artículo del «Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung» Nolte relativizaba los crímenes del nacionalsocialismo y los veía como una reacción a los crímenes del estalinismo. «¿No fue el Gulag anterior a Auschwitz? ¿No fue el asesinato de clase de los bolcheviques el antecedente lógico y fáctico del genocidio de los nazis?», se preguntaba Nolte en el ensayo. El historiador concluía que la política de los nazis había sido a la postre una respuesta a la «amenaza existencial» que representaba el bolchevismo.

Su disputa con Habermas

Se trata de una obra que ha dado lugar a grandes polémicas y sobre la que se han fundado algunas ideas actualmente en boga como las de los radicales ultraderechista Alternativa por Alemania (AfD). El artículo de Nolte generó una respuesta del filósofo y sociólogo Jürgen Habermas, publicada en el semanario «Die Zeit. Habermas acusaba a Nolte de ponerse a la cabeza de un grupo de intelectuales neoconservadores que procuraba liberar a los alemanes de su responsabilidad histórica negando el carácter único y sin precedentes del Holocausto. Además, Habermas mencionaba a otros historiadores, como Klaus Hildebrandt y Andreas Hilgruber, a quienes veía cerca de la posición representada por Nolte.

Las ideas de Nolte son fundamentales para movimientos como Alternativa por Alemania

Cuando se cumplieron 30 años de la «Historikerstreit» el diario «Die Welt» le dedicó un artículo de Nolte en el que se afirmaba que él había formulado muchas posiciones que ahora representa la agrupación AfD. La carrera de Nolte como historiador se inició en 1963 con la publicación de su libro «El fascismo en su época» en el que hacía una aproximación comparativa del fascismo italiano, el nacionalsocialismo y la Acción Francesa. En 1994 Nolte aportó un artículo a un libro titulado «Die selbsbewuste Nation» (La nación segura de si misma) en el que se agruparon varias voces de la nueva derecha alemana, que trataba en ese momento de aprovechar el júbilo que había generado la reunificación cuatro años atrás.

Source: ABC (Spain)
http://www.abc.es/cultura/abci-fallece-93-anos-polemico-historiador-aleman-ernst-nolte-201608181833_noticia.html

The physiology of barbarism. "The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class" - Donny Gluckstein

Few historical events have been subject to the same degree of controversy, confusion and mystification as the Nazi rise to power and the tragedy which unfolded in its wake. Attempts to understand the phenomenon have focused on a variety of explanations, some stressing the psychology of individual Nazis, others, such as Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, arguing that the German population shared Hitler's pathological race hatred and that this mass psychosis made the Holocaust possible. Various studies have stressed the exceptional nature of the Nazi regime, and many have therefore tended to minimise the potential for such atrocities to happen again. Recent trends have seen earlier social explanations of Nazism challenged by studies which claim that the Third Reich was above all else a racial hierarchy.1 Another increasingly widespread view holds that the Nazi state pursued a programme not of reaction but of modernisation or revolution. Donny Gluckstein offers a powerful counter to such arguments, and in the process reaffirms the Marxist analysis of fascism with a clarity and an authority that make The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class essential reading.

The book begins with an outline of the development of modern Germany and takes up the argument that the conditions which gave rise to the Nazi regime are somehow linked to a unique path of historical development whereby the 'normal' process of capitalist development was bypassed, producing an exceptional semi-feudal state. The opening chapter succinctly describes the specific features of German capitalism and their consequences for the classes in that society. In most advanced industrial nations capitalism had emerged with national unification and the establishment of bourgeois democracy. In Germany national unification was brought about by the Kaiser without any real democracy. This did not mean that capitalism failed to develop in Germany--in fact it did so at a great rate. But Germany's status as a 'follower' nation, industrialising after Britain, meant that it emerged with certain distinctive features, notably a greater concentration of capital in certain sectors, since it started out with larger production units, greater collaboration between capital and the state and, as a latecomer to the battle for international markets, a more prominent role for the state. At the same time, a mass of smaller, artisanal units continued to prosper, ensuring the survival of a large middle class.

The development of Nazism was to be shaped by all these factors, but above all else it was a product of the imperialist stage of capitalism. The concentration and centralisation of production, the increasing importance of banks as investors of finance capital, and the intensification of competition in an expanding world market led to a greater role for the state as an actor in defending and promoting economic interests both domestically and abroad. The fusion of state and capital under Nazism was therefore characteristic of an era dominated by finance capital which 'makes the dictatorship of the capitalist lords of one country increasingly incompatible with the capitalist interests of other countries, and the internal domination of capital increasingly irreconcilable with the interests of the masses'.2 In order to resolve these conflicts Germany's ruling elite turned to Hitler in much the same way as the French bourgeoisie had turned to Bonapartism in 1851, giving up its crown 'in order to save its purse'. Except that, given Germany's status as an advanced industrialised nation, the Nazis were forced to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie to secure power, using it as a 'battering ram' against working class opposition.3

Rather than transforming existing social relations, Nazism reinforced them 'by the most brutal and systematic methods imaginable--counter-revolution at home and, later, world war abroad'.4 Hitler, then, 'did not fall from the sky or come up out of hell: he is nothing but the personification of all the destructive forces of imperialism'.5 In the sense that Nazism reflected the tendency, identified by Marx, for the relations of production to be constantly revolutionised under capitalism, it may be considered 'modern', but, as the author argues, a regime which bolsters a system that has 'outlived its usefulness' is not engaged in modernisation.6

The origins of Nazism are firmly rooted in the counter-revolutionary current which developed in Germany after the First World War as a reaction to the revolutionary surge of 1918-1923. During this period Hitler established himself as a force to be reckoned with and sealed links with industrialists prepared to consider radical means to block the left, like the steel magnate Thyssen, who stated, 'Democracy with us represents nothing'.7 But although the capitalist class had an interest in promoting Hitler as a means of eliminating obstacles to its domination both at home and abroad, funding of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) did not guarantee complete control over them: 'Connections existed between capitalism and the NSDAP; but this does not mean the Nazis were either robots programmed by the bosses, or free agents making up their own minds and acting as they pleased'.8 Having failed to win ruling class backing for an armed uprising in 1923, Hitler realised that mass support was necessary to make fascism a serious alternative to democratic forces. The creation of a mass party of a million members with a 400,000 strong armed wing gave the Nazis a degree of autonomy, but their capacity for brutality had to be balanced against the need to keep elite supporters on board by not upsetting ruling class sensibilities.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they did so not as the result of a popular uprising, or even an electoral majority, but because they had the backing of a section of the ruling class. How, then, the author asks, did a party acting in the interests of this tiny elite achieve such widespread support among ordinary Germans? The analysis of this question, presented in chapters on the 'Nazi machine' and the Holocaust, is one of the book's great strengths. Central to the explanation developed here is an understanding of the way in which capitalism's capacity to mask the exploitation at its core is refracted through the prism of class:

The daily experience of life under capitalism mediates the impact of capitalist ideology. It can reinforce it, contradict it, or still have more complex results, partially reinforcing some points of the ideology and negating others. The general pattern is that with capitalists their life experience serves to reinforce belief in the system; the life experience of workers tends to clash with the received ways of thinking and cause it to be questioned either partially or totally. The middle class has a life experience which leaves it vacillating between both these poles.9

Nazi ideology was less likely to exert an influence over workers living in large towns--whose livelihood was threatened by unemployment and whose experience of work was characterised by a sense of collective solidarity--than over those working in craft or service sectors, less affected by unemployment, or those living in isolated rural communities. Similarly, in terms of middle class support, those whose livelihoods were threatened by the loss of savings--the old middle class 'rentiers'--or whose careers were bound up with the survival of the capitalist state--the civil service bureaucrats--were more likely to identify with Nazism than white collar employees, who remained potential allies of the industrial working class. What determined both electoral support for the Nazis and membership of the party itself were the social relations of capitalism. The more isolated the individual, the more bound up their lives and careers were with the preservation of the status quo, the less resistant they were likely to be to fascism: 'What counts in resisting Nazism are the chances of collective organisation and consciousness, and freedom from the direct influence (and intimidation) of the employer'.10

This is not to say that workers were immune to the pull of Nazism, or that no workers joined Hitler's party, but in general it was anxiety about the effects of the crisis which drove people into his arms, rather than rejection of the capitalist system, or even direct experience of unemployment. At the core of the mass movement built by the Nazis was the frustrated petty bourgeoisie which, faced with the disintegration of society and fearful of the prospect of revolution, sought to break free from the domination of the monopolies and cartels. Fusing at the lower end of the social scale with the working class, and with the capitalist bourgeoisie at the other, it is 'no wonder', wrote Trotsky, 'that ideologically it scintillates with all the colours of the rainbow'.11

Fascism's capacity to combine counter-revolutionary aims with a mass movement was both its strength and its weakness, a factor identified very early on by Clara Zetkin:

We should not regard fascism as a homogenous entity, as a granite block from which all our exertions will simply rebound. Fascism is a disparate formation, comprising various contradictory elements, and hence liable to internal dissolution and disintegration... however tough an image fascism presents, it is in fact the result of the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy and a symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois state.12

Although the 'sheer weight of forces at its disposal'13 would permit a fascist regime to survive for some time, as a movement it was nevertheless vulnerable when confronted, and sections of its support could even be won to a different political project. In the absence of a credible revolutionary socialist alternative, however, the 'countless human beings whom finance capital has brought to desperation and frenzy'14 were pulled by fascism into a movement in which everything was 'as contradictory and chaotic as in a nightmare'.15

Was fascism a middle class movement? Nazi propaganda before 1933 was full of promises to its middle class followers: '100,000 independent cobblers', declared Gottfried Feder, 'are worth more to the economy of the people and the state than five giant shoe factories'.16 Despite such rhetoric, Nazi rule offered very little to the middle classes. Indeed, once the labour movement had been defeated, ruling class power was immeasurably reinforced, at the expense of all other classes.17

If the regime can be seen to have retained the basic features of capitalism in an extreme form, rather than representing a break with it, how can the importance of anti-Semitism to the Nazi project be explained? A common view holds that the Nazis attempted a racial revolution and that their supporters were motivated above all else by pathological anti-Semitism. Here, again, the book underlines the importance of class distinctions. As far as ordinary Germans were concerned, racist attitudes derived from the anxieties and frustrations of everyday existence and provided scapegoats for their various grievances. In contrast, ruling class racism is a means of shoring up existing social relations and forms part of a hierarchical conception of society whereby notions of superiority and inferiority are bolstered by, among other things, the use of racism to legitimise the targeting of certain groups and, by extension, the treatment meted out to all 'inferior' elements in the hierarchy.18 The reification of existence under capitalism, which turns human beings into objects to be bought and sold, found its most grotesque expression in the Holocaust, when assembly line techniques and a modern transport network were used to commit mass murder, leaving what remained--teeth, human hair, etc--to be treated as industrial 'byproducts'. The distinction between ruling class and popular racism is an important one, not least because it undermines Goldhagen's claim that the Holocaust was a product of a collective German mentality. The shock and repulsion felt by ordinary Germans at Nazi led pogroms such as Kristallnacht (night of broken glass) in 1938, and the revulsion felt even by rank and file Nazis at the euthanasia programme targeted at 'lives not worth living', are evidence of this distinction.19

But if ordinary Germans did not share the same outlook as the Nazi leadership, why did so many participate in its crimes? Again, the horrors perpetrated under Nazi rule are best understood not as a reflection of some kind of primordial evil but in relation to the constraints which capitalism imposes on human activity. The dehumanising bureaucratisation of life under capitalism, which strives to subordinate individuals to an external authority, and to control behaviour patterns by imposing deference to a hierarchical social structure, was reinforced and accentuated under Nazism which, by treating genocide as an everyday productive task (to the extent that railway regulations set out a system of fares for those transported to the death camps), imbued it with an illusory normality which helps explain why so many participated in it.20 Likewise, when leading Nazis boasted of their intention to destroy the individual's private sphere (Robert Ley declared in 1938 that the private citizen had ceased to exist and that hitherto only sleep would remain an intimate affair), such ideas were an extension, rather than a negation, of monopoly capitalism, itself typified by 'the feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness'21 as personal autonomy is suppressed by the imperatives of production and the domination of the market.22

None of this would have been carried out, however, were it not for the smashing of resistance. This needs to be stressed, because it is an aspect of the Nazi rise to power neglected by writers like Goldhagen who choose to ignore opposition to the Nazis before 1933.23 In the early 1920s Hitler's attempts to seize power came to nothing. By 1928 electoral support for the Nazis stood at only 2.8 percent. As the crisis deepened and the Weimar Republic became increasingly discredited, society polarised and support for the Nazis grew. Why did the left, the most powerful and organised in Western Europe, fail to eliminate their threat? 'We have been defeated,' wrote the Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer after the fascists took power, 'and each of us is turning over in his mind the question whether we brought the bloody disaster on ourselves by our own political mistakes'.24

The tragedy of German social democracy's attitude to fascism was that it repeated the errors made by Italian social democracy a decade earlier in pinning its hopes on legality and the constitution: 'Stay at home: do not respond to provocations,' union leader Matteotti urged Italian workers attacked by fascists, 'Even silence, even cowardice, are sometimes heroic'.25 The German socialist Hilferding proclaimed 'the downfall of fascism' in January 1933, the month Hitler became chancellor, arguing that 'legality will be his undoing'.26 This loyalty to the institutions of the German state had led the Social Democratic Party (the SPD) to use violence against Communist opposition and even its own members, sending in the Freikorps to crush the Spartakist revolt in 1919, murdering Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, granting emergency powers to General Seekt to smash the left wing provincial government in Saxony and shooting down 30 Communists taking part in the banned May Day parade of 1929. Instead of attempting to win rank and file socialists to the fight against fascism, the Communist Party simply issued sectarian declarations against the SPD, denouncing it as fascism's 'twin' and calling for a 'united front...against the Hitler party and the Social Democratic leadership' which, as Trotsky pointed out, amounted to nothing more than 'a united front with itself'27. Having failed to stop the Nazis before they took control of the state, the left was immediately targeted and crushed by the regime. No amount of heroic resistance, well documented here in a chapter on defiance against Nazi rule, could prevent the imposition of the Nazis' sick 'moral norms' once the labour movement had been wiped out.

In the 1930s Trotsky highlighted the way in which barbaric aspects of medieval society survived alongside the technological advances of modernity. People all over the world could listen to radio and hear the pope talk about water being transformed into wine. Pilots flew the most advanced aircraft that science could produce but wore lucky charms to protect themselves from danger. Fascism drew on this kind of superstition and backwardness. When the Nazis came to power, he described how fascism had 'opened up the depths of society for politics':

Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.28

Today such contradictions between society's modernity and the persistence of backwardness and superstition are even more marked. Before playing his part in one of the century's most dazzling feats of technology by walking on the moon, the US astronaut Buzz Aldrin sat in his spacecraft and took holy communion; during the 1980s Reagan and Mitterrand, the leaders of two of the world's most advanced industrialised nations, both felt the need to employ the services of astrologers; in the 1990s religious sects announce their suicide pacts over the internet.

In a year when New Labour ministers have used the rhetoric of anti-fascism to justify the imposition of NATO power in the Balkans, and compared those who oppose their warmongering to appeasers of Hitler, this book is a timely reminder of what fascism is and what it is not. Donny Gluckstein has provided us with an outstanding analysis of the Nazi phenomenon. In its discussion of the Nazi leadership and its anti-Semitism, its analysis of the relationship between the Nazi regime, capitalism and the ruling class, and in its assessment of the aims and actions of both supporters and opponents of Nazism, this book's sensitivity to the interplay between the motivations of individuals and the broader historical and social context sets it out as a model for a dialectical understanding of fascism.

A review of Donny Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class (Bookmarks, 1999)
JIM WOLFREYS

Notes

1 M Burleigh and W Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge, 1991).
2 R Hilferding, Finance Capital, cited in D Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class (London, 1999), p8.
3 In 1931 Trotsky warned that 'considering the far greater maturity and acuteness of the social contradictions in Germany, the hellish work of Italian fascism would probably appear as a pale and almost humane experiment in comparison with the work of the German National Socialists'. See 'Germany, the Key to the International Situation', in L Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York, 1971), p125.
4 D Gluckstein, op cit, p128.
5 L Trotsky, cited ibid, p182.
6 Ibid, pp190-191.
7 F Thyssen, cited in D Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York, 1973), p35.
8 D Gluckstein, op cit, p44.
9 Ibid, p69.
10 Ibid, p89.
11 L Trotsky, 'What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat', in L Trotsky, op cit, p212.
12 C Zetkin, 'The Struggle against Fascism', in D Beetham (ed), Marxists in Face of Fascism (Manchester, 1983), pp104, 109-110.
13 Ibid, p110.
14 L Trotsky, 'What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat', in L Trotsky, op cit, p155.
15 L Trotsky, 'The German Puzzle', in L Trotsky, op cit, p266.
16 G Feder, cited in D Guerin, op cit, p86.
17 D Gluckstein, op cit, p135.
18 Ibid, pp175-176.
19 Ibid, pp173-177.
20 Ibid, pp182-183.
21 E Fromm, Fear of Freedom (London, 1942), p188.
22 D Gluckstein, op cit, pp148-149.
23 For a critique of Goldhagen see H Maitles, 'Never Again!', International Socialism 77 (1997).
24 O Bauer, 'Austrian Democracy under Fire', in D Beetham (ed), op cit, p289.
25 G Matteotti, cited in D Guerin, op cit, p109.
26 R Hilferding, 'Between the Decisions', cited in D Beetham (ed), op cit, p261.
27 B Fowkes, Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic (London, 1984), p163.
28 L Trotsky, 'What is National Socialism?', in L Trotsky, op cit, p405.

Source: Socialist Review Index (UK)
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj83/wolfreys.htm

[OFF] Attention! Coup Attempt in Brazil!

Don’t be mistaken, what is in course in Brazil is a coup attempt.

As a private conversation between President Dilma Rousseff and former President Lula is illegally tapped by the Federal Police following a decision by a first instance judge and selectively disclosed by the press, we must express our deepest concern with the erosion of the rule of law in Brazil. Today’s event is extremely serious and have a real potential to escalate into social unrest and bloodshed.

On 31st March 1964 a military coup was trigged against the legally constituted government of João Goulart. This was a day that lasted 21 years. It was not until 1988 that a new Constitution was drafted and Brazil began its democratization process. Similarly to 1964, the current coup attempt has the backing of the biggest Brazilian broadcaster- Rede Globo. Differently to 1964, the coup is enforced by an ideologically-driven judiciary that has three purposes: overthrown a democratically elected President, prevent former President Lula to run for the 2018 elections and ultimately blocks the Brazilian Workers Party’ license to exist.

There is no doubt that Brazil is undergoing extremely serious political instability. President Dilma Rousseff was re-elected for her second term in 2014. Right at the beginning her government Petrobras, the Brazilian state-owned oil giant, was emerged in corruption scandals. Indeed, only a naïve person would believe that the Brazilian Worker’s Party has invented corruption. As Fernando Henrique Cardoso noted on his own memoirs, he was told that a huge corruption scheme taking place at Petrobras during his term as President. Differently to Dilma, Cardoso didn’t have the courage to initiate any investigation.

While the Cardoso administration undertook 48 federal police investigations in 8 years, the Brazilian Worker’s Party conduced 250. Concomitantly to a significant increase in federal police operations that aimed to tackle corruption, both the Lula and Rousseff administrations strengthened and devolved more powers to judiciary. Prior to 2003 most investigations were filed by the government.

Despite the fact that over the past several months the Federal Police has purposely, and illegally, leaked information regarding ongoing investigations involving people linked to the Brazilian Worker’s Party, last week events escalated with the kidnaping for a few hours of former President Lula. There is no exaggeration in employing the term “kidnapped” as the Brazilian legislation doesn’t allow such event to occur on those terms.

Following the above event, President Dilma decided to invite Lula to became the government’s main minister as an effort to reestablish governability. Members of the opposition accused Dilma to offer this position so Lula would enjoy an immunity granted to ministers. Nothing more misleading… Those who make such claim forget that Lula would still respond at the Supreme Court if needed, a significant disadvantage as if he was responding as any other citizen he would enjoy the benefits of surfing between different court instances…

For those who couldn’t see the coup coming, now it is more than evident. On the same day as Lula assumes as Minister, the Federal Police backed by a first instance judge, decides to publicize conversations between Lula and Dilma to stimulate a social convulsion that could potentially lead to the removal of Dilma as President.

Brazilians must ensure that the rule of law is reestablished and that the democratically elected government can continue its mandate. Tomorrow we will go to the streets to defend the democratically elected president and demand respect to our constitution and to the rule of law! Não Passarão!

By Diego

Source: O Cafezinho
http://www.ocafezinho.com/2016/03/17/attention-coup-attempt-in-brazil/

See more:
The draining agenda of Brazil’s pathetic pro-coup opposition
Ex-President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Faces Charges

The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Sandrine Sanos

Aesthetics, Politics, and Abjection: Gendered Fantasies of Race and Nation among 1930s French Far-Right Intellectuals

The intellectual far right in 1930s France sought to reimagine national belonging by challenging what they saw as pervasive moral degeneration and a crisis in a national sense of masculine sexuality. These challenges involved articulating an exclusionary, even violent, antisemitism, and scholars have long debated precisely how to account for the political choices and rhetorical strategies mobilized by far-right writers and journalists from the period. In this lucid and thoughtfully argued book, Sandrine Sanos argues against prevailing historiographical and literary approaches to the work of far-right intellectuals and journalists in 1930s interwar France. Specifically, she challenges scholars who have conceived of interwar far-right politics as thoroughly determined by the “shameful” homosexual longings of its most ardent practitioners. She explains that scholars have unduly privileged biographical readings that view antisemitic political commitments as pathological outcroppings of “deviant” homosexual and homosocial obsessions and desires. For Sanos, antisemitic fantasies of national regeneration in interwar France cannot be tied simply to the “perverted” masculinity of leading far-right figures. Her study focuses instead on the ways in which gendered discourses of sexual perversion became central themes in what she calls the “aesthetics of hate” developed by far-right thinkers.

Drawing on the literary and political writings of such figures as Lucien Rebatet, Robert Brasillach, Thierry Maulnier, Maurice Blanchot, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Sanos convincingly demonstrates that “we must take more seriously the ways in which the tropes of heterosexual deviance, sexual perversion, and abject homosexuality helped mark the bounds of the male citizen and the meaning of public letters in French history” (p. 203). These tropes, she explains, actually constituted the ideological foundations of interwar far-right thought and as such they were explicitly mobilized by intellectuals writing for publications like Je Suis Partout, Combat, and L’Insurgé. The figures Sanos analyzes in The Aesthetics of Hate emerged from early twentieth-century right-wing nationalist and monarchist circles and took inspiration from Charles Maurras, the leading figure in reactionary and antisemitic politics from the turn of the century. One of the book’s goals is to show how these intellectuals formed a loosely knit movement bent on redefining Frenchness (in the face of what they perceived to be social “abjection”) according to a political grammar that united discourses of gender, race, and sexuality (p. 4). Sexuality was a key category for the writers Sanos analyzes, as they called for a renewed French heterosexual masculinity (and, hence, a renewed sense of French citizenship) over and against the “unmanly” bodies of Jews and colonized subjects who were often coded as homosexual. As she puts it, “the appropriate gendered and sexual underpinnings of the social order” had become unmoored after the experience of the First World War and the embrace of modernity, and far-right intellectuals sought to “restore” stable sexual identities as moral foundations for national regeneration (p. 29). Thus the figures Sanos studies were obsessed with well-regulated gender roles, denunciations of sexual “deviance” (which tended to be linked with Jews, communists, and foreigners), and the restoration of a whole masculine self that had been torn asunder by sexual difference.

Central to Sanos’s argument here is the idea that far-right thinkers sought political responses to the tense and fraught social climate of 1930s France in the realm of aesthetics. Art and literature (and aesthetic form as such) provided these figures with potential avenues for regenerating and demarcating anew a corrupt and degraded social body that had been beset from without and from within by democratic and “foreign” (i.e., Jewish) intrusion. This claim explains why she aims to avoid narrowly historicizing the movement she seeks to define; instead, she ties historicizing readings to close consideration of “the narrative and rhetorical strategies [far-right intellectuals] developed in their journalism and in their literary writings” (p. 6).

As she points out in her introduction, the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics that frames her study owes less to what Walter Benjamin referred to as fascism’s aestheticization of politics than it does to Jacques Rancière’s theorization of how the overlapping of aesthetics and politics provokes new “distributions of the sensible;” she rightly highlights how Rancière’s work foregrounds aesthetics as politics and how this emphasis helps to define “the common of a community” (p. 7). This is precisely the problem that haunted far-right thinkers in the interwar period who were obsessed with renewing or recreating a bounded masculine self and, by extension, a bounded national community in response to the excesses of modern life. This theoretical point is an original and timely contribution, given how Rancière’s work has succeeded in drawing the attention of many critics back to the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Yet Sanos only devotes a paragraph of her introduction to this observation, which nonetheless undergirds the theoretical thrust of her project. One cannot help but feel that this underdeveloped discussion of Rancière is a missed opportunity, since its pertinence seems to demand a more sustained and in-depth engagement. Additional fleshing out of this point might reveal more clearly how far-right intellectuals’ turn to aesthetics for political solutions generated new “ways of doing and making,” in Rancière’s terms, that “intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.”[1] The creation of new forms of visibility in particular seems crucial for Sanos’s study, since the far-right figures and publications she examines sought to make perceptible a pathological Jewishness (embodied by socialist Léon Blum, leader of France’s Popular Front government) that they felt was responsible for the abjection of France’s social body. Since Sanos views her project as a contribution to both the historiography and literary theory of far-right politics in France, drawing out her reading of Rancière a bit further would have been especially revealing.

The book’s chapters engage a variety of themes and figures, offering an intellectual genealogy of the 1930s far-right movement; a contextualization of the “crises” caused by modernity to which far-right journals responded by calling for a renewed sense of virility that would restore order and boundaries to a (masculine) national subject that had been decentered; and a synthetic analysis of how the far-right press polemically and even violently negotiated their fixation with the French nation’s “abjection.” The discourse and thematics of abjection thoroughly permeated the thought and written work of figures like Maulnier and Rebatet, and the figure of the “Jew” served to embody an abject national modernity that had to be transcended via a turn to aesthetics and the “rigorous order” of form (p. 113).

Two of Sanos’s strongest chapters are given over to extended studies of individual writers, Blanchot and Céline, respectively. In the first of these, she historicizes Blanchot’s interwar journalism, viewing his early far-right and antisemitic work as born of a contingent and problematic historical moment and situating her reading of his early career in response to the work of scholars who have retroactively dismissed or minimized the content of his far-right writing. She makes a similar analytic move in the following chapter on Céline, reading his antisemitic pamphlets as continuous with his literary work (especially Voyage au bout de la nuit [1932]) and as a piece of the “cultural discourses of difference and otherness” embraced by “the intellectual and literary far right” (p. 162). In both of these cases, Sanos reads canonical literary figures against the grain, illuminating provocative continuities between their 1930s writing and later literary production and, through careful historical exegesis, laying bare their intellectual and political affinities with the interwar far right more broadly.

Her chapter on Céline deals in part with his racist and hygienicist conception of social contamination, highlighting how colonial interaction with race and blackness in Africa caused his protagonist in the pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), to grow acutely aware of pervasive Jewish influence on an abject society at home in France. This observation reflects another key element of Sanos’s argument, namely, that far-right figures in interwar France racialized Frenchness within the nation by linking strident denunciations of Jews to colonial ideologies that were enacted abroad in the empire (particularly, in Africa). This is an especially fascinating and provocative point; however, whereas she deals with it at some length in her reading of Céline, at other moments in the book she brings it up only briefly, and it remains unclear precisely how meaningful this turn to questions of empire was for members of the antisemitic French far right. This aspect of her argument is handled most directly in a several-page subsection of chapter 6 (on representations of race in the journal Je Suis Partout) that takes up how the journal approached the problem of colonialism. She points out that Martinican writers René Maran and Paulette Nardal actually produced articles for Je Suis Partout’s colonial affairs page, but she does not go so far as to synthetically historicize the unlikely and paradoxical relationship with far-right intellectuals that these figures must have experienced. Since Sanos refers to this aspect of her argument throughout the book, one expects a fuller and more synthetic treatment of the ways antisemitism was articulated through a racialized colonial grammar than what is actually provided. Such an idea merits extended attention, especially since discourses of race were so central to far-right intellectuals’ collective senses of masculinity and nationality.

The Aesthetics of Hate is nonetheless a rich, well-researched, and well-documented study that succeeds in complicating historical and literary approaches to what Sanos rightly identifies as the far-right ideological confluence of aesthetics and politics in interwar France. She evinces a keen sense of the debates in the field as well as of her work’s place in relation to them, which lends the book and her writing a sense of scholarly self-awareness that makes for engaging reading. Sanos’s analyses of journalistic and literary “fantasies of abjection” avoid the pathologizing logic against which she argues and instead shed convincing light on “a particular aesthetics where young far-right intellectuals reimagined nation, race, and bodies articulated in a gendered and sexual discourse of male identity, citizenship, and civilization” (p. 14).

Note

[1]. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.

Sandrine Sanos. The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xi + 369 pages. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-7457-4.

Reviewed by Justin Izzo (Brown University)
Published on H-SAE (June, 2013)
Commissioned by Michael B. Munnik

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38444
https://networks.h-net.org/node/21311/reviews/21626/izzo-sanos-aesthetics-hate-far-right-intellectuals-antisemitism-and

Willis Carto, influential figure of the far right, dies at 89

Willis Carto, influential figure of the far right, dies at 89
By Staff Reports October 31

Willis Carto, who spent decades leading an influential network of far-right organizations, including the Washington-based Liberty Lobby and a California institute dedicated to denying the Holocaust, and whose extremist views resonated with generations of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and other fringe elements, died Oct. 26. He was 89.

His death was announced by the American Free Press, a publication he founded. No further details were available. After spending much of his adult life in California, Mr. Carto apparently lived near Jacksonville, Fla., in recent years, according to public records.

Mr. Carto founded the Liberty Lobby in the 1950s, and the organization maintained a presence on Capitol Hill for decades. He had a publishing company, Noontide Press, that distributed extremist literature and launched several publications, including the Washington Observer newsletter and a weekly newspaper, the Spotlight, which had a national circulation of 300,000 in the early 1980s.

In letters and other statements, Mr. Carto voiced admiration for Nazi Germany and recommended that black Americans be deported to Africa. In 1981, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that monitors anti-Jewish slurs and threats, called Mr. Carto “a professional anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer and the mastermind” of a “propaganda empire.”

The reclusive Mr. Carto “does not speak in public,” a 1971 Washington Post investigation found. “He refuses to be interviewed. He shies away from cameras. He keeps an unlisted telephone number. He shields his residence address in suburban Los Angeles from public scrutiny.”

Yet he controlled or maintained connections with a variety of far-right groups that opposed taxes, gun control, foreign aid and school busing to achieve racial integration. One of his groups supported the minority white rule of defiant segregationist Ian Smith in the African country of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

The Liberty Lobby’s political committee was led by former Texas congressman Bruce Alger, a right-wing zealot who once incited a riot in Dallas against then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1978, Mr. Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review, which promulgated anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and denounced the Holocaust as a hoax. Mr. Carto reportedly kept busts of Adolf Hitler in his office at the California-based institute.

Through his publications and interconnected organizations, Mr. Carto exerted outsize influence on a variety of political issues and campaigns. He organized Youth for Wallace to support the 1968 presidential bid of Alabama segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace. The group was later renamed the National Youth Alliance, which, under its next leader, William L. Pierce, became the National Alliance, one of the country’s most prominent white separatist groups.

In the 1980s, Mr. Carto helped found the Populist Party, whose 1988 presidential candidate was David Duke, a onetime leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Carto was treasurer of the Liberty Lobby, which took in about $1 million a year by 1970, and also controlled the purse strings of other allied organizations. Over the years, employees accused him of financial improprieties and having an imperious style of leadership.

“Several former Liberty Lobby executives say Carto makes all major decisions, delegates little authority and trusts hardly anyone,” The Post noted in 1971. Behind his back, his employees called him “Little Hitler.”

Source: Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/willis-carto-influential-figure-of-the-far-right-dies-at-89/2015/10/31/80eb8aee-7f36-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html

See more:
Willis Carto, Far-Right Figure and Holocaust Denier, Dies at 89 (NY Times)
Willis Carto has been a major figure on the American radical right since the 1950s, when he set up his anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby with offices not far from the White House (SPLC)

Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich

On a recent flight to St. Louis (no less), while still reading the book under review, I was asked if I would recommend it. My neighbor, a self-professed history-buff, could not help notice the striking cover--Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford next to Auschwitz-Birkenau and a swastika--and the title that linked this "American Axis" to the rise of the Third Reich. What follows is my ambivalent endorsement.

The book was not written for an academic audience to whom it will yield few new insights--in spite of the somewhat sensationalist advertisement of new disclosures and revelations on the two protagonists. The author, Max Wallace, is an investigative journalist and this accounts for both the strength and the weakness of his story. His style is dramatic and captivating, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book. The narrative is organized exclusively around the two central figures with a gallery of secondary characters ranging from alleged Nazi spies and military attachés to slave labor victims in "supporting roles." The story of Ford's and Lindbergh's anti-Semitism and racism, and their deliberate as well as unwitting efforts to assist the Nazis is an important one and should be told to a wider audience. But the account is lacking in interpretative focus and occasionally in historical perspective.

The book weaves together the genesis of Ford's and Lindbergh's racial notions, their professional dealings with Germany and their private admiration for the Third Reich. Wallace uses the existing literature on his two fallen heroes as well as Lindbergh's private papers and the Ford Company archives. Yet his account is not a biographical one. Overall Lindbergh emerges as more of a complex, real-life character from these pages; Wallace's portrait of Anne Morrow Lindbergh is nuanced and at times even moving (p. 247ff.). By contrast Ford's personality remains vague and Wallace's explanation of how and why he acquired his anti-Semitic views is not entirely convincing. In 1920 Ford began serializing articles on the "Jewish Question" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent, outlining a worldwide sinister Jewish conspiracy as detailed in the forgery. Subsequently he published the collection as a pamphlet, The International Jew, and effectively distributed it through the Ford Company's national and international network of dealerships. Wallace reviews and rejects as deficient alternative explanations of how Ford--that "hitherto shy, gentle ... and in some respects quite enlightened" man (p. 16)--had come to adopt these malicious lies. The author instead introduces as the real culprit Ernest Gustav Liebold, a Detroit-born German-American, who became both the Dearborn Independent's general manager and Henry Ford's trusted personal secretary. A 1918 "most secret" military intelligence document reported that Liebold is "considered to be a German spy" (p. 25), although the investigation remained inconclusive. Over the next three hundred pages Liebold remains a shadowy figure. Wallace insinuates that Liebold is both responsible for Ford's anti-Semitism and for his company's attempts to prevent and undermine the American war effort in both World War I and World War II.

But Liebold is also shadowy in that Wallace neither develops his character and motivations (or the makeup of his anti-Semitism) nor the specific nature of his ties to Germany from 1918 through 1941. He has contacts with Franz von Papen (pp. 131, 225), Kurt Ludecke (the Nazis' "chief fund raiser" in the 1920s, p. 49ff) and perhaps Heinrich Albert, one of the members of the board of directors of German Ford Werke since the 1930s. By page 318 Liebold has evolved into "probably a Nazi spy" but the evidence remains shaky and confusing, and consists of a few official Nazi (p. 146) or older German contacts, the significance of which Wallace cannot fully illuminate. This never explicitly-made line of argumentation then would read as follows: during World War I an unconfirmed German spy set Henry Ford up to develop anti-Semitic views which, by the time of World War II, would lead the Ford Company to undermine the American military efforts against Nazi Germany. My problem is less with the validity of this interpretation than with the lack of specific and convincing evidence that it was Liebold who was behind all of this activity; too often the argument is based on conjecture (131ff., 144, 318f.). Rather than focusing on how Ford came to be an anti-Semite (as if anti-Semitism were a contagious disease one could only catch through close personal contact), it is the story of the public and political consequences of Ford's anti-Semitism that is really the more interesting one.

No less frustrating is the reversal of the above-outlined argument in chapter 2, "The Fuehrer's Inspiration." Much is made of Ford's portrait in Hitler's office in 1931 (p. 2) and Baldur von Schirach's defense at the Nuremberg trial: "If [Ford] said the Jews were to blame, naturally we believed him" (p. 42). Surely, the Nazis did not have to rely on Ford as a teacher of anti-Semitism? Here, too, the claim of Ford's influence on the Nazis is not contextualized.[1] Wallace instead offers the opinion by another historian emphasizing "the role that Russian émigrés played in laying the ideological groundwork for the Holocaust" (p. 63).[2] Wallace uses this point to explain the significance of the White Russian Boris Brasol who is the most direct link between Ford (via Liebold, of course) and the Nazis and also the conduit for a possible financial donation to the NSDAP. The driving force behind Wallace's account is the existence of links between people who move like chess figures across board. The author establishes far-flung connections between his two protagonists and Germany, but much of the context is missing. Occasionally, the reason for the lack of historical perspective is Wallace's unfamiliarity with important secondary literature on his subject. The reference for his account of American controversy over boycotting the Berlin Olympics in 1936 is a 2001 article on China in the National Review Online (p. 415f.). But the main problem of Wallace's book is not a failure to adhere to academic standards of referencing or source criticism. At issue is a broader concern that historians and journalists share: we tell a story in order to advance an argument, to give meaning to an otherwise confusing and chaotic assemblage of facts and events. It is in this endeavor that Wallace's meandering account falls somewhat short. Instead we learn intermittently some juicy tidbits that do not pertain to the author's immediate subject matter: for example, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote an admiring piece in a student paper on the isolationist "lonely eagle" (p. 275) and George W. Bush's maternal great-grandfather "has been described by a U.S. Justice Department investigator as 'one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States'" (p. 349).

Later chapters explore the relationship between the Ford Company (Dearborn) and its German subsidiary Ford Werke during World War II. It is a story of "business as usual": the German profits were "placed in an escrow account for distribution to the American parent company after the war" (p. 329). These profits, Wallace rightly highlights, were in part based on forced labor.[3] Wallace is also correct in challenging the notion--offered as the conclusion of a recent investigation that Dearborn had conducted into the problem of wartime profits from its European, Nazi-dominated subsidiaries--that Ford "had to use labor provided by the German government" (p. 335). The German controlled Ford plants in Europe had, even before the outbreak of the war and with the consent of Dearborn, turned into "an arsenal of Nazism" (pp. 228f., 340).

The story of Lindbergh's misguided views and actions is also advanced through a narrative of secondary figures. Lindbergh--in spite of a father who is portrayed as more racist than ordinary white Americans at the time (p. 83)--acquired his racial views through his close association and friendship with the French scientist Alexis Carrel. The aviator's obsessions with racial purity were subsequently further bent in a direction of admiration for the Nazi project by the American military attaché to Germany, Truman Smith (pp. 104-111, 381). And it is the latter who invited Lindbergh and his wife "in the name of Göring" to visit the Third Reich at the time of the Olympic Games (p. 112ff.) Not surprisingly, Lindbergh was deeply impressed not only by "the organized vitality of Germany" but more importantly by a state that sought to realize his own ideals: "science and technology harnessed for the preservation of a superior race" (p. 118). As a result of the exclusive focus on the aviator, the dramatic and complex story of the Czechoslovak crisis is told with Lindbergh and his exaggerated reports on the German air force playing the decisive role in tilting British policy towards appeasement (pp. 165, 167-171). Wallace's chapter ignores the military, political and diplomatic reality of the British situation in 1938.[4]

Lindbergh, probably even more so than Ford, emerges at times in this book as an unsuspecting dupe of more sinister forces working in the background (p. 208). I am not convinced that this conspiratorial approach to history serves Wallace's endeavor to establish personal responsibility for politically damaging actions. The point to make about the problematic role of the two flawed heroes concerns the impact of their anti-Semitic, racist, pro-Nazi public activities, speeches or publications over the course of more than a decade on American public opinion. The Roosevelt administration, in the meantime, tried to rally the same public around a program of aid to Britain and subsequently in a heavily ideological mobilization characterized Nazism as an assault on civilization. Ford and Lindbergh in turn found this civilization not threatened by the Germans but by the Russians. The fact that both received a Nazi medal, which was evidently well-deserved, and that they refused to return them is telling. Particularly in the last chapter, Wallace tries hard to give the impression of a fair and balanced portrait of the "lonely eagle," defending him against Harold Ickes's public as well as Roosevelt's private accusations of being a "Nazi." This highlights one the book's more problematic aspects: the incongruity between the title and jacket design suggesting a crucial role of this "American Axis" in the rise of the Third Reich and the nuanced conclusion that the author "discovered no smoking gun proving that Lindbergh was motivated by anything but sincere--albeit misguided--motives for this prewar isolationist activities or that he was disloyal to America" (p. 378). Between title and conclusion lies the substance of the book: characterized by the absence of an explicitly stated argument, a detailed, yet narrowly focused narrative suggests that their racist convictions led Ford and Lindbergh to take a benevolent and admiring view of the Third Reich, and partly knowingly, partly unwittingly served Nazi interests.

From the dust jacket we learn that Wallace is a "Holocaust researcher" but he exhibits little scholarly background on the Third Reich itself. (To refer to Adolf Hitler as "another German philosopher" [p. 43] in the same sentence with Hegel is not helpful to his overall point.) He cites some relevant secondary literature on specific aspects of World War II, for example Nazi Fifth Column activities in the United States, anti-Semitism in the U.S. army, and forced labor in the German Ford Werke, but he does not use it to establish the urgently needed interpretive context for the events detailed in this book. Most sorely missing is a proper analysis of American anti-Semitism as a prerequisite for understanding how Americans confronted the Third Reich. Wallace, even though citing studies by Leonard Dinnerstein and Myron Scholnick, neither defines the nature of American anti-Semitism nor does he seem to understand the effect it had on the American public perception of and official responses to the Third Reich--a story told by Deborah Lipstadt, Richard Breitman, David Wyman and others. Its relevance lay in the role which even the mildest forms of social prejudice and, in particular, the Roosevelt administration's concern over these prejudices played in devising responses to Nazi Germany. Within the context of Wallace's narrower focus, it would have been helpful at least to clarify the difference between Ford's hatred fantasizing about a Jewish political-economic conspiracy and Lindbergh's obsession with racial purity. But for Wallace anti-Semitism is a monolithic, timeless, unchanging phenomenon.

Max Wallace has written a passionate, though sprawling, narrative that serves an important educational purpose: rather than continuing to admire these two deeply flawed individuals we should appreciate both the political impact of their racial beliefs and the nature of their misguided attraction to Nazi Germany. But his book is not yet a conclusive assessment of the historical role these two public figures played in German-American relations in the 1930s and 40s.

Notes

[1]. For an important primary source on Hitler's pre-1933 views of the United States, its automotive industry and his admiration for an immigration policy that produced "racially first-rate Americans" see Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), pp. 107, 109, 111-118. For the development of "Fordism" during the Third Reich cf. Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997).

[2]. The dissertation proposal on which this assertion is based, incidentally, turns into a dissertation only a few footnotes later, p. 408, n. 101, 106.

[3]. The essence of Wallace's argument with more historical context can also be found in Bernd Greiner, Die Morgenthau Legende. Zur Geschichte eines umstrittenen Plans (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995), pp. 112f., 115f.; and Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Antia Kugler and Nicholas Levis, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War (New York: Berghahn, 2000).

[4]. Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939 (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), pp. 313-464.

*Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. ix + 465 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-312-29022-1.

Reviewed by Michaela Hoenicke Moore (Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Published on H-German (May, 2004)

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9274