p 85

The Prussian Junker was not a man of leisure. He worked hard at managing
his large estate, much as a factory manager does today. His landless laborers
were treated as virtual slaves. On his large properties he was the absolute
lord. There were no large towns nor any substantial middle class, as there were
in the West, whose civilizing influence might rub against him. In contrast to
the cultivated grand seigneur in the West, the Junker developed into a rude,
domineering, arrogant type of man, without cultivation or culture, aggressive,
conceited, ruthless, narrow-minded and given to a petty profit-seeking that some
German historians noted in the private life of Otto von Bismarck, the most
successful of the Junkers.

The emphasis is my own.

Shirer was a brilliant reporter and a shrewd observer, but you need to approach his work critically. Even though he admired and respected German Kultur, he also explains too much of what happened during the NAZI years in what sounds a lot like racist terms to our ears. He felt Hitlerism was born in the German soul, it was a result of racial characteristics. It was “in their blood”. That kind of talk troubles me.

There is, of course, some truth to this, but in my opinion he gives it too much weight. It might be instructive to consider what Shirer did after the publication of Rise and Fall. He joined and led an organization that lobbied against allowing Germany to rejoin the community of nations as a full and free member. He was also politically conservative, in fact, he mentions that one of the motivating causes of Germany’s slide into dictatorship was its welfare system, which at one time was the standard in Europe. I’ll try and dig up the passage where he states this, and I will cite it here when I do.

But he was no fool, either, and he anticipated some of your comments, and my own observations of right wing authoritarianism; his sketch of the psychology of the Prussian Junker landowning class is reminiscent of more than one American stereotype.

It must be relaxing to turn your brain off and let Progressives and Liberals do your thinking for you. It’s amazing when you think about it, that Barack Obama wrote the GOP’s entire legislative agenda…in reverse.

Earlier this year I read an excellent history by Volker Ulrich, “Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939″, published last year. I believe he’s working on the next volume covering the war years. It’s gotten rave reviews, you’ve probably heard of it.

The first part is the fall of the Weimar Republic, and I found it engrossing for its analysis of the forces at work in German Society that conspired to raise up Hitler, or somebody just like him. The German people were anti-Semitic before Hitler, and deeply authoritarian (a majority pined for the return of the monarchy); he just deepened these flaws in his society and exploited them, but he wasn’t the only one engaged in the project of destroying democracy in Weimar at that time.

It seems that the German people were deeply racist before Hitler. It struck me that the translations of German slogans by a German read a bit differently than what we Americans were told by people like Shirer. We were told the Nazis believed in “Germany for Germans”, but the translation by an English-speaking German is an unvarnished “Germany for white people.” I think the idea that the German people had so much in common with Americans might have been just a little too hot to handle for Shirer and his contemporaries.

Too bad. Sweeping that knowledge under the carpet cleared the way for Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in the late ’40s, to develop the beginnings of the toxic civic religion we now know as the “Conservative Movement”, and for later demagogues like Kristol to promote it starting in the ’50s.

And the rest is tragic history.

McConnell and Ryan can then say “Sorry, we tried our best, but it was not to be. The Dems just sabotaged us” if it fails in the Senate. But if it passes, they will own it. All of it. That may not be a good thing for them in the long run.

Given their past whining about how Obama “crammed Obamacare down our throats”, this is truly breathtaking cynicism on the part of the GOP. Then again, if it works this time, they will have a working model of how to pass all of their programs through Congress, especially tax reform, without debate or opposition.

Next will come “Legislative Reform”, or the systematic dismantling of all that Congressional “red tape”, like those petty committees, hearings, debates,and speeches that the minority and the Liberal Media use to obstruct the Will of the People. There is a precedent for this. Your homework assignment is to consider The Enabling Act of 1933.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (W. L. Shirer),
Book Two: Triumph and Consolidation,
CHAPTER 7: THE NAZIFICATION OF GERMANY
Gleichschaltung: the “Coordination of the Reich”