No More Weimar Cosplay

A Return to Boring Politics

I started writing this as a note on a restack of Jenny Holland’s piece on would-be Trump assassin, Cole Tomas Allen, but it was one of those notes that ran away with itself (or with me) and I’m posting as a mini-post.

Assassination has become a serious problem in America again for the first time since the 1970s. This time, the majority of assassins and would-be assassins are drawn from the political left, most voicing a similar worldview, seeing one man with a gun as the only way of stopping an ineluctable slide towards “Fascism.”

What we have with Cole Allen and other figures on the American left is a kind of third-hand recollection of Pastor Niemöller (“First they came for the socialists…”) combined with the self-absorbed nature of contemporary life and the contemporary left in the social media era, the Hollywood-style assumption that the individual can do anything, provided his (or her, their or whatever) heart is pure. The result is a generation who believe that they personally can prevent Hitler II: The Revenge, something necessary because the generation of the 1930s singularly failed to do this the first time around.

It’s hard to know where to begin in critiquing this. The Weimar Republic didn’t collapse because people were too stupid or preoccupied to notice Hitler and what he stood for. It collapsed over a period of a decade or more because of deep-rooted social, economic and political problems to which no one had the answer. Many had tried before the Nazis. The real problems were outside Germans’ hands: the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I (particularly the reparations payable to the Allies) and the vulnerability of the German economy to the advent of the Great Depression in the American economy, plus the fact that few people in Germany supported the Weimar Republic, even if they could not agree on what to replace it with. One man with a gun, whether in 1922 or 1932, wouldn’t have changed any of that.

Even if Hitler had been assassinated before 1933 (or if the authorities had locked him up and thrown away the key after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923), there’s a very strong chance that Germany would have ended up as some kind of dictatorship, far-right or, just as likely, far-left (which presumably would suit many on the modern left, as long as they didn’t actually have to live in it).

As for killing him after he came to power, the failed 20^th July 1944 plot against Hitler (which nearly succeeded) led to 7,000 arrests and nearly 5,000 executions. That’s a lot of executions for a plan that didn’t even succeed. Similarly, the successful assassination in Czechoslovakia by the Czech Resistance (the real resistance, not the modern cosplayers) of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the highest-ranking SS officers and chief architects of the Holocaust, led to the murder of 1,300 Czechs, including 200 women. The idea that assassination is just a consequence-free game you can play is utterly insane. If Trump really was Hitler, the consequences of killing him would be catastrophic. The aristocrats and generals behind the 20^th July plot had a plan for taking power once Hitler was dead. Cole Allen would just have let the Twenty-Fifth Amendment kick in, leaving an administration headed by the most senior member of the Trump administration to survive the shooting pursuing similar policies with, it must be said, probably a great deal less chaos and scandal than the Trump administration.

The whole febrile atmosphere on the left speaks to a failure of the imagination, not a failure to imagine a possible evil, but rather the hallucination of an evil that simply is not there, combined with a melodramatic sense of destiny and a personal role in history in certain people (ironically, something they genuinely do share with Hitler), who believe that they alone, acting by themselves or in concert with others, can divert history from The Third Reich Redux to the longed-for left-wing utopia.

This is not 1933. ICE is not the Holocaust. However much it upsets you, deporting illegal immigrants (something unremarked upon by the left as much as the right until a decade or two ago) is not the Holocaust.[1] The Gaza War was not the Holocaust. However much it upset you, the tragic results of a defensive war against a terrorist army embedded in a civilian population is not a genocide. The fact that a majority of your countrymen and women voted for someone you dislike, someone you find morally contemptible, to lead the country, is not the return of Hitler. There’s a reason you can go on No Kings protests, but Germans in 1935 weren’t holding No Fuhrers protests. I promise you, you’ll have the chance to vote for someone else in two years’ time, whatever the increasingly-hysterical legacy media tells you.

What is needed, and not just in the USA, is a move away from rabid personal attacks and Hitler comparisons[2] and a return to actual discussion of policy. A return to boring politics, politics that doesn’t offer us the hope of personal redemption or a place in history, but which tries to keep the streets clean, the public services functioning well, the citizenry safe from enemies inside and out and the economy growing. It is that, and not wild fantasies of “resistance” and utopia that will get us through the genuine socio-political-economic upheavals of our era.

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[1] For the record, the current explosion of Jew-hate in the world, much of it from the type of people who fantasise about killing Donald Trump, is also not the Holocaust. Only the Holocaust is the Holocaust.

[2] I remember when infringing Godwin’s Law was something to avoid and not the main debating strategy on the left.