If You’re Worried About Fascism, Worry About War

There’s another controversy about whether former President Donald Trump praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in private. In a New York Times interview published Tuesday, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelley claimed that Trump said, “Hitler did some good things.” The same day, The Atlantic reported that Trump said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” citing anonymous sources. Trump’s campaign has denied both reports. These allegations, which have come up before, fit a liberal argument that Trump is a dangerous would-be dictator in the making.

Whether or not the specific reports are true, the discussion often misses an important historical fact. A large part of the Nazi political program was about revenge for losing a past war. Germany and its allies not only turned their guns on their own people, but focused heavily on military glory through conquest. Anyone concerned with the danger of fascism today has to understand the role that militarism played back then.

Hitler was not able to seize control simply because he was skilled at riling up mobs. The Nazi movement took root in soil poisoned by the economic collapse and political chaos caused by losing World War I. Most people understand that Hitler overthrew the weak and chaotic Weimar Republic, but many do not know how that chaos was directly related to the war.

World War I ended for Germany in 1918 with a revolution and counterrevolution. After it became clear that the war was hopeless, the country suffered a mutiny by sailors who didn’t want to fight anymore, which turned into a nationwide uprising, forcing the German emperor to step down. As the new German republic tried to hash out peace terms, the far left and far right armed themselves to fight over the future of the country.

For all the warnings about “Weimar America,” the violence between far left and far right that America has faced in recent years was nothing close to what Germany witnessed in those days. Communists poured into Berlin, trying to take the capital at gunpoint, only to be beaten back by right-wing Freikorps militia, which executed communist leader Rosa Luxemburg in broad daylight. The sight of Germans killing Germans while the enemy was at the gates created years of bitterness.

That experience gave rise to the Dolchstosslegende, the infamous “stab-in-the-back myth.” German military brass testified after the war that they could have won if only they had not been betrayed by the political class. That myth became a specifically antisemitic conspiracy theory. A key moment was the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau—who was Jewish—after he signed a deal with the Soviet Union in 1922. Nationalists believed that Rathenau, who wanted Soviet support to rebuild the German army, was really trying to sell out the country again.

Hitler, a wounded veteran who became a police informant, witnessed these events while trying to infiltrate a small nationalist party that would later be called the Nazis. He realized that he actually agreed with their conspiratorial racism—and quickly became their leader.

Even the Nazis’ genocidal ideology was hard to separate from their wartime experience. Hitler was driven by a specific fixation with securing Germany’s food supplies, argues Columbia University historian Adam Tooze in The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Since Germany’s reliance on imports had allowed the Allies to starve out the country during World War I, the Nazi regime became obsessed with both expanding Germany’s borders and removing the so-called “useless eaters” within them.

Hitler’s partner in crime, Italian ruler Benito Mussolini, was similarly bitter about World War I. Even though Italy had been on the winning Allied side, Italian nationalists did not win all of their demands at the end of the war, so they complained about a vittoria mutilata, a “mutilated victory.” The failure to take all of the land that Italy wanted, they felt, meant that the sacrifices of Italian soldiers were in vain. Mussolini, who started his political career as a pro-war journalist, rose to power leading a veterans’ movement that promised to finish the job.

Fascism isn’t just a matter of someone wanting to be dictator. The conditions have to be in place for them to take power. Hitler and Mussolini came up in societies that had gone to war, were shocked by the outcome, and wanted to try again. Of course, not all societies at war go fascist. But all societies that go fascist have a heavily militarist element. More than anything else, war is what increases the danger of dictatorship.

Just as fighting “small wars” in the colonies had made Europeans overconfident going into World War I, the “forever wars” against militias and failed states in the Middle East have left Americans unprepared for what a peer-on-peer conflict would look like, and convinced that winning is just a matter of wanting it badly enough. While the public was rightfully shocked by 13 American deaths during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, military planners are forecasting 3,200 Americans killed in the first three weeks of a potential war with China.

Dr. Jeremy Freeman, who has been working on wartime medical planning for the U.S. government, recently gave an interview about the dark scenario that the United States is looking at. He is aiming to prepare for 1,000 daily casualties (both injured and killed) in combat, along with possible attacks on American soil. Along with the mass suffering, it would be a terrifying, sudden intrusion of foreign policy into everyday American life.

Private ambulances may be commandeered to help transport the planeloads of wounded Americans coming into the homeland, along with other “creative” options, Freeman implies. With doctors stretched thin, lower-ranking medical staff could be put in charge of procedures “that they otherwise would not be licensed to do,” he speculates. In an effort to keep information on American casualties out of enemy hands, basic information about the number and types of patients in civilian hospitals might become classified.

Even the nervous online jokes about getting drafted to fight in World War III don’t really imagine what a prolonged war of attrition looks like. Everyone likes to laugh about Generation Z storming Chinese and Russian cities in some final battle. It’s less funny to imagine American citizens fighting for bomb shelter space, getting snatched off the streets by press gangs, losing access to basic goods and services, and fretting for prisoners of war in enemy hands.

No one really knows what that level of chaos and trauma would unleash in American politics. Again, although there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between war and dictatorship, military conflict creates the conditions that make dictatorship possible. Those who are worried about the reemergence of fascism should take war—and how to prevent it—seriously.

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