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adolf hitler
The American Billionaires Who Fell In Love With Fascism Are Not the First
The ultra-rich will happily march us into a dictatorship if we let them.
Jun 24, 2024
“The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.” —Plutarch, Gaius Marcius (Coriolanus)
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. ” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, April 29, 1938 (Message to Congress)
In Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, there is a remarkable description of a February 1933 meeting that occurred shortly after Adolf Hitler was chosen as German chancellor. It is remarkable because it occurred almost a century ago, a prelude to one of the darkest chapters in world history. It is a period that has been thoroughly historicized; yet something about it is eerily familiar and up to date.
The newly installed Nazis summoned the oligarchs of German commerce and industry—Krupp, the heads of IG Farben and the largest steel companies, and others—to Hermann Goering’s estate outside Berlin so that Hitler could “explain his policies.” While the moguls expected a dialogue (in deference to their financial power), Hitler appeared late, addressed them at some length, and departed without answering questions.
The influx of contributions from big capital was a decisive factor in the Nazis winning the March 1933 elections, the last competitive election in Germany for the next twelve years.
The bargain, as Hitler’s underlings explained to the attendees, was this: he had just promised the oligarchs to bring parliamentary democracy to an end, smash the Communist Party, and destroy independent unions. There was to be an election the following month; the capitalists’ part of the deal was to pay up with very large political contributions. It was not a question of should they pay, they must pay; what better return on investment could the captains of industry possibly want?
And pay they did: in the following weeks, millions of Reichsmarks flowed into Nazi Party coffers that had been severely short of funds. Tooze believes that the influx of contributions from big capital was a decisive factor in the Nazis winning the March 1933 elections, the last competitive election in Germany for the next twelve years.
Fast forward to 2024. In April, Donald Trump met with oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Floride. After hearing a complaint from one executive about supposedly excessive fossil-fuel regulation, Trump surprised the group with a blunt proposition: raise $1 billion and send him to the White House, and the oil industry will get everything it wants, from a repeal of tailpipe emission regulations to the junking of EV incentives. It would be a “deal” the industry could not pass up.
Press reports of the exchange noted the surprise of the industry executives at the crassly transactional nature of Trump’s offer, although why they felt it necessary to make this disclaimer seems quaint, if not disingenuous. As a former congressional employee, if there is one thing I learned, it is that a meeting with any representative of a business interest always carried an implicit quid pro quo. The coyness over being explicit about a cash transaction is simply the lobbyist camouflaging his greed with a veneer of decorum.
The popular mind so thoroughly associates rich people with reactionary, or for that matter fascist, politics (Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life is a hardy perennial) that we may have become numb as to the reasons. The wealthy themselves, or most of them, have long believed that any regime to the left of Dwight Eisenhower, in addition to leaving the economy in ruins, might unleash Bolshevik mobs to storm the millionaires’ mansions and murder them in their beds. (Although Robert Welch, the wealthy founder of the John Birch Society, claimed that Ike himself was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.”)
The contradictory part is that multiple sources state that economic growth in the United States has been substantially better under Democratic presidents than their Republican counterparts. The New York Timesestimated in 2021 that since 1933, average yearly GDP growth was 4.6 percent under Democratic administrations and 2.4 percent under Republicans. That growth rate is nearly double—are the rich blind to this? (If so, they are not the only ones: polling consistently shows that the public mistakenly thinks that the economy does better under Republicans than Democrats).
Objective examination of the facts is unlikely to be the primary consideration of society’s moguls, any more than it is with the general public. A tycoon may be a genius at producing widgets or vaporware, but that does not mean he understands the workings of the largest economy in the world (although his ego misleads him into thinking he does). Myth-encrusted beliefs, like Horatio Alger’s tale, can cause a rich businessman to think that by its very nature, a booming, full-employment economy can sap the entrepreneurial drive and go-getter spirit among the riffraff.
Hence the economic lore common among libertarian writers (the coat holders of the wealthy) that depressions are a “healthy” correction to too much prosperity, particularly if prosperity has been achieved by Keynesian economics. Thus, the policy advice that billionaire Andrew K. Mellon, the secretary of the treasury from 1921 to 1932, gave to President Herbert Hoover at the onset of the Great Depression: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
The wealthy rarely refrain from moralizing about the less fortunate. It helped that Mellon, even if his own fortune might have taken a tiny dent, was never going to stand in an unemployment line or dine at a soup kitchen, just as Wall Street’s authors of the 2008 financial meltdown were far less likely to suffer its effects than the people they suckered into obtaining subprime mortgages. (Mellon, who engineered whopping tax cuts for the rich in the 1920s, was likewise an instigator of the asset bubble that led to the Crash of ’29).
Like relapsed heroin addicts the oligarchs have come streaming back to the high they get from Trump and their visions of paying zero taxes.
We are entitled to suspect that those who command the heights of capital have reasons, based both on ideology (rugged individualism and the character-building quality of poverty for others) and objective circumstances (they are the last to suffer from a depression), not to be unduly concerned about the state of the macroeconomy. We might even speculate that their compassion for the downtrodden is distinctly limited.
The captains of industry and finance typically run their businesses like the captain of a ship: a dictatorship. Since the model works for them, why not in government? It’s the mentally lazy popular cliché that “government should be run like a business.”
This may account for the love affair between American moguls and fascist dictators. Henry Ford’s admiration for Hitler is well known, and the admiration was mutual. Thomas W. Lamont, the J.P. Morgan Banker who was very influential in government circles, described himself as “something like a missionary” for Italian fascism, regarding the Italian leader as “a very upstanding chap” who had “done a great job in Italy.” In 1938, the very eve of world conflict, Fred Koch, sire of the Koch brothers, built an oil refinery in Nazi Germany precisely when Hitler most needed high-octane fuel for his war machine.
So it is today. In the wake of January 6th, wealthy donors thought it politic to distance themselves from Donald Trump and other Republicans supporting insurrection. But like relapsed heroin addicts the oligarchs have come streaming back to the high they get from Trump and their visions of paying zero taxes. Politico’s headline says it all: “Never mind: Wall Street titans shake off qualms and embrace Trump.”
How fitting then, that Timothy Mellon, grandson of Andrew K., is now in the news. His political views suggest he is the reincarnation of Old Man Mellon: “In a self-published 2015 autobiography, Mellon called social safety net programs ‘Slavery Redux,’ adding: ‘For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on. The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.’”
You can probably guess how this story ends. On May 31, Mellon gave an unprecedented $50 million to a dark money group supporting Trump. The listed date of the contribution was a day after Trump’s fraud conviction on 34 felony counts. It is a warning about how rich sociopaths intend to bury forever what’s left of our tattered democracy.Keep ReadingShow Less
A Fascist Donald Trump and the Lawyer's Dilemma
Trump’s assault on democracy’s essential institutions has always been open and notorious. Examples abound—and they are laced with lies. If you were an attorney committed to defending democracy, could you defend this man?
Jun 04, 2024
“Thus was democracy finally interred…. [I]t was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament turned over its constitutional authority to [the dictator] and thereby committed suicide, though its body lingered on in an embalmed state to the very end…, serving as a sounding board for some of [the dictator’s] thunderous pronunciations, its members hand-picked by the [dictator’s party], for there were no more real elections….” —William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959)
In his book, Shirer then quoted historian Alan Bullock, whose observation decades ago frames the lawyer’s dilemma in representing Donald Trump today:
“‘The street gangs… had seized control of the resources of a great modern State, the gutter had come to power….’ But —as Hitler never ceased to boast—‘legally,’—by an overwhelming vote of Parliament. The Germans had no one to blame but themselves.”
The Constitutional Right to Representation
In the United States, anyone charged with a crime is entitled to a defense. But representing someone seeking to undermine the U.S. Constitution by destroying its institutional foundations and the rule of law is an entirely different matter. That’s because every lawyer swears an oath to support the Constitution.
Trump’s assault on democracy’s essential institutions has always been open and notorious. Examples abound—and they are laced with lies.
The Big Lie(s)
More than 60 federal and state courts ruled that Trump lost the 2020 election. But Trump claims falsely that he won. Yielding no ground to facts or reality, he and his allies claim that—unless he wins—every election is “rigged” against him and no one should credit the outcome, including the upcoming contest on November 5, 2024.
Likewise, a jury of Trump’s peers convicted him of 34 felonies. But Trump asserts that the entire civil and criminal justice system is out to get him. As for January 6, he labels the convicted insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol “patriots” and “martyrs,” and promises to pardon them if he recaptures the White House.
Trump’s congressional sycophants have fallen in line behind him in adopting his false, revisionist history of the insurrection and his assault on the criminal justice system. But as the attack on the U.S. Capitol occurred, Republicans in Congress—including then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—were clear about what was happening and who was responsible. A week after the riot, McConnell went to the Senate floor and said, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
After voting to acquit Trump in his second impeachment, McConnell said:
There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day…
The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president, and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.
He did not do his job. He didn't take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed and order restored.
No. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily—happily—as the chaos unfolded. Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger.
Today McConnell supports Trump’s re-election bid.
History Might Not Repeat Itself, But Sometimes It Rhymes
Trump has followed the lead of his most heinous predecessor.
Trump peppers his rants with bigotry, fear, and terror. He refers to immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. He says, falsely, that they are criminals from “prisons,” “mental institutions,” and “insane asylums.” Trump warns Americans to resist immigration or “you won’t have a country anymore.”
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that he “was repelled by the conglomeration of races…repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews… [His] hatred grew for the foreign mixture of peoples….” (Shirer, p. 27) And he spoke repeatedly about the need to “increase and preserve the species and the race.” (Shirer, p. 86)
Pledging that, if elected, he will be “dictator for a day,” Trump has vowed publicly to “root out” his political opponents. And he promises to stack the federal government with cronies who will never disagree with him.
Hitler said repeatedly that he would “know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals [who, he falsely claimed, had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ with the onerous Versailles Treaty of 1918] had been overthrown.” He banished or executed those who crossed him. (Schirer, p. 70)
During his first term in office, Trump stacked his administration and the courts with allies, including a federal judge in Florida who presides—and delays—one of the three remaining criminal cases against him. That judge—and many of his other appointees—were and are manifestly unqualified for their jobs.
Hitler co-opted the judiciary and then established his own special courts. He alone became the law. (Shirer, 268-274)
The Washington Post reported in February 2024:
Just before the former president lost the 2020 election to President Biden, Trump issued an executive order designed to gut civil service job protections for workers across the government. It would have paved the way for the workers to be replaced with others, including political partisans, subject to termination at will—a move the Republican president backed because he felt nonpartisan bureaucrats were hampering many of his policies. Trump has promised to reinstate the directive, which Biden quickly revoked after his inauguration. It created a new federal employment category, Schedule F, that would make federal jobs vulnerable to partisan political whims by weakening guardrails meant to ensure a nonpartisan bureaucracy.
Initial estimates that Trump’s edict would apply to more than 50,000 government employees were far too low.
Hitler populated the government with his lackeys. Before becoming chancellor, he vowed that “when the National Socialist movement is victorious in this struggle, then there will be a National Socialist Court of Justice too. Then the November 1918 revolution will be avenged and heads will roll!” (Shirer, p. 141)
Trump understands the importance of symbols and branding. “MAGA” and related paraphernalia—hats, T-shirts, flags—are no accident.
Hitler likewise understood the power of symbols and used the swastika as a unifying image.
Trump co-opted religious evangelicals, many of whom view him as the divine messenger for their cause.
Hitler exploited his country’s history to gain the support of its religious institutions. Then he assumed control over all of them.
Trump has persuaded many industrial magnates to support him because his policies will favor them economically, including a promise to reverse climate initiatives affecting the major oil companies in return for $1 billion in contributions to his current campaign.
Hitler cultivated industry leaders who supported his rise to power – until it was too late to stop his heinous acts that disserved even them.
Trump understands the power of lies, deception, and disinformation. He rode to the White House on the wings of his “birther” lie about President Barack Obama’s origins.
Hitler rode lies to power too: “[A]t a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down… This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty…” (Shirer p. 22-23)
Trump understands the power of fomenting fear and encouraging terror. January 6, 2021 made that abundantly clear.
One hundred years earlier, Hitler had discovered that power, writing: “I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.”
Trump has never won a majority of the popular vote for President.
Hitler topped out at 37 percent before an aging President Paul von Hindenburg gave him the chancellorship.
Trump uses television and social media to outline his views and to reveal—in advance—how he will proceed if he gains control of the government.
Hitler used Mein Kampf as a roadmap of his ambitions and his plans to fulfil them. Trump meets all of the criteria that one of Hitler’s professors listed in describing the future dictator: lacking “self-control and, to say the least, he was considered argumentative, autocratic, self-opinionated, and bad-tempered, and unable to submit to school discipline.”
The Lawyer’s Dilemma
So Adolf Hitler seeks your help in dismantling the foundational institutions of government and undermining popular support for democracy.
He offers you a big retainer and dangles the promise of a media spotlight for his outrageous positions.
Your assignment is simple: Do whatever it takes to help him achieve power—but all of the steps must be lawful. His objective—and yours if you accept—is the destruction of the U.S. Constitution and the demise of the rule of law.
Do you take the case?
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Lula Wrong to Compare Netanyahu to Hitler, But Israeli Policies Very Similar to Those of Fascist Nazis
Just how fascist and Nazi-like has the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu become?
Feb 19, 2024
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stirred controversy when he said, “What is happening in the Gaza Strip and with the Palestinian people did not exist at any other historical moment. Or rather, it did: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”
He continued, “It is not a war between soldiers and soldiers. It is a war between a well equipped army on the one hand and women and children on the other.”
Lula is not the first world leader to compare Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Hitler over his actions in Gaza — Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan made the same comparison.
While Netanyahu’s policies are not like those of Nazi Germany in almost any respect if we consider absolute numbers and consider the scale of killing, Lula is not completely in error if we consider more qualitative aspects of history...
Since Hitler murdered six million Jews, the comparison is hurtful. It could also be rejected on grounds of scale. Hitler not only killed all those European Jews, he also killed 6 million Poles. And consider Ukraine: “of the 41.7 million people living in Ukrainian Soviet Republic before the war, only 27.4 million were alive in Ukraine in 1945. Official data says that at least 8 million Ukrainians lost their lives: 5.5 – 6 million civilians, and more than 2.5 million natives of Ukraine were killed at the front. The data varies between 8 to 14 million killed, however, only 6 million have been identified.”
While Netanyahu’s policies are not like those of Nazi Germany in almost any respect if we consider absolute numbers and consider the scale of killing, Lula is not completely in error if we consider more qualitative aspects of history and look to European fascism as a whole and not just the German National Socialists (who were peculiar in many ways).
First: Keep People Stateless on the Basis of Identity
For instance, the Fascists stripped citizenship from millions of people and made them stateless, without the rights that come from a direct relationship to a state of their own. Chief Justice Earl Warren defined citizenship as “the right to have rights.”
Hitler took citizenship from German Jews but also from the Roma and from persons of African heritage.
Netanyahu keeps 5.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories stateless and without citizenship. So his policies in this narrow regard are similar to those of the National Socialists in the 1930s. In essence, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are living under something like the Nuremberg Laws. Their establishments and homes are attacked by militant Israeli squatters with impunity, in a sort of rolling Kristallnacht.
Note that by Israeli law, Israeli squatters in the occupied Palestinian territories have all the citizenship rights of other Israelis. So the lack of rights on the West Bank is not territorial. It is by ethnicity.
Netanyahu has boasted about derailing the Oslo Peace Accords and presents himself as the only one who can prevent a Palestinian state from being established. He reiterated his opposition to any international diplomatic track that leads to a Palestinian state just this weekend.
Second: Deprivation of Basic Individual Rights
Another feature of Fascism, underlined by Robert Paxton, is the elimination of individual rights. Israel’s regime over the occupied, stateless Palestinians fully demonstrates this feature. Palestinians can be arrested under “administrative detention” without charge or trial or habeas corpus and held for months or years. We have seen a treatment of detained Palestinians in Gaza that constitutes war crimes. It is alleged that forms of torture are practiced.
Third: Total War
Netanyahu’s Gaza campaign has demonstrated a reckless disregard for the lives of innocent noncombatants, who make up nearly all of the nearly 30,000 people so far killed, and who have been deprived of domiciles and sufficient food and potable water by the Israeli military.
Total war was adopted as a military strategy by fascist states, according to historian Alan Kramer. One academic summarized his argument: “Kramer indicated a very interesting question regarding the specificity of the kind of war implemented by fascist regimes during the thirties and the forties, characterized by its genocidal nature and opened, according to him, with the colonial war launched by Italy in Abyssinia [Ethiopia] in 1935. Kramer underlined that the specificity of this particular way of waging war typical of fascism would define itself by the final elimination of the «distinction between combatants and non-combatants», pointing how in the six years of this conflict between 350.000 and 760.000 Ethiopians were killed, victims of an asymmetric war based on the overwhelming use of air force, chemical weapons and politics of collective terror against any sign of real or imagined resistance.”
The fascist way of war eliminates the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and wreaks mass death on the latter to achieve military aims. There doesn’t seem much doubt that Netanyahu is waging total war on Gaza and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and a whole plethora of Israeli officials have repeatedly insisted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. This, even though half of Gaza’s population is children.
Total war easily leads to genocide, of course, which is why the International Court of Justice has found it at least plausible that Netanyahu is waging a genocide in Gaza, attempting to destroy a people in part or in whole because of who they are.
So, no, Netanyahu is not a Hitler. But, yes, his policies bear a strong resemblance to those of inter-war Fascism.
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