Is it time for your very own ‘Third Reich’?
Do you really not see it coming? Do you really think you can still control it? Do you really believe the ghastly spectre of facism will pass you by?
That is what Germans like you thought.
In the early days of the rise of Hitler and his Nazis.
That is what they still thought in the middle of the horrors of the persecution of our Jewish Germans, our Roma, our handicapped and his dissenters.
And that is what some thought to the bitter end.
And why?
Because in Germany as well there were two alternate realities!
One part of Germans lived in one reality – the other lived in another.
One reality was surviving the inconceivable hardships of German workers in the postwar years.
The other was enjoying the glittering world of the intellectual and artistic German bourgoisie, the old German aristocray and our Jewish German bankers.
And while hundreds of thousands of Germans of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds starved and worked day and night in the factories of Germany’s industrial tycoons responsible for paying the crippling reparition cost after the First World War, while their children went barefoot in the winter and died of hunger, cold and pneumonia in the damp basements and windowless hovels which was all the families could pay for, the other Germans held glamorous soirees in the elegant salons of their magnificent villas in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Cologne and all the other centres of intellectual Germany.
While Germany’s working poor could not afford decent accommodation, education, food, clothes or medical care, Germany’s affluent society lived in turn of the century houses, enjoyed the services of maids, cooks and chauffeurs, drove in stately cars to the theatres and operas in full evening dress, jewels and furs, attended magnificent balls and led the carefree life of a gilded society that never wasted a thought on anything but their own entertainment and pleasures.
Until it was all over! For all Germans!
When Germans had killed nearly 17 million Jewish and non-Jewish Germans and people of other nationalities in concentration camps, when 4.3 million soldiers were dead or missing, 500 000 Germans had perished in the bombing and burning of their houses and 80% of German cities lay in ruins, when 12 million unwanted Eastern German refugees had to shelter in makeshift camps in West Germany and some 60 000 Germans died in prisoner of war camps all Germans got what they deserved – a good share in the misery, poverty and degradation of an occupied nation, in which there were more ruins than houses and the primary occupation of all Germans was to sort and clean bricks from the debris, making winter clothes from German uniforms and army blankets and food from digging up turnips and potatoes in the fields.
When the Second World War had cost some 75 million lives, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians as a result of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation, only after all this had happened did Germany and the world finally wake up.
This is what it took in defeated Germany to change our society of privilege versus exclusion, of wealth versus destitution!
It was no longer a question of what one’s great grandfather or -mother had been and what position one’s father had held in the prewar decades.
It was no longer a question of where one came from and how important or affluent one’s family had been.
For those who never wanted to see how the other side had lived – it was a question of learning how to survive under the worst imaginable conditions.
For those who had always known how to survive any hardship, it was to find out what they could now achieve in a postwar society that had put everyone on an equal footing of poverty.
This is what mattered in postwar Germany.
This is what changed Germans from a society of privilege to a society of merit.
Yet, for Germans, it took two world wars to change their society.
How long will it take for America to change?
If its present society does not even really remember the social and economic devastation of the Great Depression?
But if America does not watch out and start to read the menetekel on its wall, its fate may not be much different from that of Germany.
It will see that those millions of Americans disenfranchised by American intellectuals, America’s Nazi equivalents actually, will take over and crush the pockets of liberalism and the principles of a more egalitarian society as they were crushed in Germany after the hapless Weimar Republic.
It will find that significance of Trump’s MAGA hat and T-shirt as a symbol of social underdogs ‘belonging’ to a cause they understand are no different to Hitler’s swastika and brown shirt.
And that the former stand for the same hatred!
And it will find that talking of change is not enough.
Condemning white nationalism, right wing extremism and neo nazis are not enough.
Especially not if being white, extremist and evangelical are the only visible and spiritual advantages people have that provide them with a sense of entitlement to look down, discriminate and abuse those who are not.
Talking of reforms is not enough when there are white men in the American police forces who hate every black man for his physical appearance of masculinity.
Talking of improving general education is not enough when state schools rank last in all government expenditure with regard to education in poor rural environments and there are no funds to promote skill based colleges for manual and technical trades and apprenticeships have no place in a qualification system that is not based on practical work but written tests.
The social injustice? The criminal injustice? The racial injustice? The riots? The storming of the Capitol?
Make no mistake America! This is not new!
This is your legacy from the very beginning of the first European settlers in North America.
And it is even more surprising how so many intelligent, present day Americans manage to blank out or neutralise or even justify this bloody legacy of genocide, lawlessness, oppression and exploitation not only in their history books but in their individual and national conscience.
And the end of it all?
A new civil war fought with dirty money against pretty words, deadly guns against meaningless goodwill, physical brutality against intellectual theories.
Maybe it is time again that America’s intellectual elite experiences the pain of digging up potato fields for less than minimum wages and of being evicted from tumbling down housing estates and not having enough money to provide good education and good medical care for its children.