Adolf Hitler was one of history’s most infamous, prolific liars and mass murderers. Or, if you admire the Führer and think his program made a lot of sense, arguably history’s greatest self-made man. Or both can be true at once, or partly or mostly true, and other things besides: vegetarian, artistic, eccentric, flatulent, insane, loved dogs, sadist. We often forget, in this divisive, fascistic age of black and white when we all must be either good or evil, that more than one thing can be true about each of us, and that some of these true things directly contradict other true things about us.
History is deep, complicated, nuanced, not straightforward and, though those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, it never repeats itself exactly. Historians say it doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, as Mark Twain supposedly observed. I’m thinking about Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag in the spring of 1934, about a year into his 1,000 Year Reich, a couple of weeks after The Night of the Long Knives, a nationwide execution of all of Hitler’s most prominent political rivals.
Hitler, a talented liar, was a trailblazing pioneer of the Big Lie, a technique of mass media manipulation, based on an audacious, endlessly repeated lie, that every powerful psychopath and dictator always makes use of. Hitler lied without hesitation, to everybody and under all circumstances. He said whatever he needed to say, according to the transactional needs of the immediate contest he was determined to win.
He had the Prime Minister of Britain in his office in the months leading up to World War Two and was determined to have the European Allies, his former enemies, let him have Czechoslovakia (coincidentally, producers of the world’s best munitions). After throwing a terrifying temper tantrum, rolling on the floor biting at furniture as he snarled and screamed, he calmed himself and managed to sincerely assure British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin that once Germany had the Sudetenland and the German population of Czechoslovakia was back in German hands, that the Fatherland’s territorial demands would be at an end. Peace in our time, how about it, old bean?
Chamberlin shook his hand and came back to England with the good news that war had been avoided through diplomacy (that would be remembered by history as appeasement). Once Germany had Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s men dressed some political prisoners in Polish uniforms and shot them in the act of attacking a German border outpost. With the photographic proof of dead Polish aggressors at the border, the Führer then declared war on Poland, and the rest, as they say, is history. 70-85 million (70,000,000 to 85,000,000) dead later, in another war Hitler claimed had been started by a global cabal of Jewish elders (we did the First World War, then known as The Great War, too), the Führer condemned the nation that had betrayed and failed him, shot his wife, shot his dog and then shot himself.
I apparently wrote this on February 6, 2020. It is timely today:
Once you remove the last legal restraints on a lawless person, the results are easy to predict.
I’m haunted by the image of Mr. Hitler, already the dictator of Germany for a year and a half, finally sending the Gestapo out to liquidate his enemies in “The Night of the Long Knives”. Everyone on Mr. Hitler’s voluminous enemies list was murdered that night, June 30, 1934, including a nationally known ultra-conservative politician and decorated German general named Kurt von Schleicher. He was shot seven times while sitting at his desk, his wife was also killed; a year later Schleicher’s cook, the only eye witness to the shooting, mysteriously drowned.
The killing of Schleicher was sold the next morning in the Nazi press as an act of self-defense by the men sent to peacefully take Schleicher into custody on charges of high treason. The Nazi story in the Nazi-controlled mass media was that they’d shot the accused traitor when he resisted arrest by opening fire on them, as desperate, insane traitors often do. Two weeks later Mr. Hitler could nonchalantly drop the lie during a Reichstag speech and simply tell the nation: “I had Schleicher shot.”
Even though “jobs are booming, incomes are soaring, poverty is plummeting, crime is falling, confidence is surging and our country is thriving and highly respected again” I am feeling unaccountably uneasy. (2025 note: Biden actually achieved most of these things, after, heh, stealing the 2020 election…) I keep thinking of what our infallible leader tweeted right after Mueller’s investigation “completely and totally exonerated” the man about whose ten counts of obstruction of justice Robert Mueller III wrote “we could not exonerate him.”
Mueller, the lifelong Republican who “completely exonerated” Trump, of course — a traitor– and the treason of his witch hunting partisan investigators is being criminally investigated by the aggressive Attorney General’s most aggressive investigator even as we joyously celebrate the unprecedented greatness of our great land. Here’s the part of the president’s tweet I can’t manage to forget:
“It is finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason.”
The Führer used the same kind of passion in sharing his deepest feelings with his faithful followers about his sick and dangerous enemies, the ones he said would be hanging from lamp posts, or slowly strangled on piano wire, on film, for his repeated viewing pleasure.
History rhymes, but it doesn’t always go according to a would-be tyrant’s plans, no matter how wealthy, powerful and unscrupulous his backers are.
German democracy was only about fifteen years-old when Hitler invoked the constitutional Emergency Powers his party never gave up (it’s always an emergency when one of these motherfuckers is in power, as we have seen). Our democracy, the world’s oldest, will be 250 next summer. Our founding document, The Declaration of Independence, a copy of which Trump hung on the wall of the Oval Office, has the same meaning to Trump as his interpretation of the MAGA riot of January 6, 2021 — it’s all about love, loyalty, and honor, and, personal loyalty to the boss, and freedom, and the God-given right to take long showers with plenty of water pressure to wash the shampoo out of your thick, luxuriant head of hair. Everything but what it actually is. We hold these truths to be self-evident, and shit. In the immortal words of George Lopez, fuck that puto.
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