Facism Page 5
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The Hitler Youth was founded in 1922 as the youth organisation of the German Nazi Party in Germany. After Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, the organisation gained importance as a route to indoctrinating German youth with the ideals espoused by the Nazis. As war approached it became partially a paramilitary organisation and as war broke out and Germany came under greater pressure.
Flanders, Julian The Hitler Youth: How Germany Indoctrinated a New Generation. Arcturus Publishing. Kindle Edition. x
Introduction
One of the most memorable representations of the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany can be found in the 1972 film Cabaret. In a scene set in a Berlin beer garden on a warm and gentle summer’s afternoon in 1931, two men settle an argument and toast a joyful future. In the background, a sweet boy’s voice begins to sing about nature: ‘The sun on the meadow is summery warm, The stag in the forest runs free.’ The men turn to listen, as do other drinkers as the band takes up the tune. The camera pans back and reveals the boy wearing a Hitler Youth uniform. At that moment, the music becomes more rousing, the lyrics more nationalistic. Swept up by the song, by its lyrics and the rousing melody, people rise from their chairs and more voices join in the fervent chorus, ‘Tomorrow belongs to me!’, as the boy gives a vigorous Nazi salute. The scene is hugely effective in revealing how self-delusional delusional many Germans were at the time about the Nazis. When the song first appeared in stage performances of the play Cabaret in 1966, it was met with outrage. People were shocked that a genuine Nazi anthem could feature in a Broadway musical. The song has since been adopted by right-wing groups in the USA, the UK, Sweden, Italy, Austria and even by neo-Nazi groups in Germany. Although the song was inspired by traditional patriotic music of the 1930s and even borrowed a few lyrical phrases from an authentic Nazi song, in fact it was written in the mid-1960s by John Kander and Fred Ebb, two Jewish songwriters working on Broadway. Appropriately, the song was an illusion, a deception – a technique the leaders of the Hitler Youth employed to shape the thinking and actions of millions of young Germans after its official formation in 1926.
Koonz, Claudia (2005-11-29T22:58:59.000). The Nazi Conscience . Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition. x
Introduction
“The Nazi conscience” is not an oxymoron. Although it may be repugnant to conceive of mass murderers acting in accordance with an ethos that they believed vindicated their crimes, the historical record of the Third Reich suggests that indeed this was often the case. The popularizers of antisemitism and the planners of genocide followed a coherent set of severe ethical maxims derived from broad philosophical concepts. As modern secularists, they denied the existence of either a divinely inspired moral law or an innate ethical imperative. Because they believed that concepts of virtue and vice had evolved according to the needs of particular ethnic communities, they denied the existence of universal moral values and instead promoted moral maxims they saw as appropriate to their Aryan community. Unlike the early twentieth-century moral philosophers who saw cultural relativism as an argument for tolerance, Nazi theorists drew the opposite conclusion. Assuming that cultural diversity breeds antagonism, they asserted the superiority of their own communitarian values above all others. Conscience, as we usually think of it, is an inner voice that admonishes “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.” Across cultures, an ethic of reciprocity commands that we treat others as we wish to be treated. Besides instructing us in virtue, the conscience fulfills a second, and often overlooked, function. It tells us to whom we shall and shall not do what. It structures our identity by separating those who deserve our concern from alien “others” beyond the pale of our community.
Arendt, Hannah; Applebaum, Anne. The Origins of Totalitarianism: with a new introduction by Anne Applebaum (p. xv). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
So much of what we imagine to be new is old; so many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago. Autocrats have risen before; they have used mass violence before; they have broken the laws of war before. In 1950, in the preface she wrote to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, knowing that what had just passed could repeat itself, described the scant half decade that had elapsed since the end of the Second World War as an era of great unease: “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” The toxic nationalism and open racism of Nazi Germany, only recently defeated; the Soviet Union’s ongoing, cynical attacks on liberal values and what it called “bourgeois democracy”; the division of the world into warring camps; the large influx of refugees; the rise of new forms of broadcast media capable of pumping out disinformation and propaganda on a mass scale; the emergence of an uninterested, apathetic majority, easily placated with simple bromides and outright lies; and above all the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which she described as an “entirely new form of government”—all of these things led Arendt to believe that a darker era was about to begin.