By Sheldon Greaves
Editor’s note: WordPress has just foisted a new version on me, with lots of new “features” and “enhancements.” I am trying to figure out all these new marvels work, which will doubtless cause amusement to the handful of people who actually read this blog. Your indulgence is appreciated. -sg
I recently read an extremely insightful and important piece on the nihilism that ultimately forms the basis of Trumpism and has likewise infected most of American conservatism. This article referenced a book I had not heard about. Its title was The Revolution of Nihilism. A Warning to the West.
The author, Hermann Rauschning, was a faithful member of the National Socialist party, but grew disenchanted with the excesses of its ideology and its leader, Adolph Hitler. His break with the party was in 1934, which means that he was way ahead of the game in grasping what Nazism represented for the German people.
His views brought him into conflict with other Germans and since he was a member of the Senate of the city of Danzig, he was not someone whose dissent would go unnoticed. He eventually left Germany in 1936, fleeing first to Poland, then France, Switzerland, the UK, and finally the United States, where he lived until his death in 1982.
I became aware of the present volume while reading a fascinating analysis of the current political climate that has enabled and prompted the rise of our own home-grown flavor of Fascism and the accompanying attitudes that bewilder so many of my fellow citizens. This piece, “Nihilist Nation: the Empty Core of the Trump Mystique” by Garret Keiser is both well-reasoned, thoughtful, and brilliantly written. I recommend it highly.
But back to Rauschning’s work. This book first appeared in August of 1939, the month before World War II broke out. Over the Next four months, until November of that year, it went through no less than sixteen printings. My copy, which I obtained through Abebooks.com, was printed in 1942, but I don’t obtain old books as an investment collector. I buy them in order to read them. I’m funny that way.
Rauschning’s book describes the fascism in pre-war Germany in terms that are eerily similar to what we’ve seen since Trump began his presidential campaign; distortions of fact, disregard of protocols and practices, the wanton waste of mental and moral resources, all in the service of dismantling any constraints on the focal point, the Man in Charge.
Comparisons between pre-war Germany and Trumpism were considered a bit gauche by serious historians, but when Christopher Browning, one of the world’s leading authorities on the Holocaust, started making the comparison in his article, “The Suffocation of Democracy” in the New York Review of Books, I for one, took notice. That anxiety has receded, a little, with the salvo unleashed by the Mueller investigation this past week, but even so, Rauschning’s book describes the death of a democracy that remains too close for comfort.