Remembrance of Nazis past
A review of a new book by Dennis Glover on what the past can teach us about the threat of contemporary autocrats
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
—William Faulkner
Kamala Harris has announced that her running mate for the upcoming Presidential election will be Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and I suspect this means a world of pain for Donald Trump and JD Vance. Walz exudes precisely the sort of small-town authenticity that JD Vance has desperately tried to manufacture and it will be a quite a sight to see them on the same debate stage. Vance, like Trump, is no doubt already prepping his excuses.
I’m on a bit of Walz learning curve, and found this incredible little story about him that you mightn’t have seen. It has direct bearing on the review I am offering here of Dennis Glover’s new book.
Walz used to be a high school teacher and was an early adopter of GIS technology as a teaching aid. GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, is “a computer system that analyzes and displays geographically referenced information. It uses data that is attached to a unique location.”
Waltz used GIS to teach his students about the Holocaust, and then extrapolated, as is explained in this recent article in the Minnesota Reformer:
He had his students build maps of the contemporary world using different layers of data that scholars believed could factor into modern-day genocides. “They started looking at food insecurity, potential drought, just like the UN was doing around famine early warning,” Walz said.
In 1993, he asked his sophomores where they thought the next genocide might happen, based on the geographic data. They pinpointed Rwanda. The following year, the Rwandan Genocide occurred. The New York Times interviewed some of the students involved in the project in 2008, when Walz was a U.S. congressman.
The idea that the past can teach us about the present is hardly new, though our ability to add this sort of data analysis to the mix potentially creates another dimension. Such an approach is at the heart, for instance, of Peter Turchin’s book, End Times, in which he explains his data-driven approach to analysing contemporary politics:
It became clear to us through quantitative historical analysis that complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a certain degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces, operating across the thousands of years of human history.
…To put it somewhat wonkily, when a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars), a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability.
Turchin, Peter. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (p. viii). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Turchin points out that the idea of a “science of history” has long been debated and that historian Phillip Toynbee’s suggestion that history is more than “just one damn thing after another” was for a long time a minority view:
Historians and philosophers, including famous ones like Karl Popper, vehemently insisted that a science of history was impossible. Our societies are too complex, humans are too mercurial, scientific progress cannot be predicted, and culture is too variable in space and time. Kosovo is completely different from Vietnam, and antebellum America can tell us nothing about the America of the 2020s. This has been, and still largely is, the majority view.1
Australian writer and public intellectual, Dennis Glover, has just released a new book predicated in this debate. Glover doesn’t directly argue the pros and cons but Repeat: A warning from history makes clear that he accepts the notion that we need to learn from history and that, in fact, in failing to do so, we are dooming ourselves to repeating the worst mistakes of the past. Specifically, he addresses the parallels between the rise of Vladmir Putin, Victor Orban, and, of course, Donald Trump and the authoritarian dictators of the past, and he begs us to heed the lessons of history:
The populists are back. The 1920s and ’30s have returned. The first time around, it was all so new. We were taken by surprise, disoriented, knocked off our feet, terrified, cowed. This time we have no excuse. We know the populists’ game plan. And we know that unless we show the strength to face them down, disaster will follow. If you doubt me, read on.
In this struggle, history is our friend. The similarities between then and now are clear and unsettling. The same patterns are unfolding before our eyes. To stop them repeating in full, we need to learn the lessons of the past. It won’t be enough to rely on others for this knowledge; we must all be historians now. And as citizen-historians our task is simple: to stop the Second World War being followed by a Third. Armed with the lessons of history, we must demand our governments and political parties act strongly and with courage.
Learn, good people. Fast.
The book is short and unapologetically polemical and I think it does a good job in setting out its case. In fact, it is one of the best short histories of Hitler and Stalin that I have read and I would recommend it on those grounds alone. It is clear that Glover is well-versed in this history, that he has read deeply and widely on the era of the Second World War, and I admire anyone who can absorb that much information and retell the story this accurately and succinctly.
I also have a deal sympathy for his approach in general given that—as regular readers will know—I have spent the last year or so researching a book on more or less the same topic. You cannot read the history of Weimar, of Hitler, of the Second World War, the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin, and cognate events, without seeing terrifying parallels with the present day and I understand well the urge to warn people.
I still intend to write something about all of this, specifically the role of the media played in Hitler’s ascension, though I must say, the more I read about the way the Nazis used the media in their day, the less convinced I was of the efficacy of straight comparison between then and now, of the value of relying on history as guide to the present.
Clearly the media played and continues to play an enormous role in the rise and dissemination of the right-wing populism that Glover is speaking about in Repeat, and you can make meaningful comparisons between, say, Weimar media mogul Alfred Hugenberg and our very own Rupert Murdoch.2
There is even a media technological comparison to be made, where just as today’s autocrats use the new tools of digitisation and social media to spread their poison, Hitler in particular, under the guidance of Joseph Goebbels, was equally skilled in exploiting the new technologies of radio, film, and aircraft to inveigle himself into the hearts and minds of his fellow Germans.
He even used to press phonograph recordings—78s—of his speeches, the Weimar equivalent of a podcast.
“Fifty thousand gramophone records of Hitler’s speeches had also been produced, the disks small enough to be mailed in an envelope,” as Timothy Ryback tells is in his fabulous book about 1932, Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power.
But there are important differences between the media of the 1930s and what we have now, and this is the point I want to make.
Hitler was operating at the dawn—was central to the development of—the era of mass media, whereas today’s autocrats and wannabe Adolfs are operating in the digital world of niches and rabbit holes, where the whole media landscape has been fractured, creating an entirely different environment of influence. This necessarily changes the dynamic, and therefore the value, of any comparison between now and then.
That is to say, I think we have conned ourselves into thinking that the rise of social media platforms and the like has left us uniquely vulnerable to “fake news” and disinformation, but you can make a pretty good case that the era of mass media was a much more effective system of propaganda. For all its failings, at least social media, websites, newsletters and the like provide a way for us to fight back—precisely as Glover is arguing we should—leaving us less vulnerable to the forces of fascist populism than our historical antecedents.
In other words, history rhymes rather than repeats, though I’ll concede Rhymes is a much less compelling title for a book that wants to draw out these comparisons and sound the warning that Glover is sounding.
As historian Michael Socolow noted in this CJR interview, “History should be humbling. We shouldn’t be confident; we shouldn’t say, Oh, history tells us to do x, y, and z….When somebody stands up and announces, History tells us x, it presumes, a) that there’s one story of history that everybody agrees on, and b) that history can be simplified into a moral or ethical lesson rather than a serious consideration of all the other alternatives that may have happened. ”
I’m not saying Glover is guilty of this sort of oversimplification—in fact, I would say he is very careful not to over-egg the comparison pudding—but I would’ve liked to have seen more recognition of the limits of the methodology. As I have tried to say in using the media example, highlighting the differences between now and then might actually be the best way of arming us against repeating history.
You can see the problem with the whole approach most clearly in the brief section where Glover mentions the war in Gaza. In a book that is predicated on historical comparison, this section glosses over—I don’t think that is too harsh—the most obvious historical parallel. The genocide comparison he makes is more about the actions of Hamas than of Israel:
It is estimated that more than 1100 people, some of them tourists and guest workers, were killed on this day, and more than 250 kidnapped. Learning of the unexpected success of the attacks, one Palestinian in Gaza City said: “We were ecstatic. It’s like a dream that is hard to wake up from.”
The antisemitic pogrom, banished from the world since the Germans retreated across the Oder in early 1945, had returned.
He does go onto to note that “Not only has the age of pogroms returned, but so too the age of murderous mass retribution and indiscriminate aerial bombing,” but the framing feels tone-deaf, or underplayed, given the size of the “pogrom” relative to that of the “retaliation”. No mention is made of the 40-odd thousand slaughtered in that “retaliation”.
It is a missed opportunity to really investigated the idea of what history can teach us about avoiding the mistakes of the past.
Despite such misgivings, I welcome this book and would encourage people to read it. Yes, rhymes might be a more accurate word than repeat, but there is a case to be made for the urgency Glover is trying to encourage. His point that the “Overton window is a managerial myth – anything is possible, anytime,” is well taken. His cri de cour that we need to stand up to bullies the moment they puff out their chests and start rearranging the furniture is worth remembering in any time or place.
Once I used to join in
Every boy and girl was my friend
Now there's revolution, but they don't know
What they're fighting
—Living in the Past, Jethro Tull
The history of Toynbee’s quote is itself an interesting investigation.
Though, just note, that Hugenberg was more than a media proprietor and was also a politician in his own right, as leader of the rightwing German National People’s Party.
I have some familiarity with GIS, having been a military cartographer in a past life, and Waltz' use of it in 1993 was pretty sophisticated.
I have read 'Repeat' and found that it pushes a distorted view of history and the present. There are many example's. But what is mostly dishonest is the lack of inconvenient context. It mainly comes down to gross distortion and therefor lies by omission. If the question of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been given the slightest context one would have understood the role of the 'Western Powers' and their encouragement to Hitler to launch his expansionary war to the East and destroy the Soviet Union and all the Slavic and Unmensch and defeat the biggest threat to Capitalism/imperialism