Friedrich Hayek writes,
"We must now examine a belief from which many who regard the advent of totalitarianism as inevitable derive consolation and which seriously weakens the resistance of many others who would oppose it with all their might if they fully apprehended its nature. It is the belief that the most repellent features of the totalitarian regimes are due to the historical accident that they were established by groups of blackguards and thugs. Surely, it is argued, if in Germany the creation of a totalitarian regime brought the Steichers and Killingers, the Leys and Heines, the Himmlers and Heydrichs to power, this may prove the viciousness of the German character but not that the rise of such people is the necessary consequence of a totalitarian system. Why should it not be possible that the same sort of system, if it be necessary to achieve important ends, be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole?" (157).
[Many of these people are now forgotten, but the footnotes in the book provide a good glossary. Most of us are aware of Himmler, but not Streicher or Killinger. They are all googlable. Suffice it to say that they were abominable stalwarts of Hitler's regime, leaders of the Gestapo, leaders of the SS, major newspaper editors who stumped for the extermination of the Jews, etc.]
So why do such people end up on the top in totalitarian systems? Why has this ALWAYS been the case whether it's in the USSR, in the NAZI period, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? Take a guess.
Answers from Hayek himself tomorrow: he argues that it will ALWAYS be the case that scum rises under totalitarian regimes. What are his reasons for this? Could he be right?
2 comments:
The first, and still the best known, biographer of the German-American poet-general, whose Civil War poems I translated, was a Nazi. Ludwig Finckh was also the first visitor at Gaienhofen, the little artists' colony established around 1905 by Hesse at Lake Constanz on the Swiss border with Germany. The two writers were born a year apart, died less than two years apart as octagenarians and were very much lifelong friends and contemporaries. Finckh was an unabashed anti-Semite. Hesse's third wife was Jewish. The best reference on Hesse's family genealogy was written by Finckh. Assistance Hesse provided to Brecht and Mann during the Nazi era in facilitating their exile may have owed much to Finckh's good standing in the Nazi party. Who knows? It's nearly all still in German.
Finckh was quoted recently about architecture by Scottish professor, Iain Boyd Whyte, on page 2 of a 12 page paper called 'National Socialism and Modernism'. The quotation was from a comment Finckh made in 1919, urging that the capital of Germany should be moved to somewhere other than Berlin.
The essay culminates with a discussion of public works projects funded by the Nazis in the run-up to WWII. They spent nearly as much money on propaganda for the autobahn as they did in actually building it, so the project was a sort of nationwide Potempkin village that opened the door to conscripting labor and establishing labor camps that became the groundwork for their system of concentration camps.
The propaganda for the autobahn was so appealing it could easily have been the inspiration for America's interstate highway program a decade or two later.
Post a Comment