The Collapse of Weimar Democracy: Not a Uniquely German Event

There are those who think that the collapse of a fully functioning democratic system in the form of Weimar German democracy is a uniquely German event. We are told it was caused by the "German Mind". Martin Luther taught Germans to be mindlessly obedient to authoritarian rule. Richard Wagner taught Hitler that he must transform the world into a opera by murdering Jews by the millions and starting WWII. The prejudice here is that ideology and culture drives history. If you think the right thing, then history will unfold in such a way that Good Things happen, and if you think the wrong thing then Bad Things happen. History is seen as a conflict between Good-Think and Bad-Think.

In actuality, Luther taught that it was the right of the individual's conscience to rebel against authoritarianism. One of Wagner's many Jewish friends recounted how Wagner stood with musket in hand rallying his fellow pro-democracy rebels behind the barricades on to victory during the 1848 Revolution.

The reason Luther and Wagner are deliberately misrepresented as prime examples of German Bad-Think, of the sort that caused Bad Things to happen, is to give false credibility to the thesis that the flights of fancy of poets and philosophers fuels the engine of history. If ideology causes history to unfold, then false ideology, born of a culturally engendered mindset and the resulting Bad-Think ingrained in The German Mind, must have caused the rise of Hitler leading to Bad Things such as WWII and the Holocaust.

The problem here is that this dogma leads to the false reassurance from saying that the collapse of Weimar democracy was a uniquely German event, engendered by a German cultural mindset. It cannot happen elsewhere in states where the German Mind and its inherent Kraut-Think does not predominate. It cannot happen in the United State of America because the culture of that nation is not culturally imbued with Bad-Think, but rather on the exceptional idealism of the founders of the nation.

The fact is that before the Great Depression, the National Socialist Party only won 2.7% of votes, and its clownish leader was widely held to ridicule. After the Great Depression suddenly they won as much as 37% of votes. Those votes were mostly cast in anger as protest votes against mainstream parties and the political elite in favour of an angry outsider who openly expressed his contempt for the entire system. It was the socio-economic climate that engendered political polarisation and fanned the flames of hegemonic class conflict. For while most nations saw the rise of fascist populism after the Great Depression, what made Germany unique was that it was crippled by the huge reparation payments imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, which had already seen a period of destabilising hyperinflation. The Depression had thus hit Germany much harder than other nations. The end result was that Weimar democracy turned out to be a fair weather democracy that collapsed in the storm of the Depression.

"Oppose Papen, Hitler, Thälmann" says a 1933 election poster by the Social Democrats. With their three arrows, they opposed the anti-democratic forces of monarchism, fascism, and communism

Today we see the democracy of the United State of America, something that seemed to function during fair weather, similarly battered in the destabilising socio-economic climate after the Great Recession. Given that capitalism undergoes crises every decade or so, and it has already been almost a decade since the GFC hit us, we are set for the next storm of capitalism to strike us soon. That may yet turn out to be the final coup de grace for American fair weather democracy. And you can run around and try to encourage Good-Think in your neighbour all you like and it will be to absolutely no avail whatsoever. You are an abject fool if you think otherwise, and you may soon find yourself imprisoned for such activity. It is a foolishness equal to that of thinking that the imposed Good-Think of politically correct language will solipsistically manufacture Good-Things.

I expect to see the political opposition soon placed on trial facing "trumped" up charges. A state of permanent emergency may be put in place to fight "terrorism" i.e. the political opposition and any other perceived dissenters. All we need is a Reichstag fire moment to justify a permanent state of emergency to be declared. Lots of Guantanamo Bay type prisons will be set up as part of the "war against terror", only on US soil, as part of a war waged against political enemies. In those camps will go those labelled as a "terrorist" for being of the wrong ethnicity, religion, or political orientation. People will think that such a regime is little more than a joke, and that it will rapidly collapse. Yet that is what people had been saying from the movement's very origins, that it was so risible that nothing need be done to oppose it because its sheer absurdity would guarantee its instant failure.

Jetzt bricht der Sturm los...