Historian Timothy Snyder wrote an interesting piece for the Guardian a while back:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-may-not-be-so-far-away
The turn of phrase that struck me most was "misunderstanding the Holocaust has made us too certain we are ethically superior". It struck me as a pointed attack on Goldhagenism. Daniel Goldhagen argued that the cause of Holocaust was the German Mind, which had filled itself with morally depraved genocidal fantasies for centuries to the point that it formed the foundation of cognition itself:
Genocide was immanent in the conversation of German society. It was immanent in its language and emotion. It was immanent in the structure of cognition.
Goldhagen: Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996, p. 449
For a German to think was a priori to think genocidal thoughts, and so entrapped in this world-outlook were they that it was impossible to do otherwise. The ethical inferiority of a degenerate German Mind steeped in genocidal bloodlust was claimed by Goldhagen to be the single sufficient cause of the Holocaust. The implication is that World War II was a battle of minds and of ideologies, where the ethically superior American Mind triumphed over the evil incarnate inherent to the German Mind. Good-Think triumphed over Bad-Think.
In actuality, it was hardly the ethical superiority of the British Mind, the American Mind, or the Russian Mind defeating the "Evils of the German Mind" at all. That view of things is entirely propagandist in its orientation, a propagandist 1940s view that Daniel Goldhagen tried unsuccessfully to revive in rewriting history from a populist position that harnessed the emotive power of World War II anti-Hun propaganda in an attempt to bury every academic nuanced uncovered by historians since. Little wonder that Goldhagen's book hit the top of the bestseller list while historians worldwide, including Israel, condemned him.
Those who are inclined towards simplistic Goldhagenist thinking seem to think that the only way something like World War II and the Holocaust could happen is if the German Mind had been brainwashed with warmongering, genocidal thoughts for generations or centuries beforehand to the point that this formed the very foundation of cognition. The reality is that societies are invariably torn by class conflict, so there can never be any homogeneous Mind of the Nation except in the eyes of propagandists. It also underestimates how difficult Hitler's struggle was to rise out of abject obscurity to impose himself as the singular Voice of the Nation.
Goldhagen's followers also like to express outrage at "ordinary Germans" within the fascist Third Empire for a having failed to have actively resisted him. The accusers imagine that had they been German citizens back in the day, they would have been heroes who would have risk their own safety, as well as that of their family, to have risen up in armed defiance against the regime. They imagine that failure to have done as they supposedly would have could only have been due to the whole German nation having been long before indoctrinated with a proto-Nazi Bad-Think that had rooted itself so deeply into the German Mind as to constitutes its very structure of cognition, thus making Hitler's rise to power a walk in the park.
Yet today, it has become all too easy for these fantasy heroes to imagine what it might have been like. Look at all the support Donald Trump is getting in America, where at the time of writing some 80% of Republicans still support him. Can you imagine what it would be like if Trump passed an Enabling Act permitting him to rule entirely by decree, bypassing congress or the judiciary? Next imagine if what Trump calls the "lying press" spreading "fake news", and what Goebbels called the Lügenpresse, were to be dissolved, journalists critical of the regime imprisoned, murdered in concentration camps, or forced to flee abroad.
That means that the entire media would be pushing the same Party propaganda line as Fox does currently. The fantasy that a few armed rebels could rise up and depose Trump in such a state is pure fantasy. Retrospective prosecutors might be speculating that everything in American history had always formed a direct teleological antecedent and prelude to such a world. American history will be read by discovering evidence of an American Mind imbued with proto-Trumpist ideology going back through the entire twentieth century and even the nineteenth. So deeply imbued, that such Trumpist ideology came to frame the very foundation of the American Mind's cognitive structure. Every Hollywood film and Broadway musical, every American poem and song, even those long predating Trump's birth, will be forcibly reinterpreted as incontrovertible evidence of the all-pervasiveness of American Bad-Think.
Yet an America following the collapse of democracy like this has today become a plausibility, with Trump likely to only be a taste of what is to come. Trump may yet be only a Kurt von Schleicher paving the way to the collapse of democracy.
Next, people place too much emphasis on personality as a driver of history. We are told that Hitler's personality and his personal tastes or interests drove the outcomes of history. We are told that Trump similarly has a personality disorder, that he is a psychopath and a pathological liar, which may be very true, but such people have always existed. The problem is what it is about society at large that allowed such a personality to rise to such a position of authority. Trump, like Hitler, is a by-product of conflicts found in the context of a wider society. Getting rid of just one bad personality will hardly restitute these wider structural issues that are driving such divisive class conflict of such severity that America verges on open civil war.
The idea that Trump can be removed by due legal process and that everything will be thereby fixed and the critical situation normalised is pure fantasy. Removing Trump leaves in place the entire structure of class conflict that brought him to the surface in the first place. A forced removal risks inflaming class conflict in such a way that the indicted and imprisoned members of the Trump administration may end up been seen as martyrs to the cause. Their incarceration in an American Landsberg Prison, an opportunity to regroup and reform to come back with a lethal vengeance that will unleash itself onto the fragile remnants of American democracy like a storm.
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