I do not wish to say that the decisions made by Adolf Hitler of Germany and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were similar at most levels. But where Hitler had his Gleichschaltung, Roosevelt had his TVA, NRA, AAA, WPA, PWA and other, multifarious, lettered organizations which hoped to relieve the ill-effects of the world's economic depression and the ravages of unemployment. Most historians would agree today that some of FDR's projects worked. Many others did not. There were still almost ten million unemployed at the end of his first year of administration. But in the realm of relieving bad housing, unemployment, and despair for most of his people, Hitler was an unparalleled success. By 1935 there were no unemployed in Germany. Roads were built, industries revived even without assistance of government-supported war industries in the first Hitler years. Housing projects, cheap holidays subsidized by the government, and the ending of poverty were still an American goal long after they were achieved in Germany. As a result most Americans turned their backs on Europe and the rest of the world in an attempt to conquer their own problems at home.
In Britain where the depression hit a bit less dramatically and deeply simply because there had been no effective post-World War I recovery in the first place, the Liberal and Labour parties fixed their attentions on domestic matters. The Conservatives who held effective power throughout the 1930s tended to welcome Germany's economic recovery under Hitler as a new opportunity in a foreign marked close to home. Though most Britons, like the Americans, considered the Nazi regime to be somewhat distasteful and sordid, particularly in the context of its blatant racism and anti-Semitism, they did not think about it much. Those who did, apart from British and American Jews, to a greater or lesser degree admired Hitler's swift and remarkable achievements in the German economic sphere, and there were even those who argued that Britain and America ought to emulate Hitler's deeds. After all, Hitler claimed to be a socialist, albeit of a certain type which rejected international socialism in favour of National Socialism in one country. Therefore left-wing socialists and communist disagreed violently with Hitler's ideological stance, but could not have found too much wrong in what he did, specifically on the economic front, since they were proposing similar measures. And of course there were right-wing imitators of Hitler's style both in Britain and America who found little or nothing wrong in whatever Hitler was doing, such as Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and the far less successful American fringe groups. Fritz Kuhn's German-American Bund which held Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden to packed houses and which baited the Jews with equal vociferousness but with less violence than Mosley's bully-boys in London's East End.
Hitler, always subliminally conscious of the effect of his movement and its ideas, was aware of the shameful fact that many if not most of the Northwest Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and South Africans shared his racial prejudices. Hitler, Goebbels and the rest bellowed the principles of racial hatred and anti-Semitism that were merely whispered and joked about in country clubs, college fraternities, and fashionable soirées in the Anglo-American world. It was therefore not what Hitler said but the way he said it that tended to pall. Such vehemence in the 1930s would be attributed to 'continental emotionalism' by those who ought to have known better. Though few would have condoned concentration camps, the elimination of opposition political parties and the virtual abolition of freedom of speech, press, and assembly in Germany, anti-Semitism, which lay at the heart of Hitler's philosophy, was as American as apple pie and as British as steak and kidney pudding. Americans and Australians had adopted policies toward immigrants from Asia. Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe, which Hitler would have been proud of long before National Socialism was ever a threat to world security. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, was an American phenomenon. Even a cursory reading of British authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, and G.K. Chesterton reveals it.
(...TO BE CONTINUED...)
No comments:
Post a Comment