A Teacher's Dilemma

Academic Life in a Totalitarian State

Feliks Dzerzhinsky, father of the Soviet security forces. 1918.

"The problem was that, yes, his favorite student who used to sit on the left side in the third row from the top had been right, and the professor had been able to head the department all these years only because he had engaged in treachery, had kept silent, and had gagged those just beginning to speak, gagged them with the phrase 'politics has no place in the classroom,' although what was at issue was not politics but ancient history and the parallels that arose on their own when readings concerned Caligula or Nero, and you knew how Muraviov ... No, no, one cannot talk about that. Ancient history should be banned from the curriculum and replaced with any other kind of history. Then everything would be clear-cut and logical. Then such monstrous questions would not arise in his classes, and he would not be forced to betray anyone. He touched the window at which he had spoken with the student: it bore blurred traces of the lines on his forehead and the jumbled grid of his hair. The professor had stood, leaning against this window, after being summoned to the dean's office and served a short, ridiculous ultimatum: by evening the next day one of them, either the student or the professor, would have to abandon these walls forever and with no possibility of reinstatement. The dean, with his puffy face and excessively large violet lips that seemed to hang from their own skin, informed him that the most appropriate reason to give for the expulsion would be academic truancy. His favorite student had already spent fifteen days behind bars for having uttered the word 'Muraviov' during an even less appropriate argument. It had happened in winter. In hindsight, the student obviously had no intention of 'committing himself to his studies.' Just the opposite: he would continue speaking the word 'Muraviov,' and nothing would stop him. He would not be able to compensate for the classes in ancient history that he had missed. Therefore, the university could not allow him to continue his studies. No politics. Just academic progress." 

- Victor Martinovoich, Paranoia (2013) p. 26. After expulsion, the student is quickly drafted into the armed forces, and shortly thereafter he dies in a training accident.

"A little fire is quickly trodden out / Which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench."

- William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3 4.8.7-8.

Dzerzhinsky photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #6464, http://visualrian.ru/ru/site/gallery/#6464

See also A Lesson From the Berlin Wall, Narcissism and Dictatorship.

The Real Parallels Are With Weimar

What Happens When Elites Hate Democracy

President Hindenburg delivering a radio address, 1932. 

If you say the word Hindenburg to an American, the reaction is likely to be a blank stare, or possibly the thought that a dirigible of that name burned and crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937. But behind the zeppelin there stands an actual person: Paul von Hindenburg, a German field marshal who was a hero of World War I and later served as the second and last president of the Weimar Republic (he served as president of Germany from 1925 to his death in 1934). 

When Americans think of military leaders who have later careers as presidents, they may think of Washington, or Grant, or Eisenhower. Hindenburg was not like them; he did not believe in the form of government he was presiding over. 

As historian Mary Fulbrook puts it: "... Hindenburg was not in principle committed to upholding and strengthening the democratic system: on the contrary, he made little secret of his intention to replace it with a more authoritarian political system as soon as was practicable." (Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany 1918-1990, 1992, p. 45.) 

Hindenburg was not alone in his dislike of the Weimar form of government. A whole bunch of German elites basically wanted democracy dead. This did not always come in the form of active support for the Nazi party, but industrialists, for instance, "certainly made little effort to sustain the democratic political system and indeed attacked its structure and fabric sufficiently to render it weak in the face of the final onslaught. The agrarian elites who had such a favourable reception with Hindenburg must also bear a burden of guilt, as must those army officers who worked to undermine democracy and install an authoritarian alternative." (P. 64.) 

If all of this sounds to you like the earlier rise of Mussolini in Italy, you wouldn't be wrong. (For more on Italy, see Jim Crow Was a Failed State, So Why Do We Want to Go Back?)

Even the churches got into the act: "Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches propagated essentially conservative, monarchist and anti-democratic sympathies; they were moreover highly critical of the moral decadence, as they saw it, of a society in which birth control was for the first time becoming widespread." (P. 41.) 

It was in this very opportune context that the Nazis cleaned up their definitely fringey act and started appealing to a more mainstream audience. A key was messaging. As Fulbrook puts it, "... Nazi 'ideology' was a somewhat rag-bag collection of largely negative views combined with a utopian vision of a grandiose future coloured by nostalgic appeals to aspects of a mythical past." (P. 52.)

As history has shown, such a formula can have considerable success, and not just in Germany.

After Hitler came to power, the parade of prefiguration continued. For instance: "... some civil servants who harboured misgivings about the Nazi regime justified their decision to stay as 'preventing something worse.' Yet the overall record of civil servants in the Third Reich remains one of compromise, rather than serious subversion of the regime." (P. 69.) 

Hitler did eventually become Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and immediately began to consolidate a totalitarian regime. If you were to ask an ordinarily knowledgeable American when democracy died in Germany, the reply would probably be it was when Hitler became Chancellor, or possibly when the Reichstag burned down a few weeks later.

In fact, parliamentary democracy in Germany died nearly three years before Hitler became Chancellor. Fulbrook again:

"The Grand Coalition of 1928-30, including the SPD [social democrats], led by Chancellor Hermann Muller, was the last genuinely parliamentary government of Weimar Germany. Plans had already been made for its replacement by a more authoritarian alternative - essentially presidential rule through a Chancellor and cabinet lacking majority support in parliament - several weeks before its actual collapse." (PP. 53-54.) 

The proximate cause of the government's collapse was the question of how to pay the rapidly rising bill for unemployment benefits as the depression threw more and more people out of work. The parties in the coalition were unable to agree.

"Foundering on this issue, the last cabinet of the Weimar Republic to rely on parliamentary support was replaced by a presidential cabinet under Chancellor Bruning, which, lacking majority support in parliament, was to rule by presidential decree." (P. 54.)

A brief observation on the role of chance in history. Weimar's first president, the social democrat Friedrich Ebert, was only 54 when he died from appendicitis and septic shock in 1925. If he had lived, the course of German and world history might well have been very different. 

Hindenburg Disaster, Lakehurst, N.J., 1937.

One final note. The fiery crash of the zeppelin Hindenburg is, in my opinion, a valid metaphor for the collapse of the Weimar Republic under President Hindenburg. It's true that one was slow and complicated, and the other was over in less than a minute. But the result was the same - disaster.

President photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13227 / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Zeppelin photo: Sam Shere.

See also Fascism, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?

He Saw It Coming

And He Warned Us

September Sunset, Asbury Park.

In 2018, John M. Barry looked back at the 1918 flu pandemic and then assessed our preparedness for a future pandemic:

"In 1918, the world population was 1.8 billion, and the pandemic probably killed 50 to 100 million people, with the lowest credible modern estimate at 35 million. Today the world population is 7.6 billion. A comparable death toll today would range from roughly 150 to 425 million.

"Chiefly because antibiotics would slash the toll from secondary bacterial infections, if a virus caused a 1918-like pandemic today, modern medicine could likely prevent significantly more than half of those deaths - assuming adequate supplies of antibiotics, which is quite an assumption - but tens of millions would still die. And a severe influenza pandemic would hit like a tsunami, inundating intensive-care units even as doctors and nurses fall ill themselves and generally pushing the health care system to the point of collapse and possibly beyond it. Hospitals, like every other industry, have gotten more efficient by cutting costs, which means virtually no excess capacity - on a per capita basis the United States has far fewer hospital beds than a few decades ago. Indeed, during a routine influenza season, usage of respirators rises to nearly 100 percent; in a pandemic, most people who needed a mechanical respirator probably would not get one. (The strain influenza puts on health care was driven home to me in a personal way on my book tour. In Kansas City, a flare-up of ordinary seasonal influenza forced eight hospitals to close emergency rooms, yet this was only a tiny fraction of the pressure a pandemic would exert.) This and similar problems - such as if a particular secondary bacterial invader is resistant to antibiotics, or shortages of such seemingly trivial items as hypodermic needles or bags to hold IV fluids (a severe shortage of these bags is a major problem as I write this) - could easily moot many medical advances since 1918."
_________

See the 2018 afterword to John M. Barry, The Great Influenza (2004, 2018), pp. 450-451.

No Parking Sign, Philadelphia.

See also Coronavirus, The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along.

Hope Hicks Is Sick

Should I Feel Bad About Not Feeling Bad?

No. We're in a war. It's a war for the soul of America. In wars people do things they ordinarily wouldn't do, and they have feelings they would rather not have.

In this case the feeling is a certain numbness. The empathy string on your violin has been muted.

Years ago I read Jonathan Shay's Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, and it changed my view of these matters. Friedrich Nietzsche's famous dictum "What does not kill me makes me stronger" is simply wrong. It doesn't make you stronger, But it does make you different.

Shay also wrote Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. I've never quite been able to lay my hands on it - it's a bit rare. Perhaps now I'll make another try.

But I do know a bit about the Greeks and war. Homer saw these things very clearly. The path that Odysseus takes home to Penelope is full of twists and turns, and it takes a long time.

After we win the war, we will need to recover. The path will be long, and unpredictable.

See also The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along.