Oh, Ye of little faith

Being clear about Kanye West

Let’s be clear. Mr Biden wants to be clear, so let’s be clear.

Post-war and post-reunification Germany has said one thing clearly: Adolf Hitler is a blight on the nation’s history. Its leaders have shown contrition for his ills, right down to Willy Brandt falling to his knees at the Holocaust Memorial. Showered with condemnation virtually the world round, Germany has willingly been led back from the precipice. Germany is our example; not a faultless one, but one that takes a proud place in today’s European movement. The post-war light that dawned in Germany is far from setting on it yet.

The good that can be discerned in the Nazi Party’s policies up to the outbreak of war is at best questionable: motorways, built for fluid communication in California, were mimicked in Germany with unquestionable military aims. The HaFraBa built as the nation’s backbone, from its major port at Hamburg, through the industrial heartland of Frankfurt, down to Basel and what would become the Ostmark, once Austria had been annexed. And Mr Hitler’s development of social security would be mimicked after the war – in spirit if not letter – by Beveridge’s plan for the United Kingdom: Beveridge’s was cast as a safety net for all; Hitler’s was selective – “We look after our own.”

Hitler combatted the unemployment and depression of the 20s by putting the entire nation to work: no one, but no one, could by 1945 claim they had no job, as those who were barely into their teens were conscripted into Germany’s failing “Total War” effort and foreign resistance members were turned to slave labour to manufacture the bombs that would rain down upon London. Elsewhere, Hitler was admired, notably by Moseley in Britain, from his rhetoric down to his clothing style. Hitler enjoyed popularity ratings, according to two plebiscites, of 95 and 99%. Without question, Adolf Hitler was the most popular politician in Germany – ever. More popular than Konrad Adenauer, than Willy Brandt, than Angela Merkel. It was a frenzy of popularity – women swooned when he approached them at Nuremberg’s rallies and the photo opportunities are indeed sweet as the devil’s right-hand man would kiss babies and shake the hands of honoured thugs. Eva Braun’s home movies at the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden are without sound but almost invite a distant call of “Anyone for tennis, what?” Hitler looked so much more elegant in his white dress uniform.

And, how, just how, was this all achieved? How do you turn an economy around from flailing in all directions to being united behind a single, charismatic leader? Strange to relate, it was done with words. “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me” goes the admonition to children. It’s true to a degree, but certainly not when the words that do not hurt you incite others to take up sticks and stones to crush you and remove you from existence. How did Hitler cultivate such a devoted following while casting out many in the very society that was behind him? Did those who cheered him not fear that they could follow to the oubliette of those who jeered him? Hitler was canny: he directed his vitriol against defined sections of society. His aim, to purge society of them, to purify it, to make it whole and wholesome. Those who did not fit the profile identified as society’s enemies needed to fear no act of malevolence from the purge: provided, of course, they obeyed his command.

In the field of diplomacy, there is a certain protocol that needs to be followed. A set of game rules that use a code of their own – like a half-back’s calls in a game of American football: transparent to his players, mumbo-jumbo to the opposition. Hitler did not keep his word, notably the one he gave in Munich in 1938. It’s telling that Neville Chamberlain, when announcing the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 made mention of his own, personal disappointment at how matters German had turned out. It was, on reflection, an astonishing admission of naivety, for Hitler was in the end fairly easily calculable and had long since shown that he was untrustworthy: in that, if nothing else, he was predictable. To have placed Europe’s entire security and prosperity in the balance and hope that his “piece of paper” would save the day is illustrative of Chamberlain’s hope, his ardent hope that Munich would secure peace. It was a hope shattered. But it was a hope he had no option but to place according to the rules of the game he was playing. I don’t castigate his efforts at peace; I laud them. However, the sorry state in which the BEF ventured into Europe and its abject defeat at Dunkirk are likewise illustrative: of the fact that he placed all of his hope in Munich, and reserved none for preparing Britain for the eventuality of war. These are lessons learned: as Russian rhetoric decries putative escalation of the Ukraine hostilities, NATO responds by preparing “just in case, Mr Putin, just in case.”

In his book Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock reiterates the importance that Hitler placed on speaking to his people: “Hitler showed a marked preference for the spoken word over the written word. ‘The force which ever set in motion the great historical avalanches of religious and political movements is the magic power of the spoken word. The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the spread of rhetoric than to any other force.’ The employment of verbal violence, the repetition of such words as ‘smash’, ‘force’, ‘ruthless’, ‘hatred’ was deliberate. Hitler’s gestures and the emotional character of his speaking, lashing himself up to a pitch of near-hysteria in which he would scream and spit out his resentment, had the same effect on an audience. Many descriptions have been given of the way in which he succeeded in communicating passion to his listeners, so that men groaned or hissed and women sobbed involuntarily, if only to relieve the tension, caught up in the spell of powerful emotions of hatred and exaltation, from which all restraint had been removed.”

From which all restraint had been removed. There, I think, we have the leitfaden guiding the utterances of such as Kanye West. When Elon Musk restored Ye’s platform on Twitter, he removed a little of the restraint that had been laid upon the rapper. The words that do not hurt, because they are not directed at you, still hurt if they offend against your sense of what is right. Many have spoken up against Ye’s utterances, and I join them in this piece: for, although not directed at me, they provoke such revulsion in me that there rises in me an involuntary urge to condemn them. And, the kind of world that Ye seeks to bring about as a reflection of the sentiments that he expresses is no world in which I believe I could ever feel secure and, though I might shed no tear for myself, many would be those I shed for those persecuted and damned on the say-so of a rapper.

Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) was a Lutheran priest at the time of Hitler’s rise, which he supported and welcomed. Later, he saw things turn sour, and said so. His later opposition earned him imprisonment and, in a reflection of his own actings, he wrote this poem:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –

            Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –

            Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

            Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller, Joseph Biden and I are united in one thing above all else: that when wrong is done, it is our duty to speak out.

Silence is complicity, oh, Ye of little faith.

Niemöller’s poem as displayed at the US Holocaust Museum.