Month: March 2022

This post is only partly about Hitler; it’s really about Putin, and it’s mostly about us.[1]

I write about train wrecks in public deliberation, so it was just a question of time till I got around to the question of appeasing Hitler. That UK politicians chose to appease Hitler (and the US decided to do nothing) is not just a famously bad decision, but a consequential one. Jeffrey Record says it nicely:

No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War II U.S. presidential use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of World War II. The great lesson drawn from appeasement—namely, that capitulating to the demands of territorially aggressive dictatorships simply makes inevitable a later, larger war on less favorable terms—has informed most major U.S. uses of force since the surrender of Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. From the Truman’s Administration’s 1950 decision to fight in Korea to the George W. Bush’s administration’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, presidents repeatedly have relied on the Munich analogy to determine what to do in a perceived security crisis. They have also employed that analogy as a tool for mobilizing public opinion for military action. (1)

When I started researching the issue, I approached it with the popular story about what happened. That is, Hitler was obviously a genocidal aggressor who couldn’t possibly be prevented from trying to be hegemon of all Europe—he had laid all that out in Mein Kampf, after all. Leaders who chose to appease him were wishful thinkers who deluded themselves; other countries should have responded aggressively much earlier, at the remilitarization of the Rhineland, ideally, or, at least, when he was threatening war with Czechoslovakia over what he called “the Sudetenland.”

Turns out it’s way more complicated than that. Way more complicated. To be clear, I still think various countries made terrible decisions regarding Hitler and Germany, but the leaders were constrained by voters. It was voters who got it wrong. I’ll get to that at the end.

Hitler took over from the Weimar democracy, which had its problems. It also had its critics. It liberalized laws about sexuality and gender identity, reduced the presence of religious proselytizing in public schools, opened up opportunities for women, included a lot of a demonized group in its power (Jews), relied on democratic processes that included Marxists and democratic socialists, had a reduced military, encouraged avant garde art.

Here’s what is generally left out of popular narratives about WWII. Conservatives in all the countries that went to war against Nazis hated everything the Weimar Republic had done, including its tolerance of Jews, and so many didn’t think the Nazis were all that wrong–better than the USSR, and better than Weimar. Popular between-the-wars UK literature is filled with anti-semitic and anti-Slav rhetoric. Even during the war, a US anti-Nazi pamphlet that condemned Nazi racial ideology was severely criticized because it was attacking the “science” used to defend US segregation. As late as 1967 (in the lower court rulings on Loving v. Virginia) theories of race integral to Nazism were cited as authorities.

Hitler had a lot of apologists among conservatives, including the owner of the very popular Daily Mail in the UK. And, as George Orwell describes in the book that conservatives who quote him never read (haha, they never read anything he wrote–they just quote him), many UK media were knee-jerk anti-communist in their coverage of events—so knee-jerk anti-communist that they failed to distinguish between various kinds of leftist movements. So, a lot of UK media liked what Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler were doing.

Hitler’s first move after being granted dictatorship powers in 1933 (which he did with no particular outrage on the part of major media in other countries, including the US) was to criminalize membership in unions, the democratic socialist party, the communist party, or any other party that advocated democratic deliberation. His second act was to kill all the socialists in the Nazis, which, weirdly enough, was used by his defenders as proof that he was more moderate than they. And from that point on it’s hard to get things in chronological order. The important point, thought, is that by 1939, when there were still major media and figures defending him, he had criminalized not just dissent but any criticism of him, begun engaging in mass killing, criminalized various identities, begun a process of fleecing emigrants, openly reduced Jews to constant humiliation and abuse, put into law the racialization of Germany. He had also remilitarized the Rhineland, incorporated the Saar, violently appropriated Austria, and then appropriated the “German” part of Czechoslovakia. He then took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, and he still had defenders.

Then, when he invaded Poland, some (not all) said, oh, wait, he’s a bad guy. So, why didn’t they do anything earlier? Because his rhetoric was pretty clever.

He had two kinds of rhetoric. For his internal audience, it was exactly what the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke described in 1939. Unification through a common enemy, scapegoating/projection, rebirth, bastardization of religious forms of thought, toxic masculinity (not Burke’s term, of course—he talks about the feminization of the masses). All of this was about the rebirth of Germany into a “strong” nation set on domination of weak groups. But he also always made a point of the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, especially the guilt clause.

His external rhetoric had a lot of overlap with that. For instance, a lot of UK media—specifically “conservative”—endorsed and openly admired Hitler’s ‘strong man’ crushing of liberal democratic practices and leftist policies, since they hated those policies and practices. They were also anti-Semitic, anti-Slav, and believed in the Aryan bullshit behind Nazi policies, as were many people in the US. In both the UK and US, many major political figures were sympathetic to thinking of Jews as “a problem” who should be denied immigration.

To go back to the UK, these “conservative” media were thereby writing approvingly of very new practices, ones that traditional conservative voices (such as Edmund Burke) would have found horrifying. “Conservatives” were now writing approvingly of what had until recently been seen as the enemy of the UK. In other words, people often claim to be “conservative” when all they’re conserving in their loyalty to their party, and it has nothing to do with conserving principles.

Here’s the part I didn’t know about appeasement. Many people, all over the political spectrum, were willing to say that the Versailles Treaty was unjust. Hitler’s foreign policy was defended through the rhetoric of the Versailles Treaty, which emphasized self-determination. He didn’t believe in self-determination, of course, but he could use that rhetoric. And he did.

And, as scholars have argued, his use of that rhetoric made it hard for advocates of the treaty to say he was wrong in what he was doing. They certainly couldn’t go to war over it, since the Great War, as it was called, was almost unanimously understood everywhere other than Germany as a colossal mistake. To go to war over the remilitarization of the Rhineland would have seemed to most UK voters a bizarre compulsion to repeat the errors of 1914, when a minor political issue could have been resolved without war.

Hitler adopted the rhetoric that his enemies had recently used—the rhetoric of self-determination—to scoop up territories. He claimed that “the people” of a region wanted Germany to invade because they were being oppressed by [Jews/liberals/Slavs], and so his appropriation was actually liberation. When it came to Poland, he couldn’t plausibly argue that, so he shifted his rhetoric to self-defense—Poland, France, and the UK were intent on attacking Germany (he claimed they had), and so all Germany was doing was justifiable self-defense.

And that’s what Putin did. He adopted the rhetoric his enemies had used, which made it hard for them to call him out.

The rhetoric for a preventive war against Iraq—an unprecedented kind of war for the US—was that it was preventive self-defense. In fact, it was motivated by the desire to make Iraq a reliable ally in US foreign policy.

The rhetoric was that Iraq was supporting a global war against the US in the form of Al Qaida (Bush later admitted they knew it wasn’t), the site of anti-American terrorism, and various other lies. The Bush Administration, and its fanatically supportive media, told a lot of lies, that they knew were lies, because they wanted to put in place a government that would be an supportive of US policy or because they loyally and irrationally supported whatever a GOP President did. I happen to think Bush meant well. I think he believed a very simplistic version of the extremely controversial (and circular) “democratic peace” model, one he didn’t think most Americans would find compelling enough for war, and he so he lied to get what he thought was a good outcome.

The problem is that rhetoric has its own consequences, regardless of intention. By arguing that the US was justified in invading Iraq and putting in a new leader because 1) that state was fostering terrorism, 2) part of an anti-US conspiracy, and 3) presented an existential threat to the US, Bush legitimated a certain set of arguments (what rhetoricians call “topoi”). Just as the Versailles Treaty was grounded in topoi of self-determination, the Iraq invasion was grounded in topoi about terrorism and existential threat. There was a long history of that kind of rhetoric in the Cold War, especially about crushing any kind of political movements in the areas that the US considered its sphere of influence, such as Nicaragua, that might threaten US control. Throughout the Cold War, the US persistently crushed local popular movements of self-determination on the grounds of “sphere of influence”–we would not let any government exist in those areas if it wasn’t loyal to the US.

Putin used US Cold War rhetoric to justify his scooping up of areas, such as Chechnya. It would have been rhetorically and politically impossible for the US and NATO to go to war over that region, given how factionalized US politics is. Look at how the GOP—which had far less power in those days—was critical of US intervention in Serbia. Had Clinton advocated going to war, or even threatening war, over Chechnya, the GOP would have gone to town, and very few Dems would have supported it.

When it came to Ukraine, Putin adopted a rhetoric that cleverly blended Hitler’s rhetoric about Poland, US Cold War rhetoric, and Bush’s rhetoric about Iraq. It was a gamble, but not an unreasonable one (a different post) given the rhetorical conditions of US politics. You could take Hitler’s speech about invading Poland and just do a few “find and replace” to get his speech, and blend it with a speech of Bush’s advocating invading Iraq.[1]

My point is that adopting a rhetoric to get what you want—Cold War rhetoric to justify propping up corrupt and vicious regimes in Central and South American, lying about terrorism to get a war desired for other reasons—has consequences. Rhetoric has consequences in terms of legitimating certain kinds of arguments.

And here is the point about appeasing Hitler. I’m writing a book with a chapter about the rhetoric of appeasement. My argument is that it was a bad choice in terms of what was in the long-term interest of the UK (and the world). However, and this is what most people don’t know, or won’t acknowledge, politicians made the choices they did because appeasing Hitler was the obvious choice to make for any political figure (or party) who wanted to get (or remain) elected. If they advocated responding aggressively to Hitler they would have been excoriated by the most powerful media. Had Clinton advocated responding aggressively to Putin’s treatment of Chechnya, it would have gone nowhere. Had a GOP President advocated responding aggressively to Putin’s expansionism, the Dems would have thrown fits.

I’m not saying that we should have responded aggressively when Putin took over Austria, I mean Chechnya, but that we should have deliberated what Putin was doing. And we couldn’t. Because we are in a culture that demonized deliberation. We are in a culture in which engaging in politics means standing in a stadium chanting, having no political opinion more complicated than what can be put on a bumper sticker, loyally repeating, retweeting, or sharing whatever is the latest in-group talking point, and hating the other side is proof of objectivity.

And here I’ll go back to appeasing Hitler. I don’t really blame the politicians for appeasing Hitler, but that’s largely for the same reason I don’t blame my dog Delbert for eating cat shit. Delbert will do whatever he can to get to cat shit, and politicians will do whatever they can to get elected.

Politicians appeased Hitler because the voters wanted Hitler appeased. We need to stop asking why politicians did what they did in regard to Hitler and instead ask why voters voted the way that they did. FDR and Chamberlain don’t bear the blame for why the US and UK responded as we did to Hitler; voters do. The lesson of appeasement, and the lesson of Putin, is not that leaders make bad decisions, but that voters make bad decisions, and then blame leaders.

After the tremendously popular Sicilian Expedition ended in disaster, the very people who had voted for it claimed that they had been misled, and politicians were at fault.

They voted for it.

George Lakoff pointed out that “liberals” and “conservatives” both adopt the metaphor of family for government in that the government is a parent to the citizens who are children. What if, instead of imagining voters as tools in the hands of political leaders, we acknowledge what Socrates says: even tyrants are tools in the hands of citizens.

So, how do we counter Putin’s kind of rhetoric?

We accept the responsibility of voters, citizens, commenters, sharers, likers. We are all rhetors, and we try to behave responsibly, whether it’s about how awful cyclists are or whether Putin is right.

We stop remaining within our informational enclave. And we feel no shame about pointing out how unfair and irresponsible people are being.

We read the best arguments against our positions; we hold others to the same rhetorical standards as ourselves; we stop engaging in rhetorical Machiavellianism; we argue, well and fairly and vehemently. And we shame others who argue badly. We might do so vehemently, kindly, gently, or harshly, but we do so because we want others to do that to us.

[1] Normally, I link to citations, but that would have delayed this post by a week, since there are a lot of links. If folks want links and cites, let me know.
[2] For the people who have trouble with logic, and reason associatively, I’m not saying Bush was Hitler. I’m saying we shouldn’t judge rhetoric by whether we like its outcome or its advocates—it has its own consequences. Bad rhetoric in favor of a cause we like is, I’m saying, still bad rhetoric in that it legitimates what others might do with it.