How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance by Paul Mason

Author:Paul Mason [Mason, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141996417
Amazon: B08GWQPYFL
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2021-08-25T23:00:00+00:00

WHAT COULD HAVE STOPPED HITLER?

Let’s once again hit the pause button and ask, as we did with Italy: in the years before 1932, how could Hitler have been stopped? The most obvious point was after the Beer Hall Putsch. If he had been treated as a terrorist, his backers among the elite prosecuted and the SA permanently dissolved, then right-wing extremist politics in Germany might have been forced down a more containable route.

Thirteen million people voted for the SPD and KPD in the 1930 election. At 43 per cent of the vote that was not enough to form a government, but might have been enough – if united around a single project – to appeal to middle-class people who were suffering under austerity, and to those in farming communities not completely blinded by nostalgia and anti-Semitism. But the KPD’s ‘social fascism’ theory was mirrored by an equally blinkered set of ideas among the socialist leaders.

First, they were blindly committed to legality and parliament, at a time when politics was becoming radical, violent, populist and moving to the streets. Second, decisively (and just as social-democrats in the 2015 Eurozone crisis would do) they subscribed totally to the austerity doctrine: that prices must fall before consumption can rise. They overtly rejected the solution of state-funded public works, which under the influence of John Maynard Keynes was becoming popular on the European left. Third, they were committed to defending the international order agreed in the Versailles Treaty of 1919, and thus to honouring the reparations system.

Finally, they were terminally dull. When their own experts, including a leading professional psychologist, urged the socialist leaders to focus on emotion not economics – deploying a single logo, a few key slogans, simple language and a positive vision of the future – they were dismissed: ‘We shall make ourselves look ridiculous with all this nonsense,’ came the reply.28

Though dissidents inside both parties pushed for a united front between the SPD and KPD, the effects of the crash turned ideological differences into sociological ones. In places like Little Wedding, mass unemployment meant that working-class life became detached from the workplace and focused on the streets. For KPD members like Petersen, day-to-day politics were reduced to physical confrontations with the Nazis, solidarity with those injured or arrested, and election agitation.

The KPD’s leadership knew that – as both they and the Nazis were competing for the allegiance of young, unemployed men – the only way to survive was to destroy the Nazis. But they had no idea how to do so. From September 1929 the KPD’s slogan had been: ‘Hit the fascists wherever you meet them.’29 In June 1930, however, they withdrew the slogan, ordering their members to engage the Nazi rank and file in political arguments, and sent speakers to Nazi meetings to hand out specially targeted leaflets and put the communist point of view.

At the same time, the KPD repeatedly tried to appeal to the Nazi base using the rhetoric of national resistance, and to out-shout the Nazis as revolutionary opponents of the system.

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