Haaretz: "Trump, Brexit, ISIS and the Unmistakable Stench of the 1930s"
Though Karl Marx may have nailed it when he said that history comes first as tragedy and then as farce.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a compulsive comparer. Throughout his decades in public office, Netanyahu has been roundly ridiculed and comprehensively criticized for his obsession with Nazi-era parallels. For the prime minister, an enemy of Israel always winds up as Adolf Hitler’s successor, the country’s critics are forever Neville Chamberlain’s heirs and any meeting between the two is another latter-day Munich. This isn’t 1938, his detractors will sneer.
But perhaps Netanyahu deserves an apology, partial at least. His personal analogies may have been misplaced and his interpretation of events self-serving, but Netanyahu is definitely on to something. His pessimistic perception of the world we live in may have been more accurate than the condescending dismissal of his detractors, including this one. The world today increasingly seems no less 1930s than 21st century. That’s why it’s creating such a deep sense of foreboding.
Take the dread that quickly replaced the shock that most people in the West felt in reaction to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. The results undoubtedly came as a big surprise, but that can be ascribed to the complacency and detachment of British elites, opinion-makers and opinion-analyzers, a topic that has been thoroughly dissected in the short days that have passed since the shock outcome was announced. What is harder to shake, however, is a sinking sense that Brexit isn’t just an isolated phenomenon but one in a series of unfortunate events that should prick our thumbs, as the second witch says to Macbeth’s approach, to warn us that “something wicked this way comes.”
Imagine the fear that may have gripped astute Americans or Europeans on any given day in the early 1930s, when nativism, xenophobia and racism were spreading like wildfire, when fascism became fashionable, when a loud-mouthed and uncouth demagogue became the toast of cultured Berlin and an egomaniacal despot was culling the best and the brightest in Moscow. They may not have had Facebook, Twitter or 24/7 news coverage, but anyone with eyes in his head could have surmised that this was not going to end well. Which is what went through many minds on Sunday night, as the results of the British referendum came in.
Think of 1932, as one example. The stock market is down, unemployment skyrockets, famine breaks out in the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler is asked to form a government and Benito Mussolini promises to stay on as dictator for 30 years. Each event might have triggered anxiety in and of itself, but taken together they were like large blips on a radar screen that warned of “The Gathering Storm” as Churchill called it.
In 1932, the baby of hero pilot Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered. Fleeing the immense publicity that the tragedy elicited, Lindbergh went to live in England, visiting Germany frequently and becoming best mates with Luftwaffe chief Herman Goring. He came back to America in 1939 as a Nazi sympathizer and outspoken anti-Semite to headline the isolationist America First Committee. This is the slogan that Donald Trump clings to almost 80 years later, despite the negative connotations that it raises in so many quarters.
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