Demonizing “the Other”

1938 Nazi propaganda praising the “Neues Volk” (the “New People”) of Nazi Germany.

Why Hitler chose to persecute the Jews of Europe when he did is puzzling.

It was very untimely!

If he’d delayed the murder of innocent Jews, dissidents, and other supposed inferiors—until after he had extended the borders of Germany—Hitler might have won the war.

Similarly, it’s puzzling why Donald Trump chooses to denigrate immigration, and immigrants, in the 2020’s.

All the statistics say that there’s no factual basis for his claims.

I guess it’s just another gambit in the culture war.

If he ever admitted that American big business is dependent on immigration—and that his “great wall” was just a scam—his chances to win (on November 5th) would go down.

Trump can’t help saying South American immigrants bring drugs and crime, just as Hitler couldn’t help saying that Jews were vermin.

Essentially, Fascists fought against globalism as well as equal rights for all peoples, from 1923-1945.
Right-wing movements (like MAGA and Putin’s Russia) are fighting against globalism, and equal rights for all, today.

Hitler claimed that Jews were ruining Germany, despite the fact that many German Jews were patriotic veterans of WWI; made up only 1% of the population; and a share had intermarried with Christians, or converted to Christianity.
Perhaps, Hitler believed—that for his brand of politics to win—it required a scrape-goat to blame.
Maybe, his unreasoning resentment of Jews—plus his belief that Aryan people needed to be in complete control—turned Jewish destruction into a principal goal.
Did Hitler plot to become the ruler of Germany as revenge, for the way he was treated as an untalented art student, and as an inept foot soldier?
Is Trump plotting to become President once more, for revenge against those who don’t respect him?

Hitler’s resentment of Jews is the chief reason why the German Fascists didn’t simply turn the Jews into second class citizens, as Mussolini did in Italy (until 1938), and as America has done with its’ Black citizens (and its’ immigrants).
In Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, one story that Rachel Maddow tells, is that of Lawrence Dennis, an American diplomat who (in 1936) advised his Nazi friends to avoid American criticism, and “treat the Jews more or less as we treat the Negroes in America.”*
Mr. Dennis’ advice was not taken seriously.

During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the German government put on a performance for the rest of the world.
All the signage against the Jewish population was removed, and foreign newspapers were sold once more at newsstands.
During the Olympics, shopkeepers and hotel owners were instructed to fake “extreme tolerance” to foreign visitors, even American Blacks and Jews.

Of course, the scheme worked!
Newspapers—like The New York Times—spoke glowingly of Hitler’s “great leadership,” and ignored all evidence of his treatment of minorities.

Jesse Owens beating the German and Japanese runners, in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The American Olympic Committee—so as not to “offend Hitler”—didn’t allow Jewish athletes, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, to compete in the 400-meter relay.

(Glickman and Stoller were replaced, at the last minute, by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe.)
Sad note: F.D.R. didn’t bother to send congratulatory telegrams to any of the eighteen Black athletes who participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Beginning about 1933, the German education system rewrote the textbooks, and taught its’ children, that all people—except Nordic or Aryan—were “bastard races,” incapable of civilization.
Jews were described as alien, and less than human.
These textbooks described made-up physical differences between Aryans and Jews (for example, that Jews had longer arms, and longer skulls).

Another method that Nazis used to reshape society, was to separate German children emotionally from their parents (the people who could have taught them a moral code).
Boys and girls were placed in paramilitary groups, where they were instructed to trust the Nazi Party, more than their mothers and fathers. 

A painting of Gaius Scaevola, a Roman centurion who placed his arm in fire, and showed no pain. 

Italian fascism began a bit earlier before German fascism, and it didn’t rely as much on blaming “the other.”
Instead, Mussolini tried “to improve” Italians, and persuade them to become more similar to the ancient Romans.
Partito Nazionale Fascista radio broadcasts talked about Gaius Scaevola (a Roman centurion, so macho that he was immune to pain) and turning the Mediterranean Sea into “an Italian lake.”

Mussolini didn’t pass his antisemitic racial laws until 1938.
However, scholars argue that Mussolini didn’t establish those laws just as a late concession to Hitler.
Despite all the intermarriage between Christians and Jews in Italy, antisemitism has long been an aspect of Italian culture.
(It also must have annoyed Mussolini that Italian Jews—for example, Primo Levi—were among the first to organize against his fascist government.)

In Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Candlewick stands up to his father, a Fascist military official who despises “weakness.”

Patriarchy and Fascism are hand in hand.
The Italian educational system underwent an overhaul between 1923-1928.
In 1923, Mussolini appointed Giovanni Gentile as the Minister of Education, a man who believed women were only fit to bear children.
As a result, Gentile made sure that women couldn’t be teachers at the higher grade levels, and that women would not be in positions of authority over men.
The Italian government wanted Italian boys to become citizen-soldiers, but mere girls were left in the hands of the Catholic Church.
In 1929, all teachers were required to take the Fascist oath of allegiance, and schools had to use the new Fascist textbooks.
By 1934, all Italian teachers were required to join Fascist militias, and to wear their uniforms during school hours.

The Trisulti Charterhouse

The topic of Fascism in Italy reminds me of the school for right-wing American politicians (The Academy for the Judeo-Christian West) that political advisor Steve Bannon is planning to create in central Italy.
The site of the proposed “gladiator school” is an 800-year abandoned monastery called “Trisulti.”
(There’s been a dispute over this school since 2017. Recently, an Italian court ruled that it would be legal.)
The goal of the academy (according to an article in The New Yorker, quoting Bannon), is to create the next generation of Trump followers.

We’re engaged in a “culture war,” that’s dividing society into two camps.
Just as we would expect changes in how our health care is managed, a Trump presidency—along with a subservient Congress and a right-wing Supreme Court—would make unpopular changes in the educational system, the judicial system, and the criminal justice system.
(Have Libertarians really thought the Trump agenda through?) 

Today, candidate Trump is demonizing “the other.”
Among others, his targets are immigrants, and those who refuse to be second class citizens to white wealthy Americans.
He proclaims that immigrants are escaped lunatics, sex criminals, Hannibal Lector types, and somehow poisoning American blood.
When he visited his Trump fence—at the Texas border (in 2024)—he accused immigrants of speaking intelligible languages.
(I wonder what Candidate Trump misheard, that he came up with that ridiculous remark?)

It’s funny; Benjamin Franklin often complained that German immigrants didn’t assimilate quickly enough into American culture.
Did Donald Trump, and his father, ever truly assimilate?

*Rachel Maddow reveals—in the epilogue of Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism—that Lawrence Dennis was a bi-racial man who lived as a white man.

 

Teetering on the Edge of Fascism?

Poster from Gabriel Over the White House, starring Walter Huston, as President Hammond.

There’s a lot about U.S. history that I didn’t learn in school.
For example, I learned this year that Republicans took the presidency from a Democrat before 2000.
(The “election” was in 1877, a backroom deal—in which 20 electoral votes were conceded to Rutherford B. Hayes, to end Reconstruction—which made Hayes the 19th President by a single vote!)
In addition, I wasn’t aware that, during the 1930’s, America teetered on the edge of giving up on Democracy. 

Evidence for a “lack of confidence” in Democracy can be found in the 1933 film, Gabriel Over the White House—directed by Gregory La Cava, and financed by William Randolph Hearst.
(Hearst was a newspaper publisher and politician; his life was one of the inspirations for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.)
“Gabriel” is the story of a political hack who’s elected President.
Early in his presidency, he nearly dies after speeding.
After the car crash, he changes from a figurehead, to an activist intent on saving the country.
According to IMDb, the film was released with two different endings—an American version and a little-seen European version.
(I’ve only seen the American version. According to sources on IMDb, the European ending is similar to that of the original novel. See below.)

When President Hammond (Walter Huston) is elected, he’s a caricature of a glad-handing politician.
He jokes about not fulfilling election promises.
His knowledge of geography is nil, so he asks his attractive young secretary (with whom he’s having an affair) where Siam is.
He’d rather crawl around on The Oval Office floor—with his four-year-old nephew—than pay attention to an army of the unemployed marching on Washington.
After Hammond awakens from his coma, however, he refuses Cabinet pleas to “defend the Capitol.”
Instead, he supplies food to the homeless men, and promises them jobs.
Dramatic lighting (and the sound of faint trumpets) reveal that this is a new President, guided not by his party’s needs, but by the Angel Gabriel.

The film script was based on a science fiction fantasy entitled Rinehard, by British author Thomas F. Tweed.
In the novel, American President Rinehard, changes, after a car accident, from a fan of “detective and wild west” tales, to a reader of political and economic tomes.
He dissolves Congress, fires his cronies in the Cabinet, declares martial law, creates his own militia, sets up agents in all state governments, increases the size of the Supreme Court (to 15), and replaces the Constitution—all to eliminate “red tape,” and create a functioning government.
At first, the White House staff is hesitant to follow (thinking he’s become insane), but one by one they conclude that it’s “a divine madness, the kind of madness that this crumbling world needs.”

Cover of Gabriel Over the White House, as published in Britain by Fantasy Books. Kemsley House, London. This is the version I read, but it was first published in Britain as Rinehard.

Cover of Gabriel Over the White House, as published in America by Farrar & Rinehart. Thomas F. Tweed’s name is not mentioned in the printed American version.

Oddly, the 1933 film credits list the Gabriel Over the White House author as “Anonymous.” Did Hollywood want to keep it hushed up that the author of “A Sensational Novel of the Presidency” was British? The story is told in first person by Hartley Beekman, Secretary to the President.

Tweed (1891-1940) was a British WWI Lieutenant-Colonel, and a political advisor to David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister.
According to Wikipedia, some characters in the novel are based on real people that both Tweed and Lloyd George knew.
Rinehard is set in the near future, and is about the world being given the government it “needs”—an efficient, benevolent dictatorship, where evildoers are punished.
(The secondary plot is a tale of Rinehard battling vicious Italian gangsters.)
Tweed later wrote another book known alternately as Blind Mouths or Destiny’s Man—which again involved a dictatorship and a healer.

It’s easy to figure out that Tweed was a Brit who never “crossed the pond.”
His novel is filled with British terms (“queue” instead of “line,” and “hire-purchase” instead of “buying on time”) plus awkward attempts at American slang.
(His gangsters seem based on British penny dreadfuls.)
A group of Chicago gangsters—"talking rapidly in Italian,” and described as “fat, swarthy, and soft-voiced”—are comically named Wolf Miller, Jose Borelli, “Spike” Jameson, and “Roddy” Greenblatt.
They commit a robbery with one thief costumed as Pierrot.*
(It’s strange that Tweed imagined that an Italian-American gangster would dress as an Italian clown; this “flourish” must have come from reading penny dreadfuls.)

The book was written in the 30’s, so it’s riddled with casual anti-Semitism, anti-Black, anti-immigrant and anti-Feminist sentiments.
A Chicago newspaper (Chicago Searchlight) is called a “filthy tabloid loved by Negroes, Jews and Italians.”
The President’s mistress/secretary (Pendie Malloy) is described as having a “faint strain of Jewish blood” because of her “acquisitive nose” and “full red lips.”
(“Acquisitive” is not my typo; that’s what Tweed wrote!)

The only sections that deal honestly with human emotions occur late in the novel, when an assassination attempt causes a head injury, and Rinehard returns to his former self.
Four years have passed since the car crash, but the befuddled Rinehard thinks it’s just days later.
He’s horrified to discover all the undemocratic measures he’s taken during his presidency, and wants none of it.
He asks that the White House staff set up the “television apparatus,” so that he may apologize to the nation.
However, his aides have become too invested in his legacy.
They refuse his request, causing a heart attack.
Rather than give Rinehard the medicine he needs, a staffer allows him to die.
The President’s legacy is left intact. 

President Hammond (Walter Huston) and Pendola Malloy (Karen Morley). In the novel, the secretary’s name is “Pendie Malloy” (short for “Independence”), but in the movie her name is Pendola Molloy.

In the novel, the only indication that Rinehart is possessed by an Angel is found on page 64.
Pendie Malloy tells the narrator (Hartley Beekmann) that: “Sometimes when Rinehard is dictating, he seems to be at a loss at a certain point. . .He lifts his head and bends it sideways, for all the world as if he were listening to something or someone.”
Malloy speculates to Beekmann that “God has become a little merciful,” and has “sent Gabriel to do for Rinehard what He did for Daniel,” lead The Prophet in the right direction.

Tweed’s 1933 novel presents an America in which “people had lost all hope and faith and belief in their institutions,” and have “a deep distrust of politics.”
Above all, they need a “Leader.”
After President Reinhard begins to present his “Rinehart bedtime stories” on television, the populace dutifully lines up behind him.
There’s no need to gag the press, or to interfere in the free expression of public opinion.
(Indeed, a science fiction-fantasy! Rinehart’s “bedtime stories” preceded FDR’s fireside chats.) 

Crime boss Nick Diamond in center (C. Henry Gordon) faces the President’s top aide, Hartley Beekman (Franchot Tone), on right. In the movie (and book), the President’s top aide heads a Federal Police unit that punishes criminals, not by imprisoning them, but with courts martial and firing squads.

The Hollywood film is somewhat different from the Tweed novel.
The film is set in the present (1933), rather than the late 1940’s.
The President’s relationship with his young secretary is obviously amorous in the film (but not so clear in the novel).
The film gangsters are slightly more realistic, and more “upscale.”
Several characters from the novel are combined in the film script, to simplify the plot.
The ending for the film is different too, with President Hammond dying after he’s signed a World Peace covenant.
However, the gist of the story is there.
Both the film, and the novel, are based on imagining whether America (and Britain too?) might be better off, if democracy was suspended and a “benevolent” dictator took power. 

In Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1939 article “Keepers of Democracy” (in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter), she describes a world in which the people of the U.S. had allowed themselves “to be fed on propaganda which has created a fear complex. . . People have reached a point where anything which will save them from Communism is a godsend, and if Fascism or Nazism promises more security than our own Democracy, we may even turn to them.”
(Sadly, this description of propaganda-believers sounds very similar to what’s occurring in 2023.)

President Hammond (Walter Houston) addresses the “army of the unemployed” under a statue of George Washington and offers them jobs as the “army of construction.”

In Gabriel in the White House, President Hammond becomes a dictator, but he’s also a protective figure, who gives people a sense of security.
In the film, he walks—unescorted and Jesus-like—to address the “army of the unemployed.”
He bravely confronts the evil crime boss Nick Diamond in The Oval Office.
He’s aware of his role as a servant of God and Country, and becomes remote from human affections.
In 1933, President Hammond was the only type of benevolent dictator that Hollywood (and Hearst?) could imagine as a substitute for Democracy. 

*”Pierrot” and “Harlequin” are both commedia dell’arte characters. In her youth, Dorothy L. Sayers did admit to enjoying trashy over-the-top “penny dreadfuls.” Their influence can be felt in Sayer’s 1933 Lord Peter Whimsey mystery, Murder Must Advertise. In that story, Lord Peter disguises himself in a Harlequin costume, while infiltrating a cocaine party, to solve a murder.