Someone posted a link on Twitter the other day to a review of a book published in 2017 about the rise of Hitler (Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939 By Volker Ullrich). It was posted in response to some of the measures being proposed and passed by Johnson’s government. Let me say at the outset, I don’t think the person posting it was suggesting any similarities between the PM and Adolph Hitler. Johnson may be on the right but he’s not he’s not that far. But the book points to the way these things tend to creep up on society.
The review is A Warning From History, and is said to "remind us that there is more than one way to destroy a democracy". The review is by Richard Evans. The lesson from history that we are expected to learn is how things go once you’re on the slippery slope.
Reading the review, I remembered I had also been reading recently an article that Johnson had written in September 2017 setting out his 'vision' for a thriving Britain after Brexit and it included this:
"I used to look at the Brussels bumper stickers saying “Mon patrie, c’est Europe [My homeland is Europe]” and think it was a bit of a laugh, and that they would never engender a genuine Euro-patriotism, or compete with people’s natural feelings for their own country.
"I have to say that I am now not so sure. I think I was complacent. I look at so many young people with the 12 stars lipsticked on their faces and I am troubled with the thought that people are beginning to have genuinely split allegiances."
"And when people say that they feel they have more in common with others in Europe than with people who voted Leave, I want to say: “But that is part of the reason why people voted Leave.”
"You don’t have to be some tub-thumping nationalist to worry that a transnational sense of allegiance can weaken the ties between us; and you don’t have to be an out‑and‑out nationalist to feel an immense pride in this country and what it can do."
His answer was not to engender a new sense of pride in the country but to pander to the racists and xenophobes like Farage and erect a curtain between us and our friends to the east. If anything Brexit has redoubled many people's sense of feeling they are being separated from their own British homeland - for a lot of EU citizens, particularly women who came here, got married and had children but are now separated this is more than a sense. Their kids are British and don't want to return to Belgium say. The mothers are now isolated and feel unwanted in their adopted country.
But now listen to the Hitler book review:
"The main objective of Nazi education and culture was not, however, to distract people from issues of political importance; it was to instill a new sense of patriotism. Pupils were made to salute the flag before school every morning, and the religious assembly that opened the school day was turned into a festival of obeisance to Hitler."
Johnson and his fellow travellers (or perhaps the other way round) are proud of Brexit. They think it's a good idea. But this is precisely what Hitler thought too when be broke with the League of Nations (forerunner to the UN):
"Ullrich tellingly quotes the Nazis’ triumphant declaration of “our departure from the community of nations,” buttressed by Hitler’s assurance that he would “rather die” than sign anything that was not in the interests of the German people."
Does this sound familiar? Johnson often talks of dying in ditches doesn't he?
Johnson writes his own speeches and thinks far more about the phrasing and the words used to convey a message rather that keeping things accurate. He's a bit of a tub-thumper, firing up the mob with enthusiasm for his 'vision' even though experts warn him it's not remotely achievable. His private life is feral.
Again, from the review of Ullrich's book:
"Above all else, Hitler was a media figure who gained popularity and controlled his country through speeches and publicity. Far from being a consistent and undeviatingly purposeful politician, he was temperamental, changeable, insecure, allergic to criticism, and often indecisive and uncertain in a crisis. There were many occasions in which he nearly came to grief, most notably as a result of his unconventional private life—such as when the suicide of his half-niece Geli Raubal, with whom he’d been having an affair in the early 1930s, threatened to destroy his reputation with the respectable classes of German society."
We know the PM is also inconsistent, capricious, indecisive and uncertain in a crisis.
Next, this government has stuffed the statute book with masses of Henry VIII powers allowing ministers to create law without parliamentary scrutiny under the excuse that Brexit and the pandemic required it, but it is part and parcel of the prime minister's approach; to shut down debate, ignore parliament and treat it with contempt. His senior adviser was found to be in contempt of the House and Johnson himself prorogued parliament, illegally as it turned out.
So, back to Ullrich's book:
"The courts could safely be ignored, not least because Hitler’s government was able to govern by executive order after the burning down of the Reichstag, the national parliament building, on February 27–28, 1933."
Of course, we think the more extreme stuff that happened in Germany in the mid and later 1930s could never happen here because of the strength of our civic institutions, and that's true. But some of the measures to limit the powers of judicial review, suppress the votes of opposition parties, curtail the right to peaceful protest and so on are expressly designed to weaken the institutions that protect our rights.
The Conservative party, at least the version that's in power at the moment, would like to see Britain withdraw from the Human Rights Convention, The EU have had to insist it is retained as part of any trade agreement. All of these point to a more authoritarian future whether or not Johnson realises it.
If he is toppled, to be replaced by (say) Priti Patel who is probably the most right wing Home Secretary in history, we might easily see the return of hanging and harsher sentences for plenty of other crimes.
We shouldn't forget that Hitler didn’t gain power illegally. The German people weren’t forced into Nazism, certainly not in the beginning, "Ordinary Germans were not wholly won over by such acts of persecution and destruction; only a minority applauded them. But the great mass of Germans did nothing to stop any of this." It simply crept up on them until it was too late.
The review ends with this:
"Everyone concerned about democracy should read this book. For the Nazis were “a warning from history” (to quote the title of the still-unsurpassed 1997 television history by Ian Kershaw and Lawrence Rees, now being rebroadcast in the United Kingdom as a response to current political events), and we would all do well to heed it."
As I mentioned, the review was written in 2017. Have things got worse? I think they have, a lot.
