A History of the World (76 page)

The Problem of Politics

A key theme in this history has been the mismatch between mankind’s ability to understand the world and so reshape it, and on the other hand the lack of progress in how we are ruled. Science strides ahead; politics stumbles around like a drunk. We saw it in the age of discovery and the age of empire, but it was particularly glaring in the twentieth century – and, I would add (so far), the twenty-first too.

Our two Russian convict-philosophers were having their argument because of the greatest failure of twentieth-century politics: namely, the belief, tested to destruction, that mankind was on an inevitable journey from hierarchies and classes to a paradise of ungoverned equality. Communists felt that the means – cruelty and tyranny – were justifiable because of the grandeur of their ends. They were not the first to make this mistake. Catholic Inquisitors, for instance, felt the same way. But by the 1930s, with the apparatus of a huge state in their hands, the Soviet Communists had the power to go further, and to try to annihilate whole classes, nationalities and categories of humanity who, they felt, were getting in the way. (Marxists never resolved the conundrum that though their victory was inevitable it had to be struggled for with maximum guile, discipline and ruthlessness. If it was inevitable, why the need for struggle?)

Did Stalin and his coterie really believe it? He lived the high life himself, travelling between luxurious private apartments, a ‘Red Czar’ whose smallest flickers of irritation terrified his minions. Stalin had started as a gangster and behaved like a gangster boss – wily,
coldhearted and cynical about human motives. But it would be wrong to conclude that Communism was itself a purely cynical coating for a system essentially not so different from that of Ivan the Terrible. Without vast numbers of true believers, leather-coated killers, simple workers, chairmen and bureaucrats who genuinely thought they were on the side of history and working to make the world anew, Stalinism could never have happened. The problem was not Communism’s cynicism, though it produced cynicism; the problem was its sincerity.

Something similar can be said of Communism’s mutant rival sister, Fascism. Neither Benito Mussolini in Italy, nor Adolf Hitler in Germany, thought of the inevitable march of history in quite the way that Communists did. Nor were they trying to abolish whole classes. But they did have a sincere belief, communicated to millions of sincere believers, that their part of the human race was special, that it had been shaped to dominate others and had a right to glory. Not historical inevitability; but
destiny
. Letters and diaries from the Nazi commando groups who systematically butchered Jewish women, old men and children show that they believed this was the right thing to do, however unpleasant. The bogus science of race, laced with scientific-sounding language about hygiene, helped them distance themselves from what they were actually doing.

Marxism was a bogusly ‘scientific’ version of history; Nazism was a bogusly ‘racial’ version of evolutionary biology. Just as species were in endless competition, so were the races. For the stronger to fail to struggle against, and destroy, the weak, was a moral failure: it meant humanity would decline, rather than advance. In Hitler’s world, this amounted to an Aryan duty to advance at the expense of Slavs, Jews and other, lower forms of humanity. It would lead not to a Communist Utopia, but to a golden age. Both regimes had to kill their way to paradise – kill rebellious, selfish peasants, kill rival socialists, kill class enemies, kill Jews. Attacking better-off peasants, or ‘kulaks’, or attacking Jews, they used similar language, labelling their enemies bestial and subhuman, vermin or bacilli. Interestingly, neither seemed able to imagine the coming paradise except in the most banal and old-fashioned terms: Communist and Nazi propaganda alike beckoned followers towards a world of apple-cheeked mothers in semi-rural sunlit landscapes, overseen by a mustachioed father figure – a schmaltzy, timid Eden.

If this were the story of modern times it would be bleak. But the twentieth century also brought an expansion of democracy that had seemed impossible during its darkest decades. The ‘American Century’ brought liberty and choice to millions around the world. This was the triumph of the market economy, defended by science, which had produced weapons so destructive that the great powers of the planet no longer dared to go to war against each other. Russians still do not have the freedoms of Americans, Europeans or many others. But they have more freedom than Grossman could have dared hope when he invented the argument in the prison cell.

We could argue, therefore, that this is an overwhelmingly positive story. The follies of politics in the twentieth century were only the logical conclusion of ideas that had developed in Europe much earlier. Racism, Utopianism, a belief in national destiny, anti-Semitism, a weakness for strong leaders . . . these are hardly new. Surely, after the experiences of Marxist dictatorship and of the Nazis, they are lessons learned for all time? Have we not broken through into a politically chastened and better world, with our United Nations, our declarations of human rights, our international criminal courts? There is a lot to that argument. The fact that wars still go on, in Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East, does not disprove the theory of general advance; it just reminds us that progress is bumpy.

Yet there are two bumps so large they cannot be steered smoothly around. The first is that, in fact, democracy has not spread effectively. The highly intelligent political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in
The End of History and the Last Man
that the big arguments about politics were over. They had finished with the triumph of liberal, free-market democracy. Some countries and cultures would take longer than others to get there, but eventually everyone would. In a world where undemocratic but booming China, and oil- and gas-based autocracies (Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia) loom so large, this no longer feels likely. Fukuyama was wrong, because democracy, it turns out, is not a system. It is a culture. It is based on habits, attitudes, long-established divisions of power, ingrained belief in law and absence of systemic corruption and cynicism. You can import a system and set it up, and get it working. You cannot import a culture. This does not mean most of the world is doomed to live under tyrannies or kleptocracies. It just means that it is a little early for democrats to declare the game over.

The second bump concerns the nature of democracy itself. Recently, democracies have mostly based themselves on the ability of competing political parties to offer voters a better material future (more stuff) year by year, and generation by generation. But because science and peace have boosted the planet’s population beyond what its natural resources can bear, this is not a plausible long-term proposition.

To feed, clothe and entertain ourselves, we humans have dug deep into Earth’s reserves of oil and water, and have (probably) irreversibly changed the climate by the quantity of carbon dioxide our activities have released. If all Chinese people, all Indian people, all the peoples of South-East Asia and Africa, expect the material goods of today’s Western middle class, they are going to be badly disappointed. In the West, we now have the first generations of adults who expect their children to be worse off, materially, than they are. Democracies have survived trade recessions, and have managed to hold together during dangerous wars; but they have not yet dealt with a long period of lowered expectations and less prosperity. Until we see how they do so, we cannot assume that liberal, market democracy is secure. We have learned some of the lessons from what follows in this part of the book; but not all of them.

The Man in Landsberg

July 1924, and a bizarre scene was being witnessed in spacious, well lit rooms on the first floor of the Landsberg Prison near Munich. The prisoner, convicted of high treason after a cock-eyed attempt to overthrow the German government, was dressed in leather shorts and a short mountain tunic. He had put on weight and his rooms were crammed with gifts from well-wishers – cakes, chocolate, bouquets of flowers. Visitors thronged. According to one friend, ‘The place looked like a delicatessen store. You could have opened up a flower and fruit and wine shop with all the stuff stacked there.’ Hitler looked visibly fatter.
⁴

Indeed, the flabby thirty-five-year-old beer-hall agitator eventually had to declare a new regime and order visitors away, so that he could have some quiet time to settle down at his desk and slowly start to
dictate a book. Its original snappy title had been ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice’,
⁵
which was shortened by his editor to
My Struggle
, or in German,
Mein Kampf
. Hitler would do more than any other human being to unleash hell into the twentieth century, but nobody who bothers to read
Mein Kampf
, which had sold six million copies by 1940, could claim that he tried to disguise his plan. Far from it. He too was sincere.

Hitler is of course best known for his determination to rid Germany, and later Europe, of the Jewish people. Some historians have questioned his personal involvement in the Holocaust. Others have argued that the industrial mass murder began almost by accident, once Germany had invaded Poland, Baltic Russia and the Ukraine. As he sat composing
Mein Kampf
, surrounded by his flowers and his boxes of chocolates, Hitler put the Jewish question like this. Was there, he asked, any ‘form of filth or profligacy . . . without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light – a kike!’
⁶
He compares the Jews to ‘pestilence, spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death’, and to blood-sucking spiders.

Some have said that, despite this, Hitler only wanted the Jews moved elsewhere and bore them no personal ill-will. In
Mein Kampf
(the second volume, written after his release from prison) he says: ‘If at the beginning of the War and during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas . . . the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.’
⁷
Hitler equates Bolshevik Communism and Jewry, but also finds the Jews pulling the strings of its apparent enemy, international capitalism. The Jews are weak, yet also everywhere in control; they are tiny in numbers but dominate Germany. They control the press, the left-wing parties, the banks, everything. They have to be destroyed.

Hitler was a rare human. Biographers and historians believe he had almost no capacity for empathy, perhaps because of a cold and violent childhood. He was a fantasist who happened to live at a time and in a place already so disrupted that he could make his fantasies come true, though only for a few years, before they collapsed in on themselves. Poorly educated, lazy, physically unappealing, he was nevertheless able to mesmerize audiences, hypnotize individuals who met
his dark stare, and whip a nation into a frenzy of adulation. Yet without Germany’s defeat in the First World War, without Lenin’s triumph in Russia or the long history of European anti-Semitism, he would have been a nobody.

Almost nowhere in Europe had been immune from anti-Semitism. The first Jewish ghetto had been created in Venice. English kings had burned, persecuted and expelled Jews. During the crusading period, French monarchs had confiscated Jewish wealth and expelled them. The Catholic Inquisition had offered them a choice of conversion or death. The history of the Russian empire is littered with murderous anti-Jewish pogroms. And in the early twentieth century, few places were as passionate in their anti-Semitism as Austria and Germany. Vienna, where the struggling would-be artist Hitler had spent some of his hardest formative years, had a particularly vicious anti-Jewish political and newspaper culture, epitomized by its populist mayor Karl Lueger. As Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw says, ‘It was a city where, at the turn of the century, radical anti-Semites advocated punishing sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews as sodomy, and placing Jews under surveillance around Easter to prevent ritual child-murder.’
⁸

Hitler must have imbibed some of this, but he knew Jews and indeed used Jewish acquaintances to help market his not very good paintings of the city at a time when he was living in a home for destitute men. Though a ‘pan-German’ who wanted all Germans to unite in a single
Reich
, and an early lover of Richard Wagner’s art which is shot through with anti-Semitism, there is no reliable evidence that he was a notable anti-Semite during his early years, and there are even suggestions that he sympathized with the left-wing Social Democrats.

Much was written later, when he was Germany’s ruler, claiming a consistent line, but that turns out difficult to prove. Hitler says in
Mein Kampf
that he was shocked during the Great War, when he was home on leave, by how many Jews were not fighting. The book seethes, too, with claims about Jewish involvement in prostitution. Hitler may have been impotent, and he certainly expressed feelings of repulsion, even horror, about sexual licence; which may have become somehow mixed up with stories about Jews going back to medieval times. It is likely, however, that Hitler’s loathing of the Jews really began shortly after Germany’s defeat in 1918, when he returned with his regiment, as a highly decorated corporal, to Munich.

As a native Austrian he had been lucky to be accepted by a Bavarian regiment, and had fought in the trenches as a message-carrying runner with considerable bravery. The defeat of the Imperial German Army was something he found hard to accept. Almost worse was that when he returned, with few prospects, Munich was a hotbed of revolution. Over the winter and early spring of 1918–19, anarchists and Communists established a revolutionary ‘Red Republic’ in Bavaria, mimicking the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. There followed a time of food shortages, assassination, seizure of property, violence and left-wing censorship. It fell far short of the ‘red terror’ experienced to the east, and it was soon ended by a right-wing military counterattack, but it left deep scars.