The Western Powers Loved Adolf Hitler

This is the second installment in a series on “How Hitler Saved Capitalism and Won the War.”

Last Monday this series on the Second Coming of Adolf Hitler began with a brief allusion to the special responsibility Christians have to resist Hitlerism without Hitler. That first entry recalled how Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller and others formed a Confessing Church to counter the surrender of Germany’s mainstream churches to Hitler’s nationalism. The example of the Confessing Church and the tenets of its Barmen Declaration should be kept in mind as this series progresses. An underlying thesis here is that given the similarities between Hitler’s Germany and the contemporary United States, would-be followers of Jesus should emulate the defiant example of the Barmen Declaration’s authors.

Today’s entry focuses on the relevance of Adolf Hitler to U.S. policy since 9/11/01:

In the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11th, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, co-founded by Mrs. Lynne Cheney, the wife of Dick Cheney, the former United States Vice President, accused dissident professors of being the “weak link in America’s response to the attack.” To support its accusation, the Council published a list of more than a hundred recorded statements by such professors characterizing them as “anti-American.” Statements ranged from “Any attack on the Pentagon’s got my vote” to “Ignorance breeds hate,” and America should “build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls.”

Of course, any professorial references to “fascism” and “Nazism” connected with U.S. policy were anathema to Mrs. Cheney’s group. Such accusations, it was alleged, revealed an ignorance or suppression of real United States history. A more genuine narrative of the past showed America to be an unparalleled opponent of Nazism and an unrelenting advocate of freedom and democracy in the face of fascism. Schooling in truer, more patriotic history, Mrs. Cheney said, would make students valued assets in civilization’s war against terrorism.

As a teacher of history in a small liberal arts college in the American South, I found extremely welcome the new centralizing of history’s importance. I also welcomed it as an opportunity to explore a suspicion that had been with me for some time – precisely in connection with the categories of terrorism and anti-terrorism, but especially connected to fascism, Nazism and the study of history.

The suspicion came from reading closely and teaching the standard Western Civilization text many professors use at Berea College, where I teach. It is a book of which Mrs. Cheney might approve – Jackson Spielvogel’s Western Civilization. For a long time, I had been finding unmistakable clues there to support the thesis that far from being a beacon of freedom and democracy, the United States is actually the opposite. More specifically, in relation to most of the world, it has since the conclusion of the Second Inter-Capitalist War (aka World War II) embodied Hitlerism without Adolph Hitler.

Put more starkly, the clues in my students’ textbooks indicated that Hitler’s system actually triumphed in World War II. Moreover, his system was police state capitalism, and Hitler was capitalism’s savior. Even more importantly, police state capitalism continues today in the process of globalization and, most recently, in the U.S. “War on Terrorism.”

Such challenging assertions find additional support in conservative histories like Hagen Schultze’s Germany: A New History, and Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity. Support appears as well in statements by U.S. government officials, and in the daily newspaper.

All of these sources indicate that at the beginning Adolf Hitler enjoyed the support of western powers because of his stern opposition to socialism and communism. Hitler was the West’s champion against the Soviets and those who admired Soviet accomplishments. So after his coming to power in 1933, Hitler’s international sponsors quickly rescinded the harshly punitive clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. They forgave Germany’s debt. British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain hastened to align Great Britain with Hitler. Pius XII referred to der Fuhrer as “an indispensable bulwark against the Russians.” Henry Ford loved the man. The admiration was mutual; Ford accepted a medal of honor from Hitler’s hands, as did the founder of IBM. Trans-Atlantic aviator, Charles Lindbergh and movie actor Errol Flynn were prominent among Hitler’s champions.

With such backing, the Western Powers allowed Hitler’s Germany to rearm. But in the end, der Fuhrer lost the support of his capitalist backers, because he went too far. His crime, however, was not gassing Jews. The West proved remarkably compliant with that. Rather, Hitler’s crime was his attempt to establish control of the world economy – over such capitalist competitors as Great Britain, France, and the United States. He proposed a New World Order, which, he promised, would bring prosperity to all. Nonetheless, Hitler’s attempts to impose his order ultimately met with stiff resistance from his opponents’ Allied Forces. The Second Inter-Capitalist War followed.

Afterwards, the United States emerged relatively unscathed from the conflict, and proceeded to establish its own dominance of the world capitalist system, in ways not extremely different from those employed by Adolph Hitler. That dominance of the capitalist world turned to imperial global dominance following the disappearance of the Soviet Union as the lone super-power adversary of the U.S. at the beginning of the 1990s.

In other words, there is surprising continuity between Hitler’s New World Order and the New World Order embodied in the contemporary system of globalization. To understand this perhaps shocking claim, it is necessary to (1) clear up some common misconceptions about fascism, (2) describe the connections between Hitler and capitalism, (3) indicate how fascism triumphed in World War II and its aftermath, and (4) show how Hitler’s system is continued today in globalization and the War on Terrorism.

These points will be elaborated here (on Mondays) during the coming weeks.