In some ways, the military is the most important consideration when you’re wondering whether a country is primed for a dictator or resistant to one. So…<\/p>\n
The Military<\/strong><\/p>\n –United States 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n A few months ago, my brother and I were having lunch with some friends who expressed worry that Trump could take over the United States the way Hitler took over Germany. My brother said, “Not going to happen,” and when the question, “Why not?” was posed, both of us at the same time said, “The Army.”<\/p>\n A tyrant needs to have the country’s military behind him. Rather in\/famously, Trump does not have our military anywhere near him: “My generals” have sharply reminded us that soldiers swear an oath to our Constitution, not to a monarch. Nor to an elected C-in-C.<\/p>\n Trump never had “his” generals. They were always our country’s generals.<\/p>\n –Weimar Republic 1930<\/strong><\/p>\n High-ranking officers, numbers of whom were of the Germany nobility — for whom having at least one son in the military was a traditional source of pride — paid little attention to Hitler until the 1930’s. By and large, military officers were monarchists, not democrats or communists.<\/p>\n The Versailles Treaty, which mandated a painful reduction to the Germany military,\u00a0 enraged the officer corps. After that, William Shirer writes, “…the Army, small at it was in numbers, became a state within a state, exerting an increasing influence on the nation’s foreign and domestic policies until a point was reached where the Republic’s continued existence depended on the will of the officer corps.”<\/p>\n Shirer reports a striking incident from 1923 when Bavaria was making noises of secession. The Reichstag’s then-President Ebert hastily summoned his cabinet and invited “the monocled, poker-faced Prussian Commander in Chief” General von Seeckt to attend.<\/p>\n “Ebert wanted to know where the Army stood. Seeckt bluntly told him. ‘The Army, Mr. President, stands behind me.<\/em>‘”<\/p>\n So, in effect the German military was a forceful political party in itself. Only after Hitler’s Nazi Party won a majority in the Reichstag did the officer class reluctantly accept Hitler; they came to understand many of the underclass soldiers were eager Nazis.<\/p>\n Of the many (over 40) attempts at assassinating Hitler, the most serious were led by German military officers. And the Abwehr, the military intelligence agency, had a dual personality attitude to Hitler. The Abwehr leader, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris<\/a>, operated surreptitiously, personally handing classified information to the Allies. Some of his agents acted to subvert the Reich, even while the body of the Abwehr did its job, collecting intelligence for the Wehrmacht. (It’s a terrific, if strenuously complex, spy and double-agent story.)<\/p>\n Hitler had quite a number of his military leaders executed. Canaris was one of them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That’s it, that’s all I’ve got under the general heading “Why the contemporary United States is not now and never has been anything like Hitler’s Germany.”<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In some ways, the military is the most important consideration when you’re wondering whether a country is primed for a dictator or resistant to one. So… The Military –United States 2024 A few months ago, my brother and I were … Continue reading