Watching old newsreels of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) when I was a teenager, it always amazed me that millions of German people in the 1930s and 1940s voted for, followed and even worshipped this deeply unimpressive man. With his ugly features, pitiful physique, laughable toothbrush moustache, high-pitched screeching voice, shuffling gait, limp-wristed hand-flapping, absurd ‘Sieg Heil’ salute and unflattering buttoned-up and belted mock-militaristic uniform he cut a repulsive figure, made worse by his many health problems from tertiary syphilis to eczema, chronic stomach complaints to insomnia. Yet he presented himself as some sort of superman, women swooned in his presence and men were in awe of him.
Why? How could this repellent piece of murderous fascist trash come to rule the land of Goethe and the Brothers Grimm, Copernicus and von Bingen, Mann and Hesse, Bach and Beethoven, Schumann and Strauss, Einstein and Marx, Hegel and Heidegger, Dietrich and Fassbinder, Lubitsch and Murnau, Kraftwerk and Can?
The question is relevant now because of what is happening in the USA and the march of the far-right across the world. Another great German, the historian, philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a Jew who fled Germany when Hitler came to power, perhaps came closest to explaining the appeal of totalitarian thugs to ordinary people when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. This was an account of the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), one of the main organisers of the Holocaust who had fled to Argentina after WW2 before being captured by the Israeli secret service in 1960. Arendt grasped the most alarming truth of all about somebody who methodically arranged the murder of 6 million people: he was neither a sadistic genius nor a psychopathic madman; he was just an average bloke.
The death of his mother when he was only nine was a defining moment for him. His cold, authoritarian, middle-manager father quickly replaced her with a bible-bashing protestant step-mother and thus the possibility of any civilising gentleness was precluded. Like so many men from the ‘respectable’ lower middle classes, he was ambitious and diligent but untalented and mediocre, performing badly at school and working in lowly white-collar jobs before joining the Nazi Party. He was a typically conformist, compliant, unquestioning and unimaginative conservative who ‘loved’ his family because it was his and believed in God because that was the done thing. Vain and aspirational, bullying and cowardly, Eichmann’s virulent racism, hostility to the working class and instinctive support of patriarchy, hierarchy, the nuclear family, masculism, the subservience of women, reactionary politics and big capitalism were then and still are today the routine attitudes of anti-intellectual, resentful, insecure men with a chip on their shoulder, a giant inferiority complex and unexplored issues of sexual repression. We have all known many men like that.
Donald Trump fits a similar template, as does Elon Musk – the main difference being that they were born into vast wealth. Both had unhappy childhoods in dysfunctional, broken families, both had particularly difficult relationships with domineering fathers and both have gone through life largely friendless racking up failed marriages and fathering multiple children with different mothers. They have matured into brutal, twisted, destructive egomaniacs trapped in an infantile rage they show no sign of understanding and entirely lacking even a shred of decency or empathy for anyone else, for society and for the planet. And because of their unimaginable fortunes and their positions at the pinnacle of the most powerful country in the world with unprecedented control over information and opinion they make someone like Eichmann look almost innocuous.
But most of all it is the banality Hannah Arendt nailed that connects them to Eichmann, Hitler and all the demagogues and megalomaniacs that have plagued the world since the beginning of recorded history. Trump’s scowling orange face, lacquered bouffant hair and garish vulgarity; Musk’s puerile fits, ketamine confusion and inability to shut up; all encompassed by the sheer charmless inadequacy they share.
What is most alarming though is the fact that 77 million Americans voted for Trump. And here we reach the crux of the matter, an undeniable truth that so many otherwise good people seem incapable of facing, an inarguable fact that will certainly bring about the annihilation of humanity unless it is tackled: MOST PEOPLE ARE GENERALLY AWFUL AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN. The brilliant American stand-up comedian George Carlin (1937-2008) summed it up succinctly: “Selfish, ignorant people elect selfish, ignorant politicians. The public sucks – fuck hope.”
Stop pretending otherwise, stop denying the evidence of history and your own eyes, stop clutching at straws, stop the wishful thinking, the cock-eyed optimism, the glib complacency, the neophiliac futurism, the comfort blankets and the threadbare platitudes. Start fighting back – or else burn baby, burn.