Totalitarianism and Barbarism

1
Totalitarianism and Barbarism

• The Rise of Hitler and Stalin

2
The Great Depression
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The Stock Market
4
Unemployment
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Gross Domestic Product
6
Causes of the Crash

• Stock market crash, October 1929
• 1920s prosperity was real 45 increase in
  productivity
• But also large expansion in money supply,
  especially in 1928
• Bad foreign loans, buying on margin, speculative
  funds with few real assets
• Crash wiped out only one year of gains, and half
  that was recovered within months

7
Causes of the Depression

• What happened in 1930?
• There is no consensus
• Many policy decisions, some good, some
  baddisagreement about which are which
• Different effects in different countries

8
Hoovers Presidency

• Great Contraction in money supply From the
  cyclical peak in August 1929 to a cyclical trough
  in March 1933, the stock of money fell by over a
  third. (Friedman and Schwartz)
• Hoover worked to keep wages and prices high
• Result unemployment from 4.4 to 25
• 1932 top tax rate raised from 25 to 63

9
International Trade

• Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930
• 1,000 economists signed a letter warning that its
  effects would be disastrous
• War debtsTreaty of Versailles
• US, UK refused to forgive debts, but floated
  large loans
• Shutting down trade shut down the only way the
  loans could be repaid

10
Roosevelts First New Deal

• Vast increase in the size and conception of
  governments role
• 100 Days
• Emergency Banking Act
• Abandonment of the gold standard
• Economy Act, cutting government employee salaries
  and veterans benefits 40
• Repeal of Prohibition

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Roosevelts First New Deal

• Vast increase in the size and conception of
  governments role
• 100 Days
• Agricultural Adjustment Actkept food prices high
  by taking land out of production, plowing under
  crops, slaughtering and burying pigs (unpopular
  led to widespread hunger declared
  unconstitutional in 1936)
• Jobs and infrastructure programs WPA, PWA, CCC,
  REA, TVA

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Roosevelts First New Deal

• Vast increase in the size and conception of
  governments role
• 100 Days
• National Industrial Recovery Actestablished
  National Planning Board, found unconstitutional
  in 1935
• National Recovery Administrationminimum wage,
  limits on working hours and conditions,
  negotiated with industry dropped industrial
  production 25 by raising costs 40 unanimously
  found unconstitutional in 1935

13
Roosevelts Second New Deal

• Tax increases 1934, 1935, 1936 (top rate 79)
• National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act)tipped
  balance strongly in favor of unions
• Social Security Act
• Court packing planswitch in time that saved
  nineWest Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), U.S. v.
  Carolene Products (1938)
• Extensive regulations throughout economy
• Led to recession of 1937-38

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The Rise of Stalin

• Moral relativism in monstrous incarnation
• Trotsky Problems of revolutionary morality are
  fused with the problems of revoutionary strategy
  and tactics.

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The Rise of Stalin

• Lenin died in 1924 Stalin had already taken
  power
• Posed as a moderate
• Main competitors Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kaminev,
  Bukharin
• Trotsky out of the end of 1924 exiled 1928
  murdered 1940
• Kaminev, Zinoviev out in 1926 Bukharin, 1928

17
Show Trials

• 1929 Mining engineers charged with sabotage
  12-year-old son testified and demanded execution
  of his own father
• Carefully scripted and orchestrated
• Stakhtyites (wreckers) Arrest! Try! Shoot!

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Cult of Personality

• Stalin Man of Steel, Granite Bolshevik,
  Universal Genius
• Corruption of Soviet science Our task is not to
  study economics but to change it. We are bound
  by no laws. (S. G. Shumilin)

19
Socialists Dilemma

• Lenins New Economic Program, 1921 allowed
  ownership, free exchange for peasant farmers to
  end famine
• Socialists dilemma market forces reassert
  themselves. So, one must either allow resurgence
  of capitalism or use force to stop market forces

20
Collectivization

• Poor harvest in 1927 peasants would not accept
  paper money for their crops
• Hoarding no food in towns
• Stalin sent 30,000 armed party workers into the
  fields, stole the peasants food
• 1928 planted less, harvest even worse
• Desperate for cash, Russians sold art treasures,
  many to Andrew Mellon, who donated them to the
  National Gallery

21
Collectivization

• 1929, impulsively, against the words of Lenin,
  with no debate Forced 105 million peasants into
  collectives (3/4 of the Russian population)
• All-out offensive against the kulak. We must
  smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.
  Liquidate the kulaks as a class!
• Leszek Kolakowski probably the most massive
  war-like operation ever conducted by a state
  against its own citizens.

22
Collectivization

• More than 10 million slaughtered
• More than 10 million transported to Siberia
• 10 million in concentration camps
• Serfdom Rest lost all property, enslaved in
  grain factories
• Man-made famine more than half of all farm
  animals slaughtered

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Eyewitness account

• "Barefooted and poorly clad peasants were jammed
  into railroad cars and transported to the regions
  of Murmansk and the like. Peasants were unloaded
  into snow about two metres deep. The frost stood
  at 75 degrees below zero. Without even an axe or
  a saw we began building huts from tree branches.
  In two weeks all the children, the sick and the
  elderly had frozen to death."

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Malcolm Muggeridge

• The novelty of this particular famine, what made
  it so diabolical, is that it was not the result
  of some catastrophe like a drought or an
  epidemic. It was the deliberate creation of a
  bureaucratic mind which demanded the
  collectivization of agriculture, immediately, as
  a purely theoretical proposition, without any
  consideration whatever of the consequences in
  human suffering.

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Mendacity

• Westerner observers (other than Muggeridge) who
  observed Stalins Russia wrote about it and him
  in glowing terms
• Some of this was credulity or deception
• But some was mendacity The heroic lie

30
Muggeridge

• You published Winter in Moscow when you got back
  from the Soviet Union, and you were attacked in
  the press for your views.
• Very strongly. And I couldn't get a job.
• Why was that? Because people found your reports
  hard to believe?
• No, the press was not overtly pro-Soviet, but it
  was, as it is now, essentially sympathetic with
  that side and distrustful of any serious attack
  on it.

31
Muggeridge

• How do you explain this sympathy?
• It's something I've written and thought about a
  great deal, and I think that the liberal mind is
  attracted by this sort of regime. My wife's aunt
  was Beatrice Webb, and she and Sidney Webb wrote
  the classic pro-Soviet book, Soviet Communism A
  New Civilization. And so one saw close at hand
  the degree to which they all knew about the
  regime, knew all about the Cheka (the secret
  police) and everything, but they liked it.

32
Muggeridge

• This will be one of the great puzzles of
  posterity in looking back on this age, to
  understand why the liberal mind, the Manchester
  Guardian mind, the New Republic mind, should feel
  such enormous sympathy with this authoritarian
  regime.
• You are implying that the liberal intelligentsia
  did not simply overlook the regime's brutality,
  but actually admired and liked it.

33
Muggeridge

• Yes, I'm saying that, although they wouldn't have
  admitted it, perhaps not even to themselves. I
  remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very
  cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an
  early member of the Fabian Society and so on,
  saying to me, "Yes, it's true, people disappear
  in Russia." She said it with such great
  satisfaction that I couldn't help thinking that
  there were a lot of people in England whose
  disappearance she would have liked to organize.

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The Rise of Hitler
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The Rise of Hitler

• Munich Beer Hall Putsch
• ImprisonmentMein Kampf
• Two great evils Judaism and Communism
• Crowds are irrational
• A great leader can lead through propaganda
• Supplements class analysis with race superior
  race must rule
• Struggle for powerthose who dont fight dont
  deserve to live

36
Churchills Summary Mein Kampf

• Man is a fighting animal therefore the nation,
  being a community of fighters, is a fighting
  unit. Any living organism which ceases to fight
  for its existence is doomed to extinction. A
  country or race which ceases to fight is equally
  doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends
  on its purity. Hence the need for ridding it of
  foreign defilements.

37
Churchills Summary Mein Kampf

• The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is
  of necessity pacifist and internationalist.
  Pacifism is the deadliest sin for it means the
  surrender of the race in the fight for existence.
  The first duty of every country is therefore to
  nationalise the masses intelligence in the case
  of the individual is not of first importance
  will and determination are the prime qualities.

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The Rise of Hitler

• Released from prison, December 1924
• Allied himself with Gregor Strasser and Joseph
  Goebbels, 1925
• Took control of National Socialist (Nazi) party,
  1926
• Socialist working-class revolution
• But anti-Jewish, anti-Communist as well as
  anti-Weimar
• Third wayone meaning of Third Reich

39
The German Economy

• Early 1920s extreme inflation wiped out war
  debts
• 1924-1929 prosperity, but still below pre-war
  levels
• 1928 Nazis got less than 3 of the vote
• Smoot-Hawley (1930) German unemployment 33.7 in
  1931 and 43.7 in 1932

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Increased Support

• Student movementlargely Nazi by 1930as were
  many professors
• 1929 partnership with industrialist Alfred
  Hugenberg
• 1930 18 of the vote
• 1932 37 of the vote Nazis and Communists had
  more than half
• Hindenburg refused to make Hitler Chancellor

41
Hitlers Program

• Politicians had ruined the Reich
• State as an organic unity
• To achieve unity, get beyond politics
• One-party state, the party of a great, heroic
  nation
• Government of artists
• Leave industry alone Do you think I should be
  so mad as to destroy Germanys economy?
• Change relation of man to the state We are
  socializing the people.

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Seizure of Power

• August 10 Hitler sent his men into the street,
  beat a Communist to death in front of his family
• Hitler published a defense of the murder
• November elections Nazis 196 seats (33),
  Communists 100
• Hitler became Chancellor January 30, 1933

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Seizure of Power

• 25,000 man torchlight parade
• Hindenburg dissolved Reichstag

44
Seizure of Power

• February 27, 1933 set Reichstag on fire, blamed
  Communists

45
Seizure of Power

• March 1933 won 44 of the vote
• Reichstag passed Enabling Act, giving all
  legislative power to Hitler and cabinet
• Hitler to Socialists And now I have no further
  need of you.

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Seizure of Power

• Communist party banned
• July 1933 Nazi party was the only legal party
• Labor unions brought under Nazi control
• National government assumed all regional
  authority
• Goering The law and the will of the Fuhrer are
  one.

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Security Systems

• Three competing security systems
  institutionalized Darwinism
• SA (Brownshirts)
• SS (Blackshirts)
• Gestapo

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SA

• Brownshirts, run by Roehm
• Over 1 million by fall 1933 3.5 million in
  reserve
• Brutal, open-street violence
• July 2, 1934 Night of the Long KnivesRoehm,
  Strasser, other political opponents shot 5-7,000
  victims

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SS

• Heinrich Himmler headed up the SS (blackshirts),
  a highly trained elite 52,000 in 1933

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Gestapo
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Concentration Camps

• March 1933 first concentration camp opened at
  Dachau for 5,000 prisoners, charged with
  suspicion of activities inimical to the state

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Concentration Camps

• Additional punishments flogging, death for
  holding meetings, making speeches, forming
  cliques, loitering, collecting information about
  the camps.

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Hitler and Stalin

• Hitlers methods inspired Stalin
• 1934 Stalin had more than 5,000 opponents
  murdered, including Kirov, Zinoviev, and Kaminev
• 1935 Began secret negotiations with Hitler

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Hitler and Stalin

• 1937 killed 3,000 senior police officers, 90 of
  prosecutors, 30,000 army officers, 80 of
  colonels and generals, 1 million party
  membersmaybe as much as 10 of populationwho
  knew history of revolution
• Probably more than a million per year murdered
• Camps the Gulag archepelago

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Kolyma
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Intellectuals

• Western intellectuals often defended Stalins
  tactics
• E.g., Lincoln Steffens, George Bernard Shaw,
  Andre Malraux, Bertold Brecht, Harold Denny and
  Walter Duranty of the New York Times
• Their writings were often used to break down NKVD
  prisoners

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Intellectuals

• American intellectual class self-corrupted by
  attempt to defend Stalin
• Lionel Trilling In any view of the American
  cultural situation, the importance of the radical
  movement of the Thirties cannot be overestimated.
  It may be said to have created the American
  intellectual class as we now know it in its great
  size and influence. It fixed the character of
  this class as being, through all mutations of
  opinion, predominantly of the Left.