When he discusses his faith, the Republican candidate sounds a great deal like the businessman-turned-politician who coined his campaign slogan.
.. The columnist Cal Thomas recently asked Trump, “Who do you say Jesus is?” Trump replied:
Jesus to me is somebody I can think about for security and confidence. Somebody I can revere in terms of bravery and in terms of courage and, because I consider the Christian religion so important, somebody I can totally rely on in my own mind.
Trump’s emphasis on Jesus’s bravery and courage may not resonate with every believing Christian, but it draws on a century-old tradition of Muscular Christianity.
.. A physical weakling! Where did they get that idea? Jesus pushed a plane and swung an adze; he was a successful carpenter. He slept outdoors and spent his days walking around his favorite lake. His muscles were so strong that when he drove the money-changers out, nobody dared to oppose him!
.. Barton wrote that book. The Man Nobody Knows became an instant bestseller, moving a quarter-million copies by 1926. It was, like The Art of the Deal, an inspirational success manual.
.. Where his supporters saw a straight-talking businessman, his rival saw a scarcely disguised fascist. They pointed to an essay Barton had written seven years before, praising Mussolini for fostering “love of country, respect for courts and law, and sense of national obligation” in Italy. “Must we abolish the Senate and have a dictatorship to do it?” Barton had mused. “I sometimes think it would be almost worth the cost.”
China’s memory manipulators
The country’s rulers do not just suppress history, they recreate it to serve the present. They know that, in a communist state, change often starts when the past is challenged
.. On the one hand, we know this is a country where a rich civilisation existed for millennia, yet we are overwhelmed by a sense of rootlessness.
.. What does this tell us about a country? Optimists feel a sense of dynamism – here, at last, is a country getting on with things while the rest of the world stagnates or plods forward. This is always said with amazement and awe. The apex of this era of wonder came shortly before the 2008 Olympics, when the western media tripped over itself trying to trot out the most effusive praise for China’s rise/transformation/rejuvenation – pick your cliche.
.. The bluntest I have experienced is this: a country that has so completely obliterated and then recreated its past – can it be trusted?
What eats at a country, or a people, or a civilisation, so much that it remains profoundly uncomfortable with its history? History is lauded in China. Ordinary people will tell you every chance they get that they have 5,000 years of culture: wuqiannian de wenhua.
.. It is hard to overstate history’s role in a Chinese society run by a communist party. Communism itself is based on historical determinism: one of Marx’s points was that the world was moving inexorably towards communism, an argument that regime-builders such as Lenin and Mao used to justify their violent rises to power. In China, Marxism is layered on top of much older ideas about the role of history. Each succeeding dynasty wrote its predecessor’s history, and the dominant political ideology – what is now generically called Confucianism – was based on the concept that ideals for ruling were to be found in the past, with the virtuous ruler emulating them. Performance mattered, but mainly as proof of history’s judgment.
.. The unstated reason for Xi’s unwillingness to disavow the Mao era is that Mao is not just China’s Stalin. The Soviet Union was able to discard Stalin because it still had Lenin to fall back on as its founding father. For the Communist party of China, Mao is Stalin and Lenin combined; attack Mao and his era and you attack the foundations of the Communist state.
.. Five years after the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, the party issued a statement that condemned that era and Mao’s role in it, but which also ended further discussion of Mao by declaring that “his contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes. His merits are primary and his errors secondary.”
.. history is especially sensitive because change in a communist country often starts with history being challenged. In the 1980s, for example, groups such as the historical-research society Memorial morphed into a social movement that undermined the Soviet Union by uncovering its troubled past
.. The Communist party does not just suppress history, it recreates it to serve the present. In China, this has followed the party’s near self-destruction in the Cultural Revolution, which led to a desperate search for ideological legitimacy. At first, this was mainly economic, but following the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the party began to promote itself more aggressively as the defender of Chinese culture and tradition.
.. on 5 December of that year, Xi visited Confucius’s hometown of Qufu, picked up a copy of The Analects – a book of sayings and ideas of the great sage – as well as a biography of him, and declared: “I want to read these carefully.” He also coined his own Confucianesque aphorism – “A state without virtue cannot endure.” The next year, he became the first Communist party leader to participate in a commemoration of Confucius’s birthday.
.. Xi said, “to understand today’s China, today’s Chinese people, we must understand Chinese culture and blood, and nourish the Chinese people’s grasp of its own cultural soil”.
.. The bamboo slips that Liu was describing are from a much later date, but they challenge certainties of Chinese culture in other, possibly more profound ways. The texts stem from the Warring States period, an era of turmoil in China that ran from the 5th to the 3rd centuries BC. All major Chinese schools of thought that exist today stem from this era, especially Taoism and Confucianism
.. The bamboo slips change how we understand this era. Some have compared its impact on China’s understanding of the past to how the past was viewed in Europe’s Enlightenment, a period when western core texts were for the first time analysed as historical documents instead of texts delivered intact from antiquity. “It’s as though suddenly you had texts that discussed Socrates and Plato that you didn’t know existed,” Sarah Allan, a Dartmouth university professor who has worked with Liu and Li in the project
.. “People also say it’s like the Dead Sea scrolls, but they’re more important than that. This isn’t apocrypha. These texts are from the period when the core body of Chinese philosophy was being discussed. They are transforming our understanding of Chinese history.”
.. One text, for example, argues in favour of meritocracy much more forcefully than is found in currently known Confucian texts. Until now, the Confucian texts only allowed for abdication or replacement of a ruler as a rare exception; otherwise kingships were hereditary – a much more pro-establishment and anti-revolutionary standpoint. The new texts argue against this. For an authoritarian state wrapping itself in “tradition” to justify its never-ending rule, the implications of this new school are subtle but interesting. “This isn’t calling for democracy,” Allan told me, “but it more forcefully argues for rule by virtue instead of hereditary rule.”
.. “We think we have another 15 volumes, so that’s another 15 years – until I’m retired,” Liu said, laughing. “But then you and others will be debating this for the rest of this century. The research is endless.”
.. For them, he held a key to the present: the past.
Review: Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich
‘The Führer,’ he said, ‘finds it very difficult to bring about by order from above things which he intends to realise sooner or later.’ It was, therefore, ‘the duty of each one of us to try to work towards him in the spirit of the Führer’.
.. Willikens was not revealing some unknown fact. But he was offering posterity (as well as the party comrades in front of him) a really useful way of understanding how decisions were made in the Third Reich. ‘Working towards the Führer’ explains how many initiatives, including some of the worst, originated in the wider Nazi bureaucracy rather than with Hitler himself. And it can be argued that this commandment to second-guess and anticipate Hitler helped him to surf into ever more radical and terrible policies which are usually attributed to his invention alone.
.. anyone who could claim convincingly that he was carrying out ‘the Führer’s will’ would get his way. On the other, a chaotic, ‘Darwinian’ struggle of overlapping Nazi institutions raged as each competed to make up Hitler’s mind for him.
.. But often he watched a policy emerge from some underling who thought he was ‘working towards the Führer’, and then adopted it as his own ‘irrevocable decision’.
.. Everyone who ‘worked towards’ him in this way, not only in the bureaucracy but throughout society, was ‘helping drive on an unstoppable radicalisation’.
.. those who wanted to get ahead in this system … had to anticipate the Führer’s will and take action to prepare and promote what they thought to be Hitler’s intentions. This not only explains why the regime was so dynamic but also why it became more and more radical. In competing for the dictator’s favour, his paladins tried to trump one another with ever more extreme demands and measures.
.. And we know a lot now about Hitler as an individual. Published studies of the dictator are already said to number something like 120,000.
.. Ullrich has strong feelings about the way Hitler came to power in January 1933, enthroned by a ‘sinister plot’ of stupid elite politicians just at the moment when the Nazis were at last losing strength. It didn’t have to happen. He constantly reminds his readers that Hitler didn’t reach the chancellorship by his own efforts, but was put there by supercilious idiots who assumed they could manage this vulgarian. ‘We engaged him for our ends,’ said the despicable Franz von Papen. A year later, in the Night of the Long Knives, von Papen was grovelling to save his own neck.
.. But he and his recent predecessors have slashed away some of the nonsense nettles that have grown over the period: Hitler didn’t have a Jewish grandfather, he didn’t spend his childhood in poverty, his father didn’t beat him more than most European fathers of the day belted their sons, he wasn’t bipolar, he didn’t have only one ball or syphilis, he wasn’t exceptionally anti-Semitic before he settled in Munich.
.. Hitler had an excellent voice, and his harsh ‘Austrian’ (actually Lower Bavarian) accent seems to have given North Germans an impression of sincerity rather than provincial uncouthness
.. He required a strong warm-up before, deliberately late, he strode into the hall. He insisted where possible on seating that was spread horizontally before him rather than a narrow corridor reaching far back: this gave him as much close impact as possible. Cleverly, he channelled his own tendency to throw tantrums into a speech-style: beginning with long, droning and ostensibly sober recitals of fact and analysis, he would suddenly shift his voice upwards almost an octave, double its pace and explode into yelling demagogy. (I once saw Oswald Mosley do exactly this in the 1950s, and in spite of my contempt for all that he was saying, that sudden gearshift raised all the hairs on my neck.) His old trench comrade Max Amann saw him in 1919: ‘He yelled and indulged in histrionics. I’d never seen the like of it. But everyone said: “This fellow means what he says.” He was drenched in sweat, completely wet. It was unbelievable.’
.. Germans had been reading Briefsteller guides on how to write persuasive letters and studying manuals on charm, table manners and impressive conversation for at least a century before a more ambitious, chest-expander literature on how to ‘bend others to your will’ became popular in Europe and America around the end of the 19th century. Even the mild Carnegie trained speakers to be angry about something, and his bestseller (five million copies in his lifetime) includes a whole section on how to be a leader.
.. All was manipulation, aspects of his enormous repertoire as an actor of parts. He could be charming, shy and funny. He could talk quietly and civilly; he could be a skilled, quick-witted diplomat with a remarkable memory (as he presented himself to Anthony Eden). He could lapse into screaming tantrums of threat and abuse, most of them, it seems, calculated rather than spontaneous.
.. But he could also break opponents with calmly stated threats of lethal violence if they went on resisting him.
.. Ullrich notes that Jew-hatred and territorial expansion (Lebensraum) were Hitler’s only two consistent principles
.. After Kristallnacht, as after other outrages, many Germans (probably shocked more by the street vandalism than by the suffering of Jews) commented that ‘the Führer surely did not intend this.’
.. ‘Yes to Adolf Hitler – but a thousandfold No to the Brown Bigwigs!’ The effect of this false distinction was to maintain loyalty to the regime even through years when the public was coming to regard the Nazi Party apparatus as institutionally corrupt and self-serving.
.. As in France and to a lesser extent in Britain, the colossal loss of life in the First World War still haunted the German public. But Hitler knew how to manipulate that fear. Each time Germany seemed to be steering towards the brink of war – the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, the seizure of Memel, the Sudeten and then the 1939 Czech crisis – Hitler got his way at the last moment without a shot being fired and an enormous surge of relief and gratitude would sweep across the nation. Adolf had saved the peace yet again! Most Germans assumed – against all the evidence – that the bloodthirsty propaganda campaign against Poland would end in the same way, with the Poles caving in and abandoning Danzig
.. It’s not a point Ullrich makes. But Hitler was a moderniser as well as a genocidal tyrant. His perceived legacy is a burden of unbearable horror and humiliation. It’s a difficult thought that the Third Reich also contributed to postwar Germany’s success in unacknowledged ways: a robust sense of social equality, a stronger sense of common German identity co-existing with the restored federal structure, an imaginative provision for working-class welfare and leisure.
Is This the West’s Weimar Moment?
there were four trends that led the country to reject its post-World War I constitutional, parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic: economic depression, loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation and political blunder. To a certain degree, these trends can be found across the West today.
.. All this happened as traditional ways of life and values were being shaken by the modernization of the 1920s. Women suddenly went to work, to vote, to party and to sleep with whomever they wanted. This produced a widening cultural gap between the tradition-oriented working and middle classes and the cosmopolitan avant-garde — in politics, business and the arts — that reached a peak just when economic disaster struck. The elites were blamed for the resulting chaos, and the masses were ripe for a strongman to return order to society.
.. In fact, many mainstream politicians recognized the danger but they failed to stop him. Some didn’t want to: The conservative parties and the nobility believed the little hothead could serve as their useful idiot, that as chancellor he would be contained by a squad of reasonable ministers.