The lessons of history

This week: some thoughts on who goes Nazi; some thoughts on understanding the past; and a Tube map, built with circles.

The past few years, a leftist friend noted recently, joking but not entirely joking, have been “one big and surprisingly immersive game of ‘Who Goes Nazi’.” That “interesting and somewhat macabre parlour game”, if you haven’t had the pleasure, was invented by Dorothy Thompson – a veteran foreign correspondent, the first American to be expelled from Hitler’s Germany – in an essay published by Harpers magazine in August 1941. The game is very simple: you simply look around a group of people you know, and attempt to determine “who in a showdown would go Nazi”. 

It is not, it must be admitted, one of the fun parlour games.

Thompson’s conclusion – upsetting, but supported by the histories of both Germany and elsewhere – is that a lot more people would, in extremis, cross that line than feels comfortable. It’s difficult to reduce Thompson’s descriptions of all those who wouldn’t to any simple matter of wealth, or class, or even race. But there is a throughline in her thinking nevertheless: broadly speaking, those who are happiest with their own position and status, however high or low, are those who would never go Nazi.

So: one American aristocrat Thompson describes “has never been engaged in sharp competition... I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code”. He’s poor, and bereaved, but he’s contented: and thus, he would never go Nazi. By the same logic, neither would the actress whose career is past its best, but who lives a happy family life with few money troubles.

Others, though, are spoilt, or bitter, or feel the need to affirm or improve their place in the hierarchy. The woman neglected by her “genius” husband, “looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement”; the overgrown, twice-divorced boy “constantly arrested for speeding [whose] mother pays the fines”.

The pen portrait that really stays with me, though, is this one:

…a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.... He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. 

Thompson wrote this, remember, in the summer of 1941, before the full horrors of Naziism were clear even to those who had seen it first hand. Yet there already is the insight that it was a movement based not on strength, but on the brittle and the bitter. It’s the old joke, tasteless but with a grain of truth, that all this could have been avoided if Hitler had only got that place at art college. 

The world of 2024 is not that of 1941. But you don’t have to look far among the extremely online today to come up with examples of people whose far right politics, one suspects, comes from a similar source: a broken personal life, or professional failure, or a baffled rage that money or success has not brought the popularity or respect they so crave. I could list a dozen of them; so, I imagine, could you. This is not a sufficient condition – many of us have managed to fail in one sphere or another, without feeling the need to avenge ourselves on an entire class of humanity – but nonetheless, one of the recurring themes amongst those who’ve spent the last few years sliding towards the far right is quite how disappointed they seem. 

But of course we can overstate all this. Yesterday, in some corner of the internet or another, I spotted yet another conversation about the drift of what were once mainstream centre-right publications into some truly horrible territory, and the thought occurred that there was another dynamic Thompson highlights that we should keep in mind, too.

Consider her description of a different American aristocrat, far richer than the first, “a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early”:

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer… His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

This is not a portrait of a failure, but of a man who doesn’t care about the cost of his success.

We’ve talked a lot, these past few years, about the causes of right-wing radicalisation: from lost status, to economic change, to the damage done by online bubbles and social media algorithms, to simple, uncomplicated, unadorned racism. But perhaps this is overcomplicating the picture. Not everyone drawn to right-wing extremism is an embittered failure. Some – including more than a few senior Tories, and their cheerleaders in the British media – seek nothing more than power, see the far right as a convenient ladder, and simply lack the moral scruples not to use it.

Perhaps we should spend less time debating their reasons, and more time trying to kick away that ladder.

An unprecedented takeover

In an unexpected turn of events I’m going to briefly hand over to my friend and editor Jasper Jackson, who’s got a thank you note to send:

As the editor of this newsletter, I’ve read a LOT about TfL. Though it may not be the best circumstances to do so, here I get my chance to add some further notes.

When my mother dislocated her hip a couple of weeks ago on the ticket hall level of Paddington’s Elizabeth Line, I turned up to find a privacy screen and hugely attentive TfL staff gathered round, and my mother in good spirits for someone with one leg several inches shorter than the other. Over the two hour wait for an ambulance, the station staff were polite, reassuring, diligent and good humoured.

A massive thank you to all of them, and in particular station manager Darren, who twice phoned me to check up on her recovery. Service above and beyond which made a difficult situation much, much more bearable.

Thanks again to Darren and his team; and wishing Angela a swift and comfortable recovery.

An entirely precedented bit of book promo

In an event one would probably not describe as unprecedented, I’ve been talking about my book into a microphone – chatting to Paul Bloomfield about borders and other lines on maps for the BBC’s History Extra podcast. You can also read the chapter concerning the Siamese twin towns of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau in the current edition of the New European.

You know the drill by now: you can buy the book from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, and Bert’s Books.

The day before yesterday

Some thoughts inspired by two history books I’ve read in the past year, each of which managed to completely re-frame how I think about the world. As so often when I’m writing about history, this is not so much an argument as some vague and developing thoughts about which you are strongly invited to argue with me in the comments. 

First up, the one I’ve just finished. The argument Josephine Quinn puts forward in How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History is that our standard narrative of “western civilisation” (from Greece and Rome through dark ages to renaissance, and so forth) was essentially invented by the Victorians – in large part, like rather a lot of intellectual effort that went on in that period, as a justification for all that imperialist conquering they were doing.

In fact, Quinn argues, the idea that world history can be neatly broken into separate silos, one of which we call the “west” – a concept she calls “civilisational thinking” – is misleading: societies have always been defined as much by their connections, through trade and war, as by the division between them. To prove her point, she highlights the roots of western civilisation that can be traced back to those which preceded the classical era (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia), or to those which lie outside the simple linear narrative (to India, say, or the Islamic caliphates, which left a huge intellectual legacy for the West which we do not, for some reason, tend to talk about).¹