West’s 1930s obsession is warping its view of today’s threats. Trump & Putin aren’t ‘Hitlers’

The long shadow of the 1930s blinds us to the fact that the US and NATO have been behaving like Nazi Germany, while Putin was the appeaser until 2014, and then again until 2022.

A protest placard comparing Putin to Stalin and Hitler | Image for representation | Commons

Lately, I have been thinking a great deal about the long shadow of the 1930s, especially in the West. My British and American friends, even those who haven’t read Edward Gibbon or Arnold Toynbee, are almost all well-acquainted with this era. They know how decent Germans were either foolish or complicit in the rise of Hitler. They know how the British ruling class “appeased” Hitler. In fact, the very word “appeasement” has acquired an aura of the diabolically mystical for them.

When I look at contemporary Britain and America, this obsession with the 1930s seems to be driving so much of their public discussion. Many of my friends and acquaintances are convinced that Donald Trump is a potential Hitler. They are worried about falling into the same trap that many Conservatives, Social Democrats, and others in 1930s Germany fell into by underestimating the malign tendencies of Hitler. They are, therefore, determined to “cut Trump off at the pass”.

When I point out that Trump’s foreign policy initiatives in his presidential term seemed quite benign from the perspective of someone who lives very far from the US, they dismiss the content of my arguments. The implicit ad hominem criticism is that I am a fool who does not understand Trump’s capacity for wickedness. This mindset also justifies the trivialisation of the American judicial process, with laughable cases being brought against Trump by tendentious prosecutors. In India, while we do have central and state agencies prosecuting Opposition politicians, these cases almost always have merit and content. They are never as convoluted and outlandish as those against Trump. This obsessive rancour against Trump has resulted in a moral inversion, where the ends justify the means.

 

Who’s really behaving like Nazi Germany?

The shadow of the thirties is not confined to domestic matters. It overlaps into foreign policy. The establishment media has effectively declared in an ex-cathedra fashion, with no room for dissent, that Putin is the new Hitler. No pushbacks to this premise are allowed, let alone tolerated.

But in the 1930s, Germany had a much stronger demographic and economic position than that of its neighbouring rival, France. Today’s Russia is not weak, but it certainly does not possess great demographic or economic strength. Putin is not an aggressive atheist; in fact, he supports the very conservative Russian Orthodox Church. And while his interview with Tucker Carlson included a meandering lecture on Russian history, it did not appear megalomaniacally inclined, at least to me. Even if he had ambitions, he does not have the wherewithal or the strength to gobble up mainland Europe from Poland to the Atlantic as Hitler was able to do.

Talking of the ‘30s, it seems to me, as a distant observer, that it is the US and NATO who have been behaving like Nazi Germany, while Putin was the appeaser until 2014, and then again until 2022.

During Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution, its hapless president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, resembled the frightened duo of Kurt von Schuschnigg and Edvard Benes during the Nazi takeovers of Austria and Czechoslovakia.. And the former US representative Victoria Nuland proved herself to be a professional regime-changer. The far-right Azov battalion, which was tolerated if not patronised by Nuland, resembled the Nazi troopers of Czechoslovakia’s Konrad Heinlein and Austria’s Arthur Seyss-Inquart.

The anti-Putin and anti-Russian obsession have reached such a point that the dim-witted Justin Trudeau and his fellow parliamentarians in Canada actually gave a standing ovation to an elderly Ukrainian Nazi last year.

Does Volodymyr Zelenskyy actually resemble Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle? Or is he more like Vidkun Quisling or Philippe Pétain? The question never gets asked by the BBC, although fifty years ago, it would have been just the kind of BBC debate that us oldies loved to watch.

 

Britain’s poisonous ‘political correctness’

And now to turn to Britain and the long shadow of the ‘30s. Every Prime Minister, from Boris Johnson to Keir Starmer, is so worried about being called the Neville Chamberlain of his day, that they have blindly over-committed Britain’s meagre resources to Ukraine, encouraging it to keep fighting and even escalate.

Many of my British friends are quietly ashamed of Chamberlain for his purported ‘appeasement’ of Nazi Germany. Recent revisionist historians, however, have pointed out that in many of his dealings Chamberlain was a sober realist. The so-called appeasement of Germany at Munich may have bought Britain precious time to rearm and build the planes that finally saved the country in 1940. Ironically, the Labour Socialists who hated Chamberlain were, for many years, the greatest opponents of such rearmament.

The Nazis claimed that the Reichstag fire was a dangerous “communist” conspiracy and justified letting loose a judicial tyranny over Germany. Ironically, the Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer seems to have decided to use the Southport anti-immigration riots to posit the existence of a dangerous “far right” movement, setting in motion an unprecedented assault on citizens—not necessarily to punish crimes, but to  “set an example”.  The extra-speedy and overly harsh approach of the police, the prosecutors, and the courts has been truly astonishing.

Luckily for us in India, our laidback police force and our verbose prosecutors are unlikely to act with such celerity or harshness toward the real or imaginary opponents of our rulers. Our courts also have a penchant for granting bail, acquitting, or at worst, giving light sentences to opposition figures.

Of course, Starmer is an eminent lawyer. He need not go back to the precedent of the Reichstag fire and its aftermath. He can hark back to Judge George Jeffreys and the “bloody assizes”, or trials, after the 1685 Monmouth rebellion against King James II. There too, the objective was not just to punish, but to set a stark and stern example for other potential “rebels”.

However, given that most of his Labour Party leaders have been “comprehensively” educated in modern Britain, they may not be particularly knowledgeable about Monmouth or Jeffreys. Starmer is better off sticking to contemporary sanctimonious political correctness.

The long shadow of the “low, dishonest” 1930s truly operates in mysterious ways. If the West insists on being obsessed with that time, it would be wise to exercise sobriety and caution, rather than fall into superficial and simplistic approaches.

Jaithirth ‘Jerry’ Rao is a retired Indian businessperson who lives in Lonavala. He has published three books: ‘Notes from an Indian Conservative’, ‘The Indian Conservative’, and ‘Economist Gandhi’. Views are personal. 

(Edited by Asavari Singh)