I wrote most of this in 2017 but didn't publish it as it was unfinished and I'd got stuck on a tangent about military strategy. It's horribly relevant to 2022.
They say that if you don't learn from history then you're bound to repeat it. Sadly, historical knowledge seems to be a bit lacking nowadays and things that have been happening are ringing loud historical bells for me. In particular, anti democratic leaders with apparently narcissistic or psychopathic personalities are taking power around the world. The last time a similar phenomenon occurred was in the 1930s. Much of the politics of the post World war II era has been about avoiding the errors of the thirties. All that is now being discarded by people who think they know better.
Narcissists have a fatal flaw. They believe themselves to be perfect, so they can only stand to have around them people who reflect back their own glory. Dissenters, even helpful ones, are banished to outer darkness. This leads them to make huge mistakes as no-one dares to put their ideas to the test of argument.
Let's go back a bit further than the 1930s, to the end of the great war as it was then known. Germans were left with a sense of humiliation. They had good reason to be puzzled as in 1918, the final year of the war, German forces had made a huge advance into France. They had also gained Ukraine, ceded to them by the revolutionary government in Russia, who they had helped in order to close down the Eastern front. They felt like they was robbed, and looked around for scapegoats. The bells ringing here are about America post Vietnam, puzzled and humiliated at being defeated by a small impoverished country.
The peace settlement after the first world war was a disaster, setting up conflicts that haunt us to this day. America played little part in the conferences as they had gone into a period of isolationism.
Ukraine got its independence, and pretty soon was having a war with Poland over their borders. Russia, looking for opportunities to regain its lost empire (ring any bells) saw the opportunity and attacked, taking back Ukraine into it's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Poland managed to fight off Russian aggression, for the time being.
Back to the peace settlement. Italians felt humiliated by the peace. They fought against Germany in the war and, as victors, expected considerable territorial gains, which they did not get. In 1928 they elected Narcissistic bully boy Mussolini to power. He later assuaged the sense of humiliation by invading Ethiopia (talk about picking on somebody your own size!)
Off to America now. The stock market kept going up and up, underpinned by non existent money borrowed several times over.(ring any bells?) When reality hit home there was the Wall St crash, which knocked the world into a decade long recession, made worse by most countries adopting a protectionist stance to keep out imports (the bells the bells). America was pretty much isolationist, though they gave limited help to China when attacked by Japan.
An interesting piece of technological racism occurs here. When american advisors to the chinese reported back to America that the advanced Japanese aircraft were far superior to the Chinese biplanes they weren't believed. It wasn't thought that the Japs could make so much technological progress. This idea persisted until both Britain and America found out the hard way (or, at least, their pilots did) when they later fielded inferior aircraft against the Japanese Zeros. Britain made a huge mistake in sending slow lumbering Brewster Buffaloes to defend their eastern empire. When they did acknowledge that Zeros were formidable fighters it was assumed that they had been designed by Germans. This belief that non europeans can only copy, not invent, still persists today, particularly with regard to China.
In the 1930s it was not uncool to be a fascist sympathiser. Democracy was widely seen as being messy, troublesome, inefficient. Racism was also fine. Henry Ford was an anti semite and helped to fund the nazis. King Edward VIII (Duke of Windsor after his abdication) was a great Hitler fan. Charles Lindbergh, first man to fly the Atlantic, was rampantly anti semitic. Fascism was widely seen as the new, efficient, strong way forward, each country led by a strong man who would make the trains run on time and crush wasteful opposition. Any country that continued to mess about with freedom and democracy would of course perish because it was too weak to survive.
The opposition to this was of course Communism, equally totalitarian but with a dream of an egalitarian utopia once the struggle was completed. Communists around the world made the mistake of seeing the USSR as a leader in the march towards this Utopia, rather than the oppressive nationalism manipulated by a malignant narcissist that it actually was. It's incredible how blind people can be to what they don't want to see.
Talking of malignant narcissist, lets move to the king of them all, Hitler. Our Adolf never actually got a majority in the German parliament, or a majority of the votes. There was a fire in the Reichstag, blamed on a Dutch communist but widely suspected as being done by Nazis, that provided an excuse to arrest loads of opposition politicians (something similar seems to be currently happening in Turkey in the aftermath of the coup attempt). With the opposition weakened he took absolute power and abolished democracy. Things went well for a while with the revival of the economy through infrastructure spending etc and lots of prestige projects to keep people happy.
Nazi Germany and "Communist" Russia signed a non aggression pact. It had secret clauses regarding the future dividing up of Poland. A note on narcissists and agreements. A narcissist has no honour, so they do not feel themselves bound by any agreement, however solemnly sworn. Once the agreement is inconvenient to them they will find an excuse to revoke it. The Russian promise to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons springs to mind.
Narcissists tend to be a bit paranoid, so they see threats and disloyalty all around them. Stalin was like this, and many good people were sent to Siberia in his purges. This included many of his best military people, but that was OK because there was this non aggression pact.
Back in Britain the Labour party was led by a very nice chap called George Lansbury. Here's a bit from the Wikipedia page about him :-
After his return to parliament in 1922, Lansbury was denied office in the brief Labour government of 1924, although he served as First Commissioner of Works in the Labour government of 1929–31. After the political and economic crisis of August 1931 Lansbury did not follow his leader, Ramsay MacDonald, into the National Government, but stayed with the Labour Party. As the most senior of the small contingent of Labour MPs that survived the 1931 general election, Lansbury became the party's leader. His pacifism and his opposition to rearmament in the face of rising European fascism put him at odds with his party, and when his position was rejected at the 1935 party conference he resigned the leadership. He spent his final years travelling through the United States and Europe in the cause of peace and disarmament
Ring any bells? A very nice man who thought that Hitler and Mussolini could be reasoned with. The Labour party was down to about 50 seats.
Back to Adolf. He did very well and had a knack of getting huge numbers of people to believe the most crazy things (bells?). The start of the second world war was a miscalculation on his part. He actually believed that Britain and France were too weak (being still democratic) to honour their commitments to defend Poland. He did not believe he had the strength to fend off an attack from the West, lucky for him that Britain and France did not believe they had the strength to attack, hence the period of "phony war".
The problem with narcissists is that they think they know everything and reject advice from experts when it clashes with their "knowledge". They think they're smarter than everybody else. This leads them to make huge mistakes, and their power combined with vindictiveness make others reluctant to challenge them.
The first big military mistake that I know of was when the British army was retreating towards Dunkirk. Hitler personally ordered his panzer divisions to rest, thus giving the British an opportunity to get most of their troops out. Had the panzers been let off the leash then the 'Dunkirk miracle' could have been a very different story.
The next was the Battle of Britain. The idea was to break the RAF so as to have control of the air ready for an invasion. This was working. The Luftwaffe had a lot more planes and they were steadily wearing down the British defences when a load of bombs, intended for destroying an airfield, were accidentally dropped on London. Churchill ordered a retaliatory raid on Berlin, which so incensed Hitler that he ordered the Luftwaffe to concentrate on hitting British cities. Bad luck for my relatives living in Coventry, but it was just the respite the RAF needed. A cooler headed commander would have stuck to plan A, invaded and subdued Britain, then used her remaining resources to strengthen his long term plan of overwhelming Russia.
Addendum, February 2022- We now have a new and terrifying force in the world, Libertarianism. Under libertarianism there are basically no rules. Everyone is free to do as they wish. So, what's different from Anarchism? Well, libertarianism is a sort of capitalist version of anarchism. Under most versions of anarchism (and there are as many versions as there are anarchists) there is no ownership, and therefore no-one is able to amass wealth and use it as power. The libertarian wants the state to be swept away and have a situation of every person for themselves. Libertarianism is the new fascism. The old fascism of goose steps and jackboots is, I hope, dead. Under the new fascism the strongest man will rule with no civil structures to hinder him.
What's scary is that many Jeremy Corbyn supporters have been seduced by this idea, which is the antithesis of socialism, the idea that a better world can be achieved by collective action, collective ownership of resources and living by collectively agreed rules. Yes, rules are irksome, especially if we're in a minority that disagrees with the rules, but having a democratically elected government deciding and enforcing the rules that we live by is far better than any other system yet invented.