New Times,
New Thinking.

  1. Ideas
27 January 2025

The Nazis and us

The Holocaust continues to haunt our politics. But slurring our opponents as Hitlers is not the way to defeat them.

By Andrew Marr

This starts with an excessively fair-minded, appallingly nice observer; and that gesture. The observer is me, debating with colleagues; and the gesture is Elon Musk’s “salute”. I say no, they say yes. Yet again, we are thinking, only because we must, about Hitler. Are comparisons with Trump and team useful, or not?

Not. All my life Nazi Germany has hung around, noisy and unavoidable, the monster in the basement. It’s been the biggest historical fact: many schoolchildren seem to learn little else in the human story. Its imagery is everywhere: in 1975 the (Jewish) comic writer Alan Coren published a book called Golfing for Cats, embellished with a giant swastika, because the biggest-selling books then were about golf, pets and the Nazis.

Any witty irony there has worn away to nothing. In society at large, there is a subculture of hopeless, clammy men who idolise Hitler. Today, on the 80th Holocaust Memorial Day, the patient, insistent narrative of survivors asks merely to persuade us that it was real, that it isn’t fiction. History shrivels to an aerosol tag. “You Nazi” or “literally Hitler” have become the liberal West’s go-to insults for anything it dislikes, now flung back with equal gusto at liberals by the libertarian right. It’s the first haven of self-righteousness.

More grimly, Hamas reportedly learned some of its terror tactics from the Einsatzgruppen; Mahmoud Abbas, president of the state of Palestine, accused Israel of having committed “50 Holocausts”; and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in 2018 that “the spirit of Hitler” lives on in Israel.

In a way this is inevitable. The Holocaust was one of the worst things that happened to humanity. The fact that it happened at the centre of European civilisation – nearer to us than the Stalin purges or Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the Killing Fields – explains its continuing power to shock. Hitler-insults simply mean: “This is the worst we can imagine.”

But now, through glib overuse and misapplication, they no longer shock. Hitler comparisons have become one of those tropes we have worn away and, worse, have become a way of closing conversation. The danger isn’t turning up the outrage meter too high; the danger is the exhaustion of curiosity and attention. I agree with Musk when he says, “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

Fine: so what was he up to? I have read the historians, listened to German and Israeli politicians, and to his estranged child; I have studied the angles of his arm and photographs of other politicians on the left making similar gestures; and reflected on his generally weirdly exuberant physical antics. Would a man who has been admired by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Morgan Freeman do something like that intentionally? Yet he also makes a point of backing a German party that contains neo-Nazis. Alongside his streaks of brilliance, there is a juvenile delight in provocation which makes it very hard to finally decide what’s going on in Musk’s mind. 

Subscribe to The New Statesman today for only £1 per week

On balance I still don’t think he was consciously giving a Nazi salute. His arm would have been stiffer, and he would have stood differently – and, in any case, really, why would he? He was trying to express a connection between himself and the jubilant crowd. Then again, I am an excessively nice softy. Most people around me disagree.

Big picture, however: it is not useful to talk about the second Trump presidency as the return of Nazism. What we are seeing is something new for our times, with its own taxonomy and fresh challenges. If we must have parallels, Trump’s Washington is much more like the divided English court of Henry VIII, its spirit closer to American populism in the heyday of John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil than it is like Berlin in the 1930s. Only if we treat Maga with maximum curiosity and attentiveness, do we have any chance of understanding what we are living through.

But at this point in the argument, I doubt myself again. What about the unavoidable echoes of lebensraum when Trump talks of “manifest destiny”, Greenland and. indeed, Mars? What about the dehumanisation of migrants and Muslims? What about the leader cult and yearning for old-fashioned family values over liberalism?

Let us take them in turn. Lebensraum? Trump is having a happy time winding up the Canadians. He is, separately, trying to bully Denmark to sell him Greenland in a way that is hugely dangerous to Nato and offensive to the Danes. He is doing it, it seems, because he understands the new power game going on in the far north and regards Greenland as an effectively empty territory to be turned into a bulwark against China and Russia. Perilous. Misguided.

But it’s not the bloodlands. A row with Copenhagen isn’t sending the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union. The takeaway is that Trump still regards international politics as similar to real-estate deal-making. This is one to watch over relations with Vladimir Putin. Mars? Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, told me he thought it possible for Musk to plant American flags there… though it would be a one-way suicide mission and a huge waste of money. None of this is Hitler, and it doesn’t help to say so. What is fascinating is the sheer optimistic scale of the ambition in Washington right now. We should assume the diplomatic plays, the provocations ahead are going to get ever bigger, ever bolder.

What about the demonisation of minorities, particularly immigrants? This is deeply nasty and, in a society built on migration, weird. But what’s happening now is rooted in fear of crime and disorder – the impact of the big drugs gangs has been to turn parts of American cities into dangerous no-go zones. Trump’s promise to get rid of “the bad hard criminals first” is popular. This does not necessarily apply to his wider pledge to deport millions of people from across the US. If he goes ahead, that may prove one of the greatest sources of mayhem in the America of the near future. Trump has a sneeringly blanket approach to cultures and problems which will always make decent people recoil. Take what he’s said about Muslims or his ambition to “clean out” Gaza, as if the people living there were merely human garbage.

Vile and very close to language used in the Third Reich. Yet Hitler’s anti-Semitism had been built on a long tradition, snaking back through European history and particularly strong in the Vienna of his early years, which we don’t see in anything like the same way in contemporary America. For many of his contemporaries, Hitler’s anti-Semitism was merely an extreme expression of a mundane prejudice. It teaches us – the greatest lesson from the 1930s – never to dehumanise other religions or cultures. We are very close to the edge of something horrible. But to want “a secure border” is not, prima facie, Nazism.

Then there is the political structure of Maga and modern Trumpism. It is aggressive towards its enemies; leader-centred; deeply intertwined with corporate power; and paranoid and militaristic at its fringe. All this was true of Hitlerism – and he too, of course, arrived through a democratic process.

But the pathetic “Proud Boys”, however much they may flaunt their regalia, are not the Storm Troopers of Hitler’s brown-shirted SA. Yes, they include some real Nazis and yes, “white power” has been part of America’s political underworld since the Civil War. But the US today is not a paramilitary society with massed, uniformed groups controlling the streets. And Trump, thus far, is more deal-monger than warmonger: until he declares he will retain power for longer than four years, or abolish future elections, the straightforward fascist parallel remains misleading.

There is a subtler historical one, though, which deserves more attention than it gets. It is misogyny. In the Third Reich, harking back to the empire, they proclaimed a social message of Kinder, Küche, Kirche – or children, kitchen, Church – as the proper place of womankind. This was a reaction to the unsettling freedoms of the Weimar Republic, celebrated in caricature terms through Sally Bowles of Cabaret.

The war on woke being waged by the Trumpian right – which is obsessed with trans rights, gender fluidity and diversity – mirrors those earlier conservative fears of the “new woman” in the German Republic of 1919-33, which also saw less censorship and the openly gay network, the Deutsche Freundschafts-Verband. Deep unhappiness in Christian conservative America with the hyper-liberal universities is certainly part of the Trump culture. We know what he’s like around women and the kind of woman he admires. JD Vance is a Catholic convert and has spoken frequently about his enthusiasm for traditional marriage – most notoriously in mocking “childless cat ladies”. Then there is the bitter falling-out between Musk and his transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson.

Social conservatism runs deep in the leadership of this America. Yet even here the fascist or Nazi parallels are not particularly useful. The trad wife movement is more internet meme than major social shift. The war against abortion, including the repeal of Roe vs Wade is more founded on evangelical Christianity than conventional politics. Sacking diversity, equality and inclusion staff from federal jobs is one thing, but if you want a dystopian critique of modern America, the work of Margaret Atwood is probably more useful than historians of Nazism.

No, the social and political pendulum swinging in the US is so big, so interesting, it requires full concentration and attention from all of us. “Fascists” feels, to me, more like shrug or a turning of the back, than an analysis. Ultimately it leads nowhere but to incurious despair.

What we should be focusing on instead is the mysterious but powerful transmission mechanism bringing parts of the American revolution here, and disconcertingly fast. We can see this all around us. I don’t know whether the sudden withdrawal of so many Whitehall departments from a diversity scheme run by Stonewall is a reaction to Trump, or simply a coincidence highlighted by his arrival. I do know that a hardening of language on migration there is echoed here; and that it is spreading fast beyond Reform into the Conservative ecosystem. Trumpism isn’t something simply over there, it’s here too. Raw power has a phenomenal, magnetising effect and the transmission system is mostly familiar, online, and controlled by a few wealthy individuals.

We are living in revolutionary times. That gesture may not have been a Nazi salute, but it was deliberately defiant, and it meant, if anything: “We’re coming for you.” Better to look clearly at our times; try to keep our heads; remember who we are; and face the new world open-eyed, than to shudder, “Well, they’re all Nazis,” and think no further. 

[See also: Can the United States resist fascism?]

Content from our partners
The future of exams
Skills are the key to economic growth
Skills Transition is investing in UK skills and jobs

Topics in this article : , , , , ,

This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War