Exactly 100 years ago last month a tiny organisation was born in a Germany still bleeding from defeat in the First World War.
A small band of bitter working-class men, led by the racist tradesman Anton Drexler, were so humiliated by the armistice (and a political system they felt emasculated them) that they formed a German Workers’ Party (DAP). But the loutish behaviour of that gang so worried the German army that it dispatched a new intelligence officer, a corporal named Adolf Hitler, to infiltrate and investigate.
Of course Hitler saw Drexler’s racism in his own anti-Semitism, and he soon joined the DAP as its 55th member. Hitler’s gift for hate-filled speech saw him quickly take control of the DAP and, with an adoring band of followers, he soon rebadged this rabble as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). The Nazis’ early success came not only from pandering to racists who blamed Jews for every German woe, but from the Sturmabteilung (SA): the Brownshirt “stormtrooper” thugs who bashed the democrats, trade unionists and news editors who resisted them.
That’s why we can only admire the millions of allies who laid down their lives in the war against the Nazi menace.
Indeed, so indelibly inked is the fight against fascism in America that, in the 1950s, the American Republicans — the party of Abraham Lincoln — endorsed Dwight Eisenhower as the man who’d led the war on Hitler. In 1980, that same party chose Ronald Reagan to defeat a similarly tyrannical Soviet Union in a global ideological war.
I thought about the rise of the DAP, the NSDAP and the SA — and the grand old party the Republicans used to be — last week when I saw something from a Donald Trump rally, in El Paso, Texas, that made me both frightened and physically ill. Who could not be revolted by the sight of a MAGA hat-wearing thug — ironically wearing a brown shirt — coward-punching a BBC cameraman who was doing his job?
Read the article by Dr Paul Williams, senior lecturer at Griffith University in The Courier-Mail.