Tag Archive for: Nazi Germany

The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Nazis: Compare and Contrast

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Back in December 2020, Benjamin Kerstein argued here that the Islamic regime that rules Iran is an enantiomorph — a mirror image — of the Nazi regime. If anything, the ensuing three-and-a-half years have proven him correct, and his article is worth revisiting.

Iran has been described as many things: “Islamic republic,” “Islamist dictatorship,” “the mullahs’ regime,” and so on. All of these terms make the same mistake: they assume the Iranian regime is something new. The problem is that this simply isn’t true. The Iranian regime is something we have very much seen before.

Put simply, Iran is a Nazi regime.

The parallels between the two are quite striking. They include:

One-Party Rule: Both Nazism and the Iranian regime are ruled by parties or movements that were once part of a spectrum of parties, but succeeded in crushing or purging their opponents and seizing absolute power, making the party and the government essentially synonymous.

It is true that what began as an authentic and anti-dictatorial popular revolution based on a broad coalition of all anti-Shah forces was soon transformed, after a seizure of power by Khomeini, into rule by Islamic fundamentalists. The other, non-theocratic, groups had assumed that Khomeini intended to be a spiritual guide instead of a ruler; he soon showed that he was determined to be both. These groups were all quickly crushed soon after Khomeini returned from exile on February 1, 1979.

The Nazis managed to consolidate power, similarly, soon after Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler to be chancellor in 1933. But unlike Khomeini with the anti-Shah leftists, after entering into an initial governing coalition, Hitler quickly dispelled any illusion that he was willing to share power. He always insisted that he, and the Nazis, would rule alone. Even fellow Nazis were not exempt from being crushed if they appeared to represent a threat to Hitler’s power. The Night of the Long Knives was carried out in 1934, a massacre of fellow Nazis, ordered by Hitler, with Himmler orchestrating the murders of all those who belonged to the SA (Sturmabteilung), or Brownshirts, led by Ernst Röhm. Hitler had been persuaded by Himmler and Goring to eliminate Röhm as a possible rival, and his SA, too, for they were seen as a group of “street thugs” who frightened people away from the Nazi movement. After that purge, 16 months after he was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, Hitler held absolute power; Khomeini obtained the same absolute power even earlier, practically from the moment his plane touched down in Tehran on February 1, 1979.

Totalitarianism: Both regimes foster a cult-like mass movement in which every aspect of life is defined by the party. Everything down to one’s clothing — whether the compulsory hijab or the SS uniform — are decreed from on high. And they both, of course, have the idolatry of a supreme leader — whether Hitler or Khomeini. Without this totalitarian system, neither regime could have maintained itself in power for long.

Both Hitler and Khomeini were considered by their respective peoples to be the “absolute, wise, and indispensable” leader. The Complete Regulation of Life that was imposed by Khomeini, governing everything from dress, to food, to sexual behavior, was not, however, his invention – these were the rules not of Khomeini but of Islam; other Muslim regimes have had similar codes imposed. The rules set for Germans by the Nazis were indeed unique to them. And in both cases, as Kerstein maintains, the government was based on a mass movement. There is a certain simian similarity between the million Nazis shouting themselves hoarse at the Nuremberg rallies, and the hundreds of thousands of Iranians turning out to shout their “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” mantras in a dozen cities. Hitler was The Leader; Khomeini was the Supreme Leader, both were all-wise and all-knowing and therefore had to be, because they deserved to be, obeyed unquestioningly.

There are differences. The “SS uniform” was not compulsory for anyone but members of the SS; ordinary Germans – not in one of the branches of the military or police – had no particular dress requirements. In Khomeinist Iran, all women have to observe certain dress requirements, especially wearing the obligatory hijab or even, at times, the chador. They are required to wear loose clothing, deliberately shapeless, so as not to be dangerously alluring. Men have no particular rules, but many no longer wear ties, as they did during the days of the Shah; the tie is taken by some to represent unacceptable mimicking of the West, and considered un-Islamic.

Belief in a Single Metaphysical Force That Defines Existence: Both Nazism and the Iranian regime hold that there is a single, overriding metaphysical force that defines all of existence. In the case of the Nazis, this force was race. They held that all of human history is a struggle between the biologically superior master race — which was, of course, themselves — and all the inferior races. For the Iranian regime, this force is not race, but religion — a spiritual supremacism instead of a biological one: all of existence is seen as a struggle in which Islam will eventually conquer and destroy its inferiors.

Kerstein strikes me as absolutely correct here: both semi-demented regimes have reduced all of existence to an endless struggle. In the case of the Nazis, that struggle is twofold: the first, and greatest danger comes from the endlessly evil Jews, who must be wiped out, and second, there is the danger posed by all the other non-Aryans, who are inferior to Germans and deserve to be subjugated by them.

As for Khomeini, the Islamic supremacism that he preached was not his invention, but lifted entirely from the Qur’an, and especially from the many verses that command Muslims to fight, to kill, to smite at the necks of, to strike terror in the hearts of, all non-Muslims. Khomeini’s Mein Kampf was the Qur’an, and its key passages concerning treatment of Infidels are to be found especially in such verses as 2:191-193, 4:89, 5:33, 8:12, 8:60, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4. And this supremacism is pithily set out in two verses: Qur’an 3:110, which tells Muslims that they are “the best of peoples,” and 98:6, where non-Muslims are described as “the most vile of created beings.”

A Separate Army Loyal Only to the Regime: One of the Nazis’ most potent means of enforcing its power was that it wielded an elite army loyal solely to the regime, separate from the regular military. The Nazis originally had several such forces, but all were eventually crushed or purged except for the infamous SS, which led the way in committing the Holocaust. In Iran, this separate army is the fanatical Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which both runs the regime’s terrorist activities and helps enforce its domination at home.

Again, the SS was, inside Germany , the tip of the Nazi spear, consisting of the most fanatical and cruelest troops; they crushed the last rival to Hitler, Röhm’s Brownshirts, in 1934, and then went on to distinguish themselves as mass murderers of helpless Jews; the SS were the people who ordinarily manned the death camps. The IRGC plays a not dissimilar role in Iran. While the regular army is supposed to defend Iranian borders and maintain internal order, the Revolutionary Guard (pasdaran) is intended to protect the country’s political system – the Islamic Republic. The Revolutionary Guards base their role on protecting the Islamic system, as well as preventing foreign interference and coups by the military or “deviant movements.” But unlike the SS, which dealt mostly with enemies of the Third Reich (though it did recruit some foreigners for the Waffen-SS ), the IRGC works with Iran’s proxies and allies, channeling money and weapons to Shi’a groups in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

GERMANY: Supporters of Hamas jihad massacre paint Star of David on Jewish homes in Berlin

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Germany has been here before. It didn’t end well. But this new resurgence of violent Jew-hatred in the country is their own doing. Angela Merkel opened the doors to a flood of Muslim migrants. Now Germany is celebrating diversity.

Star of David is graffitied on Jewish homes in Berlin after Hamas attacks on Israel – in chilling echo of anti-Semitic persecution of the Jews under the Nazis

by Elena Salvoni, Daily Mail, October 15, 2023:

The Star of David has been graffitied on the doors of homes in Berlin, in a chilling echo of anti-Semitic persecution of Jewish people under the Nazis.

Pictures circulating online show the symbol was drawn on several buildings, with four cases reported to German police in recent days.

Jewish people living in the German capital have reported a rise in abuse following Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel last week.

Among those targeted by vandalism was a young Jewish woman, who said she was shocked when she returned to her apartment on Thursday evening to find a star marked on her door.

The woman, who has a mezuzah – a Jewish house blessing – outside her flat, said that the incident was a ‘huge shock’ and left her ‘scared’.

‘I speak Hebrew, talk on the phone in Hebrew, and wear a Star of David… I really thought about whether I should stay at home,’ the woman told Bild.

Police said they are now investigating ‘whether the other houses have a Jewish resident and whether the incidents are connected.’

The incidents amount to a crime under German law, and seem to be an imitation of the persecution of Jews during the 1930s.

During the Holocaust, Nazi Brownshirts painted the Star of David in white on the doors of Jewish businesses to discourage non-Jewish Germans from going into them.

It comes as a German intelligence chief claimed that ‘some Palestinians are openly and blatantly calling for a kind of Kristallnacht 2.0,’ in reference to the Nazis’ violent coordinated attacks on Jewish homes and businesses in 1938….

Read more.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Meet the First American Journalist to Interview Hitler—and the First Expelled From Nazi Germany

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In a 1990 interview, legendary English singer and songwriter David Bowie opined that being famous was not itself “a rewarding thing.” The co-composer (with John Lennon) of the 1975 funk rock hit, Fame claimed that “The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.”

Fame is certainly fickle. Some people get it but don’t deserve it; others don’t get it when they do. It can also be disappointingly fleeting.

Its enemies include short memories, ideological bias, and new generations.

Fanny Crosby comes to mind. When my grandparents were young, millions of Americans were singing her songs. One President of the United States after another (21 in all) wanted to meet her. When she died in 1915, she was widely regarded as among the best known and most beloved women in the country. Now, I’d wager not five percent of Americans could tell you a thing about her.

Another example of fame won and lost, the subject of this two-part essay, is Dorothy Thompson. Does that name ring any bells?

Thompson deserves to be far better remembered than she presently is. Most Americans of just 80 years ago could tell you exactly who she was. Born in 1893 in Lancaster, New York, she was broadcasting news and commentary on the radio at a time when women were widely supposed to stay in the kitchen. As a foreign correspondent in the late 1920s and 1930s, she was “the undisputed queen of the overseas press corps, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any importance,” recounts one of her several biographers, Peter Kurth.

Her thrice-weekly newspaper column, begun in 1936, was syndicated nationally. It ran in 170 papers read by tens of millions of Americans. For a quarter century (from 1937 until her death in 1961), she authored a separate monthly column in Ladies’ Home Journal. She was known as “the First Lady of American Journalism” by 1940.

She was courted by presidents, prime ministers and potentates and admired by men and women alike for her trenchant writing. A celebrity herself, there was hardly another celebrity who didn’t relish a few moments with her. Over the years in movies and on stage, such actresses as Kathryn Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Lois Nettleton played characters based on Thompson. She counted among her best friends the fellow journalist Rose Wilder Lane, an influential libertarian political theorist.

In December 1931, thirteen months before Hitler took power as Germany’s Chancellor, Thompson was working in Munich. She had tried since Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 to speak with the Nazi leader but he proved elusive to her and other foreign journalists.

In his biography of Thompson, American Cassandra, Kurth revealed that when she read Hitler’s political manifesto Mein Kampf in the 1920s, she “recognized it for what it was”:

…[N]onsense, ‘one long speech’ filled with lunatic diatribes about nations and races, ‘eight hundred pages of Gothic script, pathetic gestures, inaccurate German, and unlimited self-satisfaction.’

Some read Mein Kampf and, like Katherine Atholl in Britain, warned of the coming danger it foretold. Others, like Thompson, were initially more dismissive, thinking it a disgusting rant that would go nowhere. She scoffed at the future Fuehrer’s boast that Germans would come to embrace Nazi rule. “Imagine a would-be dictator,” she sneered, “setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” Of course, by making the Nazis the largest bloc in the Reichstag, that’s exactly what they did.

Hitler was likely unaware of Thompson’s personal view of Mein Kampf when he finally consented to a meeting with her in December 1931. Expecting his Nazi Party to win big in upcoming elections in March 1932 (they did), he decided it was time to engage with the world. He agreed to sit down with Dorothy Thompson. The result, her 1932 book titled I Saw Hitler!, proved embarrassing for both of them.

Hitler, she wrote, came to his scheduled interview an hour late and accompanied by a bodyguard “who looked like Al Capone.”

Biographer Susan Hertog, in Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, describes the meeting:

As she watched and listened to the Nazi leader, the psychodrama began to unfold. Shy and cool at the outset, Hitler whipped himself into a frenzy, raising his voice to a crescendo, all the while banging his fist on the table to hammer his point. He spoke in a monologue, as if he were addressing an audience of thousands, and he seemed to be looking right through her. Cunningly shifting the focus of the meeting toward his own agenda, he sidestepped all but one of her questions…Dorothy was shocked to think that this great nation, this citadel of art, philosophy, and science, would voluntarily hand over its rights to a thug.

Though she detested the Nazi movement, Thompson offered an assessment of its leader in I Saw Hitler! that vastly depreciated his potential. Of her 1931 meeting, she recalled:

When finally I walked into Adolph Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the whole world agog…He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.

Thompson would eat those words in short order but in the meantime, the interview boosted her worldwide profile considerably.

Why did an intelligent person like Thompson, who knew well the language, history, politics, and culture of Germany, so egregiously underestimate Hitler? Youthful naivete may partially explain it, but I believe the answer is primarily her overestimation of a people in crisis. Defeat in World War I followed by hyperinflation, political instability, and then the Great Depression combined to form the cauldron in which Germans stewed. By the early 1930s, they were more ready to flush their freedoms away than she (and many others) imagined.

Upon becoming Chancellor in January 1933, Hitler moved swiftly to consolidate power. “In less than a month,” wrote the reporter Rothay Reynolds, bureau chief in Berlin for Britain’s Daily Mail, “Germans had lost freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.” But Hitler’s popularity at home was high and rising.

Thompson by then was back at home in Vermont with second husband and Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis. Soon, however, developments in Europe beckoned. When Nazi agents assassinated the Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in July 1934, she knew she had to cover the aftermath. Thompson flew to Austria.

After a short stint in Vienna, she headed by car to Berlin. A few days later, she learned the hard way what Hitler had thought of her book. She recounted the episode in a piece for Harper’s magazine, “Goodbye to Germany”:

I was still in my room in the morning when the porter rang up from the desk. ‘Good morning, madam, there is a gentleman here from the secret state police.’ ‘Send him up,’ I said. He was a young man in a trench coat like Hitler’s. He brought an order that I should leave the country immediately within forty-eight hours, for journalistic activities inimical to Germany.

In the space of three years, Dorothy Thompson had become the first American journalist to interview Hitler and the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany. Though she didn’t at first believe that Hitler would talk his way to power, she more than made up for lost time once he did. In her columns in the late 1930s, she frequently and mercilessly assailed him and his Nazi thugs. That alone should earn her fame and recognition to this day and forevermore.

What were Dorothy Thompson’s political and economic views? Did she see any resemblance between the fascism of Hitler and the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt? What influence did Rose Wilder Lane’s libertarianism have on her? Why is she largely forgotten today?

These are questions I will explore in my next article. Stay tuned.

For Additional Information, See:

The Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War by Deborah Cohen

Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson by Susan Hertog

Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time by Marion K. Sanders

American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson by Peter Kurth

Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship, Letters 1921-1960 by William Holtz (editor)

Reporting on Hitler: How Foreign Correspondents in Nazi Germany Battled to Expose the Truth by Will Wainewright

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and Its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States by Dorothy Thompson

The American Journalists Who Defied Nazi Intimidation (PBS video)

AUTHOR

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.