Hey again everybody. I know I just dropped a big essay on all of you adapted from my final research paper in grad school, and many of you might still be working through it, but I wanted to give everyone another little bonus for all of your patience waiting for the proper big historical episodes of History Impossible. It’s been a while since I’ve done an…

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Hey everyone. I am happy/sad to report this is my last proper research paper that I have written for my time in graduate school, outside of my still-to-be-completed master’s thesis. But this one quickly became my favorite piece of academic writing I have done so far because it marries two of my great interests: the history of the Third Reich and psychology.

The seeming theme of History Impossible this year is about the end of the Second World War and in what sense it was, well, made sense of. That’s the theme of the research conducted here, the theme of all this Third Reich historiography I’ve been doing, the theme of the upcoming special episode, and the theme of the final episode of “The Muslim Nazis,” which is indeed being worked on as we speak. It makes sense that such a theme would resonate with me, but it also resonates with everyone who studies the war and its effects. I’d even go so far to say that I understand the position a lot of revisionists—both those I have criticized directly and not—find themselves in. The more one does a meta-analysis of the Second World War, the more chance of getting gobsmacked one seems to have.

It makes sense. Everything about this conflict, including its supposed heroes and villains and what they did, is unthinkable. There is no other way to put it. And instead of embracing this enormity, it breaks brains and requires explanation and a desire to put everything in a box; revisionists simply don’t like the current box. In a sense, that’s what inspired my research for this paper, along with the impressive film Nuremberg from 2025 that starred Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring. As we’ll see with this paper, the efforts to understand the Third Reich and how things got to the point that they did began even before the Second World War started. This speaks to its strangeness and its significance to history and, as we’ll also see, the drive to diagnose it at the deepest level possible.

Thanks, and enjoy.

—AVS

…

“Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?”
—Bret Easton Ellis

“The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
—Bertrand Russell

“Kelley found some darkness in every person. Gilbert found a unique darkness in some. They were both right.”
—Joel E. Dimsdale

It was June 11^th, 1945. The Second World War had yet to fully conclude in the Pacific Theater, but the Allies had been victorious in Europe for over a month. Despite the finality of this victory, and of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s demise at his own hand, it had quickly become clear that there were more questions than answers forming among the Allies. How had things escalated this much? How had the Nazis managed to exceed the destruction of the First World War so quickly? How had so many crimes on a never-before-seen scale—the crimes that would come to be known as the Holocaust—managed to occur under the very noses of so many Germans? What kind of men could even do these crimes? Were they mad? Or were they truly evil monsters? Answering these questions had vital importance to many within American academia, from a variety of different fields including medicine, neurology, the arts, administration, and psychology. Leading a group of professors was the psychiatrist Dr. John Millet, and on that day, he drafted a letter to be sent to the chief prosecutor in what would become the famous Nuremberg trials, United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. The letter’s primary purpose was requesting that these experts get hold of the war criminals’ brains after they had been executed, with the letter reading as follows:

Detailed knowledge of the personality of these leaders […] would be valuable as a guide to those concerned with the reorganization and re-education of Germany. […] In addition to the psychiatric interviews it would be desirable to make a number of psychological tests such as the Rorschach. […] If and when the accused has been convicted and sentenced to death, it would be desirable to have a detailed autopsy, especially of the brain. Therefore it is urged that the convicted be shot in the chest, not in the head. [Signed,] John Millet.¹

An agent for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) named Sheldon Glueck echoed and even spelled out these sentiments three days later in a letter written to Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of that organization. Glueck wrote that “a chief aim of the [Nuremberg] trial […] will be to convince posterity of the facts and to interpret those facts and the entire Nazi leadership from the points of view of law, medicine, and sociology. For the first time in history, a thorough scientific study of the types of mentality possessed by the German military, political, and industrial insiders will be made.”² Both of these letters demonstrate the enthusiasm many had for trying to understand the very nature of those they rightfully saw as the embodiment of evil on earth. Such measurements—the brain’s post-mortem and the Rorschach test—were considered the cutting edge for their time. There had been a growing chorus of speculation surrounding the psychology of the Third Reich since its very beginning, and now that they had been defeated, the victors could study their enemy up close and, so the thinking seemed to go, with few ethical limits or questions.

The professors eventually got their chance to study the literal mind of a Nazi. Justice Jackson had ultimately supported both proposals from Glueck and Millet, and had already allowed the Army to send in a psychiatrist in August of 1945, when the unthinkable happened that October: one of the accused war criminals held at Nuremberg, the Nazi politician and head of the German Labour Front Robert Ley, had hanged himself in his cell, using a towel that he had turned into a noose by ripping it into strips and fastening it to his toilet pipe. Within hours, Ley’s brain was extracted and sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. The neuropathologist found evidence of damage to the frontal lobe, likely caused by a head injury Ley had incurred during the First World War, and exacerbated by chronic abuse of alcohol, confirming what many assumed: Ley’s brain was abnormal. When the media learned of these findings, they began to trumpet the news, with the Washington Post proclaiming in their headline, “Nazi Ley’s Brain Found Diseased.” Surely this helped explain, many reasoned, how and why the Nazis’ reign had seemed so deranged. Despite another neuropathologist named Dr. Nathan Malamud of San Francisco offering a second opinion, backed up by microscopic analysis, that Ley’s brain did not show any signs of true pathology, the American media continued to promote the idea of the diseased Nazi brain. However, no one actually studying the Nuremberg criminals was resting on their laurels quite yet.

Ley, along with the other defendants, had already been analyzed by the U.S. Army psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Kelley, as well as the Army psychologist, Dr. Gustave Gilbert, among others. Both were developing their own ideas about the nature of these men’s minds—men who included the Reichsmarshall himself, Hermann Göring, and other high-ranking Nazi officials and military figures—but Kelley had put it most bluntly after Robert Ley’s suicide, writing in his preliminary report on the Rorschach tests that had been conducted, “since Ley kindly made his brain available for postmortem examination, we were presented with the rare chance to verify our [...] findings.”³ It had become a matter of course that the Third Reich and its crimes would not just be understood, but quite literally, diagnosed, and Kelley, along with Gilbert, would be at the center of finding that diagnosis, arriving at what seemed to be completely different conclusions, but what would, with time and despite some later setbacks, be demonstrated to be complementary ones.

Arriving at a diagnosis of the Third Reich and its leaders has been at the root of many questions raised about the history of the Nazi years, but it had a wider impact on many fields of study that go beyond history, not least of which, psychology. With the collapse of the Third Reich, the destruction wrought by World War II, and the realization of the Holocaust’s extent, deeper questions about human nature were given a new lease on life, thanks to many developments and advancements in the relatively new field. Sigmund Freud had long been a household name, and had indeed made his own commentary on the Nazis known, alongside many of his followers and critics alike. However, the Nuremberg trials and the role of psychologists in their judgments made a much more lasting impact on the field. This impact would experience a number of diversions, beginning with Hannah Arendt’s reportage of the SS man Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961, but it found its origins in the differing interpretations of the two main psychological experts that spent time with the Nazi war criminals in 1945-1946: Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert.

This paper addresses the extent to which the Kelley-Gilbert debate shaped the development of the theoretical frameworks that experimental social psychology used to explain perpetrator behavior. This paper also examines how Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis overrode the influence of the Kelley-Gilbert debate on social psychology’s perpetrator frameworks during the subsequent decades of intellectual development. Finally, this paper assesses what was potentially lost in Arendt’s intervention, namely the missed opportunities in understanding crimes against humanity. The Kelley and Gilbert debate, I argue, offered vitally complementary insights into Nazi ordinariness, but their debate went cold after 1958, missing an opportunity for synthesis, and allowed Arendt’s provocative reframing as mere “banality” to fill this void, directly inspiring the most influential social psychological studies for decades to come and thus shaping the development of social psychology. That is, until recent challenges that resurrected both Kelley’ and Gilbert’s assertions, and revealing their complementary nature.

The paper thus contributes to the preexisting historiography, which often connects the work of Kelley and Gilbert to the later observations by Arendt, but has so far neglected to interpret Arendt’s contributions as a potential diversion in the development of social psychological theories of evil. In other words, the intellectual through-line observed in this paper is a novel one that attempts to bridge the gap rather than simply note the continuity. Thus, in attempting to chart this intellectual history of modern social scientific attempts to diagnose evil, it follows the lead of historian Peter E. Gordon, who wrote that “intellectual history resists the Platonist expectation that an idea can be defined in the absence of the world,” and instead “tends instead to regard ideas as historically conditioned features of the world which are best understood within some larger context.”⁴ In other words, our psychological understanding of evil did not sprout from the ground, unbidden; it was thanks to our attempts at diagnosing the Third Reich.

…

Attempts at psychologically diagnosing the Third Reich occurred well before the Nuremberg trials themselves, beginning even before the Second World War began. In fact, these attempts appeared shortly after the Nazi Party seized power in 1933. Most psychological commentary was based heavily on the principles of Freudian psychoanalysis. The unconscious mind held the key, many of these analysts believed, to understanding how and why Germany had transformed so completely in such a short period of time; it held the key to understanding the people who led this new Germany, particularly its Fuhrer. This was why Hitler inspired so much close, behavioral scrutiny from psychoanalysts. As medical historian Daniel Pick writes, “it was noted by a number of commentators that the personality of Hitler, his style of performance, and the panoply of rituals that surrounded him and his henchmen inflamed his followers far more deeply than they knew,” leading to what many of these analysts believed was a “an erotic and destructive enjoyment at stake in politics.”⁵ It mystified many observing the Nazis’ rise to power that there seemed so little resistance, at least effective resistance, against their ascent and increasing belligerence. Therefore, the explanation had to be internal; thus, psychological.

Those searching for the key to Hitler’ and the Party’s continued success acknowledged political realities and historical grievances, “but the unconscious, charismatic effect of the Fuhrer was widely recognized to be of central importance,” which was reinforced by the widespread coverage of Nazi propaganda material that depicted “mass enthusiasm,” such as the footage of the Nuremberg rallies of the mid-1930s.⁶ The Third Reich’ and the Fuhrer’s popular support was thus frequently conflated with psychopathology and seen as something alien, understood the same way as one might understand a novel virus; contemporaries in government and media certainly “wondered if the Chancellor [Hitler] was out of his wits,” which included the likes of George Orwell, to whom “the madness of Hitler [was] assumed.”⁷ As a more pointed example, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote an article for Cosmopolitan in 1931 (followed by a book in 1932 called I Saw Hitler!) in which she famously characterized Hitler as a “little man.” She later doubled down on her charge in an interview with the New York Times after the Nazis’ seizure of power, in which she called the dictator “the apotheosis of the little man in Germany,” further extending her analysis to include the German people, who were “the victims of a war-defeat psychosis” who “were taught to believe the German military machine could not fail” and that “when Hitler tells them it did not fail, but was betrayed, they believe it.”⁸

These sentiments had intellectual merit at the time. Within the dominant Freudian psychoanalytic school of thought, this was completely normal; the Nazis and those who followed them were the mass embodiment of “illness,” which was seen as “the price of the impossible conflict between unconscious desire and social restraint,” and leading to “fears of sociopolitical degeneration and a wider sense of cultural malaise,” in the decades following the First World War.⁹ Freud’s daughter Anna, a psychoanalyst in her own right, wrote in 1936 that victims of aggression often identified with their aggressor, representing “a preliminary phase of superego development and, on the other, an intermediate stage in the development of paranoia.”¹⁰ This observation, among others, “was soon taken up in interpretations of the psychology of Nazism and even sometimes of concentration camp inmates,” demonstrating the influence of a psychoanalytic approach when trying to make sense of the nascent, and eventually dead and buried, Third Reich.¹¹

The psychoanalysts’ assessments of the Third Reich were mostly theoretical, especially before the outbreak of war, but military intelligence officers with the OSS interested in psychoanalysis decided to turn theory into practice with the analysts’ help and guidance, especially after the outbreak of war in 1941. Dr. Walter Langer was one of these analysts. He had studied with the Freud’s in Austria and assisted in their and other anti-Nazi activists’ escape in 1938, developing a keen personal interest in finding a psychopathological explanation for what was unfolding in Germany. Back in the United States in 1941, Langer, with the help of his brother William, applied for and received funds from “Wild Bill” Donovan, chief of the OSS. Langer did work on troop morale, but he also produced a “report on the unconscious phantasmagoria in Hitler’s mind,” that “would finally see the light of day after decades as a secret document: The Mind of Adolf Hitler became a surprise best-seller in the early 1970s.”¹²

Langer’s report had a number of issues, mostly involving the use of speculations and assumptions that could not and cannot be disproven, but it makes for a compelling document. It is certainly steeped in hindsight to point out, but it is noteworthy that Langer’s report accurately predicted, based solely on his interviews and observations of the man, that “one outcome was highly likely: the German leader would carry on to the end, staying true to his desire,” finally seeing a clash “between his wishes and reality,” leading to “his mind [collapsing] altogether, even as his political regime and military organization came apart around him,” and “a final total breakdown.”¹³ Langer also interviewed figures like Hitler’s old friend, and later enemy, the industrialist Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who was able to sketch out a fairly detailed image of the Fuhrer and his personality characteristics, at least as he saw them. As Pick summarizes, Hanfstaengl would “[recall] how the leader would enter in states of what he called ‘destructive madness,’” and “claimed that Hitler was a madman who understood life through the ‘muzzle of a gun,’”; but most significantly Hanfstaengl presaged a similar diagnosis of the German people when he warned that “German culture […] was producing a nation of ‘Machine Beasts.’”¹⁴

While Langer’s report has its limitations, it was a hit with military intelligence. It provided a vector for understanding the enemy, particularly its leader. The idea of the Fuhrerprinzip was understood by U.S. military intelligence as a very real thing, not simply propaganda, so understanding the Fuhrer was key to understanding the German people who supported him; the theories of crowd psychology from Gustave Le Bon would only take them so far, so grasping the inner world of the Fuhrer became paramount. This was, after all, part of the shared premises of Nazism and fascism, in which “the party would gather the people into a unity,” with an “ideological promise […] of unity, singularity, and resolute direction: only through total allegiance to the masterful leader […] could the hopeless confusion of modern life be ended.”¹⁵ The notion of “understand the Fuhrer, understand the people” thus became the lodestar for the intelligence community.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, they would not get the chance. While Langer had written nothing about suicide as the likely outcome of the Nazis’ defeat, when Hitler and much of the upper echelons of the Third Reich including Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler killed themselves, his assessment of Hitler reaching a total final breakdown likely felt eerily prophetic to those who had read his report. Nevertheless, as it quickly became clear in the months that followed VE Day, there were other high-ranking Nazis who could be questioned and profiled and, hopefully, provide the diagnosis that so many had been trying to find. Even better, all of these Nazis would be in a completely controlled—that is, experimental—environment: the jail cells at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice.

…

Little did the two psychological professionals at the center of the coming debate likely know, the essence of their debate had already emerged, and not exclusively from fellow psychologists. It had actually come from two very influential media commentators: the aforementioned Dorothy Thompson and George Orwell. Echoing Putzi Hanfstaengl’s lament about Germany becoming a nation of “Machine Beasts,” Dorothy Thompson, had, while still assigning Hitler the role of proverbial band-leader of the Third Reich phenomenon, described the German people as “the accompaniment of a tom-tom of mechanized howls from a drilled mob — howls that seemed to come from the throats of ten thousand robots.”¹⁶ While Thompson’s early assessments of the Fuhrer suggested a belief in his madness, she had become more concerned with exposing the danger of a charismatic leader who could, in all likelihood, whip any people up into a frenzy. Conversely, Orwell had become less concerned with “drilled mobs,” and more with the idea that “creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present,” and that there were indeed those who simply possessed “a Fascist streak.”¹⁷

These interpretations echoed the growing split among psychologists and psychiatrists regarding the particularity of the Third Reich and its crimes that had become clear by 1943 with the publication of two separate inquiries by New York psychiatrist Richard Brickner, and Vienna-born psychiatrist and former prisoner of the Nazis, Bruno Bettelheim. As Daniel Pick summarizes, “Brickner’s Is Germany Incurable? and Bettelheim’s work on camp inmates, ‘Individual and Mass Behavior,’ pointed the way towards two different trajectories of post-war thought: the former concerned with localizing the horror of Nazism to the German ‘case’; the latter suggesting that, under given conditions, certain victims—perhaps any victims—might start to think and even function like perpetrators,” the latter case logically expanding into the idea that anyone could become a perpetrator of heinous crimes.¹⁸ Apart from the pointed allusions of media commentators like Thompson and Orwell, this diagnostic split had remained confined to academic journals and monographs like those written by Brickner and Bettelheim, but it was about to grow in notoriety and significance thanks to the arrival of Dr.’s Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert at Nuremberg.

That debate emerged from the needs created by the Nuremberg trials, which sought to create a new precedent in which the international community would, collectively, charge a foreign state with a crime (and a crime that had to be defined; that is crimes against humanity). In that spirit of expanding the purview of a typical court, the judges and prosecutors had to first address the basic question of whether any of the defendants were, in fact, mentally ill and therefore unfit to stand trial. While there was some controversy with Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess’ fitness due to his claims of amnesia, and other more outlandish behavior from figures like the propagandist Julius Streicher, none of the twenty-two defendants were deemed unable to testify. However, there were more than practical, legal reasons to consider that had more to do with providing answers to a deeper question that many psychologists had been trying to puzzle out for years; in the words of historian Laurence Rees, “was there, as popular mythology suggested there might be, a Nazi personality type?”¹⁹ The incentive to address this question, as previously covered, had been in place for over a decade. Finally, there was a chance to find answers, though they would come in pieces rather than as a whole.

Kelley was the first to arrive at Nuremberg in August of 1945 and immediately got to work trying to make sense of his subjects, as he saw them. By Kelley’s own estimation, he spent around eighty hours with each prisoner, though as psychiatrist and historian Joel E. Dimsdale explains, “he may have stretched things a bit,” in his telling, since “the defendants arrived in Nuremberg on August 12, 1945, and Kelley left in January 1946.”²⁰ Based on his notes and the number of pages dedicated to each criminal, he almost certainly spent the most amount of time with Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, but he provided assessments of every one of the defendants in his 1947 memoir, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals. This memoir provides insight into Kelley’s assessments of the defendants themselves, and how he saw his own role in assessing them. Kelley believed that “as a scientist I regarded my duty in the Jail to be not only to guard the health of men facing trial for war crimes but also to study them as a researcher in a laboratory,” because “Nazism was a socio-cultural disease which, while it had been epidemic only among our enemies, was endemic in all parts of the world” and thus required “prepar[ing] a vaccine or serum that will protect against it.”²¹ He concluded his psychobiographical sketches of the twenty-two prisoners with a relatively speculative portrait of Hitler based on the testimonies of his subjects and preserved medical records, writing that “the Hitler legend can be rendered relatively harmless only if we help all the world to see Adolf Hitler as he actually was,” or, as he later put it, “an abnormal and a mentally ill individual.”²² This was, in essence, an early version of the “never again” argument, intended to inoculate the reader from manipulation by a Hitler-like figure in the future.

Despite labeling the Fuhrer as mentally ill, Kelley was quite insistent that the people who followed him, including his closest followers, were anything but. He painted a picture of a country enthralled by a capable, intelligent, and socially adaptable madman of extraordinary skill; certainly unique as an individual, but by no means different in terms of those capabilities. There were, in other words, no shortages of human beings who had possessed similar qualities to Hitler, who possessed them at the time and who would possess them in the future. And given that the prisoners under his care were all sane by most measures, and thus recognizable to him even as an American, there was no reason to doubt that “there is no real difference between the individual German and the individual American,” psychologically speaking.²³ Most powerfully and famously, Kelley claimed that “the Nazi leaders were not spectacular types, not personalities such as appear only once in a century,” and only shared three things: “overweening ambition, low ethical standards, [and] a strongly developed nationalism which justified anything done in the name of Germandom,” plus “the opportunity to seize power.” Dramatically concluding, Kelley proclaimed:

Let us look about us. Have we no ultranationalists among us who would approve any policy, however evil, so long as it could be said of advantage to America? Have we no men so ruthlessly eager to achieve power that they would not quite willingly climb over the corpses of our minorities, if by so doing they could gain totalitarian control over the rest of us?²⁴

Kelley had clearly developed a dim view of the sociopolitical nature of humanity, informed largely by his time spent with the twenty-two accused war criminals at Nuremberg, particularly the time he spent with Hermann Göring. According to Kelley himself, “of all the Nazis tried at Nuremberg, the one who made the greatest impression [was] Göring.”²⁵ Some scholars tend to put an even finer point on it, given Kelley’s own mental deterioration in the decade that followed the war, marked by alcoholism and a deep depression, culminating in a dramatic suicide in 1958 that mirrored Göring’s own method: ingestion of cyanide. Jack El-Hai points out that “there was more behind Kelley’s choice of that particular poison and that exceedingly rare form of suicide,” considering that he kept a loaded gun in his office, strongly suggesting that it had been “a deliberate evocation of Göring’s defiant suicide and the Reichsmarschall’s pose of a hero backed into a corner.”²⁶ Dimsdale concurs, going even further by citing contemporaneous articles covering Kelley’s suicide, which were “quick to note the link to Nuremberg and Göring,” leading to “dark questions and speculations […] as to where Kelley got the cyanide,” including the “San Francisco Chronicle report[ing] that Kelley’s poison ‘was brought back from the war criminal trials,’” and “the New York Times [taking] the matter further, stating that the cyanide was ‘one of several capsules Dr. Kelley had brought home from Nuremberg. The capsules had been discovered on Hermann Göring.’”²⁷ In the aftermath of his death, rumors of who supplied the cyanide to whom became more notable than Kelley’s own work. But Kelley’s own assessment of Göring’s own suicide carries with it the most weight, writing that “[Göring’s] suicide, shrouded in mystery and emphasizing the impotency of the American guards, was a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch, completing the edifice for Germans to admire in time to come” [Emphasis added].²⁸ It is a striking addendum to his otherwise critical assessment of the infamous Reichsmarshall.

Göring’s influence was at the center of Kelley’s diagnosis of the Third Reich, as most scholars and Hollywood screenwriters tend to claim. During their interviews, Kelley found the Reichsmarshall “a man of charming manner (when he chose to be charming), of persuasive speech, and of excellent intelligence bordering on the highest level [with] a keen imagination and good educational background,” which was paired with “no sense whatsoever of the value of human life, of moral obligation, or of the other finer attributes of civilized man when they conflicted with his own egocentric aims.”²⁹ Even as a prisoner, “he still maintained his extroverted reaction patterns, his need for attention, his narcissistic bodily fixations,” as well as “his dominant drives, his ability to visualize clearly his goal, and his willingness to attain his end regardless of the cost,” complete with “all the forcefulness, brutality, ruthlessness, and lack of conscience which made him the ideal executive for Adolf Hitler.”³⁰

These broader observations largely fall in line with Kelley’s eventual replacement, Dr. Leon Goldensohn, who characterized Göring as “up and down […] always playing to the public,” and one who “can turn on a smile and turn it off like a faucet, almost at will, mechanically.”³¹ In addition, Goldensohn observed that Göring’s “attitude toward Hitler was quite different in reality [...] than it seemed to be from his testimony in court during his defense,” to which Göring replied that “’as a loyal German and a follower of Hitler, I accepted orders as orders,’” and that “’I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities and ungentlemanly actions,’” which quickly contrasted with his callous sentiment that the “’drunken Robert Ley […] did us a favor by hanging himself before the trial started [because] he was not going to be any advantage for us defendants when he took the stand.’”³² It was these characteristics, as well as those of Göring’s compatriots, that led to Kelley’s own counter-intuitive conclusion about the relative normalcy of the Nazis, as far as their mental health went (their Fuhrer’s notwithstanding). Kelley’s own compatriot, Dr. Gustave Gilbert, would ultimately come to a much different conclusion.

Gilbert arrived in Nuremberg in October of 1945, and like Kelley, “desperately wanted in at Nuremberg to study and characterize the depravity of the Nazi leadership,” but where Kelley saw them as specimens for his lab, “Gilbert didn’t find them interesting in Kelley’s dispassionate way but loathed them and told them so.”³³ This almost certainly colored his impressions of the accused criminals, but he took diligent notes and produced two books out of his experience profiling them, unlike Kelley’s one. A fluent speaker of German of Austrian Jewish heritage, Gilbert took his position at the prison very seriously, which contrasted with Kelley’s own manner, and this led to clashes between the two men that were likely just as personal as they were professional. Their ultimate conclusions also differed, though not in the sense that Gilbert believed the Nazis were insane; quite the contrary. Generally speaking, Gilbert “diagnosed the defendants as narcissistic psychopaths whose lives were formed by a diseased German culture,” in which they “represented a unique category of psychopathology.”³⁴ They were not insane, in other words; but they were different from everyone else.

Gilbert’s first book was more detailed than Kelley’s, more resembling Goldensohn’s own work in which he reproduced the questions and responses of the defendants and recapitulated the trial proceedings as he recalled them, including the prosecution’ and defense’s statements, “refrain[ing] from embroidering the data with too much psychological speculation, leaving that to later collaborative studies which would be more comprehensive and objective than my own immediate reactions could possibly be.”³⁵ And indeed, this was the point; “as a reviewer from the New Yorker put it […]: ‘The author lets the defendants talk for themselves and introduces himself into the picture very little.’”³⁶ It was not until he later published The Psychology of Dictatorship in 1950 that he clarified his conclusions on Nazi psychopathology.

Gilbert claimed “that authoritarian leadership, like any other, reflects the nature of the culture in which it emerges,” and “is expressed […] in the social values developed among the leaders of the given culture,” leading to “motivational development in interaction with society and culture, so that the individual level of explanation cannot be fully understood without reference to the social and vice versa.”³⁷ This framing allowed Gilbert to explain that the Nazis were, in fact, unwell; as individuals, as an organization, and as a culture, but all thanks to the singular influence of a dictator. To help make this case, Gilbert spent much of the first section of his book exploring the psychology of Adolf Hitler himself, pointing to the “dark recesses of Hitler’s libido there lay the smoldering ashes of violent, unresolved Oedipal conflicts,” leading him to embrace, and thus encourage others to embrace, a “rigidly obsessive development of aggression.”³⁸ By placing Hitler at the forefront of his argument, Gilbert telegraphed his conclusions about where the Third Reich, and the German people, had gone wrong.

As Gilbert saw it, understanding Hitler was key to understanding, and thus diagnosing, the Third Reich. Drawing from his experiences interviewing the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg as well as the growing body of knowledge and scholarship about those who had died, Gilbert finally concluded that “the irrational behavior of the crowd may not determine the decision [to wage war], but the emotional tensions of the leader in an authoritarian system do determine it,” and that the evidence available “leads inevitably to the conclusion that the final decision to go to war and commit genocide was determined by the irrational obsession of a dictator to ‘exterminate my enemies.’”³⁹ In addition, unlike Kelley, Gilbert was not convinced that dictatorship was as easy as flipping a proverbial switch; conversely, Gilbert characterized “the struggle between democracy and dictatorship as fundamentally a struggle between two modes of social organization and value systems developed in [the] process of adaptive social behavior.”⁴⁰ The Third Reich could not just happen anywhere; authoritarianism and dictatorship needed to be value systems in and of themselves. The United States was not akin to Nazi Germany, no matter how tempted one might be to draw parallels; they had distinct cultures and distinct value systems, in which one produced democracy, however flawed it might be, and the other produced a violence-obsessed dictatorship.

Gilbert had more reason than Kelley to come to this conclusion. While Kelley was looking at the accused war criminals with a detached eye that placed everyone on a morally neutral playing field, Gilbert had no interest in doing that. Evil was evil and the evidence was right in front of his eyes. In addition to that, Gilbert had witnessed far more than Kelley had, having stayed in Nuremberg many months longer than Kelley. In particular, Gilbert witnessed the Soviet Union’s prosecution during the trial, and what he witnessed was far more disturbing than even the film that had been shown during the United States’ prosecution. One of the Soviet prosecutors named Lev Smirnov displayed a film titled Atrocities Committed by the German Fascist Invaders in the USSR, which depicted “a basement [where], the narrator explained, human corpses had been rendered into soap,” as well as “a pile of decapitated bodies, stacked near large vats [while] severed heads were heaped nearby in a bin.”⁴¹ These images had a profound effect on the court, and this likely included Gilbert, who even “agreed that the film had hit the mark even more than the one the Americans had shown.”⁴² Gilbert also clearly came to this conclusion before finishing his time at Nuremberg, believing that the defendants were always paying attention to how their circumstances changed during the trial, thus showing that he saw most of those in his charge as more calculated than they might let on, and therefore exhibiting what he would later define as an authoritarian personality.

Gilbert’s view on the authoritarian personality was also shaped by his time spent with the Nazi leaders, and like Kelley, it was deeply informed by his interactions with Hermann Göring in particular; they also “both agreed that Göring was venal, corrupt, and brutal.”⁴³ However, unlike Kelley, Gilbert ultimately saw Göring in relatively simple terms: as a criminal psychopath, unable to muster any real empathy or humanity. In describing him in his second book, Gilbert believed that “Göring continued to use the Nazi ideology as a camouflage for his own aggressive narcissism,” thus connecting ideology with psychopathology, and making it clear that he saw the two as codependent.⁴⁴ This was further evidenced by “the persecution of scapegoats [serving] a three-fold purpose: (a) distraction and suppression of criticism of the Nazi regime; (b) the conditioning of public opinion to accept an aggressive ‘defense against our enemies’; (c) material incentives for the faithful,” all of which satisfied Göring’s narcissism, “least of all the third” purpose.⁴⁵ While genocide was “something that shattered [Göring’s] entire frame of reference,” that did little to shatter his—or, by Gilbert’s estimation, Germany’s—complicity in it, for it was part and parcel with Hitler’s own ambitions, and Germany was in thrall.⁴⁶ In the end, Gilbert assessed Göring as “a ruthlessly aggressive personality camouflaged by a disarming amiability when it suited his purpose; cyclothymic in affect, extremely narcissistic in his ego-gratifications, but lacking in moral courage which might have given his heroic fantasies more than theatrical substance.”⁴⁷

All of this helped explain Gilbert’s attitude toward Göring, which was less detached interest, and more moral disgust, something he could not hide. As the psychiatrist Goldensohn reported, “I knew that Gilbert, the psychologist, had been on rather strained terms with Göring,” which likely came from the fact that Gilbert did indeed see the Reichsmarshall as a deranged criminal at a deeper level than one simply of socialization, and treated him as such.⁴⁸ Göring did little to dissuade anyone from characterizing him this way, proclaiming to Goldensohn during their time together that “’frankly, it is my intention to make this trial a mockery,’” adding later that “’if I really felt that the killing of the Jews meant anything, such as that it meant the winning of the war, I would not be too much bothered by it.’”⁴⁹ For Gilbert, Göring represented the Nazi personality and the perversion of German culture. As Gilbert bluntly concluded in his Nuremberg Diary, “Göring died as he had lived, a psychopath trying to make a mockery of all human values and to distract attention from his guilt by a dramatic gesture.”⁵⁰

In the end, Kelley’ and Gilbert’s interpretations of the war criminals could not have sounded more different; the garrulous Kelley saw the potential for a Nazi war criminal in everyone, while the dour Gilbert saw a developed, distinct Nazi personality. As Laurence Rees summarizes, “Douglas Kelley maintained […] that the Nuremberg defendants were not only ‘essentially sane’ but that ‘such personalities […] could be duplicated in any country of the world today,’” while “Gustave Gilbert […] believed that the psychological evidence showed how ‘diseased elements of the German culture’ were ‘inflamed to epidemic proportions under the Nazi regime.’”⁵¹ While both men emphasized the importance of social forces in their work, it was clear that what divided the two interpretations was a greater emphasis on nature versus a greater emphasis on nurture in generalizing the Nazis. Kelley clearly came out in favor of the nurture argument, writing that “insanity is no explanation for the Nazis,” and that “they were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are.”⁵² This aligned with his later warning about how, in essence, the Nazi menace could just as easily happen in the United States. Conversely, Gilbert carefully laid out “the chief psychosocial qualifications of leadership for a revolutionary dictator,” which included “(a) the social resolution of frustrations in a manner which had a certain resonance in the needs of the people at the time, and (b) aggressive pursuit of goals which had a deceptive identity of purpose with the ulterior motives of other leaders and groups in that culture and abroad,” while also acknowledging that there was a “crucial relationship between any leader and his supporters” informed by the leader’s “purposes and values.”⁵³

The debate quickly turned into “acrimonious arguments between Kelley and Gilbert about the nature of the Nazis’ diagnoses,” resulting in a lack of mediation between the two schools of thought; “Kelley […] saw little to be gained by including ‘narcissistic psychopaths’ in the same boat as patients with depression or schizophrenia,” while Gilbert merely saw criminals like Göring as “psychopaths [who] bore the mark of Cain,” and could not be helped in their deeply-rooted pathology.⁵⁴ This difference of biases proved unshakable and turned into “squabbling and accusing each other of having purloined each other’s notes,” and later threats of lawsuits over the matter, as well as accusations of ethical violations.⁵⁵ They went their separate ways, with Gilbert writing his second book and Kelley turning to a career in television. The debate’s essence became forgotten, and in 1958, when Kelley committed suicide, there was no chance it could ever meaningfully reignite again. The door had been left open for a new diagnosis to be applied to the Third Reich, and in 1961, Hannah Arendt would provide it.

…

“Is Eichmann in all of us?” wondered the New York Times headline on May 26^th, 1974, reflecting the controversial claim that had been circulating for well over a decade. Discussing the series of experiments run by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram from 1961-1962 that claimed “to show that the ordinary person, in situations of ‘normal’ obedience to authority, would do things which go against decent or humane behavior,” the article summarized CBS’ “Sixty Minutes” co-anchor Morley Safer’s own assessment during the show’s segment on Milgram that “in introducing the experiment, if concentration camps were ever created in the United States, it would not be difficult to staff them.”⁵⁶ Had the Kelley-Gilbert debate remained active during the previous two decades, this summary would have been redolent of Kelley’s own claims regarding the nature of Nazi evil. The article’s author Daniel Bell, however, did not agree, and in fact took major umbrage, writing that “Mr. Milgram is simply promoting, wittingly or unwittingly, a liberal platitude that in the end erases any grounds for moral responsibility, on the basis of saying ‘we can all’ be guilty,” and that all the experiment had revealed was that “the subject in Mr. Milgram’s experiment was simply in a stacked situation where he had no recourse to independent judgment.”⁵⁷

Bell’s refutation of Milgram’s experimental methods, ethical dimensions, and ultimate conclusions were not, in fact, unique for the time; they had been inspiring debate within the psychological field for many years (and would for many years to come). Bell’s outrage had simply helped maintain the controversy’s mainstream status and keep it in the public consciousness for longer still. However, the reference point was perhaps less clear; most understood what was meant by Milgram’s references to the Third Reich, but why was there a reference to Eichmann—that is, the infamous SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, by then many years dead—when discussing an experiment conducted by a Yale psychologist? The reason was simple: Eichmann, and specifically one woman’s assessment of him as he sat in a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, had inspired Milgram’s obedience experiments in the first place.

The famed philosopher Hannah Arendt had arrived in Jerusalem in April of 1961 to cover the trial of Eichmann for the New Yorker. Eichmann had been tracked down and captured by Israel’s Mossad in Argentina the year before, with the sole purpose of putting him—a supposedly key functionary of the Nazis’ Final Solution—on trial for his crimes. It had been fifteen years since the Nuremberg trials, but the moral imperative of putting Eichmann on trial (and, to many participating, arriving at a guilty verdict) was as strong in 1961 as it had been in 1945-1946. Arendt did not exactly know what to expect apart from her own disgust at Eichmann’s monstrous crimes: arranging the transportation of millions of European Jews from all over the continent to the locations where they would be slaughtered en masse. But as she watched the middle-aged, bookish-looking man in the glass box at the front of the courtroom, she was shocked at what she heard. She was “surprised to discover on the stand a nondescript man who did not even distinguish himself by a special dislike for Jews,” and believed that “the most striking thing about Eichmann, for a supposed criminal mastermind, was his dullness,” thus making it clear that “Eichmann was monstrous precisely because he was not a monster.”⁵⁸ Everything about Eichmann, and by extension the Third Reich, was deeply and unsettlingly evil, Arendt began to believe, because of how normal the personification of that evil appeared to be.

Following the trial and after Eichmann’s unceremonious execution in 1962, Arendt adapted her New Yorker coverage into a full length book, which was published in 1963 under the title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In her book, she fully fleshed out her case for Eichmann’s normalcy, her book’s subtitle previewing exactly what she was about to lay out. Eichmann had made an impression on Arendt and a number of other observers in the Jerusalem court for a number of reasons. First was his plea of innocence, “to each count Eichmann pleaded: ‘Not guilty in the sense of the indictment,’” along with protests that “’with the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter—I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it,’” though Arendt also wrote that by the end of the trial, “he left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect.”⁵⁹ His splitting of hairs regarding the question of his guilt (or responsibility) left less of an impression made by “half a dozen psychiatrists [who] had certified him as ‘normal’—’More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,’ one of them was said to have exclaimed,” leading to “the hard fact that his was obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity.”⁶⁰

Ultimately, Eichmann was banal, both as a criminal and as a man, who only spoke one language; that is the language of the soulless bureaucrat, one focused only on his career. As she explained, “officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche,” leading to the perception by psychiatrists and others that he was indeed normal.⁶¹ This made it clear that Eichmann’s “inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”⁶² In Eichmann, Arendt saw the depth of evil that could only be explained by this banality; his cliches lasted to the bitter end as he headed to the gallows and proclaiming that “’We shall meet again,’” to the gathered observers, offering a “lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”⁶³ Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Eichmann’s case was generalizable, perhaps to the scale of the Third Reich itself, because “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal,” indeed suggesting that “this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”⁶⁴

The intellectual power of this assessment, as well as Arendt’s clever arguments, cannot be underestimated. Her “courtroom portrait of that quintessentially obedient Holocaust ‘manager’ became a classic, an indispensable starting point of discussion.”⁶⁵ It was felt in all fields, particularly history where Arendt’s claims created some controversy, including “a storm of denunciations and threats,” with the celebrated historian Barbara Tuchman “[giving] voice to the public anger,” writing in the introduction of Gideon Hausner’s Justice in Jerusalem in 1968 that “’the attractiveness of the thesis is that by shifting guilt onto the victim, it relieves everyone else.’”⁶⁶ But the power of Arendt’s argument was felt most keenly in the world of psychology. The Third Reich and the Holocaust had certainly not been forgotten among psychological researchers, but it did not still possess the same moral imperative that it had in Kelley’ and Gilbert’s day. Gilbert had continued to practice and write, and was even called to testify during the Eichmann trial, but beyond that, there had not been much in the way of motivation to litigate Nazi evil as there had been. Eichmann’s trial and Arendt’s coverage had changed that, particularly with the young Stanley Milgram.

Whether he was aware of it or not, Milgram had become part of the intellectual lineage forged by the forgotten Kelley-Gilbert debate. This is not to suggest the interest in diagnosing the Third Reich had waned; indeed, as psychologist Robert M. Farr writes, “coming to terms with the Holocaust set the research agenda in social psychology for decades following the end of the war. It was difficult for many to understand, never mind to come to terms with, what had taken place in the death camps.”⁶⁷ For his part, Milgram had been following the Eichmann trial with great interest and had been “moved and fascinated by Arendt’s controversial thesis,” beginning his experiments only three months after the start of the trial.⁶⁸ He was among those, like Kelley, who wondered “what if there was nothing demonically ‘special’ any of [the Nazis] at all?” and Arendt’s observations of Eichmann seemed to suggest this, observing as many had, “the machine of the state and the chemistry of the group that was most horrifying.”⁶⁹ After all, so many Nazis had claimed to be following orders, and there was no reason to disbelieve them, including Eichmann, whose supposed thoughtlessness had been so pointedly observed by Arendt. This was how Milgram conceived of what became known as his series of obedience experiments, conducted between 1961 and 1963 (though planned as early as 1960). There were some variations but the general procedure went as follows:

Under the guise of an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning, the teacher-subject, seated in front of the shock machine, was instructed to give increasingly painful shocks to the learner, who was seated in an adjacent room and not visible to the subject, each time he made an error on the word-matching task [he had been given].⁷⁰

The most famous variation of the experimental design involved the learner, who was an experimental confederate (that is, who was in on the deception), crying out in pain at increasing severity, eventually going silent, as if to simulate their having lost consciousness—and even dying—from the shocks. Any time the teacher-subject protested or expressed concern during the procedure, the researcher in the room, often dressed in a white lab coat, simply, but firmly, replied that the experiment required the teacher-subject to continue. At the conclusion of the experiments in 1963, Milgram “found that in a controlled laboratory environment, more than 65 percent of his subjects could be readily manipulated into inflicting a (seemingly) lethal electrical charge on a total stranger,” far outweighing the estimated one percent predicted by a group of psychologists and psychology students that Milgram had interviewed prior to the experiments.⁷¹

The results were staggering and disturbing to many when they were published in 1963. Milgram claimed that “obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose,” and believed that the results suggested that “the tendency to obey those whom we perceive to be legitimate authorities” could very easily override “the disposition not to harm other people.”⁷² This was a difficult prospect for many people to accept, and it became a national story, especially when the New York Times reported that the experiment had “also shown, however, that such people do not enjoy being cruel. In fact, some of the subjects became distraught.”⁷³ This led to a greater backlash, both because of the dark implications suggested about human nature—namely, the apparently then-open question, “was there a hidden Nazi in two-thirds of the good citizens of New Haven?”—but also because “some deemed the experiments unethical,” thanks to the distress caused to the subjects of the experiment.⁷⁴ As reported in a New York Times review of Milgram’s later book on the subject, “the experiments themselves were a cause of distress and debate among professional psychologists, and Milgram came in for harsh criticism for having both devised and gone through with them,” and he was “accused of unethical practices; in manipulating his subjects and in not protecting them beforehand from what might be the consequences upon them of their behavior in an extremely stress‐filled experimental situation.”⁷⁵ These accusations have followed his experiments ever since. Nevertheless, Milgram seemed to have proven Hannah Arendt right and demonstrated that his experiment had “provided the scientific underpinnings for [her] ‘banality of evil’ perspective,” by “insist[ing] that such behavior could indeed be studied and, by applying the tools and language of social science, he helped forge a new perspective.”⁷⁶ Milgram directly addressed the Arendt connection in the book he published in 1974 about the obedience experiments, in which he stated that:

After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare to imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation—a conception of his duties as a subject—and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.⁷⁷ Little did Milgram seem to realize, his perspective had already been suggested, at least to a certain extent, during the Kelley-Gilbert debates in postwar years, but had indeed become largely forgotten by the 1960s and 1970s.

Milgram’s obedience experiments may have been controversial, both then and now, but they nevertheless “endure as a powerful form of folklore, useful in explaining situations in which a person suddenly finds herself doing something untoward.”⁷⁸ This suggestion about human nature—and thus, the explanation for the Holocaust and diagnosis of the Third Reich—was compounded by similar experiments conducted by social psychologists, including the bystander apathy experiments conducted by John Darley and Bibb Latané in 1968 (which revealed the bystander effect phenomenon, in which intervention became less likely with greater numbers of people present), and even more infamously, the prison experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo (a fellow graduate student of Milgram’s, it should be noted).

Zimbardo’s experiment, in which “volunteers were told that Stanford was studying prison behaviors and that they would be randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison experiment,” quickly ran out of control, with many of the volunteers assigned as guards engaging in their roles with disturbing zeal, leading to Zimbardo canceling the experiment before it had been completed.⁷⁹ The drama that had unfolded had not necessarily been part of the experimental design but it supposedly had disturbing implications. As Zimbardo himself later explained in the New York Times, “normal, healthy, educated young men could be so radically transformed under the institutional pressures of a ‘prison environment,’” and this suggested that “the subjects’ abnormal social and personal reactions are best seen as a product of their transaction with an environment that supported the behavior that would be pathological in other settings, but was ‘appropriate’ in this prison.”⁸⁰ The guards’ disturbing behavior—which included abusing and humiliating the prisoners in increasingly creative ways—was not indicative of anything wrong with them psychologically; they were, in fact, merely inhabiting roles. The experiment suggested that “social context alone could foment a phenomenal amount of nastiness,” which in turn suggested that “power corrupted, and brutality emerged.”⁸¹ Zimbardo’s prison experiment, even more problematic in its implementation than Milgram’s, had added to the notion posited by Arendt (and by extension Douglas Kelley) that normal, everyday people, and even people deemed intellectual elites like students at Stanford University, were perfectly capable of engaging in monstrous behavior due to socialization. Everyone had, in so many words, an inner Adolf Eichmann.

Given the preexisting ethical questions regarding Milgram’s own experiments, much more scrutiny was given to Zimbardo’s, both on ethical grounds and in terms of his conclusions, with many “critics [arguing] that such studies cannot generalize to the Third Reich” and that his experiment “was like a fraternity hazing gone bad.”⁸² This is certainly possible, and much evidence was gathered in the decades that followed that challenged the social psychological findings of these various studies and, by extension, Arendt’s assessment of Eichmann and the Third Reich. Critics suggest a flattening had occurred, in which “Milgram can be seen as setting up the scene, Zimbardo start[ed] from the already scripted scene,” and more problematically, “Milgram [had] psychologized the past of the Nazi era,” while “Zimbardo […] pre-empted forms of torture to come, creating, as it where, a rationale for so-called psychological torture.”⁸³ These sorts of problems are rooted in the criticism of the most high-profile social psychological studies conducted in the field’s history (particularly those from Milgram), and those were essentially derived from Hannah Arendt’s observations of Adolf Eichmann. There were indeed problems with both.

In the decades that followed, more information about Nazi war criminals, as well as their motivations, had continued to come to light. Milgram’s conclusions in particular had been challenged on psychological and historical grounds over the decades, with S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher pointing out that “[the banality of evil] thesis loses credibility under close empirical scrutiny,” by its ignoring of “copious evidence of resistance even in studies held up as demonstrating that conformity is inevitable” and of “the evidence that those who do heed authority in doing evil do so knowingly not blindly, actively not passively, creatively not automatically.”⁸⁴ Other, broader critiques of Milgram’s conclusions involved his use of “strictly monocausal terms,” an assumption “that the process of obedience to authority operates uniformly across levels of a social hierarchy,” and a failure “to describe the type of gradual and irreversible conversion process that […] transformed basically ordinary medical professionals into autonomously evil actors.”⁸⁵ Other critics pointed out that socialized genocide was insufficient because it provided credence to the Nazis’ frequent defense of just following orders; in fact, “the orders may have provided an opportunity for the expression of more powerful, emotion-based motives,” while “there [was] little or no evidence of moral opposition or distress by the killers,” which contrasted with the behavior of many of Milgram’s subjects (whose experience in a college psychology lab was, it must be said, far different than that of a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern Front).⁸⁶

There was also the matter of Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt’s own conclusions about him. As more information became revealed about the supposedly banal face of evil, it became clear that he was not as much of a boring, cliché-spouting bureaucrat as Arendt had suspected. Indeed, while hiding in Argentina, Eichmann was interviewed by the Dutch Nazi collaborator and member of the Waffen-SS, Willem Sassen. During the course of these interviews, which were eventually published in Life magazine in two parts under the title “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” Eichmann frankly admitted, as the titles of each installment suggested, “I transported them... to the butcher” and “To sum it all up, I regret nothing.”⁸⁷ More consequently, tapes of the Sassen-Eichmann interviews were uncovered in 2022, revealing that Eichmann believed “’had we put 10.3 million Jews to death, then I would be content and would say, ‘’Good, we have destroyed the enemy,’‘’” and that “’I didn’t care about the Jews deported to Auschwitz, whether they lived or died.’”⁸⁸ This completely runs counter to the picture that Arendt painted of Eichmann. This shows that it was not as clear that Arendt’, Milgram’, or Zimbardo’s observations were as definitive as they might appear.

Nevertheless, despite all of these valid critiques of the post-Arendt boom of social psychological assertions about the learned capacity for evil, including Arendt’s own, these assertions remained not just valid, but doctrinaire and popular, especially when seemingly supported by historical evidence, such as that provided by the likes of Christopher Browning in his landmark work Ordinary Men. This helps explain the resistance experienced by later psychologists when they explored the idea that some things were more ingrained than many liked to admit. The developmental psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen observed that human cruelty is very much connected to psychopathic characteristics; that is, that psychopathic individuals have psychopathic brains and thus, when they engage in cruelty, they are doing something that is as much a part of their inner nature than it is something to which they have been socially conditioned. Baron-Cohen explains that “psychopaths are blunted in their moral development,” thanks to a number of factors including an inability to “fear punishment,” and “less of a startle reflex […] to a loud sound or to an object looming toward them,” leading to a diminished or even completely absent capacity for empathy.⁸⁹ Their brains even register differently on neurological scanners, such as fMRIs and MRIs, particularly in a major part of what Baron-Cohen calls the empathy circuit, or the ventral part of the medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), which activates when people think about their own or other people’s feelings. In psychopaths, “just as we might predict, abnormalities in the empathy circuit are seen,” producing “a problem in the frontal lobes because these are meant to provide ‘executive control’ over action, stopping us from doing what could lead to punishment.”⁹⁰

It seems likely that based on many of the previously described assessments of many of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, like Eichmann, or Göring, that they too would have shown similar abnormalities. The lack of available insight or technological capabilities at the time of both trials certainly makes this impossible to say, and it certainly is not to say that the diagnosis of the Third Reich begins and ends with psychopathy. But it does suggest that after Hannah Arendt’s intervention in Jerusalem, there had been a lack of psychological insight that could well have been a boon to everyone interested in diagnosing the Third Reich. That is, of course, excepting the insight that had been provided by both Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert.

…

Primo Levi once stated that “Auschwitz defies ‘understanding,’ or at least understanding in terms of the culprits’ rationality,” while at the same time “reject[ing] the idea that the perpetrators could be categorized, for the most part, as abnormal, especially sadistic individuals.”⁹¹ Nevertheless, many tried, especially in the decades following the Second World War, to thread this needle; to explain why so much suffering had been caused by people so supposedly normal in their disposition. That seeming contradiction was explored most famously by Hannah Arendt as she covered the Eichmann trial in 1961, and was furthered by the social psychologists who, instead of looking for previously obtained evidence, simply appeared to take her observations at face value and find evidence that confirmed them. What these psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo and others discovered was valuable insight about the nature of phenomena like obedience and role fulfillment and indeed, they appeared to be providing a scientific basis for Arendt’s observations and thus, a profound diagnosis for the Third Reich that, in its own provocative way, implicated everyone.

One can only speculate why the Arendt framing was so intellectually attractive to so many scholars and experts in various fields, but it seems likely that it was an attempt to essentially refute Levi’s observation; after all, to say something so profoundly and tragically human as the Holocaust defies understanding feels like abdicating responsibility. In making these observations that supposedly implicated everyone, however, Arendt’, Milgram’, and Zimbardo’s observations implicated no one. After all, if everyone had a little Eichmann within them, and given how banal he supposedly was like all of us, what made him—an actual war criminal, even partly responsible for the murder of millions—special or even worthy of meaningful condemnation, to say nothing of the death penalty? If anything, by morally flattening the Nazi war criminal into something recognizable in all of us, it calls into question human agency itself, and thus our ability to make destructive choices that deserve punishment of any kind. To say embracing this paradox opens a window for nefarious apologia, revisionism, and justification of unspeakable crimes is putting it mildly.

Not only were Arendt’s observations misguided—something she eventually admitted, to far less media attention, after the Frankfurt trials of twenty-two SS guards stationed at Auschwitz in 1963-1965, “giving recognition to the fact that there was another face to the Holocaust besides that of the dutiful bureaucrat”—but their downstream effects on the intellectual history of the Holocaust were profound.⁹² As Eichmann biographer David Cesarini once wrote, “Anyone writing on the subject today works in the shadow of Hannah Arendt. Her notion of ‘the banality of evil’, combined with Milgram’s thesis on the predilection for obedience to authority, straight-jacketed research into Nazi Germany and the persecution of the Jews for two decades.”⁹³ Her provocative reframing of Eichmann—and thus, Nazi war criminals and the Third Reich in general—as generally banal was such that it inspired the most influential social psychological studies for decades to come—that is, the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments, as well as others following their lead—and thus shaped the development social psychology with very little resistance in either the psychological or historical fields. The impressive work by Holocaust scholars such as Christopher Browning and others who demonstrate that the horror of the Final Solution was the result of social pressures, if only in part, helped reinforce what had become an intellectual tradition, with only slight challenges.

This paper has attempted to make the argument that the true Third Reich diagnosis had already been achieved, at least in a complementary sense by the psychological experts, Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert, appointed to the prisoners at Nuremberg. Neither of their arguments were solely persuasive on their own. Kelley’s heavy focus on the ordinariness of the criminals, including the likely psychopath of Hermann Göring, led to him seeing more of himself and others in them than he probably would have liked, and subsequently underestimated what it would take to convince regular citizens—American, German, or otherwise—to commit monstrous crimes. Gilbert’s focus on the criminals’ pathology as part of an authoritarian and dictatorial value system, inspired by a psychologically unwell Fuhrer that attracted similarly unwell individuals to positions of power, led to him seeing something deeply wrong with German culture at the time of the Third Reich, and likely missing the role that general socialization—significantly part of Kelley’s equation—provided. But instead of contradicting one another, these were complementary insights into Nazi ordinariness and pathology, and later research, inspired by Arendt’s flawed interpretation of Eichmann, missed this opportunity for synthesis, thanks largely to the debate going cold after Kelley’s suicide. As much influence as Arendt’s thesis and the subsequent psychological studies by the likes of Milgram and Zimbardo enjoy, the growing body of evidence bears this out.

What was also lost without the synergy of the Kelley-Gilbert debate leaving room for these developments is the role of agency in the actions of criminals, both in the context of an authoritarian state and in the context of pathological behavior. As Daniel Pick has explained, “something like Nazism might be commonplace in ‘us’ [but] this thought has always had to be balanced against the fact that there is no equivalent of, or precedent for, Auschwitz.”⁹⁴ This balance was never properly struck, despite a few less-known monographs engaging with the debate in the decades that followed that mostly focused on Kelley’ and Gilbert’s use of Rorschach tests, but it might indeed have been if the arguments made by Kelley and Gilbert had been synthesized into one, and we do see this when looking at both the margins of historical and psychological research.

For example, in the 1980s, the psychologist and historian Robert Jay Lifton had interviewed many former Nazis, especially those who had taken part in medical experimentation and atrocities, and come to the conclusion that things were more complex than learned or socialized savagery. Contra Arendt’s (and by extension Milgram and Zimbardo’s) assertions, Lifton explained, the Nazis were not “faceless bureaucratic cogs or automatons,” and were, in fact, “actors and participants who manifested certain kinds of behavior for which they were responsible.”⁹⁵ In other words, Lifton’s theory of the case was that while the Nazis were indeed ordinary human beings, they fundamentally made themselves extraordinary by doing what they did. Lifton emphasized the fact that “in order to [perform demonic acts] the men themselves changed,” and even went so far to reframe what killing innocent people actually meant: a medicalized form of “killing as a therapeutic alternative,” all in service of a biomedical vision of the world driven solely—particularly, uniquely, in other words—by Nazi ideology, which could be called a “biocracy,” or a type of “theocracy, a system of rule by priests of a sacred order under the claim of divine prerogative […] of cure through purification and revitalization of the Aryan race.”⁹⁶

Lifton had managed to nuance the arguments that had been taken for granted among many social psychologists and a growing number of historians by particularizing Nazi ideology in this way. He also particularized the perpetrators via his observations on the “doubling” that so many of the titular Nazi doctors engaged in to justify their actions, where there is a “division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self” in which the “humane self can be joined by a ‘professional self’ willing to ally itself with a destructive project, with harming or even killing others,” and, thanks to the biomedical vision of Nazism, allowed them to believe that “if you are curing a sickness, anything is permissible.”⁹⁷ When examining Lifton’s arguments, one starts to see a striking similarity to Gilbert’s own assertions about the war criminals’ socialization played a part in allowing them to develop a true pathology, which was indeed unique to Nazism, but never downplaying the notion that the Nazis were indeed people with motives and defense mechanisms recognizable to the rest of us, per Kelley’s own assertions.

Insights like Lifton’s, however unwittingly synthesizing the Kelley-Gilbert debate, would echo through the emerging field of perpetrator studies, which aims to bring nuances like his to bear when explaining the human capacity for evil in a way that avoids the monocausal trap unwittingly laid by Arendt. As criminologist Augustine Brannigan explains, given the wealth of both historical and psychological evidence we have gathered over the decades since World War II, the Nazis’ ability to “produce an over-control over their citizenry” to make them complicit and participants in genocide was “not a function of obedience to bureaucratic authority, but an overidentification with the political leadership that cultivates a powerful sense of duty characterized by both pathological altruism and a sense of fatalism,” which was, as it happened, “reflected in Eichmann’s testimony” in 1961.⁹⁸ In addition, perpetrator studies expert Alette Smuelers—ultimately a defender of Arendt’s thesis—acknowledges that “obedience, conformity, group dynamics,” do indeed play a part in genocide, but so too do “many other social-psychological mechanisms,” leading to a true multi-variate explanation lacking in the previous scholarship derived from Arendt’s conclusions.⁹⁹ However, synthesizing Kelley’ and Gilbert’s arguments made eighty years ago accomplishes the same thing. Kelley and Gilbert both saw the criminals of the Third Reich for what they were: complicated individuals that were part of a singularly-minded ideological system that, in the end, necessitated the genocide of a supposedly eternal enemy. While it is certainly a shame that an opportunity for a more accurate Third Reich diagnosis was missed as the Kelley-Gilbert debate moldered following the Nuremberg trials, leading to decades of compelling, if still inadequate, theorizing, one can also reasonably say that it is better late than never.

Better late than never though this may be, this delay in diagnosing the Third Reich may also suggest something deeper: that there were, and thus always will be, limitations to psychologizing history. The limitations of psychologizing historical figures long dead is problematic enough, but how does one psychologize something as complex as a society, particularly one as chaotic as the Third Reich? A society is made up of individual people, each with their own motivations, dreams, fears; that level of granularity makes it incredibly difficult to generalize, perhaps even impossible, especially many decades on. And lest we forget, cultural and political norms, as well as historical circumstance, can easily overwhelm our understanding of individual psychology, and neglect the role of agency. In addition, by focusing on the pathologies of the leaders or the social forces that help facilitate their will, it potentially neglects factors like institutional capture or even breakdown. While it is certainly possible that understanding the mind of an all-encompassing personality like Adolf Hitler can be accomplished through thorough biographical analysis, how can one be certain that understanding him, or understanding any of the Third Reich’s leadership, allow us to accurately understand—or diagnose—the whole of German society that lived under their collective boot? We may be able to understand the psychological contours of the Third Reich’s system and the personalities of those who directed it, but to claim that this gives us a window into the soul of an ordinary German—from the small town baker that voted for the NSDAP in 1933, to the Einsatzcommando with the blood of a hundred innocents on his hands—is quite possibly a fool’s errand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

Bell, Daniel. “Is Eichmann in All of Us?” New York Times, May 26, 1974. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/26/archives/is-eichmanna-in-all-of-us-eichmann-in-us-all.html?searchResultPosition=14.

Elms, Alan C. “The Crisis of Confidence in Social Psychology,” American Psychologist (October 1975), 967-976.

Freud, Anna. The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, rev. ed. London: Karnac Books, 1966. Accessed via: https://psptraining.com/wp-content/uploads/Freud-A.-1936-1993.The-ego-and-the-

mechanisms-of-defence.-London-Karnac-Books.pdf.

Gilbert, Gustave M. Nuremberg Diary. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1947.

Gilbert, Gustave M. The Psychology of Dictatorship: Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1950.

Goldensohn, Leon. The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses, edited by Robert Gellately. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Kelley, Douglas M. 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals. London: W.H. Allen, 1947.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986.

Marcus, Steven. “Obedience to Authority An Experimental View. By Stanley Milgram. illustrated. 224 pp. New York: Harper & Row.” New York Times, January 13, 1974. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/01/13/archives/obedience-to-authority-an-experimental-view.html?searchResultPosition=10.

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963), 371-378.

New York Times Editorial. “Hitler Power Seen in Middle Class; Dorothy Thompson, Back From Germany, Calls Him ‘Apotheosis of the Little Man.’” New York Times, May 12, 1933. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1933/05/12/archives/hitler-power-seen-in-middle- class-dorothy-thompson-back-from.html.

Orwell, George. “Wells, Hitler, and the World State,” in Critical Essays. London: Secker & Warburg, 1946). Accessed via: https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/CriticalEssays/wells_hitler.html

Ring, Kenneth. “Experimental Social Psychology: Some Sober Questions About Some Frivolous Values.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3 (1967), 113-123.

Sullivan, Walter. “65% in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain; Yale Experiment Shows Many Became Distraught Over Cruelty but Did Not Stop.” New York Times, October 26, 1963. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1963/10/26/archives/65-in-test-blindly-obey-order-to-inflict-pain-yale-experiment-shows.html?searchResultPosition=5.

Thompson, Dorothy. Let the Record Speak. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939.

Zimbardo, Philip. “The Mind is a Formidable Jailer.” New York Times, April 8, 1973. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/a-pirandellian-prison-the-mind-is-a-formidable- jailer.html?searchResultPosition=12.

Secondary Sources

Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

Blass, Thomas. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Brannigan, Augustine. Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Cesarini, David. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer”. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2006.

Dimsdale, Joel E. Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

De Vos, Jan. “From Milgram to Zimbardo: The Double-Birth of Postwar

Psychology/Psychologization.” History of the Human Sciences 23, no. 5 (2010), 156-175.

El-Hai, Jack. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of the Minds at the End of World War II. New York: MJF Books, 2013.

Farr, Robert M. The Roots of Modern Social Psychology, 1872-1954. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Fenigstein, Allan. “Milgram’s Shock Experiments and the Nazi Perpetrators: A Contrarian Perspective on the Role of Obedience Pressures During the Holocaust.” Theory and Psychology 25, no. 5 (2015), 581-598.

Gordon, Peter E. “What is Intellectual History? A frankly partisan introduction to a frequently misunderstood field.” Unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, revised Spring 2012.

Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995.

Haslam, S. Alexander, and Reicher, Stephen D. “Contesting the ‘Nature’ of Conformity: What the Milgram and Zimbardo Studies Really Show.” Public Library of Service Biology 10, no. 11 (2012), 1-4.

Hirsch, Francine. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Tribunal After WWII. Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Lemov, Rebecca. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

Mandel, David. “The Obedience Alibi: Milgram’s Account of the Holocaust Reconsidered.” Analyse & Kritik: Zeitschrift fürSozialwissenschaften 20 (1998), 74-94.

Pick, Daniel. The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rees, Lawrence. The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History. New York: Public Affairs, 2025.

Smeulers, Alette, Maartje Weerdesteijn, Barbora Hola, eds. Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theories, Methods, and Evidence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019.

NOTES:

1. Robert Houghwout Jackson Papers, box 107 (Library of Congress), quoted in Joel E. Dimsdale, Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 58.

2. Ibid., 59.

3. Douglas Kelley, “Preliminary Studies of the Rorschach Records,” 45-48, quoted in Dimsdale, Anatomy of Malice, 80.

4. Peter E. Gordon, “What is Intellectual History? A frankly partisan introduction to a frequently misunderstood field.” Unpublished manuscript (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, revised Spring 2012), 2.

5. Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9.

6. Ibid., 10.

7. Ibid., 24, 101.

8. “Hitler Power Seen in Middle Class; Dorothy Thompson, Back From Germany, Calls Him ‘Apotheosis of the Little Man.’” New York Times, May 12, 1933.

9. Ibid., 16, 17.

10. Anna Freud, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, rev. ed. (London: Karnac Books, 1966), 120.

11. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 19.

12. Ibid., 32-33.

13. Ibid., 149.

14. Ibid., 139.

15. Ibid., 87.

16. Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939), 217.

17. George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler, and the World State,” in Critical Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1946), 98.

18. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 172.

19. Laurence Rees, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History (New York: Public Affairs, 2025), 316.

20. Dimsdale, Anatomy of Malice, 63-64.

21. Douglas M. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals (London: W.H. Allen, 1947), 12.

22. Ibid., 204, 235.

23. Ibid., 237.

24. Ibid., 239.

25. Ibid., 51.

26. Jack El-Hai, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of the Minds at the End of World War II (New York: MJF Books, 2013), 210.

27. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 152.

28. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, 76.

29. Ibid., 52, 64-65.

30. Ibid., 75-76.

31. Leon Goldensohn, The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses, ed. by Robert Gellately (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 101.

32. Ibid., 118.

33. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 64.

34. Ibid., 144, 145.

35. Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1947), 10.

36. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 177.

37. Gustave M. Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship: Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1950), 6, 14.

38. Ibid., 64.

39. Ibid., 299-300.

40. Ibid., 304.

41. Francine Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Tribunal After WWII (Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), 231.

42. Ibid., 232.

43. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 93.

44^. Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, 100.

45. Ibid., 102.

46. Ibid., 106.

47. Ibid., 109.

48. Goldensohn, Nuremberg Interviews, 119.

49. Ibid., 130, 131-132.

50. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, 397.

51. Rees, The Nazi Mind, 316.

52. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, 3.

53. Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, 297.

54. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 146.

55. Ibid., 148.

56. Daniel Bell, “Is Eichmann in All of Us?” New York Times, May 26, 1974.

57. Ibid.

58. Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 226, 227.

59. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 21, 22.

60. Ibid., 25, 26.

61. Ibid., 48.

62. Ibid., 49.

63. Ibid., 252.

64. Ibid., 276.

65. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 246.

66. Dimsdale, Anatomy of Malice, 168.

67. Robert M. Farr, The Roots of Modern Social Psychology, 1872-1954 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 153.

68. Lemov, World as Laboratory, 227.

69. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 219.

70. Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 94.

71. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995), 141.

72. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963), 371, 378.

73. Walter Sullivan, “65% in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain; Yale Experiment Shows Many Became Distraught Over Cruelty but Did Not Stop,” New York Times, October 26, 1963.

74. Lemov, World as Laboratory, 227.

75. Steven Marcus, “Obedience to Authority An Experimental View. By Stanley Milgram. illustrated. 224 pp. New York: Harper & Row,” New York Times, January 13, 1974.

76. Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World, 268.

77. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 5-6.

78. Lemov, World as Laboratory, 227.

79. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 178.

80. Philip Zimbardo, “The Mind is a Formidable Jailer,” New York Times, April 8, 1973.

81. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 179.

82. Ibid.

83. Jan De Vos, “From Milgram to Zimbardo: The Double-Birth of Postwar Psychology/Psychologization.” History of the Human Sciences 23, no. 5 (2010), 171, 172.

84. S. Alexander Haslam & Stephen D. Reicher, “Contesting the ‘Nature’ of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s Studies Really Show,” Public Library of Service Biology 10, no. 11 (2012), 3.

85. David Mandel, “The Obedience Alibi: Milgram’s Account of the Holocaust Reconsidered,” Analyse & Kritik: Zeitschrift fürSozialwissenschaften 20 (1998), 5, 6, 7.

86. Allan Fenigstein, “Milgram’s Shock Experiments and the Nazi Perpetrators: A Contrarian Perspective on the Role of Obedience Pressures During the Holocaust,” Theory and Psychology 25, no. 5 (2015), 589, 594.

87. “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” Life, November 28, 1960 & December 10, 1960.

88. Nirit Anderman, “Long-lost Recordings of Eichmann Confessing to the Final Solution Revealed,” Haaretz, May. 23, 2022.

89. Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 78, 80.

90. Ibid., 29, 81.

91. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 251-252.

92. Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World, 276.

93. David Cesarini, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2006), 15.

94. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 249.

95. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986), 5.

96. Ibid., 12, 15, 17.

97. Ibid., 418, 464, 488.

98. Augustine Brannigan, Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 206.

99. Alette Smuelers, “Historical Overview of Perpetrator Studies,” in Alette Smuelers, Maartje Weerdesteijn, Barbora Hola, eds. Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theories, Methods, and Evidence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 19.

“The formation of reactions against certain impulses give the deceptive appearance of a change of content, as if egotism had become altruism and cruelty had changed into sympathy. The formation of these reactions is favored by the fact that many impulses appear almost from the beginning in contrasting pairs; this is a remarkable state of affairs called the ambivalence of feeling and is quite unknown to the layman. This feeling is best observed and grasped through the fact that intense love and intense hate occur so frequently in the same person.”
—Sigmund Freud

“There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.”
—Eric Hoffer

“We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.”
—François de La Rochefoucauld

…

On April 12th, 2026, Ezra Klein, the 2000s policy wonk boy-wonder, wrote for the New York Times an article the reheats the usually-reasonable argument that left-liberals’ inability to engage with their critics is the Democrats’ real problem. While the main thrust of the article focused on the somehow-continually-rising neutron star of internet leftist punditry—and, to name just one recent example of internet leftist brain vomit, bemoaner of the Soviet Union’s collapse—Hasan Piker, Klein shared what are apparently his thoughts on Zionism and anti-Zionism. In the article, Klein repeats a variation of an argument that has become a bit of a meme at this point, given that it is going on three years since the massacre of October 7th, 2023, kicked off the series of events that, almost certainly, has led to the U.S. and Israel’s 2026 war on Iran. That argument, in Klein’s words, is as follows:

Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing. It will simply not be possible to treat it as a marginal viewpoint that can be shamed or shunned into invisibility. Yes, antisemitism often cloaks itself in anti-Zionism. So don’t do the antisemites’ work for them. If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.

When looking at this line, which has been making the rounds among Israel-focused commentators, without squinting too hard, it comes across as a perhaps-reasonable, most-certainly-framed-as-pragmatic approach to winning elections as a Democrat in the foreseeable future; emptily performative pledges of rejecting “AIPAC money” certainly suggest it. Maybe that’s true; I honestly don’t know, nor care, as long as this newest incarnation of the “JQ” doesn’t become a major plank of any politician in the running for the 2028 ticket. It’s just not that important, all things considered. But what is important is the voodoo morality play in which Klein, and an increasing number of otherwise-smart people, are engaging. It is probably one of the more galling inversions of how we, at least should, understand agency when it comes to human behavior, both in the present and in the past. The argument essentially goes like this:

“The recent rise of antisemitism or dislike of Israel didn’t come from nowhere. It’s obviously a reaction to Israel’s behavior since October 7th if not long before!”

Or, the ostensibly more nuanced version:

“The recent rise of antisemitism or dislike of Israel might not be just because of Israel’s actions, but it’s obviously not not a factor!”

Really? Is it really that obvious? There has indeed been a rise in measurable antisemitism and a decline in measurable support of Israel, particularly among young voters. But to simply attribute that to people being aware of alleged war crimes or misbehavior on the part of the IDF, or to resentment—as Klein suggests—at being called antisemitic for having a fixation on Israel and its behavior, strikes me as, to be blunt, stupid and ethically childish. This is primarily because the “anti-Zionist position” has not changed since it became the de facto position of people identifying as postcolonial or anti-imperialist leftists over half a century ago. As Eli Kowaz writes:

For most of the people who hold anti-Zionist views today, the framework came first. Not as a response to Israeli conduct, but as a prior — built over decades in activist spaces, campus culture, and international institutions long before Gaza. The question isn’t what Israel did to produce this moment. It’s what was already waiting when the moment arrived. [Emphasis added]

Blaming Israel for people unaffected by things Israel does or does not do—that is, 99% of Americans—disliking the Israeli government, Israeli citizens, or, most unfortunately, Jews as a whole including those in the diaspora, is not a nuanced position. This is despite being framed that way by people like Klein, or anyone else; not when similar “nuance” is not granted to any other conflict or state, including those of our own allies (after all, where are people blaming any anti-Arab sentiment on the atrocities committed by the Houthis in the Yemeni Civil War?). This double standard exists all over the place, but this is a particular problem on the American left; the American right was already playing around with this argument (and way of thinking) for years. There is distrust or even hatred of Ukraine in America’s right wing coalition; I personally think that position is steeped in conspiratorial thinking, a weird proxy for postliberal fantasies that involve Russia, and other pseudo-intellectual premises, but at least it’s more consistent with their distrust or even hatred of Israel. Much of the American left has no such consistency, flawed as it might be. But the point is that neither of those positions—a knee-jerk distrust or hatred of Israel or Ukraine (or any country with whom the United States is allied, for that matter)—are coming from an informed, or honest place.

To be clear at least about my position on things: people can hate Zionism, or Israel, or, yes, even Jews, all they want. But what they cannot do is pretend that it is coming from some magically nuanced and informed place that also just so happens to provide an agency-free cover for the person hating Zionism, Israel, or the Jews. This is peak “look at what you made me do” schoolyard bully logic. Such logic is the jet fuel that powers the populist impulse that has been infecting American psychopolitics for the last decade and a half. If it were based on being informed, then the people engaging in such anti-logic—especially those who should clearly know better, like Klein—would realize the exact same kind of thing they are now defending is something they would find abhorrent if they saw it in a different, historical light. Because Americans have done this song and dance before, where we use stories of horror and strife overseas to create justifications for distrust, conspiratorial thinking, and bigotry here at home, as if the former has anything to do with the latter.

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…

In 1937, the Japanese Empire attacked and invaded China and, in many ways, marked the true beginning of the Second World War. There had been localized conflict in northern Manchuria as early as 1931, but total war broke out across China in July of 1937. It was a smashing defeat for the Chinese, resulted in the occupation of Shanghai, and left the way open for the Japanese to invade and occupy the Chinese capital of Nanjing.

The Japanese forces entered Nanjing in December of 1937 and the genocide known as the Nanjing Massacre—sometimes the Rape of Nanjing—began almost immediately. The destruction seen in Shanghai had been shocking, as could be expected, but no one observing (or likely experiencing) the violence brought upon by the Japanese Imperial Army to the people of Nanjing to be so horrific. The late historian Iris Chang immortalized this horror in her 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, and there are far more stories from this phantasmagorical event to tell than can possibly be covered here, but the essence of what Chang described cannot be ignored. Amid systematic mass executions of thousands of Chinese civilians, there were killing contests held by the Japanese, often via the method of beheading with a katana, something witnessed by many Chinese and even glowingly reported on in Japanese newspapers. One witness and miraculous survivor, Tang Shunsan, recalled that after each bound prisoner was beheaded, the Japanese soldiers would shout in unison “Kill and count! Kill and count!” as one of the men would pick up the head and toss it into a pile. Tang was able to survive after getting buried by corpses and playing dead for several hours.

There were also hideous stories of death by torture, including live burials and subsequent crushing, mutilation, burning, freezing by exposure, being fed to dogs, and other ghoulishly creative methods. There were also, of course, almost uncountable cases of mass rape, with the Japanese soldiers paying no mind to age in the most literal sense. Iris Chang, calling it “one of the greatest mass rapes in world history,” cites Susan Brown Miller, who “believes that the Rape of Nanking was probably the single worst instance of wartime rape inflicted on a civilian population with the sole exception of the treatment of Bengali women by Pakistani soldiers in 1971,” and that it probably “surpasses in scale even the raping of women in the former Yugoslavia” in the 1990s.

The point, Chang later explains, is that “there seemed to be no limit to the Japanese capacity for human degradation and sexual perversion in Nanking.” Unlike Japan’s closest European ally, Nazi Germany, the Japanese government and media, at least initially, did very little to hide what they were doing. Indeed, it was clear many were proud of it. Thus, many Americans, especially those who followed international news, were aware of all this horror and many were disgusted. But China was still a world away, and the desire to avoid entanglement in another global war was still strong in 1937-1938, at least among much of the populace (if not in the Roosevelt administration). That all changed on December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the American forces stationed at Pearl Harbor.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was shocking; thousands were dead, seemingly out of nowhere. War was immediately approved by Congress and declared. The almost 130,000 Japanese Americans, thanks to their heritage and, in many cases, familial connections to the home islands, were immediately seen as suspect by many of their non-Japanese countrymen. Many first generation Japanese immigrants had already been compiled onto FBI lists for several months before the Pearl Harbor attack, thanks to the increasingly tense situation between the Japanese Empire and the United States. It seemed clear to many in the federal government that the Issei (first generation) and even Nisei (second generation) Japanese Americans posed a legitimate security risk, given the situation with Japan.

Nevertheless, some early reports likely sounded promising. For example, basing his claims on the intelligence reports of the Navy’s Lieutenant Commander K.D. Ringle, the syndicated newspaper columnist John Franklin Carter (and spy for President Franklin D. Roosevelt) wrote the following to FDR:

There will be no armed uprising of Japanese […] The essence of what Munson [another private spy for FDR] has to report is that, to date, he has found no evidence which would indicate that there is a danger of widespread anti-American activities among this population group. He feels that the Japanese are in more danger from the whites than the other way around. […] There will undoubtedly be some sabotage financed by Japan and executed largely by imported agents or agents already imported. There will be the odd case of fanatical sabotage by some Japanese “crackpot.” […] Japan will commit some sabotage largely depending on imported Japanese as they are afraid of and do not trust the Nisei.

Indeed, these intelligence reports portrayed the second-generation Nisei as profoundly loyal, with the aforementioned Munson writing another report to FDR one week later that estimated “90 to 98 percent [of Nisei] are loyal to the United States,” and that “They are not Japanese in culture. They are foreigners to Japan.” These kinds of distinctions would ultimately matter very little, which became clear on February 19th, 1942, when FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which read, in part, as follows:

Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.

The day after this order was issued, the Secretary of War authorized the creation of Military Areas as part of the Western Defense Command under the command of Lieutenant General John DeWitt. In these areas, concentration camps would be set up. Who would populate these concentration camps had already been established by a Stanford lawyer and member of the Washington Army National Guard named Karl Bendetsen who sent a memo to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, titled “Alien Enemies on the West Coast.” The memo painted a picture of a Japanese American fifth column, implicating even the second generation Nisei, who, less than a year before, were being called 90-98% loyal to the United States. Indeed, as the memo stated:

A substantial majority of the Nisei bear allegiance to Japan, are well-controlled and disciplined by the enemy, and at the proper time will engage in organized sabotage, particularly should a raid along the Pacific Coast be attempted by the Japanese. […] This will require an evacuation and internment problem, of some considerable proportions.

This pre-9066 sentiment had not even been limited to internal memos circulating within the administration’s War Department. It made appearances in national media as well, under the byline of the incredibly influential Washington D.C., columnist Walter Lippman, who wrote a widely-circulated column, appearing in the Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and literally hundreds of other newspapers across the nation. The February 13th, 1942, column read, in part, as follows:

The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without. […] It is a fact that there has been no important sabotage on the Pacific Coast. From what we know about Hawaii and about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some would like to think, a sign there is nothing to be feared. It is a sign that the blow is well-organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect. […] There is the assumption that if the rights of a citizen are abridged anywhere they have been abridged everywhere. Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.

Lippman’s influence cannot be overestimated; as historian Richard Reeves writes about Lippman, he “was essentially writing to an audience of one: Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Acting more as a chorus to Lippman’s antagonizing column than as representatives of all their constituents, the Congressional representatives of California, Oregon, and Washington signed a letter to FDR that read, “We recommend the immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage, and all others, aliens and citizens alike, who presence shall be deemed dangerous or inimical to the defense of the United States from all strategic areas.” The pressure was clearly enough, because less than a week later, FDR signed Executive Order 9066 and handed the necessary authority over to the War Department, who quickly began setting up assembly centers, relocation centers, and internment camps, most of them dotting the American southwest and interior of the West Coast states.

To say Japanese Americans were wholly unprepared for the evacuations would be a mischaracterization. Many War Department representatives like John McCloy would travel to various Japanese American enclaves, particularly in big West Coast cities like San Francisco, to meet with community leaders and discuss the evacuation process. But to paint this as a more humane version of what the Third Reich had been doing to German Jewish citizens would be missing the point and be painting a distinction without much of a meaningful difference, at least in the years before Kristallnacht. Japanese Americans were aware of the looming day of their internment—of the literal stripping of their constitutional rights as citizens—and many acted accordingly.

That was the case with Hideo Murata, an Issei from Monterey County in California, as well as an American veteran of the First World War and recipient of “Honorary Citizen” status thanks to that service. After confirming with the Monterey County Sheriff (and long time friend) Alex Bordges that evacuations were happening, “Murata went to a hotel in Pismo Beach, paid for a room, and shot himself in the head. In his left hand, he clutched the [Honorary Citizen] testimonial from [the United States government,” to quote historian Richard Reeves’ account. This, tragically, would not be as uncommon as one might hope as evacuation day loomed and in the years that followed. As Reeves reminds us, “[Murata] was not the first or the last Japanese American suicide.”

Japanese Americans were quickly hit with travel restrictions and curfews that did not apply to anyone else as the evacuation plans began to take shape. They were given a chance to sell of whatever valuables they couldn’t carry, usually for a pittance so small it would be laughable if it wasn’t such an indignity. For example, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, the Kobayashi family—a relatively successful farming family with a barn, land, crops, livestock, equipment, and a home sold it all for $75, about $1,519 in 2026 money. In scenes mirroring necrophagous Germans absorbing looted and abandoned Jewish businesses across the Atlantic, non-Japanese Americans gobbled up abandoned Little Tokyo storefronts in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities for a song after their owners were evacuated by the National Guard.

The tragic indignities of evacuation could be seen even more acutely with the evacuation of the Japanese American population of Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, Washington. They were to be transported by rail down to Manzanar, “a barren, wind-whipped ghost town 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the eastern foothills of the Sierras, on the road between tiny places called Independence and Lone Pine,” to quote Richard Reeves again. Despite the softened framing from the likes of the Seattle Times, it quickly became obvious that what was happening to all of these families lugging what little baggage they could carry. As Richard Reeves summarizes:

Thirteen of the marchers that day were seniors at Bainbridge High School, who had not been allowed to attend their senior ball the night before because of the 8:00pm curfew for all American Japanese. Many of the white residents of the island lined the ferry road, some of them crying and calling out to friends in the march. Some of the spectators were holding the dogs and cats of the evacuees, who were not allowed to carry pets. Many of the dogs had stopped eating when they were taken from their owners, and died within a week or two. […] There was no music and no crowd of white residents waving and crying when the families of Bainbridge arrived at Manzanar. There were construction workers, some of them Japanese volunteers, banging together 504 tar-paper barracks, each barrack divided into six units of sixteen by twenty feet. The camp was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard towers with machine guns pointed in toward thirty-six blocks of barracks.

Like all stories of internment, aspects of normalcy creeped in during the years the America’s Japanese population was kept behind barbed wire. However, normalcy is the way people cope with what is decidedly abnormal, or even intolerable. And it was clear, at nearly all times, that the Japanese American experience from 1942-1945, was anything but normal, in the sense that whatever had been normal for the internees was long gone. This is reflected in many of the diaries, letters, and recollections of those who were interned at camps like Manzanar, or Tule Lake, or Topaz, or assembly centers like Fresno, or Salinas, or Tanforan. This is seen in the account by Tanforan internee, Charles Kikuchi:

Mom is gradually taking things into her own hands. […] For 28 years she had been restricted in Vallejo, raising children and doing homework. […] Now she finds herself here with a lot of Japanese, and it has given her a great deal of pleasure to make all these new social contacts. Pop, on the other hand, rarely leaves the house and still retains his contempt for the majority of the Japanese residents. His attitude is intensified when he sees that Mom is gradually moving away from him. I have a suspicion she rather enjoys the whole thing. She dyed her hair today, and Pop made some comment that she shouldn’t try to act so young.

These changes might seem relatively minor, but it pays to remember that none of these changes would have occurred had Japanese Americans not been uprooted and put in these camps to begin with. Families throughout the camp system would fracture thanks to these circumstances, with particular fissures occurring between the Issei and Nisei. While such generational divisions between immigrants is perfectly normal, it got exacerbated by the camp system and the mindset into which it had put everyone. Kikuchi observed this, in that he saw Nisei more “taking things in stride” and “thinking about the future,” but it was not a firm rule. In fact, many of the Japanese Americans that defied evacuation orders were themselves Nisei, and were most aware of and offended by the indignity of internment. One of them, a Quaker student at the University of Washington named Gordon Hirabayashi, wrote the following in a letter from May of 1942:

This order for the mass evacuation of all persons of Japanese descent denies them the right to live. It forces thousands of energetic, law-abiding citizens to exist in a miserable psychological and horrible physical atmosphere. […] It kills the desire for a higher life. Hope for the future is exterminated.

There was plenty of reason for many Japanese Americans to feel such hopelessness, especially when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided in 1943 that curfew and general restrictions on Japanese American movement were in fact constitutional, given the state of war. Not only was the wider American culture not particularly on their side, neither was the law that supposedly protected everyone equally and blindly. Hirabayashi devoted himself to his Christian principles that he had inherited from his parents—Christian converts from Japan, which was hardly any more common in the early 20th century than it was centuries earlier—but not all Japanese Americans felt that way or had such perspectives or principles toward which they could turn. “Life,” as Richard Reeves explains, “continued to be a struggle,” with circumstances in the camps sometimes taking “a tragic turn.” As Reeves continues:

There had been suicides and suicide attempts and more than a dozen Japanese men had been killed or wounded by soldiers guarding them in the relocation centers and in Justice Department camps and jails. On May 12, 1942, a man named Kanesaburo Oshima was killed by a sentry at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a temporary center for the so-called dangerous aliens. The next day, Ichiro Shimoda, a forty-five-year-old gardener from Los Angeles who had served in the Japanese army as a young man and was arrested on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, was badly wounded by another guard at Fort Sill. He was known to be mentally unstable and had twice attempted to kill himself by trying to bite off his own tongue. An FBI report dated May 18, 1942, said he was shot twice while trying to climb over a camp fence. On May 16, 1942, Hikoji Takeuchi was shot at Manzanar by a military police private named Edward Phillips. A WRA [War Relocation Authority] investigation report quoted his commanding officer, Lieutenant Buckner, as saying that guard service was so monotonous that MPs “welcomed a little excitement, such as shooting a Jap.”

Legal and moral indignities had, clearly, turned into outright abuse and violent persecution by the authorities responsible for the now-hundreds of thousands of Japanese American internees. Abuse was by no means the norm across the board, but the circumstances had created a pervasive atmosphere of “frustration and fear,” in which the threat of violence became endemic to the internee experience.

As is often the case in concentration camps, the violence began to turn inward from the internees themselves. Sexual assault, while never reaching epidemic proportions, did still become more common than it otherwise would have. Even before internment occurred, there was an instance of a gang of thugs taking advantage of the situation, with “a woman [being] assaulted by men who forced their way into her home posing as FBI agents,” as reported by the Densho Japanese American Legacy Project. In describing the inward turn of the violence, the report continues that “within one month of the opening of Tanforan, three rapes and at least two attempted assaults” had occurred, with very little if any attempt to find the perpetrators occurring.

Internal discord and even violence became even more systemic as angry Kibei—that is, second generation Japanese Americans who had been at least partly educated in Japan before returning to the United States—formed anti-American gangs and, as Richard Reeves describes, “began to terrorize residents [of the camps] they considered spies or collaborators for the [Roosevelt] administration […] traveling in groups during the day, then harassing and beating the residents they did not like, usually at night.” This led to a community council member named Fred Tayama almost being beaten to death. Most of the time, camp administrators ignored these gangs and outbreaks of violence, “saying it was up to the Japanese to settle things among themselves.”

Obvious as it might seem, it must be stated that such circumstances were not particularly appreciated by the wider American public. Obviously, as described earlier, there was, by no means, a singularly delighted reaction to the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans among the wider American public; many non-Japanese neighbors and friends expressed grief and outrage at seeing members of their community treated this way. However, the compassion Japanese Americans experienced from some of their neighbors and friends was by no means the norm. According to a poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1942, 93% of Americans supported the relocation of Japanese Issei while only 1% opposed it, and nearly two-thirds of Americans supported the internment of Nisei while only one quarter opposed it. To most Americans, any and all Japanese—Issei or Nisei or otherwise—were a liability in a time of war, especially one that had begun the way this one had for Americans.

With such broad public support of the measures made possible by Executive Order 9066, not much in the way of justification was required. However, justifications proliferated, as if many of those supporting—or enabling—the evacuations and internment realized how such policy looked, especially vis-à-vis the war with Nazi Germany, whose policies of internment were well-enough-known. Much of the justifications for the internment of Japanese Americans were either on-the-nose racism, or, more nefariously, reeking of post-hoc moralizing. In the case of the former, angry and threatening notes started getting shoved under the doors of Japanese-owned businesses, like that of the Tamaki family in San Francisco on the eve of evacuation, with the one addressed to them reading, “This is a warning. Get out. We don’t want you in our beautiful country. Go where your ancestors came from. Once a Jap, always one. Get out.”

Townsfolk in various places near the Manzanar camp even went on the record, with a local barber proclaiming that “We ought to take those yellow-tails right down to the edge of the Pacific and say to ’em, ‘Okay boys, over there’s Tokyo. Start walkin’.” More chillingly, a flight instructor in Inyo County proclaimed, “It’s a plain case of survival of the fittest. It’s either us or the god-damned Yellow-bellies! What are we waiting for? The Army needs target practice on those sons-of-bitches.” Shopkeepers in California concurred, putting up signs in their windows saying things like, “This restaurant poisons both rats and Japs,” “Open hunting season for Japs,” and, in the case of a barbershop, “Japs shaved: Not responsible for accidents.”

However, it was the previously mentioned post-hoc moralizing that strikes a particular chord when thinking about overseas events being used to justify at-home bigotry in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Many Americans were indeed aware of and horrified by the atrocities taking place in the Pacific, well before the attacks on Pearl Harbor. It was well-covered in the media and while there was not nearly the reach or technological capability possessed in the 1930s-1940s as there is today, plenty of what was occurring in China was reported by a number of American foreign correspondents.

As Iris Chang explained, the three main American journalists stationed in China during the Nanjing Massacre—Frank Durdin of the New York Times, Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News, and C. Yates McDaniel from the Associated Press—“made an enormous impact” in raising international awareness of the Empire’s crimes. They “[wrote] riveting stories that were splashed across the biggest and most prestigious newspapers in the United States,” and, like many international observers, even took part in trying to save as many Chinese civilians from the awful fate that had befallen so many. Even if they had not felt the moral pull to do the right thing in these instances, these men could not have forgotten what they had seen and experienced, and, they reasoned, neither would anyone else who read their copy. As Chang summarizes:

On December 15, most of the reporters left Nanjing for Shanghai to file their stories. Their last day in the city was grisly. On the way to the waterfront, the reporters literally had to drive over several feet of bodies under the Water Gate, where dogs were already starting to gnaw on the corpses. Later, as they waited for their ship to arrive, they saw the Japanese military line up one thousand Chinese men, force them to kneel in small groups, and shoot each of them in the back of the head. During the execution, some of the Japanese were laughing and smoking, as if they greatly enjoyed the entire spectacle.

Later, the AP’s McDaniel encountered another group of Chinese prisoners, one frantically pleading with him on hands and knees to save him from being murdered like everyone else. McDaniel remembered: “I could do nothing. My last remembrance of Nanking—dead Chinese, dead Chinese, dead Chinese.” These tragic sentiments were seen by millions, amplified further still by newsreel footage provided by Norman Alley and Eric Mayell of Fox Movietone titled “Butchery and Looting Reign in Nanking.” Japanese media tried to create PR spin, but the damage had been done, and American audiences were outraged at what they saw.

However, after the Pearl Harbor attacks, any chance of principled moral outrage on behalf of the Chinese suffering from the rapacious assault by the Japanese Empire gave way to full-on nativist paranoia and bigotry, and that Chinese suffering was reduced to mere post-hoc justification for the state-enforced expulsion and internment to come. The Japanese Empire’s continued expansion throughout southeast Asia, as well as the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States, did not help matters either. As Richard Reeves writes, “whatever goodwill there had been toward Issei and Nisei after Pearl Harbor was gone as news arrived daily of seemingly invincible and brutal Japanese armies running wild through the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies,” leading to an atmosphere in which “tolerance of any kind was replaced by fear.”

While many were honest about their motives—such as columnist Henry McLemore, who wrote in both the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle that “personally, I hate the Japanese and that goes for all of them”—layers of more “high-minded” justifications for distrust, hatred, and expulsion began to appear almost immediately after the Pearl Harbor attacks, most of which had nothing even to do with the war. “Crime and Poverty Go Hand in Hand with Asiatic Labor,” blared the Chronicle on December 10th, 1941, as well as “Japanese a Menace to American Women,” emphasizing supposedly systemic problems with the Japanese American population that went beyond base fear. The Seattle Times ran a story involving two Nisei businessmen being indicted for allegedly trying to sell three industrial-grade storage tanks to the Japanese forces occupying China, thus linking the supposed Japanese American fifth column to the imperial ambitions of Emperor Hirohito. William Randolph Hearst was at the forefront of this kind of framing that highlighted Japanese atrocities, and escalated it into an all-out campaign as the war continued, providing fodder for those looking for such high-minded rationale to justify the maltreatment of their countrymen. It became all the easier to create a demonic image at home, within Americans’ reach, once the war began in earnest in 1942.

In the summer of 1942, the Japanese Army stormed the city of Nancheng and began a reign of terror nearly as horrific as the one that befell Nanjing five years earlier, and was followed up by a wave of experimental biological warfare conducted by the notorious Unit 731, who unleashed approximately 300 pounds of paratyphoid and anthrax germs onto the region after the army had destroyed the city. When the news broke in the spring of 1943, the New York Times would claim that “the Japanese have chosen how they want to represent themselves to the world. We shall take them at their own valuation, on their own showing. We shall not forget, and we shall see that a penalty is paid.” Similarly, the Los Angeles Times stated that “to say that these slayings were motivated by cowardice as well as savagery is to say the obvious. The Nippon war lords have thus proved themselves to be made of the basest metal.”

What neither of these publications admitted was that this operation had been conducted as a direct response to the United States’ own Doolittle Raid the year before, with the Japanese Army specifically targeting Nancheng’s citizens who had assisted the Doolittle raiders that had crashed in the Chinese countryside (just shy of seventy airmen in total). While it did nothing to justify the response made by the Japanese—which included torturing the Chinese civilians who had cared for the injured raiders and then later helped them escape—everyone involved in the raid’s planning, especially including Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle himself was fully aware and even predicted that there would be a wave of destructive vengeance that would follow his own vengeance-driven raid on the Japanese capitol, as explained by historian James M. Scott. This darker aspect of the Nancheng massacre—the “Rape of Nancheng” as some came to call it—was only revealed by the wartime recollections of the American missionaries stationed there, with one of them, a Reverand Charles Meeus, writing the following:

Little did the Doolittle men realize, that those same little gifts which they gave their rescuers in grateful acknowledgement of their hospitality— parachutes, gloves, nickels, dimes, cigarette packages—would, a few weeks later, become the telltale evidence of their presence and lead to the torture and death of their friends!

In the United States, there was certainly growing understandable outrage as the fighting in the Pacific intensified, and as stories of the brutal treatment of American POWs, and the overall carnage of the fighting made their way home. But as we have already seen, the reality was that many Americans were already prepared to hate the Japanese as a whole, even if they were their own neighbors. That turn may have seemed sudden, as if Pearl Harbor alone had created it. But at least one person had seen the writing on the wall as early as 1932: the Rabbi Rudolph Coffee of Oakland. In an editorial for Jewish News of Northern California, Rabbi Coffee wrote the following about a sad-looking Japanese American gardener who had smiled at him as the rabbi complimented his work:

I have harbored a distressing thought. Can it be that the white man is letting his innermost feelings about Japanese atrocities in China react upon this innocent gardener? Unfortunately, some mass-minded individuals will link all Japanese in one groove, quite unconscious of the startling fact that a poor Jap gardener in the United States may be just as opposed to Japanese militarism as were the innocent Germans in our midst to the tactics of Deutschland’s Kaiser.

At this point, it would perhaps be too obvious to say that Rabbi Coffee’s remarks proved tragically prescient. But they were. Almost a decade before Pearl Harbor, he identified the logic that would later help justify the incarceration of Japanese Americans: the projection of anger at an empire abroad onto innocent people at home, many of whom had little or even nothing to do with the empire in question. The concentration camps were not the outcome of some cool-headed grasp of strategy or justice. They were the result of fear, racialized and displaced, made easier to manage by turning neighbors into symbols of a global enemy and the architects of their own misfortune; a misfortune that many Americans, as often appears to be the case, were all too happy to endure.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “if those urban blacks didn’t act like such thugs, then less people would be afraid of them.” Or, perhaps more pointedly to this comparison, “then more people would support causes like Black Lives Matter.”

It sounds pretty ugly, doesn’t it?

Let’s be blunt. The latter example is the same logic being employed by Ezra Klein when he says rising anti-Zionism is being caused by Israel’s actions, and the former is the same logic being employed by anyone blaming the increase in antisemitism in the Western world on Israel’s actions; both kinds of justifications are increasingly common. But more to the point of this entire essay, if it wasn’t yet obvious, is that it’s also the same logic people used 85 years ago when they justified the internment of hundreds of thousands of their own countrymen by citing the barbaric actions of an overseas empire—far more barbaric than anything Israel has done both in scale and character, for what it’s worth, shocking as the Gaza War has been in its violence and destruction.

The choices we make are always part of an ecosystem of incentives; no choice is an island, so to speak. But a choice is still a choice, especially when it is applied to groups of people and in general terms. Just because the proverbial elephant we all ride is governed by emotions and impulses does not suddenly make the conclusions that come from those emotions and impulses understandable, much less defensible. This is to selectively apply agency, the lifeblood of populism, discrimination, and eventually, crimes against humanity. It’s not speech or expression or “dangerous ideas” or anything like that; it’s the true belief that one has no control over one’s own hatreds, and that those you hate are in absolute control. This was the case with Japanese Americans, particularly after the Pearl Harbor attacks, and much of that could be reduced to typical race hatred. Considering that antisemitism is more of a skeleton key that purports to explain the ills of the human experience, rather than typical race hatred, the significance is even more profound. The discontent, the distrust, and the hatred all come first; the justifications come later.

After all, before a single American GI set foot in the South Pacific, much less was killed by a Japanese banzai charge, Americans needed very little encouragement to indulge in race hatred that allowed them to celebrate the internment of their own countrymen. There might have been fear of the carnage to come that would consume so many American families, and at least that can be understood with hindsight, but no such excuse can be made for the people who have made hating Israeli forces and the Israeli government for their alleged (and quite possibly real) crimes and then see their proxies in American Jews. Perhaps, god forbid, that will change. But so far, it has not changed, and American moral hand-wringing over Israel’s conflicts has done very little to show itself as anything other than a vulgar kabuki.

When I told her what I was writing in this essay, my partner Molly asked me who this essay is for. That is a fair question (and a good one especially if you’re writing from a place of frustration). I think it was mostly for me, as a way to vent, as essays like this often begin; as Andrew Fox recently wrote, “I am furious at the antisemitism pouring through the West, confident and shameless.” I am pretty furious, at both the antisemitism, but also the willful hypocrisy, double-standards, and historical illiteracy that, as always, seems to animate it. But if I was to pinpoint an audience that I believe needs to hear what I’m saying, I’ll suggest that it’s for anyone who has vaguely or even poorly-defined animus toward any group of people or even particular state. It doesn’t even have to be Israel, though that state and its people are certainly the most relevant ones here.

There is a shocking amount of outsourcing of animus today. Seemingly no one can just be honest about where they are coming from. It brings to mind the famous line from Hans Landa—yes, a fictional character—in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds when explaining why he finds Jews distasteful: “You don’t like them. You don’t know why you don’t like them, all you know is that you find them repulsive.” Many people engaging in such animus outsourcing do well to embrace their inner Hans Landa. Or, if one is to be perhaps less uncharitable (or at least use a real life example), be more like the managing secretary of Salinas Valley’s Grower-Shipper Association Austin Anson, who told the Saturday Evening Post in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks, “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.”

It is difficult to be so forthright with one’s own priorities and biases, and especially socially unacceptable bigotries; as we have seen, it was as difficult nearly a century ago as it is now, except for the rare exception like Austin Anson and others like him. No one wants to be seen as being hateful of anyone for any reason, and yet, here we are, always hating. So, then as now, we search for reasons bigger than ourselves to justify something so base, so human; thus, so truly and fundamentally small.

This has been an issue since October 8th, 2023, when protests, vandalism, and the like might have been understandable (if a bit tone deaf) if they had solely occurred outside of Israeli embassies. It would have (and did, when it occurred) sent the message that the Israeli government under Netanyahu was the problem. But then the protests, vandalism, et cetera (eventually including violence) quickly started appearing outside of Jewish community centers, Jewish synagogues, and Jewish gatherings. Whenever I have pointed out the self-evidently ghoulish vibe and underlying suggestions this created, inevitably I would be met with dismissive responses of “well, this is about Zionism.” To which I would say, and I say even louder now, “who the fuck are we kidding here?”1 If this were about “Zionism,” and the purveyors of Zionism, and not a lazy conflation of Jews with Zionism, why not target the most significant (and most problematic) promoters of that ideology; that is dispensationalist Evangelical churches? Not that I want to see such protests, vandalism, and threats of (or real) violence disrupting those people’s lives either, but should there not at least be some consistency on this question if we are not to assume there is some self-selected, conspiratorial, and obviously bigoted reasoning going on?

Of course not. And this kind of inconsistency has continued long enough—going on three years—without being meaningfully addressed. So a new script and moral license needed to be and has been provided by Ezra Klein and those like him, and one that sounds very familiar indeed. After all, if one can’t bring oneself to call a spade a spade, it can be extremely handy to have proxies to give you all the justification needed for remaining complicit or even acting as a participant in the newest incarnation of the world’s oldest hatred.

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Hey everyone, it’s good to be back with all of you. I’ve just finished a lengthy writing session for grad school—my final semester of classes!—as well as some family issues that needed my immediate attention during most of March. But I’m back with a new special, historiography-focused episode of History Impossible. It was actually not one I was planning…

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Hello all. Some quick housekeeping before we get going here. I’m currently on the road, and haven’t had time to do as much work on the show or the Substack as I would like, but I am really happy to give you guys this newest essay. In case you missed it, there are a couple interviews I recently released that I’m really happy about.

First was my conversation with the journalist Eli Lake where we discussed the phenomenon of radical politics joining forces with Islamist radicals across the 20th century, particularly in the context of Iran, but also delving a little deeper into the “Green-Brown alliance” I’ve discussed on the show. You can check that out HERE.

Next was my conversation with the host of the Crackpot History Podcast, in which we discussed his mission to demystify stories and figures that are engaging with poor interpretations of history in order to advance, we’ll say, disagreeable political projects and beliefs. We discussed his work critiquing Darryl Cooper, host of the MartyrMade podcast, and his current series critiquing Scott Horton’s recent book Provoked, which lays the blame for the Russo-Ukrainian War at the feet of the West. You can check that one out HERE.

Anyway, that’s all I have for all of you. Please enjoy this essay that I honestly didn’t think I would stick with thanks to its stranger (than usual) subject matter, but it worked out. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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“I seek to describe the quite extraordinary atmosphere in which such things have become possible. I call that atmosphere anarchy; but insist that it is an anarchy in the centers where there should be authority. Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.”
—G.K. Chesterton

“We are always unhappy when are changing our nature. We are concerned that we fool with Mother Nature we will be made to pay a price. I will tell you in advance that what you are going to hear from me is the good news. I bring glad tidings. I am the optimist in today’s crowd. I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to.”
—Willard Gaylin

“I never asked for this.”
—Adam Jensen

…

It should not be surprising for me to say this, given that my beat is events and experiences of the past, but is not often that I directly write about the future. I may make implications and show that the past can somewhat inform us on what the future might hold, at least in terms of social and psychological trends and tendencies. But it is hard for me to avoid thinking about the future, especially the immediate future, since I am a fan of science fiction, particularly of the dystopian near-future variety. So when I read the recent profile of Looksmaxxer Clavicular in the New York Times, it got me thinking about the future and, thanks to my appreciation of near-future dystopian science fiction, what it resembled.

According to the profile, Clavicular—real name Braden Peters—and those like him have one goal in mind: “ascending” to aesthetic perfection (that is, looks) by any means necessary, in order to become more socially dominant. That can mean substances, surgery, and even self-mutilation. No cost is too great to achieve this goal. As the New York Times profiler Joseph Bernstein explains, this goal comes from a “bizarre argot and nihilistic worldview, in which the universe is a Darwinian nightclub full of aggressive men jockeying for status.” There are several implications that have come from this worldview—not least of which is a sort of black-pilled, extremely online misogyny common among incels and their subgroups—and the political associations are hard to avoid.1 However, once I became more aware of the Clavicular phenomenon (and it is a phenomenon if his social media metrics are anything to go by; 100,000 dollars a month streaming on Kick is nothing to sniff at), I started to sense that something felt familiar.

The year 2011 feels like an eternity ago, but that year, a video game was released that I had been looking forward to for a while. It was part of a long-running series that had gone dormant for almost a decade called Deus Ex, a cyberpunk dystopian universe set in the near future. The first two games—to which we will return later—took place further into the 21st century than many of humans living today will likely never see (2052 and 2072, respectively), but the new one, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, was a prequel that took place in—take a deep breath—2027.

When Human Revolution was released and I played through its 15-20-hour campaign, I, like millions of other players, was captivated by everything about it. But what captivated me most was this vision of the future it painted, one that I almost certainly would live to see. So as the years ticked by and 2027 started becoming more of a reality than a fictional forecast, I started looking to see if there was evidence we were heading in the direction predicted by Eidos Montreal’s masterpiece. Now, the vision for this future created in 2011 decidedly does not resemble our current present in 2026, or likely what the world will look like next year, especially in terms of societal aesthetics, urban development in some places (namely places like Hengsha Island, Shanghai, and Detroit, Michigan, both shown in the trailer above), and other specifics that will never perfectly (or even, in some cases, slightly) match up when predicted by speculative fiction. This can indeed be seen in the above-linked trailer. Nevertheless, there seems to be one thing that held true in the past decade and a half since Human Revolution was released, and that is the central theme that seems to drive both its and our society in the late 2020s: the idea of human-engineered perfection, particularly via new technologies, and particularly in a period defined by a decline of greater meaning.

One can certainly point out, and it would be fair to do so, that for the developers of a dystopian sci-fi video game to highlight such changes in 2011 was not particularly insightful, since we were already experiencing the early stages of such problems, with the birth pangs of 21st century American populism (the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, representing a rejection of supposedly meaningless American institutions, both political and religious) and online social networks making way for social media and smartphones becoming the norm. But to me, that smacks of hindsight bias; it is certainly true that those phenomena were beginning to coalesce and give us the picture shared by Human Revolution and our current era, but no one (or at least almost no one) lived as if those phenomena were coalescing. And coalesce they have.

These voids are depicted in Human Revolution and, like any good dystopian science-fiction, done in a very literal way to make sure as many people as possible pick up on them, in which the protagonist of the game, Adam Jensen, has become so heavily augmented with technology—in a nice nod to Robocop, no doubt an inspiration for this game’s setting and themes—that the question of whether or not he is even a human being is frequently called into question. In parts of the story, particularly when talking to characters of a more traditional, religious outlook, this question is expanded to include quite possibly everyone who has taken part in human augmentation, which has simply gone past giving people artificial limbs and organs who need them, and now includes people voluntarily sacrificing their (if you’ll pardon the cliche) god-given components in order to improve themselves. Or, in the vernacular of a one Braden “Clavicular” Peters, to “ascend.”

The civil unrest we see play out in Human Revolution is no less eerie in its resemblance to our own, despite it having everything to do with the story’s themes and specifics, and nothing to do with immigration restriction or, in a flashback to 2020, strained racial relations amid a global pandemic. When seen through a historical and psychological lens, civil unrest is almost always an act of meaning-making en masse; while the unrest we have seen play out during the 2020s has had more to do with political anger, and the unrest we see play out in Human Revolution has more to do with resisting human augmentation and preserving what it means to be human, both share the same impulse: to inject meaning into a world where meaning itself is being called into question or is even believed to flat-out not exist at all.

This brings us back to the curious case of Clavicular. To reiterate, as the New York Times piece put it, Peters’ outlook is a profoundly nihilistic one. And yet, unlike many black-pilled reprobates peppering cyberspace, Peters, to his credit I suppose, has taken matters into his own hands. He still does not believe that there is any greater meaning beyond beauty; he would likely agree with the maxim shared by a particularly vile character from Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2016 masterpiece The Neon Demon that “true beauty is the highest currency we have,” accentuated later by the film’s lead when she says that “beauty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

Nevertheless, Clavicular is, through his Looksmaxxing regimen, creating meaning to replace its absence. And the way he is creating meaning is by, regardless of whether one agrees with his methods or his thesis or even likes anything about him, perfecting himself through technology. He is not replacing his limbs, but he is injecting himself with drugs to, in his mind, improve them; he is not getting pieces of inorganic material implanted in his face or any other part of his body (yet), but he is supposedly creating microfractures in his jawbone to change its shape. The point is, in a crisis of meaning, humanity has a tendency to try and create it, and, to bring this back around to history and—for the moment—away from video games and future speculation, it is not the first time that notions of engineered perfection through technology (and a bit of social engineering) have been attempted to fill the fathomless void that threatens to swallow us all.

…

When one hears the word “eugenics,” one often thinks of the ghoul in human form we know as Dr. Josef Mengele, and, if they are unfortunate enough to read about his more sadistic experiments, is inclined to believe that it was only done for the man’s sick predisposition. In the case of Mengele (as well as other human experimenters, such as Japan’s Shirō Ishii), this was likely true, though there was always a layer of pretense that matters for what we are discussing here; that is, a pretense of the “eugenic health” of the people, often (though not always) reinforced by sincere notions of racial purity. That pretense, however cynical it was in the case of Mengele and many other medical sadists of the half-century before the end of the Second World War, was a very real belief particularly in the United States, and well before the rise of the Third Reich in Germany. As the famous psychologist and writer Robert Jay Lifton wrote in his incredible book, The Nazi Doctors:

There had been plenty of racial-eugenic passion in the United States, impulses to sterilize large numbers of criminals and mental patients out of fear of “national degeneration” and the threat to the health of “the civilized races,” who were seen to be “biologically plunging downward.” Associated with the American eugenics movement was a biomedical vision whose extent is suggested by the following quotation from a 1923 book by [psychologist and eugenicist] A.E. Wiggam: “The first warning which biology gives to statesmanship is that the advanced races of mankind are going backward; […] that civilization, as you have so far administered it, is self-destructive; that civilization always destroys the man that builds it; that your vast efforts to improve man’s lot, instead of improving man, are hastening the hour of his destruction.” [Emphasis added]

While sterilization programs and worse became symbolic of what eugenics truly meant in practice, Lifton is careful to explain that eugenics had two expressions: “positive” and “negative.” Negative eugenics involved the destruction and elimination of bad traits (through practices like sterilization and, as the Nazis would demonstrate, euthanasia and mass murder), while positive eugenics involved the promotion and, ideally, propagation of good traits (through incentivizing large, single-demographic families and prohibiting abortion). How those traits were defined—that is, what was “good” and what was “bad”—is certainly what is most problematic about late 19th century/early 20th century eugenics, especially given where it ended up in the 1930s-1940s, but it is important for us to recognize because it allows us to understand the key goal of eugenics: to perfect mankind. As Lifton explains, “doctors were active in research on people viewed as hereditarily gifted, and in helping to enlist the medical profession for what was called the ‘fostering of talent.’” The idea that any kind of positive social constructions would save the day was out; improving human beings at root was in.

Of course, the idea that men were born good or born bad (to use reductive terms) was largely academic and hardly universally agreed upon. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the cutting edge and went against what was, up until then, largely common sense. Criminals were criminals because they were desperate; they might be morally defective, the old thinking went, but that could be fixed with prayer and, perhaps, hard work. Not so, those on the cutting edge believed; it was eugenic destiny. Even if that were somehow true, that prayer could save a man’s soul, if he were defective from birth, he would still be unfit for tomorrow’s newer, better world. And why should we, the eugenicists likely wondered, wait to pray and educate the dregs of our society out their lot when we can just consider them lost causes and promote those who are not? This kind of thinking was largely reserved for those among the economic and intellectual elite—the influencers of the day, one might say—but it began to have influence and even inform policy.

Eugenics began its inglorious ascent in the cultural imagination largely thanks to one man: the English polymath and cousin to Charles Darwin, Francis Galton. While his most infamous theory certainly gained ground it probably never should have, he was no fool. As Daniel Okrent writes in his book The Guarded Gate, “Galton’s major discoveries—among them the individuality of fingerprints, the movement of anticyclones, the statistical law of regression to the mean—elevated his obsessive collection of data from triviality to significance. But for every one of his substantial contributions to human understanding, he probably hit upon a dozen that were trivial.” It is difficult to fit eugenics into such a generalization because some of the ideas underpinning eugenics—that we do, in fact, contain genetic differences that can, to one extent or another, be grouped together, for example—are true, but it is no doubt true that Galton and those who followed his example got carried away with generalizations and conclusions.

Probably the most significant of these generalizations and conclusions involved Galton’s belief that talent was heritable; this included knowledge-based talent, and by extension, artistic talent, among other things. While there are certainly elements within these fields that could be considered heritable, this was an area where Galton certainly overstated the case. Inspired largely by his elder cousin Darwin’s research into natural selection, Galton began his research. As Okrent summarizes:

If the development of species was not guided by a divine hand, he reasoned, neither were the minds of men. As physical qualities were provably heritable, so much be “peculiarities of character.” Darwin had defined the principles of natural selection in the animal world; now Galton dared to adapt them to the lives of humans. In the words of Galton’s protégé, disciple, and biographer Karl Pearson, “the inheritance of mental and moral characters in man [became] the fundamental concept in Galton’s life and work.

Ultimately, Galton collected a list of several hundred “notabilities” from a four hundred year period and concluded that about one in six were related to one another, thus “proving…what exactly?” in Okrent’s words. “Looked at today,” he continues, “Galton’s research and his conclusions seem risible. His sources were at best problematic, his measures of eminence arbitrary (they were in many cases measures of fame, not accomplishment).” In other words, Galton, like many excitable social scientists, had not done his diligence in applying experimental controls and almost certainly had a conclusion toward which he was groping before he even selected his “subjects.” This did not matter to Galton at the time (or his intended audiences), and he simply dressed up his claims with “a series of eccentric extrapolations,” to use Okrent’s words again. As an example, Galton would claim that, “Most notabilities have been great eaters and excellent digesters on literally the same principle that the furnace which can raise more steam than is usual for one its size must burn more freely and well than is common.”

This circus of claims and disconnected data eventually turned into Galton’s 1869 work, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, in which Galton would expand his wild claims into even wilder ones, supported by ad hoc historical anecdotes about Roman genealogies and, as Okrent writes, “some extremely acrobatic math to calculate that precisely 1 in 3,214 ancient Athenians who reached the age of fifty was ‘illustrious.’” The book was not particularly well-received when it released, with the London-based Saturday Review wrote disparagingly of the “disjointed facts, inert and lifeless […] logically worth nothing.” Galton’s spirits were lifted when the great Darwin wrote to him to praise his little cousin’s efforts at expanding his thoughts of trait heritability, and gave Galton’s ideas the shot in the arm they needed when he openly praised him in his 1871 work, The Descent of Man, writing that “We now know, through the labors of Mr. Galton, that genius […] tends to be inherited,” and that “it is certain that insanity and deteriorated mental powers run likewise in families.”

This support from Darwin was enough to keep Galton’s ideas very much afloat to allow other luminaries of the time to praise and promote these ideas; ideas that would, gradually but rapidly, develop into programmatic eugenics. These promoters included inventor Alexander Graham Bell and the suffragist Victoria Woodhull. Bell, in addressing the National Academy of Sciences in 1883, proclaimed “if we could apply selection to the human race we could also produce modifications or varieties of men.” Supporting his claim, he stated “if the laws of heredity that are known to hold in the case of animals also apply to man, the intermarriage of congenital deaf-mutes through a number of successive generations should result in the formation of a deaf variety of the human race.”

Woodhull went even further, claiming that “the criminal and vicious classes were made so by their mothers during gestation,” later becoming an early advocate for negative eugenics by proclaiming that “[carriers of] hereditary sensuality and vice”—that is, prostitutes, gamblers, drunks, criminals of any kind—were “a crime against the nation.” Elevating women to the status of voting citizens would therefore, in Woodhull’s mind, prevent such maladaptive behavior from occurring in the first place. Woodhull’s comments in particular show how power a seemingly utopian idea like eugenics truly is, when it can be adopted and molded to support another idealistic program so easily. This started to become increasingly apparent as the eugenics bug began to bite across the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century.

Eugenics made its debut into American respectability in 1906 at the third annual conference for the American Breeders Association (ABA), with the storied Washington Post declaring in a headline, “Science to Make Men and Women Better.” As Okrent summarizes, “By adding human breeding to its remit, the ABA began the first American effort to elevate Galtonian theory into something both programmatic and, at least as conceived, scientific,” with the ABA’s committee being a who’s who of scientists and intellectuals that would “bring eugenics into wide public consciousness, introduce it into the nation’s political debate, and elevate it into the realm of respectability.” And it was indeed respectable; it was seen as a true science on the cutting edge, endorsed by leading universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Virginia. Eugenics research and advocacy was funded by the Carnegie Institution, and major media and elites amplified it—eugenics conferences were front-page stories in Science magazine, other popular magazines favorably covered “better breeding,” and public intellectuals and foundation-backed experts promoted sterilization and immigration restriction as rational social policy. Eugenics was, as they might have said at the time, the bee’s knees.

The full story of eugenics’ legitimization and its downstream effects is a long one (and one I hope to cover in greater depth one day on History Impossible), but perhaps needless to say, it was not one without ghastly consequences, not least of which being the Nazis’ use of it to disastrous ends, as mentioned earlier. But one need not even reference the Third Reich’s crimes to demonstrate just how destructive those consequences ultimately were. The main thrust of Okrent’s scholarship deals with one of those consequences, namely that of immigration restriction on the basis of eugenics deeming European immigrants—particularly Jews, Italians, and Eastern Europeans—unfit to “pollute” the American populace, arguably (and demonstrably in some cases) consigning them to a much worse fate as early 20th century Europe continued its path of self-immolation.

Then there were the sterilizations. Throughout the early-to-mid-20th century, approximately 60,000–70,000 Americans underwent state-ordered or supported sterilizations in the United States, primarily under eugenics laws targeting those deemed “unfit” (that is to say, the “feeble-minded,” criminals, or even the poor). Programs appropriately peaked in the 1930s–1940s across 32 states; my own state of California alone performed around 20,000, or one-third of the national total, between 1909 and 1979. And as a native Minnesotan (and U of M alumnus), I would be remiss not to mention the role the University of Minnesota and its Eugenics Society in legitimizing the practice of compulsory sterilization. The Society’s president, Charles Fremont Dight, is also worth highlighting if only because he was a bit of a pen pal with Adolf Hitler, writing to the Fuhrer in 1933, praising the Nazis’ new sterilization law and sharing materials about American eugenics efforts.

But most disturbingly of all, there were the instances of human experimentation, most infamously represented by the syphilis experiments conducted on 600 impoverished black American men from Macon County, Alabama. The study, titled “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” included 399 infected with syphilis and 201 without. No one was deliberately infected with syphilis as is often claimed in more conspiratorial versions of the story, but the subjects were deceived with promises of free care for “bad blood,” given placebos like aspirin, and subjected to painful spinal taps misrepresented as therapy. More to the point, even after penicillin became widely available in the 1940s, officials actively withheld it, even intervening to prevent participants from getting it elsewhere, in order to study the degenerative effects of the neurosyphilis that ultimately killed most of the men.

Truly distasteful as this was, it paled in comparison to a series of studies that were conducted in Guatemala in the late 1940s, which were under the direction of Dr. John C. Cutler and the overall approval of Dr. John F. Mahoney, who were also involved in the Tuskegee experiments. In the Guatemalan version of the experiments, American doctors deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis as part of the wider effort to understand and treat the disease. As Martin J. Tobin explains in a 2022 paper for the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, because half a million Americans were infected with syphilis every year, “investigators drew up plans for an experimental model wherein infection would be induced in healthy subjects,” in order to develop better protection against the disease. Only uncovered in 2010 by historian Susan Reverby who was researching the Tuskegee experiments, the details of these experiments truly beggar belief and are best left alone, but as Tobin summarizes:

The original plan was to induce syphilis in prisoners in Penitenciaría Central through sexual intercourse with infected prostitutes and then test the efficacy of prophylactic regimens. When the American physicians encountered unexpected difficulties, they began to conduct studies on Guatemalan soldiers, inmates in the country’s only mental hospital, and children in the national orphanage. Because the rate of infection resulting from intercourse with prostitutes was lower than expected (<10%) the NIH-sponsored researchers attempted to artificially inoculate subjects with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid.

Unlike the cases of mass sterilization or immigration restriction in the United States or even the racial policies of the Third Reich, the connection to eugenics with such human experimentation is less clear on the face of it, but the connection is nevertheless there. Many historians and bioethicists now explicitly link the Tuskegee syphilis study and those like it (such as the Guatemala study) to eugenic ideology and to a broader “scientific racism” that grew out of the U.S. eugenics movement. Some of the main physicians who initiated and ran the experiments were trained at the University of Virginia, then a major center of eugenics teaching, where race was treated as a biological determinant of disease. These same physicians were publicly aligned with the eugenics movement thanks to their membership in the American Eugenics Society, and scholars argue that Tuskegee functioned as a vehicle for testing a eugenic hypothesis: that “racial groups were differentially susceptible to infectious diseases,” in the words of historians Paul Lombardo and Gregory M. Dorr.

While there was no direct effort to sterilize anyone through these studies or any attempt to control breeding patterns, the core premises—biological racial difference, differential susceptibility, and the expendability of black or Guatemalan lives in the name of racial science and social hygiene—are continuous with the mentality of the American eugenics movement. And lest we forget, such premises were all in service to another, simpler, broader premise: that the human being could be perfected, if only the imperfections could be weeded out root and stem. But more to the point, we should not forget that this dream of perfecting humanity largely began with a single source—a bit of an oddball named Francis Galton—and that this source’s ideas gained intellectual currency and respectability seemingly out of nowhere, and before anyone realized what was happening, it had largely swelled well out of any semblance of control.

…

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the protagonist Adam Jensen is very clearly meant to stand right in the middle of the existential battle over what it means to be human thanks to the proliferation of this new technology that has challenged, if not obliterated, everyone’s preconceptions. He is in the middle because, as he famously puts it, “I never asked for this.” The technology that makes up most of his body was put in him while he was on the brink of death (or perhaps, the game implies, already dead; this opens up a whole new can of philosophical worms). The point is, he had no choice to be part of this fight, and yet here he is; an emblem of it, thankfully (for him) fighting in the shadows, instead of the front lines where he could be made a symbol for the people in this world, rather than just the millions of us playing in it. That kind of pressure would do a number on anyone.

But this puts him in a unique position to understand just what the hell has happened to this world. The problem is that he doesn’t have time to understand the world; he has to save it, and save it he does, because that is usually what you’re supposed to do when you’re playing a video game. And yet, it does not take away from what we have seen and experienced in this game: a very real, if disturbing and pessimistic vision of humankind in our very near future. That is what ties together all of the games in this franchise, even though they were all released at different parts in our history, when we all had different concerns about our future.

The first game was released in 2000, when everything seen within it—a global pandemic that seemingly doesn’t effect elites, civil unrest and conflict, conspiracies at the highest level of government, to name just a few—were mere references to the best episodes of the X-Files. And yet, they resonate with anyone playing the game even today, well over two decades after it released, precisely because of the sociocultural anxieties that seem to have been presaged. It isn’t even the previously-mentioned details (or the eerie fact that one can’t find the World Trade Center when looking at the New York City skyline; again, this game came out in 2000) that can cause one’s breath to catch in their throat. It is the sheer audacity of this story to claim—accurately—that one of the most pressing questions to the United States (or the world) would be the role artificial intelligence plays in everything, particularly governance.

The second game was released in 2003, when the War on Terror was in full swing and civil liberties were appearing to be snatched away all in the name of security and, ironically, liberty, so the game’s marketing and dialogue frequently invoked the fear of terrorism and freedom. And yet, it was a story that fundamentally questioned the nature of government as a concept and, given the advancements being made in technology and communication in the world of 2072, what a government should look like and how should it reflect human will as that becomes ever-globalized. What would be required for such a shift that shows no signs of slowing down? A post-democracy, governed by a merged AI-human hybrid messiah? Perhaps.2 That is indeed one of the proposed solutions to the problem of inherent “otherness” created by human augmentation, intense and seemingly eternal inequality, and sclerotic (if not non-existent) democracy.

The third game, as we’ve discussed, went back in time and looked at how the quest for human perfection started down the bleak path where the first game began. The fourth game, a direct sequel to the third that takes place two years later in 2029, looks at the aftermath of the first cataclysm that comes from such a quest, and shows us that civil liberties and human rights are extremely malleable things that can always be redefined in service of a new, yet always familiar, ideal. Overwrought as the concern often was, there was a growing concern about civil liberties given the growing animus toward immigration across the West at the time of the game’s release in 2016; there was even some controversy surrounding the fourth game, with its invocation of a “mechanical apartheid.”

The concerns depicted in this trailer remained and continue to remain relevant to many people, especially so, ten years later; this applies just as much to those experiencing profound anxiety over ICE raids in places like Minneapolis in 2026 to those who experienced profound anxiety over COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine passports in 2020-2021. The specifics are different, as are the people experiencing anxiety, and so too are the specific plot points of the appropriately-subtitled Mankind Divided that saw humans without augmentations called “naturals” and those with them “gonks.” However, the cognitive mapping in all cases is the same and the writers of this game—and all of the other games—understood that.

The real tragedy was that there was never a follow-up to the fourth installment thanks to supposedly disappointing sales numbers. The Deus Ex series’ specific plot points, entertaining and compelling as they are, honestly pale in comparison to its world-building and sophisticated exploration of such vital and shockingly prescient themes. As much as I have always appreciated most incarnations of Star Trek as a fan of science-fiction, Deus Ex is a true triumph in terms of depicting a future I don’t have to imagine, at least compared to Gene Roddenberry’s strange post-scarcity neo-socialist utopia. Ironically, perhaps, there have been moments in Star Trek’s canon where it has been stated that humankind’s purpose is for us to better ourselves. As explained above, Deus Ex has made the same claim. However, Star Trek has often made the implication that, thanks to that aforementioned strange post-scarcity neo-socialist utopia being the setting, human beings currently are not pursuing that same goal today. To pursue betterment (or perfection) for its own sake is seen, per Star Trek, as transcendence of our current or older form as a species; per Deus Ex (and I agree with this), it is merely a continuation of the norm, with the warts and all that come from the human condition. Hence, why entries in the Deus Ex series feel like a downright fortune teller and those in Star Trek feel like a doe-eyed fantasy (though there are of course some moments in the various series that deal with the theme of engineered perfection at an individual level; lest we forget, the classic villain Khan was the leader of genetically engineered ubermenschen).

The alternative to engineered perfection, especially in the context of creating meaning where none supposedly exists, is often framed as a dedication to some version of “purity,” often in religious terms, and if we are indeed in the opening stages of a new culture-wide embrace of engineered perfection (which could also be said to include GLP-1’s, improved plastic surgery, and, of course, Looksmaxxing), I doubt that would change. As much as I find all claims of “purity” to be generally distasteful, I have increasingly found myself to have more intellectual sympathy for such claims; in other words, I may not like them or their implications, but I completely understand why these claims of “purity” can resonate. This is partly thanks to my experience playing the Deus Ex series, but it is also thanks to my unease and moral disgust regarding past attempts at engineered perfection in our not-so-distant history. Near future dystopian stories of a hypothetical “mechanical apartheid” might be unsettling enough, but true stories of forced sterilization, human experimentation, and genocide from the recent past are downright terrifying. What terrifies me is not the idea that these are all “the same”; what terrifies me is that they all come from the same psychological impulse.

It must be said that this could be much ado about nothing. There have been plenty of memes made and commentary had about how, well, silly this whole Clavicular thing is. Despite my high-minded attempts to connect this phenomenon to the history of eugenics and the speculative dystopian fiction of relatively high-brow video games, “Looksmaxxing is,” as Katherine Dee recently put it, “what our society already encourages: endless self-optimization toward nothing, a life of becoming.” This could just be more cultural wheel-spinning. As Dee further explains, “The Human Potential Movement [of the mid-20th century] promised that everyone could be more. What we live with now is the hangover, the conviction that we must be. What Looksmaxxing offers is potential itself as a terminal condition, becoming that never arrives, a body always in progress and never in use.” It could well be that the inherent silliness of the Looksmaxxing meme will be a barrier to entry to anyone searching for meaning in a meaning-starved world.

So yes, it might indeed be silly for me (and probably is) to project into our near future based on the antics of a weird guy IRL streaming on Kick and how his quest for perfection kind of sounds like the calls for eugenic health a century ago. But lest we forget, the idea of a former reality TV show host with the verbal IQ of an eight year old boy and overall-consummate-douchebag running for president, much less winning (twice, NON-CONSECUTIVELY) was just as silly, especially since he resembled populist clowns of our past from Denis Kearney to Huey Long, not the monstrosities of Hitler or Stalin. History is full of things we recognize as silly, often for good reason, but they exist, have influence, and most importantly can reflect broader trends, nonetheless. I have no idea if this is one of those times because neither does anyone else. But I would not be surprised if the cultural historians of the 2050s see a through-line to their present that includes some of the silliest things we see happening now.

I am wont to often say, and for good reason, that history is not something that gives us one-to-one analogies. A Gen-Z influencer calling itself “Clavicular” is not literally the same thing as the intellectuals, politicians, and other elites promoting the eugenics craze of 100 years ago. Clavicular and this trend he currently embodies is also not literally the same thing depicted in the world of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But all three examples—two real, one fictional—share the same impulse. That impulse—of engineered perfection—is the same regardless of external context, and one to which we should never ignore, especially if it begins to grow as a trend. Trends often begin with individuals and it does not take long—especially in the 21st century—for such trends to expand into something far larger than niche communities. And the trend of attempting engineered perfection is indeed one we have seen before, and it did not end well. There is no reason to believe such a thing would end well again if it became more widespread, especially when it is clear that the thing that deeply gnaws at people like Clavicular is the world’s supposed dearth of real meaning.

In other words, this has less to do with “Clavicular” than it does with what he and many like him—in the past, present, and in the future—are pursuing. He might be a punchline (and he is certainly that), but what he is searching for, for our entertainment and commentary, is much more than social media clout, if we are to take him at face value. What he is searching for has endured for all of human history: meaning. And for many people throughout history, meaning often comes from the pursuit of perfection. Countless numbers of people have pursued this goal via these means with far more primitive technology and have created far more devastating results, especially when their obsessions are bought up to scale. As Edwin Black wrote in his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race:

Mankind’s quest for perfection has always turned dark. Man has always existed in perpetual chaos. Continuously catapulted from misery to exhilaration and back, humanity has repeatedly struggled to overcome vulnerability and improve upon its sense of strength.

In this newest installment of History Impossible, we’re privileged to be joined by the host of the Crackpot History Podcast, which began life just over a year ago by doing a detailed, long-running critique of the Martyr Made Podcast’s inaugural series, “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.” As many of you know, I have frequently recommended that seri…

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In this very special episode of History Impossible, we are joined by the esteemed journalist, political commentator, and fellow historical podcaster Eli Lake, host of the incredible Breaking History podcast and writer of many incredible articles over the past few decades. Eli’s own series runs the gamut of many historical topics, particularly with reson…

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As covered in the most recent episode of History Impossible, the Nazis could be pretty keen on developing supposedly strange bedfellows, especially as the Second World War continued. This could be seen most pointedly in the SS’s attempted merging of Islamic aesthetics and religious practices with National Socialist values with the creation of the Handsc…

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It’s already 2026, which, to someone like me that enjoys the occasional sci-fi or cyberpunk speculative future scenario, definitely feels like the future. The news lately certainly feels like another ramp-up of “living through history” moments, from the kidnapping of Venezuela’s bus driver-in-chief Nicolas Maduro, to the potential regime-altering revolution in Iran that is revealing the empty double-standards of decolonialist and anti-interventionist rhetoric, to the undeniable vibe shift being created by ICE raids—and murder—in my hometown of Minneapolis. I may have more to say about all of these things at some point, but I have yet to fully collect my thoughts on them, much less let them play out to my satisfaction to do so.

Plus, this is (predominantly) the realm of history and I wanted to give all of you fine subscribers some quick updates on what is to come in History Impossible’s seventh year of existence (!). I’ll be honest, I did not expect this to still be going on as strong as it is, or with as many awesome folks like all of you tuning in to listen or heading here to read my weird thoughts and musings.

First: The new episode!

• In case somehow any of you missed it, there is a new episode of History Impossible and it is indeed the newest (and second to last) installment of the long-running “Muslim Nazis” series. This one is probably the biggest of kahunas, adding the most to the historiography such as it is, since it actually covers the titular “Muslim Nazis” themselves. It was also a beast to put together and its length (and I hope its quality) reflects that. If you haven’t yet listened, please check it out on whatever platform you get your podcasts.

  • Apple Podcasts:

  • Spotify:

  • Podcast Addict: https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/history-impossible/4051009

  • Spreaker: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/history-impossible--5634566

• If I add anymore platforms—namely YouTube—you will all be the first to know!

Second: The new website!

• Not necessarily something everyone will notice, especially if you’re already subscribed to the History Impossible Newsletter, but now this very here Substack is just known as History Impossible. That is because I decided late last year—especially after receiving a shocking bill from my original website host—to pack things in and move everything over to Substack because that seems to be where everyone enjoys the History Impossible content the most. This changes nothing for any of you, or anyone over on Patreon, or anyone subscribed to the main feed. The main feed is still hosted elsewhere, but I will be doing some tweaking here and there to see if I can streamline everything even moreso. The great thing about Substack is they let you change things with very little interference to the subscribers’ experiences. That is, if everything works well, so please make sure to let know if you’re experiencing any problems, either here through DMs, or via email at historyimpossible@gmail.com.

Third: The new episodes!

• Obviously with the release of the mega-episode that covers the Handschar Division and its gargantuan length, I want to give all of you who are invested in the story a chance to hear the whole thing before I start bombarding you with new audio content. However, I already have a few things cooking that will likely also be of interest to many of you, and don’t necessarily require you to have finished this newest episode. They include:

  • An updated audio adaptation of “The Forgotten Green-Brown Alliance” I recently released

  • A conversation with the host of the, in my opinion, potentially game-changing podcast, Crackpot History

  • Some more historiographical episodes, similar to the one I released about a year or so ago called “A Bug in the Software”, adapted from previous essays I have posted here

  • More interviews, conversations, and collaborations with friends of the podcast; I have been in contact with several in the last couple of weeks brainstorming ideas

  • More special episodes! This hopefully includes one I’ve been trying to crack for some time regarding Allied atrocities during the Second World War; think something similar to the old episode I did called “The American Executioners” but on a larger scale

  • Potentially a return to the Infinitesimal Impossibilities sub-series! I have been discussing various subjects with Molly and I actually have one in mind that could well fit into our wheelhouse. I’ll say nothing else about it until I know for sure we can make it work, but smaller-scale stories like the American Revolution’s submarine, Idi Amin’s cook, and the goodest of boys Rags the war dog could be making a return this year

Fourth: More essays!

• This is a given, since writing is my bread and butter. I already have a really fascinating one coming very soon that will also likely get turned into an episode, but further down the line. Independent research, opinion, historiography, and reviews all apply here and I would very much like to try and increase the output that comes from that. I have an idea I’ve been kicking around for a few months that involves the history of ideas so if I can make that work and keep each installment brief (I know, I know; the jokes at my expense write themselves), it could work. I will keep all of you posted on that one.

Fifth: The final episode of the “Muslim Nazis”?

• I have learned, like George R.R. Martin before me, to never promise something is being released at a particular time until I know for sure it’s coming by then. But looking what I already have completed, I have already made a lot of progress on the story. However, the challenge will involve bringing together all of the loose threads I created with the past several episodes, and making sure I leave nothing vital out of the finale. It’s easier said than done. That said, it’s possible, provided my thesis work for grad school doesn’t take up too much of my time, that the end of the “Muslim Nazis” series could arrive before the end of 2026. No promises on that, but I wanted to try and be optimistic for all of you.

Finally: Who the hell knows? Maybe you can help!

• The future is always uncertain, as they say. My schedule was derailed by about a month and a half in 2025 by current events and while I would like to pretend I’m immune from shooting my mouth off and connecting current events to history when I think the comparison is appropriate, I am not. That said, sometimes I am at a loss for ideas and want to put something out for all of you fine people. So while I have ideas for things, I am open to suggestions! Leave a comment or shoot me a message with any ideas you might have, like interview subjects or general subjects you want me to look into (that ideally won’t create too much of a rabbit hole).

And that’s about all I have for updates. I hope this gives what is ultimately an accurate snapshot of what is to come. Obviously life happens, and curve balls can be thrown, but I consider this a wish-list for myself. So thank you all so much again for subscribing and following me down this weird, crooked path I’m trying to forge. Here’s to a great 2026!

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After nearly five years, we have finally arrived at the point where we began this series about the so-called “Muslim Nazis.” We still have a little ways to go before we can call this story complete, but the image that inspired this half-decade deep dive into one of the darkest and strangest corners of the Second World War can finally be fully developed.

…

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“The times are better now because we have freedom. You can say what you want, and you won’t end up in prison. There’s no harassing people, no thought control, no spying. And the standard of living is higher, too. Just think about all the possibilities our kids have. People still grumble a lot, but they’ve never been so well off as they are now, never. Only there are bad things in politics: prices are rising, we’re having a hard time with unemployment, and everybody will tell you that there’s a lot of injustice. And it’ll get worse: there’ll be millionaires and paupers. Most people here don’t like it.”
—Konrád Niesner, born 1941, electrician

“I just say—every period brings along good things as well as bad. You can’t say it’s all black; some things are always white. […] It was all wonderful back then in 1989, during the Velvet Revolution. People shouting ‘Havel for President,’ you know, we all went crazy. […] At that moment, we were all a bit nuts, like intoxicated because we suddenly saw life could be great. And we couldn’t imagine what would come after fifteen or twenty years of freedom—that it could be in some ways even worse than before and that some of us would be living on a shoestring. But I said to myself back then, I’ll become a great fireman. Everything will be fine. Yeah, and so five years later, I was looking for another job. So every period is difficult in its own way. That’s why I’m not saying life is grey—it’s got colors, including black and white.
—X. J., born 1962, fireman

…

One may assume that revolutions come about via violence as a matter of course. The philosopher Rene Girard theorized that a community can unite around the violent expulsion of a scapegoat—that is, an oppressor—but always framed such an expulsion in violent terms. As Girard writes, “any community that has fallen prey to violence or has been stricken by some overwhelming catastrophe hurls itself blindly into the search for a scapegoat. Its members instinctively seek an immediate and violent cure for the onslaught of unbearable violence and strive desperately to convince themselves that all their ills are the fault of a lone individual who can be easily disposed of.”¹ This formulation applies to many revolutions across European history, from the French Revolution in 1789, to the revolutions of 1848, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as well as the decolonialist revolutions all over the world throughout the mid-twentieth century, in places as far flung as Vietnam and Algeria. However, in 1989, there were a cluster of anti-communist revolutions across central and eastern Europe that, with the exception of the violence that broke out in Romania, largely bucked the trend observed by Girard and others.

At the symbolic center of this cluster, thanks largely to the name it came to be known by, was Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, a largely non-violent affair (at least on the part of the protesters) that, in the words of historian James Krapfl, “was an inversion of [the] process” described by Girard in which there would normally be “unanimous exclusion, whereby the community unites in violence against something”; in the inverted case of Czechoslovakia in November of 1989, “it was the police attacking the marchers that cemented the unity of the latter party.”² Whether or not revolutions require violence in order to qualify as revolutions was largely irrelevant in the case of Czechoslovakia (as well as the wider liberation of central and eastern Europe) in 1989; what was noteworthy, to many watching at the time and many historians analyzing the Velvet Revolution well into the twenty-first century, was and is the rapid and large scale transformation of a society once thought to have completely succumbed to the darkness of totalitarianism, all done without a single shot being fired against the authorities in whose interest it was to stop such a revolution from occurring in the first place.

The Velvet Revolution unfolded relatively peacefully as the Soviet Union began its disintegration. This stood in stark contrast to the violence that characterized the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of the Prague Spring only twenty years earlier, which resulted in over 130 civilians being killed, and subsequent violent demonstrations, such as the self-immolation of Jan Palach. In many ways, one of the best symbols of the Revolution’s character was the election of famed dissident and playwright Václav Havel to the presidency, emphasizing cultural achievements rather than military ones, as is often the case in revolutions. It even helped symbolize what many optimistic observers of the time, including Francis Fukuyama, felt when they began to see the future as one solely dominated by open, democratic societies. Because of the self-evidently historic nature of the Velvet Revolution, the historiographic process began almost immediately after the establishment of the newly independent Czechoslovak state, though it would be difficult to truly classify the initial works dedicated to the Velvet Revolution as truly historical, given the immediacy of the events in question.

This changed over time, of course, and ultimately, demonstrated something striking: how the historiographic process typically works in real time. Whereas many, if not most, histriographies are relatively removed from the events that they cover, the historiography of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was held prisoner by the present, forcing innovations, responses, and complications to occur much faster, with the scale of approach expanding and contracting much faster than is typical. While there is no iron law of the histriographic process, the Velvet Revolution’s historiography appears to follow a similar trajectory seen in much longer time-scales, beginning with a focus on the most visible, major figures of revolution—the Great Men of History, so to speak—followed by a broadening of the historical context to include larger transnational forces and contexts—the Trends and Forces—and then, finally, a shift back towards history from below, in which the concerns and experiences of everyday people were centered, made possible with the use of the growing field of oral history. This makes the historiography of the Velvet Revolution significant, serving as a proverbial Petri dish that indicates how events are chronicled in their immediate aftermath and how they transition into the realm of history.

The first works that covered the events of the Velvet Revolution and their aftermath focused almost solely on immediate documentation, preservation of data, and interviews with participants and observers. This was best characterized by the book, The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia, 1988-1991, co-written by Bernard Wheaton and Zdenek Kavan. Kavan, a participant in the revolution himself, provides his own firsthand accounts but they used many other sources, including “local and regional newspapers” from regions across the country, interviews “with members of the theatrical community (especially at the Vinohrady Theater) who were personally involved in the revolution from the very outset,” and finally, “original documents gathered at the [Václav] Špála Gallery, one of the nerve centers of the revolution.”³ This approach to sourcing allows Kavan and Wheaton to create early analytical frameworks that provide the standard early narrative of the revolution and in a sense lay the groundwork for future analysis. By working with these sources, Wheaton and Kavan come to the conclusion that 1989 was a tipping point for the crises created by the normalization process that began in 1969 after the Prague Spring was crushed, made most apparent by the public’s “mood of disillusionment and retreat into the private sphere,” also known as “inner emigration.”⁴

The static conformity that this created, the authors argue, was merely on the surface; there was plenty of dissent to be found, particularly with those who signed the famous Charter 77, and with whom that document resonated. This involved “a broad coalition including reform Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, and conservative Catholics who, though quite disparate politically, all agreed on [the question of human rights] and on the need for an ethical basis to politics.”⁵ Despite the Chartists’ relative isolation from one another, Wheaton and Kavan make it clear that “the significance of Charter 77 lay […] in the personal example of the courage of its individual members, who withstood everything thrown at them.”⁶ Out of this milieu came the significant figures of the Velvet Revolution, particularly Václav Havel, as well as others, who all play the most significant role in Wheaton and Kavan’s narrative. The authors certainly pay the appropriate lip service to the systemic forces at work, particularly when it comes to the backlash to normalization, “the growth of public criticism, economic difficulties, and the changes in Eastern Europe,” and the government’s inability to to ignore “one area of popular concern—namely, ecology,” with pollution standing tall among the public’s concerns.⁷

However, individual actors stand taller in the narrative, particularly those at the symbolic head of the revolution, like Havel, and the symbolic head of the toppled Stalinist regime, like disgraced general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Miloš Jakeš or politicians like Miroslav Štěpán. There are sweeping descriptions of the demonstrations that occurred in late 1989, but Wheaton and Kavan often return to the people in charge, describing at one point the Central Committee as having “torn itself into pieces in the search for a solution at an all-night meeting,” and ultimately “acceded to the wishes of the public, and Štěpán and all the villains of the normalization disappeared from the Central Committee.”⁸ From there, the story shifts to Havel and the new government’s attempts at establishing democratic structures after their takeover in 1990, as well as the question of which economic path needed to be followed for Czechoslovakia to catch up to the rest of Europe.

The other limitation that emerges from Wheaton and Kavan’s recency comes more from hindsight but is nonetheless significant, in that the break-up of Czechoslovakia—the Velvet Divorce, as some called it—had not yet occurred, though they were indeed aware of “the national question” in terms of the dissent it was creating as of 1992 and that it was “noticeable […] that the nationalist rhetoric used in particular by the Slovaks had acquired its own momentum,” and that “the situation facing Czechoslovakia […] today is unprecedented.”⁹ While one cannot expect the authors to predict the future with any reasonable accuracy, such concerns would be addressed by later scholarship, like Robin H.E. Shepherd’s 2000 work, Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond. Shepherd extends the arguments presented by Wheaton and Kavan by examining the role of Slovak nationalism more directly, but he also historicizes the Velvet Revolution by directly addressing any challenge to the notion that the Velvet Revolution was, in fact, a revolution. In fact, he opens his work by stating plainly that “the events in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in eastern Europe in late 1989 were genuinely revolutionary in character,” thanks largely to the transfer of power to the powerless, the rapid transition to a different economic and social model, and the persistence of some old elites.¹⁰ By doing this, he both makes it clear that the Velvet Revolution was not something to be consigned to the dustbin of history, but also that revolutions in general can and should be understood in a broader context.

Shepherd accomplishes this by focusing on what Wheaton and Kavan were unable to do: by looking at “the most obvious change,” which is that “the constituent nations have split into two separate and independent states,” creating a relatively unique challenges of “reforging the national identities of two relatively small European countries and projecting them to a foreign audience still reeling from the world historical changes associated with the fall of the Soviet Union.”¹¹ Many pages are spent looking at the systemic forces at work, especially in the economic context following the Velvet Revolution, as well as the “institutional and structural explanations for the [Czech-Slovak] split” as well as “the developing national consciousness which eventually made federation unviable.”¹² And yet, the temptation to reduce complex events to the behavior and machinations of individuals is difficult for Shepherd to resist, with him dedicating an entire chapter to Havel and his interpretation of Czechoslovakia’s communist past and speeches as a vital hinge point for the entire narrative, as well as spending a large amount of time discussing the Slovak presidency of Vladimír Mečiar when discussing the path Slovakia took after the divorce.

Shepherd makes it clear that in order to understand the Czech people’s growing frustration with Havel’s 1989-era anti-politics and thus the politics of the Velvet Revolution with hindsight—as history, so to speak—then one needs to “go back to Havel’s dissident past, trace some important elements of his thinking, and relate them to developments in the 1990s.”¹³ Similarly, Slovak nationalism, and thus the Velvet Divorce, is understood as an extension of the politics and governance of Mečiar, which supposedly reflected a delayed realization of “living in an independent state with the real prospect of rule by a fully democratic government.”¹⁴ This is not to say that these figures do not matter to the development of a free Czechoslovakia, or to two independent, democratic nations; they absolutely do, and Shepherd’s commentary does reflect larger forces than men such as Havel and Mečiar, particularly in the economic realm, but his focus does at times overrate these men’s roles.

This is, arguably, a symptom of attempting to historicize something as relatively recent as the Velvet Revolution and its after-effects, as of the time of the book’s publication in 2000. Equally suggestive of this difficulty is Shepherd’s commentary on the then-contemporary issue of the Czech Republic’ and Slovakia’s potential joining of the European Union, something that would not happen for another four years as of the book’s publication. With so much systemic uncertainty in the present and on the horizon, it is perhaps inevitable that a historian would focus on the so-called Great Men of this particular history. It was therefore perhaps inevitable that larger trends and forces that surrounded the Velvet Revolution—and other revolutions around central and eastern Europe—would begin to take center stage in the scholarship, particularly regarding the question of state breakdown and cultural shifts across borders.

The second era of scholarship that focused on the Velvet Revolution lasted from the early 2000s to the early 2010s, and it sought to contextualize its place in the wider events that were taking place across central and eastern Europe at the time; there was little in the way of centering the Czechoslovak experience and more in the way of treating it as a significant puzzle piece that helped create a coherent picture of the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union. This could first be seen most pointedly in Padraic Kenney’s A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, published in 2002, in which Kenney saw the Velvet Revolution as part of a much broader cultural trend that nigh-simultaneously swept the countries of the Eastern Bloc, and less to do with the particularities of the Czechoslovakian experience.

Kenney did not dismiss the particular cultural experiences of all the countries completely, and indeed placed some focus on them—including the experiences of Solidarity in Poland, Hungary’s Catholic dissidents, and Ukraine’s nationalist movements—but he places them all in the wider context of a carnival. According to Kenney, these movements “[broke] down borders of all kinds,” and “[forced] a suspension of the usual rules of society, issuing a challenge to the existing order, and reversing social and political hierarchies,” mostly by “[disregarding] the fear that held so many others back” and “[breaking] the rules of politics”; this perspective thus allows historians to look at the Velvet Revolution and the 1989 revolutions like it in a new way: “from the perspective of grassroots social movements.”¹⁵

While Kenney acknowledges significant historical actors like Mikhail Gorbachev and their decisions like perestroika and glasnost, he is careful to note that such figures’ decisions do not fully explain what happened in central and eastern Europe. It was indeed the social movements across the entire region, often operating in tandem, using various methods including samizdat, the antipolitics of the much-analyzed (and soon-to-be-challenged) concept of “civil society,” church resistance, counter-cultural forces such as punk rock music groups, and nationalist organizations. Much of this is revealed by Kenney’s own experiences and interviews with participants in these social movements, thus employing an element of oral history that would come to dominate the Velvet Revolution’s historiography in the years to come. However, this was all part of his project of characterizing the Velvet Revolution and other revolutions of 1989 as part of a broader shift away from the politics of the Cold War and Soviet communism.

Similar to both Wheaton and Kavan as well as Shepherd, Kenney spends some time explaining how normalization helped lay the groundwork for the titanic shifts of the late 1980s, but quickly moves to the loci of social resistance that also existed and persisted until that time. His broader focus that also includes the nationalist groups in the Eastern Bloc—particularly, but not exclusively in Ukraine—is unique compared to the previous scholarship but where he departs most is the due he pays to the role of churches and the counter-culture. As Kenney writes, “if there was any hope at all, it came from churches” since “the churches of Central Europe were the only official institutions with any independence from the regimes,” since it provided a fundamental and powerful center of community.¹⁶ This was experienced in several central and eastern European countries, including Poland and Hungary, but more particularly for our purposes in Slovakia.

While the Slovak churches were, of course, closely monitored by the communist regimes and their hierarchies were carefully vetted, Kenney points out that by the mid-1980s, “the underground faith exploded into view at a ceremony at Velehrad,” celebrating the 1,100^th anniversary of the death of St. Methodius, the man who introduced Christianity to the Slovaks, the celebration of which Kenney compares to the return of Pope John Paul II to Poland in 1979.¹⁷ The significance of this event to the growing confidence of Slovaks and their willingness—often times greater willingness than their Czech counterparts—to join in the efforts of the Velvet Revolution, Kenney argues, cannot be understated. Neither can the role of groups like the Independent Peace Association, a “loose alliance of musicians, pacifists, and more or less frustrated youth,” or the demonization by the communist regime of the hippies who came out to mourn the killing of John Lennon.¹⁸

Stories like these make up the bulk of Kenney’s work, which culminates in sixteen vignettes, which Kenney refers to as “a revolution in sixteen scenes” that occur all over the map of central and eastern Europe, but are all brought together into a greater whole that is made clear in the final scene, which centers on the Velvet Revolution itself, but that Kenney contextualizes within a broader framework of five different factors: “the formation of student self-government, the arrival of waves of East German refugees, and new examples of regime arrogance,” as well as “the festival of Czech culture in Wrocław and, just days before the Opletal anniversary, a large ecological demonstration in Teplice, in northern Bohemia.”¹⁹ The international framework provided here speaks for itself.

Kenney’s contribution thus went beyond even widening the cast of characters in these different social movements, and made it clear that they needed each other, creating a transnational network that made them all the stronger in their efforts to create their civil society. This could be seen most pointedly with what Kenney calls “Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity,” which “destroyed the isolation of the Czech opposition,” after the border between the two states was loosened by the efforts of both Ukrainian and Polish activists, as well as sympathetic border guards.²⁰ Thus, while placing it within a larger international framework, Kenney still acknowledged the significance of the intellectuals’ “civil society” concept as being, at least in part, central to the success of the Velvet Revolution. The scholarship that came next not only called that significance into question, but promoted a completely different angle that challenged the power of dissident movements: the angle of state breakdown.

Some scholars had previously questioned the impact of state breakdown, such as John K. Glenn, who has stated that such an approach “has been limited by studies of single movements against the state,” and that instead that the “democratic outcome” of the Velvet Revolution “was the result of successful mobilization for a general strike by the civic movements that linked their demands for gradual, legal change on behalf of the nation with striking theater networks, which served as an organizational basis for a general strike.”²¹ In other words, the Velvet Revolution’s ultimate outcomes was the triumph of the civil society. Previous to Glenn, Shepherd had actually discussed the concept of a civil society in his own work, describing it as “the core issue of post-communist political transformation,” at least for some, and that it involves “the intermediary institutions which fall between the apparatus of state power and the individual,” acting as a vital conduit for dissidence, however problematic that term may have been to dissidents like Havel.²²

However, in 2009, the Sovietologist Stephen Kotkin, along with his contributor Jan T. Gross, dismissed this popular notion entirely in their book Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. Kotkin’s central argument was that “in 1989, ‘civil society’ could not have shattered Soviet-style socialism for the simple reason that civil society in Eastern Europe did not then actually exist.”²³ There was, in fact, no way “to self-organize” and “have recourse to state institutions to defend associationism, civil liberties, and private property,” and thus, Czechoslovak citizens lived in an uncivil society.²⁴ That is, until they did not; when the peaceful revolutions broke out across central and eastern Europe, this was because of collapsing state legitimacy and, thus, power in the Soviet metropole as well as in their satellite state apparatuses. Functionally speaking, Kotkin’s argument almost entirely dismisses the significance of figures like Havel and other figureheads of the Velvet Revolution, writing that “recourse to the concept of ‘civil society’ in fact exaggerated the role of intellectuals (at the expense of workers, churches, and the world economy),” with his parenthetical placing an even finer point on broader trends and forces that, in Kotkin’s view at least, allowed the Velvet Revolution and others to happen in the first place.²⁵

It is fitting that Kotkin singles out Poland, Romania, and East Germany for his analysis, while also claiming that they represent similar circumstances in all countries affected by the disintegration of communism in central and eastern Europe in 1989, since they most strongly support his conclusions that state breakdown was at the center of these changes. Counter the claims made by Kenney, he writes that “the social-movement analogies to Poland’s mesmerizing Solidarity have been profoundly misleading, falsely generalizing a successful strategy in one special case to others,” suggesting that the gatherings of protesters in Wenceslas Square as well as the general strike had no inspiration or leadership by dissidents like Havel.²⁶ The dream of a civil society, Kotkin argues, was merely that: a dream. And indeed, the fact that authorities saw it that way allowed the dream to at least appear that it had become a reality, especially when it became clear that “the near-complete absence of outlets or safety valves for basic popular grievance” had “made elementary conflict into an existential threat.”²⁷

In other words, communist authorities had trapped themselves in a self-fulfilling prophecy they did not even realize they had made, and when they did realize it, it was too late and they imploded, essentially allowing the dissidents to fill in the gaps all over central and eastern Europe. As Kotkin writes, “Gorbachev’s ‘socialism with a human face’ was a bundle of contradictions that were impossible to reconcile,” and that “the bloc’s implosion vastly accelerated the exposure of those contradictions and emboldened many people […] to seek the formerly unthinkable: namely, full emancipation.”²⁸ Kotkin’s formulation, intriguing and compelling as it is, is somewhat troubling in its complete and deliberate neglect—i.e., dismissal—of agency to the dissidents and even citizens of Czechoslovakia, and really all countries under the thumb of Soviet influence. In a way, Kotkin’s argument acts as the logical endpoint of the idea that grand, historical trends and forces shaped the end of the Cold War rather than a confluence of decisions made by people, large and small, inside the context of these trends and forces. It was therefore unsurprising that a shift back towards history from below was in order.

After 2010, many scholars saw this need and the potential for it being met by approaching the history of the Velvet Revolution from a different perspective. That is, by focusing on the more immediate, personal realities of those living through the Velvet Revolution, returning to a more bottom-up approach to the historiography. This led to a greater emphasis on the everyday lived experiences of those who took part in and lived through the Velvet Revolution as a means to illustrate the challenges that faced post-communist societies. Slovak historian Soňa Lutherová helped pioneer this approach for a wider, English-speaking audience in her 2010 paper that focused on the autobiographies of the Velvet Revolution’s youngest participants and witnesses, presaging the direction that the new approaches were beginning to take. As she notes, “the attitudes of child witnesses of the Velvet Revolution were characterized by a large measure of internal inconsistency,” which largely came from “a significant change of personal values, with the acquisition of new knowledge and new experience,” and reflected the overall nature of “the revolution of 1989, which in both individual and collective interpretations generally is distinguished by a large degree of ambiguity.”²⁹ In essence, this clarifies why a need to zoom back down to earth developed in the Velvet Revolution historiography in order to understand it better and to address the shortcomings of previous work.

In 2013, historian James Krapfl did precisely that in his monograph, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992. From the outset, Krapfl seeks to break from the traditions established by the earlier works by scholars like Wheaton and Kavan, as well as the revisionist works by the likes of Kotkin. Instead of focusing on the figures cut by elites—both on the side of the revolution and those arrayed against it—or focusing on the broader forces faced by Czechoslovakia in 1989—namely state breakdown and transnational cultural forces—Krapfl seeks to focus on the Velvet Revolution’s “most important actor: Czechoslovak citizens”; seeing as “the revolution of 1989 was democratic revolution,” Krapfl writes, “then it follows that the demos—the people—should be at the center of our attention.”³⁰ In so doing, however, the scope can still be broadened thanks to the Velvet Revolution’s success and its “[ability] to run its course,” and thus, Krapfl argues, “we can learn most about the revolutionary potential of 1989.”³¹

This is accomplished by following the lead of Kenney and looking at more than just the dissident intelligentsia’s writings and instead taking a closer look at “the words and actions of the citizens themselves,” immortalized by the “tens of thousands of declarations, flysheets, bulletins, posters, and open letters,” as well as “video recordings, newspapers, and the minutes of Party and administrative organs as well as the new citizens’ associations.”³² By forgoing the high-minded speeches (but not completely discounting them) or the machinations of the Kremlin and communist leadership of Czechoslovakia, Krapfl manages to bring about a deeper understanding of the Velvet Revolution from the perspective of its participants and, as mentioned, those lower down the Party ladder who opposed it.

Krapfl also emphasizes the importance of what he calls “sacrality” when it comes to the Velvet Revolution, or the sacred “idea of ‘humanness,’ to which other revolutionary principles like nonviolence and democracy were logically related.”³³ Based on the sources he uses, Krapfl is adamant that this focus on the human quality of things—and the inhuman quality of the communist regime—was what motivated the people that made up the true foundation of the Velvet Revolution and, by extension, what kept it “velvet,” so to speak. It was never about crude regime change or even ideological warfare (though ideology certainly came to the forefront after the new government took power); rather, as Krapfl writes, “Czechs and Slovaks did not reject the Communist regime because it was socialist but because it was unresponsively bureaucratic and ‘inhumane.’”³⁴

This somewhat aligns with the revisionist approach taken previously by Kotkin, who pointed out the unresponsiveness as a factor leading to all the Communist regimes’ collective demise, but Krapfl singles out Kotkin’s argument as not matching that of the Czechoslovak experience, since “Czechoslovak citizens achieved a high degree of organization in a matter of days, consciously influencing the way Communist leadership surrendered political power and giving rise to forms of political practice that would set lasting precedents.”³⁵ Krapfl also points out that Kenney’s characterization of the carnival-esque nature of 1989’s revolutions does not really apply to Czechoslovakia in the sense Kenney explored because, contra Kenney’s assertions, the Revolution was not a culmination; it was a beginning. This resonates especially in the context of the later Velvet Divorce and rise of Slovak nationalism discussed earlier.

Krapfl indeed follows Kenney’s lead in emphasizing the importance of ideals as cultural signifiers, especially when it comes to the attempts at spreading “the five ‘core’ ideals,” including non-violence, self-organization, democracy, fairness and, perhaps surprisingly to some readers, socialism, and finally, humanness, as mentioned earlier. These ideals all mattered in the Revolution, based on the evidence gathered, Krapfl emphasizes that “the central ideal of the revolution was suggested by the words l’udkost’/lidskost or humanita, which might be translated according to context as humanity, humaneness, or humanness” because “the desired new society was to be a society for people, not for parties, machines, systems, or bureaucracies.”³⁶ The popular pursuit of these ideals are significant when it comes to explaining what those who participated in the Revolution wanted, but they do not necessarily explain the shortcomings that came to exist. Krapfl does address these shortcomings—particularly the revelations involving Havel’s backroom deals and negotiations that almost certainly violated the values he claimed to represent—but it would not be for three more years that a new approach was taken to help nuance the narrative of the Velvet Revolution and, especially, its aftermath.

In 2016, the historians Miroslav Vanek and Pavel Mücke released Velvet Revolutions: An Oral History of Czech Society, which brought to English-speaking audiences a missing link in the Velvet Revolution historiography: true oral history and recollections from the participants and witnesses to the revolution itself, as well as reflections on the triumphs and, more interestingly, the disappointments experienced by them. The disappointment on which many participants reflect in their interviews is especially stark, and while Vanek and Mücke do not go so far as to suggest that the feelings of disappointment means the revolution was a failure or a mistake, they do suggest that it “calls into question just how heinous and intolerable a ‘prison’ the Communist regime really was,” and that “by ascertaining both Czech individual and popular perceptions of the turning points and major processes, and gaining insight into the rhythms of their everyday lives,” some light can be shed on the ambiguities created by post-revolutionary disappointment.³⁷

The most significant revelation to be found in Vanek and Mücke’s work is not that life under the communists was “better” or “worse” but that life existed in a variety of colors; there was no single person or experience that dominated that of anyone who lived in Czechoslovakia and the masses of trends and forces that supposedly cause everything to happen without the agency of those they happen to even mattering one iota. As the authors summarize, “Every individual has unique memories, priorities, and values,” in which “there are people who prefer freedom to any sort of state intervention, and alongside them, there are people who are willing to accept limitations on their personal freedom in exchange for guarantees of social security.”³⁸ This reality of everyday life and the perception of forces larger than the individual from the individual perspective can only be accomplished via the approach taken by historians like Vanek and Mücke, whose use of oral history can only be accomplished when the event in question exists not only in living memory, but in living memory for so many. The limitations faced by so many oral historians trying to unravel the stories of many generations past are not as apparent in the case of the Velvet Revolution’s historiography and those of other, far more temporally distant events.

The question of where the Velvet Revolution historiography continues is something that can only be guessed. In the English-speaking world, there is a relative scarcity of histories that deal with the question of gender relations and the role of women in the revolution, as well as that relationship compared to those observed in other revolutions. There is also opportunity to expand the scope of comparative history, particularly in the context of other “non-violent” revolutions (that is, where violence was meted out against protesters rather than a mutual clash or violent overthrow) outside of 1989 in central and eastern Europe, such as the Indian Revolution or the Civil Rights Revolution of the United States in the 1960s, to name just two.

What is clear is that the attempt at historicizing the Velvet Revolution only a mere few years after its occurrence reveals both the limitations of trying to treat current events as history and the trajectory that longer scale historiographies tend to take. As we have seen, from the beginning, the larger than life figures—the so-called Great Men—loom large and dominate the narrative of the story in question. Then, as time goes on and the limitations of such a limited focus and emphasis on the romantic and nostalgic aspects of the story begin to wear thin, grander trends and forces begin to take center stage, often opening the door for revisionist and even contrarian interpretations to prompt further study. In such an interpretive frenzy, what is lost—the human element—makes itself apparent, and the need to approach the story “from below” becomes more pronounced, and social and oral histories arrive to fill in the gaps.

Normally, these shifts occur over the course of many decades, perhaps even centuries, depending on the subject in question. However, in the context of the Velvet Revolution, they occurred in a microcosm, in which observers and, eventually, historians knew that something truly transformational—and thus, historic—had indeed happened. It is ultimately a testament to the study of history that such rapid shifts occurred in the historiography with the goal all history sets out to achieve set firmly in mind: to allow everyone to understand what it was like to be there when the world turned upside down, or, perhaps, when the world was made right again.

…

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Glenn, John K. “Competing Challengers and Contested Outcomes to State Breakdown: The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.” Social Forces 78, no. 1 (September 1999): 187-212.

Kenney, Padraic. A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Kotkin, Stephen, with Gross, Jan T. Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. New York: Random House, Inc, 2009.

Krapfl, James. Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Lutherová, Soňa G. “Before and After: the Phenomenon of Czechoslovakia’s ‘Velvet’ Revolution in Narratives by its ‘Youngest Witnesses.’” Sociológia 42 (2010): 671-690.

Shepherd, Robin H.E. Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000.

Vanek, Miroslav and Mücke, Pavel. Velvet Revolutions: An Oral History of Czech Society. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Wheaton, Bernard and Kavan, Zdenek. The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia, 1988-1991. London: Routledge, 1992.

NOTES:

1. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred trans. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 79-80.

2. James Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 49.

3. Bernard Wheaton & Zdenek Kavan, The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia, 1988-1991 (London: Routledge, 1992), xi.

4. Ibid., 9.

5. Ibid., 12.

6. Ibid., 13.

7. Ibid., 24.

8. Ibid., 93.

9. Ibid., 177, 183.

10. Robin H.E. Shepherd, Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000), 1.

11. Ibid., 3.

12. Ibid., 8.

13. Ibid., 40.

14. Ibid., 149.

15. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002

16. Ibid., 34.

17. Ibid., 36.

18Ibid., 166-167.

19. Ibid., 283.

20. Ibid., 107-108.

21. John K. Glenn, “Competing Challengers and Contested Outcomes to State Breakdown: The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia,” Social Forces 78, no. 1 (September 1999), 187, 188.

22. Shepherd, Czechoslovakia, 108, 109.

23. Stephen Kotkin, with Jan T. Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Random House, Inc, 2009), 7.

24. Ibid., 9.

25. Ibid., 8.

26. Ibid., 10.

27. Ibid., 15.

28. Ibid., 136.

29. Soňa G. Lutherová, “Before and After: the Phenomenon of Czechoslovakia’s ‘Velvet’ Revolution in Narratives by its ‘Youngest Witnesses,’” Sociológia 42 (2010), 671-672.

30. Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face, 1.

31. Ibid., 3.

32. Ibid., 4.

33. Ibid., 7.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 36.

36. Ibid., 100.

37. Miroslav Vanek & Pavel Mücke, Velvet Revolutions: An Oral History of Czech Society (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 4-5.

38. Ibid., 199.

History is often forged upon the frontiers—both literally and figuratively. That includes the field of history, whose frontiers have become wildly expanded with the advent of podcasting and other forms of content creation. This has certainly created tension, but it has also created opportunities for narratives and voices that would never have otherwise …

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“Let us leave modern men to their ‘truths’ and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.”
—Julius Evola

“Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice, not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head—this being just a symptom and not the real disease—but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress. Even the Western world realizes that Western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. The leadership of mankind by any Western man is now on the decline, not because Western culture has become poor materially or because its economic and military power has become weak. The period of the Western system has come to an end primarily because it is deprived of those life-giving values, which enabled it to be the leader of mankind.”
—Sayyid Qutb

“You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.”
—Oswald Spengler

“Dear Hitler, I welcome you back with all my heart. You have been defeated, but in fact one should regard you as the real victor. There will be no peace in the world until Germany again takes first place. Your principal mistake was opening too many fronts, but everything is forgiven, for you are a shining example of belief in one’s fatherland and people. You are eternal, and we shall not be surprised if we see you again.”
—Anwar El-Sadat

…

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On the eve of his controversial election as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani had his fair share of critics. While some criticisms had more to do with his inability to sufficiently distance himself from his more inflammatory and just-plain-dumb previous comments and performances as well as his planned policies, there was a common thread with some conservative and right wing commentators. Namely, that Mamdani was not just a socialist, but a closet Islamist. Figures as prominent as Ayaan Hirsi Ali—herself a strident and long-time critic of Islamism and Islam itself—were more than willing to claim that Mamdani was “an Islamist clad in socialist garb,” as Ali stated on her X page. Figures like Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire went even further earlier in 2025, claiming that “Mamdani comes from a culture that lies about everything,” because “It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda,” echoing simplistic claims of “taqiyya” that are often quoted by drive-by critics of Islam. This kind of commentary prompted a lot of criticism, including from opponents of Mamdani, mostly because it was largely seen as missing the point, to say nothing of being completely inaccurate and arguably even Islamophobic (in the case of Maguire’s commentary, rather than Ali’s).

However ultimately untethered from reality this fear of a leftist-Islamist blob monster was, though, it was certainly understandable (especially from figures like Ali who have been on the proverbial Islamism beat for so long). As Sadanand Dhume at the Wall Street Journal pointed out in response to these claims of Mamdani’s plan “to establish a caliphate on the Hudson,” there is a troubling synergy that has been seen with Islamists and far left activists, particularly when it comes to the issue of Israel (and, often, Jews in general, though usually with the “Zionist” filter laying over everything). This has become well-covered territory, especially in the wake of the campus and street protests against alleged genocide preemptively launched while the bodies from the October 7th, 2023 pogrom were still warm. It has even received serious academic and think-tank treatment, with a report from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism being published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence as far back as 2013. Even I, as many of you reading no doubt recall, took a stab and explaining elements of the newest incarnation this alliance via the soft imperialist strategy employed by Islamist groups, calling it their “Velvet Jihad,” as well as discussing it with spiked!’s Brendan O’Neill. However, I will defer to the renowned British-Israeli historian Robert Wistrich in summarizing both the contradictions, shared values, and ultimately obsessions in what he calls “the Red-Green Axis” in his tome, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad:

Islamists may sharply disagree with their […] Far Left allies about feminism, homosexuality, religion, secularism, and the validity of socialist ideals, but they share a common anti-Western, anti-globalist, and anti-Zionist agenda. Radical Islamists […] are not, of course, interested in the traditional class struggle of the proletariat. But like the Far Left, they hate America, revel in the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy, and are determined to eliminate Israel. Palestine is the issue where their cooperation with the Left is most harmonious.

In Britain, as in France, the anti-globalist Left and the Islamic fundamentalists also share a common rejection of liberal modernity and the entire Enlightenment project. Yet, ironically, both want to globalize the Middle East conflict, demanding “humanitarian” intervention by the wicked Western imperialists, if only to “stop Israel,” while at the same time threatening it with UN and EU sanctions. […] Nowhere is the morbid emotionalism and self-indulgence of a victim-centered culture more palpable than in the pro-Palestinian partisanship of the International Solidarity Movement.

Without question, the Palestine issue has become the omnicause for what passes as the left in the West in recent years, with the only globalization they support seeming to be the so-called decolonialization struggle. Even Mamdani himself made this clear when, in 2023 while speaking on a panel called “Socialist Internationalism: The Solution to the Crisis of Capitalism,” he claimed the following:

For anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local. We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF. We have to make, not specifically that example all the time, but just to say that for working-class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn’t that much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life. We are in a country where those connections abound, especially in New York City, you have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there is tied to capitalist interests over here.

Clearly, when your chosen method of highlighting the alleged injustices by the Israeli Defense Forces is to “make them hyper-local” (and thus missing the point by citing a shared training exercises program that also included police forces from places like Jordan and Qatar, not just Israel, as part of the NYPD’s International Liaison Program), you are basically just inflating the importance of your own personal cause by marrying that cause to more global events and associations; hence, an omnicause. And given what active opposition to Israel has largely become in the last two years, it is clear that this cause has constituted an unholy marriage of values on much of the Western left. As Robert Wistrich further explains:

In the pro-Palestinian narrative of liberals and Marxists, remarkably little attention is paid to the crazed ideology, the poisoned culture of martyrdom, or the violently anti-Semitic hatred emanating from much of contemporary Islamism. Instead, terrorism and Islamist suicide attacks are explained away as a product of social conditions and the general misery induced by Israel’s policies.

However, this marriage of values—that of functionally supporting a theocratic terrorist government and social progressivism—is built upon moral contradictions that have also been well-covered territory, including, again, by yours truly, over in the pages of Quillette. In other words, there really is no need to further litigate the self-evident absurdity of “Queers for Palestine.” There is plenty of well-written history covering the rise of the PLO and the leftist activists and terrorists who allied themselves with them during the height of the radical era of the late 1960s-early 1970s. Thanks largely to the resurgence of this strange Red-Green alliance in the wake of October 7th, this has, perhaps understandably, overshadowed the story of the other alliance with Islamism that has found a home the margins of Western society. In fact, as undeniable as it has become that there have been plenty of Western leftists willing to make common cause with Islamists, there is a sturdy history of the far right making common cause with Islamists.

In 2002, less than one year into the United States’ global War on Terror, the geopolitics professor Alexandre Del Valle (real name Marc d’Anna) coined a provocative term: “the Red-Green-Brown alliance.” Del Valle had been controversial in his assessments before, going so far as to claim that the United States was using Islamist organizations to destroy Europe in his first book Islamism and the United States: An Alliance against Europe, originally published in 1997. Outlandish as this claim was (and likely informed by Del Valle’s extreme hostility toward the Clinton and Reagan administrations in particular), Del Valle’s later assessment—that of an ideological alliance, however unofficial, between the far right, the far left, and Islamism—ultimately gained some legs thanks to its relative soundness. Far from claiming that there were some shadowy backroom deals being forged between representatives of the American Nazi Party, the Communist Party USA, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Del Valle was more interested in characterizing this phenomenon as “a convergence of totalitarianisms” (or a “coalition of long-time losers,” and a “syndicate of universal hatred,” as he put it in a later article). In other words, he was taking note where their usually divergent values overlapped, similar to Robert Wistrich’s “Red-Green Axis,” but with a greater ideological and intellectual scope. As Del Valle writes:

It is evident that Islamism, the third totalitarianism after Nazism and Communism, echoes to a definite extent the aspirations of its two predecessors: seizing the struggle of civilizations and religions, then declaring war on the Judeo-Christian world in the name of the “dispossessed” of the rest of the planet, Islamism seduces as much those nostalgic for the pagan Third Reich, resolved to eradicate Judaism and Christianity, as it does those partisans of the hammer and sickle, determined to come to blows with the “bourgeois” and “capitalist” West.

Continuing later, Del Valle writes the following:

From the outset, one asks oneself what could be able to unify movements as ideologically antagonistic as the Reds (atheists and materialists), the Greens (theocrats and Islamists), and the Browns (believers in the war of the races). To believe that such an alliance would be philosophically impossible and strategically improbable—and, therefore, from the get-go doomed to checkmate—would be to forget that Islamism is not only the third totalitarianism to come about, but is also equally, in a number of points, the inherited unifier of the two predecessors. Insofar as Islamism is not only simply a religious “fundamentalism”, but also and above all a subversive revolutionary totalitarianism, an ideology of mass destruction comparable to Nazism, Maoism or Stalinism, this “Green fascism” prolongs the anterior totalitarianisms. What distinguishes the Green version essentially is that it brings to the historical totalitarian hatreds a theological justification and a divine benediction.

Whether it concerns the Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas, the al-Qaeda combatants, or the Iraqi and Palestinian “resisters”, it must be recognized that in the marketplace of global revolution, the Islamists and the Arab-Muslim mujahedeen in general are the most effective and ferocious adversaries of “Israeli-American imperialism.” They are the ones who are inflicting the most damage on the “colonialist” and “capitalist” powers—whom the Reds and the Browns detest above all.

Being the third moment of totalitarianism, an avenging Islamism leading the assault on the capitalist democracies and the “Judeo-Crusader forces” knows now such an ascension throughout all corners of the globe and, in particular, in Europe—an ascension facilitated by the planetary and unprecedented mediatization which it has enjoyed since the shock of September 11—that it has been attracting, like a magnet, the attentions of those nostalgic for the communist and Nazi totalitarianisms. Drawing at the same time from the vulgate of the extreme right and from an “Islamically correct” template that is pro-Arab and Third Worldist, this new revolutionary and planetary hatred henceforth seduces the latest anti-Jewish and anti-American militants of the extreme radical right.

Del Valle has more to say about the formation of this alleged unholy alliance, but in short, when one examines the contours of the radical ideologies that inflame so much of modern political discourse, one begins to realize that the supposed contradictions within these radical ideologies matter less than their shared, broader visions of the world. War with one another can come later; in the meantime, they all have a shared enemy. And just as radical leftists and revolutionary Marxist-Leninists can leave aside their supposedly progressive social values and supposedly secular worldview to make common cause with theocratic Islamists, there are many radical right and self-styled neo-fascist dissidents who have just as little difficulty doing the same, all in the name of defeating their shared enemies, though there is almost always a single shared enemy at the center of this radical nexus.

The question of this shared enemy is not a mystery, because it has been the shared enemy of ideological radicals for well over a century, and arguably far longer if one looks at theological developments across time. To name this shared hatred has become, unfortunately, a bit of cliche destined to fall on deaf ears, but it needs to be stated: it is a hatred (or, perhaps more commonly, distrust) of Jews. It could be said that the skeleton key for radicals is the Jew—the “Eternal Jew,” as Goebbels might have put it—thanks to his rejection of Christ or the Prophet Muhammad, thanks to his murder of Gentile children, thanks to his stateless cosmopolitanism, and, now, thanks to his state-sanctioned genocide. The Jew has always been framed as “outsider,” and outsiders are often the greatest threat to a utopian project, whether it is a Christian, Muslim, nationalist, communist, or truly globalist one. This is why it is a mistake to place antisemitism in the same category as rank racism and more in the same category as conspiracy theory. The journalist David Reaboi recently wrote about this in Tablet Magazine while discussing what is appearing to be the newest incarnation of this strange radical alliance that we are about to discuss:

What unites these audiences isn’t ideology so much as a way of seeing. In this world, nothing happens by accident; every war, election, or scandal confirms the existence of an unseen hand. The more elaborate the theory, the more convincing it feels. [The current peddlers of this theory] didn’t invent this pattern; they inherited and updated it into a modern vernacular of globalist plots, unipolar elites, and “foreign lobbies.” The content changes, but the structure never does.

[This is] a cognitive map built entirely on lies. Yet most people, including many Jews, still describe antisemitism as “anti-Jewish racism.” That mistake is fatal. Racism begins with emotion; antisemitism begins with explanation. Its logic is counterfeit, but it poses as reason all the same.

This confusion has deep roots. After the civil-rights era, “hate” became the moral grammar through which all prejudice was understood. Jewish institutions, eager to speak that language, adopted it wholesale. Once antisemitism was redefined as an emotional or linguistic offense, its conspiracy core was buried under “tropes.” In that bucket, the falsehoods that launched pogroms and genocides—blood libel, world-Jewish control—were lumped together with trivial stereotypes.

The result was a flattening of meaning. Even the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s official definition, adopted by governments and many Jewish groups, reflects this collapse. Its warning against “mendacious, dehumanizing, or demonizing allegations about Jews” treats antisemitism as a moral failure rather than an epistemic one.

Indeed, the more I have learned about antisemitism throughout history, the less it has appeared to me to be some strained social construct akin to racism, and more like a tradition. This is the tradition of conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theories are the bedrock of radicalism, whether we are describing religious or secular radicalism. Antisemitism is the bigotry that comes in with grand post-hoc justifications, rather than a bigotry that forms them on the fly; there is, in other words, a relatively robust internal logic to antisemitism, creating a vastly more powerful permission structure than your traditional colorist racism that we still occasionally see in the West. Its connection to social and religious tradition that goes back far further than Berlin in 1933 reveals its durability across time and ideology and thus helps explain its frequent role in unifying seemingly disparate ideologies, in creating this “Red-Green-Brown Alliance” described by Del Valle.

Much can be and has been said about the horseshoe theory of Western politics—the idea of a “Red-Brown Alliance,” which many socialists angrily dispute, perhaps doth protesting too much—and, as stated before, much more can be and has been said about the Red-Green alliance of late. However, the “Brown” prong of what Del Valle called the convergence of totalitarianisms has gotten far less play as far as commentary goes. There are many possible reasons for this, but it likely lies at the core of why there are many people who might scoff at the idea of a Red-Green alliance; it just seems too outlandish to assume that the Western radical right could ever possibly see eye to eye with Islamists on anything. And yet, as we will see, there is a robust history that shows precisely the opposite.

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Much has been said about the controversial soft-ball interview Tucker Carlson gave to America’s most infamous Hitler-lover, Nick Fuentes, on October 27th, 2025, especially after the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts made a series of statements, none of which went over well. The ongoing fracture within the American conservative movement is interesting in and of itself, and will likely continue to be examined for some time to come as of this writing. However, Carlson—and by extension, Fuentes—both provide an interesting window into what the most recent Green-Brown Alliance may start to look like, if we are indeed witnessing its early days.

For example, on an episode of his program from May of 2025, Carlson, almost certainly trying to be provocative as a way to criticize the American healthcare system’s handling of the ongoing opioid crisis, claimed that “if you really want to be red-pilled,” one should learn about the Taliban’s “faith-based” approach to drug rehabilitation. And while it nothing to do with Islam, Carlson also seems to have an appreciation for what are ultimately theocratic and medieval values lately. Similarly, a clip of Fuentes began circulating where several people paying to have their superchat comments read live on his show complained of him taking a soft view on Islam and Muslims, to which he simply accused them of “just wanting Muslim hate, or something,” and of being, of course, “Jews.”

Putting aside these relatively minor comments’ salience to my own observation on the Green-Brown alliance—as well as the question of whether or not Tucker Carlson or even Nick Fuentes can be classified as traditionally “Brown” in this case, instead of just a garden variety incessant Jew-baiter and traditional antisemite, respectively—if one takes a more broad look at the wider, paleoconservative/paleolibertarian commentator class, one can start to see a common thread, especially regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who is being granted agency in their commentary that conflict (Israel) and who is being granted none (Hamas). This is not to say that any of these figures—including Carlson and Fuentes, despite their previously-cited comments—actually yearns for a victory of Hamas, or actually wants a theocratic Islamic state to replace our own (I would wager most of them actually would not). The same can also be said for most radical activists on the Western left also functionally caping up for Hamas across social media.

This common thread is not surprising because, again, it is never really about the actual cause believed in by one’s allies; it is always about one’s shared enemies. While the radical Western left believes in a vague notion of “decolonization,” the radical right believes in a vague notion of being “anti-war,” and the Islamist groups like Hizb-ut Tahrir or Hamas believe in the restoration of a caliphate or Islamic dominance over the Holy Land—all very disparate standpoints—all three groups share the same enemies: Israel/the Jews (which are rapidly becoming functionally synonymous), and, almost always, the United States and the West in general (at least as they currently exist). It is therefore not all that outlandish to call the radicals on the Western left and right functional allies of Islamists. And just as the functional allyship of various leftist groups has existed with Islamists for some time, so too has that allyship existed between radical right wing groups and individuals and Islamists.

Similar to the radical Western left, the radical Western right does not, at first glance, seem to be a good fit for making common cause with Islamists. There is always a preternatural paranoia about border security and even immigrants in general, to say nothing of what often veers into Western chauvinism and outright racism, and a disgust with all things foreign, with the people of Islamic countries often (though of course, not exclusively) being used as examples of who not to allow within Western borders. And yet, in his 2006 book, The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right, the political science scholar George Michael explains that despite these tendencies of the Western radical right (and the tendencies of Islamists), “they actually share some strikingly similar characteristics.” Continuing, Michael writes the following:

Both movements evince a high degree of exclusivity as they endeavor to create their own utopian versions of homogeneous societies. Moreover, increasingly, there is a meeting of the minds on several important political issues—oddly enough, one example is the cause of Palestinian independence. The two also offer similar critiques of American foreign policy in the Middle East, the American media, modernity, secularism, and globalization. Finally, both movements see the U.S. government as hopelessly under the control of Jews or Zionists, pursuing policies that are at cross-purposes with their own group interests.

The key, Michael argues, for a meeting of the minds between the far right and Islamists is finding potential vectors for cooperation, particularly where perceived enemies overlap. In fact, according to Michael, “perhaps the greatest potential” has to do with my profession: that of history. More specifically, the greatest potential for cooperation between the far right and Islamists can be found with the phenomenon of historical revisionism, particularly when it comes to events like World War II and the Holocaust. As Michael explains:

There are several reasons why the prospect of cooperation between [the historical revisionist] segment of the extreme right and militant Islam is strong. First, the racialism in this segment tends to be muted and much less strident. Rarely does one read claims about the racial superiority of European-derived peoples or the racial inferiority of other races. Furthermore, non-Europeans, such as Afro-Caribbean scholar Tony Martin, have on occasion given lectures at revisionist conferences. Finally, there is a great congruence of interests in this field of intellectual endeavor because both militant Islam and revisionists are highly critical of Zionism.

While one can likely imagine several examples of this convergence of interests, especially the longer one spends in right wing corners of X, one of the most infamous examples of far right anti-Zionism comes from a particularly notorious Swiss Holocaust denier named Jürgen Graf. Graf’s first and most infamous book was Der Holocaust auf dem Prüfstand: Augenzeugenberichte versus Naturgesetze, or, The Holocaust on Trial: Eyewitness Accounts Versus Natural Laws, published in the early 1990s and co-authored with fellow Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno. Thanks to this work and many others echoing similar themes, Graf was dismissed from his teaching position, giving him further credibility in the eyes of the revisionist crowd, where he continued to thrive until his death in 2025. According to Michael, who interviewed him for The Enemy of My Enemy, Graf “saw great potential for an alliance with Palestinians and their supporters, especially because any effort to discredit accepted views of the Holocaust would undercut the legitimacy of the state of Israel and, by extension, the larger international community of Jews.”

Graf was indeed an unrepentant antisemite, and a true Holocaust denier (not “just” a revisionist, though that is largely a distinction without a difference in this particular context), claiming to Michael that “the ‘Holocaust’ lie is but a rotten corpse,” just waiting to be disproved, despite “the fact that those who profit from these myths control the education system, plus the media, of the West.” While completely ostracized by mainstream historians for views and claims like these, Graf was able to help organize a conference called “Revisionism and Zionism,” slated to occur in Beirut, Lebanon, in the summer of 2001. The event ended up being cancelled at the last minute, but it was spearheaded by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), probably the most infamous historical revisionism outfit thanks to its frequent laundering of Holocaust denial. The IHR was not content to simply distribute supposedly respectable pieces of Holocaust denial and skepticism; they sought to form foreign alliances and not just with fellow traveling European white supremacists. As Michael explains:

The IHR had interfaced with Muslims in the past; its director, Mark Weber, has been interviewed numerous times on Iranian state radio (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB). According to some accounts, Arabs were among the first financial supporters of the IHR. Just prior to the founding of the IHR, it is believed that the government of Saudi Arabia funded the Holocaust denier, William N. Grimstad, author of The Six Million Reconsidered. And on some occasions, Muslims have addressed IHR conferences, including Issah Nakleh of the World Muslim Congress.

The IHR has long since lost any luster it might have once had and its circulation of paid supporters was already in the four-digit range as of Michael’s writing almost two decades ago. Nevertheless, the revisionism link between elements of the far right and Islamism continues to persist and has a rich tradition; even the infamous German-Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel (who was, appropriately, helped in court by David Irving in the late 1980s) once commented that “the poor Palestinians are the most abused victims of this ‘Holocaust’ propaganda tool.”

In modern times, however, the link the two worldviews goes beyond mere shared interests in denying or downplaying the Holocaust, and even becomes more specifically wedded to current events. This became especially clear following the pogrom of October 7th, 2023. As reported by Katherine Keneally and Zoe Manzi in their paper “Hate united: Neo-Nazi accelerationist support for Hamas,” there were a number of far right accelerationists—that is, people who wish to speed along the destruction of modern society so a newer, better utopia can be born from the ashes—on Telegram who “believe they share commonalities with Hamas and consider the Israel-Hamas conflict to be an opportunity to radicalize, recruit and inspire violence against the Jewish community,” going so far as to share what they believe are Israel’s critical infrastructure details for Hamas’ consumption on Telegram.1

In a way it is unsurprising that accelerationists see something to admire in Hamas; back in 2006, George Michael pointed out—accurately—that “since the 1980s, the extreme right has evolved from a movement characterized by ultrapatriotism to one increasingly characterized by nihilism.” Hamas, it has been accurately stated by many, is a death cult and has described themselves as loving death more than the rest of us love life. It is not hard to imagine how a hyper-privileged, insufferably bitter Western radical yearning for an apocalypse of the modern world could find something admirable in one of the most barbarically nihilistic organizations on the planet. Indeed, Keneally and Manzi make it clear that “inter-group support is not rooted in a common religious or cultural ideology but rather in uniting against a common enemy: the Jews and the ‘corrupt’ West,” and that accelerationists are fans of Hamas’ tactics, suggesting “that their guerrilla-style warfare is worthy of adoption and should be implemented by accelerationists in the U.S.” Despite different ultimate visions of the world, the researchers found that without question, “both ideology and methodology are in the spotlight as areas of potential convergence” for Islamist terror groups like Hamas and far right terror groups and individuals in the West. Again, shared hatred is often all that is needed to forget diverging visions of the future.

However, there have been figures on the far right who have gone even deeper with finding common cause with Islamists, going so far as to exhibit outright Islamophilia. The most famous recent example of this phenomenon recently was the streamer Sneako, who converted to Islam in 2023, but had been fashioning himself a far right provocateur for some time. However, a less famous, but far more significant figure serves as what George Michael refers to as the “Islamic-National Socialist synthesis” of our modern era. That figure’s name is David Myatt, and his is a fascinating story.

David Myatt’s strange position within the far right influencer network is made most apparent by his writings appearing on the website for the Aryan Nations’ Ministry of Islamic Liaison, whose stated goal is to establish “solidarity, to the bona-fide adherents of Islam in the Arabic world and abroad,” in their own words. He is less known outside of the UK where he is originally from, but over the years he gained a bit of a reputation as the leader of the underground paramilitary group Combat 18 in 1998 after the original leader was thrown in prison for murder. This murder had been part of a broader strategy of “attack[ing] left-wing bookshops, gay pubs, and anti-apartheid activists” in the 1990s, and there is little doubt that Myatt played a part in the terror, or, if one is to be more charitable, was fully aware of it. However, like a lot of self-described “seekers,” he became disillusioned with the movement, especially after it self-destructed from “internecine conflicts and government repression,” in Michael’s words, though he never let go of the Nazi ethos. Myatt sought new meaning from various avenues, including Taoism, Buddhism, Christian monastic life, and even pagan and Satanic secret societies, but eventually, discovered Islam and was entranced.

This discovery and enchantment did little to tamp down Myatt’s neo-Nazism; in fact, it only accentuated it. His “racial-ethno-nationalism,” as Michael calls it (or “neoracism” as Myatt himself calls it), interestingly does not apply a hierarchy to the races, but does emphasize the importance of “racial particularism” in the context of “cultural identity and self-determination,” in which “the various races of the world have different destinies, different abilities, and different ways of living that should be respected,” in Michael’s words. Yet, the West—that is, the New World Order, in Myatt’s parlance—was not included in this formulation and was, in fact, the corrupting force that did not allow for different ways of living that should be respected. And, of course, given his continuing neo-Nazi beliefs, there was a very particular group that helped orchestrate this corruption thanks to their supposed influence.

Myatt admitted to George Michael in one of their interviews that he was slightly opportunistic in his pursuit of Islam because he admired the militancy practiced by Islamist groups against what he saw as the enemy—that is, the New World Order. Yet again, the idea that he—an avowed National Socialist—and Islamists “shared common enemies, the capitalist-consumer West and international finance,” was enough to entice him. But unlike other far right activists and radicals simply seeing the value of shared enemies, Myatt took it a step further: he converted, taking on the Islamic name Abdul Aziz. This made perfect sense to him because, as Michael explains, Myatt believed that “something was terribly missing in the hearts of right-wing extremists.” There was something truly inspiring about jihad to him; the truly fanatical commitment of the soul. As Myatt explained:

I came to understand that what motivated the fighters I and others had discussed previously was an intense faith: a real belief in an after-life; a belief that it was their duty to act in such a way, and that by doing their duty in the way they did, they would be assured of entering Paradise. And this faith was not a political belief they had acquired or accepted in adult life: it was part of their very culture. Indeed, it was their culture, their tradition, and their way of life, from birth through death.

It was this type of faith, this immersion in one’s own culture, which our own people so sadly lacked. We were trying to motivate people in a political way, whereas Muslim fighters did what they did because it was accepted as their duty, as their own people understood this duty and gladly accepted their martyrdom.

Despite his deterministic and all-encompassing diagnosis of Muslim culture, Myatt was adamant that racial differences played little role in his thinking. In fact, he insisted that “the truth about National Socialism has been obscured for over fifty years, thanks to the intensive, hateful, worldwide, well-financed, and unending propaganda campaign directed against it,” characterizing the image of the Nazis we get from the historical record as “the stereotyped Marxist-capitalist image of a National Socialist.” He rejected any notion of being “a rabid so-called ‘racist’ who hated other races,” instead proclaiming that he “loved my own people, valued my own heritage, and wished to see the creation of independent homelands where different races and cultures could live in freedom according to their own customs.”

While this certainly contradicts the original National Socialist mission of Liebensraum, this type of modern day racial radicalism is common enough among those who would consider themselves racial separatists. Myatt did not believe that the well-established history of National Socialism—or the history imperialist militant Islam, for that matter—contradicted his worldview or, more importantly, that these worldviews would conflict with one another. This was, of course, thanks to his belief that we have gotten the history of the Second World War wrong, as well as our Western understanding of Islam, but it was also because he believed that there was more than enough kinship between the faiths. As Myatt explained in his interview, “There is some common ground, since both ways—when correctly understood—produce civilized, honorable individuals who use reason as a guide.” However, he started to notice contradictions as he attempted to create something akin to, in Michael’s words, “‘Aryan Islam,’ in which Aryan culture and identity could be expressed in the confines of Islam.”

Eventually, Myatt—a very intelligent man, it should be noted, with a reported IQ of 187—conceded that, at least for him, there were too many contradictions between Islam itself and his vision of true National Socialism, which he saw as more tied to folk culture (that is, culture of the Volk) and, as Hitler believed, a reverence for “Nature.” The main problem, though, was not the issue of racial or even general, cultural differences; the problem was that Islam was too concerned with Jannah, or the next life. Radical action for the reward of the hereafter was ultimately too individualistic for him, and he left the faith to continue his political project from the standpoint of folk culture. Nevertheless, Myatt continued to express admiration for Islam and even stated that, “I do believe I understand Islam, which is why I know an alliance between Muslims and National Socialists is possible, and indeed necessary.” If he, an avowed National Socialist devoted to crushing the New World Order, could see the value in such a friendship, others would have to as well and perhaps even embrace the faith as he once did. However, there were others—particularly one man—who had already done just that.

Ahmed Huber was not born “Ahmed,” but was, in fact, born Albert Friedrich Armand Huber in 1927 to a Protestant family in Freiburg, Switzerland. He had converted to Islam in 1962, after having spent most of his adult life in the Swiss Socialist Party, which had brought him into greater contact with Islam through the Party’s support for Algerian independence. As he put it in his interview with George Michael, he was drawn to Islam because “it was an antitheology,” in which “Allah is a declaration of war against all theology,” because “Allah is always greater and greatest and completely different […] beyond all human reason.” Even better, Huber realized, Islam taught “the unity of faith and reason,” and that “there was no church; the only authority and message and of the messenger,” from which “the religious, the political, the social are [all] one, are together.” Enchanted by the promises he saw in this new faith—unlike what he saw as stunted Protestantism and milquetoast liberalism—he made the decision to convert. It was upon his joining the faith, reciting his Shahada in Egypt to the Sheikh Mahmud Shaltut on the invitation of the Egyptian embassy, that Huber’s views on politics started to change, especially the more often he spoke to the more radical Islamists among his new friends. One of those friends was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the pan-Arabist radical and President of Egypt. As Huber recalled:

Nasser explained to me some things about the Third Reich and about the Second World War, and about Adolf Hitler, and some things that I have never known. It was for me a complete culture shock. And then I went back to Switzerland. I was invited to the embassy [again] and there I met a young girl. She was a secretary, and we later married in the private officers’ club of Abdel Nasser. There we got married in August 1963 and from then on I’ve been a Muslim.

Continuing to describe his journey into the faith, Huber recounted that while he began as an Arab nationalist, “the Islamic Revolution in Iran made […] something new out of me.” This deepened his ties to political Islam and through those ties, he eventually met the infamous Ayatollah Khomeini, and even spoke in front of the Iranian parliament. Despite practicing in the Sunni tradition, Huber “became very much touched by Shi’a Islam,” and began to advocate for the Islamic Republic. It was when he returned to Europe from Iran that he was implored by his Iranian contacts to “make contact with right wing movements in order to stop them from attacking Muslims and to speak of common values [that] we have and also of common enemies.”

Huber did ultimately make those contacts, connecting with both European and American right wing extremists over the following decades. This relationship culminated in a bit of a rabbit hole but one that I think is worth delving into at least a little bit to understand the scope of this Green-Brown Alliance phenomenon we’re examining. This involves something called al-Taqwa, later renamed Nada Management in late 2001, which was a financial firm that, according to George Michael, “allegedly funded al-Qaeda,” and “[allegedly] provided assistance [to] Hamas […] and the Muslim Brotherhood.” As Michael explains, “the last known chairman of al-Taqwa is reported to have been Youssef Nada,” hence the name-change; this man matters to our story because, as Michael writes, Nada had connections to the Western far right that “extended back decades,” beginning with his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood during World War II and acting as a liaison between the Abwehr, or Third Reich intelligence, and the Brotherhood.

Huber fit into this equation in 1988 as one of the founders of al-Taqwa, which registered as an import-export company, but was, according to Swiss authorities, more akin to a terrorist money-laundering operation, with resources moving through the company to nefarious figures like Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden. About two weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration put out Executive Order 13224, which designated over two dozen international entities as supporters of terrorism; a significant number of these entities, including al-Taqwa, were registered to Youssef Nada, the Nazi-Muslim Brotherhood liaison. It was through the investigations that followed EO13224 that Ahmed Huber’s name came up and it was revealed that he had sat on the board of al-Taqwa since its founding in 1988. Thanks to the publicity created by the investigation into al-Taqwa, Huber agreed to a number of interviews and in one with the Jewish Telegraph Agency in November 2001, he admitted that he “met in Beirut on several occasions with bin Laden followers, whom he described as ‘very intelligent and nice guys.’”

More to the point, the same article references the Swiss newspaper Blick’s own reporting that Huber acted as “a go-between for Islamic extremists and neo-Nazis,” and that he believed “the greatest leaders of the 20th century were Hitler and Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini,” made evident by the two men’s portraits hanging prominently in his office. When asked about his attendance to a rally for Germany’s neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (which, it should be noted, takes issue with Germany’s newer populist right wing party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, for essentially stealing their thunder) as well as his contacts with them, Huber simply replied, “[The National Democratic Party] are brave people who understand that the Holocaust is a big lie.” When George Michael sat down for his interview with Huber in 2003, the Swiss Muslim convert made his positions even clearer—about as clear as one could—and it is thus worth quoting at length:

I judge as a Muslim, I judge Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich and his movement in a different way than the Zionists, or the Marxists, or the Anglo-Americans do because I know very, very much. I have been studying the sources of what was the Third Reich. And I met a lot of people who knew Hitler personally. I have met his [secretaries], Frau Gertrud Junge, who recently died, and Christa Schroeder. I have met Anton Axman, the last Hitler Youth leader, who brought the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun to the Reich Chancellery and burnt them. I met a lot of Waffen-SS generals from the Leibstandarte, who personally knew Hitler.

We Muslims were fascinated by the Third Reich in the 1930s because Hitler had some ideas at the political level and the economic level, and the cultural field, which were very close to the political, economic, and cultural sharia. For instance, the economic concept of an interest-free non-capitalist economy is very close to the Islamic concept of the economy. [Hitler’s] idea that art should represent god and not be degenerate and make a cult of ugliness, of lies, and of evil, this corresponds to the cultural sharia, and so on.

So this man and his movement were fascinating to many Muslim intellectuals all during the 1930s. And since 1945, Muslims have been studying all of these things. And we judge him [Hitler] in a different way. Even if now, of course, when the Muslims protest against America, they say Bush equals Hitler, or [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon equals Hitler, they say that not for themselves, but [because] they know that it has an impact on Western public opinion. [Emphasis added]

You see, Hitler himself had a quite positive attitude towards Islam. He said several times, “The only religion I respect is Islam. The only prophet I admire is the Prophet Muhammad.” He said several times in his table talks that “After the final war the swastika will rule all over Europe and will represent a new Europe. We will help the Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East to reestablish the Caliphate.” That means there would be an Islamic civilization. [And Hitler said], “In the Far East, there will be the rising sun”—Japan, of course. He didn’t see China [laughs]. He had no thought for China. He only saw Japan with whom he had an alliance. He spoke of a new stability in the world. The swastika, the crescent, and the rising sun would be a new stability. He said in America, people will wake up [as well as] in Latin America and Black Africa. He was against colonialism, you know. After the beginning, in Mein Kampf, there are still some colonialist ideas he had, like all people of his time. But later in the 1930s, especially during the war, he changed.

[…]

I have been around with groups of young people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, and especially what we call the New Right. Sometimes we hold meetings together, Muslims and people from the New Right, to speak about these things and to show what we have in common. I also spoke about this at the University of Tehran. I spoke at a seminar and workshops about these problems. Explaining what was the Third Reich, what it was all about. In London, we had conferences. We had Islamic conferences in the United States between 1988 and 1998, the last time in 1998 in the United States.

[…]

When you talk about this to young Muslims and young right-wing [people], they say there is common ground. The link is a criticism of the so-called modernity of the modern world, which in many ways has gone far away from god. It is against creation. It is against nature. Look for instance at the cult of homosexuality. This is incredible. This is against common sense, against reason, against nature. It is ridiculous. If you look at modern art, it is an insult to reason and an insult to the sense of beauty, which is in every human being.

If this lengthy diatribe started to sound familiar to anyone keyed into the rhetoric of the current New Right, especially online, the reason why should be appearing increasingly obvious: anti-modern radicalism is anti-modern radicalism, whether it comes in Brown or Green.

A more interesting and yet crucial thing for us to highlight here is that unlike David Myatt, and a number of other far right figures who have become converts to the Islamic faith (like Traditionalist René Guénon’s turn toward Sufism), Ahmed Huber came to his far right radicalism from his conversion to Islam. This is fascinating in and of itself, but it is also indicative of how malleable belief systems can be when made radical; how easy it is for one radical ideology to inform and influence the formation of or joining of another, no matter which way around.

However, Huber’s particular experience also allows us to see the real historical origin of this Green-Brown Alliance, and it is a very familiar origin, especially to those who listen to History Impossible. Huber recounted a story directly to Michael during the course of his interview with him for The Enemy of My Enemy, and one that really helps bring the bizarre phenomenon of this Green-Brown Alliance full circle. You see, in the 1960s, as he was becoming more and more invested in his newfound Muslim identity, Huber had traveled to Beirut, where he met with an aging titan of Islamism and, in my opinion at least, the godfather of the Islamist and far right friendship. This titan not only impressed him with his status and prestige, but also with a story seemingly too wild to be true:

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who I met in 1965 in Beirut, we had a long talk. He told me many, many interesting things, because he had an almost friendship, [definitely] a relationship, with Adolf Hitler. He told me a fantastic story. On one night in December 1941, after the big victories of Germany over the Soviet Union, he had a long talk with Hitler about architecture, culture, the music of Richard Wagner, and so on. Hitler started talking about race theory and antisemitism and the Grand Mufti asked Hitler, “Did you ever think, Mr. Chancellor, that your race theory comes out of Judaism? It comes out of the Old Testament.” And Hitler was very astonished by that. The Grand Mufti knew the Bible very well. He said, “All of your ideas, the doctrine of the Nazi Party, are in the Old Testament. The chosen people of god are not the chosen people, but the chosen race and that blood carries the soul. And this chosen race must keep its blood pure. It must not mix its blood with non-Jews; the foreigners, the subhuman beasts called the goyim, are inferior to the Jewish master race. The genocide order of God in the fifth book of Moses and in the book of Joshua. The race laws of Ezra and Ishmael. All of these things are in the Old Testament.” Hitler was absolutely astonished, and the Mufti told him [further], “You have not high esteem for the Africans, for Black people. And also this comes from the Old Testament in the first book of Moses, the Black race is doomed, considered by god to eternal slavery. It’s the famous curse by god on Ham, one of the three sons of the prophet Noah.”

So when the Mufti told Hitler another story, he said, “You, Mr. Chancellor, hate the Roman Catholic Church,” [to which] Hitler responded, “Really?” [The Mufti replied], “Yes, it’s true, but you, Mr. Hitler, you never left the Church. You are still formally a member of the Roman Catholic Church.” Then the Mufti added, “Mr. Chancellor, you have organized your Party like the Roman Catholic Church. You are the pope. Your Gauleiters and Reichsleiters are the cardinals and the archbishops. And your Party congresses are [like] high masses—religious ceremonies—which you celebrate as the high priest.” Hitler became furious and walked out. And for three weeks the Mufti could not come back in. After three weeks the Mufti had to go to the Reichschancellary in Berlin, and he told me, “There I thought he [Hitler] would arrest me and shout at me.” Hitler came and smiled at the Mufti, put his hands around his arms, and said, “Your Eminence, I want to apologize to you. I behaved like an uneducated little boy.” He said, “I have read the Bible and thought about what you said and now that final victory is close, Moscow will fall in a few weeks, and the Soviet Union will be gone, and then final victory will come. We must talk about all these things and try to make some changes in our ideology.” And, of course, final victory never came, but Hitler [dictated] a text to Christa Schroeder and Frau Junge, his [secretaries], which is called the Hitler-Bormann Documents, or the Testament to Adolf Hitler. In this text, Hitler makes a criticism of his policies.

There is literally no way to know whether this second-hand story from Ahmed Huber about Hajj Amin’s encounter with the Fuhrer in December of 1941 has any amount of truth to it; it would certainly be significant to the historiography if proven, since the only confirmed face-to-face encounter between Hajj Amin and Adolf Hitler was their late November 1941 meeting (which is to say nothing of their language barrier, which would require at least one interpreter at all times). However, despite the fact that Huber was not the most trustworthy individual (given his laughable denials of having any financial associations with al-Qaeda) I am inclined to believe that Huber indeed met Hajj Amin and the aging Mufti told this story to Huber in order to impress him. Because it clearly did impress him, and resonate enough for him to regale it to a political science scholar nearly five decades later, significantly earlier than Hajj Amin’s historical profile began to expand in the early 2010s; he had little reason to lie to Michael about hearing this story.

Nevertheless, I do not believe we should take Huber’s story at face value as the unvarnished truth about Hajj Amin’ and Hitler’s relationship, especially since it makes Hajj Amin, in his own eyes, look good. After all, causing Adolf Hitler to apologize and say “I acted like an uneducated little boy” is probably one of the biggest quasi-humble-brags that someone like Hajj Amin could make. And Hajj Amin was, as we have covered before on History Impossible, never exactly forthcoming when it came to telling the truth about his relationship with the Third Reich, especially after the fact. It behooved him to downplay that relationship to anyone but fellow travelers, and when fellow travelers showed up to his door, it behooved him to play it up. Most importantly, however, is that it is also highly unlikely that Hitler would even consider “making some changes to our ideology”—his ideology—because he “read the Bible” for a couple of weeks after getting shaken up by a meeting with a Middle Eastern clerical leader he had, based on Huber’s telling, only met twice. Finally, the document cited by Huber—the so-called “Testament of Adolf Hitler” or “Hitler-Bormann Documents”—has, despite receiving citations from respectable historians like Joachim Fest and Alan Bullock, largely been debunked, thanks to the work done by historian Mikael Nilsson in 2018. Hitler’s only eleventh hour change to his ideology—and I do not really think this was much of a change from Nazism’s nihilistic core—was his open willingness to let Germans die for failing to meet his vision.

The accuracy (or inaccuracy) of all this, interesting though it is (at least to me), is less relevant for our purposes than what it reveals: that the “Green-Brown Alliance” phenomenon goes back exactly to where one, at this point might well expect—the attempted ideological marriage of Islamism and National Socialism. This attempt is obviously well-covered territory on History Impossible does not make this any less significant for our story. In fact, it illuminates yet another historical through-line starting with some bizarre, seemingly new trends in our contemporary era and ending with an equally bizarre story from the Second World War that, until recently, acted as a bit of a strange footnote that bucked every possible assumption about Nazi ideological priorities. And that bizarre story has, for better or worse, taken on far greater significance, especially in the wake of the growing radicalism of the early twenty-first century. This can be seen in a letter written by the Nazi Johann von Leers, who changed his name to Omar Amin von Leers after his postwar conversion. In this letter, written to his friend, the American Nazi agent and fascist, H. Keith Thompson, von Leers saw which way the wind was blowing for anyone who considered themselves an enemy of the New World Order, when he wrote the following:

The Islamic bloc today is the only spiritual power in the world fighting for a real religion and human values and freedom. […] I think sometimes if my nation [Nazi Germany] had got Islam instead of Christianity we should not have had all the traitors we had in World War II, two million women would have been burnt as “witches” by the Christian churches, there would have been no Thirty Years War which destroyed Germany and killed more than half of our nation.

One thing is clear—more and more patriotic Germans join the great Arab revolution against beastly imperialism. […] To hell with Christianity, for in Christianity’s name Germany has been sold to our oppressors. Our place as an oppressed nation under the execrable Western colonialist Bonn government must be on the side of the Arab nationalist revolt against the West. […] I hamd ul Allah! […] Indeed, for our nation there is only one hope—to get rid of Western imperialism by joining the Arab-led anti-imperialist group.

…

In 1979, the Iranian Revolution exploded into being, beginning as a carnival of opposition where the most improbable bedfellows—leftist intellectuals, socialist ideologues, and Islamist agitators—found common cause in toppling a regime they each believed to be beyond saving, thanks to corruption and servility to what the Islamists came to call the Great Satan, i.e. the United States. Many forget—thanks to what the triumphant regime would come to resemble, that in those early days, banners flourished that bore the iconography of Marx and Lenin as readily as the Ayatollah Khomeini, promising a new dawn for the country’s disaffected and dispossessed. Revolutionaries of all types, crowded into clandestine apartments and meeting halls, crafted a fragile unity, convinced that the tyrant’s demise would surely herald a government as diverse and plural as those who rose against it.

But history, ever favoring the cynic, has very little patience for such sentimentalism. When the Shah’s throne was finally toppled, the mullahs proved far less inclined to share power than to consolidate it. The Islamist boot came down, and came down hard, on their former comrades; censorship, suppression of publications, and banning of leftist organizations soon gave way to mass purges and executions (usually accompanied by, perhaps ironically, the most socialist of all mockeries of a liberal justice system, the show trial) with thousands of socialists, communists, and other non-Islamist revolutionaries imprisoned or killed between 1979 and the early 1980s, with some scholars determining it to be upwards of 30,000. In essence, Khomeini’s disciples, having transformed proletarian fury into a clerical dictatorship, offered their supposed comrades not the spoils of revolution, but the gallows (or, in the case of the regime, cranes). The story of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 turned from solidarity to betrayal, as the revolution devoured its own children with a zeal that would have likely looked very familiar to Maximilien Robespierre.

I tell this story to illustrate the core reason why, despite this interesting tale’s implications, it is good to feel skepticism about the long-term prospects of a supposed “Green-Brown Alliance,” or a “Red-Green Alliance,” for that matter. As can be seen from the story of Iran, when the dust settles and the radicals realize it’s now time to fight one another over what is left, this often leads to the self-destruction of that coalition. There may be a darkly amusing irony to that, but in the end, that shared hatred has still been eradicated and untold amounts of collateral damage has likely resulted and will continue to result from the fighting. Running the risk of stating it too bluntly, this seems to be the law of physics that undergirds the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Thus, it is fair to be skeptical of such alliances bearing any meaningful, long-term fruit. The potential for such a coalition in mainstream politics remains unlikely, especially in Europe. Too many far right and generally right wing governments and political parties—such as AfD in Germany, PVV in the Netherlands, National Rally in France, and Fidesz in Hungary, to name just a few—have made stemming the tide of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries a major plank of their platform. The same has largely been the case with the Republican Party in the United States, though with a broader animus toward immigration seeming to characterize things, especially during the second Trump administration.

This barrier to entry for such an alliance was actually bemoaned by the far right-Islamist figures profiled earlier. Jürgen Graf, while praising Islam, referred to it as too “fundamentally alien to European culture and thought” to be accepted by right wing parties, who he believed needed to understand the tactical alliance more radical Muslims could provide against globalist and Jewish interests. David Myatt claimed that right wing politicians like the Le Pens in France making “political capital” out of taking “an anti-Muslim pose” was “contrary to honor and reason.” Ahmed Huber more charitably called it “a misunderstanding on both sides” and even seems to agree with the idea many immigration skeptics in Europe have expressed—that “many Muslims who come […] did not really integrate in Western society for a simple reason”—but sees this as the obvious failure of Western society on a deeper, moral level; not to integrate these newcomers or even accommodate them, but rather, to submit to the moral structure of Islam and bring them closer to the vision Hitler had for the European continent. Other far right activists and writers like Kevin MacDonald, Sam Francis, and Michael Collins Piper also expressed skepticism—much of it regretful—that such an alliance could be meaningfully formed and maintained.

This is at least partly why it does not really matter how “dangerous” a Green-Brown Alliance actually is, or for that matter, how “dangerous” the oft-observed Red-Green Alliance actually is. Clearly there is more respectability to be found in what has become a functional Red-Green Alliance thanks to the ideological makeup and nature of cultural institutions like academia (as well as a long-standing leftist tradition of supporting the Palestinian cause), while most historically far right ideologies remain relatively discredited regardless of the alliances they make. However, the Western left’s long-standing tradition of taking the so-called “anti-Zionist” position provided enough credibility to fast and loose criticisms of Israel and Israelis, while also delegitimizing criticism of radical Islam, that it clearly helped move the Overton window in such a way that the so-called “Jewish question” could start to actually gain traction from far right figures in the modern day like Nick Fuentes. Nevertheless, neither alliance is, in any meaningful sense, dangerous, at least not yet; at the end of the day, speech is speech and speech is free, at least in the United States. The purpose in noting the Green-Brown Alliance in this essay is not to highlight that it is the “true” danger; it is to highlight intellectual heritage in order to better understand the nature of radicalism.

When it comes down to it, radicalism purports to be about a greater cause, a larger end goal: a utopia. Those causes and goals of utopia certainly exist and are sincere, but the thing is that a utopia has never existed. It has no analogue. The behavioral history and intellectual heritage of radicals does exist, however, and it is always animated by the same impulse: to form contradictory alliances based solely on shared hatred and a desire to eradicate that hatred. In the case of these alliances, that enemy is, indeed, the Jews (whether as people or as a nation) though there are larger, more abstract forces and symbols they all oppose—capitalism, globalism, the West.

These three forces and symbols represent the antithesis to all three totalitarianisms’ ideas of utopia, and that matters far more than the fundamental differences between their respective utopias. It is the powerful critiques of these forces that attracts people to totalitarian ideology, but seeing this unity of purpose between contradictory ideological projects reveals that the appeals only really work in ideological isolation; when it is made obvious what the shared DNA—or political psychological impulse—is with all these ideologies, it might start to seem less appealing, at least to the more thoughtful among us. Thus, understanding the common ground that these ideologies can forge despite their fundamental differences is what helps discredit them, at least for anyone who appreciates what remains of liberal values.

Unfortunately, many people—particularly those drawn toward contrarianism and an unwillingness to modify or even let go their beliefs they hold dear—will be more likely to see something compelling in these disparate ideologies sharing their hatreds. “If they can all agree on what the problem is,” this hypothetical person reasons, “then they must be onto something!” This is a tempting fiction, because it is a compelling story, especially in the heat of the moment. Maybe it will continue to be a tempting fiction, especially in our age of seeking novelty, both in ourselves and in the content we consume. Contradiction—aesthetic, ideological, or otherwise—is indeed novel, and humans do not appear to be in any hurry to get over that tendency. And yet, behind the novelty lies a very familiar tale. And that story has been told many, many times throughout history and it rarely, if ever, looks appealing.

That is why another, more particular story from 1794, and in France of all places, comes to mind. Despite the time and place, and despite how our culture has tended to regard this time and place, it is not a romantic story. In fact, it carries with it the same stark nastiness as most stories involving revolution or civil war or other things for which our contemporary radicals appear to constantly yearn. Much had happened to lead to this story, and much followed, but I have always believed this particular moment in France’s famous—or infamous—revolution serves as a great object lesson, perhaps reality check, for those among us that believe the way of the radical, contradictory alliances based on shared hatreds and all, is the only way forward.

When he was placed upon the execution platform, about to have his head removed from his body, the radical French Revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre, did not deliver a moving speech, or utter any famous last words of defiance against those he might have once considered friends and comrades. In fact, he did not say any words at all. Robespierre had tried to shoot himself to escape justice, but only managed to shatter and mangle his jaw in the process. His face had been wrapped in bandages to keep his jaw in place after a military doctor removed a few of his teeth and pieces of the jawbone for posterity. When he arrived at the guillotine, the executioner removed the bandage, no words left the revolutionary. Instead, all that was heard was a primal scream of pain.

It’s unlikely that I’ve undersold the significance of the Salem witchcraft crisis to the development of American history, particularly in the religious and institutional context. But what I always felt somewhat sad about leaving out was the true horror of the event itself, and really the confusing knot that it has created throughout the nearly 340 years…

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The attempt to characterize or even diagnose the twentieth century is often done in the context of its violence thanks to the World Wars and the inherent threat of nuclear apocalypse that hung over the years of the Cold War. This is understandable, given the unprecedented scale of violence that occurred during the wars made possible by advancing technology, but many scholars have looked at the increasingly common role of ideology in creating such circumstances. As the century reached its final decade, many scholars and writers began to reflect on the century that was coming to an end as a way of determining what was to come.

This trend began to manifest in 1989 with the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s infamous article, “The End of History?”, which argued the fall of communism was paving the way for a relatively stable liberal, democratic future with no meaningful ideological alternative. In discussing a supposed “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama explains that with the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the liberalizations occurring within the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, the final viable permutation of ideological development had revealed itself: liberal democracy. As Fukuyama explains, the end of history is “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”¹ Fukuyama does not outright say that there will be no other challenges (or “histories,” so to speak) that will challenge this new, final paradigm, but he is also clear that no viable alternative has revealed itself on a civilizational scale.

All alternatives were dead ends, Fukuyama argues: fascism had been completely discredited since 1945, China clearly did not follow the Marxist-Leninist paradigm anymore, and because the only other great power, the Soviet Union, was going through a process of liberalization, all that was left was liberalism. An important thing to realize is that Fukuyama is the first to admit that the idea of an “end of history,” as he is describing it, is not a novel concept. In fact, he points to eighteenth and nineteenth century writers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx to show that many have claimed that history would one day “end.” But his argument’s greater influence is the writer Alexandre Kojève, who believed that history had reached its end with the conclusion of the Second World War, after which “no struggle or conflict over ‘large’ issues” could exist, with all that remaining being “primarily economic activity.”²

Fukuyama’s argument for an “end of history” has been savaged in the years since its publication, thanks largely to the benefit of hindsight making his claims come off as naive, but taking his arguments in the context of their time, it is understandable that he would see things the way he did. It is true that some of his arguments do not age well at all, particularly his dismissal of neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer’s claim that without its Marxist-Leninist ideology, Russia’s “behavior will revert to that of nineteenth century imperial Russia,” and his assumption that Gorbachev’s attempt at resurrecting Leninism are “Orwellian doublespeak,” going against the evidence later presented by scholars like Vladislov Zubok, shown in his magisterial work on the disintegration of the USSR, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.³ Without digressing much further into the historiographic weeds, Zubok’s work does much to disabuse us of the notion of Gorbachev being a cynical operator and, in fact, a product of post-Thaw Soviet cultural developments in which Stalin—and not communism itself—was the aberration, and the goal was to return to what Lenin intended for the new communist state in 1917.

However, Fukuyama deserves more credit for understanding where China’s development under Deng Xiaopeng was heading—a market-driven command economy of sorts; something closer to Mussolini’s corporate fascism than anything envisioned by Karl Marx—as well as acknowledging the challenges facing liberalism in the form of Islamism and internal nationalism. Fukuyama does discount the idea of expansionist nationalism at the peril of his credibility (especially with hindsight vis-a-vis later events in the Yugosphere in the 1990s and, again, with Putin’s Russia and its new era of imperialist expansionism), but he provides a good reality check when it comes to the civilizational threats posed by Islamism and nationalism; these things are serious and can have provably threatened internal stability in various nations, as we have seen in the thirty-six years since “The End of History?”’s original publication, but having lost the other pole of the Cold War’s bipolar world, assuming Western liberalism’s unipolarity was a fair assumption.

Standing in contrast with Fukuyama was his old professor, Samuel Huntington, whose equally infamous 1993 article “The Clash of Civilizations” (and one that was likely written in response to Fukuyama’s own) argued that the end of ideological conflict was heralding a far darker and more existential future in which entire civilizations would compete for dominance over the globe. According to Huntington, the world order, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, is defined by the interaction of various civilizations, which includes the West, but also other cultures, including Confucian, Islamic, and Slavo-Orthodox, to name just a few. Whether these categories actually constitute “civilizations” as Huntington describes them or not is less relevant than the fact that they all contain fundamental differences; as Huntington writes, “differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic.”⁴

As Huntington would have it, because these differences are products of unique cultures and centuries of history, they largely cannot be reconciled in such a way that precludes conflict. While Huntington is careful to note that conflict due to civilizational differences is not guaranteed and that violence is not inherent, he makes it clear that these differences between the world’s seven or eight civilizations are so fundamental that a true multiculturalism is essentially impossible. Huntington also believes that clashes between civilizations are almost certainly inevitable in the modern era—contrasting with Fukuyama’s more liberal, multicultural view—because of several factors. For example, local identities have started to become separated from individuals; as he puts it, “the nation state as a source of identity” has been fundamentally weakened and thus strengthens the more fundamentalist parts of societies as identity anchor points.⁵

In addition, Huntington argues that the shrinking of the world leads to greater interaction between civilizations, and a greater effort to emulate the West’s success at achieving such great influence, as well as an increase in “economic regionalism.”⁶ However, he does also describe conflicts that “occur between states and groups within the same civilization,” while also claiming this is less likely to occur in the future.⁷ Huntington supports his claims with the writings of other writers and scholars, such as Indian journalist and later member of Parliament M.J. Akbar and the renowned Orientalist and intellectual Bernard Lewis with their predictions of Western-Islamic conflict and explanation for the origins of “Muslim rage” against Judeo-Christian culture, as well as Murray Weidenbaum and his explanation of the growth of the East Asian economic bloc in the late twentieth century, to use two prominent examples.⁸

Like Fukuyama, Huntington’s argument has elements that are compelling, as well as elements that do not age well. However, the “‘us’ versus ‘them’ relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion” he identified within the framework of clashing civilizations did and would indeed continue to hold true in various contexts as the years progressed after his initial writing.⁹ For example, it is undeniable, based on much of the writings from figures like Osama bin Laden such as his 2001 open letter published (and later removed in 2023) in the Guardian, and the rhetoric of figures like George W. Bush in the wake of events like 9/11 that nations and forces were viewed in this way from either side, whether due to religious fundamentalism or a fundamentalist belief in the supposed civilizing mission of American democratic supremacy. Huntington seems to believe in this divide and does little to dissuade his readers from believing it as well, but his civilizational framing is, at least for my tastes, far too deterministic and does not leave room for the nuance required to understand why disparate cultures have and continue to have common interests and support one another.

It is therefore clear that both articles reflected an awareness that an old era had passed, and that it had been dominated by ideological conflict, but their authors seemed to have little interest in interrogating their own certainty.

Filling that void was the unapologetic Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, in 1994, provided definition and clarity to what he called the “Short Century” of the previous eight decades in sweeping detail, with his book The Age of Extremes: A History of the World: 1914-1991. Now, one might not expect someone like me to make this claim, but to my mind, the best “big history”—that is, large scale diagnosis—of the Twentieth Century did not come from a neoliberal or neoconservative historian (I will be the first to admit, likely much to the chagrin of some of you reading, that I often tend towards those schools of thought when it comes to history), but rather, from a Marxist, and one of a truly classic vintage at that: Eric Hobsbawm. This is not to say that I did not find certain assertions made by Professor Hobsbawm in his book that we are about to examine to be particularly troubling, with his refusal to label the Soviet Union as an actual totalitarian system being perhaps his most noteworthy, when he wrote the following passage:

Brutal and dictatorial though it was, the Soviet system was not “totalitarian,” a term which became popular among critics of communism after the Second World War, having been invented in the 1920s by Italian fascism to describe its objects. Hitherto it had been used almost exclusively to criticize both it and German National Socialism. It stood for an all- embracing centralized system which not only imposed total physical control over its population but, by means of its monopoly of propaganda and education, actually succeeded in getting its people to internalize its values. George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) gave this Western image of the totalitarian society its most powerful form: a society of brainwashed masses under the watchful eye of “Big Brother,” from which only the occasional lonely individual dissented.

This is certainly what Stalin would have wanted to achieve, though it would have outraged Lenin and other Old Bolsheviks, not to mention Marx. Insofar as it aimed at the virtual deification of the leader (what was later shyly euphemized as “the cult of personality”), or at least at establishing him as a compendium of virtues, it had some success, which Or- well satirized. Paradoxically, this owed little to Stalin’s absolute power. The communist militants outside the “socialist” countries who wept genuine tears as they learned of his death in 1953—and many did—were voluntary converts to the movement they believed him to have symbolized and inspired. Unlike most foreigners, all Russians knew well enough how much suffering had been, and still was, their lot. Yet in some sense by virtue merely of being a strong and legitimate ruler of the Russian lands and a modernizer of these lands, he represented something of themselves: most recently as their leader in a war which was, for Great Russians at least, a genuinely national struggle.

However, this problematic assertion—along with Hobsbawm’s later shocking admission that he believed the proven death and destruction created by the Soviet Union was not enough to get him to reconsider his Marxist beliefs—surprisingly does little to dampen the overall diagnosis and analysis he provides of the twentieth century’s depraved, violent character, as well as the relatively prescient awareness he had of where things were going as of the book’s publication in 1994. Credit should be given where it is due, even when it is going to a Stalinist like Hobsbawm most certainly was. The only reason there was any prescience at all is because of how keenly he observed the eight decades that had just passed.

In short, Hobsbawm argues, the purpose examining the Short Twentieth Century is “to understand and explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together,” and thus see it for what it was: “a century of religious wars.”¹⁰ In doing so—that is, understanding the fundamentalist character of the Short Twentieth Century—one may perhaps understand how the future, according to Hobsbawm, would be one defined by our “unfortunately accelerating, return to what our nineteenth-century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism”; it became, as he later concludes, “the atmosphere which urban humanity at the end of the millennium learned to breathe.”¹¹ For anyone, including a civilization (to use Huntingtonian language), to be able to breathe barbarism, one must have been inculcated and conditioned by barbarism, and as Hobsbawm would have it, there is no better way to define the Short Twentieth Century.

Hobsbawm makes it clear that the bang with which the Short Twentieth Century began—that is, the First World War—was not driven by ideology, but rather by the notion of infinite growth. It was, in fact, “waged for unlimited ends,” because, “In the Age of Empire, politics and economics had fused.”¹² The chaos and fury of the First World War set the table for the birth of the ideological global conflict, first with the October Revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union, and then the rise of “the revolutionaries of counterrevolution” that made up fascism and National Socialism in Italy and Germany, respectively.¹³ Despite the rise of ideology (or perhaps because of it, especially in the case of communism’s vision of world revolution), the world was “no longer Euro-centred and Euro-determined,” which was made all the clearer by the rise of the Third World following the end of the Second World War and the end of empires, though Hobsbawm does note that the Great Depression and failure of liberal capitalism was “a landmark in the history of anti-imperialism and Third World liberation movements.”¹⁴ In short, nothing would ever be the same after the period Hobsbawm calls the Age of Catastrophe, but not necessarily in the way other commentators at the end of the Short Twentieth Century would assume.

The middle of the Short Twentieth Century began with what Hobsbawm calls the “Golden Age,” though not in the way that later commentators would necessarily have it. Instead of one “single homogeneous period in world history,” that begins in 1945 and ends in 1989, the era that came to be known as the Cold War “fall into two halves, the decades on either side of the watershed of the early 1970s.”¹⁵ There were attempts made by both the United States and the Soviet Union—the two belligerents of the “very peculiar [Third World War]”—to secure their power over vassal states and smaller world powers, though Hobsbawm makes the curious claim that “the ‘communist camp’ showed no sign of significant expansion between the Chinese revolution and the 1970s,” which does little to countenance the military expansionism of the Soviet forces into places like Czechoslovakia.¹⁶ However, his point is well-taken in that the ideological spread of communism did little expansion during this period of time. This tracks with his later claims about the true appeal of communism in the Third World, which was, as it would turn out, limited and often confined to a more nationalist scope.

Making good use of economic data and first-hand accounts, Hobsbawm charts the changes occurring throughout the First World during and following the Golden Age, particularly with the decline of peasant classes, the rise in the importance of higher education, the emergence of women in the labor market, and the related cultural shifts that began to manifest in the 1970s. While he compellingly explains that the notion of “a collapsing working class” during this period is an “illusion,” he does point out there was “a crisis not of the class, but of its consciousness,” resulting in what would eventually be recognized as the individualism that defined the world of the 1990s (and arguably beyond).¹⁷ Beyond these shifts in the First World, however, there were profound and revealing shifts in the Third World that were both independent of and conflicted with the First and Second Worlds of the Short Twentieth Century.

While ostensibly the First World was defined by capitalism and the Second by communism, the Third World was defined by “a distinctly new phenomenon,” in which military coups became the norm thanks to being “the product of the new era of uncertain or illegitimate government.”¹⁸ This development, a product of the decolonization process and the rise of national consciousness (often filtered through a communist or socialist lens, as was the case with states like Vietnam), thus made First and Second World military intervention into the Third World “far more inviting, especially in new, feeble and often tiny states.”¹⁹ This was part of a “wave of rebellion [that] swept across all three worlds,” but ultimately, Hobsbawm contends, lead to a situation in which “the revolutions of the late twentieth century thus had two characteristics: the atrophy of the established tradition of revolution” and “the revival of the masses.”²⁰ This was, per Hobsbawm, symptomatic “of the growing barbarization of all three worlds,” that would come to define the end of the Short Twentieth Century, forming one of the most compelling parts of his overall argument.²¹ By the end of this eighty year period, inequality became massive not just between the First and Third Worlds (to say nothing of the collapses facing the Second World in the late 1980s), but also between members of the First World itself.

This inequality, not to be saved by what Hobsbawm very subjectively sees as the vulgarization of art and culture, as well as the insufficiency of scientific and technological development to save us from his foreseen barbarization, could be seen in the failure of the remaining ideological structure in place in the 1990s—that of neoliberal capitalism, which started to become the First World’s raison d’être during the post-1945 Golden Age—to address the reality that “human collective institutions had lost control over the collective consequences of human action.”²² The consequences of this, Hobsbawm argues, is that globalized competition will result in “one or both of two consequences [that] must follow [as of 1994]: the transfer of jobs from high-wage to low-wage regions and (on free-market principles) the fall of wages in high-wage regions under the pressure of global wage competition.”²³

This could only have happened with the continued inequality between the First World and the Third, and the victory of the First World over the Second; the division of the globe into such worlds was only accomplished through the dominance of ideology and what Hobsbawm calls “an era of religious wars, though the most militant and bloodthirsty of its religious were secular ideologies of nineteenth-century vintage, such as socialism and nationalism, whose god-equivalents were either abstractions or politicians venerated in the manner of divinities.”²⁴ And this was only possible thanks to the zero-sum attitude developed during the Age of Empire, bolstered by similar attitudes toward infinite growth on display at the end of the Short Twentieth Century.

The greatest trouble facing the world is that no one has the memory of such developments; that is the third and final transformation that brought the Short Twentieth Century to a close. Ultimately, Hobsbawm argues, this “third transformation, and in some ways the most disturbing,” in which the links between previous and subsequent generations have undergone “snapping […] that is to say, between past and present.”²⁵ There was no end of history or a grand clash of civilizations as the Short Twentieth Century came to an end; there was the victorious forces of capitalism, which had indeed proved itself to be “a permanent and continuous revolutionizing force.”²⁶

Neoliberal political scientists such as Francis Fukuyama have admitted an “end of history” was a depressing thing, he never fully elaborated on why this might be the case, and even, perhaps facetiously, suggested that the “very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”²⁷ Conversely, pessimistic conservative historians like Samuel Huntington have suggested that a retreat of ideological and a deterministic return to increasing “civilizational consciousness”—firmly rooted in an innate knowledge of a deep, shared (and conflicting) past—lay in our future, in which “violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars.”²⁸

However, Eric Hobsbawm made it very clear that something far more depressing, and far less dramatic, lay in store for the future of humanity after the age of extremes had passed: a complete divorce from history, in which everything exists in the self-interested present, with our only guide being our century-long learned adaptation of breathing barbarism. Perhaps Hobsbawm would disagree, but when reading his words, it appears that he was simply restating the implications made by figures like Fukuyama and Huntington in plainer, perhaps even more compelling terms.

Notes:

1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” in The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 4.

2. Ibid., 5.

3. Ibid., 13, 15.

4. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993), 25.

5. Ibid., 26.

6. Ibid., 27.

7. Ibid., 38.

8. Ibid., 28, 32.

9. Ibid., 29.

10. Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World: 1914-1991 (New York: Random House, 1994), 3, 5.

11. Ibid., 13, 457.

12. Ibid., 29.

13. Ibid., 117.

14. Ibid., 34, 204.

15. Ibid., 223.

16. Ibid, 226, 227-228.

17. Ibid., 302, 305.

18. Ibid., 348.

19. Ibid., 349.

20. Ibid., 444, 456.

21. Ibid., 457.

22. Ibid., 565.

23. Ibid., 572.

24. Ibid., 563.

25. Ibid., 15.

26. Ibid., 16.

27. Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, 18.

28. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, 48.

Before I get going with this academic review I wrote of the Sovietologist and Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin’s excellent Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, I want to first point folks to some of the writing I have been fortunate enough to see published in other outlets in the last couple of months.

First, at one of my regular writing gigs, the classical liberal LGBT-themed publication Queer Majority released the review and analysis I did of the recent docu-miniseries on Netflix that covers the rise, fall, and rise again of the infamous actor Charlie Sheen, called aka Charlie Sheen. I was honestly shocked at how moved I was by the series, never really being a massive Charlie Sheen fan myself, but I was teleported back to the salad days of Empire, to use the Bret Easton Ellis term that was often paired with his analyses of Charlie Sheen’s antics from the time. It really shook loose the realization that the world of 2009-2012 really was a different time, not just because my generation was still finding our way in the world as post-Recession 20-somethings, but also because it somehow feels so recent until you look at a calendar. Maybe that’s just getting older.

Similarly, I was struck even harder as I read the excellent ’ incredible book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and Demise of Discourse. I still have many complicated feelings about the chaos of 2020, stated most often in my work here with History Impossible, but Thomas’ book really struck a chord with me. This was both in his very sharp analysis of post-2008 optimism among the young and liberal, but also how that all fell apart and ultimately became that chaos. Being from Minneapolis myself and forced to watch everything unfold from 3000 miles away in Los Angeles was always something that hit me hard, but I don’t think I ever tried to grapple with how hard it actually hit me. But Thomas’ book put me in that space, so I sat down and started to write. I wasn’t sure what it was that I had written, since it was more personal than usual, so I asked my friend to give it a look and, if he liked it, give it a home. He was insanely generous to do so, and you can read it here, and I recommend you do if you have not already.

That is all I have in the way of updates and links to my other recent work, so I hope you have been enjoying the episodes recently released to the feed. I am currently recording and editing the next major installment of the “Muslim Nazis” series, so please stay tuned for that. Given the scope of that series, it may take a little while, so to fill the gap, I’ve been reaching out to some folks to see if I can arrange some interviews; we’ll just have to wait and see where that goes.

In any event, please enjoy this review of Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain while you wait. It was dense, but fascinating stuff, and I am starting to finally realize that outside of American religious history, the obscure corners of World War II, and Hollywood true crime, Soviet history is becoming a growing area of interest for me.

…

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The horrors of the Soviet Union, while not as well-understood or well-known as those of Nazi Germany, are well-enough-known and well-enough-understood that we can draw many associations with several images or themes. The gulag. Genocidal famine. The NKVD and KGB. Censorship, including the erasing of people from photos. The Orwellian nightmare of the Soviet Union came alive most famously from the work of Robert Conquest in which he documented the “Great Terror” of 1937, during which an estimated 700,000 to 1.2 million people were executed or allowed to starve and die of disease in the gulag system. His assessment, which seems to suggest that it was “carried out as if its scale and the identity of almost all its targets were known in advance,” was largely considered the norm in the historical scholarship.¹ This created a notion of a monolith, one in which the individual human being—especially the human being living their day-to-day life in Stalin’s Russia—is immersed in the communist blob, the role of agency forgotten and the role of ideology made coarse.

What is forgotten is that the Soviet Union, even (or especially) under the heel of Joseph Stalin from 1924 to 1953, was itself a civilization, different only in expression and kind from the capitalist norms of the West. It had its own rules, its own values, its own individuals working within it, the last of which acting as human beings as much as any American or European, and not as the automatons assumed in Western propaganda. Studying and realizing this does nothing to diminish the aforementioned horrors that existed for millions of people living within the Soviets’ grasp, but it does help illustrate the on-the-ground realities of the world’s first true, socialist civilization. That was the goal of Stephen Kotkin when he wrote his lengthy account of the industrial city Magnitogorsk’s conception, construction, and life within during the first two decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization.

Kotkin’s central argument in Magnetic Mountain rests within the story of Magnitogorsk, but by no means is it limited to that city. As a matter of fact, for Kotkin, Magnitogorsk serves as “a microcosm of the USSR,” in which the experiences of those who built, as well as worked and lived in Magnitogorsk scaled up to how many citizens of the Soviet Union lived and how the defining feature of Stalinism—that is ideologically-motivated state building—manifested.² As Kotkin writes, “[Stalinism] was a way of life,” in which “intricate encounters, conflicts, and negotiations […] took place in and around the strategy of state-centered social welfare in its extreme, or socialist, incarnation.”³ Stalinism, as Kotkin explains, was built on “something hopeful,” but like any system, life inside of it was “characterized by gradations of commitment—particularly in the willingness to suspend disbelief.”⁴ This stands in stark contrast to any notion of mindless sheep following the will of the dear leader, as is often conjured in the Western imagination when one thinks of Stalinism.

Making use of both primary and secondary sources throughout, Kotkin begins the first section of his analysis from the broadest vantage, in which he looks at the role played by economic planning in the construction of a planned community like Magnitogorsk, as well as the massive resettlement that occurred, and the creation of what would be “a recognizably socialist city.”⁵ Calling to mind the efforts made by the French government to essentially “civilize” their peasant population as described by Eugen Weber in Peasants into Frenchmen (as well as elements of David Blackbourn’s Conquest of Nature), the Soviets engaged in what Kotkin calls “internal colonization” of their people into “the epitome of the Bolsheviks’ commitment to massive social transformation, their martial style of economic mobilization called planning, their understanding of industrialization as class war, their yearning to overcome Russia’s historic ‘backwardness’ and to master the country’s expanse, their obsession with outracing time, and, above all, their infatuation with heavy industry.”⁶ His ultimate point, made even clearer in the second part of the monograph, is that a focus on Magnitogorsk offers an opportunity to scale the analysis up to the Soviet Union as a whole, thanks largely to the socialist city’s legacy as just that: an emblem of Soviet socialism.

The primary sources Kotkin uses for the first section are effective in illustrating the themes to which he has wedded his argument about Magnitogorsk. In examining the role of a planned economy, Kotkin pulls from the recollections of “a Soviet manager […] when he was upbraided by the people’s commissar” in order to get new equipment delivered to Magnitogorsk’s construction area so he could meet the deadline that was being enforced by that very commissar and others like him.⁷ This demonstrates, according to Kotkin, that “the establishment of a hierarchical command structure,” endemic to a planned economy, “with authoritative commanders in the field did not […] mean that all bureaucratic conflict had been eliminated.”⁸ A planned economy, the Soviet thinking went, did away with such inefficiencies; not so, according to the sources. Similarly, the Stalinist dream of Magnitogorsk included many promises made to the people the state imported—especially dekulakized peasants—that their work would result in proper housing against the harsh elements of the Chelyabinsk Oblast. Quoting from a heartbreaking account from “a Soviet eyewitness,” who remembered that “’it was raining, children were crying, as you walked by, you didn’t want to look,’” Kotkin demonstrates that the imported peasantry “lived initially in tents,” with thousands dying in the harsh winter.⁹ This was all in service to making a socialist city, or “the modern world’s first completely planned city,” which ultimately “arose largely in spite of the plans.”¹⁰ Showing the diagrams drawn by German architect Ernst May, Kotkin demonstrates how these plans were modeled after the theory of the “linear city,” and then faced several challenges that could not be easily overcome even with the power of the Soviet state.¹¹ However, what resulted—a “part barracks settlement, part village, part labor camp and place of exile, part elite enclave, and part new city”—was “a microcosm of the Soviet Union during the building of socialism.”¹² Kotkin then turns his attention away from the construction of this fully planned socialist city and then turns to what it was like to live in it, as well as the revisionism he seeks to challenge.

For part two of Magnetic Mountain, Kotkin does little to shake up his methodology when examining what it was like to live in a socialist city, using different sources to explore the housing and domesticity situation of Magnitogorsk’s people, as well as the different expressions of belief and identity, the “shadow economy” that grew from an official one without private property or freedom of commerce, and finally, the effects of the Great Terror and how “individuals came to participate in their own destruction.”¹³ That final chapter is where revisionism comes into play, something in which scholars like Sheila Fitzpatrick who see Kotkin’s “post-revisionism” in a more skeptical light, claiming that “Kotkin and those who followed him saw the Stalinist ideology and values [...] as a collective social construction, not something imposed by the regime.”¹⁴ Kotkin’s seeming revisionist revisionism contends a more nuanced view than is suggested there, but it only becomes clear when one examines his arguments involving living in a Stalinist civilization.

When looking at the living situation of Magnitogorsk, Kotkin makes it very clear that socialism’s “anti-world” was reflected in its rejection of capitalism as its defining feature, made most apparent by the outright non-existence of private property. Explaining that “the antagonism between socialism and capitalism […] was central [...] to the mind-set of of the 1930s that accompanied socialism’s construction and appreciation,” Kotkin explores the about-face that occurred from anti-family communalism to pro-family policies.¹⁵ This shift is explored most directly through the decree against “hooliganism” that was passed in 1935, thanks to the communal living situation faced by many families who were not happy about placing families in the same place as “’regular drinking bouts,’” and “’noise, fights, and abusive language.’”¹⁶ This, in turn, led to the adoption of policies like “private housing,” as well as more supposedly pro-family policies, like “making divorce complicated and expensive,” as well as making abortion more difficult, but ultimately, putting in place a system of mutual surveillance within the populace.¹⁷ This all revealed the further challenges in creating the perfect socialist city, showing how compromises needed to be made, and how these, in turn, produced more opportunities for state control, including via the populace themselves.

Kotkin later examines those opportunities, and the people’s ability to deceive themselves, most effectively in his discussion of “speaking Bolshevik” and how this new “anti-world” (that is, a world seemingly existing entirely in opposition to Western capitalism; i.e. a world made of “socialist competition”¹⁸), managed to form itself just as easily from below as it did from above. Using a letter sent by the wife of the allegedly best locomotive driver to the wife of the alleged worst, Kotkin shows that “the new terms of social identity were articulated and made effectual.”¹⁹ Because the latter wife was illiterate and the former was obviously not, Kotkin shows that, in an ideological sense, the people of Magnitogorsk (and the USSR in general) were creating new social hierarchies defined by the state, instead by the acquisition of wealth, seen as the default in the West. What this, in turn, supports, is Kotkin’s contention that the Stalinist world was, as Fitzpatrick noted previously “a collective social construction,” and forces him to defend his position against such revisionists.

Kotkin does so admirably when nuancing the old arguments made by Conquest, by highlighting the revisionist arguments made by the likes of J. Arch Getty and Gabor Ritterspoon. He notes that the former’s “startling and baffling conclusion” of “chaos” being “the force driving events” during the Great Terror as being derived from a “backwater” archive in Smolensk, while noting the latter’s conclusion that the Party overextended itself is “equally idiosyncratic.”²⁰ He more than ably counteracts these old, supposedly counter-intuitive interpretations, by making use of primary source documents—namely those that explain the elaborate processes, from making steel itself to party entrance—that demonstrate anything but an atmosphere of chaos and one of complexity (which, of course, often begets dysfunction). This is to say that, despite Fitzpatrick complaining that the Soviet history revisionists had been placed in an unfair position of “the new orthodoxy,” she is right to point out that scholars like Kotkin attempted to “[impose] new rules on research methodology stressing archives and primary sources,” leading to a more cultural view of the Soviet Union during the 1930s.²¹ This synthetic view is what strengthens Kotkin’s overall argument better than anything else.

Kotkin does not shy away from either highlighting the Soviet Union’s horrific human rights abuses as a given, nor from pointing out that there was still a highly-functional society at the core of Stalin’s early reign, more despite the dysfunction that existed rather than because of it. It both was and was not a product of the iron will of the state, as well as the individual human responses to the events and pressures that occurred throughout the 1930s, up to and including the Great Terror. As Kotkin writes, “the Soviet regime was a dictatorship,” in which “unconditionally binding decisions backed by the threat of coercion were handed down from Moscow, without discussion beforehand and with little opportunity to give direct voice to reservations afterward.” And yet, this “realization of socialism in practice involved the participation of the people,” including attempts to “[circumvent the] official strictures” themselves.²² This does nothing to erase the horror of the Soviet Union itself, but rather, demonstrates how—like with all states, including the most heinous ones—horror is not something solely perpetuated by the state from on high. Everyone plays a part.

Bibliography:

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Revisionism in Soviet History.” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (December 2007), 77-91. Accessed via: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4502285.

Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (1995).

Notes:

1. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 284.

2. Ibid., 25.

3. Ibid., 23.

4. Ibid., 358.

5. Ibid., 25.

6. Ibid., 33.

7. Ibid., 418.

8. Ibid., 57.

9. Ibid., 81.

10. Ibid., 107.

11. Ibid., 110, 112-113.

12. Ibid., 144.

13. Ibid., 24.

14. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (December 2007), 88.

15. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 153.

16. Ibid., 175.

17. Ibid., 179.

18. Ibid., 204.

19. Ibid., 218-219.

20. Ibid., 284-285.

21. Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” 90.

22. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 356.

It might seem a bit gauche to discuss the Salem witchcraft crisis for Halloween, but here it is: the story of the real damage done by the infamous Salem witch trials beyond the deaths of about two dozen people that did not need to occur. The causes of the witchcraft hysteria are not discussed here, since those would require an entire episode of their ow…

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In the chaotic month that was September 2025, much has been said about the role of rhetoric and violence in the United States; namely how the former causes the latter, or at least how the former and the latter cannot be separated. This came up on the previous episode of History Impossible, in which I discussed this concept with my friends Daniele Bolell…

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In light of the recent killing of conservative pundit Charlie Kirk and the realization among many that the United States is facing a stark rise in the possibility of greater political violence than any other time in its recent history, it became clear that a deeper conversation on the nature and, more importantly, the reality of political violence was n…

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In reading The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trostsky this week as part of my graduate studies on European revolutions of the 20th century, I was stopped dead in my tracks when I read the following line in its concluding pages:

Individual terror is a weapon of impatient or despairing individuals, belonging most frequently to the younger generation. But, as was the case in Tsarist times, political murders are unmistakable symptoms of a stormy atmosphere, and foretell the beginning of an open political crisis.

Our professor obviously had no inkling of what was going to happen on September 10th, 2025. But he understood, as he made clear as we discussed the role of workers in the Russian Revolution, that the United States has not seen the levels of escalating political violence that have characterized much of the 2020s in my entire lifetime.

Personally speaking, I haven’t really been able to properly articulate why the story of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, bothers me so much compared to other examples of the escalating political violence and explicit approval of it that I’ve been seeing ramp up for years now; from the ugly riots of summer 2020 all the way to the killing of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson at the end of 2024 (to say nothing of other horrifying recent events, like the antisemitic murder of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky as they left the Capital Jewish Museum), political violence has already been relatively “normal” up until this particular event. But talking to the most amazing woman in my life, my partner Molly, helped crystallize it for me.

We were walking our dogs and I was recapping the story for her and answering her questions about why this has hit so hard for so many people, both as something to cheer and something to mourn. It eventually got to my resentment of the people cheering on this man’s murder and the bloodlust being experienced by those most hurt by it all. I off-handedly mentioned that it just bothered me because it was so clearly motivated by weakness, hypocrisy, and performative cruelty on seemingly everyone’s part, with the only logical conclusion being more violence. She then very matter-of-factly said, “well, you’re also in Charlie Kirk’s business.”

By that she didn’t mean conservative activism or public debates with college students; she meant punditry. My focus is obviously history, but I also do follow and comment on politics and, if we are honest, history inevitably crosses streams with politics. Someone who discusses these things honestly and doesn’t consider themselves a journalist is going to come off as a pundit; they essentially are a pundit whether they like it or not. In other words, to quote journalist on a recent episode of , slinging ideas for a living.

This is why, with very few exceptions, I have yet to hear any of my podcasting and writing comrades and people whose work I enjoy—all of whom with wildly different political views across the spectrum—have had the same exact reaction as me: seeing this as a broad threat not particularly coming from any “side.” Even most those in the space I occupy who are ready to pin the blame on transgender antifa Marxists or Nick Fuentes’ Groyper cult (despite growing evidence at least against the latter), all recognize the broader threat of political violence itself as being the true, root problem at hand. The last time a lot of people, including me, felt this way was after the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices by Islamist thugs. That’s why, in my opinion, it’s not fair or accurate to say that these reactions are driven by fear of repercussions. The desire to simply reach for low-hanging fruit and try to seem edgy is not as strong as a revulsion at viewpoints, however controversial, being met with actual destructive violence, at least to those of us who, to use Singal’s term again, sling ideas for a living.

This is not to compare myself or anyone I know to Charlie Kirk quantitatively; given his massive success and cultural and political influence, that would not be possible. This is to say, however, why this killing likely feels significantly different to so many of us out there; why it’s different to me. I’ve come to believe, sadly, that the number of us who actually want to express ourselves without fear of violence being used as a reaction is actually not really that high, but that’s because, frankly, we are weird people that believe this stuff matters. So it’s therefore different for me when a pundit—no matter what kind of things he is espousing—is shot for what he says.

Because make no mistake: that is what happened. Charlie Kirk was shot through the throat and killed not because he was a bad person, or because he was a bigot, or because he hurt anything more substantive than other people’s feelings; Charlie Kirk was shot through the throat and killed because he said things. Maybe those things he said were awful, according to you, but he was still shot for what he said. Not what he did.

Maybe this last way of explaining it, via basic moral philosophy, will make some people understand this perspective better: if Donald Trump had been killed last year, obviously the consequences would have been devastating and by general moral metrics it would be a tragedy, but one could, in theory, make a moral argument for that outcome the same way people make the classic “using a time machine to go to 19th century Austria to find baby Hitler” arguments. A president makes choices that literally kill people, after all.1 But, unless you literally believe words and beliefs are violent acts themselves, a pundits like Charlie Kirk have never caused anything with what they do. Common sense might tell you speech causes violence but 1.) it has been proven over and over again via psychological research that there is no causal connection, and 2.) even if there was, ask yourself: do you really want to go down that road to its logical conclusion? Longtime readers know this is the thing that concerns me most when it comes to the protection of speech. If you’ll pardon a paraphrased cliche, pundits don’t kill people; assassins—assassins that are too insecure to live in a world where people are free to believe and say what they want—do.

With all of that said, like a lot of people in this business I was describing, I see the assassination of Charlie Kirk as part of something far worse facing the United States; something that many of us have been clamoring about for years now. That is, the escalation of political violence. In an effort to help get across why this is as bad as it is, I’m planning to have a conversation with some fellow podcasters this coming week who know a thing or two about escalated political violence, thanks to their upbringings in very different cultures from our own. In the meantime, however, I want to reshare a written adaptation of something I discussed in an earlier episode of History Impossible, from the first part of the “Balkan Inferno” trilogy, “The Yugoslav Vortex.” In this story, you will see first hand what Trotsky spoke of when he warned of “open political crisis.” I can only hope that it will get through to the people clamoring for a new civil war or who think a political assassination of a “bad person” is no big deal, and in fact worth celebrating. Because this story is what it looks like when a country is truly polarized; this is what it looks like when political norms have truly broken down.

…

In his short story “A Letter from 1920,” Yugoslav writer (and eventual Nobel Prize laureate) Ivo Andrić would write the following of his native homeland of Bosnia, one of the many nations incorporated into Yugoslavia:

[B]y strange contrast, which in fact isn't so strange, and could perhaps be easily explained by careful analysis, it can also be said that there are a few countries with such firm belief, elevated strength of character, so much tenderness and loving passion, such depth of feeling, of loyalty and unshakable devotion, or with such a thirst for justice. But in secret depths underneath all this hide burning hatreds, entire hurricanes of tethered and compressed hatreds maturing and awaiting their hour.

When Andrić wrote these words, the Vidovdan Constitution had not even been written yet, much less passed; the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—later to be known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia—was in the midst of its painful birthing process. In less than a decade, the democracy at the core of this new Kingdom would be completely gone.

On the night of June 20^th, 1928, the floor of the Yugoslav parliament was soaked with the blood of three of its Croatian members, representatives from the Croatian People's Party, including its leader, Stjepan Radić. The three, including Radić's own nephew Pavle, had been shot by a parliamentary member of the Serbian People's Radical Party (or the Radicals), a one Puniša Račić, after the debates rocking the parliamentary floor had grown increasingly filled with shouted accusations and violent threats. Račić, a longtime supporter of the Radical Serbian cause and something of a son to the Radicals' leader and Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, Nikola Pašić, who had long-encouraged the young Račić in his political ambitions until his—that is, Pašić's—death in 1926. There is evidence that much of this was premeditated since, earlier that day on June 20^th, Račić had met with the King of Yugoslavia, Aleksandar, and, as historian Misha Glenny puts it, “strode purposefully out of [the King's] chambers.” As Glenny also notes, no one knows what had been discussed between Račić and the King (seeing as it was a private audience), but what is known is that Račić “left the palace an angry man with a revolver in his pocket.” Only a few hours later, he would be arrested and three of his political (and ethnic) opponents—including a beloved Croat leader—would be dead, with Montenegrin representative calling the event “one of the worst nights of my life.”

It began when Puniša Račić and another member of the Radicals, Toma Popović, had shouted in the middle of a parliamentary session, “Heads are going to roll here and until someone kills Stjepan Radić there can be no peace!” With their leader's life being essentially directly threatened (both here and previously in the Serbian nationalist press), this then prompted insults to be shouted at one of the Serbian politicians by a Croatian People's Party deputy named Ivan Pernar, who shouted, “Oh yes, what a hero! He slaughtered defenseless people in cold blood. You're real Robin Hoods, you are! You've slaughtered people, you've eaten people and you know it. And after such heroic deeds, you proclaim yourselves Dukes!” And if accusing a member of parliament of cannibalism wasn't enough, Pernar continued his harangue at a different Serb politician named Pechanac, shouting, “Oh we know about Comrade Kosta Pećanac! He massacred 200 Muslim children and pensioners! He slaughtered them like sheep. You killed them like chickens […] Is it not true that Voyvoda [Duke] Pećanac killed 200 Muslims in 1921? Just tell us it's not true!” Now, I couldn't find any evidence of either of these claims, though it's known that Kosta Pećanac did play a role in suppressing Muslim votes under the orders of Serb Radical leader Nikola Pašić in 1921. Regardless, as Misha Glenny explains, “The mood in the [Parliament had] turned extremely nasty, even by its own standards.” Continuing, Glenny writes:

“When [Serbian Radical Toma] Popovich repeated his warning that he would murder Pašić, there was an uproar on the opposition benches. Insults were bawled across the floor, tables were banged and death threats hurled around with abandon. Ninko Perich, the [Serb] Radical who presided over this undignified assembly as Speaker, refused to cancel the session and instead ordered a recess of five minutes. Having spoken with Punisha Rachich in his private chamber, Perich then invited the Radical member to take the floor.”

During what was apparently a bit of a meandering speech that mostly recycled the Radical Serbian nationalist talking points typical of the day, Račić was likely set off by Ivan Pernar heckling him just as he had heckled the other Serbians earlier, with Pernar shouting that Račić , like the others, had looted Muslim houses in Macedonia, shouting “you plundered beys!” using the old Ottoman terminology. The Zagreb newspaper Novosti's correspondent who was present when this happened described what then happened:

“Račić, expecting Dr. Pernar to be called to order, turns towards the Speaker while slipping his hand into his right pocket where his revolver is hidden. At this time, the most indescribable commotion is going on. At exactly 11:25, seeing that the Speaker does not intend to enforce the satisfaction he had demanded of Dr. Pernar, Puniša Račić takes the gun from his pocket. The Justice Minister [Milorad] Vujičić, who is sitting behind the podium, grabs Račić's back. The former Minister of Religion, Obradović, seizes his right shoulder. Puniša Račić shrugs them off, throwing Vujičić against the ministerial bench while Obradović is sent flying several meters. Rude Bacinić runs to the Speaker, screaming, 'Stop this, blood is going to be spilled!' Everything happened to quickly and the whole house was so shocked that nobody was able to prevent the catastrophe.”

And catastrophe it was. Račić first fired on his (and the rest of the Serbs') main interlocutor, Ivan Pernar, striking him and another member of the Croatian Peasant Party, injuring both of them. The strangest part of this story that gets repeated in all the secondary and primary sources is what the head of the Croatian Peasant Party—Stjepan Radić, the man who had been having his life threatened in both the press and on the floor of the parliament—sat perfectly still the entire time as the room erupted into bloody chaos, seemingly in a meditative trance. And this, unfortunately, made him an easy target: after shooting his first two targets, Račić immediately turned to the 57-year-old statesman and without missing a beat, shot him in the stomach. As Radić keeled over, groaning in pain, his nephew, Pavle, rushed down the length of the hall to help him. As he neared, Račić turned and saw him, apparently smiled and said, “I've been waiting for you” and shot him through the heart.

Unlike his nephew, Radić didn't die from his gunshot wound. At least not right away. While his nephew and Djuro Basarichek—the other Croatian Peasant Party representative killed in the attack—died pretty much on the spot, Radić lingered and was even able to return to the parliamentary floor after being given a positive prognosis by his attended physician. But his health took a turn for the worse and on August 8^th, 1928, he died. While new coalition had been formed and a Slovenian named Anton Korosec had been made Prime Minister—likely seen as a way to keep things “fair,” at least in ethnonational terms by sidestepping the inevitable controversy the appointment of another Serb or a Croat would bring—Radić's death all but guaranteed further breakdown of the fragile political system in the young kingdom. Croat nationalism could only grow and fester further into anti-Serb animus at this point, made even worse when, on December 1^st, 1928, three students were killed by police while demonstrating by celebrating Croatian identity on the 10^th anniversary of the kingdom's formation.

I often make it a point to say that nothing in history is inevitable, things had been building to this point throughout the 1920s in the young Yugoslav kingdom. Many territorial concessions had been made, angering both Croats and Slovenes who lost land that they saw as nominally theirs to outside powers—including Italy—all seemingly to the benefit of the Serbs in power, since the land granted to the Yugoslav kingdom in return for these concessions (namely territories in Albania and Macedonia) was largely dominated by ethnic Serbs, leaving the ethnic Croats and Slovenes in the conceded territory, yet again, under the thumb of an outside imperial power.

In addition to the drama caused by things like this, democracy was increasingly being seen by most Yugoslavs, especially the non-Serb nationalists among them, as a total fraud; a scam that only seemed to benefit the Serbs at every turn. And given that democracy was a very novel concept in Yugoslavia—something the centralizers who dreamed of a unified South Slav state were determined to find compromises for, which including softening the centralization in favor of a looser, “soft” federalism—it was not difficult for the nationalist types, especially in Croatia (and especially after the assassination of Radić) to become completely disillusioned with the whole project. And while the coalition tried to find concessions and compromises that would please everyone, they ended up pleasing no one, and, thus, infuriating everyone.

Both Croats and ethnic Serbs in Croatia eventually ended all cooperation with the Belgrade government and began to issue demands of the new Slovenian Prime Minister there that he could not possibly meet, leading him to resign in disgrace. Within the span of half a year, the decade-old democracy had already ceased functioning. And, in an effort to preserve his decade-old Kingdom (though likely in his mind, his two-century-long claim to it), the Serbian King Aleksandar did something that, at this point, would only confirm the disillusionment and resentment of the non-Serb nationalists living within his kingdom. On January 6^th, 1929, a manifesto written by the King was distributed to all public officials to be published across the Kingdom's territories. It read, in part, as follows:

To my dear people, to all Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the hour has come where there can and will no longer be any intermediaries between the people and the King. In the course of executing all my high duties in the execution of which I have demonstrated such great efforts and such patience, my soul has been plagued by the cry of our popular masses. [...] [T]hey have, guided by their natural common sense, long ago discerned that it is no longer possible to take the path which we have hitherto taken. Parliamentary order and our whole political life are taking on ever more negative characteristics, from which the people and the state have now derived only damages. Parliamentarism, which as a political means in the traditions of my unforgettable father, has remained my ideal as well, but began to be abused by blind political passions to such an extent that it became a hindrance for each fruitful labor in the states. Agreements, even the most normal relations between parties and people, became absolutely impossible. It is my sacred duty to employ all means to preserve state and national unity, and I have resolved to fulfill this duty without hesitation to the end. Because of that, I have decided that the Constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of the 28^th of June, 1921, ceases to be valid. The national parliament elected on the 11^th of September, 1927, is dissolved. All laws of the land remain enforced, as long as it is not necessary to change them by my decree. In the future, new laws will be promulgated in the same manner. In communicating to my people my decision, I order all authorities in the state to act in accordance with it, and I order every one and each one to respect and obey it.

The Yugoslav democratic experiment was officially over, and thanks to deft political maneuvering, the mobilization of loyal parts of the military, and the overall skepticism of democracy that had been infecting much of the Kingdom, he was largely unopposed in his seizure of power.

That power would only last another five years. But the violence, clearly endemic from the assassinations that had erupted in Parliament in the summer of 1928, ratcheted up almost immediately from the enraged Croat ultranationalist camp in the wake of the new Serb-led dictatorship. Historian Misha Glenny tells us what happened next as follows:

On March 23^rd, 1929, at around 8 o'clock in the evening, Toni Schlegel, the Croat editor of the pro-Yugoslav [i.e. anti-nationalist] Novosti, and a personal friend of King Aleksandar, left his office in [the Croatian capital of] Zagreb's Masaryk Street. Walking past the elegant shop fronts on one of the city's most charming streets, Schlegel took a cab from the stand outside Zagreb's most poplar meeting point, the Theatre Café. Marko Hranilović, a member of the recently formed Hrvatski domobran (Croatian Home Guard), jumped into the next taxi and followed him home. When Schlegel reached his front door at Prilaz No. 86, Hranilović leaped out of the taxi and drew his revolver. Before he could fire, however, one of his co-conspirators who had been waiting at the flat gunned Schlegel down. The hit team succeeded in killing two policemen before Hranilović was finally taken into custody. His two co-conspirators escaped but, under interrogation, he revealed their names and [the future Croat fascist dictator Ante] Pavelić’s role in the killing.

This assassination, like all assassinations, did not happen in a vacuum or even in the context of rising tensions between the kingdom's Croats and Serbs. It had been part of a larger movement—though still in its infancy—that would come to terrorize and murder hundreds of thousands in the long-term. But in the short-term, the effect was create unbearable conditions within the Yugoslav kingdom for anyone with a hint of nationalist sympathies. Because the crackdown that came from the new dictatorship under King Aleksandar was fast, brutal, and even cruel; as Misha Glenny writes, “the dictatorship poisoned relations between Serbs and Croats” in its efforts to stamp out all notions of ethnic nationalism and political radicalism not aligned with royal interests, not unlike the external empires of old. As the Croat writer Josip Horvat wrote of the period that followed:

The death of Schlegel became a pretext for [state] terror in all forms. Politics was soon indistinguishable from gangsterism. Legal authority was regularly pushed aside while in its place came the secret police, the military police, the court police, the police of influential individuals with their own gang of informers, agent provocateurs—all with teams of torturers versed in the practices of the Spanish Inquisition and the methods of the tsarist Ochrana […] Bedković [the chief of the Zagreb police] was himself a clinically pathological sadist […] He would personally torture victims, above all women, at night and then, having changed his blood-bespattered clothes for a clean dinner jacket, would attend high society dinners until dawn when he would find a church and confess his sins as a torturer (he would, of course, receive absolution) and then start the whole process again the next afternoon.

If the King believed that this heavy-handed crackdown on the radical elements within his country—which included both nationalists and communists, as well as those aligned with peasant movements across the kingdom—would put a stop to the unravelling his nation was going through as they entered the 1930s, he was sorely mistaken. Only one month after the assassination of Toni Schlegel, the following proclamation was made at a gathering in Sofia, Bulgaria:

We cannot fight these [Serbs] with a prayer book in our hands. After the World War, many believed that we would have peace. […] But what sort of peace is it when Croats and Macedonians are imprisoned? These two peoples were enslaved on the basis of a great lie—that Serbs live in Macedonia and Croatia and that the Macedonian people is Serbian. […] If we tie our hands and wait until the civilized world helps us, our grandchildren will die in slavery. If we wish to see our homeland free, we must unbind our hands and go into battle.

This was from a speech delivered by that same Ante Pavelić, a 39-year old lawyer and staple in Yugoslav politics since 1921 and staunch Croatian nationalist as a member of the Pure Party of Rights. He was to become notorious as the head of the Croatian Ustashe state, the ultranationalist fascist puppet state of the Nazis during the civil war to come, whose forces often horrified and disgusted even members of the Waffen-SS with their brutality against civilians. However, in the 1920s, Pavelić was a ways off from that, despite there being plenty of hints at his innate brutality. During his time in Parliament, he was known to be antagonistic, particularly toward Serbs, and once when a Serb colleague wished him a simple “good night,” he responded with “Gentleman, I will be euphoric when I will be able to say to you 'good night'. I will be happy when all Croats can say 'good night' and thank you, for this 'party' we had here with you. I think that you will all be happy when you don't have Croats here any more.”

Perhaps, therefore, it is not that surprising that Pavelić was the same Pavelić who was revealed to be involved in the 1929 murder of the Toni Schlegel only one month earlier. And it tracks with his previously quoted speech: this was said to a crowd of Macedonian nationalists called the VMRO. This organization, like Pavelić and his fellow Croatian nationalists, wanted to see the new Yugoslav dictatorship overthrown. This desire would only grow with time, especially since Pavelić was feeling these desires from a place of exile. Thanks to King Aleksandar's bans on ethnic and nationalist organizations and parties, labeling them as essentially treasonous to the idea of Yugoslav unity, as well as the arrests of leaders of such organizations, many nationalist figures within the Yugoslav government—namely Croats like Ante Pavelić—fled to other countries. In Pavelic's case, he had fled to Austria, the old enemy of his Serb antagonists. As we saw, he didn't simply remain complacent in his old imperial masters' homeland and went to Bulgaria to make that speech from which we just quoted, effectively appealing for what Misha Glenny calls “the violent overthrow of Yugoslavia and and the secession of Croat lands.”

In 1934, the Ustashe under Pavelić only numbered about 600 members, with Pavelić even being forced into exile in Italy under the protection of fellow fascist Benito Mussolini. But this marginal status and small number should be mistaken for a lack of influence or potential for an existential threat to the Yugoslav kingdom.

King Aleksandar was in Marseilles in October of 1934, paying a visit to France's foreign minister Louis Barthou, when the assassination occurred, creating what Misha Glenny refers to as “the most sensation and unsettling event that year in Europe.” Aleksandar was attempting to cement better relations with France—who was still six years away from capitulating to nascent Nazi Germany—and while he and Barthou were being slowly driven through the streets of Marseilles, a man stepped into the street holding a bouquet of flowers. Before anyone realized what was happening, he jumped onto the car's running board, shouted “Vive le roi!”, or “Long live the king!” and produced a Mauser C39 semi-automatic, and fired multiple shots into King Aleksandar's torso, as well as some accidental ones into the chauffeur. The assassin took off running, firing wildly at the policemen trying to chase him down, and accidentally shooting two innocent bystanders, killing them.

In the chaos, the police had fired at the assassin and managed to accidentally fatally shoot the French foreign minister Barthou, but were eventually able to catch up to the assassin, with one officer on horseback running him through with a sabre and another clipping him on the head with a gunshot, but not killing him. It was actually the crowd of angry bystanders who chased the assassin down and beat him to near death (while the police stood back and watched, it should be noted) that would do him in; he would die later that evening along with Foreign Minister Barthou. After initially having trouble identifying the assassin, the authorities caught a break when, during the autopsy process, they saw the man had a tattoo across his chest: a skull and cross-bones and the letters “VMRO.” It did not take long to identify the man as a Bulgarian nationalist named Vlado Chernozemski, whose tattoo signified his allegiance to the Macedonian-Bulgarian group the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which also, not coincidentally in this case, had direct ties to the Ustashe. Ante Pavelić had been one of the conspirators responsible for this action.

The Yugoslav kingdom would hang on by a thread for another seven years. By the spring of 1941, Europe had been engulfed in war for nearly two years, and Yugoslavia’s authorities—governed by the Prince Regent Paul until Aleksandar’s son Peter II came of age—desperately tried to keep themselves out of the fighting, likely knowing full well what would come to pass if they entered the war, by signing non-aggression treaties with the swelling Axis powers, particularly Nazi Germany. After a coup d'état forced out Paul and the royalists, Hitler saw this as a major hindrance to his soon-to-be-executed plans to invade the Soviet Union, and declared war on Yugoslavia. This was despite the fact that the coup plotters had planned to continue the treaties signed with the Third Reich, but Hitler, having flown into one of his characteristic rages, was having none of it.

Belgrade, the kingdom’s capital, fell almost immediately under the might of the Nazi onslaught, with thousands dying. Without wasting any time, Hitler carved up the kingdom, placing the various regions under the control of his more “reliable” allies, while placing the Ustashe and Ante Pavelić in charge of the new “Independent State of Croatia,” where the long-held grievances of Croatian nationalists against the Serb authorities exploded in a years long orgy of bloodletting against Serbs, Jews, Roma, and all others deemed unreliable to the new regime. The concentration camp at Jasenovac more than earned the moniker, “The Balkan Auschwitz” during this time, where most prisoners were worked to death, if not tortured and mutilated by the Croat guards—some as young as 12 years old—simply for the enjoyment of the regime. While no credible evidence ever emerged of a now-infamous claim made by the Italian journalist and writer Curzio Malaparte, there was a rumor that the Poglavnik (or “Fuhrer”) himself, Ante Pavelić, had a basket in his office containing forty pounds of human eyes taken from the Ustashe’s victims.

The dream of Yugoslavia was dead. It would remain dead, despite the attempts by the communist Tito to resurrect it in his own socialist image after the war was over and the Allies were victorious. It was never doomed to failure; there had always been a chance. But circumstances developed that eventually made it impossible. Scholars debate when that moment came, but it is hard to believe that the fate was not sealed when political violence had become so normalized that the assassin Puniša Račić believed it would be a good idea to kill his fellow countrymen in cold blood on the floor of the Yugoslav parliament. There was no reason to compromise anymore. It was now a land of death.

Nothing is preordained in history. However, the famous writer Rebecca Black wrote of her travels across the ailing Yugoslav kingdom in 1937, and despite the fall of the nation still being some years off, she seemed to see the place for what it had become and what it would remain:

I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present, and I wanted to see how the process works. Let me start now. It is plain that it means an amount of human pain, arranged in an unbroken continuity appalling to any person cradled in the security of the English or American past. Were I to go down into the marketplace, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, “In your lifetime, have you known peace?” wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word “Yes,” if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years, I would always hear, “No. There was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.”