He Never Won an Election

A haunting question lingers on, over the years, in the minds of historians: how did Hitler and the Nazis gain control of Germany? How did a twisted leader, who was clearly mentally ill, and his band of misfit rabble-rousers, obtain power over an entire nation?

The answer lies partially in the complexities of the Weimar government. The parliamentary structure which governed Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's featured administrations built of coalitions of several political parties. Weimar-era Germany had many political parties, and it was usually impossible for any of them either to obtain a simple majority of seats in the Reichstag, which was the German parliament, or to obtain a majority of the popular vote.

At any one time during these years, there were dozens of active political parties, and voters elected representatives from a variety of them. Some of these parties were regional. Many had long and unwieldy names, and were known by abbreviations, nicknames, and colors. The word ‘Nazi’ is itself a nickname; the official name of the party was the National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. Its abbreviation was NSDAP. In English, the name of the party would be the National Socialist German Workers Party.

The Nazi party gained national attention and its representatives were elected to the Reichstag for the first time in May 1928. Voting for the party peaked in July 1932 and declined thereafter. It never had a majority in the Reichstag, although it did have a plurality. How then did it grab power?

Hitler and the Nazis were good at exploiting the technicalities of the parliamentary system and the technicalities of Weimar's well-intentioned but unwieldy form of government. They were also good at bribery, intimidation, and general corruption. In early 1933, Hitler saw his chance. Historian Lowell Green writes:

With singleness of purpose, Hitler sought to consolidate his gains. Because he lacked a majority in key government positions, Hitler had Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag, calling for new elections on March 5, 1933. Meanwhile, parliament was undermined when its building in Berlin, the Reichstagebäuse, was burned down by an unidentified arsonist on February 27. It was widely thought that the Nazis had ordered the fire to block parliamentary government, but the Nazis called the fire an attack on the government. They used the occasion to justify the suspension of civil liberties and to create the foundation for the ensuing dictatorship.

Lacking a majority, the Nazis arranged for another election, and then arranged for their chancellor, Hitler, to have "emergency powers" in hand. The Nazis corrupted the election and manipulate the results. Even with blatant electoral fraud, the Nazis were unable to gain a majority. Lowell Green continues:

The election of 1933 was not an overwhelming victory for the NSDAP. Despite all its efforts to manipulate public opinion, the Nazi Party won only 44 percent of the votes on March 5. However, Hitler was able to increase his support to a 52 percent majority in the Reichstag by means of an alliance with the German National Volk Party (Deutschnationalen Volkspartei [DNVP]) and the German Volk Party (Deutsche Volkspartei [DVP]), which was called the "Battle Front Black-White-Red."

Coalition-building is common and necessary in parliamentary systems in which a single party rarely has a majority. Several parties form an alliance and thereby gain the majority. The Nazis were willing to lie and to intimidate the leaders of other parties. With the coalition in place, the Nazis quickly made whichever laws they pleased, included laws which made other political parties illegal.

The election of March 1933, while corrupt and fraudulent, still managed to reveal that the majority of German voters were against the Nazis. By November 1933, another election would be held, in which only Nazi candidates were allowed to be on the ballot. The official results were that 92.11% of the votes were cast for the Nazis. The November 1933 election was purely a sham, and did not represent any process of freely electing representatives.

Thus it was that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, who never won a majority in any free and fair election, took power. In the last meaningful election, the majority of German voters showed themselves opposed to the Nazis. By mastering parliamentary technicalities, bureaucratic maneuvering, intimidation, fraud, bribery, and corruptions, the Nazis took power against the will of the voters.

Arab Spring, Arab Winter

In late 2010, a movement in several Arab countries raised hopes that peaceful democracies could be established in that part of the world. Known as the “Arab Spring,” it reflected the fact that Arabs, like any other human beings, generally want peace and liberty.

Yet this movement quickly disappointed both the Arabs who began it and the rest of the observing world. While succeeding in deposing a number of autocratic leaders of Arab nations, the movement was unable to install successor governments, and these nations found that they had merely exchanged one dictatorship for another.

Why did the Arab Spring turn into the “Arab Winter” as it was quickly re-named? The vast majority of Arabs, after all, are reasonable people who merely desire peace and liberty. What are the factors preventing the formation of civil governments?

Part of the problem was that the Arab Spring took down one set of governments without having a clear plan for which type of new government it would install. In this way, the Arab Spring invites comparison with the French Revolution: both removed harsh governments, and understandably so, but both failed to have prepared a new government which would be ready to take effect once the old government was gone. Ahmed Ragab writes:

The mass protests in January 2011 signaled the collapse of a particular political system that had lost all legitimacy. In other words, people believed that those structures could no longer possibly serve their interests and that they would rather jump into the unknown than continue with such structures. When Egyptians took to the streets and took down Hosni Mubarak's regime, there was no other clear alternative.

After the fall of Mubarak, who was indisputably an unsavory character, a confused scramble to develop a new form of government ensued. Wide-ranging discussions about the possible type of government and all manner of public demonstrations gave occasion to think about political science, but produced no workable practical results: the middle of a revolution is not the time to engage the public in a seminar about the theories of government. Numerous drafts of plans for governments and constitutions were presented, discussed, and revised. The citizens were called to the polls to vote a number of times.

However, these successive ballots failed to produce political institutions capable of earning people's trust, or of addressing the social, economic, and political grievances that motivated the original protest movement. The protests of June 30 signaled the failure of the entire post–January 2011 pathway to create a new stable political system that could earn sufficient popular support and trust.

Why was Egypt unable to form a new government? We may let Egypt stand as a proxy for the Arab Spring movements, because similar problems faced other countries like Tunisia and Libya. While the individual Arabs themselves are reasonable people seeking prosperity, peace, and liberty, they work under the burden of a collective society which does not seek prosperity for masses and which does not seek a politically or economically thriving middle class. While most individual Arabs have, like all other people, a natural human desire for freedom, they are living in a collective civilization which does not value political liberty. While Arabs, like citizens of all nations, prefer peace to war, they live in a collective culture which glorifies war.

The election of Mohamed Morsi in June 2012 was a failure of the Arab Spring. Morsi’s thug-like dictatorship differed little from Mubarak’s. To be sure, a nuanced difference exists between the two: Mubarak’s rule was a secular tyranny which coexisted with Islam; Morsi and his political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, were not Islamic but Islamist, and the difference between those two words reveals much.

There are millions of reasonable people who adhere to a nominal form of Islam and who call themselves Muslims; peaceful people who merely want liberty and prosperity; these people may be called Islamic.

The difference between “Islamic” and “Islamist” is significant.

An Islamist seeks the establishment of an Islamofascist state, a government which will enforce Sharia law. Islamism takes seriously the Qur’an’s injunctions against civil liberties, and takes literally Mohammad’s commands to wage war and kill.

Because the Arab Spring erupted without a constitutional plan ready for implementation, the power vacuum created by Mubarak’s departure was exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood. A revolution created by those who hoped for liberty, democracy, peace, and prosperity was exploited by Morsi and his Islamofascists who wanted the very opposite. Ahmed Ragab continues:

Fifty days after Morsi's election, 72 percent of Egyptians reported that they would reelect him, but ten months later, only 30 percent of Egyptians said they would reelect him. By June 2013, 78 percent of Egyptians felt that the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood was actually worse than they expected, and a recent poll revealed that about 75 percent of Egyptians don't think that the Muslim Brotherhood should be part of the future political project or process in Egypt.

Morsi’s stay in power was short. He was deposed in July 2013. A temporary government operated by Egypt’s military took over. The big question remains unchanged: can the Arabs - in this case, the Egyptians - find a way to a new government, rather than falling to yet another dictatorship? While they seek peace, their traditions make them susceptible to embracing warlike leaders. While the seek freedom, their culture makes them easy prey for tyrants.

What is true in Egypt is true of other countries swept up into the Arab Spring. Libya, long oppressed by insane dictator Muammar Gaddafi, overthrew his regime only to end up under the tyranny of an equally cruel Islamist dictatorship. Although Libya started, like Egypt, with a handful of hopeful young rebels who sought to establish a republic with freely-elected representatives, Michael Savage writes that

in Libya, the “rebels” were infiltrated by Islamist radicals, members of al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood who see the conflagrations around the Middle East as prophetic. To Islamist dictators and jihadis, the current uprisings are nothing less than a sign that the coming of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi, is immanent.

The people of Libya, finally freed from the oppression of Gaddafi, found themselves equally tyrannized by the Islamofascists who subverted what was originally a freedom-seeking revolution. Michael Savage continues:

Bottom line: Ghadafi was a monster. But the Muslim Brotherhood is a more dangerous monster. Before they killed Ghadafi in cold blood, Libyan “revolutionaries” had repeatedly attacked Ghadafi’s tribal homeland of Sirte. They were taking revenge on Ghadafi loyalists, terrorizing them and killing more than a thousand inhabitants of the region. One rebel fighter explained what was going on: “The Misurate brigades are taking their revenge for what soldiers originally from this village did to them. They are burning houses, stealing gold, and shooting animals.”

As the Arab Spring metamorphosed into the Arab Winter, some observers began to ask if there could ever be a free society in the region. Would every and any attempt at political liberty in the Middle East be doomed? Some alleged that a political leader outside the Arab world was

perpetuating the lie that there can actually be anything resembling “free and fair” elections in Middle Eastern countries when he knows, as the rest of us know, that a free election is an open invitation to the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist groups to intimidate the population and take over control of countries in turmoil. The invitation to hold “free elections” in Middle Eastern countries with no history of democracy and no democratic infrastructure or culture in place is nothing less than a naive invitation to Islamist radicals to step in. The transition from a feudal Islamic theocracy to a modern democracy must be made very gradually, if it can be made at all. People with no history of establishing and maintaining democratic institutions must be led into their formation.

If we are to have hope for the establishment, in the Middle East, of a republic with freely-elected representatives, then we must understand those cultural elements which give a foothold to Islamofascism. Certainly societal traditions are roadblocks to civil liberty. Torture and the violation of human rights is not only tolerated in the governments of that region, they are understood as the proper functions of government. The understanding of governments and political processes needs to be reformed in order for these civilizations to embrace freedom. Michael Savage writes:

Government brutality is a fact of life in the Middle East. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Islamist dictator like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or an old-fashioned third-world tyrant like Hosni Mubarak or Moammar Ghadafi. Middle Eastern countries since World War II generally have been held together by force.

Just as the French Revolution failed to bring lasting political liberty because it tried to change society when it needed only to change the government, so the Arab Spring failed and became the Arab Winter because it failed to change the societies and cultural traditions which are an obstacle to political freedom.

Global What? Climatic Confusion

Readers who've kept current with discussions of the weather will have noticed, over the last few years, a bewildering and shifting landscape of phrases developed to label this topic. The first was global warming, which gave way, in quick succession, to global climate change, global climatic instability, and global climate disruption. The moving vocabulary betrays a deeper conceptual ambiguity in the matter.

To say that the planet is warming is equivocal: one can compare the, e.g., the average global temperature for the month of March with the average global temperature for the month of March during the decade 1960 to 1970. Or one could compare it to the averages from the decade 1930 to 1940. Or one could compare it a monthly average for any single arbitrary year.

One can find sets of data points to support the conclusion that the planet is warming, that the planet is cooling, or that the planet is holding steady. The choice of which set of points is taken as a baseline normal is arbitrary. Extrapolations into the future can be made to trend upwards or downward, depending on how far back in time one begins the best-fit line which one extrapolates.

If the planet is cooling or warming, it must be relative to some measured point. Choosing that reference point is stacking the deck. Especially because our data are limited to recent years. Extensive measures prior to, e.g., the year 1800 are not plentiful enough to be statistically significant. Because these claims are global, worldwide data points would be needed to substantiate them. Yet large parts of the world lack any reliable observations prior to the last few decades.

It may not be possible to substantiate whether or not the planet is warming, cooling, or holding even on a long-run basis. We'd need several centuries of reliable measured temperatures from numerous scattered points on all seven continents. We do not have such data.

It is possible to argue that short-term global trends, warming or cooling, are underway; data might be available to verify such claims. But short-run trends are not able to tell us about long-run trends, because the planet constantly seesaws through various short-term temperature fluctuations.

Likewise, localized cooling and warming trends can be substantiated when data are available, but localized trends also are unable to shed light on global trends; it has been documented that one continent may experience a multi-year warming while another experiences a multi-year cooling.

Lacking precise measurements over the long-run, we do still know that long-term fluctuations occur. For example, a report titled "A 1500-year reconstruction of annual mean temperature for temperate North America on decadal-to-multidecadal time scales" was published by the Instituted of Physics in London. This report shows that the earth is warmer than it was, e.g., in the year 1800, but quite a bit cooler than it was in the year 800.

There do seem to have been eras of true global warming: several decades around the year 600 A.D., and again between the years 750 and 900. The year 1300 also seems to have been near the midpoint of several decades of global warming.

Historians have noted that a few decades of unusually warm, unusually cool, unusually wet, or unusually dry weather have been the causes for large-scale shifts in crop yields which affected the Roman Empire, or caused mass migrations by groups like the Huns, the Goths, and the Magyars. Around the year 1000 A.D., the Vikings gave up their habit of coastal raiding and settled into an agricultural lifestyle, due to a massive change in the climate.

Such significant changes in climate took place before industrialization, and so could not have been caused by human beings using fossil fuels. Steve Connor writes:

Genghis Khan owes his place in history to a sudden shift in the Asiatic climate from the cold, arid period that immediately preceded his ascent as leader of the Mongol empire, to the warmer, wetter weather that allowed his horsemen to expand out from Central Asia.

Connor, writing in the Independent newspaper, notes a multi-decade increase in rainfall:

Scientists studying ancient Siberia pine trees in central Mongolia that date back nearly 2,000 years believe that Khan’s rise to power coincided precisely with a period of unusually heavy rainfall over a couple of decades which allowed the arid grasslands of the Asian Steppe to flourish.

Both long-run and short-run warming and cooling trends are possible, in the present and in the past. It's difficult to know if we are in the midst of some long-run trend at the present; the patterns become clearer in hindsight. Short-run or localized trends shed no light on planet-wide trends.

The phrases 'climate change' and 'climatic instability' were adopted when it became clear that verifying claims of warming were difficult. The earth's climate is both changing and unstable. The nature of such change and instability is twofold: first, it has endured over centuries; second, it seems unrelated to human activity.

The world has, through all recorded history, experienced climatic instability. Ancient records tell us of flood and droughts. Decades-long patterns of unusually harsh winters follow decades of unusually mild winters. Winds change directions, the jet stream wobbles a bit northward and then a bit southward. One year has many hurricanes, the next year few.

To say that the earth's climate is changing is again imprecise. The planet's weather is in constant flux, and has always been so. It is changing inasmuch as it is its nature to be constantly changing; but it is not changing its essential nature. Indeed, the only real change possible would be if the weather stopped changing.

The questions which attract attention to the climate are these: is it possible that human activity impacts weather patterns? If there is some shift in the earth's climate, might some of it be due to industrialization? Are fossil fuels creating 'greenhouse' gasses which are causing global warming? Does carbon-based combustion and carbon dioxide emission have the power to affect the climate? Is methane increasing and thereby disrupting the climate?

The earth's climate has demonstrated, over millennia, drastic swings and statistical 'outlier' periods, which make it unpredictable even to modern meteorologists. Understanding cause and effect within the global climate is not obvious, and is often counter-intuitive.

For example, during the early years of the Cold War, various nations conducted hundreds of nuclear bomb tests. These tests released radiation and also hurled large amounts of fine-particle dust into the atmosphere. Linked to a number of detrimental health effects, these bomb tests have not, however, been linked to any measurable climatic effects.

By contrast, a single event, the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, caused measurable weather changes around the world for several years. Why Krakatoa caused such a change, and yet the nuclear bomb tests did not, remains unclear. Our understanding of the climate is still partial, and does not allow us to confidently assert that human use of fossil fuel causes climate change.

The amount of data needed - precise measurements over many parts of the earth's surface stretching back centuries and millennia - is both staggering and lacking. Any confident statement that global warming is underway, or that human activity is changing the world's climate, is at least premature, and possibly unverifiable.