Adolf Hitler destroyed the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic (1918-33) and twelve years later destroyed Germany itself. Weimar has since become like the palantir in ‘The Lord of the Rings’: a crystal ball for historians to view the murky present and to predict a dark future.
Pakistan 2025 can be glimpsed in the palantir. Exhausted by Imran Khan’s [IK] unremitting attacks on Islamabad, some circles within the Pakistani state, business, and politics are deluded that the only way to achieve the holy grail of political stability is to let IK take over. This time we know better, claim the appeasers: not only can IK be controlled better in the second round, but that his complete lack of governance ability will destroy his popularity. The warning from history comes from Joseph Goebbels: “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction”.
The Nazi leader did not storm into power; he was given power by a paralysed elite. The German chancellor before Hitler, Franz von Papen, recommended Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 and boasted, “We have hired him. Within two months, we will have pressed Hitler into a corner so tight that he’ll squeak!” Media-mogul Alfred Hugenberg declared, “We’re boxing Hitler in.” General Kurt von Schleicher even had a Zahmungsprozess or taming process to bring the Nazi party into the political mainstream. Germany’s ruling classes were sure that, writes Adam Gopnik, “after the passing of a brief [fascist] storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power.” All were proven wrong catastrophically.
“Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time – specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes,” Timothy Ryback wrote recently in ‘The Atlantic Monthly’. Germany degenerated from a battered democracy to a one-party dictatorship and a police state. Freedoms of speech, press, and assembly lay shattered. The new chancellor assumed an extrajudicial power to arrest and detain people without trial, laying a legal basis for the Nazi concentration-camp system. The Nazi chancellor deposed non-Nazi state governments, and usurped full legislative powers of the German parliament. Hitler disbanded labour unions, purged the civil service and the independent judiciary, and outlawed all opposition parties.
How to un-grease Pakistan’s slippery slope towards fascism? “Weimar has bequeathed three distinct cautions,” writes Christopher Browning, “for the political right of any era about what not to do in comparable situations: join in disseminating a Big Lie; take inadequate action and impose an inadequate penalty after a treasonous uprising; and cement an alliance between traditional conservatives and fascists.” The Big Lie in our case is that the US conspired to change the regime in 2022 and that the insurrection of May 2023 was a false-flag operation. The peril of weakness or compromise in prosecuting the 9 May 2023 insurrection is incalculable.
The understanding between the PML-N and PPP to unite despite their differences is one bright spot. Weimar Germany lacked such an alliance, as the moderate-left Social Democrats and conservative Catholic Centrist never attempted a coalition. Yet Pakistan’s much-reviled ruling coalition still has to enunciate the nature of its adversary. Legions are under the delusion that by practising tolerance and abiding by parliamentary rules they could encourage IK’s hordes to play by them as well.
The hordes of critics of the hybrid regime fail to understand that fascism is a cure worse than the disease of authoritarianism. They also fail to understand the fascist hatred of parliamentary democracy. Hitler despised the haggling and compromise inherent in parliamentary democracy. Historian John Lukacs, who spent a lifetime studying the Führer’s psychology, observed, “His hatred for his opponents was both stronger and less abstract than was his love for his people. That was (and remains) a distinguishing mark of the mind of every extreme nationalist.” The parallels with Pakistan are alarming and uncanny.
In his invaluable recent book ‘Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power’, Timothy Ryback writes that the Fuhrer’s strategy was Katastrophenpolitick – catastrophe politics of cultural warfare to “flood the public space with inflammatory news stories, half-truths, rumours, and outright lies.” Ryback’s book will make any Pakistani shudder who is not blinded by the half-truths, rumours, and outright lies. Page after page reads like our daily newspapers. When the author notes the chaotic mess of struggling in-groups who feared and despised each other in the National Socialist Party, one lifts one’s eyes to the television to see the same scene broadcast live from outside Adiala jail or in Parliament yard. The strength of the Nazis lay not in their organisational efficiency, but in the unshakeable prejudices of their leader.
The Weimar Republic was a republic without republicans, just as Pakistan is a democracy without democrats. The danger lies in our governing elites – the civil and military bureaucracy, business leaders, most heads of political parties – who view democracy and elected representatives as a contemptible nuisance to be tolerated only as a stratagem to achieve power. The elites may comprehend dimly the horrors of inflation, but they underestimate the abiding effects of the extortionate 2021-24 inflation as the last straw of Pakistanis’ accumulating disillusionment with a ‘system’ racked with recurring authoritarianism, incurable rot of inefficiency, and lack of delivery of basic services to citizens.
The lessons from Weimar are relevant still, and enumerated incisively by Charles Emmerson: “The erosion of democratic norms can be fatal, even if its effects are delayed. Crisis breeds crisis; democracy is hard work; scapegoating needs to be addressed early; norms, once broken, are hard to repair; the socio-economic effects of inflation can be deadly. The regime is at the mercy of events.”
Volker Ullrich’s ‘Germany 1923’ is trenchant on the subject. The conventional wisdom on the Weimar Republic – hyperinflation and the mass unemployment produced an unstoppable wave of fascism – is wrong. The hyperinflation ended in 1923. Six years of growing economy separated the hyperinflation from the mass unemployment after the 1929 Great Depression. The German government ought to have responded with stimulus to the economy; instead, it brought forth austerity. The disastrous political outcome, writes Ullrich, was “a dramatic loss of legitimacy” for democratic institutions among “a psychologically exhausted” people.
This is the challenge for Pakistan’s current ruling coalition: our battered democracy is one economic disaster away from collapse either at the hand of fascists or of Bonapartists. The ruling coalition faces ruin until it starts reinforcing democracy, strengthening parliament emphatically and systematically, and bringing deep-seated reform to restructure the economy and the system of governance from village to federal government. The difference between the doomed Weimar Republic and today’s Pakistan is, in the words of Mark Dunbar, “circumstance rather than mood. The atmosphere of mediated mass anxiety is here. What we must do is to make sure the conditions don’t arise to meet them.”
The writer has served as Pakistan’s minister for foreign affairs, defence, commerce, and energy. He tweets/posts @kdastgirkhan
These are his personal views.
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