The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler

"Heil [Alfred] Hugenberg!": The Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk of the Third Reich: 

"The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists."

Krupp, Farben, and Seimens: The Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg Oligarchs: 

"Alfried Krupp reportedly never expressed remorse, at one point telling a war-crimes trial observer, “We Krupps never cared much about political ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”

Timothy W. Ryback @ The Atlantic 

I've plugged Ryback's book from last year before, Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power, but the parallels with the present are stunning and worth repeating: above all, the alliance of the rich and bigots against real and perceived left, labor, expanding civil rights opposition. 

There are three principle characteristics usually attributed to fascist regimes in a high school world history class: 1) They are fronted by charismatic leaders with big cults of personality; 2) In power they preach and promote violence against their political enemies; and 3) They foster nostalgia for some past time of glory and scapegoat some internal enemy, some 'other' group or groups, for threatening their national identity; the "glory" of the Roman Empire in the case of Italy and Holy Roman Empire (which wasn't very holy or much of an empire, according to Voltaire) in the case of Germany. 

First, worth reminding people that the first two characteristics are hardly limited to the self-identifying fascist governments of Italy and German in the 1920s and 1930s. Think of Rome's emperor cults or China's Mandate of Heaven. Think of Stalin and Mao, communist dictators, leftists, two of the biggest authoritarian dictatorships of the 20th century, they were backed by cults of personality and brutally and catastrophically spread violence against their real and perceived political enemies. If anything, leadership based on a personality cult and the threat and use of violence against political opposition has been more or less standard operating procedure in monarchies around the world, far and away the most common form of political power in large States, going back three to five thousand years. Even scapegoating cultural 'others,' the third characteristic of fascism, is hardly anything new or even exclusive to fascist governments. Once in power, Stalin and Mao, within way larger countries than Germany or Italy, were responsible for authorizing staggering scales of political violence, nearly constantly scapegoating internal (again, real and perceived) political enemies, "counter revolutionaries," "bourgeoisie rightists," and "capitalist backsliders," etc, as enemies of their revolutions, and purging them violently or exiling them to "re-education" and/or prison camps. The difference is that Italy and Germany, the two big self-identifying fascist States of the early 20th c were a radical revanchist conservative reaction to the humiliation of Germany and Italy after WWI. The Dictatorships of the Proletariat in Russia and China in the main rejected traditional culture as impediments to modernization. The fascists were trying to revive a past before the humiliation of the war. They ultimately galvanize big business and the church and traditional institutions against their real and perceived internal enemies, Jews, homosexuals, communists, unions, and other stigmatized minorities, promising a return to a ethnonationalist purity. Sure, "fascists" are an analog to Russia's and China's leftist Dictatorship of the Proletariat; and they're all extreme examples of violent authoritarian Sates in the 20th century. But another difference, beyond the mesmerizing right-left binary, and maybe the most important, neither communist dictatorships, or any of the other self-identifying fascist regimes of the 20th century, for that matter, so calculatingly and brutally and swiftly industrialized their political violence into a genocide against Jewish people and homosexuals and Romani people and disabled people and any of the other non-German language speaking people they encountered in Poland and Ukraine between 1939 and 1945. Hitler, sadly, was not the only violent dictator of the 20th century but he was by most measures the worst. 

This is one of the weirdest aspects of the present. For most of us, we thought Nazis and fascists and even Dictatorships of the Proletariat were all bad ideas, brutally inhumane, and terrible lessons of the 20th century and this was all settled historical thinking. Nazis and violent dictatorships are bad and to be avoided. But here we are again.