“Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois…”
In a few hundred brisk but bristling words, written just after Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany, Trotsky displays his characteristic panache in analysing ‘National Socialism’. At breakneck speed he dashes from searing insight to searing insight: on Hitler and the Nazi leadership, on the fatefully conducive conditions of the Weimar Republic, on the true nature of Nazi ‘socialism’. He delves into the interaction between class and psychology in the development of the ideology and its support, the basis of the phenomenon in the petty bourgeoisie, the alliance then struck with monopoly capital, the difference between Nazism as movement and Nazism as government, the distinctions between German Nazism and Italian fascism, the dynamics underlying racism as political theory, the inner reliance of Nazism on sentimental mystical nationalism, and the fateful inevitability of war owing to the Nazis’ inherent ferocious imperialism. Penetrating, prescient, eloquent, witty, brief but panoramic, and dripping with sardonic scorn and contempt, this is quite simply one of the most brilliant things ever written about Nazism.
2 Comments
Spot on
A masterpiece