Robert Keith Packer, of Virginia, told his judge he just put on a sweater ‘because it was cold.’ Other pictures of him earlier on January 6th show him wearing a shirt underneath the sweater that said “Schutzstaffeln.”
To describe the first six years of the Weimar Republic of Germany is to describe a nation in constant turmoil. Though it leveled out in the latter part of the decade before it was tossed into the chaos of the Great Depression, Weimar is not the image of gaeity and liberal thought we sometimes see portrayed in Hollywood, TV, or on stage that celebrates a strange democratic artfulness that tolerated homosexuality and fought off the far right in an effort to preserve human rights. This is a mutilation of history. In truth, Weimar was born of the right’s desire to contain the left without the scapegoat Kaiser, and throughout the next decade would fight back revolutions all over the German internal states from Communists, Socialists, and paramilitaries from various fascist parties staffed with hundreds of thousands of veterans of the First World War. It was in this vein that right wing activists and politicians slowly took control of not just the small states, but the large ones such as Bavaria as well, and in this way, Munich became almost as powerful as any other German capital, including Berlin.
What could have possibly brought Germany, one of the largest empires in the world in 1914, to its absolute knees just four years later? What could have brought it’s population to famine levels and it’s society sick with corruption and Lustmord? In order to believe such a large catastrophe, the destruction of the entire economy, the overthrow of a monarchy five centuries old, millions of dead German boys (sacrificed in the name of...what exactly?), you would need a universal ‘truth’ to believe in. It was too inconvenient to believe the War Guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty was true - that Germany was the sole instigator of the war. It was blasphemous to say as a German ‘we ought not have gotten involved in a local spat between Austria and Russia over a country no one can pronounce the name of, much less find on a map. Germans could not admit to themselves that they had gone along with such a disastrous enterprise. That would mean they would be culpable. Culpable for the Western Front. Culpable for the Rape of Belgium. Culpable for the multitude of millions of Allied war dead. Instead, a new, false narrative was created among the right. It was not the Allies that were responsible for Germany’s collapse - because how could Germany ever have been defeated by a foriegn foe? The Fatherland had not lost a war in over a century. No. Time for a lie. A lie big enough for everyone to believe. For everyone to vote for. For everyone to kill for. This lie would explain six straight years of horror, hyperinflation, and street bedlam. The Big Lie.
The Big Lie is this: The ruling elite of Weimar were a bunch of democrats with a small ‘d’, a bunch of republicans with a small ‘r.’ They weren’t German patriots. They were a bunch of Liberals. The German Army wasn’t defeated...how could it be? Not an inch of German soil was lost to the Allies during the war. It was the liberals who signed the Treaty of Versailles. It was the left who gave away Alsace-Lorraine to France, who had demilitarized the Rhineland, who had given Schleswig-Holstien to the Danes, who coughed up half of Prussia to fucking Poland of all places, just so enormous Russia could have a ‘buffer.’ These politicians are the ones who have destroyed Germany, not the Allies. It was a conspiracy by the “November Criminals'' who signed the Treaty. Shit, they probably helped the French write it. This was the Big Lie. We didn’t lose the war. We were betrayed. By the left. By liberals. By the Jews. It was perfectly engineered to appeal to all the instincts of the German People: patriotism, fatherland, and a European racial consciousness. It would lead not just Germany, but all of Europe down a road of annihilation. The only group that didn’t benefit from the Big Lie were those who were in charge: a string of Prime Ministers, Presidents, and office holders trying desperately to keep a Communist revolution at bay and satisfy the needs of the vocal and vast right wing voting public who felt constantly let down by the leaders of the Republic. The only institution that seemed to overlap between the Ruling Elite and the right-wing Big Lie believing public was the Reichswehr.
The Reichswehr was what was left of the Kaiser’s army, a barely surviving professional hundred thousand man force which had a reputation of brutally suppressing any coup attempt that came their way. Bavaria had, in the presence of the many proto-revolutions of 1925 (there were uprisings in Thuringia, Saxony, Hamburg, and the Ruhr), declared a state of emergency under the government of Gustav von Kahr, the State Commissioner. General Otto von Lossow, the local commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria and Colonel Hans von Seisser, the head of the Bavarian State Police acted with Kahr as a Triumvirate determined to rule Bavaria with an anti-Berlin iron fist. This was too much for Berlin, who demanded the Bavarians fall into line, recognize the national state of emergency, and suppress the Voelkischer Beobachter, the voice of the Nazi Party in print that had proven so surprisingly popular in Bavaria. The Bavarians refused, and ordered the officers of the local Reichswehr to swear an oath of loyalty to Bavaria...not to Germany. All throughout the fall of 1925, tensions ramped up to a conflict between Munich and Berlin.
After the heat of this moment came a pause. Maybe this wasn’t the right fight to pick. The Triumvirate was losing heart, being that they were a right wing government facing off with a right-wing government. Enter the leader of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) an unemployed veteran by the name of Adolf Hitler, who saw in the vacuum the chance of a lifetime slipping away. Hitler, a former Reichswehr political informer and now a leader of a burgeoning political group that could gain a huge foothold in an independent Bavaria, saw a chance to dominate the political scene if a separation from Germany succeeded. If the Triumvirate left him out of the coup, well it was all over. When Hitler saw that all three of them were planning to give a speech at the Buergerbraukeller Beer Hall on November 8th, Hitler suspected exactly this. His paranoia was increased when his requests to see Kahr were put off until November 9th.
The Nazi paramilitary arm, the Sturmabteilung (or S.A.), surrounded the three thousand mostly civil service workers on the night of the 8th. In true dramatic fashion, Hitler entered the Beer Hall and fired a revolver into the air, drawing immediate attention to his threat. He forced his way onto stage by threatening Kahr’s bodyguard during Kahr’s big speech… before Kahr was able to get to the point. Hitler had announced the National Socialist Revolution had begun, declared that the Army and the Police were now being led by Nazi appointees, and that a Nazi provisional government had replaced the current one in the room.
Hitler had started this revolution like he had started his political career and like he had started the Second World War: by lying. Nothing he had said was remotely true. The officers in charge of the national army and local police were not led by Nazis, but by Seisser and Lossow’s subordinates, all still operating under the chain of command, and no one outside the Burgerbraukeller was aware of anything happening inside, largely because the S.A., or Stormtroopers, had sealed it off and no one was allowed to leave. A machine gun was placed at the entrance to mow down anyone who attempted to leave. Unbelievably, the bluff worked, and Hitler led Kahr, Seisser, and Lossow down to the basement to convince them at gunpoint to support his coup of the Bavarian government while Hermann Goering, a veteran celebrity pilot, kept the peace upstairs.
After explaining his either very elaborate or very simpleton plan - depending on what side of the revolver you were on - the kidnappees refused first to speak to him, and then when they did, refused to join his insane attempt at capturing power. Threatened with death, all three of his captives preferred to take a bullet (possibly because Hitler promised to kill himself after he dispatched them) rather than help him an inch. Hitler, faced with such true bravery, then did the only thing he knew how to do: he upped the lie. He ran upstairs and told his other three thousand hostages that the Triumvirate had joined the revolution. The crowd's response was confusion. First, there was the ‘what the hell is actually going on?’ element, then there was the ‘All, hell Naw’ Chadwick Boseman response, but there was some genuine cheer by sympathizers in the audience probably mixed with members who just wanted to get out of the Beer Hall alive. This tremendous moment was enhanced by what I referred to earlier, what modern historians have referred to in German History as The Big Lie.
The fact is, that Imperial Germany had started the First World War. It had invaded neutral Belgium, violating a century old treaty, rushed over a million men into France in a failed effort to collapse the Third Republic, and had wiped out a third of the Russian Army over the following two years. It had also supported their ally, Austria-Hungary, with a ‘Blank Check’ in the Austrian’s pursuit of dominating the Balkans in their attempt to expand their multi-cultural and multi-ethnic empire. In fact, the entire point of Imperial Germany’s gamble in the war was to check the British Empire’s expansion and, if it could, stop France’s empire dead in its tracks. Germany’s army had been defeated on the battlefield in France, and it had turned back not just because it’s internal economy could not overcome the Allied blockade that had starved it’s population to the breaking point, but because it could no longer defend itself and an invasion of Germany was imminent. With no hope in sight, the Social Democratic Party had fled Berlin to Weimar with several allies, overthrew the Kaiser, and established a Republic that could salvage the situation. The immediate result was a German Legation sent to Paris that had swallowed the bitter pill of reality. They could not fight the Allies. They could not win the war. They could not even feed their own people themselves. They needed help, and they needed the help of the people who had just defeated them. German pride was swallowed along with reality, and they signed the Armistice ending the war that went into effect at eleven A.M. on the Eleventh of November, 1918. In The Big Lie, these politicians and the Weimar founders who sent them and ratified their work, were forever known as the November Criminals.
Hitler spun this tale on the stage of the Beer Hall, mentioned the November Criminals by name, and reinforced the common misperceptions of The Big Lie. He had been telling it for years, and he wasn’t the only one who was doing it. He had Allies. Right wingers. Fascists. Monarchists. But the Ace in the Hole, the coup de grace, was General Erich Ludendorff, the retired leader of the entire Imperial German Armed Forces during the First World War. In fact, by 1918, Ludendorff had become the defacto dictator of Germany as everything in the country had been mobilized for the war effort. Hitler had summoned him to the Beer Hall in an attempt to persuade him to join the revolution and when Ludendorff arrived, the crowd assumed he was there for that very purpose. In truth, he was pissed at Hitler for jumping the gun and leaving him out of it, and he was doubly pissed to find out Hitler was planning to be the head of this new dictatorship and was counting on Ludendorff to just have his old job again - not in all of Germany but just in Bavaria. This was simply riding the coattails, and one wonders why Ludendorff went along with it. But he did, and he saved the revolution right there in that room, at least for another six hours.
When Hitler left the Beer Hall to deal with a clash between two right wing groups outside of Munich, he left Ludendorff in charge, who unbelievably undid everything Adolf had worked so hard to put together. Ludendorff let the Triumvirate go, failed to follow up on leading the military forces tasked with executing the coup, and made no plans to deal with the coming onslaught from Berlin that everyone knew MUST be coming. When Hitler came back to the Beer Hall, he learned not only had the coup not succeeded, it was in fact falling apart. In the meantime, Berlin had found out about the coup, sent detailed instructions to the army, and declared the National Socialist movement enemies of the state. Kahr himself, in safety, joined the national government response to suppress the revolt.
Hitler and Ludendorff floundered with embarrassing activities. First incensed that they had been betrayed by people who had made no promises to join them at gunpoint, they attempted to engage a mediator to come to a negotiated settlement. This failed, but the idea of Ludendorff and Hitler leading a March through Berlin (much like Mussolini had done in Rome) to gain control of the central organs of the government seemed to be a good idea. It was a fucking horrible idea. When the Nazis came down Residenzstrasse from the Hoffbrauhaus to the Odeonsplatz right where the Feldherrnhalle stands as a monument to the Field Marshals of Germany, they found the opposite side of the platz was occupied by the Bavarian police. Efforts to mediate failed, and no one knows who shot first. The man next to Hitler took a bullet to the chest and fell. When Hitler fell with him, the dead man had dislocated his arm on the way down.
Sixteen Nazis and three policemen were killed. The only one left standing in the Odeonsplatz was Ludendorff, who calmly walked to the police in order to be taken into custody. Not one Nazi followed him. Those who could, fled. Goering, wounded, was helped by two Jews in a nearby shop. History does not record what happened to them. Hitler scraped his way to a countryside house of a nearby American supporter. He requisitioned her gun to shoot himself but she stopped him. She owes us all an answer.
The result of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1925 in the near term was disastrous for the Nazi Party. The NSDAP was banned. All party leaders were arrested. The party rag silenced. Hitler stood trial for treason and this is where the long term fortunes changed. Rather than use the opportunity to show what a true ass Hitler was and expose The Big Lie as exactly that, the Judge allowed Hitler to use the opportunity to showcase everything that was wrong with Weimar and reinforce The Big Lie. Though he served a paltry term, he used the opportunity to write a dogmatic book that would be laughable if it were not taken so seriously. It was printed, sold, then eventually required as reading in all German schools. Hitler emerged as a celebrity, poised to use The Big Lie to an even higher cause: the domination of political power in Germany and the world.
I could spend the rest of this blog detailing the highly rich history of President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept election results not decided in his favor from as early as 2016. Like Adolf, The Donald has a long, sordid history with the truth. Raised as a Republican in the rural South, I immediately refused to lend an ear to a bankrupt “billionaire” Yankee who had fucked over enough people in Real Estate deals for it to be front page news. He also gave money to Democratic causes, including to Hilary Clinton, so he was a non starter for someone like me. I was amazed when my fellow Republicans started falling over themselves to suck his cock. For the entire Clinton administration, character was an issue, we were told. If you couldn’t trust a man with your wife, why would you give him your country? If character was not an issue, Rush Limbaugh famously argued on this racist and misogynistic radio show, why isn’t Ted Kennedy President? But the GOP dropped all objections to Trump, and retrospectively I can see why. He had an in, and he had been developing it for years. Even before he officially ran for office, he subscribed and them prosthelytized the idea the Barrack Obama. Oils not be President because he was not born in the United States and was not a U.S. citizen. Like many concerned voters, I had my doubts about Obama, but as months passed and the Supreme Court ruled consistently and solidly in Obama’s favor, I knew what the truth was. But having been shown the truth, Donald doubled down and started his presidential bid, much like Adolf. On a lie. He lied about his taxes, his past, his earlier Democratic leanings, he even lied in mid sentence sometimes and when he saw a crowd geared up, he’d make another outrageous lie knowing it would only make him more powerful in the eyes of his constituency. As a Republican, I was appalled. Lying is, of course, par for the course among politicians but the nature and breadth of Trumps lying was insane. He made promises he didn’t give a shit about (putting MORE terrorists in Guantanamo) and lied about shot he never intended to even try to do (have Mexico pay for a wall). This was way different than Obama saying he was going to close Gitmo only to find out as President how exceedingly impossible it was or his very real threat to veto wall funding. These lies had purpose. These lies had flair. He was unashamed and flippant when NPR asked him why he lied so much and why he crossed the press so often. “I do it so I can discredit you,” he said in a super rare moment of honesty, “and so I can do what I want.” He aimed to destroy the only American organ that checked his power since Congress was split and the Supreme Court neutered - the media, and he succeeded. But he was only getting started.
During the election of 2020, he repeatedly refused to say he would accept the election results. It would be far easier to just cut and paste the entire text of the Wikipedia article “Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States Presidential Election '' which has an impressive 390 footnotes to the date of this publication. The movement to protest the election of Joe Biden moved from the streets into the courtrooms, where a record number of lawsuits were filed over election laws even before anyone voted. Recognized racist groups such as the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, each with their own distinctive racist ideological back drop not much different than Mien Kampf, gained more and more traction as each lawsuit failed in turn, and after the extended time after the election, they organized to persuade the individual States to lean the given electoral votes in Trump’s direction. When the States slowly reconfirmed and certified their votes in turn, the media reached a point they felt it was safe to call the election - safe in terms of their collusion in helping a corrupt President retain power, not in terms of pandering.
Trump personally intervened by ordering his justice department to make decisions that would favor the result he wanted, and called state officials from the White House to do the same. Supreme Court petitions failed. A scheme to select alternate electors failed. When it was all said and done, the Senate of the United States was the body that certified the state elections, and this was led by the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence. Faced with siding with Trump in a coup d'etat, and enforcing his oath as a servant of the Constitution, Pence decided to do the latter - who knows how unwillingly. Before he could do that, a mob stormed the Capitol to stop him.
Once again I could just paste the complete blow by blow by copying the 2021 United State Capital Attack wikipedia page here (with a whopping 643 citations to date), but I feel lying is only something conservatives do. The day of the electoral count, January 6th, the President held a rally in which he continued The Big Lie he had so carefully and consciously constructed for four long years. Only he was to be believed. Only he was to be followed. Only his truth was the truth. Ein Volk. Ein Riech. Ein Fuhrer. Alternative facts. Fake News. Stop the Steal. The Big Lie. It actually runs so close to Orwellian Newspeak and Communist Agitprop as to be academically admirable. Trump holding a rally of his followers at the mall and telling them to “go to the capitol” to “stop the steal” was the equivalent of firing a revolver into the ceiling and declaring the National Socialist Revolution had begun. As the mob of Fascists rushed the Capitol and threatened the lives of hundreds of people, the lawmakers (much like the Bavarian Triumvirate) fled to the basement… you could say at gunpoint... for safety. When the dust settled, three Trump supporters were killed, and two police officers were beaten to death. One hundred and thirty eight police officers were injured, and fifteen were hospitalized with severe injuries - injured by a mob led by a ‘law and order’ President.
If any one thing had gone wrong - our Republic would have fallen. If Pence had decided not to do his duty (Congress had no cause to remove him), or if Congressional leaders were not whisked to safety, or if Trump had convinced just one military officer strategically placed above colonel to join him, if the National Guard had not shown up, we would all be sieg hieling right now. Don’t laugh. It happened in Columbia. It happened in Argentina. It happened in Brazil. It happened in Mexico, lots of times. Shit, it happened in Spain in the thirties, Italy in the forties, and in Balkans just twenty five years ago.
The President whipped up a mob and threw it at the Capitol with the intent of stopping Pence from certifying the election. “This,” former President George W. Bush announced the next day, “is what happens in third rate banana republics.” It failed only because the lawmakers were evacuated and kept in a safe location. It failed only because the National Guard, embarrassingly not even ‘on call’ during a Mall march of this magnitude, finally pushed the mob out and started arresting a shockingly small number of people. The Capitol Putsch of 1921 failed much like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1925. It was commissioned by The Big Lie.
Judging by the November election, Donald Trump has at least seventy five million supporters in the United States. Perhaps some of them were turned off by January 6th, but I’m sure most were not. He remains popular among his constituents, and The Big Lie is still believed. It’s amazing to think that in twenty years we went in this country from making fun of Hilary saying there was a “vast, right wing conspiracy” (specifically against her husband) to it actually being true. Extrapolating the truth from this is very easy.
Fact: the President lost the election. Fact: the President attempted to keep power by engineering a coup. Fact: he did this by convincing his constituents that he was the real winner of the election. All of this is couched of course on the idea that the dreaded left will come in with all kinds of socialism that will destroy what is left of the ‘Murica that you know. This is all drivel, and you know it. It is The Big Lie. What remains to be seen is what the short term and long term consequences are. In the short term, it does not appear that there are any consequences for Donald Trump. He is free, living in his castle, doing what he likes with who he likes. He is still influencing GOP politics to the point of personal control all over this country, from influencing audits to sicking his attack dogs on members of the media. He has yet to suffer any prosecutions from the ten identifiable transgressions of the law the Mueller Report found two years ago, much less planning and executing an attempted coup d’etat in the United States.
The long term consequences are also not clear, but it does not look good. Normally I would say a divided congress is good for the functioning of democracy, but this blind GOP does not seem to be able to stop drinking their master’s Kool-Aid. They’re in it to win, or steal it if they can, by very deftly sticking to The Big Lie. They’re not just going along with it for the votes. They’re complicit. With master liars like Tucker Carlson on their side, how can they lose? They’ve gerrymandered two-thirds of the states in this country to maintain control over their shrinking power base. Their war against progressives is succeeding. In Texas in one month alone they banned abortion, stopped requiring permits for firearms in public, and passed restrictive legislation on people of color “to protect the purity of the ballot box.” Such language would make Hitler proud.
There is a direct correlation between The Big Lie the Nazis used to attain power and The Big Lie the Republicans are using to keep power. There is a direct correlation between what Hitler intended to use the The Big Lie for (suppression of the left) and what Trump wants to use The Big Lie for (suppression of the left). The only difference that I can see is the ideological difference between Trump and Hitler, though they are definitely both Fascists. Hitler was a believer in his ideology. Trump is almost unaware of it. He is in it for the power and the glory to be sure, but if you told him he could do the exact same thing on the left and get everything he wanted, he’d do it. He just couldn’t take over the Democratic Party nearly as well and as fast as he could the Republicans. He is among all things first an opportunist, leading opportunists, followed by opportunists. Everyone believes The Big Lie but him. He knows the truth. He’s been making it up for years. Just like Goebbels once said: It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be.