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“We know nothing at all except what we have experienced ourselves.” Victor Klemperer.
On the long flight home from Tbilisi, Georgia I read a book a podcast guest recommended, I Will Bear Witness, 1933-1941, by Victor Klemperer. Klemperer kept a diary of Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s. While Klemperer does note substantial shifts in policy, most of the book reveals the day-to-day of living at a moment where conversations with the baker, butcher, and car mechanic all are suffused with a singular question—are you one of them who, body-snatcher like, have lost your critical facilities or one of the minority who saw things for what they were, an apocalyptic collapse in civilization.
His stories eerily echo those I heard from Russians I met in Georgia.
“I approach conversations cautiously,” one Russian in Tbilisi told me, of her life in Moscow as we shared a lunch of bread and pkhali in a quiet cafe. “You never know what side a person is on.”
In Germany, Russia, the US, and China, the news revolves more around the leader than the followers, those with body-snatched minds who swallow propaganda like cake. About 70% of Russians support Putin. Polls (below) suggest Trump might return to power, particularly after DeSantis has plunged in the polls (how is attacking Disney an election strategy?). It’s hard to know what support is for China’s President Xi, but I suspect high. As an investor, I make money off of people who hold an inaccurate picture of reality (more on this below). But as a citizen, I fear the crowd, the followers.
If things take a bad turn in the US, I’ll be glad I read Klemperer. The key symptoms of the disease are cult of personality, breakdown in due process and voting, the concentration of power, and the mass production of lies. It’s easy to lose your mind in such an environment, to think you, not everyone around you, is nuts. This to me is literature at its most powerful. An instruction manual on human fragility and violence.
Klemperer was a specialist in 18th-century French intellectual history who lived and worked in Dresden. He was Jewish by birth, Protestant by faith and married to an Aryan. By dint of his Aryan marriage, he survived, barely. He died without publishing the book. The German version appeared in 1995, becoming a sensation. Maybe someone is writing the same book in Putin’s Russia today.
Some of my key takeaways:
This all happened recently. I was born in the 1960s. Victor’s nightmare ended in 1945. Russia today is a similar disease in a different jurisdiction. Klemperer quotes Hitler on the days he hears him. Hitler: “It was the Jew in all his Satanic vileness, which gathered around this man, but also to whom this man reached out,” referring to FDR, December 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the US. Putin: “It was the West that unleashed this war…they are destroying the institution of the family, priests are forced to recognize and officiate same-sex marriages.” The pattern in each is to a) lead with a lie b) create an enemy (Jew or homosexual) c) portray yourself as protecting (not destroying) civilization.
The rituals are similar. The Nuremberg rallies and the military parades on Red Square and Tiananmen Square could have been directed by the same person. “What stage direction of the crowds and what hysteria!” wrote Klemperer. A YouTube clip of the Nuremberg rally here and the recent “Victory Day” parade on Red Square here look similar. Recall that Trump demanded that tanks and jets be included in the July 4 parade.1
Propaganda works. While the magnitude of their crimes is not comparable (Trump is not Hitler) what’s similar is the use of media (radio in Germany, state-owned TV in Russia and China, social media in the US) to brainwash with falsehood. “If for three months all the newspapers are forced to write that there was no World War, then the masses will believe this really did not happen,” wrote Klemperer. My mother-in-law repeats the same phrase like a mantra, “NATO started it” that Russian state TV feeds her. Trump’s core supporters believe the vote is rigged even though the main propagator of lies has been forced to pay a massive penalty for lying. Many Chinese believe the US provoked Putin into attacking. Last week, China’s ambassador to France claimed that Ukraine wasn’t a sovereign state!2
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