THE 1930s PLAYBOOK
Donald Trump’s policies sound increasingly familiar — and worrying.
Once again, the chilling echoes of one of history’s darkest decades can be heard faintly in today’s global politics. Will the 1930s never leave us?
There is a state of high alert these days in the capitals of Western Europe as Donald Trump embarks next week on two critical international summits.
On Wednesday, he meets in Brussels with anxious NATO leaders who fear the worst. Five days later, he has his first formal summit as U.S. president with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
A month after the disastrous G7 summit in Quebec, Europe’s leaders are bracing for another blow-up with Trump, who seems to loathe the NATO alliance and its leaders. Even more ominous, they darkly suspect that the U.S. president at his summit with Putin will collude with the Russian president in his efforts to destroy the existing postwar European liberal order.
Putin’s immediate ambitions are clear: he wants Russia’s violent annexation of Crimea to be recognized internationally and insists U.S. forces stationed in Europe be reduced, if not eliminated. Incredibly, Trump has indicated recently that he is open to both scenarios. (When will we find out what Putin has on Trump?)
The overwhelming concern for European leaders is that they know from their own experience that the Russian president is a crafty negotiator, while his American counterpart is not.
Trump proved as much in his much-ballyhooed encounter last month with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. An open secret among informed Asia watchers — obvious to all except, it appears, to Trump himself — is that the U.S. president was taken to the cleaners by North Korea’s dictator.
In spite of Trump’s ludicrous claim after the summit that there “is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” U.S. intelligence sources have revealed that North Korea has actually continued with its nuclear program since the Trump-Kim summit by expanding its nuclear test sites, not destroying them.
So, many in Europe believe that, now more than ever, they have very good reason to worry.
In recent days, there has been a flurry of European media commentaries on the gravity of the crisis, including some who worry that a “1930s playbook” to attack liberal democracies is being written.
“The 1930s keep pressing their relevance,” writes Edward Luce in the Financial Times. “The 1930s playbook involved scapegoating minorities for crimes they did not commit … Mr. Trump’s attacks on the ‘lying media’ for pointing this out have strong echoes of Adolf Hitler’s demonization of the ‘lugenpresse’ — the lying press.”
In the Guardian, columnist Jonathan Freedland writes that he has always tried to avoid Nazi comparisons because, “far from dramatizing whatever horror is under way, they usually serve to minimize the one that killed millions in the 1940s.”
But, in doing that, Freedland writes, “we risk failure to learn its lessons” and squander the “essential benefit” of studying the Third Reich as an early warning system.
“So yes, when Donald Trump ordered U.S. government agents on the southern border to separate migrant children from their parents, to tear screaming toddlers from their fathers and even to pull a baby from its mother’s breast, he was not re-enacting the Holocaust. He was not ordering the eradication of an entire people or sending millions to their deaths.
“But there were echoes. And we must hear them.”
The other echoes of the 1930s are less stark, but still real.
European leaders, as well as Canada’s, are appalled at the aggressive trade policies being imposed by the Trump administration against much of the world. They are reminders of the “beggar-thy-neighbour” economic anarchy of the early 1930s that helped trigger The Great Depression and made it last so long.
Also, apart from stoking wild and baseless fears about the encroaching “outsider” — with the Nazis the targets were Jews and others; with Trump they are immigrants and refugees — the “1930s playbook” took aim at the very notion of “democracy” and worked tirelessly to discredit and ultimately destroy those institutions, such as an independent judiciary and a free press, that were created to protect it.
To all of us who have observed the Trump track record since he became U.S. president 18 months ago, how familiar is that?
Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and has written widely on Europe and the Holocaust. Last year, he wrote an acclaimed book, titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Using simple observations and suggestions, Snyder described it as his effort to push back the tide of authoritarianism rising in the world. It was the subject of an engrossing episode of Ideas on CBC Radio last February 23, which is available on the CBC website.
It is a slender book, intentionally so, intended to look like an 18th-century pamphlet. Its opening line is: “History does not repeat, but it does instruct.” Without stating that the Trump era is its target, Snyder’s message is timely:
“Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the 20th century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism.
“Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”