The lessons of Weimar are not just behind us; they are also in front of us. For the Nazis, the attractiveness of scapegoating Jews was that no other party did so. In a time of social crisis where those in power lose legitimacy, the truth becomes what people have not been told. Such an environment turns reality on its head. Conspiracy not only becomes the substitute for reality, it also becomes reified as the essence of truth itself.
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Today the situation has flipped. Instead of innocent members of a faith being scapegoated by a rising radical movement, potentially culpable coreligionists are being given an official pass by the powers that be.
Before the smoke cleared at the Boston Marathon, common people were thinking that the perpetrators were Muslims, but American pundits and elites were saying they had no idea what the motive for the attack was. In the aftermath of the brutal beheading on a public street, in broad daylight, of a British soldier, the first instinct of common people watching the rant of one of the murderers was that this horror was, as his rage revealed, rooted in Islam. Yet, British politicians have been telling us that this had nothing to do with Islam.
This has become a common refrain in Western societies: whether it is after 09/11, Fort Hood, the attempted bombing of New York City, the slaughter at the Boston Marathon, the 7/7 bus bombings in London, the Muslim riots on the outskirts of Paris, or any of a number of other incidents where the perpetrators have been Muslims justifying their actions in the name of their religion. Add to that the guidelines for American law enforcement, which pointedly remove any relationship between Islam and terrorism and the reluctance of the Obama administration to utter the words, “Islamic terrorism.” British Prime Minister Cameron too acted like President Obama, when he insulted the intelligence of the average Briton by saying that the wanton act of brutality in Woolrich was a betrayal of Islam. This creates a situation ripe for exploitation, for denying the obvious reinforces its truth.
Others have long observed that London was incubating its own brand of homegrown Jihad, one where the children of immigrants from the Islamic world found themselves stranded between two cultures and embraced the most radical aspects of the culture of the Islamic world that their parents left. Muslims, in substantial numbers, have broken the basic contract of immigration: you emigrate not to recreate your own culture in opposition to the culture of the land that gave you a home, but you acculturate into and embrace the new culture. When you change geography, you change history!
There is no shortage in Britain of radical Muslim preachers with radical mosques exhorting their youth to commit the very kind of act that spilled blood on the streets of Woolwich. Ironically, many of these preachers live on the British dole as they stand in the streets of London and call for bloodshed against the infidel, while protected by the liberties that they’d destroy in a second, if they had the power to do so.
The Cameron government had no trouble shifting the focus of its attention to the English Defense League and its leader Tommy Robinson, as they took to the streets to protest the very act that radical Muslim preachers have long promised Britain. One would have thought from the government’s attack on the EDL and the swiftness with which it sought to exonerate Islam, that the EDL had brutally beheaded someone on the streets of London to send a political and religious message.
But by denying what every Briton outside of its effete political and chattering classes knows to be true, the Cameron government has become English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson’s greatest recruiting instrument. Cameron’s message to average Britons is that the government can not be trusted to protect them now or in the future. His government is too busy worrying about how the violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam affects Islam, rather than how it affects the British people.
The elites might get away with peddling their nonsense a bit longer, especially if there is no social or economic upheaval. However, given a set of catastrophic economic events, more Muslim-spawned atrocities, and more gratuitous official statements that these were not related to Islam, and the British elite will wish they were, indeed, dealing with Tommy Robinson.
Alexis de Tocqueville brilliantly observed that the French Revolution was not caused by those who desired it but by the stupidity of those who sought to prevent it. The French aristocracy ruled for 400 years and was to its own astonishment overthrown in a single night.
The British, a nation that produced one of the greatest militaries the world has ever known, are not going to lie down and turn their country over to a bunch of barbarians who want to live in the seventh century. British elites, and their western counterparts, should take note that no one will ever charge a machine gun nest for multiculturalism. Nationalism is one of the world’s most enduring and potent forces. Events like that in Woolwich give the masses an appetite for mobilization. All that is required is social and economic upheaval, a precipitating event, an elite that has squandered its legitimacy, and the emergence of a charismatic leader who can turn the appetite for mobilization into an organized mass movement.
If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that once created, mass movements move not to the center but to the extremes. They become Tocqueville’s proverbial uncontrolled cart running down hill going where no one intended for it to go.
Will some future historian write, as has been written of the Jews in Weimar, that the glamour of the Muslim question for the militant right was that all other parties had not only sought to avoid dealing with it but also to gloss over it as irrelevant to public discourse? Let us hope that Western elites recognize, before it is too late, that like the French aristocracy their refusal to deal with reality is undermining their legitimacy and leading all of us on the road to perdition.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, former head of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association and counterterrorism consultant to the National Institute of Justice.