The German government subsidized municipalities, much as U. Germany had a troubled government-run pension system like our Social Security. The German government provided health insurance for millions of people. There were German government programs for 1. The government lavished subsidies on the arts. There were government-run theaters and opera houses.
Government-owned railroads lost money. The German government even operated factories producing margarine and sausages, which lost money. The German central bank began printing stupendous quantities of paper money to pay for all this. At the peak of the inflation in late , only 1. The result was that in less than five years prices soared billion-fold. Inflation harmed everybody to one degree or another. Many bank deposits were devalued to nothing. Historian Gerald D.
Feldman reported that gangs of unemployed coal miners plundered the countryside, because farmers refused to trade their produce for worthless paper money. The government enacted rent controls that limited the ability of landlords to recover their costs and discouraged developers from building more apartments.
So cities borrowed from foreign lenders to build housing that lost money. Much scientific research became financially impossible, too. Each received a bag full of paper notes. According to the figures inscribed on them, the paper notes amounted to seven hundred thousand or five hundred million, or three hundred and eighty billion, or eighteen trillion marks — the figures rose from month to month, then from week to week, finally from day to day.
People dashed to the nearest food stores where lines had already formed. When they reached the stores, a pound of sugar, for example, might have been obtainable for two million marks; but by the time they came to the counter all they could get for two million marks was a half-pound.
Everybody scrambled for things that would keep until the next pay-day. How much hostility is daily directed against that portion of the employed German people with civil service status is shown by the press and also even by those parties which previously supported the civil service and now press for a reduction of the civil service. Altogether, during the inflation, Hitler recruited some 50, Nazis and became a political force to reckon with.
To be sure, he attempted a coup that failed November 8, , and he was imprisoned. But he retained his key followers and wrote his venomous memoir Mein Kampf that became the Nazi bible. EE: Can you give us a quick introduction to the eight dictators who feature in your work? FD: Yes, I did it chronologically.
He is the very first one to start his own cult of personality. It will be the king who will have him arrested at the end of his career, so to speak. The second one seems reasonably straight forward — Adolf Hitler, how can you miss him?
Or Stalin. Or Mao Zedong. All of these being the classic 20th century dictators. I thought I had to take three figures who are not necessarily all that well known, but somehow, I think, shed light on the five big ones. The final one is Mengistu. FD: They work at it tirelessly, from the very beginning. Adolf Hitler works at his image, and, of course, also works at building up his own party from the very beginning — the early s onwards.
It is he who designs those garage-red flyers that attract new recruits; it is he who is behind the marches, the flags, etc. And, of course, he is behind his own image; he hires a photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, to produce photos that project sheer strength of character and iron determination. And again and again, he works at building up his own image as a charismatic leader. You can read Mein Kampf , for instance.
In there, of course, is a very clear program: aggregate the Versailles treaty; get rid of the Jews, make Germany greater, invade the Soviet Union. But there are also many elements of the Hitler myth — you know, the voracious reader, the born orator, the unrecognised artist driven by destiny to save his people. Mussolini, by one account, spends pretty much half of his time projecting his own image as the omniscient, omnipotent, indispensable leader of Italy, on top of running about half a dozen ministries.
So, again and again, with each dictator it becomes very clear that they are ultimately responsible for building up their own cult. They begin with a low-key approach and with every step that they increase the terror, they manage to compel people to acclaim them in public, to cheer them in public.
And the key point here — coming back to what you said — is that the cult often is seen as brainless enthusiasm. If you want to know whether there is a cult of personality, you go to a country and you find out whether you can find anyone who has anything negative to say about the man in charge.
If the answer is no, you will know what a cult of personality is. EE: So, what about the people they ruled over, and possibly appealed to as well? What conclusions did you draw about them? FD: They are great actors. Dictators are great actors. Mussolini thought of himself as a great actor. We forget, also, that ordinary people have to become great actors themselves; they have to chant on command; they have to parrot the party line; they have to invoke the slogans; they have to cry, cheer, shout… on command.
So it is not just some bizarre ritual that operates under fear. Now the point here, really, about ordinary people is to make clear that the cult of personality is not designed to convince, or to persuade people that their leader truly is a great genius; no, the cult is there to destroy common sense, to destroy reason, to sow confusion, to enforce obedience, to literally isolate individuals and crush their dignity. People have to self-monitor what they say and how they say it — and in turn they start monitoring other people.
FD: Yes. Now all of them realise that control of the press is important; that no good dictator will allow freedom of press to continue for very long. Infact, the very first act will be to close down publication houses and to eliminate, step-by-step, every single freedom. This happens in Germany within two or three years; it happens under Mussolini in about five six years… everywhere freedom of speech becomes the victim.
These are replaced by massive ministries of propaganda. And these dictators — Stalin, Mussolini and Duvalier — do that very carefully; they scrutinize what happens. So the words of the dictator, whether it is under Hitler in Germany or Stalin or Mao or Kim Il-Sung, is everywhere and in every newspaper — there are posters everywhere. The voice of the dictator frequently, but not always, will pursue you wherever you go — certainly in the case of Germany, with loudspeaker pillars erected in cities and mobile ones taken to the countryside.
And the loyalty of these potential rivals can be bought. This means diverting money from taxes or from the sale of oil - money that might otherwise be spent on public services like hospitals - to reward the select few with car collections and palaces. According to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, corruption can be used to buy rivals, but it has another advantage for the dictator:. On the one hand, by allowing them to be corrupt you induce them to be loyal because they are getting rich.
And if they should be suspected of not being loyal How do dictators and authoritarians stay in power? Dictators have an additional strategy that combines managing their rivals and their population. The third chapter in the survival guide is, somewhat surprisingly, called "elections". Most countries now have elections, but dictators usually rig them.
Today, election rigging is more sophisticated than simply stuffing ballot boxes. A good example is Madagascar's elections when the opposition candidate needed to register in person he was an exile abroad and every time he tried to fly back the president closed the airports about ten minutes before he wanted to land.
Why hold these sham elections? Jennifer Gandhi, a professor of political science at Emory University, argues that they often provide information to regimes about where their supporters and opponents live. But most importantly:. It's a way of signalling strength, that belonging to the regime is the only game in town. So far, the dictators' survival guide seems to imply that staying in power is not so difficult. Voters may experience alienation when their political choices fail to reflect their democratic interests.
This is particularly dangerous, as this presents an opportunity for authoritarian-minded political leaders to start curtailing political rights for minority groups, if not the entire national population. This can then start a backslide into dictatorship when the democratic voice becomes permanently suppressed, eliminating any kind of recourse against undemocratic policies such as voter suppression or encroachments onto free speech. Hungary, as many political observers have noted over the past decade, is a profound case of democratic decline towards illiberalism, if not an outright march towards authoritarianism.
Since , Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his political party, Fidesz, have dominated Hungarian politics through a combination of populist demagoguery and pernicious political engineering which have ensured repeated electoral success over the past three election cycles. These upheavals caused mass unemployment, creating a sense of resentment to the social-democratic and liberal parties whose policies led to the situation.
Orban has also repeatedly attacked international and European institutions in Hungary while expressing a vitriolic attitude towards economic and political globalism.
Fidesz has maintained a tight grip on Hungarian politics over the past decade, despite spirited attempts by the opposition to eject the right-wing party from power.
Orban and his party have successfully established a stranglehold on the institutions of government, having taken control of the courts , revised the Hungarian constitution , and gerrymandered the electoral districts to favor their party.
Perhaps now more than ever, citizens in democratic countries must work to prevent the encroachment of dictatorial politics into democracies. We must do more than just simply understand past historical examples of democratic decline; we must go further and make sure these historical examples do not happen again.
The first step is to recommit to democratic principles and embrace them wholeheartedly. Strongmen often turn their ireful gaze onto many different groups, including minorities, immigrants, the political opposition, and established national leaders; strongmen tend to view these groups as both personal and national enemies. Strongmen need to be stopped at the polls. Elections tend to affirm strongmen by giving them a popular mandate for their regime, but their respect for democracy ends the day after the election.
Beating strongmen means not giving them a position of power to abuse in the first place, or by denying them a mandate and voting them out of power. Ultimately, the best way to protect democracies against becoming a dictatorship is to continue embracing democratic practices. Voters need to make conscientious electoral choices that reject candidates or political groups that threaten to undermine the democratic process.
Maintaining democracy requires voters to become yet more steadfast in their empathy towards others and participating in national politics with a frame of mind towards cooperation and understanding. The Renew Democracy Initiative, Inc is a c 3 not-for-profit organization.
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