by Ray Black
In the mid-1920s Hitler attempted to take control of the German Republic by coup, but failed and ended up in jail for a year. He then set about earning power and influence by legal means. His winning formula was to keep reminding the German people of the economically disastrous state the nation had been left in by those who had lost the war. Bit by bit he won the nation over by means of this propaganda, because he appealed to people’s sense of wounded pride and their desire to stand proud on the world stage once more.
By 1933, Hitler had climbed to the position of chancellor of a coalition government. Then in 1934, President Hindenburg died. Hitler’s Nazi cabinet muscled in to make him both leader and chancellor of Germany. By this move, Hitler also assumed the role of supreme commander of the military. He now described himself as Fuhrer (Absolute Ruler) of the Third Reich (Third Empire). A year later he broke the Treaty of Versailles – the terms of German surrender – and introduced army conscription, so that he could begin rebuilding the German war machine. A worried Europe looked on.
Ultimately, of course, Hitler took Germany to war once again. World War II lasted for six years, from 1939 to 1945. Hitler, although skilled at taking the lead, proved fundamentally flawed once ensconced as a leader. He quite simply bit off more than he could chew in military terms, so that he spread his armies too thinly in all directions. An impressive initial push saw him take most of Europe – from the Pyrenees in the west to Moscow in the East, Norway in the north to North Africa in the south. But, he ended up taking his own life, trapped in a bunker in Berlin, while enemy shells rained down over the city.
It is estimated that around 60 million people lost their lives during the war. Arguably, Adolf Hitler was responsible for a sizeable proportion of those, remembering that Austria, Italy and Japan were involved, too. However, Hitler’s legacy as a killer has more to do with his policies of extermination, as opposed to his ambitions in the field of battle. The word that sums up the reign of terror he meted out on his victims is ‘holocaust’, which is derived from the Latin ‘holos-kaustos’ – ‘whole-burn.’ Because Hitler and his cronies wanted to burn, to erase, all undesirables from their world.
Those undesirables came in all shapes and sizes. The primary target was the community of European Jews, whom the Nazis rounded up into ghettos, concentration camps and death camps and systematically exterminated by all manner of despicable means, including starvation, gasing, shooting and experimentation. By the close of the war, some six million Jews had perished.
The Jews, however, were by no means the only target of the holocaust. Hitler’s basic ethos was centred on developing a master race of Aryans. They are a mythical race of people who were supposed to be tall and muscular, with blond hair and blue eyes. Hitler therefore suggested that all those who didn’t fit the bill were inferior specimens and should be treated as such. Not being an Aryan type himself, he categorized people in a descending order of perfection, so that he and other Caucasians belonged to the group immediately below.
All other racial and ethnic groups were at risk of extermination, as well as all those who had physical and mental disabilities. It meant that millions more died from general persecution by the German army and the SS – the Nazi special police force that administered the Holocaust. The most feared body of the SS was the Gestapo – the German secret police. Under Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo officers did all of Hitler’s evil and dirty work. They infiltrated all echelons of society to weed out anyone who attempted to escape what Hitler described as the ‘Final Solution’.
A key part of Hitler’s strategy was to begin indoctrinating or brainwashing Germans at an early age, so that they grew up accepting a belief system as a given truth. This process forced people into believing completely in things that have their origin entirely in the human imagination. It was therefore a very potent weapon in building a devoted following. From 1922 until 1945, there existed a paramilitary organisation called the Hitler Youth, which was used for just this purpose.
Germany’s teenagers were conditioned to believe that they were superior, in every way, to other human beings. To such an extent, in fact, that they viewed other races as sub-human. This meant that they would think nothing of killing them. To help in this process, victims were stripped of their clothing and belongings and had their heads shaven, so that they resembled one another, just like farm animals. It removed their individual human identities and personalities so that the Nazis felt no human connection with them and could more easily commit their atrocities.
Adolf Hitler is something of an anomaly to historians. He is viewed as something like a real-life Hannibal Lecter. That is to say, that his achievements in rising to power and leading Germany are regarded as rather impressive, especially to those who are insecure and have a fundamental need to feel racially superior. On the other hand, the atrocities committed in his name cast such a dark shadow that those same people wish it wasn’t true. Their way of justifying their admiration for Hitler is to deny that the Holocaust happened, despite the evidence. Ironically, in so doing they have simply indoctrinated themselves with another belief system.
Mao Zedong
The German philosopher Karl Marx has a lot to answer for. In 1836, a movement called the League of the Just was founded by German workers based in Paris. They were the first people to describe themselves as communists and changed their name to the Communist League in 1847. A year later they published their Communist Manifesto, which was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The ideology expounded by the book became known as Marxism. It suggested a course of action that involved the pursuit of a classless society by using the working class (proletariat) to overthrow the ruling classes (bourgeoisie).
At that time in Europe, the Industrial Revolution had transformed the socioeconomic landscape, leaving millions of working-class people downtrodden and disadvantaged by the class structure, so Marxism was a very appealing idea. As capitalism and imperialism continued their stranglehold, so Marxism developed a cult following as workers dreamt of the utopia it suggested. Ultimately, the plan was put into action for the first time in Russia in 1917. The Communist Revolution saw the royal family overthrown and a communist government take control of the country. Meanwhile, the rest of the world looked on. Some nations were dismayed by the events, others were inspired.
In China in 1911, there had already been a revolution, but it had been executed by a republican movement, which had overthrown the Qing Dynasty of the Manchu Royal Clan. However, in 1921 the Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded and it began to grow in membership very quickly, inspired by events in Russia. Mao Zedong, also known as Mao Tse-tung, joined the CPC in the first year, and by 1927 he had established a sufficient power base to take action against the republican government. He formed the Revolutionary Army of Workers and Peasants and initiated an uprising in Hunan Province. It failed in its aim but established Mao as a leader to be reckoned with.
Mao first demonstrated his ability to kill in cold blood when challenged, not by republican enemies, but by fellow communists with a different take on Marxist ideology. In order to establish his supremacy, he ordered the torture and deaths of those who presented a threat. An estimated 180,000 plus died in what became dubbed Revolutionary, or Red, Terrorism. Mao justified the deaths as being a necessary evil in pursuit of the greater good for the Chinese nation.
Republican persecution of the communists in 1934 led to an escape called the Long March. The CPC marched almost 9,660 km (6,000 miles) from their former stronghold of Jiangxi in the south-east of China to Shaanxi in the north-west. During the march, Mao Zedong left no doubt in people’s minds that he was the natural leader of the CPC. He even ordered his wife to leave their baby by the roadside so that they wouldn’t be burdened by the infant’s needs. His wife later went insane through her sense of guilt at this act of cruelty.
In the years leading up to and through World War II, Mao demonstrated his abilities as a military tactician by fending off attacks by the Japanese, who regarded
the Chinese as a sub-human race in a similar vein to the Nazis’ view of the Jews and Slavs. By the close of World War II, there was a marked anti-communist feeling in the West, and the USA began to support the Chinese republican government under Chiang Kai-shek. This catalysed a full-blown Chinese civil war, as the Soviets responded by supporting Mao. In 1949, the CPC succeeded in seizing total control and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established. Mao was fifty-six years of age and battle worn. His direct leadership of China continued until 1959 when it became clear that he was not quite so good at running the domestic affairs as he was at leading his party to power in the first place.
The years of his leadership had seen vast numbers of people summarily executed due to a policy of removing any individuals who were perceived as anti-communist. Victims included political rivals, capitalists, suspect intellectuals and rural gentry who owned land to be given back to the peasants. We can never know for certain how many people died during Mao’s purge, but a conservative estimate puts it at a million plus, and all in the name of a supposed communist utopia.
Mao’s leadership style was characterised by two Five Year Plans (1953–58 and 1959—64) and a cult of personality to generate a god-like reverence for his public image. The ‘plans’ involved the instigation of reforms such as the introduction of the principle collectivization. This is true to the notion of communal life, where peasants collectively own and operate farms, so that they share in all aspects. It’s a nice idea on paper but, as with all communist ideals, it falls apart somewhat when put into practise due to that age old problem – human nature.
Put in simple terms, people are at their happiest when they are progressing relative to others, so forcing them into a totally egalitarian lifestyle is fraught with pitfalls. This leads to people falling out and crimes being committed, so that communist governments resort to heavy-handed policing to repress unlawful behaviour. That, in turn, leads to a sense of oppression and a disaffected population. Communism doesn’t work.
Mao pulled a fast one in 1956 by announcing a more liberal CPC policy, which became known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, or Movement. The CPC openly encouraged people to express any opinions that countered or opposed the hard line Marxist line. Mao indicated that he was of an open mind and that he might even consider incorporating such ideas into the CPC doctrine. It proved to be a confidence trick. A clampdown in 1957 led to the persecution of millions who had been beguiled into revealing their innermost thoughts, which were interpreted as anti-communist. Trickery had been added to Mao’s political portfolio.
His downfall came in 1959 when Mao’s mismanagement of China’s infrastructure caused the worst famine in modern history. Millions of peasants starved to death. Mao had diverted so much labour into the industrial development of the nation – the Great Leap Forward – that there weren’t enough people to produce food. It only took droughts in some areas and floods in others to upset the balance and send the entire population into a crisis. It is believed as many as seventy million men, women and children perished through Mao’s neglect 1959—61, and he was removed from his presidency. The exact figures will never be known, because the CPC did their utmost to hide the truth from the world at large.
Even so, Mao remained the figurehead of the People’s Republic of China until his death in 1976, such was the potency of the personality cult that surrounded him. In 1966, Mao reacted to his fall from grace by initiating the Cultural Revolution. He circumvented the CPC and handed power to a movement known as the Red Guard. They were Mao loyalists who effectively continued his ‘good’ work. The Red Guard were very much like Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Under Mao’s instruction they closed schools and forced city folk out into the countryside to work the land. This last ditch attempt at creating a communist utopia ended three years later, having severely disrupted the lives of countless more millions of people.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Mao’s legacy is a contentious issue. As with all leaders who take up the communist banner, he undoubtedly believed that his was a cause for the good. But, while he may have been an effective guerrilla leader and visionary, he was woefully lacking in the qualities that were needed to run the nation once the People’s Republic of China had been set up. He was, by turns, both an inspiring personality and an uncompassionate human being. Having left so many people dead or emotionally scarred it is difficult to see that he benefited his people at all in the long term. If the current growth in the Chinese economy is anything to go by, then it shows that communism just doesn’t suit the human condition.
Saddam Hussein
Like that of so many tyrants, Saddam Hussein’s story is one of rags to riches. Saddam was born into a shepherd family near the town of Tikrit. His father was absent and his mother remarried. His stepfather turned out to be something of a child beater, so he fled to Baghdad, at the age of ten, to live with an uncle. In 1957, at the age of twenty, Saddam dropped out of university to pursue a political career in the Ba’ath Party, a pan-Arab organisation. A year later, King Faisal II was murdered in a coup d’état and Iraq became a republic under the rule of Abd al-Karim Qasim, who’s government the Ba’ath Party opposed, but it left the way open for Saddam’s eventual rise to power.
In 1963, The Ba’ath Party overthrew Qasim’s government and assumed power under Abdul Salam Arif, but he then withdrew from the Ba’ath Party. Saddam eventually tasted power as deputy under president Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, when they again took power from Arif’s son in 1967. Although Saddam was deputy, he played a strong hand behind the scenes, so that al-Bakr was more-or-less a puppet president by 1969. At that period, Saddam’s primary concern was to unify the opposed factions within the Ba’ath Party, as he knew it would be the key to continued power in Iraq.
As well as the Ba’ath Party infighting there were, and still are, other domestic divisions in Iraq. Although an entirely Muslim country, the population is fragmented by subtle religious and ethnic differences. There are two types of Muslim for starters – Sunni and Shi’ite – who both detest one another. Saddam was among the Sunni, who make up only twenty per cent of the Iraqi population but are the largest denomination in the Arab World. In addition, there is a non-Arab population in Iraq – the Kurds – who happen to be Sunni also. So, the situation was a complex one and took some governing.
A Revolutionary Command Council was formed and Saddam instigated a modernisation programme for Iraq. It turned out to be a visionary and progressive move on Saddam’s part. The programme introduced social services for the first time anywhere in the Middle East, including free hospitals, state schooling and a campaign to make all Iraqi citizens literate. It was so effective that UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) presented Saddam with an award for his achievements. At the same time, the economy of Iraq underwent a marked improvement due to the worldwide increase in crude oil prices. Things were looking good for Saddam who, perhaps not surprisingly, saw himself as the saviour of the Arab world.
In July 1979, Saddam was forced to seize power in Iraq because al-Bakr had proposed an Iraq–Syria unification, which would have left Saddam out in the cold. This led to the first truly ugly episode in Saddam’s political career. An assembly of the Ba’ath Party leadership was used to identify and arrest dissenting voices, and sixty-eight people were arrested and tried on charges of treason. All were imprisoned and tortured, and twenty-two were found guilty and executed for their crimes against the nation.
Saddam evidently felt that an example needed to be made of them, not least because the Iranian Revolution had just taken place. This was significant because Saddam’s regime was essentially of a secular doctrine, while the new government in Iran was conservatively Muslim and Shi’ite, so Saddam feared a Shi’ite uprising. Tensions between the two countries began over claims to ownership of a waterway that geographically divided the two nations. By 1980 all out war had erupted. However, both sides were evenly matched and the war dragged on for eight bloody years.
The Iran
–Iraq War was finally brought to an end in 1988, with neither side having benefited. Iraq had been assisted financially by the USA, ironically enough, but the infrastructure had been wrecked, so that Saddam had no prospect of paying the Americans back in the near future. Part of his solution was to ask neighbouring Kuwait to waver his debt to them, arguing that the war had been fought in their name too. The Kuwaitis disagreed, so Saddam decided to invade and annex their country in 1990. It would teach them a lesson and give Iraq access to ten per cent of the world’s oil, to add to the ten per cent they already owned.
The USA, which had previously supported Saddam, had to take exception to this move for political reasons and initiated the Gulf War. They, and a number of allied nations, forced Saddam out of Kuwait in early 1991. In so doing, they had made an enemy of Iraq and lost access to its ten per cent of the world’s oil, which was why they had supported Iraq against Iran in the first place. That left unfinished business to be taken care of and so began the gradual process of demonizing Saddam in the eyes of the Western world, so that the USA might one day find a reason to return.
That day came on September 11, 2001, with the event known as 9/11. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by extremist Shi’ite Muslims was just the ticket the USA needed. The attack presented itself as the perfect excuse for waging a crusade – quite literally – against the Arab world.
