Principles and Heresies

As the Attorney General pointed out after the May action in Washington, the tactics of the Left today are frighteningly reminiscent of “another group of civilians who roamed the streets of Germany in the 1920s, bullying people, shouting down those who disagreed with them, and denying other people their civil rights.” As he went on to say, had they been dealt with “before they could take over the German government, the world might have been spared a whole era of violence and misery.”

The strategic and tactical parallels between the Nazi—and Communist-drive against the Weimar government in the years before 1932 and what is going on in this country today, are startling. It is true that there are many differences—most obviously in the very different forms of organization that the loosely united cadres of today’s revolutionaries exhibit, with their peculiar mixture of anarcho-nihilist and neo-Marxist style, as compared with the more regimented style of the German Nazi and Communist storm troopers. But the aim is the same: to terrorize the organs of representative government, legislative, executive and judicial; to force the elected representatives of the Republic to forsake the deliberate and considered weighing of issues, which is the duty of their station, and to bend them to the will of an impassioned and violent minority.

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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As the Attorney General pointed out after the May action in Washington, the tactics of the Left today are frighteningly reminiscent of “another group of civilians who roamed the streets of Germany in the 1920s, bullying people, shouting down those who disagreed with them, and denying other people their civil rights.” As he went on to say, had they been dealt with “before they could take over the German government, the world might have been spared a whole era of violence and misery.”

The strategic and tactical parallels between the Nazi—and Communist-drive against the Weimar government in the years before 1932 and what is going on in this country today, are startling. It is true that there are many differences—most obviously in the very different forms of organization that the loosely united cadres of today’s revolutionaries exhibit, with their peculiar mixture of anarcho-nihilist and neo-Marxist style, as compared with the more regimented style of the German Nazi and Communist storm troopers. But the aim is the same: to terrorize the organs of representative government, legislative, executive and judicial; to force the elected representatives of the Republic to forsake the deliberate and considered weighing of issues, which is the duty of their station, and to bend them to the will of an impassioned and violent minority.