Book Review 383: Hitler's Heralds

HITLER'S HERALDS: The Story of the Freikorps 1918-1923, by Nigel H. Jones. 284 pages, illustrated. Dorset

Lots of people think Donald Trump is a neonazi, and they are correct; but there is a yuuge difference between Hitler or Mussolini and Trump: Trump does not have a private army of semi-disciplined goons to terrorize his opponents.

(He has the inclination to be sure. During the campaign he hired a private squad of goons and directed them to behave the way the American Nazi goons famously did at their big rally in 1938 at Madison Square Garden.)

Where did Hitler get his army of brownshirts? They were a natural growth from a spontaneous emergence of violent paramilitary bands following the end of the war and the disappearance of the empire. Millions of men went home, but tens of thousands of angry, disappointed men formed terrorist bands.

These were politically from the left and the right, but the rightist bands were more consequential.

They took their name from one of the most unsavory episodes of German history, the Freikorps of the wars of religion. (Not uniquely German, they resembled the “free companies” that ravaged France during the Hundred Year’s War.)

The Freikorps prevailed because they had money.  Businesses backed them, and sometimes they received money and weapons from secret funds of the army, or from civilian governments. Even some Socialist local governments, desperate for “order,” sometimes paid the Freikorps.

Except in the Baltic region, Freikorps fighting rarely resembled regular warfare. Usually a gang would roll into town (by train or sometimes in trucks, rarely as cavalry) and cow an unarmed citizenry or brawl in the streets with socialist or worker bands.

The fighting was seldom very bloody. The killing began when a Freikorps gained control and instituted a reign of White Terror.

Like condottiere of the Quattrocentro, Freikorps men enjoyed their work, since it was not very dangerous and allowed them to murder, rape, rob, booze and strut.

Nigel Jones provides a well-backgrounded history, popular rather than scholarly, but because there were so many Freikorps and their actions were local and uncoordinated, the story is choppy, episodic and rather hard to follow.

By 1923 Germany had calmed down enough that private armies were not wanted. The better organized Freikorps were absorbed into the army, the worse organized bands tended to break up and their drifting veterans were happy to find comradeship (often of a homosexual kind) and money in the Nazi Party, although by the time the Freikorps movement started to break up, few Germans outside Bavaria had yet heard from Hitler.

Nazi echoes

Well-dresssed nazi as the BBC envisions him (Richard Lintern as Charles Lucas)

Suppose I told you a politician gave a speech and that the principle themes were

1. economic autarky

2. huge expansion of armaments

3. denunciation of unfair treaties

4. hypernationalism and xenophobia

5. denunciation of 'enemies of the people'

Suppose further that I asked, was this speech given by Hitler or Trump? Could you decide which it was?

No, you couldn't, because Trump's speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference was a purely Nazi speech. And the brownshirts leapt to applaud as eagerly at the Gaylord National Center as they used to do at the Kroll Opera House.

I recommend an episode from the final season of the BBC series "Foyle's War," which was first shown in 2014. The writer, Anthony Horowitz, bases his plots on real events and they are carefully researched. The episode "Trespass," which concerns the British attempt to keep Jews out of Palestine in 1946, has a character called Charles Lucas who is based on Mosley, the British fascist.

Lucas gives a speech, which takes only 90 seconds or so,  which is a concentration of fascist rhetoric of the '30s and '40s. It is brilliantly done. And it sounds exactly like Donald Trump.

More voting shnanigans

And, no surprise, the perp is another Trumpeter. There are more illegal voters in the Trump White House than among all the illegal immigrants in the country.

You cannot make this stuff up.

Whip Obamacare now!

The weeks since inauguration day are the longest period that Congress has failed to vote to repeal Obamacare.

Just sayin'.

The Times reports:

As liberals overwhelm congressional town hall-style meetings and deluge the Capitol phone system with pleas to protect the health law, there is no similar clamor for dismantling it, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. From deeply conservative districts in the South and the West to the more moderate parts of the Northeast, Republicans in Congress say there is significantly less intensity among opponents of the law than when Mr. Obama was in office.

“I hear more concerns than before about ‘You’re going to repeal it, and we’re all going to lose insurance’ because they don’t think we’re going to replace it,” said Representative Mike Simpson, a Republican who represents a conservative district in Idaho.

(Laughter)

Book Review 382: The House of Mondavi

THE HOUSE OF MONDAVI: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, by Julia Flynn Siler. 452 pages, illustrated. Gotham, $28

Despite being written in broken English, the outlines of the story are moderately interesting:

Young immigrants, Cesare and Rosa Mondavi, scrap around and end up in Lodi, California, dealing in fruit. Prohibition presents opportunity, since each household was permitted to make 200 gallons of wine a year.

The Mondavis do well shipping grapes East, and in 1943, they buy a formerly well known but decrepit winery, Charles Krug, in Napa Valley for $75,000.

It was the parents’ desire that their sons (but not their daughters) establish a wine business that would endure through generations.

The sons were superficially well-matched, Michael the impulsive salesman, committed to teaching Americans to drink good wine; Peter, the quiet tinkerer devoted to making better and better wine. In the event, though, they could not work in tandem and in the mid-‘60s Peter tried to squeeze Robert out of his inheritance. He failed, or did he?

Robert started the Robert Mondavi Winery, where he was credited with leading the revolution in America’s taste for boozing. And he had sons who seemed well suited to carrying on but were as antagonistic as their father and uncle.

For Julia Siler, this is strictly a family quarrel story and the rise of the Robert Mondavi Winery to become nearly a billion-dollar business is mostly an irritation. There isn’t a graph in the book, and statistics on production, income, sales volume, employment and acres controlled are scarce and scattered haphazardly throughout the chapters. There are precisely two uninformative sentences on labor, although the expansion of Mondavi coincided with the farm workers movement. We learn (in an endnote) that Krug, which remained under the control of Peter and his family, was unionized, which implies that Mondavi was not, but Siler never says.

Even after Robert Mondavi Corp. went public in 1994 and information becomes more easily available, Siler barely uses it. She is not indifferent to facts; she just has no idea about which are significant. We learn the street addresses of several law firms that advised various Mondavis, for example, and what fabrics Mondavian brides wore.

Within 10 years of tapping Wall Street’s keg of dollars, Robert and his family are out, their departure not sweetened by douceurs of  $60 million and up each, since the hopes of Rosa and Cesare are thwarted — except over at  Krug where Peter and his family have kept the family interest intact. But Siler has little interest in that side of the family.

“The House of Mondavi” is so badly organized and badly written that it is not worth anyone’s time.

Tactical blunder

I don't know who scheduled the time and place of the hoopla meeting for the development of the Maui High site at Hamakuapoko, but by making it at 4:30 at Paia Community Centee, he guaranteed that everyone coming from Kahului hit the Paia traffic jam.

From 2:30 on, the slowdown starts at Nonohe Place, or sometimes Kaunoa and I have even seen it start at Stable Road. Traveling west. I may be malihini but I am not damfool enough to drive east toward Paia in the afternoon.

That was a PR mistake but Mayor Arakawa's statement a couple days later was bizarre. He criticized the County Council for wanting to buy land at Peahi because it would cost $20 million to bring eletricity and water to a public park there.

First, parks don't need electricity or water. Oheo is one of the most popular parks in Hawaii and it has neither.

Second, and more important, if Hamakuapoko is developed, it will require an equal or grater amount to bring in water and electricity, but his administration is pushing that boondoogle.

Shotguns n Roses

I said I wasn't going to keep making fun of the gun nuts but this is too good to pass up.