There is a myth that ‘democracy’ elected Adolf Schicklgruber into power. While it is correct that the so-called ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ became the Weimar Republic’s largest party in 1932 (despite lacking a majority), which is probably how this misconception originated, Adolf Schicklgruber himself was unappointed by the common voter. Instead, the bourgeoisie’s representatives appointed him:
For two years, repeatedly resorting to Article 48 to issue presidential decrees, the Bruening government sought and failed to build a parliamentary majority that would exclude Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis. In 1932, Hindenburg dismissed Bruening and appointed Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and Center party politician, as chancellor.
Papen dissolved the Reichstag again, but the July 1932 elections brought the [NSDAP] 37.3 percent of the popular vote, making it the largest political party in Germany. The Communists (taking votes from the Social Democrats in the increasingly desperate economic climate) received 14.3 percent of the vote. As a result, more than half the deputies in the 1932 Reichstag had publicly committed themselves to ending parliamentary democracy.
When Papen was unable to obtain a parliamentary majority to govern, his opponents among President Hindenburg’s advisers forced him to resign. His successor, General Kurt von Schleicher, dissolved the Reichstag again. In the ensuing elections in November 1932, the [NSDAP] lost ground, winning 33.1 percent of the vote. The Communists, however, gained votes, winning 16.9 percent.
As a result, the small circle around President Hindenburg came to believe, by the end of 1932, that the [NSDAP] was Germany’s only hope to forestall political chaos ending in a Communist takeover. [Fascist] negotiators and propagandists did much to enhance this impression.
On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler’s popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule, perhaps even a monarchy.
Within two years, however, Hitler and the [Fascists] outmaneuvered Germany’s conservative politicians to consolidate a radical [anticommunist] dictatorship completely subordinate to Hitler’s personal will.
I have to admit that at first I forgot why I wrote this draft when I went back to review it (I had written nothing other than two URLs, both of which had little to do with November). It quickly dawned on me that presently it is election season here in Imperial America, and for months now centrists, social democrats, neoclassical liberals, and other (white) moderates have been pressuring everybody to vote, frequently under the pretension that it is necessary to ‘stop fascism’.
I have been studying fascism for seven years now and I can confidently say that engaging in a hopelessly broken process like a U.S. election is not an antifascist method. The most that voting may do is measure how little opposition that the ruling class can expect from the general public when the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie inevitably appoints its own representatives to the government. That is it. U.S. elections are effectively nothing more than glorified public opinion polls, just like the Third Reich’s plebiscites.
My best advice is to boycott the election as a means of protesting an illegitimate process. Your time would be much better spent on supporting the proletariat (especially strikers) through direct action. If you absolutely must recommend voting, though, you could at least familiarize yourselves with the gross corruption that is part of the process, then constantly demand election integrity. I personally don’t consider that the best action to take, but I can promise you that that would be more effective than scorning adults who feel alienated from voting.
In any case, the point here is that stopping fascism is not so easy that you can do it at a ballot box (something that thousands of voters in the Saar Basin learned the hard way in 1935). Rather, (neo)fascism is the inevitable consequence of capitalism’s contradictions and inadequacies. Only when the lower classes finally overthrow capitalism will neofascism lose its purpose. Don’t blame me; I didn’t invent reality.
Click here for events that happened today (November 1).
1921: Harald Quandt, Luftwaffe lieutenant, existed.
1933: The Dachau concentration camp commander, Theodor Eicke, put its regulations into effect and it became a blueprint for other camps. Under Article 12, people who refused to work, or shouted while on the job, were to be shot immediately.
1935: Somebody attempted to murder future Axis politician Wang Jingwei and three other officials shortly before he died himself.
1937: The Defense of Sihang Warehouse ended in an Imperial victory while Imperial troops advanced deeper into Shanghai by crossing Suzhou Creek.
1939: Chinese forces launched the Winter Offensive on multiple fronts against the Imperial Japanese Army while a royal decree in the Netherlands established martial law in key regions mostly along the German–Dutch border.
1940: Fascist forces reached the Thyamis River. Coincidentally, Instanbul declared neutrality in the Greco‐Italian War.
1941: Berlin claimed that the United States ‘attacked Germany’ and that its head of state had been placed before the ‘tribunal’ for world judgment; Berlin disputed the Allied account of the sinking of the Reuben James and claimed that an Axis submarine only attacked after Allied destroyers attacked Axis submarines first. Meanwhile, as the Reich commissioned the submarine U‐214, the Axis occupied Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, and Jews in Slovakia were required to travel in separate train compartments and send and receive letters marked with the Star of David.
1942: The Matanikau Offensive commenced during the Guadalcanal Campaign and finished three days later with an Allied victory. Meanwhile, the Axis’s Army Group A captured Alagir, four Axis sailors escaped from an internment camp at Fort Stanton, the Soviets formed a committee for the investigation of war crimes committed by the Axis, and strikes broke out in Haute‐Savoie in protest of the Vichy government’s forced recruitment of labour for the Third Reich.
1943: The 3rd Marine Division landed on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands and secured a beachhead, leading that night to a naval clash at the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay.
1944: As Allied units landed at Walcheren, the Axis submarine U‐483 torpedoed Whitaker and rendered a constructive total loss, an Axis kamikaze sunk Abner Read, the Axis lost three ships in the Kvarner Gulf, an F‐13 Superfortress conducted a reconnaissance sortie over Imperial Japan, and the Western Allies commenced Operation Infatuate.