1939: A review

August 18, 2020. One of the joys of life after 65 – beyond retirement to a safe haven – includes the to me to read. Admittedly, I had fallen out of this habit during the last ten years or so of my career. Maybe it was all that soccer dad and social media time; earlier, I had been a pretty voracious reader and a top one percent reviewer on Amazon. And my reviews of books such as David Landes’ The wealth and poverty of nations and Tom Friedman’s The world is flat both gained hundreds of kudos from appreciative readers.

Back in high school my dad’s experience as a bomber navigator in the Eight Army Air Force (which had a stunningly high combat mortality rate) had nurtured my interest in World War II. So when I saw a review of Frederick Taylor’s 1939, I was intrigued. Ordered a copy from Amazon and went to work reading.

To be fair, I started with a jaundiced view. First, the subtitle, “A people’s history of the coming of the second world war,” immediately produced a visceral skepticism stemming from Zinn’s use of a similar refrain in his widely used “people’s history” of the United States, a history text that undermines much of what I had learned in school. Reading the introduction reaffirmed my skepticism. First, Taylor used what must have been the original title of the book, The war nobody wanted, in his introductory remarks. Catchy titles like this remind me of the Enron critique, The smartest guys in the room, where the ‘guys’ really weren’t that smart at all and the authors used that line to imply that evil trumps brains. Second, Taylor tried hard to draw parallels between 1938-39 with 2008-09 and what he tried to convince the reader were both times of great inequality, banal capitalism, tyrannical dictatorial types (the Trump is like Hitler trope was clearly implied), and more, all of which was an effort to position 1939 as a real insight into the twenty-first century.

He could hardly have been more wrong, and where he may have been right, he got the villain and victim relationship backward. For example, Hitler had full control over the seemingly fawning German press; today, the American press is at war with President Trump. The German Kristallnacht has its modern version not with brown-shirted government lackeys, but with violent, leftist mobs in Minneapolis, New York, Seattle and elsewhere. These anti-government, anti-police, anti-capitalist protestors are from the farm left and while there is widespread sympathy for their complaints, there is widespread ignorance or rejection of their solutions -- or they have none. They are anti-family and anti-Catholic. They look much more like the communists of 1938. There is no small irony that the current domestic terrorist group Antifa has branded itself as “anti-fascist” when they exhibit more fascist characteristics than any other protest group of recent times.

One might argue that Taylor could not have foreseen the recent twist of violent protests and destruction of poverty when he published his book two years ago. And a valid response would be, "He wasn't looking."

Taylor also suffers from the confusion over left and right in politics. In 1939, any group opposed to communism was viewed as being on the right when, as Taylor ignores, the Nazis as national socialists, were much more to the left than to the right, practicing an older and more brutally systematic version of today’s ‘cancel culture’. And trying to pin the ‘right’ as fascists ignores the fact that tyrannical socialism such as Hitler practiced, is a strategy of the left, i.e., fascism.

And the power of the press, especially in Britain in 1939, has no parallel to anything today. If anything, ‘journalism’ has devolved to Twitter accounts and 24x7 cable news, with millions of voices contributing to the babble. Who needs printing press when you have Facebook? There is a cliche about not arguing with a party that buys printing ink by the barrel; that cliche is woefully outdated. The press lords of the national papers of Fleet Street have no serious sway today. Journalism has fallen further down the ladder of respect, joining politicians near the bottom of the trust lists. Even the oft-maligned "used car salesman" is probably held in high esteem than are journalists or politicians today.

If there is a common theme to Kristallnacht and the street riots in places like Portland, it is the destruction of wealth. These are expressions of anarchy, dressed up by and for the press as protests over oppression. In Germany, the scapegoats were the Jews; in America today it is the white male. In Germany, the government/majority attacked a helpless minority; in America today, an angry minority is attacking the government and the majority.

The best point of the book is that Taylor generally avoids blatant bias in the body text. There is some intimate knowledge and appreciation gained by tapping diaries of ‘common folk’ and the mundane stories that made up the bulk of reporting outside of Germany in 1938-39. However, even a serious weave of anecdotes from commoners with those of the leaders, e.g., Goebbels, Chamberlain, leaves a gaping hole in the picture of that year. This is more of Taylor’s personal narrative that a representative or comprehensive one. There are plenty of footnotes and highlights of some of the ‘main events’ of that period (September 1938 to September 1939) but precious little analysis or digestion of the facts, save an occasional comparison, e.g., German workers earned about half of what their American counterpart earned, with workers in Britain earning something between these two figures.

The primary problem might be one of context. The devastation of World War I led to the collapse of economies as well as empires, and the massive destruction of wealth produced the lowest level of income and wealth inequality of the past 150 years. Basically, a lot of people the world over – rich and poor – lost what little (or lot) that they had. This is the ‘equally miserable’ approach to equality or, per Margaret Thatcher, where the social justice advocates would rather everyone be worse off -- even poor but equal -- than to have a significant gap between the wealthy and the less wealthy, where all parties improve their lot. This crushing poverty of ‘equality’ produced first the boom of the twenties (after the Spanish flu pandemic), followed by the global depression of the 1930’s, which led to the rise of tyrants in Germany, Italy, Japan and elsewhere. Taylor needed to better set the stage and to explain why the German people were happy to surrender to socialism and nationalism.

For the person interested in this year, interested in some of the mundane activities going on alongside this slide to a war that would kill 50 million Europeans, it is a good read, albeit a more difficult one in the time of the pandemic, as Hitler impact on lives seems much like that of Covid -- a terrifying, unpredictable assault on human life if not civilization.