"Charlottesville was right out of the Nazi playbook. In the 1920s,
the Nazi Party was just one political party among many in a democratic
system, running for seats in Germany’s
Parliament. For most of that time, it was a small, marginal group. In
1933, riding a wave of popular support, it seized power and set up a
dictatorship. The rest is well-known.
It was in 1927, while still on the political fringes, that the Nazi
Party scheduled a rally in a decidedly hostile location – the Berlin
district of Wedding. Wedding was so left-of-center that the neighborhood
had the nickname “Red Wedding,” red being the color of the Communist
Party. The Nazis often held rallies right where their enemies lived, to
provoke them.
The people of Wedding were determined to fight back
against fascism in their neighborhood. On the day of the rally,
hundreds of Nazis descended on Wedding. Hundreds of their opponents
showed up too, organized by the local Communist Party. The antifascists
tried to disrupt the rally, heckling the speakers. Nazi thugs
retaliated. There was a massive brawl. Almost 100 people were injured.
I imagine the people of Wedding felt they had won that day. They had courageously sent a message: Fascism was not welcome.
But historians believe events like the rally in Wedding helped the
Nazis build a dictatorship. Yes, the brawl got them media attention. But
what was far, far more important was how it fed an escalating spiral of
street violence. That violence helped the fascists enormously.
Violent confrontations with antifascists gave the Nazis a chance to
paint themselves as the victims of a pugnacious, lawless left. They
seized it.
It worked. We know now that many Germans supported the
fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the
streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of
clashes like the one in Wedding. It looked like a bloody tide of civil
war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike
came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop
violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis
themselves were fomenting the violence didn’t seem to matter.
One
of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency
police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence."
A supporter of President Donald Trump, center, argues with a
counterprotester at a rally in Boston on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2017. AP
Photo/Michael Dwyer
