You shouldn’t need to tell people to distrust Nazis: a report from the front line

A piece appeared recently on the New York Times’ website about a neo-Nazi living in Ohio.  The newspaper had commissioned the report and sent a journalist out to the Midwest to interview Tony and Maria Hovater. The report garnered adverse reactions on social media and the paper wrote a follow-up piece to engage with its audience but the negative tweets continued to appear.

I noted on Twitter that I found the report “anodyne” and this sparked comments from one respondent, who said, “I think there’s an awful long list to exhaust of people who need to be written about from a position of empathy before you feel the need to write a sympathetic piece on a nazi. The fact that someone felt the need to start there says something in itself.” I had suggested that the Times’ piece was reasonable. Then I said:

The problem that the elites, including the media, have ignored is that the working classes in the developed world are suffering from gross inequality. This chart shows how wages globally have changed since the 1980s.

I attached a chart to the tweet showing how wages have changed across the world over the past 30 years. The chart was presented by Professor John Romalis of the Department of Economics at the University of Sydney on 25 October this year during a talk on globalisation (which I covered on this blog). You can see big increases in wages for low-wage earners in the developing world – for example China and India – but big drops for lower-wage earners in the developed world. Wealth is gradually being moved from wealthy nations and deposited in poorer nations, so that all will eventually look the same in terms of wealth distribution (everything else being equal).

The chart is mirrored by one on Wikipedia’s page on the subject of inequality in the US, which shows how increases in productivity since the late 1970s have not been matched there by wage increases.

Further evidence on how the wages in the developed world have been affected by globalisation appeared yesterday on Twitter in an animated GIF, which I employed to make these images. The animation is based on information derived from the Pew Research Center. The images show how the wealth of the middle classes in the US has been eroded since the 1980s. As in the Romalis chart, these charts show a big increase in the wealth of the very-wealthy in the developed world.

What my interlocutor had ignored was that Nazism arose in Germany in the period between the wars following the great stockmarket crash of 1929, which started in New York and spread globally to cause the Depression. Added to that were crushing war reparations that had been imposed by the victors of WWI at the Treaty of Versailles, which saw Germany forced to pay vast amounts of money to its former enemies. In Germany the result was spiraling inflation, where whole stacks of banknotes were needed just for grocery shopping. In this environment of extreme discontent due to material hardship stemming from the Depression added to the humiliation that was linked to the reparations, the still-living memory of the defeat in WWI, Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s found fertile soil for their radical ideas about the nature of humanity and the relationship between the government and the governed.

Similarly, in the post-GFC world, Donald Trump and his neo-Nazi, white-supremacist followers have found fertile soil for their ideas among the discontented in America. And Trump even wants to make inequality worse by cutting taxes for the very-wealthy!

But I think there’s another problem at work, and that’s to do with the inability of some people to “read” irony. They want everything richly flavoured and highly coloured and so the Grey Lady – the New York Times – seems too difficult for them. The paper is objective, fair and independent. It lets the reader make up his or her own mind. What many people seem to want is to be told exactly what to think, to have all the buttons pressed for them, to have the whole package presented, complete. Otherwise they don’t “get” what you’re saying. Personally, I prefer to get just the facts and make up my own mind. Not for me the Guardian or Breitbart; I prefer the Sydney Morning Herald. I think there’s a market for this kind of writing, but it’s in a rarefied arena it seems. 

I was looking back at my blog for mid-2008 yesterday when I was writing this blogpost and I found a review from August about Chloe Hooper’s creative nonfiction book The Tall Man, which was published in that year. I had written:

Just prior to reading this book I finished a biography of the literary journalist Martha Gellhorn. The contrast between the 'old school' of Gellhorn - who did a lot of coverage of WWII - and Hooper's equitable method is tonic. 

Gellhorn never didn't take sides. Hooper refuses to, and her book - which in her cover blurb Helen Garner says is "enthralling" and "studded with superbly observed detail" - is all the richer for it.