An “imprecise analogy”?
“Mad Carolinians,” Samuel Wiley Crawford, 31, called the populace of antibellum Charleston, South Carolina in a letter to his brother after Abraham Lincoln’s election. Even the children were caught up in secessionist fervor, he wrote, and perhaps the women more so than the men, Erik Larson recounts in “The Demon of Unrest.”
Larson sees parallels in the events of January 6, 2021:
Planters who had been wearing ordinary clothing one day turned up the next in elaborate uniforms, red sashes glaring—their “soldier’s toggery,” as Mary [Boykin Chesnut] put it. With so much tension in the city, she wrote, the atmosphere was “phosphorescent.” The streets were full of soldiers in uniform marching and singing; at night she heard the heavy rumble of ammunition wagons moving over cobbled streets—no one could sleep.
Ken Silverstein at The New Republic cites another passage unearthed by Larson in his book “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.” A diplomatic cable sent from Berlin to the State Department in June 1933 described the atmosphere in the German city under the recently installed Nazi regime:
“Wherever one goes in Germany one sees people drilling, from children of five and six on, up to those well into middle age. A psychology is being developed that the whole world is against Germany and that it lies defenseless before the world.”
“With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country.”
Silverstein recalled the dispatch in the context of the atmosphere in “excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December” by Erik Prince of Blackwater fame, called Off Leash. “Not all of the group’s members are conspiracy theorists,” Silverstein offers. The more serious members mean “the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks.” But the “Bomb the hell out of them” character of some discussions on international relations gives one pause. Plus, the rah-rah for the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the vanquishing of his (and their) enemies.
“It’s Trump or Revolution!” insisted one member. “You mean Trump AND Revolution,” wrote another, a right-leaning Canadian businessman.
With the Democratic Party captured by Islamic terrorists, Marxists, globalists, and other foreign and domestic evildoers, the U.S. was “being destroyed from within,” warned [a former Republican House staffer], whose fears were shared by many among the Off Leash crew.
Silverstein cautions:
Comparing the contemporary United States to Nazi Germany is an admittedly imprecise analogy. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to be alarmed by the crypto-fascist, off the leash views expressed by Trump’s allies in the group chat about exterminating their foreign and domestic enemies and needing to “find the will to levy the toll.” However imprecise the comparison, as a model political capital, Berlin 1933 is far more compatible with the worldview of Off Leash participants than Washington 2024, and in the event they and like-minded associates gain power in the U.S. or elsewhere, they’ll be pushing backward in that general direction.
And if Nazi Germany is an imprecise analogy, perhaps the domestic one Larson sees in the pre-Civil War South in the aftermath of January 6. Red sashes then. Red ties now.
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