Later Hitler asks, with a cynicism that is still astonishing: ‘Can there be anything more shameless than to compel folk of another people, in certain circumstances, to fire on their own fellow-countrymen only because a ruinous, evil, and criminal government so demands it?’ Can there be anything more shameless than that sentiment? Shameless, of course, is hardly the word.
At the Nuremberg rally on 12 September Hitler had said brazenly that ‘no European state has done as much as Germany in the service of peace’. Hitler’s claim to peaceful desires with respect to Poland are a travesty in the light of what we know now, which is that, a year later, the German tanks would be rolling in. His contempt for democracy is evident in the suggestion that it was only the existence of a single authority in Poland that allowed him to do the deal for peace he desired. Diplomacy is reduced to the conversations of great men. Throughout, Hitler poses himself against the single representatives of other nations, Poland and Czechoslovakia, in a strong-man contest. There is no doubt about the victor: ‘I myself am a front-line soldier.’ It is just about the only true statement in the passage.
And now before us stands the last problem that must be solved and will be solved. It is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe but it is the claim from which I will not recede and which, God willing, I will make good. The history of the problem is as follows. In 1918 under the watchword ‘the right of the peoples to self-determination’ Central Europe was torn in pieces and was newly formed by certain so-called crazy ‘statesmen’. Without regard for the origins of the peoples, without regard for either their wish as nations or for economic necessities, Central Europe at that time was broken up into atoms and the new so-called states were arbitrarily formed. To this procedure Czechoslovakia owes its existence. The Czech state began with a single lie and the father of that lie was named Beneš. This Mr Beneš at that time appeared in Versailles and he first of all gave the assurance that there was a Czechoslovak nation. He was forced to invent this lie in order to give to the slender number of his own fellow countrymen a somewhat greater range and thus a fuller justification. And the Anglo-Saxon statesmen who were, as always, not very adequately versed in respect of questions of geography or nationality, did not at that time find it necessary to test the assertions of Mr Beneš. Had they done so, they could have established the fact that there is no such thing as a Czechoslovak nation but only Czechs and Slovaks and that the Slovaks did not wish to have anything to do with the Czechs. So in the end through Mr Beneš these Czechs annexed Slovakia. Since this state did not seem fitted to live, out of hand three and a half million Germans were taken in violation of their right to self-determination, and their wish for self-determination. Since even that did not suffice, over a million Magyars had to be added, then some Carpathian Russians and at last several hundred thousand Poles. This is the state which then later proceeded to call itself Czechoslovakia in violation of the right of the people to self-determination, in violation of the clear wish and will of the nation to which this violence has been done …
Before he spoke Hitler always spent some time building himself up into a state of resentment, and here it is in all its ignobility. The signature emotion of a Hitler speech is anger, fuelled by the sense of being hard done by. The location of that injustice is the Treaty of Versailles and the settlement at the end of the First World War. In this instance ‘the crazy statesmen’ unversed in geography and nationality had created an unnatural territory called Czechoslovakia without regard for the truly German lineage of those who lived in the Sudetenland. Hitler simply does not acknowledge the right of Czechoslovakia to independent existence because his conception of a nation is entirely ethnic. He is the epitome of the definition of nation by blood rather than belonging. Look at how he tries to clinch the case against Czechoslovakia. How can any nation which has to be constructed out of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Carpathian Russians and Magyars be a nation? Hitler simply runs together the two separate categories of ethnic origin and national allegiance and presents it as the merest common sense.
In his encomium to his leader’s speaking prowess, Goebbels distinguished between speakers who use reasoning – ‘a master of dialectic as the pianist is master of the keyboard’ – from a speaker who ‘knows the secret corners and aspects of the mass soul’. It is hardly surprising that he thought Hitler uniquely combined the virtues of both, and this is how he does it.
This assertion of ethnic origin passes both for Hitler’s mastery of the piano and his search for the secret corners of the soul. At Nuremberg on 12 September Hitler had delivered the full performance, denouncing in turn the atheistic Social Democrats and ‘the alliance of Jewish capitalism with an abstract version of communist anti-capitalism’. The rhetoric in Nuremberg is still shocking: ‘the burden has become overbearing and the nation is no longer willing to have its lifeblood sucked out of it by these parasites’.
And then I can only say one thing: now two men stand arrayed one against the other: there is Mr Beneš and here stand I. We are two men of a different make-up. In the great struggle of the peoples when Mr Beneš was sneaking about through the world, I as a decent German soldier did my duty. And now today I can stand over against this man as the soldier of my people! I have only a few comments still to make: I am grateful to Mr Chamberlain for all his efforts. I have assured him that the German peoples desire nothing else than peace, but I have also told him that I cannot go back behind the limits set to our patience. I have further assured him, and I repeat it here, that when this problem is solved there is for Germany no further territorial problem in Europe. And I have further assured him that at the moment when Czechoslovakia solves her problems, that means when the Czechs have come to terms with their other minorities, and that peaceably and not through oppression, then I have no further interest in the Czech state. And that is guaranteed to him! We want no Czechs! But in the same way I desire to state before the German people that with regard to the problem of the Sudeten Germans my patience is now at an end! I have made Mr Beneš an offer which is nothing but the carrying into effect of what he himself has promised. The decision now lies in his hands: Peace or War! He will either accept this offer and now at least give to the Germans their freedom or we will go and fetch this freedom for ourselves. The world must take note that in four and a half years of war through the long years of my political life there is one thing which no one would ever cast in my teeth: I have never been a coward!
This sounded frightening at the time. Hitler has already said that Germany’s patience was at an end, so here, with the repetition, he makes again the link that is the thread of the whole speech between the German people and himself as their authentic voice. Now his patience is at an end. The point is thick with menace. The end of patience meant war. Chamberlain had visited Hitler twice in the ten days prior to this speech to offer a plan for the Sudeten districts of Czechoslovakia to be transferred to Germany without even the need for a plebiscite. On the day of the Berlin Sportpalast speech, Chamberlain sent Sir Horace Wilson to appeal directly to Hitler to moderate the tone of the speech and submit to negotiations with the Czechs, with the British as honest broker. Wilson found Hitler in his usual pre-oratory mood, which was nervous, intransigent and working himself up to a pitch of resentment. His mission was pointless. Hitler already had an assurance from Chamberlain that, as long as he promised the Sudetenland would be Germany’s ‘last territorial claim’, Britain would cede the territory. Hitler therefore gave the speech as planned and the deadline for Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany was set for 2 p.m. on 28 September.
On 29 September, with no Czech in attendance, Hitler, Chamberlain, the French premier Édouard Daladier and Italy’s Benito Mussolini held a one-day conference in Munich which gave the disputed parts of the Sudetenland to Germany. The outcome was feted. Hitler was made Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1938. Chamberlain went home to a tumultuous ovation. He appeared triumphantly on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with George VI and Qu
een Elizabeth and then, from Downing Street, told the nation that he had secured peace for our time. ‘Go home and get a nice quiet sleep,’ he signed off, in one of the great misjudgements in all public speech.
It wasn’t as if Chamberlain hadn’t been warned, and not just by Churchill. At Nuremberg two weeks before this speech in Berlin, Hitler had been as clear as could be expected about his actual objectives and had then added for good measure: ‘I am a National Socialist and as such I am accustomed to strike back at any attacker. Moreover, I know only too well that leniency will not succeed in appeasing.’
If at that time a wandering scholar was able to inject into our people the poison of democratic catchwords – the people of today is no longer the people that it was then. Such catchwords are for us like wasp stings: they cannot hurt us: we are now immune. In this hour the whole German people will unite with me! It will feel my will to be its will. Just as in my eyes it is its future and its fate which give me the commission for my action. And we wish now to make our will as strong as it was in the time of our fight, the time when I, as a simple unknown soldier, went forth to conquer a Reich and never doubted of success and final victory. Then there gathered about me a band of brave men and brave women, and they went with me. And so I ask you my German people to take your stand behind me, man by man and woman by woman. In this hour we all wish to form a common will and that will must be stronger than every hardship and every danger. And if this will is stronger than hardship and danger then one day it will break down hardship and danger. We are determined! Now let Mr Beneš make his choice.
Democracy is a sting from an insect to which, mercifully, the German nation is now immune. Hitler only really has one theme; all his invective is a variation on it. His purpose at the end is simply to stir the audience; no further content is added to the case. In his essay on Hitler’s speeches Goebbels had written that ‘a sure sign of a good speech is that it not only sounds good, but reads well’. It’s not quite true that all good speeches both read well and sound well and it’s not really true of this speech either. Hitler’s method was regular repetition of well-worn themes, which reads rather badly. However, in the stadium the repetition serves to demonstrate deep feeling, to show that Hitler was, in Goebbels’s phrase, one of ‘the drummers of fate’. This is the trick of the shaman. He has created a need and a Weltanschauung and claimed it was what the people thought all along. It is the pinnacle of what every speaker would like to achieve; for rhetoric to be true as soon as I say it, and because I say it.
The achievement is not really, despite the advocacy of Goebbels, just Hitler’s. There is a major scholarly dispute, and has been ever since the war, about the extent to which the conflict, and its squalid consequences, can be attributed to the man himself. In the lesser but related question of his speeches, Hitler was known to take great pains, editing each text at least five times. In Mein Kampf he had written: ‘I know that men are won over less by the written than by the spoken word, that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great orators and not to great writers.’ He worked deep into the night, occupying three secretaries at a time in a bid to get the words right. He practised his body language and gestures in front of a mirror. Hitler knew that his command of the audience was his principal method. But other people can do this. Hitler possessed no demonic quality in his rhetoric or his public speaking that marks him out from anyone else. The demon lay in his thinking. It was the poison in the ideology that sends people, without so much as a second thought, to their deaths. Hitler bragged in this speech that nobody could call him a coward. In fact he was. He never visited a concentration camp. He let others do the vicious work. He knew that his words carried authority. Rhetoric was never more dangerous, and in the 5,000 speeches he gave, Hitler spoke himself into eternal infamy.
FIDEL CASTRO
History Will Absolve Me
Santiago, Cuba
16 October 1953
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (1926–2017) was an example of how easily glamour can attract supporters and how readily it can go wrong. He was the attractive nationalist-cum-Marxist who overthrew a dreadful, illegitimate military government and who then nearly colluded in blowing up the world. He was the man who taught a whole nation to read but controlled too much of their curriculum. He is a one-man lesson in the cycle of the revolution.
Castro was born to a Spanish soldier who settled in Cuba, where he became a sugar-cane farmer on his own plantation. Fidel was educated at expensive schools run by the Jesuits and then enrolled as a law student at the University of Havana. Already his flair for dramatic gestures was clear, and he became a big figure in the political gangsterism running student politics in Cuba at that time. He was arrested several times and was suspected of killing one of his rivals. Already disposed by temperament to radical solutions, Castro began to search in the writings of Marx for a solution to Cuba’s problems.
That path was confirmed when, in March 1952, many of Castro’s comrades were murdered in General Fulgencio Batista’s military coup. With his younger brother Raúl, Castro formed an underground military training unit, and in July 1953 he led his first attempted rising against Batista, the assault on a federal garrison at Moncada, Santiago. The rebels were forced to retreat and many of them were executed. The Castro brothers, though, were imprisoned. Batista made the mistake of turning the subsequent trial into a media spectacle that gave Fidel Castro his chance to attack the regime. Like Nelson Mandela before him, in this one respect at least Castro’s greatest moment came in court, as the first accused. The speech that follows is a title Mandela could have used: ‘History Will Absolve Me’. Whether or not history would, Batista did not. Castro was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The speech we have now, which Castro reconstructed from memory after the event, became the point at which the Cuban Revolution was said to have begun. Castro had the text smuggled out of his cell in matchboxes. A lot of matchboxes, presumably.
Released after two years, Castro fled to Mexico, where he met an Argentinian doctor called Ernesto Guevara, known as Che. Together they formed the 26th of July Movement, named after the date of the assault on the Moncada Barracks. Just after midnight on 25 November 1956 Castro led his crew of eighty-two revolutionaries in their leaky wooden motor yacht, the Granma, down the Tuxpan River in the Gulf of Mexico, bound for Cuba, where they intended to overthrow the regime. Armed with no more than ninety rifles, two anti-tank guns, three machine guns and forty pistols, they stood in the darkness and sang the Cuban national anthem: ‘To die for the motherland is to live’.
In the event, the coup was a fiasco so bad it was almost comical. The Mexicans told the Cuban embassy that Castro was coming. The Granma was horribly overcrowded and the revolutionaries felt seasick. The expedition was meant to take five days, but by the time it had taken seven they were almost out of food and water. They had also managed to miss an abortive uprising by their supporters in Cuba. When the Granma did come within sight of Cuba it ran aground far from the shore and the saviours of their nation had to leave most of their equipment in the boat and wade in to safety. Guevara described it as a shipwreck rather than a landing. The mission lost lots of men and the twelve surviving rebels were forced to take refuge in the Sierra Maestra mountains where a long armed guerrilla campaign began.
Slowly, with the help of the rural poor who gained little under Batista’s corrupt regime, Castro took over large tracts of Cuba. He lived in the mountains for more than twenty months, issuing manifestos that called for free elections and justice. By 1958 he was ready to launch an attack on the major towns which caused Batista to flee. In January 1959 Fidel Castro marched into Havana to a hero’s reception and took up residence in the Hilton Hotel garlanded with high expectations. He was thirty-two years of age.
Trouble with the United States, hatred of which was the pivot of Castro’s politics, was inevitable. In January 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations in response to the Cuban nationalisation of US-owned sugar plantations, ba
nks and businesses. On 17 April 1961, 1,500 Cuban exiles armed by the CIA invaded near the Bay of Pigs. The mission met with none of the expected support in Cuba, and Castro won the battle within three days. Fearful of his hostile neighbour across the water, Castro then signed a deal with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. When American spies saw the missiles, President Kennedy threatened to attack the Soviet Union if they were not removed. After thirteen days in which the world teetered on the edge of nuclear conflict, the Russians backed down.
In Cuba itself, literacy and health care improved under Castro but at the cost of personal liberty. As the economy faltered during the 1980s there were severe jobs and housing shortages and a steady drift of disillusioned Cubans took the dangerous journey across the Gulf of Mexico in search of Florida. The Cuban economy suffered a further blow when the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived it of its $6 billion annual subsidy and the capacity to export sugar in exchange for oil. With his factories and agriculture in serious trouble, Castro imposed strict food rationing and made limited reforms to private enterprise, in particular to encourage tourism. In 1999 he signed a deal with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to send doctors in exchange for oil.
When They Go Low, We Go High Page 38