The Uncanny Resemblance of the Beer Hall Putsch and the January 6 Insurrection [View all]

[robertpaulsen]

The Uncanny Resemblance of the Beer Hall Putsch and the January 6 Insurrection

If 1920s Germany could punish Hitler for leading a coup attempt, why can’t America go after Trump?

By David E. Gumpert

January 3, 2021 5:02 AM

Pulling off a successful coup d’état in a dictatorship is a risky affair. It invariably involves the military, and failure usually results in long prison terms or executions. But coup attempts in democratic countries, while much less common, are less perilous. They rarely involve the military, and it’s complicated to punish coup plotters who have a following and can represent themselves as protesters rather than traitors. That is why an important point of comparison for America’s January 6 insurrection is the attempted coup led by Adolf Hitler in 1923, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, and how it affected his march toward absolute power.

Conventional wisdom has it that the blossoming democratic German government of the early 1920s botched its efforts to rein in Hitler after his failed coup, and thereby helped propel him to greater popularity. In this view, the Biden administration understands the tragic German history, and is now avoiding legal action against Trump, letting the US House of Representatives investigate the coup plot and limit its punishment to some kind of public shaming.

Yet if you review the events following the failed Beer Hall Putsch, it becomes clear that German institutions successfully sidelined Hitler for nearly 10 years, and might have kept him out of the mainstream longer except for a worldwide economic depression that amplified popular disaffection. Moreover, Trump has raced ahead of Hitler’s timetable for recovering from an attempted coup, bringing the United States much closer to a fascist takeover than most Americans likely realize.

While Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and Trump’s January 6 coup attempt bore a striking resemblance in terms of the size of the insurrections and the resulting violence, the most notable similarity is the nature of the lies that led to the buildup of political tensions: Hitler’s lies about Germany’s defeat in World War I and Trump’s lies about voter fraud driving his loss in the 2020 election. Both were big lies that undermined faith in government institutions and gained credibility from frequent repetition.

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