Counterfactuals are, for the most part, the dead end dreams of history; but sometimes, their outright silliness can serve a useful purpose. Such is the case with the claim by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, that mobile technology would have stopped Nazism in its genocidal tracks. In the context of discussing Twitter’s role in fomenting political upheaval in the Middle East, at the recent CTIA mobile and wireless convention in Orlando, Fla., Roth claimed that mobile technology would have made it impossible for Germany to hide its network of concentration camps from the world for years, and that real-time, wireless communications now holds states (and, presumably, citizens) accountable in ways unimaginable in the past.
While the latter part of that statement sounds plausible, are there really grounds for believing that mobile technology could have hindered rather than helped Hitler?
After Germany was defeated, the Psychological Warfare Branch of the U.S. Army immediately attempted to find out exactly what German civilians knew about Nazi atrocities. As Morris Janowitz, an intelligence officer engaged in the study, wrote in the September 1946 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Germans were continually reminded that the concentration camps existed simply by reading the newspaper — or noting whom from their neighborhood had been sent to one, or whom, miraculously, returned. Far from being mere prisons, the camps’ dreadful purpose was noted as early as 1935 in the popular jingle, “Dear God, make me dumb / That I may not to Dachau come.”
Still, many German civilians, while acknowledging that there may have been a few bad apples in the system, dismissed claims of atrocities, especially the idea of systematic murder — as Allied propaganda. It was only the handful who were anti-Nazi to begin with, and who were, therefore, inclined to trust Allied radio broadcasts, that grasped what was going on. But even they believed their fellow Germans were powerless against the regime and could not bear responsibility for its excesses. As the noted psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer told Janowitz, “feelings of submission toward the state, toward authority, were so great as to prevent the development of any sense of guilt.”
To imagine mobile technology could have galvanized effective political opposition to state terror is to back engineer the genetic fallacy: Just because mobile technology has come to be synonymous with liberty in our contemporary culture doesn’t mean it would be equally liberating in the past.
And this, perhaps, is the first useful point to take from indulging in “what if” history: the Nazis didn’t just love technology, they regarded Technik as central to promulgating National Socialism. By 1939, over 70 percent of German households – the highest percentage in the world — had radios, thanks to generous state subsidies to manufacturers. (As Richard J. Evans notes in “The Third Reich in Power,” the sense that radio made news instantaneous caused no end of angst among journalists worried about the redundancy of newspapers). But it came with a price: as Josef Goebbels, Germany’s deviously ingenious propaganda minister, put it, “Radio belongs to us and to no one else, and we will place radio in the service of our ideology and no other ideology will find expression there.”
If radio belonged to the Nazis, why not, in our alternative history, Facebook or Twitter?
The second useful point is that technology wasn’t just a vehicle for ideology, it was fundamental to Nazism. As the University of Maryland historian Jeffrey Herf has brilliantly shown, the engineer was conceived as an artist building the timeless forms that would separate the National Socialist state from the soulless commercialization to its west and the soulless materialism to its east. As Eugene Diesel, the son of the engine inventor, declared, German “blood and essence” could only be defended by a nationalist grasp of technology.
Herf calls this fusion of magic and science, blood and tech, “reactionary modernism,” which is, to brutally simplify, what you get when you experience massive industrial and technological advancement — and all the attending fears of modernity — in a culture rife with hostility to the ideas of the Enlightenment. Only Nazism, said Goebbels, “understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythms and hot impulses of our times.”
As the great German novelist Thomas Mann noted, this was what made Nazism so dangerous: it applied organizational efficiency and industrial ingenuity to a deep cultural longing for a medieval past.
Ring any bells? One might say that this is what makes al Qaeda so dangerous — as it has filled mobile technology with the hot impulse of Jihad, deftly turning to an affiliate, the Al-Ansar Mobile Team, which uses mobile phones to circumvent attempts to restrict Internet propagandizing.
It is entirely reasonable for us to look at our connected world and see a manifest destiny, democratic and liberating. But technology has to mirror culture before it can move culture; and while those rising against autocracy in the Middle East may value freedom now, what freedom means in a culture long hostile to it is not so clear.
While the latter part of that statement sounds plausible, are there really grounds for believing that mobile technology could have hindered rather than helped Hitler?
After Germany was defeated, the Psychological Warfare Branch of the U.S. Army immediately attempted to find out exactly what German civilians knew about Nazi atrocities. As Morris Janowitz, an intelligence officer engaged in the study, wrote in the September 1946 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Germans were continually reminded that the concentration camps existed simply by reading the newspaper — or noting whom from their neighborhood had been sent to one, or whom, miraculously, returned. Far from being mere prisons, the camps’ dreadful purpose was noted as early as 1935 in the popular jingle, “Dear God, make me dumb / That I may not to Dachau come.”
Still, many German civilians, while acknowledging that there may have been a few bad apples in the system, dismissed claims of atrocities, especially the idea of systematic murder — as Allied propaganda. It was only the handful who were anti-Nazi to begin with, and who were, therefore, inclined to trust Allied radio broadcasts, that grasped what was going on. But even they believed their fellow Germans were powerless against the regime and could not bear responsibility for its excesses. As the noted psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer told Janowitz, “feelings of submission toward the state, toward authority, were so great as to prevent the development of any sense of guilt.”
To imagine mobile technology could have galvanized effective political opposition to state terror is to back engineer the genetic fallacy: Just because mobile technology has come to be synonymous with liberty in our contemporary culture doesn’t mean it would be equally liberating in the past.
And this, perhaps, is the first useful point to take from indulging in “what if” history: the Nazis didn’t just love technology, they regarded Technik as central to promulgating National Socialism. By 1939, over 70 percent of German households – the highest percentage in the world — had radios, thanks to generous state subsidies to manufacturers. (As Richard J. Evans notes in “The Third Reich in Power,” the sense that radio made news instantaneous caused no end of angst among journalists worried about the redundancy of newspapers). But it came with a price: as Josef Goebbels, Germany’s deviously ingenious propaganda minister, put it, “Radio belongs to us and to no one else, and we will place radio in the service of our ideology and no other ideology will find expression there.”
If radio belonged to the Nazis, why not, in our alternative history, Facebook or Twitter?
The second useful point is that technology wasn’t just a vehicle for ideology, it was fundamental to Nazism. As the University of Maryland historian Jeffrey Herf has brilliantly shown, the engineer was conceived as an artist building the timeless forms that would separate the National Socialist state from the soulless commercialization to its west and the soulless materialism to its east. As Eugene Diesel, the son of the engine inventor, declared, German “blood and essence” could only be defended by a nationalist grasp of technology.
Herf calls this fusion of magic and science, blood and tech, “reactionary modernism,” which is, to brutally simplify, what you get when you experience massive industrial and technological advancement — and all the attending fears of modernity — in a culture rife with hostility to the ideas of the Enlightenment. Only Nazism, said Goebbels, “understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythms and hot impulses of our times.”
As the great German novelist Thomas Mann noted, this was what made Nazism so dangerous: it applied organizational efficiency and industrial ingenuity to a deep cultural longing for a medieval past.
Ring any bells? One might say that this is what makes al Qaeda so dangerous — as it has filled mobile technology with the hot impulse of Jihad, deftly turning to an affiliate, the Al-Ansar Mobile Team, which uses mobile phones to circumvent attempts to restrict Internet propagandizing.
It is entirely reasonable for us to look at our connected world and see a manifest destiny, democratic and liberating. But technology has to mirror culture before it can move culture; and while those rising against autocracy in the Middle East may value freedom now, what freedom means in a culture long hostile to it is not so clear.
