In These New Times

Irish Independent

This is the beginning of a new epoch, if you would a new times, the dog eat dog system is sharpening its teeth, streamlining its pyramid structure, leaving casualties everywhere. Yet there is fear that the system itself cannot hold, as chaos makes for much unpredictability. Commentaries are becoming sharper and sharper. Let us bring them to you here at inthesenewtimes.com

Ignorance might be bliss; but most of all, it is ignorance. It is the utterly sublime quality of not knowing, of not having the faintest clue – as in the case of Bernard Weiss, the deputy commissioner of the Berlin police.

A war-hero from 1914-18, and holder of the Iron Cross, in the late 1920s Weiss ran a political surveillance unit from his headquarters in Alexanderplatz, targeting both communists and national socialists. In May 1927, largely through his efforts, the Berlin branch of the Nazi party, was forcibly dissolved by the Berlin police commissioner, Karl Zorgiebel. Even the two paramilitary wing of the party — the SA and the SS — ceased formally to exist. They could not meet, or raise funds, or agitate, or publish newspapers.

Weiss was a serious enemy. The following August, Hitler’s SA brownshirts went to a rally in Nuremberg. On their return, Weiss had all 450 of the SA men arrested for membership of an illegal organisation, and they were taken in open trucks to the Alexanderplatz headquarters and charged. Party leaders were singled out for particular attention, with Weiss targeting Goebbels, the Berlin gauleiter of the Nazis. The latter’s first court appearance was in May 1927, (and one of many, under Weiss’s vigilant stewardship) when he was sentenced to imprisonment for inciting violence.

The ban was lifted on the Nazis for constitutional reasons on March 31, 1928, shortly before the local government elections, which took place in May. The Nazis were routed across Germany. Nationally, they received 2.6pc of the vote, down 0.4pc , or 100,000 votes, from the 1924 Reichstag elections. But in Berlin, Weiss’s pursuit of the Nazis had been especially successful: the party had won only 1.5pc of the vote.

It was clear. Ten years after the National Socialist Party of Germany had come into existence, it remained nothing: a ranting fringe of lunatics who could be easily controlled by a vigorous police officer such as Bernard Weiss. The following year came the Wall Street crash. Within a further year, the Austrian Credit Bank collapsed, and the Darmstadt National Bank defaulted. Other banks followed. Across Germany, as businesses folded, and unemployment soared, the Nazis became resurgent. A year later, pressure on the Berlin state government from the Nazis, caused Weiss to be sacked and shortly after that, Hitler came to power. Weiss, who to add to his woes was a Jew, barely managed to escape with his life.

Well, we are having our Wall Street moment now: what we were assured could and would never happen, is happening. A critical mass of failure has been achieved, rather like a couple of upper floors giving way in the Twin Towers. Nothing more needs to be done. The rest will follow. I have no idea what is going to happen to me, my life, my savings, my home, or to society generally: none at all. New rules apply, not ones of fiscal prudence, social rectitude and compound interest, but of thermodynamics, metallurgy and gravity.

The US is trillions in debt and fighting two wars costing further trillions. The tax-base for paying for those wars is shrinking while unemployment rises: which can only mean higher taxes, and therefore deeper recession. And of course, China could pull the rug from under the entire US economy with a single tug of their dollar reserves. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers in Pakistan are waiting to join the historic struggle in Afghanistan in a war that can only now be measured in medieval time-scales, and not with the convenient system of discrete dates which applied to 20th century conflicts.

The British are similarly engaged in two wars which must be won; yet their economy is racing into recession, with millions of immigrants competing for whatever employment remains. In both countries, there is a huge black hole where much of their banking sectors used to be. Vast swathes of the population are deeply in debt repaying the purchase price of properties that are now relatively worthless. Soon, they might not have the jobs to enable them to discharge that melancholy function. And we in Ireland are dependent upon both those two economies. Wherever they go, we must follow: and this is before we consider what will happen, as the twin-tower effect races towards the lower floors marked “EU”.

Then watch as the gathering floors plummet onto Eastern Europe, Russia, and finally Africa, an entire continent totally dependent upon hand-outs from economies which are now collapsing. So it seems that we are heading into the historically darkest period of my entire life: for this is not a crisis, with a potential cure in sight, such as those various major conflicts of interest which occurred during the Cold War. Each of those could be defined and then managed out of existence. No, this an entirely new epoch, a realm of chaos composed of many global variables: and the greatest and most sinister of the lot is ignorance, of the mortal kind which filled the mind of poor Bernard Weiss that day in May, just over 80 years ago. For he absolutely knew, beyond all doubt, that he had just triumphed over the Nazis, once and for all.

kmyers@independent.ie

–