In his magisterial work on the twentieth century, Modern Times, historian Paul Johnson highlights how in the 1920s Germany transformed from being “exceptionally law-abiding into an exceptionally violent society.” A key factor, according to Johnson, was an erosion of the rule of law and partisan acceptance of political violence against groups disdained by the State. Johnson notes that from 1912-1922, there were 354 murders by the Right (proto-Nazis) and 22 by the Left (Marxists).
Those responsible for the every one of the left-wing murders were brought to court; ten were executed and twenty-eight others received sentences averaging fifteen years. Of the right-wing murders, 326 were never solved; fifty killers confessed, but of these more than half were acquitted despite confessions and twenty-four received sentences averaging four months.
The conditions that lead to the rise of Nazism in Germany are complex and varied. But this tolerance by the state of several hundred murders certainly aided in the creation of a state that would, within a decade, sponsor the murder of several millions. As history has repeatedly revealed to us, government hostility to specific groups is highly correlated with social hostility to those same groups.
That lesson is reinforced by the latest Pew Study on the “Rising Tide of Restrictions on Liberty.” As their research shows, “higher scores on the Government Restrictions Index are associated with higher scores on the Social Hostilities Index and vice versa. This means that, in general, it is rare for countries that score high on one index to be low on the other.”
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