Authoritarianism Happens
once upon a time, it all seemed so far fetched
Despots and bigots and chauvinists, oh my.
Weighty subjects, I know, but they only remain heavy so long as we’re unwilling to unpack them.
With the exception of a popular piece I wrote during last year’s Great Substack Nazi Debate (“I, Too, Have a Nazi Problem”), I refrain from opining about this comically political ideological era as a matter of principle because I’m not in the business of proselytizing writing novels scratches that itch.
However, now more than ever, knowledge is power and history is happening, and as someone who holds a BA in Holocaust Studies and an MA in the psychology of genocide humanness of cruelty, I do believe it’s my responsibility to share what I’ve learned about authoritarianism, fascism, and their effects on human nature, especially with folks who haven’t (or may never) read The Requisitions (Kingdom Anywhere, 2024).
Below are two encouraging updates + an excerpt about the ongoing pertinence of that novel, set in both 2024 and Nazi Occupied Poland. I wrote it to better understand what drives societies to mass cruelty how to remain human during dark times, and I can neither confirm nor deny I’m choosing to share these thoughts on January 6.
first, a book review
The Midwest Book Review is a literary organization founded in 1976. It publishes nine monthly magazines for the literary minded and what a joy it was to receive an email from the editor-in-chief, who asked for a copy of The Requisitions.
As an independent publisher and author, receiving these types of reviews (on Goodreads as well) is one of the only other ways aside from Substack that I have a chance of being read by a wider audience.
Thanks you to all who’ve reviewed the book, including Substack’s own
(“The Color of Forgetting”) and , who recently picked The Requisitions as his 2024 book of the year.James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, The Midwest Book Review:
“The elements of history, memory, and love are intertwined in The Requisitions, an historical metafiction set in Nazi-occupied Poland. Original, deftly crafted, memorable, and with a distinctive storytelling style, Samuél Lopez-Barrantes has elevated The Requisitions to an impressive level of literary excellence from start to finish. The result is one of those novels that will linger in the mind of the reader longer after the book has been finished and set back upon the shelf.” Read the full review here.
Two Upcoming Lectures on Fascism
Politics & Prose, an independent bookstore founded in 1984 in Washington D.C., is hosting an online class at the end of January entitled Fighting Fascism: Three Novels & A Guide to Resistance.
It’s an absolute pleasure and honor to announce that the course’s instructor,
, has deemed The Requisitions worthy of the company of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can't Happen Here (1935), The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004), and Timothy’ Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017). For more information, click here. I will be the invited guest on Valentine’s Day. The 4-part course costs $130 and starts on January 24, and if you can’t afford that, look no further than:this Sunday’s (January 12) Substack Lecture
On Sunday, January 12 @ 6:30 PM CET (12:30 EST) my usual paywalled monthly lecture will be free because history is a pendulum swing. All are welcome, please register on Zoom here,1 and please do bring your questions about The Requisitions as well.
And now, because there ain’t nothing like the present fiction
to remember the repetition pendulum swing of history, below is an excerpt from The Requisitions (if you’re a new reader and still don’t know the novel’s main themes, look no further than this footnote2).
The year is 2024 2025 and the world is unraveling again. If we’ve learned anything as a species, it’s how quickly we forget. Elvis Presley said animals don’t hate and that we’re supposed to be better than them, but if this were true, the history of fascist regimes wouldn’t be so closely linked to the history of democratic elections.
In 1928, the Nazi Party won 2.6% of the parliamentary vote. In 1930, the number increased to 18%. In July 1932, the Nazi Party won 37% of the popular vote, securing 230 seats in the German Parliament, the Reichstag. When Hitler asked President Paul von Hindenburg to declare him chancellor, Hindenburg refused. Six months later, in January 1933, Hindenburg finally conceded to Hitler’s demands just two months before a fresh round of parliamentary elections. The Nazis had already lost parliamentary seats in November 1932 and were at risk of losing more in the March 1933 elections. Six days before a democratic Germany went to the polls, a mysterious fire broke out in the Reichstag.
Hitler called it arson. Historians believe it was a false flag operation. Regardless, Hitler used the fire to convince Hindenburg to declare a state of emergency. The subsequent Reichstag Fire Decree was a pivotal entry in the fascist playbook: where there isn’t clear and present danger, invent it. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended all civil liberties, including freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right to assembly, and the right to privacy in any postal, telegraphic, or telephonic communications. Now with a legal basis to conduct warrantless raids, Hitler could imprison loosely defined “criminals,” enforce the death penalty with impunity, and could also overrule the German constitution itself if he deemed it in the country’s “best interests.”
The rise of the Third Reich’s police state was swift and efficient. The Reichstag caught fire on Monday, February 27, 1933. By the end of the week, the first concentration camp was opened in the village of Nohra, Thuringia; Dachau was opened a few weeks later. By the time Allied troops began liberating the first of some 40,000 concentration camps in 1944, the Nazis had systematically murdered over eleven million human beings.
[…]
Elsa can still see the impact of her captivity in the bags under her eyes, can feel it in the sting of her gnawed cuticles and mangled fingernails, and can hear it gurgling in her gut. She has no appetite, only the desire to drink strong liquor and sleep through the mornings.
Major Brandt enters the office and jingles his keys playfully. “Today is going to be a good day. Why isn’t the coffee ready yet? There’s much to discuss.”
Elsa holds her skirt down as she rises from her chair and goes to the kitchenette to prepare the coffee. She hocks a wad of white phlegm into the percolator’s boiling liquid before going to the medicine cabinet to add to the concoction. She’s already experimented with crushing sleeping pills into Brandt’s coffee—barbiturates, too—but nothing seems to curb Brandt’s frenzied enthusiasm for transforming Łódź into a Nazi city. Elsa spits a second gob into the brew. There are hints of red and green specks in the mucus; currently, this is the extent of her rebellion.
Elsa carries the tray of coffee and sliced carrots through Brandt’s open door to find him standing at the open window, peering up at the stone Church of the Virgin Mary, its steeple towering over the conquered city.
A ray of sun stretches across the carpeted floor. Its light catches dust particles dancing in the sunbeam like snowflakes. For an instant, in Major Brandt’s profile—is it a trick of the light?—Elsa sees a genuine smile before a shadow contorts his face. Is he reciting a song? Or perhaps an incantation under his breath? Brandt stares up at the church steeple and tenderly kisses a piece of jewellery before returning it to his pocket.
“Ah, Miss Dietrich. Please sit down. The security services demand that I keep you in the dark, but look at this.” Brandt splays out a map of the entire world on his desk. “After all, if you are going to be my secretary, you must be privy to certain information. Once England has been conquered, we gain access to the British merchant fleet. And this—ingenious, isn’t it?—is when we can begin deporting the Jews here,” Brandt jabs his index finger at a small piece of land in the Indian Ocean and explains Hitler’s plan to deport Europe’s Jews to Madagascar.
Elsa has heard a lot of fantastical ideas, but this one seems particularly far- fetched ... then again, so was Hindenburg ceding power to Hitler in 1933, and the Reichstag Fire and the subsequent decrees, and what about the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the Mischling test, not to mention the Luftwaffe’s terror bombings in Spain, Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland and Austria, Hitler’s alliance with Stalin, his sworn ideological enemy, and now the splitting of Poland in two.
Once upon a time, it all seemed so far-fetched.
“It is going to be a hectic winter, Miss Dietrich,” Brandt finally takes a sip of Elsa’s brew. “But let’s focus on a more pressing concern: I’ve been reading through your diary and there’s a lot of drivel, but what, specifically, do you know about Professor Viktor Bauman?”
Register for Sunday, January 12 Substack Lecture “Fascism & The Requisitions” here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/5n-QpWNwR5K8sFLZricDaA
History, memory, and love intertwine in The Requisitions, a historical metafiction set in Nazi-occupied Poland. A present-day narrator trying to make sense of the past recounts the story of Viktor, a disillusioned academic forced into the Łódź Ghetto, Elsa, a captive Gestapo secretary, and her estranged fiancé, Carl, a troubled policeman whose fixation with the past is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.
The piling up of events that in isolation make no sense and then all add up is chillingly familiar.
And what I’ve been trying to tell fellow Americans since this person began to run in 2015. We are at the end of that wire now. The barbed one that gets strung crating the final deadly boundaries.
I think there's a tendency to want to believe that the Reichstag fire was part of a plan. The evil becomes more fantastical. It's scarier to think that the fire happened as fires do and that Hitler seized on the opportunity in rapid stages.