The Collaborationist Temptation

How was pacifism, as exemplified by French politician Marcel Déat, twisted into a defense of Nazism?

Hello folks, Derek here with the third entry in Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins’ special Foreign Exchanges series on the anti-war/non-violence movement as a political tradition. As I mentioned in the preface to his introductory piece, this series is being offered as a special for paid FX subscribers. I hope those who are interested in the piece will consider subscribing to FX to support Daniel’s work as well as everything else that goes on here. Please subscribe today:

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Donald Trump’s dominant victory in this month’s US presidential election has naturally given rise to much soul searching amongst liberals and leftists. As a professional historian, I have particularly been interested in how my fellow historians have sought to provide answers. Not surprisingly, one group has stood out given their prestigious institutional affiliations, awarding winning books and major media network appearances since Trump’s election in 2016. The so called “resistance historians”—notably Timothy Snyder (Yale), Ruth Ben-Ghiat (New York University), Kathleen Belew (North Western University), Heather Cox Richardson (Boston College), Kevin Kruse (Princeton), and Eddie Glaude (Princeton)—generally see Trump’s rise as a product of white supremacy, misogyny, fascism, information wars, Russian meddling, the post-truth society, conspiracy theories, etc. On this reading, Trump’s electoral success has little to do with policy and even less to do with any substantive failure by Democrats. The threat is external from the Democratic Party even as “MAGA” works within the liberal parliamentary system to undermine it. Hence, there is a need to resist the forces of evil working to bring about the death of democracy for the purpose of establishing an authoritarian regime. 

For their own part, historians who are critical of “resistance historians” believe that they fail to adequately acknowledge how the policies of the Democratic Party itself have played an integral role in Trump’s elections in 2016 and 2024. In the latter contest, it was the Democrats’ inability to respond to inflation–which, in some parts of the country, doubled the costs of groceries and rents–combined with funding two expensive wars, that pushed voters in Trump’s direction. Anyone who had the courage to go on social media following the election witnessed firsthand the rancor between historians as they debated something like the gists of these two perspectives. 

Given this heated debate, I would like to discuss one element of it as it relates to the theme of this series, namely nonviolence and the antiwar movement. One of the more contentious issues that divides contemporary historians is whether Trump is a fascist. “Resistance historians” typically argue in the affirmative and regularly make recourse to the demise of the Weimar Republic as an example of what is happening in the US. Indeed, Vice President Kamala Harris embraced these very claims in the last weeks of the election, after retired General Mark Milley said Trump was “fascist to the core.” Milley’s remark was followed a week or so later by John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, saying that Trump fits the definition of a fascist and prefers a “dictator approach.” Kelly, in particular, recalled Trump saying that he wanted his generals to obey him like Hitler’s obeyed him.

Commentators have suggested that Harris’s negative messaging might have played a role in costing her the election–few Americans even know what fascism actually is, and instead proved more concerned with paying their grocery bills. But for the sake of argument, let’s say the “resistance historians” are right: Trump is a fascist who is undermining liberal democracy the same way that the Nazis undermined the Weimar Republic, and that soon Trump will destroy the constitution and establish something akin to the Fourth Reich. 

If you are an advocate of anti-war and nonviolence, how should you respond to someone who has been likened to Hitler? The Nazi führer presented a major dilemma for pacifists and this series will address the key voices who wrestled with it: Simone Weil, Martin Buber, Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, and scores more. Indeed, the  reputation of pacifism–which had a long and vibrant history throughout the 19th century and into the period between the World Wars–never recovered fully from the Third Reich, whose extraordinary violence forever discredited the idea of pacifism in the eyes of many. Pacifist responses to Nazism, however, were much more complex than often is assumed, and regularly called for self-defense.