Gleichschaltung

"Gleichschaltung" is usually translated, somewhat inadequately, as "coordination" or "unification." ~ Harold Callender

Gleichschaltung was a Nazi term meaning "synchronization" or "coordination", designating the process by which Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party in Germany, established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society. Although the Weimar Constitution remained nominally in effect throughout Hitler's dictatorship, near total Nazification was achieved by 1935 with the resolutions approved during that year's Nuremberg Rally, fusing the symbols of the party and the state and depriving German Jews of their citizenship through the Nuremberg Laws. The term has since become more broadly applied to many coordinated acts, processes or policies of forced standardization, assimilation, or exclusions to achieve social or political uniformity.

Quotes

  • Putin’s control of the media is becoming more and more comprehensive. What is left over, that ownership does not ensure, self-censorship increasingly neuters. The Gleichschaltung of parliament and political parties is, if anything, even more impressive. The presidential party, United Russia, and its assorted allies, with no more specific programme than unconditional support for Putin, command some 70 per cent of the seats in the Duma, enough to rewrite the constitution if that were required. But a one-party state is not in the offing. On the contrary, mindful of the rules of any self-respecting democracy, the Kremlin’s political technicians are now putting together an opposition party designed to clear the bedraggled remnants of Communism — liberalism has already been expunged — from the political scene, and provide a decorative pendant to the governing party in the next parliament.
  • "Gleichschaltung" is usually translated, somewhat inadequately, as "coordination" or "unification." It is difficult to find a satisfactory English equivalent — possibly because the enforced uniformity which the German term describes does not commend itself to the English-speaking peoples. The French, with their genius for definition, have done better; they have translated the verb form, "gleichschalten," as "mettre au pas" — to bring into step. This phrase suggests an almost mechanical kind of conformity, as under military command; and no other human community so well represents a perfectly unified and coordinated whole — in precisely the sense of this German word — as a well-trained company of soldiers whose every movement is completely synchronized. If, therefore, following the French, one interprets "Gleichschaltung" as the application, mentally and morally as well as physically, of the principle of the goose-step, one gets a fair representation of what the word means to the Germans.
  • Gleichschaltung is the German term applied to the Nazification of German society following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Once Hitler became chancellor, he and the Nazi Party sought to "coordinate" all political, social, and cultural institutions with the Nazi state. This "coordination" was done in the name of national unity. However, it allowed the Nazi Party to extend its power by creating a single party state. Everything was subject to coordination: local government, professional organizations, social clubs, leisure activities — even those for children.
  • Gleichschaltung: the act, process, or policy of achieving rigid and total coordination and uniformity (as in politics, culture, communication) by forcibly repressing or eliminating independence and freedom of thought, action, or expression : forced reduction to a common level : forced standardization or assimilation
  • Are we, under Trump, at the beginnings of an American-style Gleichschaltung? There are certainly some echoes of those times.
    For the past month, Trump has fired off a ceaseless barrage of executive orders that either violate or at least challenge established law and the Constitution. Like der Führer, Trump undertook sweeping moves to dump government employees who might stand in his way. Trump is also firing salvos at the arts world. During the Third Reich, Hitler’s regime banished artworks deemed "degenerate" from German museums. After Trump purged the leadership of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, he selected himself as chairman and vowed that "woke" performances would not be permitted there.
    Trump’s insistence that he is above the law is also classic authoritarianism, as is his portrayal of himself as America’s Messiah.
  • We have come to perceive Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as part of an inexorable rise to power, an impression resting on generations of postwar scholarship, much of which has necessarily marginalized or disregarded alternatives to the standard narrative of the Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung) with its political and social persecutions, its assertion of totalitarian rule (Gleichschaltung) and subsequent aggressions that led to the Second World War and the nightmare of the Holocaust. … Both Hitler’s ascendancy to chancellor and his smashing of the constitutional guardrails once he got there, I have come to realize, are stories of political contingency rather than historical inevitability.
  • You have a media environment in which Trump is very cleverly not at all like a charlatan — behaving exactly like any fascist would, claiming the other side is the democratic threat and being extremely open about his intentions.
    He’s going to replace everyone in the government-by-loyalists. He’s going to target the universities, the schools. This process is called gleichschaltung in the literature on Nazi Germany, where every organization, every government institution turns loyalist-like and is transformed. Their employees are replaced by people loyal to the leader and loyal to the party. And Trump has already announced he’s going to do this. So he’s already announced a full fascist plan.
  • The significance of Project 2025 is that it calls for what in the Nazi parlance is called Gleichschaltung, the systematic replacement of civil servants by loyalists — by party loyalists — and the systematic replacement of teachers in schools and universities and, in general, institutions throughout society by party loyalists.
    In the case of education, it’s completely implausible that Trump is ideologically distant from the goals of Project 2025. Trump has repeatedly said he’s going to target critical race theory, which, let’s face it, is simply Black history. The Project — he’s targeted — he said he’s going to replace education with patriotic education — namely, representing the United States as an exceptional grand nation whose exceptionality is due to its white Christian heterosexual men, who have defined the nation.
  • Ever since it became eminently clear that Donald Trump had MAGA-tized the Republican party and would become its presidential nominee in 2024, the image of a broad slab of highly polished black marble has been flashing through my mind. Trump’s name is carved into its surface on the upper left. Below in gilded letters appear the names of Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Mark Meadows, Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman — and all the other accomplices who either rallied to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 or officially excused it. … One whole column lists the policy wonks at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, who are charting the MAGA Gleichschaltung of the federal government. Ah, here are Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and maybe a couple of others. I could go on.
    At the top of this black marble wall, large glowing letters read: "GRAVEDIGGERS OF DEMOCRACY."
  • Gleichschaltung is a German term meaning "coordination" or "bringing into line." Another name for it is "Nazification." And, in many respects, it was as easy as "flipping a switch." With only seven laws passed (in twenty sessions) by the Reichstag (which further eliminated barriers to Hitler’s control) and 986 laws enacted unilaterally by Hitler’s government, this cultural consolidation proved to be surprisingly easy.
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