When the National Socialist Government came into office, on January 30, 1933, it was confronted with widespread chaos and confusion in the social, economic and political life of the nation. A similar state of affairs existed in the legal sphere and in the administration of justice. The situation was too critical to allow of any time being lost in dealing with it.
Schmitt’s critics, from scandalized fellow Catholics to self-proclaimed liberal-democrats, have maintained that his distinction between liberalism and democracy was purely contrived. Indeed it was intended to achieve a baneful political effect: discredit the battered remnants of Weimar German parliamentary government and prepare the ground for a fascist dictatorship bottomed on a mythic popular will and without constitutional restraints. This argument is stated most exhaustively by Jrgen Fialowski in Die Wendung zum Fhrerstaat in 1958, but it also continues to spill over into invectives against Schmitt encountered in The New Republic and elsewhere.
In 1914, 2, 416, 290 German civilians were living in Russia. When World War I began, a wave of hostility began, especially after the Laws of Liquidation passed in 1915. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 25, 1917, the ethnic Germans of the former czarist empire were subjected to an organized campaign of terror: rape, drownings, torture, burning, mutilations, mass shootings and extermination.
If each of the men in the fable about the blind men and the elephant were required to construct a model of an elephant, there would be three very different models. The blind man who felt only the tail would build a model as he described an elephant in the fable — as “a sort of rope.” The blind man who felt the leg and said an elephant was like a tree would produce a tree-like “elephant,” while the man who felt only the trunk would construct his “elephant” like a snake.