China’s Night of the Long Knives
Totalitarian leaders need two things to survive. Unquestioned support of their “inner circle” and a pretense for action, i.e. an incident, real or made up. The decisive point in time for the rise of totalitarianism in Germany in the 1930s were the decisive events of German leader of June 30 to July 2, 1934, normally referred to as “The Night of the Long Knives”. In a swift action, the ascending German Leader took action against the SA, the Sturm Abeilung, or the Brown Shirts. The leader of the National Socialists could not have gotten to this point without the Brown Shirts, the rough, violent, undisciplined element vital to his rise. Yet he was on shaky ground and for years been developing the Black Shirts as his even more inner circle.
