Hitler, Our Secular Satan
by Giulianna LamannaTwo months ago, the world was subjected to yet another scandal involving the British royal family. The tabloids reported the story with their usual outrage, coupled with their usual assumption that a family of spoiled rich figureheads with no real power is expected to behave more respectably than the general population. This time, Prince Harry (the “Party Prince�) made an idiot out of himself by attending a costume party dressed as a Nazi soldier. It remains unknown – and unreported – exactly how many people attended the same party dressed as Satan.
Would there have been as big a to-do if he’d come dressed as Christopher Columbus? Christopher Columbus is a hero of American history, the brave explorer who discovered this land. He is a man cherished and honored for his vision. As would Adolf Hitler be today, had the Axis powers won World War II. It is often said, and more often forgotten, that history is written by the victors. Few people have pointed out that “the destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.â€? (David E. Stannard) Or that the Nazi concentration camps were based largely on American camps set up in the Philippines half a century prior.
In pointing this out, my intent is not to demonize the United States. My point is that the Holocaust is not The Holocaust. It was a holocaust in a long line of genocides that have swept the earth since the birth of civilization. Who remembers that Alexander the Great and his army killed nearly all of the inhabitants of Persepolis around 331 BCE? Who cares about the Albigensian Crusade in the early 1200s? Hell, Hitler’s holocaust wasn’t even the worst genocide of the 20th century. Josef Stalin “purgedâ€? roughly 13 million people (compared to Hitler’s 12 million). And while Hitler failed to wipe out all the Jews (thankfully), the people of Tasmania were completely exterminated. Contrary to the oft-repeated phrase, “never again,â€? genocide has happened again. And again. And again.
So why the obsession with this one particular genocide? It certainly isn’t healthy. Hitler has become the secular Satan: more of a generalized symbol for evil than an actual man. Whenever one hears the rumor of a novel or a movie about Hitler, protests are never far behind. Hitler must never be allowed to be portrayed as a human being, lest his actions be seen as understandable. His crimes are held above from those of all other dictators throughout history. Anyone who dares make comparisons between current events and World War II is accused of overstatement – and, worse yet, insensitivity. As long as we keep setting Hitler apart, no leader will ever be as evil, no deed will ever be as horrible, and every warning sign of fascism will go smugly ignored. Far from ensuring that genocide never happens again, Hitler’s demonization virtually guarantees that it will happen again.
But at least people won’t be dressing up as Nazis.
True. And by demonizing him to such a degree, we guarantee that the small number of people who still actually like his ideas are that much more virulent about their beliefs & actions. One of the things almost never mentioned in today’s fear-of-terrorism climate is homegrown neo-Nazi efforts to promote his madness & recruit the young and impressionable. (I recently came across such an effort, involving distributing “white power” music at high schools. As far as I know, it didn’t go anywhere in my area, but it probably made more headway elsewhere.)
Ironically, such repression of Hitlerism & similar hateful quasi-religions avoids the real reasons that gave them birth in the first place: repression, fear, inability to adapt to changing economic situations, and other traits that are all signs of long-term psychological trauma on the social level. Likewise, it ignores the things such movements share with all successful efforts at creating human groups — a sense of solidarity & in-group common ground, belief in something beyond the individual, mutual support, etc. All of these things are rooted in our tribal heritage, but with the centuries of European/Christian expansion effectively working to absorb everyone into a single gigantic tribe, the healthy outlet of having different ways of looking at things peacefully gets lost.
Instead, we see fringe groups using the methods they’ve learned from the mainstream of history — conquest. If Nazi Germany had not been expansionist, it probably would STILL be a Nazi regime, at least in name; history is replete with long-lasting stable autocracies. Although many of Hitler’s ideas were delusional (especially the ideas that Jews and other groups were subhuman yet also controlling everything), his effort to unify & rebuild Germany was exactly what that country needed at that time. How he expressed it was the problem, because making one’s own country great does NOT mean subjugating others.
Comment by Gus — 21 March 2005 @ 7:16 PM
Oh, definitely. That’s the bitch about mass rejection of an idea: it only encourages the last remaining adherents. Just look at America’s right-wingers, who are constantly trying to convince themselves that they’re an oppressed minority despite the fact that they now control all three branches of government and basically all of talk radio. And whenever people insulted or persecuted Mormons, all it did was push them farther west, further convincing them of their righteousness all the while.
It kind of reminds me of the time my mom and I went to see the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. In case you’ve never been, the actual warehouse and office building which housed Otto Frank’s pectin business has been turned into a Holocaust museum, while the Secret Annex above has been preserved pretty much as it was when they hid there. One of the features of the Holocaust museum is a small, interactive movie theater. The documentary we saw discussed neo-Nazis in modern society and the price of free speech. At the end of the film, the audience was asked whether freedom of speech should be given to everyone â?? including hate groups. Only two people in the theater answered, “Yes” - presumably myself and my mother.
It is incredibly tempting to want to silence every person you don’t like and destroy every idea that isn’t your own. But censoring an idea doesn’t destroy it. More importantly, it sets a legal precedent. The current ruler of your country might just be interested in forbidding genuinely despicable hate speech. But the next ruler might want to silence anyone who opposes him. And now he has the legal precedent that says that some things cannot be said. Censorship is dangerous stuff to deal with. Like you said, people should be worrying about the actual root causes of these ideas. We should acknowledge that the Germans of that time period were for the most part intelligent, cool-headed human beings. Only after we acknowledge that will we be able to figure out how so many people could be engulfed in such a hideous philosophy - and how we can avoid doing the same.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 21 March 2005 @ 9:29 PM
Sadly, it looks like you were exactly right. The recent school shooting on the Red Lake Indian Reservation seems to have involved some of these very issues, compounded by things such as broken family/support structures, poverty, societal pressure and loss of identity. A tragic event.
Comment by raku — 23 March 2005 @ 11:07 AM
In case you’re curious, Discovery Times channel is running a documentary called Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy. It’s on as I write this, but probably other times too. Interesting more for what it says between the lines than overtly, which I read to be that the twisted ideology they had was very firmly rooted in salvationism… only with Hitler as the savior. While many Takers revile the Nazi period as evil — and it was — it was only the psychotic embodiment of the death element that’s inherent in salvationism: Deny death and it comes back to haunt you….
Comment by Gus — 31 March 2005 @ 12:05 AM
i need or have to know who the current ruler of the philippines is because if i dont then that would mean that i will fail summer school and i wont be in the tenth grade next year
Comment by Anonymous — 13 July 2005 @ 6:26 PM
Hmmm, well, your inability to find basic resources certainly indicates that you may not be ready for tenth grade next year … but I’m feeling magnanimous, so here’s something to bookmark for similar quandaries in the future: http://clusty.com/. In particular, the query “philippines” returns a nicely illustrated keymatch from Wikipedia, which has a nice little table on the side that will tell you that the Philippine president is Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and her Vice President is Noli de Castro. However, since the Philippines is a republic, these are not rulers, they are heads of state. They were elected in 2001, and re-elected last year amidst a scandal of alleged electoral rigging.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 July 2005 @ 7:40 PM
Wait a minute… let me get this straight. You typed “ruler of Philippines” or some such query into a search engine (probably Google), and an article on an obscure social/anthropology blog about something completely different that briefly mentions the Philippines is the first thing you come up with? And if it’s not, did you get NO websites about the actual Philippines?
This just utterly baffles me. Doesn’t it require [i]more[/i] work to ask some random eco-anarchist on the net about Filipino politics than it does to simply type the name of the country into a search engine and click on the first result? (Which, in Google’s case, is a history of the Philippines in which the current president’s name is in all caps.)
Now, look. I’m a high school dropout. I often rail against the very idea of organized schooling and promote unschooling and Sudbury schools every chance I get. That’s because a) humans are born curious and b) information is ridiculously easy to find. Especially now, what with the internet and all. I have no sympathy for those who can’t be bothered to read through a paragraph in an encyclopedia.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 13 July 2005 @ 7:52 PM