Sick of Hitler

Though members of my household subscribe to Maclean's, my encounters with the magazine are usually limited to complaining about Mark Steyn's latest column. Today, however, I laid eyes on the new issue and found a familiar face staring back at me:

My immediate reaction was an annoyed and audible groan. For some reason, I had believed that the American Tea Party movement and their extreme misuse/overuse of Hitler imagery in criticizing imaginary policies of the Obama administration had been enough to finally move Hitler out of public discourse for a while. Clearly, I was mistaken. Hitler has long moved past the point of being a mere historical figure and has become the very definition of political evil, but his constant mention in every rhetorical venue has, if anything, led to a dehistoricization of the man and his actions. Rather than looking at the circumstances that led to Hitler gaining political power and driving Europe into war, we imagine him as a kind of demon or monster separate from the society he lived in. Hitler is now the all-purpose point of comparison in arguments of all kinds (reductio ad Hitlerum), and the simplistic image of him as the personification of evil has reached new levels of ubiquity on the internet, where message board posters regularly find themselves captive to Godwin's Law ("as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1").

I'm sick of it! I'll admit that, like most people, I maintain a reserve of fascination for Hitler and Nazi Germany, because it is obviously an important issue to find out what could have driven an advanced, cultured society to embrace a racist demagogue as its unquestioned leader. But having read Ian Kershaw's masterly two-part Hitler biography, I have largely exhausted my interest in the Third Reich and have moved on to other issues. Given the fact that the Second World War was the bloodiest, most costly war in history, it's no surprise we should remain captivated by the single person most responsible. But the mention of Hitler has long descended into kitsch and cliché, with constant references to Nazi atrocities overshadowing mention of all other historical horrors.

It also reinforces our own sense of moral superiority and exceptionalism: many of the same tea partiers and conservatives who tie Hitler to Obama and their political enemies themselves embrace his most basic policies - extreme nationalism, wars of aggression, torture, hatred of outsiders (in Hitler's case, primarily Jews; with the teabaggers, liberals, blacks, immigrants, gays, etc.).

Yet because Hitler is viewed as evil incarnate, it is impossible for anyone to find flaws in themselves that Hitler may have shared. No one thinks of themselves as evil, and if Hitler=evil, we will concentrate on the aspects of his personality and politics that adhere to what we ourselves most despise. He has become a Rorschach test onto which we project our political fears. So while a progressive such as myself will fixate on the aforementioned beliefs - nationalism, war, xenophobia, authoritarianism - championed by Hitler that are shared by modern conservatives, right-wing hacks like Jonah Goldberg will point to more "left" Nazi policies - environmentalism, government work projects - and claim that modern American progressives are therefore the ideological descendants of midcentury European fascists. The obscuring of real history will only continue so long as we continue to view Hitler as a two-dimensional icon of evil rather than a flawed human being like ourselves.

With all that said, the Maclean's article itself isn't that bad. I assumed it was a sensationalist ploy to attract attention by featuring Hitler on the cover, and that it would also serve the magazine's political interests by linking Hitler's "resurgence" to Iran and the Palestinians somehow. But on the whole, the article was balanced and seemed to point to some real political developments (e.g. the recent electoral success of Hungary's far-right Jobbik party). Probably, the writer is overreaching in trying to establish a "trend story" - it would be political poison for any political party to openly associate itself with Hitler and/or Nazi ideology. Still, not as bad as it could have been.

Nevertheless, I'm very tired of hearing about Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Indisputably of vast historical importance, he still died 65 years ago. What can be said of "news organizations" that devote so much time and energy to fixating on the distant past?