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?

Militarism Old and New

Apologies for the lack of posts in recent days, but I was fighting a bad cold that now appears largely vanquished. I passed some of the time watching World War II documentaries on the Military Channel, which like the History Channel seems to be on the verge of embracing the slogan "All Nazis, All The Time." Last night I caught Bryan Singer's 1998 film Apt Pupil on late-night television - in case you forgot, that's the film with Brad Renfro as a high school student who befriends a Nazi war criminal played by Ian McKellen. Singer appears to be obsessed with the Nazi period; not only did he direct Apt Pupil and the Hitler-assassination thriller Valkyrie, but his first X-Men film opened with the young Magneto utilizing his powers in occupied Poland. Now there are rumours that Singer could take the helm of possible prequel X-Men Origins: Magneto, despite his admission that he might need a break from all the Nazi stuff.

Why the ongoing fascination with the Third Reich? On one hand, the answer is obvious: World War II was the largest armed conflict in human history, and Hitler's Germany was its principal antagonist. In addition, the appalling Nazi atrocities that culminated in the Holocaust provide a visceral example of a demonic ideology responsive only to military might - in other words, an ideal villain for the military-industrial complex. Is it any wonder that since 1945, almost every leader of a country deemed an official enemy by the United States or Russia has been compared to Hitler?

The glorification of World War II by the victors is as much about legitimizing those states' own authority as it was about defeating Hitler's regime. Especially once the full extent of Nazi war crimes became known, it became almost impossible to argue against the decision of the American, Soviet, British or Canadian governments to send their armies to Europe. Although the Nazis' crimes against the Jews were downplayed by Western governments at the time - to avoid portraying the war as a strictly "Jewish problem" - in retrospect the discovery of the concentration camps provided the ultimate vindication of the Allied war effort. Since then, WWII has became indelibly known as the "good war" in Russian and Western thought.

Unfortunately, this idealized view of the conflict belies the less romantic reality that, like most wars, World War II was fundamentally a struggle between opposing world powers with competing geopolitical interests. Such a notion is incompatible with its depiction in the West as a grand contest between "freedom and democracy" and totalitarian fascism. There is little room in this conception for moral complexity and the shades of grey that also characterized the Allied war effort - the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps, the segregation of black and white American soldiers into distinct units, the firebombing of Dresden, and most controversially of all, whether the United States was justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In similar service to jingoistic nationalism, the role of the Soviet Union is often downplayed, as in the preposterous assertion of some conservative U.S. commentators that it was the United States that defeated Nazi Germany. Rather, it was the Soviet Union that truly defeated the Nazi war machine; by the time of the Normany invasions, Hitler's armies had been largely decimated in the meat grinder of the Eastern Front.

All of these skewed depictions of the war have one thing in common - to justify our own war policies, to bolster national pride and provide a legitimacy to our governments that has lasted well into the 21st century. After all, if your opponent is Nazi Germany - indisputably one of the most odious regimes in human history - it's easy to promote your own side as morally superior. This is why the Nazis have remained ideal villains in Hollywood films. But as the past recedes further and further into history, we remain focused on it to our own detriment.

It's 2009. To still dwell on Hitler and the Nazis more than 60 years after their defeat - as is all too common in our political discourse - is ludicrous and dangerous. The world has changed immeasurably since then, and the main foreign policy of Western nations is no longer the military defeat of comparable adversaries, but rather the exploitation and subjugation of impoverished Third World nations. By continuing to paint ourselves as the heroic adversaries to a more despicable, militarily comparable rival, we distort the current state of world politics.

I remember well the onslaught of Nazi and Holocaust-themed films that cropped up in the multiplex during the 2008 holiday season. While the Israeli war machine slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and committed its own Naziesque war crimes, we were treated to films such as Valkyrie, The Reader, and most notably, Defiance - the latter, in its focus on Jewish partisans fighting Nazi aggressors, remarkable for its ironic timing. The distorted claims of the Israeli far right that its war crimes in Gaza were a defensive action found their support, as always, in reversion to a World War II mentality, a time in which Jews were the victims of ethnic cleansing rather than its perpetrators.

Let me finish by pointing you to a spot-on article by a German professor in which he examines the difference between American conceptions of WWII as the "good war" and German views of it as the "bad war". Most notable are his comments on postwar militarism. I encourage you to read the whole article, but here are some crucial passages to whet your appetite and establish the critical points:

In 1955 an Austrian member of Parliament shrewdly observed that the most significant developments in the international arena were "the Americanization of Germany and the Prussication ["Verrpeußung"] of America."

[...]

The most important legacy of the postwar occupation may well have been an ever more prevalent German pacifism in all political camps (not only in the Green Party where it is strongest). Only in the post-Cold War era have Germans begun to participate in "out of area" Western military interventions (Kosovo, Afghanistan). Young Germans abhor war and would rather not serve in the military and since the Vietnam War have become ever more critical of American military adventures abroad. The formerly deeply rooted Prussian military tradition was obliterated by the highly successful Anglo-American postwar occupation regime that produced prosperity and the "Wirtschaftswunder" instead of resentment and rejection.

[...]

Meanwhile the United States has become a militarized society in peacetime and sports a martial pride and attendant hyperpatriotism in its mainstream culture and ethos that is reminiscent of old Prussia. As the leader of the Western world, the U.S. has built the most powerful armed forces and destructive weapons systems the world has ever seen. During the Cold War the Americans spent up to 30 percent of its budget on the military. They established an awesome global base system that allows the U.S. to project its power swiftly and devastatingly when needed. It has fought long wars in Korea and Vietnam and intervened dozens of time around the world when it saw its national interests threatened.

This acceptance of a permanent peace-time military establishment and global power projection after World War II has much to do with the hard-won victories and the subsequent American memory regime of the "good war." Actually, the cultural production in the years after the war maintained an ambivalent and darker view of the war which had dehumanized so many of its young soldiers in the epic battles in the Pacific and in Europe. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 stand for this darker view.

But since the 1980s D-Day commemorations turned uncompromisingly patriotic and the cultural production celebratory of the "greatest generation" that lived through the Depression and rose to victory during World War II. Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and the ten-part TV series "Band of Brothers" signify a patriotic memory of World War II that celebrates the "good war." The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose has done more than anyone to enshrine this new view in his books and in the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. In the words of historian Chad Barry "the good war thesis became a powerfully seductive and intoxicating view of an idealized past and a golden age."