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80 Years Ago Today: Hitler Does the World a Favor
Well now. We certainly live in interesting times. The world seems to have slipped its moral gears. I can remember a time when there were certain political facts that seemed as well established as the Law of Gravity or 2 + 2 = 4 in the public mind. No matter who you were, you knew them and believed them. One of them was that autocracy, dictatorship, absolute rulers, and the abuse of human rights in general were objectively BAD. And that the standard bearers of those evils, Hitler and his Nazis, and all that goes with them, including their hated symbol the swastika, were the worst of the bad. Somebody posted a meme the other day that I don’t disagree with. It said something like “If you’re at a rally and someone is wearing a swastika and they don’t get the shit kicked out of them, you’re at a Nazi rally.”
When and why did this culture go soft on a creed that is DEFINED by evil? I don’t say a “part” of the culture. I say the culture as a whole. Because this blight has been tolerated by well-meaning liberals for decades. They do it in the name of Free Speech, which everyone of course has a right to. That Nazi rally in Skokie in 1977 seems to have been a bellwether moment. What appears to have happened over the decades is that a significant portion of the population (not everyone is a rocket scientist) has conflated the truth that it is legally permitted to express horrible sentiments with an acceptance of the content of those sentiments. While it may be legally okay, it is not necessarily morally okay, nor should it be socially accepted, and certainly the Nazi platform cannot ever be allowed to be politically pursued or implemented. The freedom to express evil has created a fog in everyone’s heads, so that even liberals lost track of a rigid line they should have held firm on an ETERNITY ago.
And the reason why the creed should have been suppressed in no uncertain terms is so simple and basic you’d think it would have been at the forefront of everyone’s minds constantly. But it doesn’t appear to be. How is it that we have Bill Maher claiming that we need to embrace people on “both sides”? That would be true if people on one side weren’t embracing a platform, an ethic, and a history that endorses murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, theft of property and a million other human rights abuses. Autocracy, especially Nazism, is that platform BY DEFINITION. That is what it was created to espouse and put into practice. Decent people do not condone or tolerate murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, or theft, do they? Against ANYONE. Or BY anyone, including especially the government. The government is not some kind of special case, though most people seem to think it is. And, yes, no government has ever had a spotless track record when it comes to this stuff. That doesn’t mean that the answer is to INTENSIFY the evil. Are crime and anarchy evils? Yes, but autocracy is crime and anarchy at the hands of the STATE and that’s even worse because its ills are inflicted upon every single citizen every hour of every day in every corner of the country. You can stop calling this a free country.
80 years ago, Hitler blew his brains out in his bunker. He did it because he had lost control, and his dream of world domination, once so nearly in his grasp, was dead. He was never a patriot. He had never put his country or his people before himself. His end game was always the pursuit of his OWN ends, whatever the cost to others. To achieve it, he had created a fog of words and images, and made his country drunk on the same sort of avarice and vanity and cruelty. It was literally a kind of plague, a form of crowd madness, as fatal as any germ. It’s clearly happening here now, and the plague has been gestating for a very long time, decades.
Contemplating the death of Hitler has reminded me of two anecdotes that take us back to the more typical themes of this blog. They are images that make me smile.
One: Lee Miller, the famous fashion photographer turned war correspondent for Vogue, found herself in Hitler’s Munich apartment on this day 80 years ago. She used the opportunity for a photo op, climbing into his bath tub and washing up, while her boots, filthy with the mud of concentration camps, were parked next to her:
It was a pretty good “fuck you”. (Kudos to Kate Winslet for re-creating the moment in the recent bio-pic Lee).
Two: when Groucho Marx returned to the land of his ancestors (Germany) a few years after the war, he was taken to the site of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. Where he literally danced on Hitler’s grave. There’s no photo of that, but his art form was the anecdote anyway, so we merely relate the story.
Irreverence and disrespect are the only appropriate attitudes Americans should show toward Nazis and autocrats. That’s what American patriotism looks like. At the moment there are armed police stationed around Trump Tower to prevent people hurling urine at it. Someday I look forward to dancing on his grave.
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