g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Friday, February 4, 2005
14:29 - A whole lotta fingers
http://www.brainshavings.com/mt/archives/001698.html

(top) link
...Add up to one big photo-Fisk. Via Dean Esmay.

It takes a really seriously thickened head to keep out the idea that these kinds of images are indistinguishable from the atrocities of the Nazis. But those heads are among us.

There's an artist from another site I run, a Japanese girl living in Germany to pursue her art career, who saw fit to write a couple of pieces on Naziism and the Auschwitz memorial into her DeviantArt account, the gist of both of which was that "Hey, the Germans are basically nice people, and it's not fair to keep making them feel bad for producing Hitler."

Which is a nice sentiment, and normally I'd be all for it. But there's a problem. I'm not going to tell this artist this, unless she asks me why I had such a tight-lipped and ambivalent response to reading the pieces; but the recent rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, where France and Germany caution Jews to protect themselves in public by not wearing any clothes or jewelry that identify them as Jews, where members of the Russian Duma introduce legislation banning Jewish groups, and where large percentages of the populations identify Israel as the primary threat to world peace (when they aren't saying it's the US), ought to signal us that the dangers that led to the formation of the Nazi party have not passed us by. One of the commenters on the artist's pieces, the one about the Auschwitz memorial, says:

Nobody should ever overlook what happened there - ghastly. Too bad I'm not so sure those or similar things are not going to happena gain - look at Iraq, for instance.

Yeah, I am looking at it.

This commenter may be too young or too cloistered or too determinedly rebellious to know what he or she is saying. But since this kind of thing also comes so readily to the fingers of the posters at DU, who hail from our most prestigious universities as well as our most slovenly basements, I can't dismiss it as irrelevant. It's quite symptomatic of our current popular mindset. Likewise when the artist herself conflates America's evangelism for "freedom" with the Nazis' then-compelling party platform of forging Germany into a perfected Aryan race. It's really, seriously, not the same thing, even if they occupy similar places in a historical template one has constructed. Such blinkered equivalence is both insulting and terrifyingly dangerous.

Now that it's been shown, for instance, that the Iraqis who want democracy actually are a majority, and the insurgents only represent a minority—it seems some people need to have it explained that not all minorities are good, and not all majorities are evil.

To put it bluntly: When we have this much difficulty in the modern world identifying fascism—or, indeed, identifying what is not fascism—then the lesson of Auschwitz truly has been lost.

It's well and good to say that the past is in the past, or to burble out (as another commenter does) the old saw that "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" (a statement that I always used to think applied to History class, which is kind of funny when I think back on it) under the assumption that they've actually absorbed what it means, while clearly drastically missing the point of the exercise. But I don't think we can afford to sanitize the past like some people seem to want to do. The moment we do, the moment we renounce our commitment to teaching our younger generations the real lessons that the 20th Century left behind for us—learning to spot real tyranny coming a mile off, instead of reciting pale and gassy slogans about tolerance and diversity—we prop the door open for the same evil to sneak up on us again from a direction we'd left unguarded.

There's really quite little to be gained from endlessly browbeating the Germans over WWII. But somehow the point of it all has slipped away, as though we've spent fifty years ritualizing a set of poorly-formed cautionary mantras, so that the process has become its own purpose and the underlying meaning has become lost. If all we've succeeded in doing is teaching kids to see fascism in everything, even in the spread of democracy, then we'll be so busy hanging Hitler signs over people like Bush that we'll never notice the real Hitler until he's on the throne again.

UPDATE: A related topic I've been itching to point out for some time has been brought up by Kevin Connors at Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing: the causes of the Civil War, and how they're represented today. InstaPundit started it off with a post that angered Kevin, who proceeds—in his post and in a number of the comments, increasingly doggedly—to defend the South's right to secede.

The discussion is fascinating. There is quite a bit of mental exercise to be done, more than most realize. Especially, as my post above tries to illustrate, in light of the fact that we are completely unfamiliar anymore with the political atmosphere or even the day-to-day realities of antebellum life in the South, in the days when you'd say The United States are doing a thing rather than The United States is doing a thing. Many posters on both sides weigh in, and there's even some flip-flopping of sides, as people come into the argument thinking one thing and leave thinking another. Those are the best kinds of arguments, I think: productive ones. (Too bad the involved parties can't seem to agree on a spelling of secession. Sheesh.)

One thing I have to note:

You have these revisionists running around nowadays who, for a variety of reasons, try to make the traitors into Noble Men Fighting for States Rights’, but they always fail to mention which State’s Right in particular they were fighting to maintain. I can’t explain it, other than to chalk it up to losing not only the physical war, but the moral one as well. The fought to maintain a vile institution and lost. Their cause discredited and tossed into the ashbin of history, they decided to sweep their shame under the rug and claim that their ancestors fought and died for some glorious cause, instead of fighting for the cause of Evil.

Exactly. There are certain "code words" in currency these days; euphemisms designed to distract and shield one's attention from the reality of a given controversial subject by changing the vocabulary to something more generalized and innocuous-sounding. "Intelligent Design" means creationism, for example. "Gay rights" means "gay marriage". Any honest discussion ought to complete the sentence beginning with any euphemistic truncation: not pro-choice, but pro-choice-to-kill-babies. Not states' rights, but states' rights to own slaves.

Whatever side one is on in any of these matters, simply stating the real terms of the discussion instead of an airy sanitized version can make all the difference. Honest debators can still exist on both sides, and many extenuating circumstances complicate the matter, but at least neither party is kidding itself.


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