Note: A slightly different veriosn of this appeared as an article in The Dakota Beacon May issue.
They’re at it again, the Nazi hunters. And this time they’ve found the state of Arizona.
Not Nazis living in Arizona, the whole state. It seems the Arizona legislature passed a law requiring enforcement of immigration law closely modeled on the corresponding federal law. The federal government has been lax in enforcing its own laws, so Arizona is going to do it at the state level on that section of the U.S./Mexican border within their jurisdiction.
To those who don’t have to live with their problems, this makes Arizonans “racists” and “Nazis” you see.
No, no, don’t bother to thank me. I’m just glad I had a chance to straighten that out for you.
That’s something I’ve wondered about for years. Why is it when someone is reaching for a symbol of ultimate evil to tar someone with, they always seem to grab “Nazi” off the shelf of history?
“WHAT?” I hear your outrage. “Don’t you know history?”
Yes, quite well, thank you very much. Enough to know the Nazis come in a distant third in the mass murder sweepstakes of the 20th century. The murder tally of the Soviet Union is at minimum, ten times that of the Third Reich. The total of all murders by all communist governments, and I mean murders of helpless civilians excluding casualties of war, is at least 100 million.
Perhaps that’s not a fair comparison, the Third Reich had only 12 years to accomplish what the USSR did in 81 years and the Peoples Republic of China in 61 years. Still one has to wonder, why nobody calls someone whose politics they don’t like, a “Lenin” or a “Mao”?
You seldom hear anyone called a communist. And if you do, you’ll be ridiculed or answered with the counter-charge “McCarthyite!” though the late senator from Wisconsin is not known to have murdered anyone.
But you can still be taken seriously after calling someone a Nazi. And by the way, I take that “Nazi” slander pretty seriously. You see, unlike those who bandy it about so carelessly, I’ve been to Auschwitz. An experience I can safely say I’ll not forget till the day I die – as much as I wish I could.
But what’s really astounding is that anyone can publicly call themselves a communist and have a successful career in the civil service or academia. If you even brought up the question of whether someone advocating a political philosophy whose adherents have murdered millions should be supported at public expense, you’d be accused of “persecuting them for their opinions.”
(This is neither speculation nor hyperbole. I’ve heard it in those exact words.)
One has to ask, for God’s sake why? Why is it acceptable, even respectable, to identify oneself with the perpetrators of mass murder, as long as it’s not Nazi mass murder?
Various explanations have been offered.
One reason could be that the Nazis mostly murdered Europeans. The Chinese and the Russians were more distant peoples whose history and culture we knew little about. Perhaps for that reason we don’t call someone a “Tojo”, though the Japanese killed Chinese in numbers far exceeding the European casualties of WWII.
It could also be the Nazis made the mistake of picking on a highly-literate people whose survivors were capable of telling their story to the world. We all know something about Jewish history because it is part of the history of western civilization. But how many in the West know or care about the history of the Crimean Tartars, Ukrainians, or Tibetans?
A bit of that elusive bugaboo “unconscious racism” might be at work as well. Perhaps we expect Asians and Russians to behave with what we think of as “oriental cruelty”, but Germany was a civilized European nation whose contributions to western civilization are considerable.
Some suggest the communist regimes lasted well past their period of greatest brutality. So that when their crimes against humanity become widely-known they were already a generation in the past.
This explanation doesn’t work for me. For one, the knowledge was always available at the time. It was just denied and covered up, sometimes by sincere believers who were shocked out of their political faith when confronted by convincing proof of communist atrocities.
Among these was the writer Howard Fast, who told about his disillusionment in his autobiography, ‘Being Red: A Memoir.’ The process of leaving the Party began for Fast after he was given a copy of Kruschev’s secret speech detailing Stalin’s crimes. It took him awhile to process it though, and he kept his knowledge of the speech to himself for quite some time.
But the horrors were also concealed by accomplices with full knowledge of the truth, such as New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who witnessed first-hand the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian peasants at Stalin’s orders. Duranty reported seeing billowing fields of golden grain, and happy well-fed peasants dancing and singing the praises of the people’s paradise and kindly Papa Stalin.
The reality he saw was people starving to death by the millions as what food they managed to produce was seized.
Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize is still displayed in the NYT offices. The prize committee refuses to revoke the award, in spite of protests by Ukrainian-American organizations.
And most damning, well after the period of the greatest Soviet terror in the ‘30s, and China in the ‘50s, intellectuals like Noam Chomsky were still following the script as a communist government murdered millions in Cambodia: first deny, then minimize, then actively excuse.
Chomsky added a step to the customary progression: then blame the United States.
And I have to ask myself, how far can you go in denying, or actively justifying the murder of millions before you must be considered an accessory at best, an accomplice at worst?
But sometimes I get the depressing feeling the real reason may be that it’s safe to beat the Nazi horse, because it’s a dead one. They lost.
The USSR was until recently, and China still is, a terrifying reality in the present. They had and have numerous apologists and defenders in the West. Among them New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who openly wishes the U.S. government could get things done just like China does.
Today’s neo-Nazis are a miniscule group of pathetic losers nursing a neurotic need for attention, who don’t really scare anyone anymore.
When I hear “Hitler” and “Nazi” tossed around by people who would never say “Stalin” or “Mao” or “communist,” I have to ask, is it because they are afraid of these kind of people? Or worse, is it because they admire them?
Could that be it? And why?
Leftists are intellectuals, just ask them. Or don’t, they’ll be only too happy to tell you anyway.
And though I say it who am one, intellectuals tend to be, shall we say, a bit on the wimpy side. They may admire strength, but often have little idea what it is, and too damned often they think strength is brutality.
America’s longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer saw this years ago when he said, “One strategy of the weak is to hint at their capacity for evil.”
Recommended reading:
Gulag: A History. Anne Applebaum, 2004.
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Mark Kramer, Jonathan Murphy, Stephane Courtois, and Jean-Louis Panne, 1999.
Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, Paul Hollander, 1997.
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Karoly · June 11, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Sooner or later the mass murderers of the 20th century are going to take their place in history among the Attilas, Genghis Khans and Napoleons. Their image will slightly blur, acquire some patina, even glamor. Hitler will most likely be an exception, but not because he was especially evil. His inexcusable historical mistake was to lose against another “great man”.
Ted Amadeus · June 12, 2010 at 12:10 am
Yes, judging from the as-yet-unrevised history of the 20th Century, 175 million dead, most at the hands of their own governments, it makes me marvel; especially since what Germany could not accomplish in two world wars is being brought to pass with banks, and massive loans that will never be repaid – in money, anyway.
And our current President thinks Chairman Mao was a great man…’nuff said!
naman · June 12, 2010 at 3:03 am
Although I hate to stereotype, Lefties seem to use the Nazi tag quite liberally (no pun intended) to demean and degrade those whose political views might not agree with theirs.
In my opinion, someone who uses the Nazi tag during an argument usually has lost the argument and has to fall back to using insults instead of reasoning.
Karoly · June 12, 2010 at 7:49 am
The reason why left-wing socialist especially hate Nazis (right-wing socialists) is that they compete for the same niche. This has been amply demonstrated by the ease with which many people switched their votes or allegiances between them, by the readiness with which these parties welcomed and absorbed the converts from the other, and by the analogous rhetoric they use.
Left wing socialists find it particularly disturbing that the Nazis so blatantly expose socialism for what it is, i.e., a system that can only triumph and survive through extreme violence, and requires an unscrupulous strongman wielding absolute power. Nazis enshrine the Führerprinzip, worship power, and glorify violence, while left-wing socialist would like to keep very quiet about such unsavory things. They speak about democratic socialism and people’s democracy. Even the bolsheviks called their system “democratic centralism”. The Nazis, by contrast, never advocate democracy as in their eyes democracy is the rule of mongrels and weaklings. The Nazis are therefore the honest socialist, and apparently honesty doesn’t go unpunished.
tehag · June 14, 2010 at 5:02 am
Add to your list damaged self-esteem. Germany and the Nazi collaborators in the West arose in a society which regarded itself as vastly superior to Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, Russian barbarism, etc. The powerful demonstration of contradiction unhinged them.
As for Thomas Friednman, he wishes to be ruled by a state that will punish Capitalist-Roaders and punish the non-subservient press (like Thomas Friedman) and I wish he could be ruled by the same. It’s win-win.