Sunday, February 29, 2004
The Nazi Meme, and taking the wingers at their word
It's hard to argue against an anecdote, which is why the anecdote (or, in Reagan's case, anecdotage) is such an effective rhetorical device for wingers. Wingers prefer (to put it politely) "a good story" and liberals counter with statistics, history, analysis... Kind of like bringing, not a knife, but an encyclopedia, to a gun fight. And part of the mission of this site is to help, in our own small way, to redress the balance between wingers and liberals by developing linguistic antibodies to winger memes that are just as agile and lethal as their targets in the body politic (Anagramming the (lame) Bush campaign slogan is an example of this.)
Anyhow, the wingers managed to drive the Nazi meme out of our discourse, using the anecdote of a single "Bush is Hitler" Flash movie submitted to MoveOn.org for a contest.
Which is a shame. As Orcinus shows through careful, scholarly analysis in "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism," the European experience with Fascism in the '30s is certainly a useful prism to look at what's happening to our country in this century.
And so I read a big Penguin book by Richard Evans called The Coming of Hitler. Besides being careful and scholarly (footnotes are democratic, since they enable any reader to check the writer's sources), the book is a gripping read. It's terrifying to watch ordinary citizens and the powerful alike—all with hopes, fears, children, ideals, ambitions, and the rest that goes with being human—slide day-by-day into an abyss they don't even see, but we know all too well.
The good news is that the traumas that, if they did not cause '30s Fascism, were certainly its framework, are mostly absent in the United States today. We have not lost millions of soldiers in a losing war, undergone a horrific inflation, then the Great Depression. Germany had been a single country only since 1871, and ruled by an Emperor, until we was deposed, in 1919. The succeeding democracy never achieved legitimacy. Our democracy, by contrast, attained legitimacy in 1787 with the passage of the Constitution.
If you want a quick picture of the difference between Germany in the '30s and the United States of today, imagine that both Republicans and Democrats had paramilitary wings; overt ones, with uniforms and offices, and that they battled in the streets on a daily basis (This is one reason why the "bourgeois riot" while the votes were being counted in Florida 2000 had an unpleasant resonance for some.)
Now, I'm sure readers can adduce plenty of similarities between "them" and "us"; I've done it myself. Irony was, after all, the theme of Frank Zappa's song "It can't happen here."
But I would like to focus on one major error that almost everyone in Germany made about the Nazis (except for the true believers):
Evans explains that the eliminationist anti-semitism of the Nazis wasn't a secret; it had been in the Nazi platform since the founding of the party. But because it seemed so extreme, so "out of the mainstream", people just couldn't believe it.
I propose that we should not make the same mistake. In other words:
That is, when Ashcroft says "We have no King but Jesus" and Bush says "it's the job of the President to drive policy toward the [so-called Christian, no doubt] ideal," we should take them at their word.
The word for a country ruled by religion is theocracy, and if we take the wingers at their word, that's the form of government they want for us. (See Orcinus here).
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the Hate Amendment (avoiding the Orwellian "Defense of Marriage Amendment").
To me, the amendment on its face is quite bad, and quite ridiculous, enough. But it's even worse than it appears.
Marriage, by definition, is a sacrament; a sacrament is something that religions are in the business of defining and performing. That's why we have the two terms, "marriage" and "civil union" in the first place. So if the government is defining marriage, that means the government is defining the nature of the sacraments that churches can and cannot perform, and that puts the government in the religion business. And a government that is in the religion business is a theocracy. The Constitution does not permit this, of course. The establishment of religion is forbidden by the First Amendment.
I don't know about you, but I have no intention of living under a theocratic government, or according it any kind of legitimacy. But if I take the wingers at their word, that is exactly the choice before me. Thoughts?
Anyhow, the wingers managed to drive the Nazi meme out of our discourse, using the anecdote of a single "Bush is Hitler" Flash movie submitted to MoveOn.org for a contest.
Which is a shame. As Orcinus shows through careful, scholarly analysis in "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism," the European experience with Fascism in the '30s is certainly a useful prism to look at what's happening to our country in this century.
And so I read a big Penguin book by Richard Evans called The Coming of Hitler. Besides being careful and scholarly (footnotes are democratic, since they enable any reader to check the writer's sources), the book is a gripping read. It's terrifying to watch ordinary citizens and the powerful alike—all with hopes, fears, children, ideals, ambitions, and the rest that goes with being human—slide day-by-day into an abyss they don't even see, but we know all too well.
The good news is that the traumas that, if they did not cause '30s Fascism, were certainly its framework, are mostly absent in the United States today. We have not lost millions of soldiers in a losing war, undergone a horrific inflation, then the Great Depression. Germany had been a single country only since 1871, and ruled by an Emperor, until we was deposed, in 1919. The succeeding democracy never achieved legitimacy. Our democracy, by contrast, attained legitimacy in 1787 with the passage of the Constitution.
If you want a quick picture of the difference between Germany in the '30s and the United States of today, imagine that both Republicans and Democrats had paramilitary wings; overt ones, with uniforms and offices, and that they battled in the streets on a daily basis (This is one reason why the "bourgeois riot" while the votes were being counted in Florida 2000 had an unpleasant resonance for some.)
Now, I'm sure readers can adduce plenty of similarities between "them" and "us"; I've done it myself. Irony was, after all, the theme of Frank Zappa's song "It can't happen here."
But I would like to focus on one major error that almost everyone in Germany made about the Nazis (except for the true believers):
The Germans didn't take the Nazis at their word.
Evans explains that the eliminationist anti-semitism of the Nazis wasn't a secret; it had been in the Nazi platform since the founding of the party. But because it seemed so extreme, so "out of the mainstream", people just couldn't believe it.
I propose that we should not make the same mistake. In other words:
We should take the wingers at their word.
That is, when Ashcroft says "We have no King but Jesus" and Bush says "it's the job of the President to drive policy toward the [so-called Christian, no doubt] ideal," we should take them at their word.
The word for a country ruled by religion is theocracy, and if we take the wingers at their word, that's the form of government they want for us. (See Orcinus here).
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the Hate Amendment (avoiding the Orwellian "Defense of Marriage Amendment").
To me, the amendment on its face is quite bad, and quite ridiculous, enough. But it's even worse than it appears.
Marriage, by definition, is a sacrament; a sacrament is something that religions are in the business of defining and performing. That's why we have the two terms, "marriage" and "civil union" in the first place. So if the government is defining marriage, that means the government is defining the nature of the sacraments that churches can and cannot perform, and that puts the government in the religion business. And a government that is in the religion business is a theocracy. The Constitution does not permit this, of course. The establishment of religion is forbidden by the First Amendment.
I don't know about you, but I have no intention of living under a theocratic government, or according it any kind of legitimacy. But if I take the wingers at their word, that is exactly the choice before me. Thoughts?
