Historical Ignorance and Demagoguery
I am about to fall foul of Godwin’s Law in my first sentence, but sometimes I wonder why we all demonise Hitler quite so much. Good start, eh? By this I do not mean to make excuses for anything he did or to play down his significance or the horror of the world he tried to create, I mean to talk about other people because Hitler was not as exceptional as you would think, given his status as human horror figure par excellence.
This all arose because I mentioned to a friend of mine that Mrs. Toad and I were planning on painting a massive Soviet Constructivist mural on the back wall of our living room. He said that it sounded like an incredibly cool idea, which of course it does, if a little nuts. Anyhow I said that I knew it was a little politically sensitive, but the actual graphic art from that period was just stunning, so sod it. The only other propaganda stuff I like as much is the Nazi stuff which, idelogy aside, is also amazingly gorgeous graphic art.
His response was interesting. ‘Oh, but you couldn’t ever do that, that would just be way too controversial’, and of course he’s right, it would be too controversial. Brian Ferry expressed a liking for their architecture and was absolutely slaughtered for it. There may well be much more personal context to that, but frankly that’s beside the point. A Nazi mural on the living room wall of your house would cause people to draw breath very sharply indeed.
But why would the Constructivist one not? Constructivism as an artistic movement flourished during Stalin’s reign and was directly influenced by his ideology. Stalin was actually responsible for a similar number of deaths – roughly 20 million* which compares pretty neatly with Hitler’s 20 million. These figures represent just murders, not war deaths. Hitler did pretty much single-handedly cause the Second World War of course, which counts for an awful lot. Nevertheless, even though Stalin is increasingly recognised for his excellence in the field of genocide, the fact that his rate of simple cold-blooded murder compares with that of Hitler makes it a little odd that the mention of his regime and his ideology does not elicit anything like the same horror in the West.
Now obviously Stalin didn’t really threaten direct geographical conquest of our homes, but then Hitler was never going to conquer America either, and yet this mentality still prevails there. It could be argued that Stalin predominantly killed his own people and was thus less of an threat to people outside his borders, but that is nonsense. Russia was very much an empire at the time, so try telling the Ukrainians, the Uzbeks, the Georgians, the Chechens and everyone else he slaughtered that it was only Russians who he threatened.
The other thing is that in percentage terms, apart from in Poland, Hitler wasn’t that efficient either. He killed almost 18% of the Polish population**, but elsewhere he was far less successful. Why is that worse than the likes of Pol Pot who exterminated a similarly massive proportion*** of his population, albeit lesser absolute totals? Hutus versus Tutsis anyone? And the daddy of them all, the relatively unknown Mao Zedong, who managed to eradicate, by conservative estimates, over 40 million people. Forty million. In fact estimates get as high as 43 million for the Great Leap Forward alone.
Now, as I said, I am not under any circumstances trying to downplay the horror of Hitler and the Nazi regime. What amazes me as much as anything is actually that he wasn’t as exceptional as you’d think. And it’s odd that he seems to be the poster child for deranged genocidal lunatics when there were actually worse. I suppose in that sense he has become a symbol in Western culture as much as a historical figure.
As much as anything it interested me that my friend visibly flinched at the idea of a Nazi mural, but thought a Soviet one sounded cool. Fascinating, I thought. Although now that I think about it, perhaps a Soviet mural from the Space Race era might be a less creepy thing to have on our wall. Ugh!
DeVotchKa – The Enemy Guns
Calexico – Dance of Death
Adam & the Ants – Deutscher Girls
Notes on sources:
* All sources are from this site unless otherwise stated. This gentleman is not an historian, he merely works in a library, but he provides massive numbers of direct citations so appears to me to be a reliable source. You are free to dispute this and anything he says of course, and I know the dangers of straying too far from source material, but I am not an historian either.
** From a BBC wiki-ish project, described here.
*** The New York Times.
apparently the nazi’s were funded with American military
Forget facts & figures, it’s all about what these people symbolize that seems to count, and if you’re the first, or the flashiest, you get to be the symbol.
Manson is very overrated as a murderer too. Did he even personally kill anybody? If his followers had killed a poor black family instead of a white movie star and her friends, would the media have cared? Manson symbolized a white threat to the white establishment, so he’s the symbol of ultimate domestic evil.
As for Hitler, he will always be the symbol for ultimate world evil because we knew about his crimes during the war, (didn’t Stalin’s crimes become known only afterward?), and we tried the Nazis at Nuremburg, something we couldn’t do to the Soviets. Stalin has probably always been the baddest boy on the eastern bloc. But Russian culture is too foreign for us. Germans are foreign but still western enough. When threatened, we like to think we can tap into some of that precise, disciplined Nazi-style whup-ass, and put it away again whenever we want. But once that evil is out, we’re learning that it’s not so easy to control.
I think you should play some of Manson’s music when you unveil your Soviet mural.
Here’s a thought. Basically Stalin (and Pol Pot, the Emperor of Japan, and whoever was in charge of Turkey during the Armenia business) slaughtered people indiscrimenantly. Now that’s easy. You de-humanize a few thousand soldiers and off you go. Nanking, Uganda, The Sudan, My Lai, the list goes on. What Hitler managed was to convince people to round up a village and choose. You’re fine, you too, go on, not you sonny, on the train, you’re fine. The higher reason functions were still engaged when the Jew’s (and Commies, gays, Polish and a bit darker than normal Germans) were seperated and slaughtered in a fashion more methodic than your average dictator. When you examine it, it really does make you shudder (not that the others don’t).
Ben – You’re on the right track, however, your estimation of the indiscriminate nature of those other mass killings is somewhat imprecise. There’s also evidence to indicate the mass delusion of the German military. According to source documents of the War Crimes Tribunals, many German soldiers were surprised to be indicted as they were psychologically conditioned to believe personal responsibility didn’t exist. They’d accepted complete domination by and allegiance to Hitler; I believe that qualifies as dehumanisation.
A few years back in Edinburgh, there was a Mao bar near Bristo square which was a Chinese restaurant. Quite bizarre; I never went there, but I couldn’t imagine going anywhere called the Hitler or Stalin bar either. I suppose one of the things that horrifies as well is that Germany was part of Western Europe and that somehow feels way closer to home -and therefore, even more uncomfortable-than Stalin or Mao. ‘Safe European Home’ by the Clash would have been a good choice too, thanks for Adam and the Ants track.
Ed
Can I be the first to deny Mr Toad ever wrote this blog?
Eh?
There is no scientific evidence that proves conclusively this blog ever happened. Those sentences, without a doubt, could very well may be the residual opinions leaking from a blog less than 5 clicks away. Probably.
(There was never a blog).
Someone’s pinched DC’s pills, evidently. This is the indie blogosphere, mate. The opinions are all the same – just insert sweeping/jarring/lush/etc.. in a random order after a song name and you have all ten thousand covered.
Ed – Safe European Home would have been a superb choice, bollocks!
The thing is, there were a lot of Communists around Europe bending over backwards to accommodate Stalin at the time as well.
I think the trickle of information probably helped. If information leaks out slowly then you never have the shock of, say, liberating Auschwitz, which must have been horrifying. Boiling a frog syndrome may start to apply.
Clayton, well they would claim they weren’t responsible. If you read the accounts of the hunts that took place in France, the German army was remarkably methodical. I’m just pointing out that any monkey can run around a city bayonetting anything they see, it takes proper evil to spend a month tracking down people geneology. Also Jewish are white and it happened in our back yard. If you go to China, they have a hard time looking at Japan in the same friendly light we do.
Downplaying how bad one genocidal dictator is perceived because there were others who killed just as many-just so you don’t feel so awkward about having a big mural on your wall. Has it come to this.
I’d maybe think of changing the title of this blog to Song, By David Irving
WLF are you some sort of illiterate retard? Try a new approach: go back to the start of the post and this time actually read the words that I have written down instead of just having an epileptic fit. I am not downplaying anything. I say this plenty of times.
What I am surprised at is the fact that we don’t have same visceral reaction to other people who, when you look at it, were just as bad as Hitler. Now we are having a spacey mural because this was during the era of the USSR which, however politically half-arsed, was not the same kind of genocidally oppressive regime as that of Stalin.
If you bother to read the words which I have written you will see fairly clearly that this is exactly what I have said.
the nazis won an electoral system in one of the most culturally civilised states in the world, were well accepted for the start by most of the west, and yet managed to start the worst war the world had ever seen, and introduced the concept of orderly and mechanical state-organised genocide.
stalin, on the other hand, maneuvered his way into power in a backwards country just out of a devastating civil war. his actions weren’t as shocking or as ideologically hateful as hitler’s.
and above all, if you look at the communist manifesto, and mein kampf, and imagine both of these instruction manuals had been perfectly and victoriously implemented, only one of those worlds would be worth living in. i think that makes a big difference.
Also, the US and the UK beat the nazis, so the worse they are seen as, the better the great allies look. nobody beat the soviet union except the soviet peoples.
Thank you Shane. I agree entirely – I think, as does Ben, that the orderly and organised side of things was perhaps the most horrific.
But you live in Berlin, and I was raised in Vienna, so it’s just that little bit closer to home. Which really does make it sting.
Interesting to read your comments on Nazi vs Communist imagery. I think the modern perception of these speaks volumes about the power of propaganda on both sides – Nazi Germany presenting itself as the New World Order, and the allies consistently portraying the Nazis as the ultimate evil. I think the main reason people remember WW2 so fondly is that, thanks to propaganda, it was a time of absolute moral certainty – WE are the good guys and THEY are the bad guys. Everything WE do is noble and heroic and everything THEY do is evil and designed to destroy us. A great deal of fear, hope and hatred can be absorbed into this mindset. There are echoes of it since then – the McCarthy era in the US effectively demonised communism in the states, and the new found war on terror. ‘Terror’ is the ultimate enemy because, unlike Nazi Germany, it can never be defeated.
Brother Toad,
nah, the pills are all in order
)
just being silly & exorcising my oft misunderstood strain of humour making reference to the holocaust denialists for (clearly un)comedic effect.
by the by: the Gregorian calendar puts the ‘October Revolution’ as actually happening in November. so, a strangely anniversorially coincidental post (90 years give or take the odd day).
LET LIVE FOR CENTURIES THE NAME & WORK OF MR. TOAD!
Just a thought. When Hitler killed people it was across class. Which means he was killing people who were more economically able to lobby, express and publish their memories. Sadly if you are too poor to afford food (Darfur, rural Russia the list goes on…), you are hardly likely to save up for paper and a pen. Is it possible the at the answer to this could be that it’s a class issue. If you want to get away with this this sort of thing, make sure you only kill poor people (a song suggests itself).
Toad, I applaud you for raising this debate. Very gutsy topic to raise.
On the whole I agree with Ben that it was the orderliness and the fact that it was in a distinctly Western country that made the Nazi regime extra horrible.
But keep in mind that moral certainty is a rare thing in politics. Let’s not forget that, in the century preceding WWII, North American governments carried out a campaign of ghettoization and genocide (physical and cultural) against aboriginals that was, shall we say, on the same moral plane as the Nazis.
The Nazis, let’s not forget, were the enemy and therefore the subject of intense propaganda efforts before and after the war. Stalin was given the benefit of the doubt and even praised by the Western media during the war. So is it any wonder that the enduring popular memory is that Hitler was the epitome of evil while Stalin gets a pass.
Finally, let me close with my own controversial observation: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao. What do all these guys have in common? They all called themselves socialists and described themselves as(perhaps even believed themselves to be)heroes of the working man.
Personally, I believe political debate should be ying-yang, with both sides recognizing each other’s contribution to the process. Nothing drives me battier than when one side or another adopts an attitude of snide moral self-righteousness. Your essay nicely illustrates the sorts of hypocrisy such attitudes inspire.
I worried a bit about getting into this actually, but I am amazed and impressed that there’s been no descent into nonsense.
And I certainly agree that because ‘we’ defeated the Nazis ourselves it definitely massages our self-image to make them out to be the worst of the worst. How else could the Allies have won the Greatest and Most Courageous Victory of All Time(TM)?
The comment about Socialism is not bait I am going to take with my current historical knowledge, but it strikes me that to actually become a proper genocidal maniac you have to basically install a dictatorship in one form or another, and generally the way people do that is a kind of revolution, either a violent one or one by election, in the Hitler style.
And you can’t do that without being the Champion of the People.
Most of the atrocities of the British Empire were done in the name of Capitalism, for example. It was an Empire based around trade, albeit ludicrously lopsided deals enforced by military might – sound familiar? The invention of capitalism is one of the most basic reasons the British Empire was as successful as it was, as I understand it.
A great many other colonial atrocities, Belgium in the Congo being one of the most horrific examples, were committed in the name of some crown or other.
Yes, that’s a good observation and one that hadn’t occurred to me before. Quite curious, really, that the atrocities of the 19th Century were done in the name of Capitalism and Trade while most of the atrocities of the 20th Century were done in the Socialism. The atrocities of the 21st Century? Too soon to tell, but the trend isn’t a good one, eh?
Anyway, I wanted to emphasize that my “socialist atrocities” observation is not meant as bait, but rather as an illustration that, in politics and ideology, no one owns the moral high ground, so we should all make an effort to put rhetoric aside in any discussion. It’s that “Monkey” business I’m always droning on about in my blog
Especially now that the Tories and the Labour Party over here are basically identical in terms of ideology, partisan hollering is all they have left Mentok, don’t you take that away from them.
It’s interesting in the States too, because a lot of the things Bush is getting hammered for, in particular the annihilation of civil liberties and executive accountability, are things Clinton were very keen on as well.