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.
Ruth and I are back on Fresh Air Radio once more this evening, live from 8pm for an hour and a half.
