While I'm on the subject of how US conservatives misunderstand the history of WW II to piss me off, there is this gem from "Right Wing News" (motto: "Bashing the French Before Bashing the French Was Cool" among others) about the vandalism of a Jewish school in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin:
I'm a little amazed that there are still Jews living in Germany because the Germans can talk about how much they've reformed, but you know there will always be a current of deep, virulent anti-Semitism in that country. Just imagine being a Jew in Germany and knowing that most of the 80 or 90 year olds you see on the street supported gassing people like you and now, those people are sitting their great-grand children on their knees and telling them about the world.
I love how the writer manages to patronize German Jews while simultaneously bashing their compatriots. Because you're only a bigot if you attack the minority, eh?
Since this is the Internet, and therefore the obvious must be stated, I find vandalism of any kind heinous and vandalizing schools and places of worship doubly so. It's the act of someone too cowardly to stand up and speak to his or her beliefs in the public and anti-Semitism is the hateful refuge of sad, loathsome people. But they do not, thankfully, represent the whole of the German nation. Nor did they ever.
( It takes less than five minutes to find more than a dozen similar incidents that occurred in the US in 2006 )The idea that the German people were enthusiastic participants the machinery of the Holocaust and the Final Solution - Hitler's plan for the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews - has a certain appeal these days, particularly among conservatives (see Slate.com,
"Goldhagen's Willing Executioners" for the controversy around the book
Hitler's Willing Executioners and its critics). It provides a nice simple answer to the question "who is responsible for the worst crime in human history" that neatly leaves everyone not German off the hook - and by "everyone else" I mean Canada, the United States, England; "enlightened" and democratic countries,
who nevertheless closed the door on German Jews seeking to emigrate (in fact, encouraged to emigrate) following the Nazi rise to power and the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. The Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust but the fault can be shared among all nations who chose not to act so long as the persecution of the Jews (as well as Communists, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies and dissidents of all sects and creeds) remained an internal matter.
Casting Nazism, the Holocaust and the Final Solution as a specifically "German" problem allows people to write the Holocaust off as a freak of History, Nazism as merely the ugliest expression of Prussian triumphalism. By doing so, we are spared having to answer the hard questions (how do you get ordinary people to commit monstrous acts) and the harder answers (easily) that this time in history has left in its wake. And any scary parallels you might draw between then and now can be dismissed as hyperbolic rhetoric because, after all, the Holocaust is a
German problem.
The fact is that Germany was no more and, in many cases, somewhat less anti-Semitic than its European neighbours and North American contemporaries in the early 20th century. German Jews experienced growth in their civil liberties and, for want of a better term, social acceptance throughout the 19th century. There was nothing about the dawn of the 20th century that suggested this would change. That thugs and hate mongers like the Nazis could come to power in a democratic nation that had all the benefits that education, affluence and urbanity could provide should be a reminder that liberty rests on a fragile compact between people and power; that when people stop thinking and stop questioning and allow themselves to be swept along with the crowd without regard to their consciences, terrible abuses can and will occur.
But what we should never allow ourselves is the comfort and the easy, smug superiority of saying that "it could never happen here."
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