The new Indiana Jones movie (which I haven’t seen) got me thinking again about the Nazis, and the Berkley podcast I’m listening to (not sure which one) just got to the Third Reich, too. This got me thinking back to Brian’s post, A question I shouldn’t HAVE to ask, and I wanted to expand a bit on some of those thoughts.
If the very reality of the Third Reich doesn’t shake the foundations of your soul, there are only two options. Either:
- You don’t actually know enough about the Third Reich to be scared, or
- You are in denial about the reality of the Third Reich
The Third Reich literally took everything that seemed so positive about humanity and turned it inside out. And it didn’t do it in some magical way — it did it through taking one step after another, and the citizens of the Third Reich just adapting to their new normal. The citizens under the Third Reich were no more stupid, cowardly, or susceptible to corruption than you and I are — we’re just as likely to be suckered in by the same tactics. And that’s what should be scaring you. It petrifies me.
Everything that might bring you hope, or that you might see as redeemable in humanity, was corrupted by the Third Reich. They took whatever it was and used its own rules and its own internal consistency in order to reach their extreme ends. There is no place to retreat to — no part of our society which inculcates you from the Third Reich’s siren call.
The most obvious example is science and technology. Germany was the foremost scientific powerhouse of Europe: both before, during, and after WW2, most of America’s great and famous scientists of the time period were really German scientists who relocated to the United States for one reason or another. But the Nazis took medical science and turned it into gruesome and tortuous medical experiments on unwilling patients. They took Nobel prize chemistry and turned it into poison gas. They took the fledgling science of sociology and used it to argue for their own tragic policies. The very thing that defined the modern era — the railroad — was the very thing that enabled the concentration camps to function. Science and technology were thoroughly co-opted by the Third Reich, and so scientific and technical advancement simply became new ways for the Third Reich to advance itself.
Mass media is another example. Germany was on the forefront in early films, and that was corrupted into propaganda. If you have not seen “Triumph of the Will”, do so now. As you watch it, watch out — there is something innate and horrifically enticing about what it is portraying.
Governmental guidance for society — that is, “progressivism” — were just as corrupted. The Third Reich spent a lot of time (particularly during its rise) in establishing effective governmental offices, reducing poverty, improving education, and cleaning up the cities. Hitler took many of his cues for economic reconstruction from the New Deal. They made the trains run on time. And, in the process of establishing this new society, the Third Reich established the Hitler Youth, indoctrinated the children, and rendered people complacent. And the eugenics programs were all progressive ideas at their time, based on equal parts of cutting-edge science and cultural bigotry.
You can go through all the places where people seem to place their hope — religion, the free market, music, books, national identity…whatever you want. All of them were taken and completely subsumed into the Nazi system.
And through all of this corruption, people just lived their day to day lives, just getting by. Some genuinely ignorant, some willfully ignorant, people walked through this world just getting by. And that’s the part that scares me the most.
The most frustrating point in all of this, though, is that we don’t take the Third Reich seriously anymore. They were just token bad guys for a long time — “the guy with the swastika was the bad guy” is a hackneyed way of establishing a villain. Now, the Nazis aren’t even token bad guys, as Brian’s post pointed out. Comparisons with Nazis are so lightly done that we have Godwin’s Law, but nobody seems to really grasp what they’re comparing against. I’m not saying we should start referring to Hitler as He Who Shall Not Be Named, but we can at least start taking our own weakness and susceptibility seriously. And we can start acknowledging, as a culture, that each of these places where we place our hope has a dark side which we need to watch out for.
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