CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog

Timothy Burke

Twizzle Twazzle Twozzle Twome

Time for this one to come home.

Or so went the line in an old cartoon where a turtle got sent into the past by a kindly wizard in order to experience the lessons of history.

It's certainly how I'm feeling at this point. Stop the ride, I want to get off. Since that's not an option, I suppose we have to buck up and think about what Gandalf (paraphrasing Lenin) tells us: that we have to decide what to do with the time that is given us.

I'm on record here as regarding historical analogies as something to be made carefully, and there is no more potent and misused an analogy than the rise of fascism in Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s. That it comes up so repeatedly is a sign both of the extent to which fascism has come to be simplistically synonymous with evil, and therefore the rhetorical equivalent of a carpet bombing deployed against an opposing argument: call it fascist, and you're done. As Godwin notes, so too is the conversation at that point. But it also comes up often because the orthodox (and I think accurate) understanding of fascism and the Holocaust see them as clear and present dangers embedded as potentialities within modern societies, much as authoritarian statism is the permanent danger of bureaucratic government.

So while most analogies to fascism and Nazism in the present conjuncture remain, or ought to remain, out of bounds--Ted Rall's comparison of US troops to the Wehrmacht was fantastically stupid, for comparison--there does strike me as being one valid analogy that focuses or clarifies an existing question about the present.

Ever since the rise of Nazism, historians and commentators have second-guessed what Germans might have done to stop it before the fatal seizure of power. There are as many opinions on this as there are historians. There is a school, mostly recently represented by Ian Kershaw, that argues that the fight against Nazism was lost within party politics, that other political parties underestimated Hitler, or selfishly thought to use him to secure their own interests. There are those who blame parties in the center and the center-left for not going into the streets and joining the physical fight against the Nazis. There are those who blame sectarianism within the left. There are those who blame the Marxists for antagonizing and frightening the German mainstream and driving them to Nazism. There are those who blame the German people as a whole and see Nazism as the authentic expression of their will. There are those who blame particular classes or social groups. There are those who blame no one, and see Nazism's rise as structurally inevitable.

I raise the analogy because it does seem comparable to me to one narrow aspect of the present crisis. I am not saying the current government of the US, much as I profoundly loathe this Administration, is an apt analogy to the Nazi Party. More, I'd say it's like a late-Weimar regime, the gathering thunderclouds of a possible storm. I wouldn't have said that two months ago. Why do I say it now?

Not because of the prison abuses, not exactly. More because of two related developments in the wake of those abuses: first, the degree to which one important faction of the American right has unabashedly revealed its total contempt for anything approaching universal liberal democratic values, or any sense that the United States must actually earn its status as moral exemplar rather than have that status conferred on it as a cultural and racial inevitability, a national destiny. In the aftermath of Abu Gharaib, the intellectual and ethical collapse of one segment of the right has been total. It's been a litmus test to see who jumps which way. Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, has jumped back from madness and begun to ask the questions that need asking and say the things that need saying. But much of the populist right like Rush Limbaugh, as well as commentators like Victor Davis Hanson and politicians like James Inhofe, have dived in and happily wallowed in pure and unrestrained moral excrement.

The far more disturbing thing for me is that this isn't just the chattering classes, that there is a segment of the American public for whom there appear to be no conditions or events that would falsify their belief that the war in Iraq is necessary, just and winnable. More, judging not just from press reports but things I've overheard myself in conversations, there are people who believe that the conduct in Abu Gharaib was justified and if anything not extreme enough, and that the war has to be prosecuted with more intensity and force in every respect. There is the ordinary American man in today's New York Times who says, "Wipe them all out". There are those who many of us have overheard saying, "Well, if it comes to that, we have nukes".

There's nothing you can really say to this kind of fairly unapologetic exterminationism. Either it's basically insane and therefore completely barred to reason--how did "wipe them all out" become the aim of a war undertaken for humanitarian reasons?--or it is supra-rational and reveals that the war has been always at its core a New Crusade against Islam, a deliberately and intentionally exterminationist or brutalist program.

The reason this raises the specter of 1930 and the question of what Germans ought to have done against Nazism for me is that I now have a new appreciation for how hard it might have been to know what to do then, because I don't really know what to do now. What does one do when one becomes aware that a significant plurality of one's fellow citizens seems to believe that it's right to torture people and pursue an exterminationist or brutalist strategy of conquest? I honestly have no idea.

Against leaders or parties or even bloggers, I think I have some idea of what to do. Against millions of other Americans with whom I might share many things in common--people I go to the mall with, play computer games against, watch films in theatres alongside, walk the streets next to, root for baseball teams with--I feel powerless. Fight them in the streets? What good would that do? Write blog entries? Do they read them, and are they persuadable by anything I might say? No. March on Washington? They don't live inside the Beltway.

I know there are things that we can do and ought to do. I'm very proud of Lindsay Graham and John McCain, for example. It's just that I find it so enervating to know that there are so many who lack basic human decency or a basic commitment to what I would regard as the essential American virtues.

I emerged from 9/11 with a renewed faith and pride in American society, with a sense of my belonging to America and treasuring its achievements and possibilities. I still believe in America, love America, but I increasingly wonder if I am believing in a once and future thing, that in the kingdom of the present, the America I love is lost.


Posted on Friday, May 14, 2004 at 9:40 AM 

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