In modern Western society, there is no worse political slur than Nazi. In Europe any positive reference to the Nazi regime or any disagreement with the official myths on that era are illegal.
The Nazi phenomenon has been elevated to one of the top official myths of Westerndom. It is cultivated to crate a separation from the past for the regimes which are the heirs of the systematic world wide genocides and atrocities of the colonial ear during which the wealth and foundations of the modern Western state were created. The myth provides that in fighting against the Nazis the West exculpated itself for its past crimes, without changing its actual social structure or ceasing even for a moment the colonialist brutality.
The Holocaust is painted as the worst event in history, and one which permits only one interpretation, one which is extremely politically useful to Western interesets. The cult of the condemnation of the Holocaust allows the US, a country which conducted the most successful genocide in modern history against the Native Americans, better than Iran, a country which in its entire history has only wage one war, a defensive struggle against Iraq.
But how long can this distorted myth survive, even with the resources of the dominant world powers and their propaganda machines behind it?
Before I continue, I must conform to the required form of speech regarding the Nazis and the Holocaust, or else I am not going to be heard at all. I am Jewish and I am not a Holocaust denier. In fact in a way I am the opposite of a Holocaust denier, I am someone who believes that holocausts of this type occurred regularly and systemically as a part of European colonial expansion and more generally as part of the human history of violence and domination. Hopefully that will reduce some of the outrage some readers may experience at the deviation of this diary from the proscribed language on this subject. To jump ahead, the thesis of this diary is that by creating and nurturing the current perception of the Nazis and the Holocaust, we are removing the Nazis and the Holocaust from the general current of Western history, we are feeding the illusion that such events are rare or even unique in this civilization, and lulling people into the feeling that as long as that exact nightmare scenario does not recur, they live in the lands of the free and the best possible political under economic system in history. The fact that there are only a few steps between the classic European fascism and its postmodern counterparts is carefully obscured and that is the main purpose and the main tragedy of this myth.
World War II, the Nazis and the Holocaust are a strange obsessive interest in modern Western culture, which is at its highest in Germanic countries, Germany, Austria, England, France, the US, Scandinavia and Australia. These are not just the cultures most closely related to the Germany which gave rise to the Nazi movement, being culturally, economically, politically and even linguistically very similar. That cannot be attributed solely to the fact that these countries were the major combatants of World War II. Russia was the country which suffered the most in World War II, and yet its myths on the subject are quite different. Having grown up there, I am very familiar with them, and would like to summarize them to illustrate how many ways there are to see this phenomenon other than the official myth current in Western countries. Russians do not see the Nazi invasion as fundamentally different from all the previous times the Germans and other Western Europeans attacked Russia. Drang nach Osten, "The thrust to the East," is a policy that dates back to the early medieval period when Western Europeans for the first time achieved technical superiority over their Eastern Slavic neighbors and began a systematic campaign of conquest and genocide that carried the frontiers of German habitation, Catholic religious practice and the Western economic models as they evolved from feudalism to industrialization and beyond, from the initial border of the Rhine, all the way east to Poland and the Baltic countries.
The Northern crusades, during which the cream of pan Western European knighthood came to fight against the Slavs in Prussia, Estonia, and Poland, went on for centuries and their main vehicle, the Teutonic Order founded the Prussian military state which, eventually absorbing the rest of Germany into the Bismarkian Empire, carried on the conflict during the World Wars. Only after the demographic pattern shifted, changing Europe from an expanding to a shrinking population zone, and when the modern economic model shifted away from direct colonialism to the current indirect modes of economic exploitation and control, did the Western Europeans shift their efforts to a more peaceful push for control of the region through such structures as the EU and NATO.
The Western historians and societies attempt to sever this fairly obvious link between early movements of Germanic expansion or previous wars of imperialist competition for power by focusing on the level of atrocities committed by the nazis, elevating them to a legendary status as The Holocaust. The power of the Holocaust is regularly mined by Western corporate and political culture, from simple invocations to silence opponents, to being one of the dominant modern historical motifs taught in public schools, to a mode to isolate opponents on the international stage for their faulty interpretation or insufficient veneration of the Holocaust. Yet the numbers killed are dwarfed even within the twentieth century by such extermination campaigns as the Soviet purges or the Chinese Great Leap Forward. The proportion of a people exterminated, estimated to be about half the world's Jewry, and a lower proportion of the world's Gypsy population, are comparable to other twentieth century campaigns carried out by other Western European powers, such as the US and Australian genocides of the aboriginal populations, or the purposeful depopulation campaigns which were one of the primary tactics in European colonial wars, such as the Boer War, the Filipino Insurrection, the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, etc. The use of concentration and death camps, the use of poison gas, all of these tactics were inherited by the Germans, who were latecomers to the colonial game, from the leaders in the field such as Britain and France.
An integral part of this myth construction is to attribute the conduct of the Holocaust to the Germans, and among them, the Nazis. It is as if an alien race came down, committed this isolated crime and then was exterminated by the righteous onslaught of the rest of humanity. Yet history definitively establishes that the extermination of the Jews was something in which members of nearly every European ethnicity participated voluntarily and enthusiastically, though in varying numbers. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Dutch, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Ukranians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Russians, Romanians, etc. etc. all took part in the rounding up and murder of Jews. From a purely numerical standpoint Polish and Ukrainian nationals probably killed more Jews than Germans did. It was a pan European phenomenon rooted in a centuries old history of antisemitism, and the resort to wholesale killing as a solution to the Jewish Question had happened countless times prior to the Holocaust period.
It is thus impossible from a purely historical standpoint to deny that the Nazis are a part and parcel of Western history, not some unique taboo phenomenon to which all reference, except in the proper hushed tone, is forbidden. So use is made of emotional persuasion, of the political tactic that used to be called "Waving the Bloody Shirt" when it was used by Republican politicians to hold on to power following the Civil War by demonizing any Democratic opponent by a connection with the horrors of the Confederate rebellion. This myth also remains, updated by a connection instead to opposition to integration which is ascribed often to Southern interests. Waving the Bloody Shirt is a powerful rhetorical technique, and is most often used to distinguish oneself from an otherwise equivalent opponent. Northern politicians, who wholeheartedly embraced segregation in their personal lives and supported fully the model of economic and police domination which replaced slavery as the mode of exploitation and control by whites over blacks, would froth at the mouth recalling the acts of resistance to federal authority engaged in by the dastardly Southerners.
Waving the Bloody Shirt in the Holocaust context is nearly ubiquitous in modern Western discourse. The label of Holocaust denier is attached to international political opponents who attempt to undermine the West's monopolistic use of this imagery. For example, Iranian leaders are panned for suggesting that the Holocaust is a European phenomenon for which Western civilization, rather than the Islamic one, bears responsibility. To disagree with the construct that because once again in the 20th century Europe once again joined together to kill the Jews in their midst, as they had done so many times before, the Islamic world must find room in its midst for an aggressive Western model settler state is absurd on its face, yet any attempt to point that out is somehow related back to Holocaust denial.
I think the postmodern generation is outgrowing this. As World War II becomes a distant memory, the purely aesthetic images associated with the Nazis and once wholly taboo, are reemerging in popular culture. Nazi chic is now gay chic, just watch a Lady Gaga video. People from British princes to porn models are wearing Nazi armbands for shock value and for their aesthetic appeal. (Say what you will about the Nazis, they had an eye for flashy outfits.) The educational/propaganda system tries its hardest to keep the interest of the students by throwing the gore and brutality of it at children who are of course fascinated by such things. I remember receiving a nasty shock when a teacher friend of mine proudly told me how she had her students design their own death camp to give them a deeper understanding of the Holocaust. As an Eastern European Jew, I feel uncomfortable at the thought of blond children cheerfully arguing whether the gas chambers would most efficiently be placed by the entrance or by the holding cells.
The interest for the technical details (oh, Zyclon B, how elegant) is extremely creepy, and any excessive interest in this one particular European crime is unhealthy. Contrary to the claims that by venerating this myth, we are somehow preventing it from happening again, the opposite is true. By removing the Nazis and the Holocaust from the general current of Western history, we are feeding the illusion that such events are rare or even unique in this civilization, and lulling people into the feeling that as long as that exact nightmare scenario does not recur, they live in the lands of the free and the best possible political under economic system in history. The fact that there are only a few steps between the classic European fascism and its postmodern counterparts is carefully obscured and that is the main purpose and the main tragedy of this myth.
I want the Holocaust demystified, placed back in the context of European and Western history where it belongs and where it will find many close parallels, and stripped of its power to demonize opponents of the Western regimes. The Holocaust should be a bloody blot on the hands of Western imperialists, not a weapon for their use. And the people should be free to interpret its significance as they wish, and to make whatever visual statements they wish with Nazi inspired artistic or fashion statements.