Sunday, June 10, 2018

Sidebar V: Why Start here?

Sidebar V: Why Start here?

War World Two. The single largest war ever fought in human history. What images come to your mind likely depend on your nation of origin but I have to honestly say that I think it conjures massive armies and battles on a scale never seen before or after. Of cities shattered and nations rendered to ruins. There a number of stories that have captured the imagination of the world, Saving Private Ryan, Enemy at the Gates, Downfall, Bridge on the River Kwai and so on. Most of these stories are epics. They capture great turning points of the war or great deeds done during the war. There are so many that you could simply focus on reviewing World War II stories and never finish. So why start with a the story of a single Jewish family trying to escape a genocide made from 20th century science and industry? Why start with the holocaust?

Because if you want to know what it was all for, you need to both start small and get at the very soul of it. The Holocaust is nothing less than the truest expression of the soul of Nazism. An all too human marriage of industrial skill, logistical know-how, and scientific ability; to vile and monstrous ends. To wipe out entire groups of human beings for having the audacity to exist and have things that the Nazis wanted (The goal of the Nazis in Eastern Europe was to enslave or kill all Slavs and take control of everything from the Elbe to the Urals as agrarian Lebensraum for the Aryan/Germanic peoples). Well, that's part of it. The Holocaust was also about degrading them, grinding them down and robbing them of every ounce of dignity and hope; seeing how many of their victims they could force to act like rats in a trap. Because the Nazis needed to prove that their victims weren't human, weren't people. This constant need to degrade, humiliate and do whatever it took to manufacture proof that their bigotry rested on anything but a foundation of lies and mad delusion is a repeating theme in Nazi actions (To illustrate how deep it ran; in the polish Ghettos, the Jews were crammed into tight conditions and there were no civil services like trash removal; everyone was on starvation rations and so bodies piled up in the streets. When the Nazis made Der Ewige Jude--yes, I’ve seen it--they used the resulting filth and disease to “prove” that Jews were filthy and didn’t care about their surroundings or fellow Jews. Knowing full well that they intentionally created those conditions. “Jews don’t want to work, but barter”, showing Jews haggling over things, even though the work in the Ghetto was very limited and people had to trade for the barest necessities like their lives depended on them. Because their lives did depend on them. They did the same thing inside the barracks in the death camps. They intentionally gave people too little room and no running water. The inevitable consequence was that they were dehumanized and this made it easier for the SS men to torture and kill them). It's writ large across Russia and Eastern Europe, where the Nazis and non-Nazi Germans (And non-German Nazis. The Slovaks paid the Third Reich 500 marks a head to cart away Jews to Auschwitz. Then there was Hungary...) worked constantly to break down the natives of their conquests to rob them of their cultures, their lands and any hope of a better tomorrow. It can be seen in Western Europe, where the Nazis might have been restrained in comparison to the East, they weren't well behaved by any stretch of the imagination.

And in many cases like France--occupied and Vichy--and the British Channel Islands, had the active and willing collaboration of local government officials. At the risk of being too nasty toward France, there are some beautiful things that happened there too. Like entire French villages who took in Jewish children and disguised them as their own relatives. A small village hiding half a dozen Jewish kids in complete secrecy. None of the kids knew they weren’t the only ones, but the entire village did and nobody said a goddamn thing, even when the Nazis paid handsomely or threatened people. No one talked. Despite governmental collaboration, 75% of Jews in France survived. In contrast to the Netherlands where there was less collaboration by non-Nazis, but where only 27% survived. The Netherlands included religion in public records so it was easier to hunt down the Jews. This is why Willem Arondeus and Friede Belinfante, an openly gay artist/novelist and openly lesbian cellist respectively, as well as other members of the dutch resistance, burned down the Dutch records office. Before he was shot, Arondeus uttered a set of last words I will remember until the end of my days. “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards” Happy pride month, everyone.

If we’re going to be honest, this bigotry and naked imperialism isn't really anything new or special in human history. It was the lengths that the Nazis took it to and the organized fashion in which they applied the modern technology of the day that brought them to a new plane of atrocity that hasn't ever been matched. Genocide continues to be part of the human condition, whether it be in Africa, Asia, the Balkans, or Central America but only the Nazis made a machine out of it. That's the why of the war by that I don’t mean that the Allies were setting out to stop a genocide. But it remains why the war had to be fought in the end. Because if the Nazis had won, or gone unchallenged, we would live in a world where such events are acceptable and possibly even common. Where some of us are human beings with feelings and thoughts and others of us are not and thus are not to be considered. These were the ideas that powered the Second World War in Europe. Hitler and his followers had, after all, the goal of remaking the entire world in their own image and we need to consider what kind of image that was. It’s the fact that the Nazi Elite were able to conceive of such a thing and then carry it out despite being at war with nearly 3/4ths of the world and needing every resource possible to stave off defeat, that tells us how important this was to them. How dear it was the Nazi soul. This was their great work, as far as they were concerned. They might deny that, they might deny that it even happened but well, by their deeds will you know them. The mass organized slaughter of entire groups of the human species was so important to them that they kept at it even as they were overrun by the Red Army. Even if that meant diverting resources from stopping that sam Red Army. That should tell us something about how high up the priority list this kind of murder was. So you cannot separate the two as far as I am concerned.

This shouldn't be considered as excusing of the very real crimes and flaws of the Western Allies or the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a authoritarian state ruled by an iron-handed tyrant that killed millions of its own. The British Empire kept hundreds of millions under its rule at bayonet point and dealt with rebellion savagely at times and let’s not forget The United States (And Canada, Australia, as well as New Zealand) was built on the destruction of native culture and peoples and I’m sure we all know about the racial system that existed in the US at the time. But under the West there was hope of improvement. In the 73 years since 1945, western society has improved greatly in how racial minorities, women and sexual orientations are treated (Indeed! I’ve gone from a fully criminalized unperson to a second-class citizen, then finally to an upper-tier second class citizen inside my own lifetime! Woo! 55% of the American population is okay with me sharing office space with them! People actually care when police shoot a 12 year old black kid now! I’m not even being sarcastic, this is good news!). We have improved in many ways in how we treat the world around us and each other. We are not perfect, we may not even be virtuous at times but we have the potential, the methods, and the cultural desire to improve ourselves. Even if we might not agree with each other on what improving ourselves means. That doesn't exist in Nazism. There is no better day. There is only, to mangle a phrase, a jackboot on the face of humanity... Forever.

You might also ask why start so small? With the tale of a single man. Not an important man. Not a really heroic man, really. To be honest Vladek Spiegelman might not even be a good man in a lot of ways. He's flawed, neurotic, quarrelsome, perhaps even grasping. He's also a man who honestly loved his wife and children, as bad as he was at showing it, and didn't ask for much. So why start with his story? As many of you have likely heard until you were sick of it, big stories are made up of little ones. Each small story of a single town or family or single person joins together but if you only step back and look at that whole, you risk losing sight of certain things. Vladek Spiegelman was a lot of things but he was also undoubtedly human, even when drawn as a mouse, and he mattered because of that. It's easy to get lost in an epic and forget the real consequences of those sweeping tank columns and grand fleets and lines of airplanes that blot out the sky. So before we get into that, we need to take a look at what this meant on the ground, what this meant to the people there. That's why we need stories like Maus in our culture, especially about big thunderous events like the Second World War, and that's why I start there. Because these grand epics, in the end are a the joining together of thousands of stories of single people or small groups of people.

The text in the red is our editor Dr. Ben Allen.
The black text is of course me, your reviewer.  

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