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05/08/2005:

"Hitler Won"

by Rootsie

Having come through Holocaust Remembrance week sufficiently chastened and guilt-ridden, we are now treated to the pomp and pageantry of the 60th anniversary celebration of V-E Day.

The one piece of European history that every schoolchild in the West is admonished from the earliest age to ‘never forget’ is the Holocaust. He or she is taught to view the Nazis’ mass extermination of the Jews as a ghastly and fascinating anomaly. The suggestion is made that a sudden eruption of ‘pagan’ notions of blood purity forms the ideological basis for Germany’s brief bout with insanity. Today, the Germans are in church, while the rest of us are patting each other on the back for banding together to defeat the evil of Hitler.

I was one of those children thus indoctrinated and thus believing. I remember the first time I came across some of those lurid photos from the camps in Readers Digest. I looked at them again, and then again. I could not stop looking.

I also ‘never forgot’ the history that gave rise to Hitler; I was never taught it

Ah, but when we become grown, we are admonished to put away childish things.

Anybody who has sufficiently informed herself knows that Hitler was no odd man out in European history. Like the centuries of European imperial bandits before him, he sought ‘breathing room’ for his cramped country. By the time he came along, the more exotic places like Africa and South America were taken, so he looked East. The idea of ‘racial purity’ was the one-note song of the previous centuries of European thought and action. Hitler neither invented the notions of Aryan supremacy nor of world conquest and the mass extermination of groups of human beings: 8 million in Leopold’s Congo, 50 million in South America and the Caribbean, 50 million in the years of the slave trade. Hitler had centuries of European science and philosophy to back him up. He didn’t have to dream up a thing.

The queer-eye guys who script the ‘look’ for all these pageants we’ve been treated to lately, from the red, white, and blue Reagan funeral to the bling bling and the acres of pricey fabric of the ‘Pope dies/Pope is elected’ party, to this weekend’s more explicitly martial themes (lots of leather and steel, with flowers strewn about for contrast), do however, owe a lot to the Nazi aesthetic. Nobody since Napolean could put together an imperial pageant like them Nazis.

Until now. It can’t be lost on the rest of the world that the V-E festivities bear an unmistakable message about power. They scream,
“Don’t fuck with me.” The heavy nostalgia of the proceedings owe a lot to Hitler too. They emotionally enjoin us to remember our past greatness and perseverance, to ‘stay the course,’ to spread the light of freedom hither and yon.

Whether Hitler died in that bunker in Berlin or lives on Mars with Elvis, the values he embodied have galloped across the planet untrammeled since V-E day. A bunch of little Hitlers, Nazis smuggled out of Europe with the help of the OSS and the Pople, were unleashed on Latin America and turned it into one giant torture chamber. European and American colonialism are directly accountable for a million slaughtered in two years in Cambodia, a million in 8 weeks in Rwanda, a million a year for the past three years in DR Congo. The techniques of and cracked rationales for mechanized mass murder have been embraced and perfected all over the place. ‘Paramilitaries,’ ‘death squads’, ‘gulags’ and ‘special forces’ stalk the planet. And the perpetrators of this hideous suffering were and are the victors partying hearty in Europe today. Bush says evil like Hitler’s still exists in the world. About that he is right. The bad guys are definitely on the march. And they are winning.

Today is Mother’s Day, but I don’t believe there has been a day for 2000 years that has reflected the interests of mothers. That muscular and distant male Sky God seems to hold all the cards, and brother do we suffer for him. “Fascism” is virtually hardwired into the European psyche, with its “anti-sexual religious morality,”* and its perverse twisting of our ancestral ideas of blood purity. Fascism is not a throwback to more “barbarous” times. It is a pure product of “Western Civilization” itself. Repression, sadism, greed, violent competition: these are not “human nature.” These are what happens when people have forgotten their humanity.

All those Holocaust museums and memorials have “Never Forget” engraved on a rock somewhere. This should set off alarm bells for anybody who has noticed that fostering forgetfulness is the primary tool of empire.

From The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor (Harper Collins, 1987)