talkpolitics | How Did We Get Here?

Maybe it was Pat Buchanan saying that we didn't need any more Jews on the Supreme court. Maybe it was Lewis Black's hilarious takedown of Glenn Beck's Nazi meme. Maybe it was both things things, combined with the Roger Ebert/Caleb Howe incident, the latest example of the insane, right wing dehumanization which has been becoming more and more "normal." Maybe it's the fact that Arizona has banned ethnic studies in its public schools. Maybe it's the fact that "empathy" is now treated as a dirty word by many right wingers.

Whatever, the reason, I felt the urge this morning to rummage back among my files and find an essay I wrote about a decade ago, about a new mantra I'd begun encountering online -- the too-ridiculous-to-even-refute claim that Hitler was a leftist.

It's worth posting again, and worth reading again, keeping in mind that it was originally written in the summer of the year 2000:

Hitler Was a Leftist": The New Revisionism

Did you know that Hitler was a Leftist? That Africans have been scientifically proven to be inherently less intelligent than Europeans? That Al Gore once said, "Democrats understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child"?

If not, you haven't spent time in the world of Internet Discussion boards, where can be found the arguments, the ideas, and the beliefs that drive much of the predominantly white and young online community. While it is difficult to gauge how seriously the reader is intended to take many of these messages, it is not difficult to see that ideas once considered discredited for good are being repeated online as if they were new and exciting theories. Add to this a disturbing trend towards historical revisionism, and the result is a situation that warrants cautious attention.

When we hear the word "revisionism" most of us think of Holocaust Revisionism. The most extreme reaches of the far right were among the first to understand the usefulness of the Internet as a resource, and as a result it's easy to become distracted by the number of hate groups who have made themselves conspicuous online. Worse, it's easy to ignore the seemingly minor examples of outright untruth that crop up. Next to a statement like "the Holocaust never happened", a statement like "The Holocaust happened, but Hitler was a leftist" seems relatively sane, even harmless.

Repeated once, and on its own, it might be. Repeated often, and at the same time as certain other statements on race, heredity, and political freedom, it is neither. And the claim that Hitler was a creature of the left rather than the right is being repeated often, alongside claims that black Americans are inferior in intelligence to white Americans, the "underclass" is inferior in intelligence to the "elite," and the blacklisting bully tactics of the McCarthy era were warranted.

The most commonly cited origin for the claim of Hitler as a leftist is Austrian economist Friedrich Von Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom." Published fifty years ago, "The Road to Serfdom" rejected the idea that Fascism is capitalistic, and lumped both Stalinism and Nazism together as "collectivism". While "The Road to Serfdom" was well-received by some conservatives, the idea of Hitler as a leftist does not seem to have caught on then, perhaps because both the Third Reich and the years leading up to it were still well within living memory. There were living right-wingers who had to cope with the embarrassment of having embraced Hitler in the 1930s as a fellow enemy of Communism, and living leftists who could look back with pride on having recognized Hitler as a danger long before many other Americans did. The memory of the Nazis flirting with Socialism in the 1920s -- mainly as a ploy to attract workers into the party -- was not outweighed by the memory of Hitler's suppression of unions and hatred of leftists.

This has changed. In a decade or two, the Second World War is going to seem as distant to young Americans as the Civil War seemed to my generation, the issues and debates that surrounded it just as antiquated, the truth just as slippery. Online discussions about Hitler's Germany these days often deteriorate into a wrangle over the significance of the Nazi Party platform from the 1920s with someone who seems less appalled by Nazi mass murder than by the fact that the Nazis incorporated the word "Socialist" into their party name. Discussion of the Social Darwinism, the racism, and the hatred of liberals and leftists that were the hallmarks of Nazism, is successfully avoided.

It can be argued that whether or not Hitler was a leftist is beside the point. Mass murder is mass murder, and leftists in this century have proven themselves to be as willing to commit it as right-wingers. But when the statement "Hitler was a leftist" appears at the same time as other, more familiar untruths, it comes across less as an interesting bit of historical revisionism than an attempt to divorce the name "Hitler" from some of the very theories that inspired his crimes. If Hitler's brutality can be associated, not with racism and Social Darwinism, but with the fact that the early Nazi Party gave lip service to Socialism, then a large hurdle in reintroducing white supremacy and eugenics into the mainstream of political thought will be overcome.

This is not to claim that there is an organized effort afoot to revive these ideas. There does, however, seem to be a disorganized effort. Perhaps, much of what we see on the Internet is merely the product of youth, inexperience, and ignorance, and will evaporate harmlessly as the Internet population ages and mature. But while people do and should have a right to post whatever crazy theory they have on the Internet, it's a good idea to keep track of those crazy theories, and to counter them, at least occasionally, with reason and facts.

Otherwise, we could wake up one morning appalled to discover what has been accepted as the truth, and what has been rejected.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lovefromgirl.livejournal.com

When we hear the word "revisionism" most of us think of Holocaust Revisionism.

I think of revisionist history in general: the idea that anyone of any ideology can twist historical fact to suit his present worldview.

Hence why I find it absurd that any of today's political machines can blame Hitler on any of the others. He came first. Any attempt to lump him in with any of today's parties is invalid; we can conjecture all we like, but Hitler and his Nazi party stand alone.

From:

paft.livejournal.com

de: I think of revisionist history in general:

Yes, in the year 2010, a decade after this essay was written.

de: Hence why I find it absurd that any of today's political machines can blame Hitler on any of the others.

It's not just "today's political machines" who "blame" the right for Hitler. His contemporaries did on both the right or the left. Trying to paint him as a leftist is a damnable lie, and an insult to the countless leftists he murdered.

de: but Hitler and his Nazi party stand alone.

Only if you carefully unfocus your eyes and pretend that history has no relevance.

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How Did We Get Here?