There is nothing new about people not knowing much history. About twenty years ago my son had a middle school history teacher who didn't have a clue when the Holocaust was.
If there was no ww2, or if it had been contained via say Germany not winning the battle of France and the holocaust didn’t happen, would anyone be a stand in for “absolute evil” the way Hitler and the Nazi’s are in the Western cultural mindset today? Who would be the bad guy in Indiana Jones? Can you think of a substitute or would there be no true substitute?
What path would communism have taken without ww2?
Was it possible for Japan to hold on to any part of mainland China long term without ww2?
To some extent moral fashions in the west were themselves shaped by reactions to WW2, which is largely *why* Naziism is viewed as the most crystalline form of evil. E.g., it's possible the reason racism is seen as the worst sin is a response to Naziism. Had there been a religious analogue to Hitler - someone who killed a bunch of people for their religious sect - then we might today live in a world where religious bigotry were the greatest kind of moral crime (the small boost Islamic terrorism in the 2000s gave to anti-religious sentiment might be a small taste of what that would be like).
So without Naziism as an eternal bugbear, it would likely be Stalinism. Arguably a big reason Stalin didn't become as much of a moral antagonist as Hitler is precisely because WW2 put Stalin, for a few brief years at least, among the 'the good guys' and helped make the conventional moral narrative around communism sufficiently morally ambiguous to keep it from being thoroughly demonized. Without Hitler, Stalin might take Hitler's place, or Mao or Pol Pot. As kids we might all go to museums about the Holodomor or the purges.
Hitler should present a problem, because what he wanted to do - get rid of people he feared or hated - is indistinguishable in its essentials though not intensity or means, from the longtime desire and practice of the left.
I don't see that. If you mean - immigration - I don't see that objecting to people's continued existence, or to their right to whatever they have - is really the same thing as not wishing to pay for them to move here and upend everything.
If you mean something else, I might well concede - just can't think of what it is.
Remember - since someone else brought up Lee as though he belonged on a podium with Hitler (!) - there was no expectation in the antebellum South that anyone should go anywhere, and certainly no absurd genocidal ideology. Just the very human failing - which we still see all over the world, and so probably always will - the moral failing that is expecting other people to do your work for you.
I will also mention what seems not to be grasped by Yankees - your really nasty Southern racism (which in my humble opinion could without downgrade be classified more accurately and unequivocally as malevolence and violent aggression, very much a thing you'll encounter down some lonely country roads, no matter who you are) is understood by Southerners themselves to be a low-class thing, that emanates from what used to be called "white trash" when they were not so numerous.
Political grandstanding about red states aside, for some reason the American elite has fallen in love with that culture and encourages it at every turn.
But immigrants did take jobs - that was not an unfounded fear. Calling it a fear, is reminiscent of time traveling back to Congress in 1965 lying with certitude about things about which you actually know nothing.
Hopefully racism is not genocide, since whatever exactly it may be, it is the human default and can sometimes even reflect "facts on the ground" if not in a way that on first pass is easily defensible in simple words.
Not sure how many people would have ever given LBGT much thought if it hadn't become the premier civic religion. To wit: there is no one on the planet more conservative than my husband, and I recall trying to engage him on the subject of gay marriage about 15 years ago. Probably on a car trip, we don't otherwise discuss stuff like that much. He rejected the importance of it, numerically. Thought it was mostly political and portended nothing in particular except that there always had to be a latest "outrage" to normalize. We'd move on.
He's not homophobic but I can tell you he's now sick of the subject of L+++++++ and its near-daily invocation.
I live in Texas, which is to say Mexico. Brown people are the personal property of the left. I can assure you that Mexicans are quite sexist no matter how you choose to define that term.
But as sexism to feminists includes things like motherhood though, I agree that you can tar the right with that particular brush.
As to your last assertion - yes, I think there are plenty such. I think Americans if asked in confidence, would probably be pretty united in that. I don't even think you have to invoke sharia lol.
ETA: except Lutherans! Lutherans are the exception that proves the rule - over and over!
"Would anyone be a stand in for “absolute evil” the way Hitler and the Nazi’s are in the Western cultural mindset today?"
Actually, my impression is that Hitler and the Nazis are already on the way out in terms of who is on the the "A-List of Evil" in the mind of a typical young western progressive. Not long from now the typical kid will think they are just "ancient history", a history from which they are increasingly and intentionally alienated save for some extremely selective and distorted portrayals of incidents useful for sowing and reaping emotional whirlwinds of political usefulness. My hunch without looking is that if someone like Zach Goldberg did one of those word-frequency studies he would find that "reducio ad Hitlerum" has been going out of style for a while. WWII movies are fading away similar to how the once highly popular Westerns disappeared.
The progressives shape current perceptions of past evil according to both the present status and political usefulness of the group targeted by that evil. Hitler and the Nazis targeted Jews and killed mostly Europeans and those groups now have low-status in the current sacred-victimhood hierarchy and decreasing usefulness to leftist electoral calculus. Thus the Confederates probably surpass the Nazis already by whatever metric you want to use to measure "fashionably evil".
There are a handful of statues or large busts of Lenin in the US, for example one that's been in Seattle for decades. I figure if you were to put a statue of Hitler to its right and a statue of Robert E Lee to its left, and asked a typical young progressive which statue should be torn down, she would pick Lee over Hitler nine times out of ten, and never touch Lenin. Probably the same goes for Christopher Columbus. It may not be too long before the same could be said about a statue of Lincoln too.
You can't employ a Hitler reducio unless you know who Hitler was and what World War II was and when it happened, at least vaguely. I believe that in my local (almost 100% white, but basically re**rded test score) school district, they teach an entire Holocaust unit to middle schoolers. So, they learn about the Holocaust before they learn about the 20th century or WWII in particular. And "learn" is doing a lot of work as a verb there when the high school graduates are only 50% "proficient" in reading. A half-literate teacher wohk-wohk-wohks for some number of hours about something she barely understands to students who are looking at their phones.
These units, which I believe are sponsored by various NGOs and then piped in through the publisher nexus, are just disconnected from everything else and must seem absurd. In the past generation, most students learned about WWII from "The Hitler Channel" on cable from Spielberg movies, and their grandparents. The current generation has no such cultural or personal link as you point out.
And would there have been a battle for France if France and Britain had not declared war on Germany? Hitler’s attention was East to recover parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost post-WWI with stranded ethnic Germans, to cleanse out the Slavs and get his hands on Russia’s resources and give Germany lebensraum.
He turned West because war was declared on Germany, and it gave him time to camouflage and prepare for the big push into Russia. Britain and France guaranteed Poland’s borders - why? Poland was no strategic interest or close friend/ally to either. And when Germany did invade, followed by the Soviet Union, France and Germany did nothing to aid Poland, which was at war’s end handed over to the USSR by FDR who went behind Churchill’s back and did a deal with Stalin at Yalta. Post-1945 there was no gain to Britain, only ruin. And today? The European Union is in all but name a Fourth Reich, a racket to serve Germany’s interests, and based in Statist, technocratic principles straight from Mussolini’s Manifesto. Who won? And what? And had Germany moved East instead of West (and most likely defeated anyway), the USA would have been able to turn all its resources on war with Japan, instead of ‘Europe First Policy’, and maybe that war would have been shorter with fewer losses.
More pertinent history for people would be the post-WWII redrawing of borders, creation of states and massive movements of people (refugees, ethnic cleansing) following the breakup of colonial empires.
Most people don’t understand that the Israel-Arab issue is just a very small and not too significant part of all that was going on in the 1940s and 50s. The Indian partition was the big one, though many millions of ethnically cleansed refugees in Germany and Poland and Ukraine were another.
Topical as it is now conflict over the breakup and borders of the Soviet empire (Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Armenia) that is also in the news. Hopefully this will not drag on as long as conflicts in the Middle East and Africa have (75 years and counting)
One thing I learned late in life was about operation keelhaul. This effectively amounted to the force return of unwilling civilians that had escaped the Soviet Union back to it as part of the yalta agreement. In effect we acknowledged these people as being Soviet slaves owned by the soviet state.
On the other side of the exchange, the Soviet leadership found out that despite the demands set forth by Stalin, British intelligence was retaining a number of anti-Communist prisoners under orders from Churchill, with the intention of reviving "anti-Soviet operations".[8] The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, which was recruited from Ukrainians in Galicia were not repatriated, ostensibly because Galicia had belonged to Poland prior to September 1939, but in reality because MI6 wished to use the prisoners in future operations.[9] The officer in charge of screening the 14th Division for war criminals, Fitzroy Maclean, admitted in an interview in 1989 that it was "fairly clear that there was every probability that there were war criminals amongst them", but argued that in the context of the Cold War, such men were needed to fight against the Soviet Union.[10] On 23 March 1947, the United Kingdom granted asylum to the entire 14th Division, whose men were subsequently settled in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.[11] The Soviet government protested against this decision, stating that most of the men in the division had previously served in German police units in Galicia and were deeply involved in perpetrating war crimes, but using a brief written by Pavlo Shandruk, an officer in the division as its basis, the Foreign Office issued a statement denying the 14th division had been involved in war crimes.[11]
My high school social studies classes in the late 90's were pretty consistent with your talk. Of course this was only a half decade removed from Schindler's List coming out, which was already being shown in nearly every school in the state. And The Diary of Anne Frank was covered many years before in middle school. A shift from military history to a focus on the holocaust is pretty consistent with a shift to a victimhood culture. Focusing on the holocaust is centering the victims. My wife went to school 2000 miles away and they covered Anne Frank, but Schindler's List was not being shown in schools at the time.
I recommend the 1973 British made 26 episode documentary ‘The World At War’ narrated by Laurence Olivier which gives an excellent overview of the various stages, players, and battles, politics of WWII. What is striking is the hardships, lack of any comforts, the uncertainties that millions of very young men had to endure, not least the almost always present risk of death or serious injury and the death and destruction around them. They learned a fortitude and insight certainly lacking in today’s crop of over-weened, spoiled, risk-averse, milquetoast.
There is nothing new about people not knowing much history. About twenty years ago my son had a middle school history teacher who didn't have a clue when the Holocaust was.
If there was no ww2, or if it had been contained via say Germany not winning the battle of France and the holocaust didn’t happen, would anyone be a stand in for “absolute evil” the way Hitler and the Nazi’s are in the Western cultural mindset today? Who would be the bad guy in Indiana Jones? Can you think of a substitute or would there be no true substitute?
What path would communism have taken without ww2?
Was it possible for Japan to hold on to any part of mainland China long term without ww2?
To some extent moral fashions in the west were themselves shaped by reactions to WW2, which is largely *why* Naziism is viewed as the most crystalline form of evil. E.g., it's possible the reason racism is seen as the worst sin is a response to Naziism. Had there been a religious analogue to Hitler - someone who killed a bunch of people for their religious sect - then we might today live in a world where religious bigotry were the greatest kind of moral crime (the small boost Islamic terrorism in the 2000s gave to anti-religious sentiment might be a small taste of what that would be like).
So without Naziism as an eternal bugbear, it would likely be Stalinism. Arguably a big reason Stalin didn't become as much of a moral antagonist as Hitler is precisely because WW2 put Stalin, for a few brief years at least, among the 'the good guys' and helped make the conventional moral narrative around communism sufficiently morally ambiguous to keep it from being thoroughly demonized. Without Hitler, Stalin might take Hitler's place, or Mao or Pol Pot. As kids we might all go to museums about the Holodomor or the purges.
Hitler should present a problem, because what he wanted to do - get rid of people he feared or hated - is indistinguishable in its essentials though not intensity or means, from the longtime desire and practice of the left.
It is just as prevalent on the right.
I don't see that. If you mean - immigration - I don't see that objecting to people's continued existence, or to their right to whatever they have - is really the same thing as not wishing to pay for them to move here and upend everything.
If you mean something else, I might well concede - just can't think of what it is.
Remember - since someone else brought up Lee as though he belonged on a podium with Hitler (!) - there was no expectation in the antebellum South that anyone should go anywhere, and certainly no absurd genocidal ideology. Just the very human failing - which we still see all over the world, and so probably always will - the moral failing that is expecting other people to do your work for you.
Which tends to have embedded in it its own end, and would have in the South as well.
Off the top of my head:
Agreed not all objections to immigration are unfounded but fear of immigrants taking jobs is not the same as paying for others to move here.
Stereotypical racists are all on the right.
LBGT haters are all on the right (far from all hate the sin, not the sinner)
Stereotypical sexists may be a dying breed but are all on the right.
There are plenty who don't want muslims in the US for fear of sharia and other reasons.
I will also mention what seems not to be grasped by Yankees - your really nasty Southern racism (which in my humble opinion could without downgrade be classified more accurately and unequivocally as malevolence and violent aggression, very much a thing you'll encounter down some lonely country roads, no matter who you are) is understood by Southerners themselves to be a low-class thing, that emanates from what used to be called "white trash" when they were not so numerous.
Political grandstanding about red states aside, for some reason the American elite has fallen in love with that culture and encourages it at every turn.
But immigrants did take jobs - that was not an unfounded fear. Calling it a fear, is reminiscent of time traveling back to Congress in 1965 lying with certitude about things about which you actually know nothing.
Hopefully racism is not genocide, since whatever exactly it may be, it is the human default and can sometimes even reflect "facts on the ground" if not in a way that on first pass is easily defensible in simple words.
Not sure how many people would have ever given LBGT much thought if it hadn't become the premier civic religion. To wit: there is no one on the planet more conservative than my husband, and I recall trying to engage him on the subject of gay marriage about 15 years ago. Probably on a car trip, we don't otherwise discuss stuff like that much. He rejected the importance of it, numerically. Thought it was mostly political and portended nothing in particular except that there always had to be a latest "outrage" to normalize. We'd move on.
He's not homophobic but I can tell you he's now sick of the subject of L+++++++ and its near-daily invocation.
I live in Texas, which is to say Mexico. Brown people are the personal property of the left. I can assure you that Mexicans are quite sexist no matter how you choose to define that term.
But as sexism to feminists includes things like motherhood though, I agree that you can tar the right with that particular brush.
As to your last assertion - yes, I think there are plenty such. I think Americans if asked in confidence, would probably be pretty united in that. I don't even think you have to invoke sharia lol.
ETA: except Lutherans! Lutherans are the exception that proves the rule - over and over!
"Would anyone be a stand in for “absolute evil” the way Hitler and the Nazi’s are in the Western cultural mindset today?"
Actually, my impression is that Hitler and the Nazis are already on the way out in terms of who is on the the "A-List of Evil" in the mind of a typical young western progressive. Not long from now the typical kid will think they are just "ancient history", a history from which they are increasingly and intentionally alienated save for some extremely selective and distorted portrayals of incidents useful for sowing and reaping emotional whirlwinds of political usefulness. My hunch without looking is that if someone like Zach Goldberg did one of those word-frequency studies he would find that "reducio ad Hitlerum" has been going out of style for a while. WWII movies are fading away similar to how the once highly popular Westerns disappeared.
The progressives shape current perceptions of past evil according to both the present status and political usefulness of the group targeted by that evil. Hitler and the Nazis targeted Jews and killed mostly Europeans and those groups now have low-status in the current sacred-victimhood hierarchy and decreasing usefulness to leftist electoral calculus. Thus the Confederates probably surpass the Nazis already by whatever metric you want to use to measure "fashionably evil".
There are a handful of statues or large busts of Lenin in the US, for example one that's been in Seattle for decades. I figure if you were to put a statue of Hitler to its right and a statue of Robert E Lee to its left, and asked a typical young progressive which statue should be torn down, she would pick Lee over Hitler nine times out of ten, and never touch Lenin. Probably the same goes for Christopher Columbus. It may not be too long before the same could be said about a statue of Lincoln too.
You can't employ a Hitler reducio unless you know who Hitler was and what World War II was and when it happened, at least vaguely. I believe that in my local (almost 100% white, but basically re**rded test score) school district, they teach an entire Holocaust unit to middle schoolers. So, they learn about the Holocaust before they learn about the 20th century or WWII in particular. And "learn" is doing a lot of work as a verb there when the high school graduates are only 50% "proficient" in reading. A half-literate teacher wohk-wohk-wohks for some number of hours about something she barely understands to students who are looking at their phones.
These units, which I believe are sponsored by various NGOs and then piped in through the publisher nexus, are just disconnected from everything else and must seem absurd. In the past generation, most students learned about WWII from "The Hitler Channel" on cable from Spielberg movies, and their grandparents. The current generation has no such cultural or personal link as you point out.
And would there have been a battle for France if France and Britain had not declared war on Germany? Hitler’s attention was East to recover parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost post-WWI with stranded ethnic Germans, to cleanse out the Slavs and get his hands on Russia’s resources and give Germany lebensraum.
He turned West because war was declared on Germany, and it gave him time to camouflage and prepare for the big push into Russia. Britain and France guaranteed Poland’s borders - why? Poland was no strategic interest or close friend/ally to either. And when Germany did invade, followed by the Soviet Union, France and Germany did nothing to aid Poland, which was at war’s end handed over to the USSR by FDR who went behind Churchill’s back and did a deal with Stalin at Yalta. Post-1945 there was no gain to Britain, only ruin. And today? The European Union is in all but name a Fourth Reich, a racket to serve Germany’s interests, and based in Statist, technocratic principles straight from Mussolini’s Manifesto. Who won? And what? And had Germany moved East instead of West (and most likely defeated anyway), the USA would have been able to turn all its resources on war with Japan, instead of ‘Europe First Policy’, and maybe that war would have been shorter with fewer losses.
Russia seems the big wild card in both world wars (one could even make the argument true in the napoleonic wars too).
Ideologically repulsive but so strategically valuable that the main antagonists can’t help but court them. Too vast a power to ever be fully defeated.
They muck up all attempts to make a narrative that’s clean and straight forward.
More pertinent history for people would be the post-WWII redrawing of borders, creation of states and massive movements of people (refugees, ethnic cleansing) following the breakup of colonial empires.
Most people don’t understand that the Israel-Arab issue is just a very small and not too significant part of all that was going on in the 1940s and 50s. The Indian partition was the big one, though many millions of ethnically cleansed refugees in Germany and Poland and Ukraine were another.
Yes, the postwar dislocations were massive, and this is a topic that only has gotten attention in the more recent literature.
Topical as it is now conflict over the breakup and borders of the Soviet empire (Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Armenia) that is also in the news. Hopefully this will not drag on as long as conflicts in the Middle East and Africa have (75 years and counting)
One thing I learned late in life was about operation keelhaul. This effectively amounted to the force return of unwilling civilians that had escaped the Soviet Union back to it as part of the yalta agreement. In effect we acknowledged these people as being Soviet slaves owned by the soviet state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul#:~:text=Operation%20Keelhaul%20was%20a%20forced,citizenship)%20after%20World%20War%20II.
P.S. Relevant to the recent situation in Canada:
On the other side of the exchange, the Soviet leadership found out that despite the demands set forth by Stalin, British intelligence was retaining a number of anti-Communist prisoners under orders from Churchill, with the intention of reviving "anti-Soviet operations".[8] The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, which was recruited from Ukrainians in Galicia were not repatriated, ostensibly because Galicia had belonged to Poland prior to September 1939, but in reality because MI6 wished to use the prisoners in future operations.[9] The officer in charge of screening the 14th Division for war criminals, Fitzroy Maclean, admitted in an interview in 1989 that it was "fairly clear that there was every probability that there were war criminals amongst them", but argued that in the context of the Cold War, such men were needed to fight against the Soviet Union.[10] On 23 March 1947, the United Kingdom granted asylum to the entire 14th Division, whose men were subsequently settled in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.[11] The Soviet government protested against this decision, stating that most of the men in the division had previously served in German police units in Galicia and were deeply involved in perpetrating war crimes, but using a brief written by Pavlo Shandruk, an officer in the division as its basis, the Foreign Office issued a statement denying the 14th division had been involved in war crimes.[11]
My high school social studies classes in the late 90's were pretty consistent with your talk. Of course this was only a half decade removed from Schindler's List coming out, which was already being shown in nearly every school in the state. And The Diary of Anne Frank was covered many years before in middle school. A shift from military history to a focus on the holocaust is pretty consistent with a shift to a victimhood culture. Focusing on the holocaust is centering the victims. My wife went to school 2000 miles away and they covered Anne Frank, but Schindler's List was not being shown in schools at the time.
Thanks for posting. It is tough for me to make your live times because I'm usually doing a baby shift when I get home in the evening.
I recommend the 1973 British made 26 episode documentary ‘The World At War’ narrated by Laurence Olivier which gives an excellent overview of the various stages, players, and battles, politics of WWII. What is striking is the hardships, lack of any comforts, the uncertainties that millions of very young men had to endure, not least the almost always present risk of death or serious injury and the death and destruction around them. They learned a fortitude and insight certainly lacking in today’s crop of over-weened, spoiled, risk-averse, milquetoast.