Engaging commentary, as always, Sam. You write so lucidly and insightfully about history.
I don't know if this is useful at all for your novel, but the notion that Nazism represented a unique evil in the 1940s and that it stands apart from other atrocities in world history has always troubled me. I don't think the scale of the Third Reich…
Engaging commentary, as always, Sam. You write so lucidly and insightfully about history.
I don't know if this is useful at all for your novel, but the notion that Nazism represented a unique evil in the 1940s and that it stands apart from other atrocities in world history has always troubled me. I don't think the scale of the Third Reich outstripped the reach of the Vatican in the 1500s and 1600s, did it? Maybe the genocidal use of technology and the seemingly unthinkable coexistence of high culture with savagery makes modern Germany stand apart, but I don't believe that is an objective truth. Spanish conquistadores represented a civilized empire, not to mention the cradle of wealth and power in Rome. The march of the U.S. Cavalry westward, followed by boarding schools, forced sterilization, and a host of other genocidal policies for indigenous people are, to my mind, of a piece with Nazism. Not to mention chattel slavery, of course. At least, to an indigenous person or to a Black person, I think the notion that Nazism represents a unique evil in human history would seem pretty puzzling.
In your search for a clear historical break around 1942, I'm reminded of how similarly American modernists viewed WWI. The radical break from the past that modernity required may have been why Hemingway, Dos Passes, Fitzgerald, and others completely ignored the 1918 influenza in their war novels. It didn't fit their narrative of newness, of the brave new world. Willa Cather is the only major American writer to include the flu in her account of the war, and I believe it was because she was a classicist who saw the present through the prism of ancient history. The Spanish Flu was just another bubonic plague -- it rendered modern medicine just as powerless as past plagues had rendered doctors with fewer scientific tools. In fact, she describes a troop ship sailing out of New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, as an ageless scene, not modern at all.
"That howling swarm of brown arms and hats and faces looked like nothing but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase . . . and on their departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea."
I think seeing the lines between fascism and democracy in 1942 in such stark terms requires a great deal of historical forgetting about past evils and about the troubled history of democracy itself. Don't the patterns you trace have some ancient roots? Even echoes in the not-so-ancient histories of Western colonies?
Thank you Josh. All fair points and well taken. What I'm arguing has more to do with perception than objective numbers of casualties. There was a sense with Hitler that he was so completely outside the normal bounds of politics that it shaped a very different political understanding that's still with us. That's almost a separate question from the sheer number of people who were killed. In gross aggregate terrible deaths, I think more people were killed as a direct result of Stalin and Mao's policies than of Hitler's. But there was a rationality, however perverse, in what Stalin and Mao were up to. With Hitler, there was a sense of pursuing destruction for its own sake - of being guided by utter irrationality. The fact that such a thing was possible - and that a whole nation willingly followed him - reshaped at some deep level everybody's understanding of how the world worked.
Engaging commentary, as always, Sam. You write so lucidly and insightfully about history.
I don't know if this is useful at all for your novel, but the notion that Nazism represented a unique evil in the 1940s and that it stands apart from other atrocities in world history has always troubled me. I don't think the scale of the Third Reich outstripped the reach of the Vatican in the 1500s and 1600s, did it? Maybe the genocidal use of technology and the seemingly unthinkable coexistence of high culture with savagery makes modern Germany stand apart, but I don't believe that is an objective truth. Spanish conquistadores represented a civilized empire, not to mention the cradle of wealth and power in Rome. The march of the U.S. Cavalry westward, followed by boarding schools, forced sterilization, and a host of other genocidal policies for indigenous people are, to my mind, of a piece with Nazism. Not to mention chattel slavery, of course. At least, to an indigenous person or to a Black person, I think the notion that Nazism represents a unique evil in human history would seem pretty puzzling.
In your search for a clear historical break around 1942, I'm reminded of how similarly American modernists viewed WWI. The radical break from the past that modernity required may have been why Hemingway, Dos Passes, Fitzgerald, and others completely ignored the 1918 influenza in their war novels. It didn't fit their narrative of newness, of the brave new world. Willa Cather is the only major American writer to include the flu in her account of the war, and I believe it was because she was a classicist who saw the present through the prism of ancient history. The Spanish Flu was just another bubonic plague -- it rendered modern medicine just as powerless as past plagues had rendered doctors with fewer scientific tools. In fact, she describes a troop ship sailing out of New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, as an ageless scene, not modern at all.
"That howling swarm of brown arms and hats and faces looked like nothing but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase . . . and on their departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea."
I think seeing the lines between fascism and democracy in 1942 in such stark terms requires a great deal of historical forgetting about past evils and about the troubled history of democracy itself. Don't the patterns you trace have some ancient roots? Even echoes in the not-so-ancient histories of Western colonies?
Thank you Josh. All fair points and well taken. What I'm arguing has more to do with perception than objective numbers of casualties. There was a sense with Hitler that he was so completely outside the normal bounds of politics that it shaped a very different political understanding that's still with us. That's almost a separate question from the sheer number of people who were killed. In gross aggregate terrible deaths, I think more people were killed as a direct result of Stalin and Mao's policies than of Hitler's. But there was a rationality, however perverse, in what Stalin and Mao were up to. With Hitler, there was a sense of pursuing destruction for its own sake - of being guided by utter irrationality. The fact that such a thing was possible - and that a whole nation willingly followed him - reshaped at some deep level everybody's understanding of how the world worked.
Cheers,
Sam
Yes, I didn't think about Stalin or Mao. You always make me think differently, Sam!