Well, we’ve passed New Year’s, so that’s the end of the secular “holiday season.” We are also approaching Epiphany on January 6, which is the end of Christmastide on the Christian liturgical calendar. So we are putting away yet another year of holiday crap. No more worrying which modern pop music act is going to butcher a holiday standard with a contemporary arrangement. No more getting a Hanukkah card for your Jewish friend and then forgetting to give it cause you can never remember which week of December Hanukkah is. No more mispronouncing “let it snow” as “le tits now.”
But as we get into 2022 let me get to a subject that has been cropping up various ways over the last year. In this particular case I was on Facebook and one gamer site I go to had this fairly badass picture of a German Stuka assault bomber in dive mode, and somebody pointed out a little detail in the picture that might have been glossed over: The swastika that historically was on the tail got the center fuzzed out (you know, like Facebook does every time they see a nipple) so you could see the branch arms but not the cross. And this person objected to the censorship and other people objected as though he was sticking up for the Nazis. Apparently there’s some mystery as to why the favorite symbol of a genocidal movement that killed tens of millions of people might be offensive.
Nazism of course was based on a myth that the relatively light-skinned (but still dark) peoples that settled northern India from central Asia were the first “Aryan” race (because Sanskrit is considered a root language for what some still call the ‘Indo-Aryan’ or Indo-European language group). The swastika was, and still is, considered to be a good luck symbol in Hinduism and to some extent in Buddhism. It is considered to be a sun emblem and a symbol of life.
In addition to the Indian civilization, the swastika was also used by the Navajo and variations of the pointed cross also exist in Africa and elsewhere. The fact of the matter is that the swastika (in both left and right-facing varieties) is used by an astounding number of cultures, not just the Hindus, and it’s possible that in addition to the symbol’s “Aryan” origins, the Nazis picked it up precisely because it was so recognized and universal. Which if anything should undermine the white supremacists’ claim of exclusive ownership of the swastika. At the risk of sounding like Randal in Clerks 2, I think we should try to reclaim it.
Of course, that would be tasteless even by Kevin Smith standards. Besides, it’s not the only example of the Nazis trying to latch onto the popular thing. If you’ve seen pictures of Hitler prior to 1919 and in the German Army during World War I, he had one of those standard droopy mustaches (sometimes waxed) but after the war he started wearing the “toothbrush” style – allegedly not because Charlie Chaplin was the most famous movie star of the silent era, but the fact of the matter is that it was a fairly popular style at the time, used also by Oliver Hardy and by fellow Nazis like Ernst Rohm and Heinrich Himmler. Chaplin’s own response to the Hitler image was the immortal film The Great Dictator. But it’s worth noting that by that point, Hitler was already at war and Chaplin hadn’t been using his Little Tramp character for years. But if that was who we most associated with the mustache, you might see it as much as you did in the 20’s and 30’s. But you don’t. Even Ron Mael doesn’t wear it any more.
I mean, that’s how bad it is. You have guys who are willing to shave their heads and tattoo swastikas on them, but wearing a toothbrush mustache is just too much.
Hitler ruined that mustache for everybody.
Which certainly didn’t stop our media from using a lot of Nazi stuff. In 1945, Germany was in ruins, we were just finding out how horrible the Holocaust really was, the Soviets were taking over the power vacuum in Eastern Europe… did we learn anything from that? Well, what did we come up with just 20 years later?
Hogan’s Heroes!
I mean, picture the scene: Southern California, Television City, CBS, a couple of executives are brainstorming in an office, and one of them says to the other, “Prisoners of war in Nazi Germany? What a great idea for a sitcom!”
Thing is, a lot of the cast and crew on that show were ethnically Jewish, including Robert Clary, who actually survived the Holocaust. The Nazi history was still fresh in everyone’s minds, and the main reason that a lot of those actors did the show was on the specific condition that the Nazis never get to win one. That Hogan’s crew would always win and that the Nazis would always be the butt of the joke. It was like Wile E. Coyote versus the Road Runner, the fun was watching exactly how the bad guy would get screwed. The outcome was never in doubt.
Back then we had a lot of war movies and Nazi media and Nazi memorabilia because that period was still fresh in the public consciousness and we knew that we had beat them. We wanted to commemorate beating them.
And I think that a lot of what’s going on today is that there’s an unexpressed fear that the Nazis are back and maybe this time, we’re not going to beat them. And the Left is acting like even a mention of Nazism is giving them recognition that they don’t deserve, and if they can’t actually stop the fascists with politics, they can at least shut them out of the media.
Which would have been a great idea five years ago when all those “liberal media” outlets gave Donald Trump free publicity and the status of a serious candidate when he excreted words that would have gotten him laughed out of a Libertarian or Green convention. But no, they promoted Trump cause he was “great for ratings.” Then he got elected and a year or so afterward, he gave the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville moral equivalence with their counter-protestors, and everyone was just so shocked.
But now it’s basically a culture war between people who want to preserve certain media for free speech reasons, sometimes even sincerely, but don’t know (or care) that these media are seen as endorsing fascism and genocide. And so the response from the Left is to try to shut down such displays as if pretending that these things don’t exist will make them just go away.
I am not sure which approach is worse. But I know that neither one is solving the problem.
As with the swastika, you used to be able to show the Stars & Bars a lot more – back when Jimmy Carter was running for president, Democrats embraced the flag because he (and the party) had Southern roots. But back then it sorta was “heritage, not hate.” Since then, as the more racist parts of America have decided it’s safe to come out and play, people have been doing a lot of retrospection and have come to realize that it was one thing to try to bring the white South back into the national community, but ever since Reconstruction, the Union has given the Confederate sympathizers an inch and they took it as a mile. A lot more than one mile, in fact.
This peace-and-good-feelings approach to a defeated enemy was also endorsed for the Germans after World War I by the idealist president (and Confederate sympathizer) Woodrow Wilson, and because Western civilization was so shellshocked by that war (and had a whole bunch of other problems, including a major pandemic, to deal with) they basically left the new German republic to its own affairs.
Well, once Germany started another major war, we eventually decided that that approach to peace wasn’t going to work. At the Casablanca conference, the three big Allies (Britain, USSR, US) decided that their military end goal was the unconditional surrender of Germany and the other Axis powers at which point the Allies would occupy the entire nation (which they did not do in World War I) and impose their order of government. In fact, if you think Germany got screwed in 1945, you should have seen what Henry Morgenthau wanted to do.
And of course one of the first things that the postwar governments of Germany did was to ban the display of the swastika and related symbols to make it clear that such beliefs would have no tolerance and no home ground. (That’s another reason you don’t see swastikas in European games, because they’re made for an international market.) But we didn’t think that was necessary here. We were the winners. We were the good guys. We thought that we didn’t have to worry about fascism in this country, or that we didn’t have to worry about domestic terrorism (as opposed to imported terrorism) because the powers that be generally assumed that we had the best of all possible countries and no one could have a problem with our system of government, and people who knew the example of Germany’s history would think, “now that we know better, no one could be THAT stupid!”
Of course the flaw with that thinking is the assumption that Americans learn from history.
Because, in addition to World War II and various other nerd hobbies, I’ve also delved into the the fictional world of H.P. Lovecraft (another politically incorrect racist) and many of these stories are a Pulp/Horror genre where an archaeologist or investigator encounters some black magic cult that wants to summon an extradimensional deity to Earth so that it can destroy reality and eat everybody, and I always thought that killed plausibility. I thought “Why would even evil people want to destroy the world they have to live on?” Now I look around me and go “Oh.”
I mean, right now there’s a cult that worships an amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity, and as it turns out, they don’t exist in enough numbers to win a national election, but they’re trying to make sure that having a majority is irrelevant to controlling the country. And part of the reason they have gotten as far as they have is because the majority of Americans are if anything too kind. We are too willing to assume that the cult are reasonable people with good faith motivations and not nihilists who seek out misery and death.
These people are so determined to identify as “free thinkers” that they bypassed the “thinker” part and uncritically accepted any space case idea that some idiot or charlatan threw at them, precisely because it was rejected by everybody else. Ideas like “horse dewormer is good for COVID”, “maybe anti-Semites had a point” and “regardless of your opinion of the morality of anti-Semitism, declaring war on the entire planet at once is GREAT military strategy”.
I don’t think that they realize that just as with the Nazis, they run the risk of making their (not) cool thing not only uncool, but completely unacceptable. Who knows, in the next few generations taking a paint roller to your face and turning it the color of a rotten orange might be considered repulsive and unfashionable. Which is one thing if we’re talking fashion sense but something else if we’re talking about political ideas.
So, this is why we can’t show swastikas anymore. We used to be able to, ten, even six years ago, but back then people were smart enough and well-adjusted enough to keep Nazi cosplay in its place and not make it the basis of a major American political party.
Oh, and on a related subject, January 6 is also the one-year anniversary of the January 6 holiday, in which the Trump cult celebrates their Leader’s ascension from elected official to unaccountable God. So kids, make sure to leave out a burnt steak and a can of Diet Coke for Mr. Trump when he magically appears at your house to steal your silverware and plug up the toilet.