You’re All a Bunch of Fascists

Leftists have been saying something to this effect for years. The Nazis and the Holocaust have been central symbols for the Left since the 1940s. They draw from them a very specific lesson that forms the foundation of their entire worldview: Western Civilization is irredeemably corrupt and the Nazis were its apotheosis.

So, ever since the war, promiscuous accusations of kinship with the Nazis were made to villains, both in the present and in the past. McCarthy and the Republicans were fascist. Christopher Columbus committed genocide. The Vietnam War and Nixon were expressions of a fascist tendency in American culture. And, most recently, the ubiquitous Bush=Hitler posters.

The problem is that the Holocaust as symbol has been widely appropriated by a variety of groups. Alan Bloom notes in Closing of the American Mind that it’s the closest thing we have in our culture to a universally accepted symbol of evil. But people draw different lessons from the event. Conservatives often conclude that this was a spasm of modernity, or hyper-nationalism, or of mass movements–not an essential part of Western Civilization, but rather a phenomenon of the rejection of “Christendom” and its limits in the 18th Century. Zionists widely conclude that it justified their warnings about the need for a Jewish state and the fundamental tensions between Diaspora Jews and the Christian societies in which they lived.

Enter Littlegreenfootballs. There is one dominant narrative on that website. It’s some kind of mishmash of the Zionist and the Leftist views described above: the Nazis and the Holocaust prove that Europe was evil, Jews needed to form Israel, and that to this day Israel cannot count on decadent, anti-Semitic western civilization. All other interpretations are considered suspect and are often labeled anti-Semitic. The problem is that there is no way something can be of universal significance, that is, something everyone should know about and that supposedly teaches important and timeless lessons about life, morality, and history, yet also be incapable of analogy to present-day circumstances. To understand and analogize the Holocaust or any historical event, one must always be aware of how it is different and how it is the same as some present day event. To make these distinctions, and to make them with greater clarity, is part of what it means to have historical knowledge.

But it is no surprise that the lemming-like and very narrow view at LGF devolves into accusations of anti-Semitism as soon as a leftist–in this case the idiotic Ward Churchill–employs this familiar, and near-universal symbol of evil, in the service of work-a-day leftist causes, such as opposition to the war on terror or immigration reform. One cannot promote universal awareness of an event and expect it not to be employed in ways with which one disagrees. And it’s frankly unpersuasive to think that the champions of minorities and the oppressed are engaged in a basic and somewhat primitive prejudice, especially for nothing more than using the Holocaust as an analogy.