Jonah Goldberg & Nazis
Jonah Goldberg
opines on the Nazi-like tendencies of the Arab polities. Fair enough. But some have noted the nationalist
and socialist tendencies of the early Israeli state as well. Jonah
makes fun of the overtly Islamic nature of Arab polities-but as I've mentioned before, Israel has a not-so-subtle philo-Semitic bias (and this goes beyond not being able to eat ham sandwiches-it goes to barring intermarriage between freely consenting adults of different religions).
But anyway-anyone watch
Spy TV? If you weren't distracted by
Ali Landry-you might have seen the clip where three men are hired as security guards. Their supervisor leaves them alone-and someone sticks their hand out a window and asks for help. All three men balk. The gag keeps going to the point where the "prisoners" make a jail-break and two of the three men pull the lever to send an electric charge through a fence to stun the hapless men and women trying to escape. One of them is almost amused-and declares that as long as he's paid they're not going to escape. Another man-a middle aged Latino man-is so angered by what he sees that he almost accosts the
Spy TV actor who's pretending to be the overseer for this illegal detention. Obviously we all hope we would act as the latter individual behaved-but who knows?
It makes me wonder less about how Nazism came to power and liquidated 10 million human beings. Germany was a cultural and scientific powerhouse-this was not the Rwanda or Cambodia of its day. According to
Halford Mackinder, Germany is a crucial geopolitical state, guarding the entrance to the Heartland. Ideas as diverse as Marxism, Positivism, Austrian Economics, Freudianism and the Frankfurt School all came out of the German-speaking world (some, like Freudianism were of course almost wholly Jewish-while many of the others had strong Jewish components, even putative right-wing movements like Austrian Economics). And yet whenever I hear one of my more Europhilic friends beginning to ramble about the faults of the United States-I point to the liquidation of the Jews, the complicity of the French, the fascism of the Mediterranean, the nationalism of eastern Europe, and so forth. Even today-one's blood is a strong determinant of German citizenship, criticizing the French president is a crime, and neo-Fascists flirt with the seat of power in Italy.
Of all the regions of the world, Europe and the European Diaspora have achieved an objective morality unswayed by sentiment or nepotism. 2,000 years of law derived from Greek philosophy, Roman politics and Hebrew monotheism have tempered the capriciousness of the dictator of the impetuousness of the mob. And yet even in the heart of Europe-only two generations ago unimaginable slaughter and cruelty were commonplace.
It certainly makes me feel a bit more pessimistic, and more likely to worry about Nazis rather than fret about throwing the appellation around in a careless fashion.