Permit me to triangulate three words that explain the greatest heroism and villainy of human history. Namely, war, peace and justice.
On the face of it, war has an obvious and conclusive truth: It is miserable, undesirable, brutal, cruel, unfair and in a moral sense, profoundly criminal.
And yet, I can see worse alternatives. War as an alternative to genocide is certainly one such consideration. When the great Jews of Vilna started to shoot back at the SS brutes, led by the legendary Abba Kovner, then I think this was a favourable development. In fact, the history of the partisans, both in the East and the West, is a tragically understated one. Usually they are framed as the “French Resistance” in popular culture. Who are often romanticised and politically tame characters that fight for some vague notion of freedom.
The real partisans are very different however. A lot of them defied common assumptions. The archetypical partisan was a career criminal who read lots of books. Who knew how to use their hands as well as their fists. Who were equal part brawns as they were brains. They were veterans of civil wars and insurrectionary efforts to topple monarchies, and they had very radical convictions about life.
Partisans were rarely moderates. They were often Bolsheviks, Zionists and Nationalists. They formed uneasy alliances with political opposites, with an unspoken agreement that the moment the Nazis were dead, they were going to start shooting eachother.
In fact the only moderates found among the partisans were usually the least virtuous ones, namely mercenaries and opportunists. They didn’t care about politics, they cared about filling the power vacuum that was going to be produced by the end of fascism. These partisans would often leave the war to become gangsters and black marketers.
In fact, gangsters in general are probably the most moderate people in the world. They practice politics entirely void of ideological convictions, where they get straight down to the nuts and bolts of institutional power for its own sake. A gangster will never kill you for being a national traitor, or a revisionist, or an untermenchen or a fascist, they will kill you because it serves their immediate individualistic interests. They are in many ways a true testament to David Hume’s rational liberalism.
So how is it then, that we find heroism in political segments that are deemed as detestable by popular culture? The answer to that is simple: Popular culture generally sympathises with the positions Hitler had.
That might sound ridiculous. But keep in mind that racism, antisemitism and chauvinism in general are means to an end. They’re ways in which to justify what would otherwise be very transparent acts of unprovoked and gratuitous brutality. Without antisemitism, then you don’t have fascism, you just have banditry. Antisemitism allowed the fascists to turn criminality into law.
And the biggest end to which these metaphysical doctrines were means, was that of military industry. Nazi Germany had the biggest military budget in German history. They gained their rise to power from the sympathies of industrialists who produced coal, and steel, and oil and vehicles. The great and miserable doomsday war that Goebbles spent so much time trying to market to the general public was little more than a consumer market.
A way in which to contract tanks, weapons, munitions and uniforms. A way in which to turn the labours and taxes of German society into the cold hard profits of the governing military aristocracy.
And at this time, the people who generally detested such notions were either Bolsheviks or Zionists. They represented the left and right wings of opposition to military industry. There were other ideas too of course, but it was generally Bolsheviks and Zionists who had the grit to actually pick up a rifle and shoot at these Nazi madmen who began trespassing everywhere.
Granted, after the war, Marxism and Zionism went very separate ways. As Zionism found a home in Israel, and Marxism found a home in Palestine. As we began to form divisions using acronyms such as PFLP, IDF, RAF and IGRUN.
In our times antisemitism and racism and similar doctrines have been greatly discredited, and are becoming more and more unpopular as people become more aware of both the historic and philosophical grounds for these ideas.
But military industry, this model of Hitler’s economics, is more fashionable than ever among the powerful. To the rich, war is a gift that keeps on giving, it is the golden goose that lays the golden egg.
If you listen to the news pundits who speak for military industry, then you get a very distorted view of history. It seems like Hitler’s biggest conviction was a refusal to privatise natural resources. At least, that’s what we’re lead to believe given how this is the easiest way to find yourself being declared a “modern day Hitler” by such self-appointed experts.
Supposedly the Hitlers in my lifetime were people like Gadhafi, the Ayatollah, Fidel Castro, Assad Al-Bashar, Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong-Un.
Apparently the Hitlers of the world are presented by poor countries who are defending their borders rather than rich countries who are attacking those borders.
Imagine if we had used this criteria to examine the conditions of the war itself. Who would be the Hitler then? Apparently it would be Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, and just about everyone except for Hitler.
And when I point this out, often I get criticised because these places are far from perfect. But so what? Do you have to be perfect to avoid comparison to Nazi Germany? You must have a pretty high opinion of Hitler if you think he was just two degrees short of establishing some kind of democratic utopia.
And moreover, since when does it even matter? What justified the French killing German soldiers was how they started doing it in France. If American marines were holding off the Ba’athist hordes during the legendary siege of the Madison Square Garden, then yes, that would be quite comparable.
But when we see US Troops in Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Nicaragua, Panama, the Taiwan strait, Nigeria, Zaire, Korea, Yemen, Syria, Egypt and Venezuela, then we are not living in a world full of dozens of Hitlers. We are living in a world with one Hitler.
