Barbara Mezeske: Never again

I grew up watching WGN-TV in Chicago. Most afternoons, the station ran old black and white films starring Hollywood greats: John Wayne, James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck. That’s where I first saw "Casablanca," released in 1942, and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It is an iconic romance, but also a political film: all the characters we admire — Rick, the bar owner; Ilsa, his former love; and Victor, the Czech resistance fighter — are trying to stay out of the hands of the Nazis.

"Casablanca" is the first film I remember in which the Nazis were villains; it certainly wasn’t the last. Hollywood has long depicted the terror of the Nazi regime, creating the stereotype of the Nazi villain. Here’s a partial list: "The Guns of Navarone" (1961), "The Longest Day" (1962), "The Dirty Dozen" (1967), "Schindler’s List" (1993), "Saving Private Ryan" (1998), "The Pianist" (2002), "The Reader" (2008), the entire "Indiana Jones" franchise (1981-2023).

Television did the same. The second season of the PBS drama "The World on Fire" aired this year.

Books? There are too many to count. "The Diary of Anne Frank," "All Quiet on the Western Front," "The Book Thief," "All the Light We Cannot See," "The Paris Library." Enough to fill a library or occupy a book group for years.

Why this persistent cultural interest in Nazi Germany? To begin, World War II touched people at all levels of society across the globe. It left deep memories and equally deep scars. It created what newsman Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” shaping those Americans’ worldview. It inspired revulsion for those who rounded up undesirables and threw them into work camps to starve or be murdered. Today, one can visit those concentration camps, kept as a reminder of atrocity. There are other reminders, too. Remember the book-burning scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? There is a memorial to the empty libraries of Nazi Germany in the Bebelplatz in Berlin: viewers see an empty room beneath the plaza, filled with empty shelves.

Our cultural memory presented Nazis and the Nazi regime as evil incarnate, the worst thing that had happened to civilization in modern times.

So, what has happened to that cultural memory?

Judging from the number of neo-Nazi organizations and demonstrations in recent years, that cultural memory of horror, that aversion to authoritarian repression, is fading. Those who are old enough to remember how our fathers and mothers fought in World War II have become silent in the face of new indications of the nazi-fication of our politics.

Here are a few recent examples:

In 2017, the white supremacist group Unite the Right rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia. They rallied again in 2018 in Washington, D.C. That same year, then-president Donald Trump told his chief of staff John Kelly that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” (Bender, Frankly, We Did Win This Election, 2021).

In 2018 there was a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League documented over 3500 antisemitic incidents in the U.S., including harassment, vandalism, and assaults.

In 2022 someone called in bomb threats to six historically Black colleges. The caller claimed membership in a neo-Nazi group.

In September this year, a man hung a Nazi banner from an overpass on I-4 in Orlando. In the same month, neo-Nazis demonstrated outside of Disney World. In October, a mayoral candidate in Franklin, Tennessee, invited a neo-Nazi group to escort her to a candidate forum. (She lost the election.)

In November, candidate Trump called his political opponents “vermin,” the same language used by Hitler to dehumanize the Jews and other non-Aryan people.

Today’s Nazis don’t look like Adolf Hitler, though many of them sport the swastika on flags, insignia, or tattoos. They don’t goose-step through the streets. They do sometimes “Heil” their support for violence, as they did in online media when Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty of all charges in the death of two Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin in 2020.

But today’s Nazis do support privileging white people, using political office to seek revenge on enemies, politicizing the justice system, banning books, and demonizing immigrants. Some people running for public office today, like the mayoral candidate in Tennessee, are quite open about what they believe in these matters.

Why has the popular culture not revolted against all of this? Do we really want to be Nazis? When did it become acceptable to identify with the Nazis, instead of with their victims?

And why on earth would we choose to be governed by such creatures, for whom power is an end in itself and an excuse to bully others, and who rule via top-down dictates?

Hitler came to power in 1933 because the Nazi party had been elected to the German parliament in sufficient numbers that they held the balance of power. Hitler rose through the ranks of that political party to become chancellor. He then used the tools of the democratic government to create a dictatorship. That’s all it took.

They say that if you don’t know history, you are doomed to repeat it.

— Community Columnist Barbara Mezeske is a retired teacher and resident of Park Township. She can be reached at bamezeske@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Barbara Mezeske: Never again