Nazism, Militias, and the Abuse of History

by Richard K. Moore
24 April 1995

It always fascinates me how absolutely any postition can be "substantiated" by selective quotes from history, just as you can justify anything you might want to do by finding some particular isolated quote from the Bible (or the Koran, or the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook.) I find much of the recent revisionist thinking about Nazism disturbing, especially the blurring of distinctions among different varieties of totalianarism. Hitler & Stalin may have been equally reprehensible, but their ways of seizing and maintaining power were very different.

I've lived in Germany, and over the years have read many books and articles about the rise of nazism, from diverse perspectives, and I believe one has to very careful in trying to unravel what it was all about.

From what I've seen, I think one of the clearest central thruths about Hitler is that he was anti-liberal. He despised the democratic process, despised diversity of opinion, and built his constituency by lying about history and by inciting hatred and mistrust of government, labor unions, liberals, subtleties of political thought, intellectuals, gays, and nearly all minorities. He appealed to a simplistic, jingoistic version of "traditional German" values, and referred selectively to religion when it suited his propagandistic puposes. The core of his enemies- lists was what is today mis-called the "liberal elite". Yes he hated Jews, and he exploited native German anti-semitism, but he rounded up labor leaders and democratic spokesman long before he launched the formal holocaust. When he invaded Poland, his first act was to round up and shoot liberal political leaders and activists, even before the smoke had cleared from his Luftwaffe bombs. The Warsaw ghetto pogrom came much later.

Hitler's rhetoric was at core indistinguishable from what we now hear from the Limbaugh's and the right-wing talk radio hosts, and in a more disguised form, from the Gingrich's. He then, and they now, try to blame society's ills on those dis-empowered groups which have the least say in public policy. They blame the victims, and the public then and now seems to revel in those kinds of easy answers.

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Posted by Richard K. Moore - rkmoore@iol.ie
PO Box 26 Wexford, Ireland
(USA Citizen)
http://www.iol.ie/~rkmoore/cyberjournal
* Non-commercial republication encouraged - Please include this sig *
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