We could try to just dismiss people such as Ye, the celebrity formerly known as Kanye West, as unhinged. After all, US talk shows — such as the one on which Ye slavered his latest drivel from underneath the black ski mask he was wearing — teem with bigoted twaddle. Nobody takes that stuff seriously, right?
However, ask yourself how one of the few remaining Holocaust survivors would hear the words Ye uttered. Or, for that matter, how one of the many Holocaust deniers would now use them. No, we cannot just call Ye and his ilk deranged, and move on. We have got a problem.
Ye’s topic was Adolf Hitler. The rapper apparently sees the Fuehrer as yet another right-wing victim of the woke and lamestream media’s fake news.
“Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler,” Ye said. “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler, a lot of things.”
“I am a Nazi,” Ye said. “We got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.”
A few days earlier, Ye and another anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes, had dined with former US president Donald Trump at the latter’s resort in Florida.
However, it is not only the odious bully pulpit that comes with celebrity that makes these haters dangerous. It is the way they simultaneously propagate and embody a pre-existing trend toward general ignorance and bad faith, the preconditions for a resurgence in anti-Semitism, racism and hate.
The ignorance alone is staggering.
ALARMING IGNORANCE
A survey showed that 63 percent of young adults in the US do not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and 36 percent think the number was “2 million or fewer.”
About one in 10 is not sure whether the Shoah happened at all or denies that it did.
Perhaps most shockingly, 19 percent of Millennials and Zoomers in New York state believe that it was the Jews who caused the Holocaust.
How did we get to this point? Within the lifetime of a Holocaust survivor, many Western societies went from seeing Hitler as the worst embodiment of evil in human history — and an exhortation never to let genocide happen again — to just another meme to be exploited in our social media and petty political skirmishes.
Part of the answer has to do with a phenomenon Germans, who should know something about the matter, call “Nazi porn” or “Hitler kitsch.”
It is a trend I have been watching with concern for years.
The 1960s and 1970s were decades when the public in most countries learned the full extent of the Holocaust and therefore held its remembrance in awe. It began during the 1960s with high-profile Nazi trials in Jerusalem and Frankfurt, Germany, that exposed the genocide in new detail and famously inspired philosopher Hannah Arendt to opine on the “banality of evil.”
It continued with groundbreaking biographies of Hitler in the 1970s and the TV series Holocaust, which also jolted Germans into a new and harrowing round of soul-searching.
This line of documenting and commemorating the Shoah continues.
However, starting in the 1980s, another media phenomenon developed in parallel. It began when Stern, a German magazine, published what it alleged was Hitler’s diary. It was a sensation — and also turned out to be fake. A worrying precedent was set: the Fuehrer as clickbait to sell copies and, nowadays, to harvest reposts on Twitter.
The fascination with the Nazis became prurient. German television, as I have written before, airs almost nightly documentaries on Hitler’s henchlings, women, ailments, table silver or German shepherd Blondi.
HITLER PARODY
Increasingly, the obsession veered off into parody. It was one thing for Charlie Chaplin, during Hitler’s lifetime, to ridicule the enemy in The Great Dictator. It was quite another in 1998 for Walter Moers, a German satirist, to score a hit with a comic strip called Adolf, the Nazi pig.
That launched a genre of Hitler farce, including bestsellers such as Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back. In that novel, the Fuehrer wakes up near his old bunker in present-day Berlin and so amuses people with his shtick that he kills it as a comedian.
The phenomenon is not just German, but global. Hitler has become the raw material for memes.
For example, there is that scene in the movie Downfall in which the dictator, played by Bruno Ganz, loses it. The clip keeps circling around the world, each time with new captions. Here the Fuehrer cannot find his favorite cupcakes on either New York’s Upper East Side or Upper West Side. Here he is stuck with bitcoin when he should have invested in dogecoin.
Pundits and the public keep invoking Hitler’s name in vain. As early as 1990, Mike Godwin, a US lawyer and author, coined “Godwin’s Law” of Nazi analogies. It states that as an online discussion grows longer — regardless of the topic — the probability of a comparison to Hitler approaches.
We hardly batted an eyelid anymore when Prince Harry showed up at a party dressed in a Nazi uniform.
I once heard a yoga teacher who was rather too precise about asana alignment described as, yes, a “yoga Nazi.”
The phenomenon amounts to a reverse Voldemort effect. In the Harry Potter novels, the personification of evil commanded such revulsion and awe that witches, wizards and warlocks referred to him only as “he who must not be named” or “you-know-who.”
ANTI-VOLDEMORT
With Hitler, it is the opposite: The Fuehrer is “he who must be named all the time, whether it fits or not.” As a result, he no longer seems evil, just cartoonish.
What began funny (to some) has become perverse. It is unbearable to watch Russian President Vladimir Putin hop on the meme bandwagon while simultaneously adopting Hitler’s own propaganda style — by reversing the roles of victims and perpetrators, for example.
Thus Putin would have you believe that it is the Ukrainians who are Nazis, and that he is defending Russians from them.
Confronted by the cognitive dissonance that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is Jewish, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov has mused that “Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood, too.”
So here we are, with everyone from rappers in ski masks to genocidal autocrats holding forth about Hitler and the Nazis, unburdened by fact, proportion or decency.
The rest of us, especially Millennials and Zoomers, are left groping through a postmodern fog, where nothing is true and everything is possible — and, when in doubt, hilarious.
This is the moral void we used to fear, the intellectual vacuum where hatred grows and eventually makes mass murder imaginable once again.
The problem is not just Kanye West. All of us have dumbed down memory to the point of nihilism.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. He is a former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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