Richard Weikart’s new book cuts through political manipulation of history.
Suffering is a commodity. Two recent events demonstrated this. On March 27, 2022, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Many prominent African Americans, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wanda Sykes, condemned Smith’s choice to resort to violence. Race hustlers, though, depicted Will Smith as a victim of white supremacy. The Guardian ran a piece calling reaction to Will Smith an example of “downright racist … anti-blackness … inequality in plain sight.” “Race scholar” and Loyola Marymount University Professor Maia Niguel Hoskin wrote that the slap “is about … White supremacist culture designed to police the behavior of Blacks.” Others focused on Jada Pinkett Smith as a victim. “How a black woman’s hair grows out of her head has been a constant battle in this country … while at the same time celebrating white women for fitting your styles … Humiliating a black woman fighting for equality is not a ha-ha moment. Making fun of a black woman a week after we saw Ketanji Brown Jackson’s ambush” proves that “racism always finds a way,” wrote columnist Jeneé Osterheldt.
A similar process of victim-mongering occurred after Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the Supreme Court. My Facebook page was flooded with memes depicting Jackson as a helpless Little Match Girl facing off against big, scary, white male dragons.
In fact, of course, Smith is worth an estimated $350 million. He is one of the most profitable and popular film stars who has ever lived. Jackson is the child of two professionals. She attended Harvard and married surgeon Patrick Jackson, a Boston Brahmin and descendant of a Continental Congress delegate and also a relative of Oliver Wendell Holmes and former House Speaker Paul Ryan. She is a millionaire. White male Joe Biden guaranteed her elevation by vowing, in a political promise to help him win an election, to nominate only black women to the SCOTUS. Ilya Shapiro, a white man, tweeted that Sri Srinavasan, an Indian immigrant, was the best qualified person to be the next SCOTUS nominee. Shapiro was suspended from his job for this tweet. Neither alleged “white male privilege” nor the first amendment guarantee of free speech protected Shapiro from workplace retaliation for expressing his opinion. Senate questions for Jackson were brief and mild compared to the trials-by-fire endured by conservative nominees Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy are all too real and unspeakably evil. But rushing to attribute criticism of Will Smith or the Senate questioning of Ketanji Brown Jackson to past evils is not warranted by the facts. People made those connections because they commodify suffering to gain political ends. In this approach, suffering belongs exclusively to African Americans. Race hustlers are currently depicting war-ravaged Ukrainians as enjoying white privilege, as Joy Reid did in her March 7, 2022 broadcast.
Evil, like suffering, is also commodified. Powerbrokers rush to monopolize the evil Nazis committed to serve their own narrative ends. This commodification and monopolizing of evil interferes with our desire to understand.
Americans have been struggling for ninety years in their effort to tell the Nazi story accurately. This effort is recorded, inter alia, in Peter Novick’s 2000 book, The Holocaust in American Life, Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, the This American Life episode “Before It Had a Name” and the documentary “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust.” It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when Hollywood moguls were fearful of making accurate films addressing Nazism. There was a time when Holocaust survivors and those who recorded their stories, both in the US and in Israel, were ignored and silenced. In the Soviet Bloc, the unique victimization of Jews under Nazism was suppressed to near invisibility. There was a time, even after the publication of Mein Kampf, when mainstream American and British magazines focused on the interior decorating of Hitler’s homes. In these articles, Hitler was referred to as “charming.”
In much American media produced before, during, and immediately after World War II, Hitler was seen as a lone madman, unconnected to previous history or culture, and Nazism almost as a kind of virus – an alien force that infected otherwise innocent Germans. There was a great deal of emphasis on depicting “good Germans,” so that Americans could learn to hate Nazis while not hating all Germans, because Germans were an important part of America’s cultural and economic life. This process of condemning Nazism while shielding German identity from hatred is exemplified by the 1951 best-picture-nominee, “Decision before Dawn.” See a discussion of how diligently this film works to exculpate “ordinary Germans” from any guilt, here.
In profound contrast to this approach, in 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. This book became a bestseller and an international sensation. The book was accused, by serious scholars, of being racist against Germans. Goldhagen, his critics alleged, depicted Germanness itself as the guilty party. “No Germans, no Holocaust,” as Goldhagen put it. While others pointed to a perfect storm leading up to Hitler’s rise, including Germany’s defeat in World War I, the violent rise of Communism in Russia, the Versailles Treaty, the Depression, etc, Goldhagen insisted that “Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure,” caused Germans to kill, but rather their own anti-Semitism. Raul Hilberg, the “founder of the academic field of Holocaust studies,” said that Goldhagen depicted Germans as being possessed of “a medieval-like incubus, a demon latent in the German mind … waiting for the chance to strike out.” Hilberg said that Goldhagen is “totally wrong about everything.”
Another big change in how the story of Nazism has been told is in how various retellings depict Christians and Christianity. Nazism’s ultimate goal was to eliminate Christianity (see here, here, here, here, here.) See, for example, this photo of a Nazi shooting Father Piotr Sosnowski to death, or priests murdered in Bydgoszcz, here. In material produced before and during the war, journalists and filmmakers recorded Nazi persecution of Christians. See, for example, “Nazi Persecution of the Catholic Church Shows They Fear It,” from the June 1, 1936 New York Times, or “3 Faiths Protest Nazi Persecution: A Catholic, Protestant and Jew Represent the Conquered Peoples at Meeting Here” from the November 14, 1941 issue. The Times covered clergy who resisted the Nazis, including Dutch Archbishop Johannes de Jong, German Bishop von Galen, Belgian Cardinal van Roey, Norwegian Lutheran Bishop Eivind Berggrav, Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Gavrilo, and the Swiss Calvinist Karl Barth.
The 1943 Hollywood feature film, Hitler’s Madman dramatized the real-life assassination of top Nazi Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak partisans, and the subsequent retaliatory Nazi massacre of the Czech village of Lidice. In that film, Heydrich plows his car through a Czech Christian festival, and one of Heydrich’s men shoots the village priest dead. In real life, Heydrich was anti-Christian and he identified “clerics” as well as Jews as among the German people’s “eternal” “enemies.” Heydrich devised ways to close and limit operation of churches.
Popular attention to Nazi persecution of Catholics and other Christians changed dramatically after the 1963 play, “The Deputy.” “The Deputy” insinuated that Pope Pius XII shared guilt for the Holocaust. One image promoting the work depicts a monstrous face wearing a grotesque caricature of Catholic vestments. One of the eyes in the face is replaced with a swastika. Nazism = Catholicism, the image communicates. Playwright Rolf Hochhuth was a former Hitler Youth member. Hochhuth went on to make other shocking allegations. For example, his 1967 play Soldiers, An Obituary for Geneva suggested that Winston Churchill plotted the murder of the Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski. There is clearly a pattern here; Hochhuth wrote plays that denigrated WW II heroes of the Allied side. Hochhuth also praised Holocaust-denier David Irving as a “fabulous pioneer of contemporary history.” Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking defector from the Soviet Bloc to the West, and author of the book Disinformation, alleged that Hochhuth’s play was part of a KGB campaign. Whether Hochhuth intended it or not, his tarnishing of Western anti-Nazi figures like Churchill and Pope Pius XII served Soviet interests.
John Cornwell’s 1999 book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s 2003 book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair are representational of more recent works condemning Catholics and Catholicism for Holocaust guilt. Both works were criticized as severely flawed (see here, here and here).
Anti-Semitism from Christians is an undeniable historical fact, and confronting that fact in an honest way with a view to repentance and reconciliation is a good thing, and has been pursued by the Vatican for decades, and, indeed, for centuries. Too many Christians were at worst complicit in genocide and were at least not as heroic as, say, Franz Jägerstätter, Sophie Scholl, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or the Ulma Family, all of whom were martyred for their resistance to Nazism. What is not a good thing is the distortion of history by politics. “History is politics projected into the past,” said Mikhail Pokrovsky, the Russian Marxist historian. We deserve a better approach to history.
In fact the Catholic Church was notorious among intellectual elites one hundred years ago. It was notorious because official Catholic teaching insisted on human equality, an insistence that defied then current scientific racism, that argued against human equality on scientific grounds. Noteworthy Catholic documents on the equality of humans include, for example, the 1537 Sublimis Deus, which argues for the full humanity of the then recently discovered Native Americans; the 1888 In Plurimis, which argues for the full humanity of enslaved persons; Pius XI’s 1938 statement that “Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are Semites,” as well as his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. Yes, Catholics have certainly been bigoted and have committed crimes inspired by their bigotry. But official Catholic Church teaching has insisted, for centuries, on human equality, and, again, during the rise of scientific racism one hundred years ago, this stance was seen as backward and anti-science.
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