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IMO the leftists are correct. I mean, the ones that are serious about leftism. Or maybe I should say - the ones serious about what is supposed to be the most important struggle in the world, the fight against the greatest evil humanity has ever faced. And in that fight, enemy agitator has been killed. At a cost to, what, public decency? Social trust? The commons? Democratic norms of debate? None of those near-empty phrases matter more than what is cheekily undersold as "punching nazis". Has the right, by the way, ever come up with a similar term less cumbersome than "free helicopter rides" or "RAHOWA"? Something that calls for and legitimizes political violence, yet is convenient and palatable enough to employ in everyday speech? But I digress. I had never heard of Charlie Kirk prior to yesterday, me not being American. But in the context of an actual conflict, a struggle for the fate of humanity, in which one side is "the nazis" - the people of ultimate evil - what does it matter that a father, an unarmed man, or a polite debater was killed? A nazi was killed! Didn't you watch Inglorious Basterds, don't you know that this is the one good violence that everyone can agree on is necessary? Doesn't the American people regularly celebrate its historical deadly violence against the Nazis? And had Kirk not been killed, far greater evil would have befallen the American people! More of them might have been converted to naziism! "What's the worst that might happen?", one might ask in the face of a polite man getting up to stage and offering his opinions. Nazi rallies and the rise of the NSDAP, that's what. Who cares that they set out the bait politely if the end goal remains the Fourth Reich, or if not that then some even worse bastardization with American ideals that effectively results in Wolfenstein or The Man In The High Castle or Forever Trump? A world in which blacks are slowly shifted back towards exclusions and slavery, women back into the kitchen and domestic violence, and other minorities eradicated outright, and in which nothing good can be hoped for anymore, social progress is annihilated, and only caricatures of the darkest past are permitted as modes of life.
The older I get, the harder I find it to put myself into the leftist mind-space. I used to be there, but...I'm not the same person anymore. And even when I was there, I wasn't the same as leftists today, and doubly so American leftists. Still, I think it's important to consider the following: Given the values and cultural touchstones those people have been handed from birth, and the conclusions one can very directly draw from those, any elation at the death of Charlie Kirk is simply consistent with what is good and proper.
They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.
This makes them monsters. At least the extremist subset of them who have drunk the Koolaid enough to literally believe this enough to celebrate violence. A monster does not need to be sadistic and take joy in doing evil, sometimes they are uncaring and hungry: acting on instinct rather than reason. Sometimes they are heroes in their own minds and do monstrous things in their futile quest to enact their utopian vision. There are many different types of monster.
The classical logical chain, Modus Ponens, goes "If A then B. A is true, therefore B." A is "my opponents are Nazis", B is "violence is justified to stop them". You've identified that the leftists are correct about "If A then B" but this is only half of the picture. The leftists are half correct and half wrong, and therefore reach a wrong conclusion and behave monstrously. And it's not some minor detail that they get wrong. "My opponents are Nazis" in the strong sense required to justify violence is a bold claim. It would not be sufficient that they wear swastikas or Heil Hitler: the part of the Nazis that justifies violence against them is the violence and genocide they use. This requires strong evidence. You can't just "be taught" that my opponents are evil and blindly believe it and start attacking them. The only way to look at the world we live in and come to the conclusion that right-wing people are literal Nazis to the level of deserving political violence is to practice sociopathic, monstrous, willful ignorance. To vilify such obvious non-villains is exactly what the Nazis themselves did that enabled them to commit so much evil.
I don't believe that ignorance or stupidity justifies evil behavior. Ignorant and stupid people still have to take responsibility for their own actions. If you lack the levels of intellectual sophistication required to parse the truth in the modern media landscape then it is your duty as a good person to practice some epistemic humility. Someone who says "I think right wingers are bad people because the news told me they hate minorities and that's wrong." Is a good person, even if they're wrong on a factual level. Someone who says "Right wing people should die because the news told me they want to kill minorities" and sincerely believes it rather than merely exaggerating for rhetorical effect, is a monster.
Here is where I suppose the American public at large has not yet noticed the extent to which things have come full circle.
WW1 (yes) and WW2 propaganda clarified that resistance to and the ultimate defeat of the Nazis was a moral imperative. Post-war Germany adopted this, at the Allies' command, and went full hog - youths were indeed taught that nazism was the ultimate evil, and that even the most minute form of it was a germ from which the Third Reich could rise again. And with no narrative to actually counter this, since any opinions to the contrary were banned either in law or in practice, this view grew ever more extreme over the generations, and ever more wide-spread, and could take uncontested hold of many public institutions. You may have heard of the Frankfurt School and the philosophical underpinnings of modern American leftism coming from Germany. But please understand - the practice of modern leftism, its modes of operation and expression, its lines of thinking and of everyday argumentation, its symbols and axioms, have also been grown here, in our youth clubs and universities and cultural centers. And then, though I know not how exactly, they made their way back across to America. It's no coincidence that you now have "Antifa".
What you have now is a synthesis of all this; American propaganda filtered through generations of German self-hatred and nationally enforced anti-nazism, and all the weight of WW2 and the Holocaust behind it. And the spearpoint of it is this - that it is better to burn down the entire country and everyone in it than to permit even the smallest expression of nazism, than to risk a repeat of the greatest atrocity that ever was.
You don't need any more strong evidence to prove that violence is justified to stop nazis, because there's the 20th century to prove it. Are you ignorant of history to deny it? Do you secretly hate the jews to downplay the unique horror of the holocaust? Are you just unworried because you aren't a minority? Are you uneducated, or unintelligent, not to see what all good people agree is the case? Such is the dominant discourse in Germany, as imposed by the victors of WW2, and you're getting a taste of it now.
Do you have any sources I can read on this boomerang effect of American propaganda? What were the "modes of operation and expression" and whatnot that American propaganda imposed on postwar Germany?
Nope. Just half a lifetime of first-hand experience and German general education. Just trust me Bruder.
Here's the tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
My grandpa's joke about Denazification was that it was like like potato harvest - pull out the big ones and leave the rest.
But denazification was officially and ostensibly only about punishing and removing from positions of power or influence in post-war Germany the most prominent nazi funcitonaries. Things went further than that. I blame the allies for the original impulse, the leftists of back then for taking it and running with it, and the good people of Germany for taking it all at face value, doing as their told, and making denazification-in-all-things the de-facto civil religion of Germany. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
In the immediate post-war years, Germans were dazed and confused. Teachers didn't know what they were still allowed to teach. Public officials tried to keep a low profile. The only thing that was clear, and which allied propaganda now becoming official policy codified, was that the nazis had been evil, and that good Germans must wholeheartedly reject nazism. Which they did, and then mostly washed their hands of history, and concentrated on the simple work of rebuilding normal life. The federal republic of Germany was created in 1949, as a state without even an army until 1955. For the Allies, an apolitical Germany with an army was what they needed as a bulwark against the rising threat of communism. And at first young Germans seemed to grow up with no higher ideals at that time other than "reject nazism". But that's a negative without a positive, a void that communist propaganda eagerly filled. And so, while the allies barred the way for any expression of right-wing sentiment or nationalism in Germany and would have left it at that, German youths egged on by leftist agitation had an ideological void to fill and picked up what they could. Which was a proto-globalist worldview that experimented with rejecting national culture and identity in favor of something in between https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkerverst%C3%A4ndigung ("Understanding between peoples". German, sorry) and more general cosmopolitanism.
And so we get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_German_student_movement in 1968. And then we get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Autumn in 1977.
And I'm rambling. To cut to a tl;dr:
American propaganda during the wars created a general anti-German sentiment among EuropeansEdit: American propaganda was part of the general promotion of anti-German sentiments among Westerners, Allied policy de-politicized German society from the top down AND set anti-nazism as the default position and absolute boundary of all political thought, and Germans growing up in the post-war years adopted the anti-Germanism and the anti-nazism and filled the remaining political void with the then-ascendant communism. Following generations synthesized that into modern German leftism.Where does anti-Nazism in Russia come from? Is it the same flavor and degree at all?
I wouldn't know. Don't we have any Russians here who might answer?
But I reckon that Russian anti-nazism is different. Firstly because their opposition to Nazism is driven by a more explicit ideological difference, and secondly because they had to fight for their lives in an existential conflict against the Nazis that was even more horrible than the War in the West.
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I see, thank you for the detailed summary!
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I can accept a great deal of your premise, but given how much anti-German propaganda in both wars was used to get the Americans into the conflicts, years after the wars had started and many of the greatest battlefield calamities and sovereignty violations had already occurred (on all sides), I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to say it was the American propaganda specifically that shaped the anti-German sentiment among Europeans. Certainly the French and the Russians needed no American inspiration, and the German violent-left had its own interwar ascendance (that was crushed, but still a rising).
If the propaganda claim aperture were widened to the allies in general, fellow Europeans they might be, I'd have no objection. Or even the British in particular, given their anglosphere influence through the language of the Americans, that might work in a stretch. But American propaganda being the decisive influencer of European views of Germany?
You might be surprised. As an Easterner I grew up with a fair bit of "Germany bad" injected right into my veins, but then I met actual Germans and it turned out trotting up historical greviences isn't even that fun with them, bcause they've been self-flaggelating to the point that nothing you throw in their face can faze them. Then started hearing about "controversies" like "people are waving the German flag after winning the world football championship".
These were bizarre and unsettling experiences, even with all my historical biases in place. The French / Russian propaganda was a completely different thing from what was being pumped into Germany.
I couldn't believe it when I saw Angela Merkel's attitude to the German flag.
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Fair criticism. You're right. American proapganda was not the driver of European anti-German sentiments, I conflated things there.
American propaganda did however drive American Anti-German sentiments (duh), which influenced American policy.
I edited the post above accordingly.
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