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Ye, better known as Kanye West has released a song titled "Heil Hitler"
I have to admit, it's quite catchy, especially the unlikely refrain "nigger, Heil Hitler", which definitely has an intriguing ring to it. Whether Kanye is a truly great artist or not, he's nothing if not a skilled craftsman.
I've long since lost the ability to treat anything on the internet seriously and my reaction was limited to squeezing my eyes shut and suppressing a chuckle, but I suspect that the wider audience is also outraged only in a performative, inertial way. I doubt it will end up making any real impact on anything and waves in the social media will likely fizzle out in no more than a few weeks.
I wonder if we're seeing the first signs of postmodern corrosion eating away at the last grand unifying narrative of our age: WW2 mythos, with Adolf Hitler at its center not as mere historical figure, but as the archetypal villain and the secular devil. In many countries the taboo is backed by legal force, but legislation doesn't truly govern things of this nature. The law may end up hollowed out and irrelevant long before someone cares to remove it from the books
Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.
Should this really happen, good riddance. Though on the other hand, we might end up remembering having this kind of culture spanning, unifying narrative as kind of comfy compared to total balkanization
The actual lyrics of the song are 'I still can't see my children, niggers see my twitter but they don't see how I be feeling, so I became a nazi yay bitch I'm the villain, nigger heil Hitler, they don't understand the things I say on twitter nigger heil Hitler nigger heil Hitler they don't understand the things I say on twitter all my niggers nazis nigger heil Hitler'. This is not political commentary it's lashing out. He's still framing the nazis as villains.
I agree that the WWII taboo is fading. I don't think a mentally ill black man identifying with Hitler in an act of rebellion is the sign thereof.
A fair take, and entirely plausible given that it’s Kanye we’re talking about.
But, I think there is an alternative possible interpretation. Identifying with the villain doesn’t necessarily, in our modern age, indicate that the speaker thinks they are wrong or even the evil guy. It is entirely possible that Kanye both understands Hitler as the pre-assigned villain of the modern religion, and not only identifies with him but in some fashion views him as having done good things, or been on the right path, or something like that.
It’s sort of like how Joshua is viewed as a Biblical hero by Christians and Jews, but did quite a lot of total genocide in Canaan, of the sort that makes him very much a proto-Hitler if assessed by the dominant morality of our age. Villain to some, but an indicator to others that the dominant morality is actually wrong about quite a lot of things.
Kanye could be viewing Hitler in something like the same sort of framing.
Edit: I just realized Taylor released a song a while back about being the villain. I think there is an incipient cultural trend of “Maybe I’m the bad guy, but I’m right and I’m going to embrace it” occurring. Which is the first step on the road to the villain eventually being reinterpreted as the hero.
Given his difficult relationship with Ms. Swift I suspect that might be intentional.
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