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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
They said rap should be subversive, well what did they think subversive meant? Vibes? Essays?
Honestly it's a pretty good song, bizarre subject matter aside. This Youtube link is live as of this writing, although it seems like the platform keeps taking new uploads down.
I wonder if 'racism is the paramount evil' would still be a defining characteristic of western ethics if WW2 hadn't happened? I mean, the Transatlantic slave trade and the scramble for Africa still happened, smallpox still wiped out the American Indians. Maybe we would just find some other kind of racial guilt? My assumption is that it all stems from the fact that we're so outbred and WEIRD, not from the particular events of the early 1940s.
Not a reply to you, strictly, but man am I bothered by "the nazis are the absolute zero of morality and we must forever obsess about them".
Alexander Gauland (a senior figure of the German far-right political landscape) called the Nazi years a "bird-shit-stain on German history". I think it somewhat undersells the impact of the events, but I agree with his overall sentiment. Man, I do wish we could just collectively damnatio memoriae the entire time period. Throw it into the nearest dumpster. Burn the records. There's nothing left to be learned from it. The well of valuable experience has been poisoned by all sides that ever had a damn thing to do with it. Who still stands to gain from keeping it open? What good does it serve? People who suffered negative events can deepen and prolong their trauma by focusing on it, and even create trauma where there needn't have been any. The nazis may have killed me for a mongrel. Who cares, they're gone. Germany is doomed to lose itself in the 21th century no matter what happens, demography being destiny. What does it matter then what the Germans of 80 years ago did? You may as well believe in Nazis in Antarctica or hiding on the far side of the moon as in the continued actual relevance of the events of the mid-20th century. Wake up babe, a new millenium just dropped and we - no matter who we is - have enough on our hands without keeping them both full wringing and whinging about the antichrist of yesteryear.
So to the latter-day revisionists who decry the holocaust as false, and the propagandists who still try to make hay of the deadest horse on Earth: Yes you're perfectly right, the other guy is completely wrong, now shut the fuck up, bury your obsession and face the future.
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