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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.
I’m going to disagree here. Yes, we knew about the Indian removals of the 1800s and the slave trade and colonialism. But they weren’t things that people were supposed to feel deep guilt about. Indian removal was seen as perhaps unfortunate, but necessary to build a civilization in America. Hitler changed that because he moved at an industrial pace and we won in time to film the aftermath. He was also a gift to the Military-Industrial complex, as the specter of Hitler somewhere in the world was useful to convince tge populace that they should send their sons to some military adventure out in the world, and for that, we needed a huge military. Anti-racism is also politically useful globally because it gives those nonwhite nations a reason to choose our side — we fought genocidal racism.
Without Hitler I don’t think it happens. Without Hitler racism goes from being the evil to being on par with any number of other political evils that we knew about and don’t celebrate, but don’t punish ourselves over. And there are plenty of other evils to bring up.
Certainly there were lots of people who at the time of the Holocaust saw it as a uniquely terrible crime, even as it was ongoing. For example in July 1944, Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden (concerning the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):
It's worth noting that Churchill does not, in this passage nor anywhere else in writing- including Churchill's six volumes of Second World War, reference Nazi gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The Holocaust is not referenced at all in any concrete terms either in Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, nor in Charles de Gaulle's memoirs.
One rule of thumb which never, ever fails is that any claim you can be arrested for questioning is false. It's been like that through recorded history. Why would gas chambers in WW2 be some singular exception to this otherwise completely reliable rule?
You can be arrested in Ukraine for questioning Holodomor. Does this falsify Holodomor?
This seems like a fairly odd rule in general. People have been arrested throughout history for advocating claims that are not true. For instance, it is literally impossible for the claims of all religions (or the central claim of atheism) to be true, and yet, throughout history, it has been typical for people to get arrested for advocating all and sundry religions or for advancing atheism.
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