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Thanks for sharing. But I'm nearly as tired of Holocaust-themed morality plays as I am of the Civil Rights Era-flavored ones. Has anyone under age 70 not been bludgeoned through their entire lives with "Prejudice is bad!" and "The banality of evil!" and "Never again!" etc?
I don't understand people who write books on these themes in 2014. Is there even the thinnest residue of stunning bravery to be mined and exploited by speaking truth to a (long vanquished) power? I have to imagine that even blue tribers would yawn at yet another Holocaust tear jerker or To Kill a Mockingbird clone, "don't they know trans persecution or MAGA terrorism are where the points are scored in 2023?" And even dispensing with the cynicism, is there really anything interesting left to say on these topics? I'd wager that nearly any book you could write on them has already been written.
You mistake the process of cultural moral education as an attempt at saying something novel. If I tell a young boy to not throw trash on the street every day, it is no flaw for my lesson to be repititive.
Hitler, for the foreesable future, remains an important figure in the West's cultural history - he is the ultimate evil who must be known so that he and his followers can be rejected. Likewise with the Civil Rights Movement - it represents an important step in moral progress, so it is taught to people.
These films should be recognized for what they are - an attempt at recreating our ancestors' feelings about these things in ourselves or our descendants.
That's true. Books and films on these topics makes instruments of Leftist moral education. But IMO racism or mass killing of perceived enemies are not the ultimate sins (though they're certainly not good), so these sorts of books are grating to me. I imagine a Leftist would feel the same about, say, The Passion of The Christ.
No, status quo education. Hating Hitler as the ultimate evil, supporting the CRM, all of these are now the status quo. Even conservatives (not the radical ones) are not lukewarm on Hitler.
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How many young boys do you know who keep committing holocausts?
Anyway, I don't necessarily disagree, but the more often the lesson is repeated, the more glaring are the cases of evil we don't teach about.
If you don't teach it, you either don't consider it immoral or it's simply not relevant to you.
That's my point, actually. There's plenty of things that happened in history that were plainly evil, that people will swear up and down they don't support, but don't teach about how evil they were. My suspicion is they don't find them evil.
Such as?
Gulags, struggle sessions, killing fields... you know, the usual.
You think that the those, even the gulags, aren't widely known or taught? The latter two are less well known, sure, but if anything that simply seems like a product of the fact that for Westerners they were and are too remote to care all that much about. How many Americans could even find Cambodia on a map?
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Presumably there are places in the world where young boys are still committing holocausts. Xi's regime surely will have some Eichmann-type functionaries choosing where the camps in Xinjiang are built and how many they should detain. Problem is, show them the film, and you'll likely get the same excuses that the PRC uses for doing it in the first place. And probably a few "how dare you compare it to the holocaust" comments alongside it.
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I've still been hearing about the fall of the Roman Empire and that was even longer than 70 years ago.
I guess Leftist propaganda has done a number on me because when a new book about the Holocaust or Racism or whatever comes out in $currentyear (although admittedly this one predates mass TDS by a few years) I steel myself for the inevitable parallel between Conservatives/Christians/White males/etc and the not-so-subtle implication that people who oppose immigration are literally SS guards or that people who are not in favor of "trans rights" are little Bull Connors. I'm still willing to read stories about the Holocaust that were written a decade or two after the fact, but I treat anything written later with extreme skepticism, because at some point (maybe during the 60s and 70s?) the Holocaust was elevated from "terrible thing that happened" to "the worst and purest example of evil in human history" and assumed near-mythical qualities. The Civil Rights Movement on the other hand seems to have undergone the transformation to myth almost immediately so I am extremely selective and skeptical when consuming anything about that period.
When a book about the Fall of the Roman Empire comes out, I expect it's going to be a dry history, maybe revealing a few new discoveries or advancing some new theories. There are books that try to draw parallels between the British Empire/American Republic to claim that we're repeating history, which by this point is quite a tired and trite comparison, but they're not usually imbued with the same moral outrage.
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As I've remarked when every new "fascist" politician is compared to Hitler, it speaks to a lack of interest in the breadth of history, even in the relatively narrow scope of 20th century genocides, fascist regimes, or political oppression. Why does it seem like basically no one is interested in comparing their opponent to Franco instead of Hitler, for example? I suppose it's just not enough of a cultural touchstone, but it would at least make me pause for a moment and think about whether they have a point, as where yet another Hitler comparison completely fails to do so.
It’s rather difficult to cast Franco (or Mussolini and especially Salazar) as a villain. If history happened differently and Italy didn’t go to war on the side of Nazi Germany, I would say there was a fair chance that Mussolini would end up staying in power just like Salazar and Franco. Apart from actual war stuff, their murder numbers are also quite low.
Many (MANY) people thought fascism was a good answer to the crisis of capitalism and Bolshevism treat at the time. The problem started when fascism became the de facto ideology of the revanchist states who weren’t happy with their lot and wanted a rematch of the Great War.
They lost in a way that led to absolute American and Soviet control over Europe. So there was a need for a narrative to justify why these countries should become docile obedient work horses of their respective hegemons and never ever try something like this. At this point the holocaust and evils of fascism is just the greatest narrative one could ever imagine.
The commies in the West later tried to cast capitalist hegemony as also an evil on par with fascism. Just like how the anti-commies in the East tried to do with communism. So far neither of them have succeeded much
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Franco, Pinochet, etc have much higher risk of opposing politicians and their supporters responding with the yeschad.jpg image.
The blue tribe generally views these men as Spanish-speaking Hitler, but to non-blue tribers they were standard strongmen at worst and benevolent dictators at best, and it's worth noting that the one occasion of democrats in the US comparing their enemies to these guys was a Biden Spanish-language ad campaign in south Florida in which he called Trump a Caudillo. Needless to say this campaign clearly didn't work.
It's only slightly more interesting why Mao and Stalin don't get used in comparisons; Mao is weird and foreign and Stalin does sometimes get used in political comparisons, just less commonly than Hitler(or Fidel Castro, for that matter- the red tribe tends to see him as unmitigated evil while the blue tribe has more nuanced views in an interesting reversal of the situation with Franco and Pinochet).
Far-leftists might likewise reply to Stalin comparisons with a yeschad.jpg, but only if they're in so deep that they've effectively created a whitewashed version of Stalin in their head, and are as committed to Holodomor denialism as neo-Nazis are to Holocaust denialism.
Sure, I was trying to mostly be talking about people closer to the mainstream than tankies or neonazis.
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Hitler dominates the cultural education people are provided. He is the ultimate devil, the most evil being to have existed to many. Asking why people care about one figure instead of another presumes that they care at all in the first place.
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In 2016 I kept reiterating that the alleged parallels between Trump and Hitler seemed like incredibly weak sauce to me, whereas Berlusconi (not a dictator - that's part of my point) seemed like a much more obvious referent.
But most Americans don't know who Berlusconi is, so. TV Tropes calls this small reference pools - much as Mozart and Beethoven are the only classical composers whose names Joe Sixpack can be assumed to recognise, Hitler is the only historical dictator meeting that description (maybe Stalin, at a push. Mussolini? Forget it.). So if you want to criticise a politician by way of comparison to a historical dictator, and you want that comparison to be legible to a mass audience, you're going to see a lot of square-Trump-in-round-Hitlers until the average person becomes a lot more historically literate.
This was great writing.
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Franco just wasn't murderous enough. The highest numbers I can find for his killings are in the low hundreds of thousands, which makes him a piker by 20th century standards. Occasionally you get comparisons to Mussolini, who outside of war deaths probably killed fewer, but he gets to enjoy some of the evil rubbed off of Hitler.
If people weren't combining ignorance and hyperbole, I think the comparably low death tolls from guys like Franco and Pinochet make them much more plausible cautionary tales. There isn't really a plausible path to the Nazification of the United States, but killing a few hundred political prisoners (of either side) doesn't seem like it's something that definitely won't happen. As an avowed anti-communist, you probably can't really get me to condemn either one of them in strong terms, which makes the comparison even more effective! When someone says that the guy I support is like Pinochet, I don't immediately roll my eyes and say they're ridiculous.
I'd say that in most cases hyperbole is the point. They are sick of arguing and just trying to insult you by likening you to something unambiguously bad.
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If you really want to compare someone to the least murderous Fascist dictator, then Salazar is surely the go-to? Regardless any comparing of recent US presidents to fascist dictators would inevitably run into the problem that Biden, rather than Trump, has done more of the whole purging political dissent through force thing.
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I haven't seen the film, but it certainly sounds like it is the opposite of a morality play, and of speaking truth to power, nor does it sound like a tear jerker. It sounds instead like it asks the viewer to empathize with the protagonists, in a "there but for the grace of God go I" sense. I certainly hope so, because that sort of depiction those who do evil is all too rare.
As for whether there is anything new to say, I found [this film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_(2017_film) to be a somewhat different take.
And, IMHO, the point of a film about the Holocaust should be to explore broader issues of inhumanity, "evil" etc, rather than to simply bemoan the Holocaust in particular or atrocity crimes in general. Every 10-year-old has already figured out that mass atrocities are bad; what needs to be figured out is why those who perpetrate them apparently feel otherwise (or that they are less bad than the alternative), at least at the time.
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