I recently came across an Orwell line that, as he tends to do, leapt out of the page and smacked me in the head.
It read: “The people who say that Hitler is the Antichrist, or alternatively, the Holy Ghost, are nearer an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have kept it up that he is merely a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All that this idea really reflects is the sheltered conditions of English life.”
It, of course, struck me because of the man who dresses in orange makeup and performs a dark comedy act on our national stage.
Many people like myself will never forget the “good willed” and “thoughtful” people who had decided that Trump was not, in fact, an evil and existential danger to American society, but, at worst was a clown. Even today, with a hundred thousand dead due to this man’s negligence and hateful desire to cause states that don’t support him to suffer, and hundreds of thousands more in danger, there are people who are convinced that every Trump action is not one of evil but of a certain vain stupidity that just happens to result in minorities, immigrants, Muslims, queer people, Jews, and more suffering under what looks increasingly like a fascist regime.
I used a lot of words that make many of these same people cringe. Fascism? Really? Evil? Come on.
And it is this, I think, that reveals why Hitler analogies are so apt. It is not that our president has built concentration camps, and that we have come to accept them. It is not that our president regularly shares literal white power tweets (always a “mistake”, of course). It is not that literal Nazis support him, and kill people using the same conspiracies he spreads (another “stupid” mistake, of course).
No. The lessons of Hitler, so often, are often framed around what one evil man can do to a society. Or they are used in such a limited way that they are essentially useless (“Unless it’s literally the Holocaust, how dare you compare?”). Or that bigotry is bad (an apparently very difficult to grasp concept).
No, these are not really the lessons Hitler has for this age is how people will respond to evil when it presents itself.
Now, when I say “evil” I am not simply referring to Trump, just as when someone refers to Hitler they are not unaware that the Nazis and the Germans and the Poles and all the rest were complicit in their own ways.
What I mean is that every generation has its own Hitler. A person, or an idea, or both, or more, that represents a deep, unbinding evil that threatens to swallow the world around it.
Obviously, we have deeply embedded evil in our society already, but these evils are like the spiritual manifestations of what is happening underneath the surface finally deciding that it’s time to come out and establish itself as the overt, true reality. Vice is now virtue, virtue is now vice. Protecting the innocent is redefined as protecting my people, be they guilty or innocent. Love is hate, hate is love. All lives matter; but by the way, blue lives matter. Pro-life but not the lives of immigrants or those in danger of COVID or black people or…
These are not simply the unaware, well-meaning good but actually evil of systemic racism: this is racism that no longer desires to find justifications for itself. It is the dynamic that Martin Luther King and so many others pointed out as “white backlash” in American society: a sort of insistence on going backwards the moment things move forward, because moving forward brings out the latent fears of the evils of the past within. The light shines, but only into a dark abyss.
This is what Hitler represented: a society openly accepting the darkness upon itself. There was no virtue in it except in the tribal selfishness of thinking that creating a superhuman race of Aryans to destroy all the rest was somehow a dream world. The sort of fever dreams that motivate the mass shooters and terrorists of today: destroying without any compunctions.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing trends that most aligns with this sort of mass bigotry combined with cult-thinking (again: the word for this is evil) is QAnon. Like Hitler, like Trump, like the alt-right, it was mocked when it first arrived.
Today, hundreds, if not many more, shared their commitment to this other-worldly cause with an oath to become “digital soldiers”, with a hashtag that trended nationally on Twitter and is an acronym for “Where we go one, we go all”. Among the oath-takers: General Flynn.
But it goes further than that: QAnon has already turned violent, with “ two murders, a terrorist incident near the Hoover Dam, and multiple child kidnapping plots, among other crimes,” according to a report in the Daily Beast.
It is scary to grapple with what may be coming, especially with thousands of people committing to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals.
This is simply the most extreme version of what is spreading all around us: evil.
But there are people in America and beyond who still feel safe. In the case of the “intellectuals,” their lives have mainly been threatened by things like online backlashes (that is to say, not threatened), and so their prominently placed op-eds complain about the time a random Twitter user called them a bedbug or imaginary conversations with Trump supporters.
No matter the concentration camps. No matter the fact that democracy is being openly, overtly subverted. No matter the deaths, the pandemic, the hate, the mass shootings, the car rammings, the police beatings, the growth of hate movements, the men storming state capitals with guns drawn, the third of our country thoroughly radicalized, the most popular cable station and Facebook posts spreading white nationalist talking points daily. And never mind Trump.
No, what matters to the “liberal” intellectuals of our day is that America is “divided” and has “lost civility” and must finally learn to “listen” again.
These are the voices of the effete, the empty modern intellectuals that are simply holding the torch of the voices Orwell yelled at regularly in his essays. These are the people who don’t have to worry about being shot by the people whose job it is to protect them. These are the people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs or who aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. These are the people who have decided that now is the time to create a new publication devoted to “persuasion” written by the people they see as being increasingly pushed out of the national conversation: all writers with large national platforms for their empty civility exercises to be spread daily.
The same group of people who have just recently penned a letter in one of America’s top read publications about their concerns over the illiberalism of rigid ideology. A letter that equated Trump’s fascism with “cancel culture,” and which was penned and signed by some of the most powerful, richest, and sheltered intellectuals of our time.
This is one of many reasons that Hitler matters today. Because evil matters today. And try as hard as we can, evil just keeps rearing its ugly head, and people keep falling back into it. But worse: the people with a means to truly change things, to truly stand for something, keep falling back into minimizing that which they don’t perceive threat from, and instead focus on the small picture, on their own concerns. At best, they find ways to equate the issues that personally affect them (being called out online) with literal fascism.
How many of these people, who signed a letter that said “ The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away” would be okay with Holocaust denial becoming part of our national discourse? How many of them would support the publication of articles calling for the military to come and raid their gatherings, as the editor whose job was lost over just such an article (but an article that only put simple protestors and civil rights organizers in danger)?
These are the modern equivalent of the “white moderate” that Martin Luther King warned us were more dangerous than the KKK. They are what allow evil to spread, because evil can only be defeated with a fight to the death. And these people don’t have things they’re willing to die for. Because they take life for granted.
Just as those who stood by when Hitler rose, either supporting or ignoring orders to keep the Jews out of their countries at the same time. Passive evil, in other words. The same evil that exists at all times, but which becomes overt evil when the world forces you to no longer hide your intentions and to finally make a choice between that and goodness, light, truth, and equality.
Hitler analogies matter because evil matters and because cowardice matters.
Cowardice is what moves people to see evil as clownish. It’s what moves them to stand up more strongly to progressive cancel culture than to fascism. It’s what moves them to stand for civility over morality.
It is why tyrants run rampant: because tyrants will fight, but the intellectuals will not. It is why movements like QAnon spread but intellectuals can only talk to themselves. It is why racism continues to embed itself in our society as intellectuals cheer for its end while criticizing those who actually dare to do something about it.
Cowardice is humanity’s greatest weakness, and today those with the largest influence in our institutions are practically defined by it. Perhaps the real reason they are scared is because they know their cowardice is finally being exposed.