Historical Illiteracy

History is a tricky subject. Some historical facts (especially dates, times, locations, persons and so forth) can be known with considerable certainty, while other things are either too complex to analyze, or we simply don't know enough to say anything useful. We can have interpretations and hunches and even present pretty convincing arguments, but we'll never actually know.

A good example is the French Revolution. We know when it happened. We know the flow of events. We know the majority of the personalities. But why it happened? Jeez. There are probably as many reasons as there were participants, and the best we can do is say "Well... These seem to be the main reasons..."

It's hard to know where to draw the line. What can be accepted as a more or less concrete historical fact, and what is more or less a matter of opinion? (Possibly very well informed opinion, but still, in the end, opinion.)

Postmodernists seem to argue that there is no historical objectivity, that everything is a matter of opinion and that all interpretations are valid. While there is some truth in that (how can we, at this remove, ever possibly begin to imagine we know what Julius Caesar had in mind, except through his admittedly self-serving dispatches from Gaul?), I think it leads in the end to a kind of intellectual exhaustion where scholarship has no meaning - since any one interpretation of history is as valid as any other, why not just dump all the old books and documents in the incinerator, clear out some space in the library for books by Foucault, and imagine that pink bunny rabbits were the prime motivators in human history?

But I didn't really want to go there. Mostly I wanted to discuss the recent revelation that Hitler was a socialist. I can think of three reasons why people would believe this mistaken contention.

The first is that they were fooled by the Nazis themselves. Though Hitler was pretty much the complete opposite and mortal enemy of socialists, and though the Third Reich remained a more or less unfettered capitalist system throughout, the Nazis went to the trouble of calling their party the "National Socialist German Worker's Party". Sounds pretty socialist, doesn't it? And it was meant to sound pretty socialist too - Hitler and the early Nazis hoped to lure the German working class away from its alignment with the German Socialist Party by pretending to be socialist and hoping that most people wouldn't go to the trouble of looking deeper. But in practice, the best way to interpret the name of the Nazi Party is to skip every other word - National German Party. "Socialist" and "Worker's" was just more artful Nazi PR work.

The second is that thanks to postmodernism, we can say anything we want about history and it's still right - or at least just as right as anything anyone else says. Research? Fah. Facts? Fah. Screw it, we'll just make it up as we go. And I think this sort of moral exhaustion is infectious - people catch it, give up on any kind of intellectual rigor, and believe what's easy.

And the third is that I think certain people in America in particular wanted to recast Hitler as a socialist so that they could link President Obama and Adolf Hitler - linking someone with Hitler is pretty much the hydrogen bomb of political rhetoric, and it works. What one thinks of Obama or his policies is irrelevant, and none of my business anyway. In a democracy, we settle such issues at the ballot box, and all the screaming and howling is a waste of energy that could be put to better use elsewhere. But I do think it's cheap and shabby to deliberately distort and even falsify history just to provide ammunition for a modern-day political attack. I am not implying that only certain right-wing commentators do this. I've seen it from both sides. And it irritates me no matter who does it.

But let's make this clear: Hitler was no socialist. In fact, by destroying the German trade unions, denying German workers the right to organize, shutting down socialist and communist newspapers, kicking socialist organizers to death, and so terrorizing the SPD and KPD that their leaders actually fled Germany in fear of their lives, the Nazis produced a Third Reich that was profoundly less socialist than it had been during the preceding Weimar years. One could argue that the early Nazi economic programs like the construction of the autobahn system had socialist overtones, but they were a good deal more cynical than that - the Nazis knew that a particularly good way to buy a man's loyalty in economic hard times was to give him a job so he could feed his family. It had nothing to do with socialist notions of equitable distribution of wealth and everything to do with boosting the popularity of the regime (with a side-dish of giving the German army improved interior lines of communication).

There were, it is true, some Nazis, particularly some of the early ones, who placed more emphasis on the "Socialist" part of the name than the "National" part of the name. It is true that some of the Immutable Points promulgated by the Party in the early days had socialist overtones, such as vows to break up big businesses and seizure of war profits. But in actual practice, none of the economically-focused Immutable Points were honored, and in fact the suppression of socialist thought in the Nazi Party and in particular the SA was a sine qua non for Hitler's eventual appointment as Chancellor. It was part of the deal - Hitler offered the generals the prospect of rearmament and national revenge, and he offered the industrialists the prospect of amassing huge profits from rearmament without those dratted trade unionists and socialists getting in the way. And, it must be said, Hitler delivered on that deal, to the detriment of the world.

Alas.