more comment (re: anti-Hitler in 2025)

I think about this sometimes also. That our continued anti-reverence for Hitler serves a variety of ongoing purposes in US culture & politics. One is that fascism gets to pretend it isn’t fascism so long as there is no ongoing Holocaust, as though killing Jews is the only characteristic of fascism.

Another is that the US gets to continually pat itself on the back for “defeating” fascism and thereby becoming the Leader of the Free World, regardless of what US foreign policy has done since or does now, and regardless of the greater sacrifices made by the Soviet Union and other countries in defeating Hitler.

Another is this ongoing “never again” mythology that centers Jewish people as the sympathetic victims of genocide who therefore deserve Zionism, while of course other genocides continue to occur around the world and we didn’t/don’t act to stop them — Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Myanmar, Indonesia, Guatemala, Yazidi, Uyghur, Tigray — and none of those peoples deserve their own versions of Zionism.

And finally — WW2 films serve as an ongoing full-employment program for white straight male actors in Hollywood and if there are any women or non-white or LGBTQ+ characters in these films historical accuracy requires that they be treated on camera in bigoted ways.

We trap our culture in the amber of WW2 to keep certain heroic myths in the forefront.

society splintered

“Postmodernism essentially argued that there are no grand narratives, that each person’s subjectivity holds a different perspective on the world. This is true to an extent. But while postmodernism shifted our perspectives on what constitutes truth, it failed to dismantle power, resulting in a world in which rather than chorus together, society splintered into dissonant calls of ‘my truth’.”