Yes, but.
The Drefus affair, and anything that came before it in terms of antisemitism was on a different order of magnitude than the Holocaust. So much so that it was unforseeable for most people.
Consider Charlie Chaplin: “Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”
Inside the Third Reich, there were vast differences in what people actually knew. Deportation and internment were known facts, but the mass murder was not publicly announced. After the war, the more naive supporters of Nazism who lived farther away from the centers of political power were in for a rude awakening.
This is why Holocaust denial is such a big thing. There were and still are racists of the second-most despicable kind, who do not approve of mass murder.
There is a widespread consensus that Hitler’s actions were evil. There is an - unfortunately - significantly less widespread consensus that Hitler’s ideology (the racism, making Germany great again, but not the mass murder) was evil.
But there is no consensus, even among smart and nice people, on how quickly and how inevitably one will lead to the other.
I agree. That doesn’t negate my point, which is that part of the reason why something like the holocaust was “unforeseeable” was because antisemitism was so ingrained in European culture and society. Christian supremacy was as much a way of life as white supremacy. You’re also forgetting that the Protocols had been published in the early 20th century (in part inspired by the Dreyfus affair). And there were the pograms in the East (which Western European countries used to comfort themselves that at least they weren’t like THOSE Eastern Europeans).
I’m not a huge fan of the Sonderweg theory, because it says to us that it CAN’T happen elsewhere or that there was something peculiar in the German mind that made them susceptible to mass murder. It lets the rest of humanity off the hook and assumes (despite all evidence to the contrary) that we are somehow not capable of such atrocities, that it was only at that moment, and in those conditions, and because of who people were that it happened.
Yes. And Hitler’s ideology (and it’s various corollaries) are still very much with us, as you rightly point out, and animating some wings of the Trump coalition.
I think one of the problems is going to be what we’ve found with regard to pro-choice issues: the people on the haters side are generally retired or otherwise out of work, so they can afford to spend the day (or week) protesting.
The people fighting for equal rights usually have jobs and other responsibilities (and a sense of responsibility toward them) so there is less free time available to protest.
I agree that antisemitism was widespread/ingrained, but I’m not quite sure we’re saying the same thing.
Of course, if antisemitism hadn’t been widespread, Hitler might have been less popular / faced stronger opposition for his antisemitism. But the thing that surprised many people was the step from being an antisemite like most others to being a mass-murderer like… more or less nobody else.
For me this is evidence that only a small percentage of despicable racists/…/whatever-ists end up being mass-murdering *-ists. On the other hand, the more despicable *-ists you have, the higher the risk of getting a mass-murdering *-ist.
So the question is, should we oppose Trump on the basis of “He’s like Hitler and will become a mass-murderer”, or should we stick to “Racism is bad even when its victims aren’t murdered”? I don’t think we have enough evidence to do the former without losing credibility. But we should definitely be on guard.
I have to tread very carefully on this subject, but I believe that part of the problem was that middle class German Jews were largely so integrated that they did not take anti-Semitism very seriously by the 20th century. Germany was possibly the most advanced country in the world technically, and one of the most advanced politically. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was a bit of a joke; Ludwig II’s Walhalla was full of busts and statues of great Germans, many of them Jewish and without distinction. Anti-Semitism, in fact, was something that low class, deluded people believed, who had no chance of ever achieving power. It was the kind of thing that happened in the East, or in France.
I have sat in on sad discussions of this by people who escaped the Reich and younger Jews. I remember one exchange in which a woman (born in England around 1940) said that she would not want her children ever to learn German because of what the Germans had done; and an elderly woman replied “But we were Germans.” And someone else pointed out that without a knowledge of German, you cannot read some great Jewish literature in the original.
The 1930s showed that, even in advanced countries, progress is far from inevitable.
