The murderous legacy of Adolf Hitler and Nazism seems to be in the air over the past few days. Why can people not learn?
Here's news from Turkey, which ostensibly wants to modernize itself enough to be admitted to the European Union, that the new bestselling book is... Mein Kampf.
Cheap cover prices and a rise in nationalist sentiment have made an unlikely best-seller in Turkey of Adolf Hitler's infamous autobiography, "Mein Kampf", analysts here say.The book was first published here in 1939, when Axis and Allied countries were competing for Turkey's soul as they tried to woo it away from the neutrality it would maintain until the very end of World War II. But since January, the book has sold more than 50,000 copies and is number four on the best-seller list drawn up by the DetR bookstore chain.
"'Mein Kampf' has always been a sleeper, a secret best-seller," said Oguz Tektas of Mefisto editions, one of several publishing houses to re-release the book Hitler wrote while in jail in 1925. "We took it out of the closet for purely commercial reasons."
His company's sole aim, he stressed, was "to make money," which they did by slashing the cover price.
"This book, which does not contain a single ounce of humanity, unfortunately appears to be taken seriously in this country," political scientist Dogu Ergil complained in a recent newspaper interview.
He agreed that the unexpected popularity of "Mein Kampf" in this Muslim-majority country has its roots in a rise in anti-American sentiment sparked by the occupation of Iraq and anti-Semitism resulting from Israel's Palestinian policy.
"Nazism, buried in the dustbin of history in Europe, is beginning to re-emerge in Turkey," he warned.
Then via Jan Herman's Straight Up blog we're tipped to an act of intellectual sophistry by the (usually) straight arrows at C-SPAN's Book TV, as exposed by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.
You will not be seeing Deborah Lipstadt on C-SPAN. The Holocaust scholar at Emory University has a new book out ("History on Trial"), and an upcoming lecture of hers at Harvard was scheduled to be televised on the public affairs cable outlet. The book is about a libel case brought against her in Britain by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, trivializer and prevaricator who is, by solemn ruling of the very court that heard his lawsuit, "anti-Semitic and racist." No matter. C-SPAN wanted Irving to "balance" Lipstadt.The word balance is not in quotes for emphasis. It was invoked repeatedly by C-SPAN producers who seemed convinced that they had chosen the most noble of all journalistic causes: fairness. "We want to balance it [Lipstadt's lecture] by covering him," said Amy Roach, a producer for C-SPAN's Book TV. Her boss, Connie Doebele, put it another way. "You know how important fairness and balance is at C-SPAN," she told me. "We work very, very hard at this. We ask ourselves, 'Is there an opposing view of this?' "
C-SPAN's cockeyed version of fairness -- it told Lipstadt that it had bent over backward to ensure its coverage of the presidential election was fair and balanced -- is so mindless that I thought for a moment its producers and I could not be talking about the same thing. This is the "Crossfire" mentality reduced to absurdity, if that's possible. For a book on the evils of slavery, would it counter with someone who thinks it was a benign institution? Why does it feel there is another side to the Holocaust or to Irving's assertion that he was libeled? He was not. He was described to a T.
In the end, Lipstadt had to choose between promoting her own book -- a terrific read, by the way -- and giving Irving the audience of his dreams and a status equal to her own. C-SPAN said it was only seeking fairness, but it was asking Lipstadt to balance truth with a lie or history with fiction. On this occasion, at least, Irving did what he could not do with his libel suit: silence Lipstadt. He may still appear on C-SPAN, but Lipstadt will not -- a victory for "balance" that only the truly unbalanced could applaud.
Thankfully, Lipstadt has quickly garnered support from hundreds of prominent historians through a petition organized by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
As historians and social scientists, we strongly oppose your reported decision to broadcast a lecture by Holocaust-denier David Irving, to "balance" your intended broadcast of a lecture by Holocaust historian Prof. Deborah Lipstadt.We support Prof. Lipstadt's refusal to participate in this project. Falsifiers of history cannot "balance" historians. Falsehoods cannot "balance" the truth. Justice Charles Gray of the British Royal High Court of Justice, in his verdict on April 11, 2000 dismissing Irving's libel suit against Prof. Lipstadt, concluded that Irving "is antisemitic and racist" and ruled: "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."
Just a few weeks ago, we concluded Black History Month. Presumably
C-SPAN did not consider broadcasting a program about Black history that would be "balanced" by a program featuring someone denying that African-Americans were enslaved. C-SPAN should not broadcast statements that it knows to be false, nor provide a platform for falsifiers of history, whether about the Holocaust, African-American history, or any other subject.
C-SPAN should be smart enough to realize on what thin ice it is standing. Brian Lamb, wake up!
Meanwhile, indispensable scholar Victor Davis Hanson examines why the Hitler/Nazi slurs have been flying at George W. Bush and others.
So what gives with this crazy popular analogy — one that on a typical Internet Google search of “Bush” + “Hitler” yields about 1,350,000 matches?One explanation is simply the ignorance of the icons of our popular culture. A Linda Ronstadt, Garrison Keillor, or Harold Pinter knows nothing much of the encompassing evil of Hitler’s regime, its execution of the mentally ill and disabled, the systematic cleansing of the non-Aryans from Europe, or mass executions and starvation of Soviet prisoners. Like Prince Harry parading around in his ridiculous Nazi costume, quarter-educated celebrities who have some talent for song or verse know only that name-dropping “Hitler” or his associates gets them some shock value that their pedestrian rants otherwise would not warrant.
Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.
There is something profoundly immoral for a latte-sipping, upscale Westerner of the postmodern age flippantly evoking Hitler when we think of the countless souls lost to the historical record who were systematically starved and gassed in the factories of death of the Third Reich.
Read the whole brilliant thing. Given recidivist anti-Semitism in Europe and even here, shallow thinking and loose talk, even by the loony left, is risky -- the stakes are far too high.
Posted by Alan at March 20, 2005 10:29 AM