On arriving at Northwestern University many years ago, I was kind of surprised to discover that there was a Nazi on the faculty. Or so said a publication I found in the student center, which went into great detail about what it said were his beliefs and why the university had to reject him, ignore his tenure and fire him.
It turns out, of course, that he wasn't actually a Nazi. He was a Holocaust denier, which is gross and evil enough, but he didn't teach history. He taught in the school of engineering. He had written a book outlining his beliefs shortly after gaining tenure, and the university had an officially recognized student organization whose sole purpose -- spelled out in its name, even -- was to get him fired. For his part, he stayed on the side of the line that kept him under tenure's umbrella. He never claimed official university sanction for his views and he never brought them into his classroom. Other than an article or two here and there he never wrote anything else about the Holocaust beyond his one book, although it seems he kept some level of activity among similarly-minded people.
By the time I was a senior the official committee to get rid of the guy had kind of fizzled out and folded into a larger committee which included that point of view. I remember a discussion with one of its members, an earnest freshman whom I asked, "Who pays attention to a history book written by an engineering prof?" I was assured that his work held great currency among several groups, a list of which I was provided. I later checked them out, and as far as I could tell they were groups that already believed what the guy said.
All of this came to mind when reading the cover story in the latest issue of National Review, an essay reflecting on the centennial of the October Revolution that paved the way for Imperial Russia to become the Soviet Union and spread misery, death and dopey dorm-room utopias across the globe ever since.
Article author Douglas Murray notes that the 20th century spawned two hideous totalitarian ideologies that murdered millions of people, Nazism and Communism. Today, any kind of association with Nazism or its ideas draws scorn upon the belief holder, in the same way that his denial of the Holocaust brought scorn and exacting scrutiny on the professor at my alma mater. Openly wearing a swastika symbol is a good way to get mocked and perhaps assaulted. Its appearance as graffiti on a college campus will prompt official investigations and consequences on the perpetrators, if they can be determined.
Nazism is rightly discredited and rightly judged as an ideology of evil, always linked to the horrid results of its most comprehensive attempt at implementation. Whatever positive benefits it had for Germany in the years leading up to WWII are rightly judged not worth its cost to Jews, a host of other ethnic minorities and anyone else that its thuggish leadership disliked.
No such scarlet badge of shame is awarded to Communism, Murray notes. Its modern devotees have few, if any, official student committees on campuses seeking the ouster of professors who may be among them. Even though when you add up the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, North Korea and so on, the number of people who needed to die to enable the worker's paradise is probably in the nine digits (and counting), the thought of shunning Communist ideas is nowhere nearly as automatic as that of shunning Nazi thought. Professors who denied the reality of the Khmer Rougue's killing fields were given platforms to do so. Although the weight of evidence of Pol Pot's attempt at genocide eventually convinced many, some people today still suggest that the idea of more than a million dead (out of a population of only 7 million) is exaggerated.
Even the iconography is treated differently. A quick internet search for T-shirts with swastikas comes up with that symbol inside the universal red-circle-and-line "not allowed" design or heavily Hindi-styled to make it clear that the picture represents the Indian symbol rather than the later German one. Shoppers who want the plain Reich-styled version have to hunt some pretty creepy sites. But a similar search for a hammer and sickle will find all kinds of artsy representations on high-profile T-shirt sites. It's not hard to find Alberto Korda's picture of the murderous Che Guevara on a shirt, poster or other item either.
Murray's essay is worth reading. It's an historical sketch of Communism's history, from the view of an admitted opponent in a magazine that's never going to be a friend of that movement. Readers may make such correctives as they believe the evidence warrants, and you may not agree with either him or me either way.
There's no mystery at all as to why those who'd like to give Nazism a second bite at the apple are roundly dismissed and rejected. Their ideology is demonstrably harmful and tainted. But it's still curious as to why Karl Marx's fan club seems to have no end of second chances. George Orwell once noted that he seemed to find Communism's excesses excused by its defenders in light of the necessity to stand firm against imperialism and oppression. If you want to make an omelet, he said he was told, you have to break some eggs. All well and good if you're not one of the eggs, but he noted that even if you accepted the premise, none of his opponents seemed ever to have an answer to the question, "Yes, but where's the omelet?
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