Unsacred Cows

A colleague in a private online forum in which I participate got angry, as I predicted some would, after reading what I had to say about parallels between Bush administration and Nazi propaganda (see my 12/23/05 blog post). My colleague’s outrage seems a reaction to the very word, Nazi — so reflexive that she went on for several paragraphs with condemnations that had absolutely nothing to do with what I actually wrote. I’ve seen such outrage from other people before.

It seems as if these good folks want to believe that the Nazis were a unique anomaly. They insist that nothing should be placed nearby or even mentioned in the same breath.

The problem with treating the Nazis as if so thoroughly unrelated to anyone else, a sort of untouchable breed of unholy cow, is that the herd is full of similar animals.

If we don’t learn to stare past the horrors of the end result — the holocaust — to see Nazism’s beginnings, we won’t be able to prevent a manifestation of a Nazi-like culture elsewhere. Setting Nazism so far apart requires that we minimize anything similar that is on a smaller scale. We can convince ourselves the smaller, similar actions and tactics are benign by comparison and therefore, not similar at all. But all things begin small. Nazism did too. And that’s the whole point.

It’s worth repeating part of the passage I quoted earlier from Milton Mayer’s book, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 - 1945":

>> Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.<<

Given the right set of circumstances, any government can exhibit Nazi-like traits. And any people can be convinced that the government’s actions are necessary to their survival.

If we insist on setting Hitler and the Nazis in a distant place that nothing and no one else can approach, we put too much distance between us and our understanding of how such movements begin, develop, and , if unchecked, overwhelm. We, ironically enough, almost invite a new proliferation of the unsacred cow by not being able to recognize it — and cull it — when it first appears in the herd.