Do You Not See What I See?

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I don’t often talk about certain encounters I experienced in Austria. Some of them are deeply personal. Some of them were things I was specifically advised not to discuss. Some of them involved evils that I would rather not remember. Some of them are relevant today. From the time I returned from my missionary service in Austria to the present President of the United States, I watched people bandy about the term “Nazi” without apparent understanding of the true nature of those people. Although I didn’t see the brunt of Eichmann, Goebbels, Hess and the like in their heyday, and although I know full well that Austrians are not Nazis, I feel continually distressed at how freely people vilify those with which they happen to disagree by the inappropriate denotation and indemnification of Nazi. However, it is completely normal albeit unacceptable human behavior to see the virtue in those you prefer and describe all others in caricature. The Nazis are really too convenient a scapegoat to be effectively and validly compared to any evil that has ever walked the earth. Consequently, unless you have ever really met and spent any time with a real Nazi (not just someone who was a party member during the Nazi regime or someone who is just a bigot and claims kinship with that ilk), your comparisons are largely emotional and almost always misanthropic. Consequently, since I had the dubious honour of meeting/encountering/confronting some real Nazis while living in Austria, I dismiss almost all comparisons to Nazis immediately. So should you, and here’s why.

With one exception, the Nazis I encountered in Austria were random encounters. As part of our missionary duties, frequently we went door to door knocking on every door and speaking to anyone who would speak to us. My first encounter was at the Nashmarkt in Vienna where, while shopping for souvenirs, a vendor pulled me aside and said, “I know what you really want” and then proceeded to produce an SS company grade officer’s cap. To my everlasting shame, there is a picture of me wearing it. I don’t think other people have it, but I know people who have seen it, and it is not something with which I desire to be associated, and so I do not have ANY Nazi paraphernalia. I do know the woman who owns the hat now; she is a proud liberal and clerks for a federal judge in DC and thinks it’s perfectly fine to wear the hat for Halloween (I probably have written evidence she does that in a chat log in my gmail account, but this is not an attempt to libel her). Most of the rest of my encounters came because we knocked on doors of former SS members. You could tell who they were relatively quickly because they would offer you propaganda (well, they offered it to me; they all thought I was a Dane). Before I knew, we knocked on this one door, offered the man a Book of Mormon, and he said, “I have a book for you” and returned with an original copy of “Mein Kampf”. When another gentleman offered me a copy of “Die Grosse Weisse Rasse”, I knew exactly who he was, and we left Seekirchen bei Wallersee to get away from him. I did not keep either book. I didn’t want anyone to think that, because I owned those books that I agreed with the authors. Then, we went to Braunau am Inn, where Adolf Hitler was actually born. I could not believe the hero worshipping fandom in which his sycophants engaged. A man ran up to us and asked, “Are you here to see Hitler’s birth home?” We weren’t but we went. As we left, we found the big statue (which I think has been torn down subsequently) of Hitler giving his famous salute. At the church, we were shown his family pew. It was, without a doubt, the creepiest place I have ever set foot on earth.

Not every Austrian was a Nazi. I remember sitting one evening in Innkreis listening to an old war vet drunkenly describe his absolute shame at having gunned down a bunch of naked women and children to save his own skin. I remember a woman in Neumarkt am Wallersee who was elated that the US Army had occupied her town instead of the Russians. I remember Rudolph Hirshmann, himself a Holocaust survivor, who owned the brownstone where some people lived that we knew. Then there was Hermann Dospil, who went to prison in a Russian camp; he was just a soldier. Sure, some Austrians pretend it didn’t happen. I think some of them can’t face the truth or own up to the shame of not having done something to stem the spread of Naziism. Not everyone was like a man I met in Innsbruck whose father was the mayor of Innsbruck who was shot down in the public square when he gave Hitler the bird. This man was the youngest of four sons who were sent to the Russian front and the only one who survived. Most Austrians are ordinary people, and the people who throw out the accusation of Naziism never seem to think all of them are unified, but they tend to unjustly ascribe that belief system to other groups, most of whom have never been to Austria and met a real Nazi, let alone agreed with him.

Almost every attempt to label someone as a Nazi is used as a trump card to beat down the opposition. Nazi is used to label and libel someone the speaker happens to dislike. I have not yet heard an instance where this accusation was leveled concomitant with evidence that the target of the euphemism actually shared Nazi philosophy. Normally it’s used to genuflect and turn the attention away from the accuser because being a Nazi is akin to being the worst kind of human being possible. It’s the ultimate form of yellow journalism all too often. Nazi is used to invalidate the ideas of someone the speaker opposes. I don’t know any people who think the Nazis were right or righteous of justified. If you can be guilty by association with an acceptably evil ideology, then in this reducto ad absurdium everything about you can be declared tainted and therefor invalid if the accuser can make it stick. Never mind if it’s true. The accusation alone is enough to condemn almost any man to ignominy. Real Nazis should be eschewed by EVERYONE, and anyone who remains confederate with them after the fact is as equally guilty as those worthy of the title. Yet, all too often, after the dust of the allegations settles, the accusers find no problem whatsoever making deals with those they betimes accuse of Naziism. I mean, imagine if the current president suddenly switched to agree politically with those who libel and slander him. His “sins” would be forgotten, because this isn’t about principles; using the term Nazi is almost always political. It’s almost always a ploy. It’s almost always wrong. Perhaps paradoxically, the accuser in many cases shares far more in common with the Nazi regime than the accused. It’s sort of how the old Federalist party was against federalism and the Anti-Federalists were against the Federalists but for Federalism. Conflagrate the issue enough, abuse semantics, and you can make good seem evil and evil seem good and confuse people until they act only on the information they possess and follow you blindly, just like the Nazis did to their people.

Coming home from these experiences, imagine my surprise at how easily Americans bandy about the libelous label of Nazi. At university, the parking enforcement workers were referred to as “parking Nazis”. In politics, the current president is compared to a Nazi, primarily because Fascism under the Nazis was a nationalistic idea, but the people who use the term forget that Nazi means “National SOCIALIST”. Of course, almost every republican is libeled as a “right wing extremist” because people don’t really have any idea what Nazis believe or just how extreme they were. I have actually met some Nazis, unfortunately, and so I tread carefully with this aspersion. I think most people use the term Nazi, not because they are morally superior, but because they are morally inferior. It’s not a problem with the principles of their opponents; it’s that they have a personal hate problem towards their opponents. Naziism is enmity incarnate. Nazis are people who hate other people, who find a way to dehumanize and delegitimize those they consider to be opponents and impediments as a pretense to remove them, as a pretense to righteous indignation. It’s insipid. Fortunately, I think the Nazis I met are now dead. Unfortunately, this means that you are never really likely to ever meet a real one, and so this parliament jester’s foist will resonate all the more readily with those who darken counsels by words without knowledge. They lack appropriate frame of reference. Most of you will not see a Nazi. You should be glad.