The trouble is . . . that words fail in the face of evil on such a scale [the Nazi attack on European Jewish existence]. As many survivors have argued, silence is the only fitting tribute to the three and a half millions who died in concentration camps and death camps, to the two million exterminated nuy mobile killing unites on the eastern front, and the the half million more who died in the ghettos of eastern Europe of hunger, disease, terror, and Nazi reprisals. Words fail, but it is nevertheless necessary to speak. Who can remain silent, having witnessed such events? But a language of extremity, the only language appropriate to extreme situations, soon loses its force through repetition and inflation. It facilitates what it seeks to prevent, the normalization of atrocity.
Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self
p. 101
The second and third chapters of Lasch's follow up to The Culture of Narcissism examine the way so much of our public discourse and cultural understandings in the late-20th century began to rely more and more on "survival" as a theme. Whether it was popular manuals on business success, or serious works on feminism, race relations, and even history, more and more commentators began to proclaim the goal of life should be survival.
This is the bulk of chapter 2; chapter 3 examines, as a way of highlighting and clarifying this issue, the way the Nazi extermination program (and Lasch is wise enough to include Stalin's various exercises in mass death as well) has been mined far too frequently as a guide to understanding our own, contemporary social, political, and cultural situation. With the appearance of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, the plethora of right-wing commentators and politicians insisting that Barack Obama is leading the US toward a kind of Nazi-like authoritarian state, I think it more than relevant to consider whether or not this mainstreaming of extremist understandings has not only reached a kind of logical conclusion, but also if this might not also be an opportunity to place the Nazi and Stalinst horrors back in their proper, historical, perspective.
Lasch is never explicit, but he certainly attempts to make clear the historical ambiguity of attempting to understand unique historical events - the Holocaust, the various Stalinst crimes - while also seeking to draw from them lessons for the rest of humanity. This is always the tension in historical understanding. History is the record of unique events, never repeatable (therefore non-scientific) yet nevertheless events capable of understanding, and therefore, should we delve deep enough, meaning. Yet, as he also points out in the epigraph above, faced with the inhuman ferocity of mass death, words fail even as the dead cry out for words as their final plea for some kind of justice. Lasch seems to straddle a fine line between insisting on the qualitative uniqueness of 20th century experiences of mass death, and our own attempt at understanding robbing them of their character as a break with the past.
Since the late-1960's, at least in the United States, we have lived far too long with the rhetoric of extremism. The radicals of the time far too often compared our country then to a fascist state. That the early-70's saw an attempt at extra-legal Executive power on a scale previously not seen only seemed to intensify the idea in the minds of many leftists that there is an inherent authoritarianism to conservative rule that, if unchecked, could lead us down a dangerous path.
This line of thought intensified, three decades later, during the Bush Administration. It was given impetus by the right-wing acceptance of massive intrusions on constitutional liberties in the name of national security, apologias for torture and indefinite detention without trial, or even accusation of wrong-doing, and domestic espionage on a scale unheard of even during the Nixon Administration. While these illegal acts are certainly troubling, just as troubling was the regular cries one heard of "Fascist!" and "Nazi!" on the left (that I, too, did some of this is a source of remorse; one should be far more careful with this kind of thing).
When Jonah Goldberg published Liberal Fascism, it was greeted with a mixture of humor and scorn for its lazy lack-of-research, its poor reasoning, and perhaps its biggest flaw - the idea that a political ideology based on extending human freedom, both individual and social, and extending the benefits of society to as many heretofore excluded persons and groups as possible could somehow be equated with the irrational desire to make war on one's neighbors, all the while exterminating vast numbers of one's own population. This isn't just bad logic or scholarship; it is deeply offensive to anyone who understands the historical realities bound up with those horribly-coupled words in the title.
Thanks to the popularizing of Goldberg's work, however, we now have far too many on the right equating Pres. Obama's Presidency and many of his policy initiatives compared to fascism and Nazism. Placards at protests paint a Hitler-mustache on Pres. Obama. The attempt to extend health care to underserved groups is seen as an attempt to steal our Constitutional freedoms and rights. It has reached such a ridiculous pitch that, as often noted, many of those protesting health care reform are recipients of a kind of socialized health insurance in the form of Medicare, and this is too often passed over in silence.
While all this Nazi-talk does indeed rob the words of any substantive meaning, an attempt to address it head-on might present an opportunity to place the historical referents back in their proper place; it might also be an opportunity to ratchet back the reliance on "extreme" rhetoric and place it back where it belongs - out of the public discussion of routine, and mostly beneficial, policy discussions. I realize this kind of thing - Holocaust comparisons, the cry of "Fascist!" - will always be around, sad to say. There is no reason to take it seriously, or include such nonsense as part of any serious discussion.
