The New Neo

…writes Roger Simon.

I strongly agree.

An excerpt:

I would call it the most appalling, morally reprehensible example of cultural appropriation imaginable. Why? Well, think what is being appropriated — the Holocaust.

Making your extreme dislike for Donald Trump and his policies equivalent to battling the Nazi murder of six million Jews and countless other people — when the original Resistance came into being and got its name — is beyond absurd and completely despicable. At that time, innocent people were being shot in cold blood, incinerated in gas chambers and often buried alive by the thousands. Donald Trump makes intemperate remarks on Twitter while supporting some conservative policies and judges. Are those things even remotely the same?

Not only is this an insane comparison, it is also wildly anti-Semitic. That some Jews participate in this abominable exploitation of their greatest tragedy gives those same Jews a lot to atone for during these coming Days of Awe. They should think about what they are doing for ten seconds.

I would add that the original Resistance during WWII was certainly about that, but it wasn’t wholly about that by any means. It was about resisting the Nazis and Hitler in general as well as in the specific case of the Holocaust.

There were many many reasons to resist Hitler, and the Holocaust was most definitely one of them. But there was also the murder and/or enslavement of other groups of people: for example, gypsies and Slavic peoples. There was the occupation of so many countries in Europe under Nazi rule, countries that wanted to be free. There was a desire to end the war of aggression waged by Germany.

The German Resistance had the additional motive of wanting to erase the stain of Hitler and the Nazis from the German people. I’ve written a number of posts about the German resistance (see for example this, this, and this), particularly the attempts to assassinate Hitler.

What motivated the most famous of the Nazi would-be Hitler assassins, Claus von Stauffenberg? There’s some disagreement about it, but here’s the take of well-known British historian Richard Evans:

…Stauffenberg was much more than an action hero driven by the kind of simple moral imperative that suits Hollywood’s desire to portray everything in terms of starkly opposed opposites of good and evil. He found moral guidance in a complex mixture of Catholic religious precepts, an aristocratic sense of honour, Ancient Greek ethics, and German Romantic poetry. Above all, perhaps, his sense of morality was formed under the influence of the poet Stefan George, whose ambition is was to revive a “secret Germany” that would sweep away the materialism of the Weimar Republic and restore German life to its true spirituality. Inspired by George, Stauffenberg came to look for a revival of an idealized medieval Reich, in which Europe would attain a new level of culture and civilization under German leadership. A search of this kind was typical of the Utopianism that inhabited the wilder shores of Weimar culture – optimistic and ambitious, but also abstract and unrealistic. It was ill-suited to serve as the basis for any kind of real political future.

Such influences set Stauffenberg apart from many of the longer-standing members of the military resistance, whose multifarious projects and plans to overthrow Hitler dated from as early as 1938, and were driven above all by a belief that the war the National Socialists were aiming for was unwinnable. To launch it, they believed, would cause incalculable harm to Germany. It was this, rather than any fundamental opposition to National Socialism as such, that motivated the leading members of the military-aristocratic resistance in the late 1930s and at the beginning of the 1940s.

Like the few other army officers who were critical of the conduct of the war in the east, therefore, Stauffenberg at first took a stance that was motivated more by military than by moral considerations. In the course of 1942, however, Stauffenberg realized that such atrocities were not just counter-productive by-products of a brutal policy of waging war, but formed the very essence of the German war effort. Hitler and the National Socialist leadership were betraying Germany, not merely preventing the realization of the true spiritual values of the “secret Germany” but actually negating them. They were perverting military values and implicating the Armed Forces in terrible crimes that went against all the most fundamental principles by which Stauffenberg and his fellow-officers lived; had he survived the war, this realization that the army itself was being turned into an instrument of criminality would no doubt have made him impatient with those who would claim that it remained untainted by the murderous spirit of National Socialism. It was this moral conviction, arrived at when Germany was still absolutely dominant in Europe, that set Stauffenberg apart from the more instrumental views of some of the other conspirators, who sought above all to rescue Germany from the total defeat that stared it in the face after Stalingrad. These beliefs, combined with his energetic personality, were also what led him to act where many other members of the military-aristocratic resistance still hesitated.

As you can see, it was complicated.

But none of this has any parallel with the self-named, self-aggrandizing, overly-dramatic “Resistance” to Trump, who is neither murderous nor an aggressive warmonger. Mere disagreement (however intense and heartfelt) with someone’s relatively ordinary and non-murderous political policies doesn’t merit the title, and it is a travesty for the current Trump opposition to use it.