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Wake up America by Abid Ullah Jan A German Minister has likened Bush Junior to Hitler. The remarks are seemingly directed at the American public, rather than its leadership – to alert the unsuspecting American to his role in the looming World War! A war in which the enemy of choice for the Christian World are no longer the Jews, but Muslims! To understand what is happening to the American people, we need to go back in history. Irrespective of the claims that Holocaust did not happen, or that it was the initially unintended and largely inadvertent result of a confluence of wartime circumstances, we need to be more concerned with those who have failed to recognize the true nature of the part the German people played in the implementation of Hitler’s plans. We need to see if Americans are following the same course or they still have some power to rein in their leaders. By the time Hitler appeared on the scene, most Germans were thoroughly imbued with a racist brand of eliminationist anti-Jew feelings, the same way Western media – particularly the American print and electronic sources of information – has been trying its best to thoroughly instill the same kind of racist brand of anti-Islam feelings among the Western public since 1990. Just like the American attitude after September 11, the Germans were not fully primed for massacres, only that they agreed it would be desirable to exclude the racially alien and menacing Jews from the life of their nation one way or another. Such a consensus was the result of years-long propaganda, just as we have been watching since the fall of the former Soviet Union against Islam and Muslims. Like the post-September 11 mood in many Western cities, German attitude was pregnant with murder, but the baby could not be born until a state that would not permit the organisation of anti-Jew sentiments into systematic persecution was replaced by one directed by the most virulent and dedicated anti-Jews person ever to assume the leadership of a modern nation. Just as no anti-Islam feeling played any role in Bush’s election, Hitler too was elected without any reference to the Jewish problem. Although the Nazi anti-Jew attitude mirrored the sentiments of German culture, it had no link to the electoral success of Hitler’s party. There were a host of other factors which explain Nazi appeal better than fear of Jews. Once in power, however, Hitler and the Nazi could unshackle and thereby activate Germans’ pre-existing pent-up anti-Jew rage and guide it toward a murderous goal that would have been beyond the capacity of the great majority even to imagine. When others finally showed the way to genocide, they displayed a ready willingness to follow. Today, we find most of the Americans indifferent to the foreign policy of their country. Tomorrow they would have to shoulder more responsibility for the bloodletting of Muslims than their President. To many historians, it is wrong to exculpate the majority of the German people by depicting them as merely indifferent to the fate of the Jews. Such indifference in the face of one’s neighbour’s extreme suffering is nothing less than a virtual psychological impossibility, but if indeed it somehow existed, it constituted a cognitive state that still requires further elucidation. Why should Germans have been indifferent to the slaughter of Jews but not to many other occurrences that, on the face of it, should have been less likely to have stirred them from a state of total neutrality than would the elimination measures that culminated in mass murder? What has been mistakenly labelled “indifference” was in reality an ideology and morally depraved pitilessness. Pick up any mainstream American newspaper or magazine, or watch any talk show on foreign affairs and your will find a copy of the same ideology wrapped in the American colours – this time against Muslims as enemies of the West. This deluded and inhuman state of mind was so typical of the Germans of the Nazi era that virtually any citizen could easily have been promoted from the state of guilty bystander to that of wholehearted accomplice in genocide. Nothing illustrates this better than the men of the Order Police, who patrolled German occupied territory and massacred Jews by the thousands. Compare German Order Police with US marines and other forces who are bombing marriage ceremonies in Afghanistan and starving millions to death in Iraq. Christopher R. Browning, the author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, devotes a great deal of attention to the unusually well documented activities of one Order Police battalion. Many authors stress that the men of 101 were selected for their task more or less randomly. In their attempt to explain how such ordinary men could rapidly become professional killers, both emphasize the fact that they were like the rest of German society immersed in a deluge of racist and anti-Jew propaganda that bred in them an aversion to Jews. Killing thousands of retreating Iraqi forces during the Gulf War and bombing mosques and homes in Afghanistan in 2001 represent the same kind of mentality with an aversion to Muslims. This was however not enough to turn the men of Battalion 101 into obedient murderers. The decisive contributing factor in their transformation was their fear that they would risk isolation, rejection and ostracism if they did not shoot Jews – a very frightening prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population. Compare this with Allied forces in Afghanistan today and Iraq tomorrow. If motivated, eight or nine of every ten members of 101 could fight the claims of their incompletely silenced consciences and go on with their filthy jobs, the Americans and their Allies would do the same against Muslims without any remorse. We can see precious few signs that the men of 101 had consciences to squelch. They seem to have been feeling great like the Israelis taking photos with dead Palestinians and Americans inscribing their names on the bombs before dropping on Iraqis during Ramadan. We can find evidence of this in the general good spirits of Germans, their openness about their genocidal slaughtering, the excessive brutality with which they went about their business, what they said and did not say in their off-the-job conversations, the alacrity with which they participated in murderous operations from which they could have obtained exemptions, and their neglect of readily available opportunities to obtain transfers from the Order Police. The men of Battalion 101 and those of similar units killed Jews because they wanted to kill Jews, because they, like virtually all of their countrymen, had been thoroughly corrupted by an insidious ideology. On reading books like Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Knopf, 622 pages) by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, one might think the book is designed to disabuse readers of any such notions and to place the primary blame for the Holocaust on the German people in general. But this is definitely not the case; indeed, such books are the ablest defence of the idea that leaders cannot turn a people into killers unless they willingly start ignoring reality and blindly follow their leaders’ propaganda. We can see from the outside that most of the ordinary Americans have been marginalised. Even those in the corridors of powers have little room to manoeuvre when it comes to telling the truth. This situation is not very different than what existed in Germany before an all out war on Jews. Hitler’s genocidal plans long antedated his genocidal actions. If from the time he seized power until the launching of Operation Barbarossa he pursued less drastic goals than the extermination of the Jews, this was not by choice but for lack of any prudent alternative. At each phase of its development, the major thrust of Nazi policy was the maximum feasible eliminationist options possible given the existing opportunity and constraints. And Hitler very clearly opted for extermination at the first moment that the policy became practical. Men like Browning spent years poring over documents of the Nazi era. It is difficult to summarise the evidence Goldhagen brings to demonstrate just how hearty and enthusiastic was the participation of the German people in the Holocaust. What we can say for sure is that in the face of the facts and arguments historians like Goldhagen marshal, it is extremely difficult to exculpate the great mass of ordinary Germans in the Hitler era. The same will be true for the Americans tomorrow. Present day Americans have to decide whether they want to be willing executioners of Muslims and whether they want to live under people infected with anti-Islam bias. We hope they would not want the US to be home of a people under the sway of absurd, racist beliefs and for that they find the truth and learn how to speak truth to power. Concluded Abid Ullah Jan is a columnist for The Statesman, The Nation, and the Pakistan Observer (Pakistan). He is also sub-editor for the Tribune International (Sydney, Australia), and is the Executive Director of the Integrated Regional Support Programme (IRSP). He can be reached at abidjan2@psh.paknet.com.pk
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