This is a parody of this article, which defends the placing of the Confederate flag. There are some who will say this is an unequal comparison. I agree. What the South did is, arguably, worse. Germany did its evil over 12 years, and did a complete about face after 1945. The South held steady on slavery for about 250 years. About 2 million slaves died during the treacherous Middle Passage alone. There were 4 million slaves in the United States at the close of the Civil War — and this is after slavery had been going strong for 250 years. Millions of slaves lived their entire lives in chains. And after that, there were a hundred more years of segregation, lynching, and extremely problematic racism. The 12-year travesty in Germany was serious, and affected millions, but an honest picture of the whitewashed racist past of the United States reveals a much longer, more systematic, more stubborn racism that, arguably, has done even more long-term damage. And yet, we are still reluctant to change.
[Image Courtesy of RV1864 under Creative Commons License]
Like many German boys, I grew up with two flags hanging in my room — a German flag and a Third Reich battle flag. The German flag was enormous, taking up much of one wall. It was the “1848” flag, with a thick black, red, and yellow stripe. My grandmother bought it for me on the 125th anniversary, and for years it was a treasured possession. The flag took on a special meaning later in life, when I learned more of a family history that included service with Otto Von Bismarck.
The Third Reich battle flag was much smaller, and it hung over my bookshelf. We bought it at the Berlin battlefield in Germany, where one of my Nazi ancestors fought and where Adolf Hitler died on the 2nd of May — the general that many considered the great hope of the German army. My Nazi forefathers went on to fight throughout Germany until the official surrender on May 8th, 1945. I grew up looking at old family pictures, including men who still wore their Nazi uniform for formal portraits — long after the war had ended.
Like many German families’, my family’s military story didn’t merely start and end with the Nazi war — it extended back to World War I, and forward to Bosnia, Kosovo, and then to my own recent deployment during the Surge in Afghanistan. The martial history of our family is inseparable from the family story, and it includes men in black, white, and red.
So I’ve followed this most recent round of debate over the Third Reich battle flag with perhaps greater than normal interest. In the immediate aftermath of mass shootings, there is always a demand to “do something.” Always, that demand involves gun control — typically, gun-control measures that wouldn’t have actually stopped the shooting in question. But often there’s something more. In the aftermath of the recent acts of white supremacist shooting, the Left demanded “civility” — despite zero evidence that the barking-mad perpetrator was motivated by any form of political discourse. Now the demand is to remove the Third Reich battle flag from a Nazi memorial near Berlin (and presumably elsewhere). Several writers, with characteristic vehemence, say, “Take down the flag. Take it down now.” Their calls have resonated around the web.
If the goal of our shared civic experience was the avoidance of pain, then we’d take down that flag. But that’s of course not the goal.
There’s a disturbing habit on the Left of trying to find the position that renders one especially virtuous in their identity politics culture — regardless of its real-world impact — and then sneering from that high ground at all who dissent. But that’s certainly not everyone’s motive, and it’s certainly not the motive of those calling for the flag’s removal. It’s simply undeniable that the Third Reich battle flag is a painful symbol to our Jewish fellow citizens, especially given its recent history as a chosen totem of White Supremacists. So it’s critical to respond to the argument in good faith. And just as the history of WW II is personal to me, so is Germany’s present racial reality. As I’ve mentioned before, my youngest daughter is quite literally Jewish (born in Israel and now as German as bratwurst), and when she’s a little bit older, we’ll no doubt have many tough conversations about history and race.
If the goal of our shared civic experience was the avoidance of pain, then we’d take down that flag. But that’s of course not the goal. Rather, we use history to understand our nation in all its complexity — acknowledging uncomfortable realities and learning difficult truths. For white Germans — especially those with deep roots in our past — those difficult truths are presented front and center throughout our lives. Yes, Germany fought in large part to preserve its concentration camps. Yes, had Germany prevailed, the mass murder of millions of Jews not only would have been preserved for the indefinite future, it may have even spread to new nations and territories. And no, while some Germans were kinder than others, there was nothing “humane” about the fundamental institution of concentration camps themselves. As many writers have often and eloquently explained, it was a system built on plunder and pain.
But there are other difficult truths.
Among them, when the war began, it was not explicitly a war to defend concentration camps. Indeed, had the Allies quickly accomplished its war aims and Germany surrendered early without invasion, concentration camps would have endured, at least for a time. When hundreds of thousands of German men took up arms (most of them non-concentration-camp-guards), many of them fought with the explicit belief that they were standing in the shoes of their German forefathers, men who’d exercised their own right of self-determination to gain independence. Others simply saw an invading army from World War I as ruining their economy — in their towns and across their farms — and chose to resist. And no one can doubt their valor. Both sides displayed breathtaking courage, but the Nazis poured themselves into the fight to an extent the modern American mind simply can’t comprehend. If you extrapolated Nazi losses into our current American population, the war would cost the lives of at least a staggering 16 million men, with at least an equivalent number injured. To understand the impact of that human loss, I’d urge you to read Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust’s Republic of Suffering — a book that explores the psychological impact of omnipresent, mass-scale death on southern culture, which had considerably fewer casualties in America’s Civil War. Those men fought against a larger, better-supplied force, yet — under some of history’s more brilliant military commanders — were arguably a few better-timed attacks away from prevailing in Germany’s deadliest conflict. Then, the defeated survivors came home to the consequences of total war. Large sections of Germany were simply devastated — crops burned, homes burned, and livestock slaughtered or scattered. Entire cities lay in ruin.
Germany had to rebuild — under military occupation — and it had to rebuild more than just its physical infrastructure. It had to reimagine itself. It ultimately did so.
My apologies. The parody ends here, because Germany, as a country (although there are some strong racists left) got the fuck over itself and actually, like, changed. They compensated the victims (crazy, I know), repudiated the Third Reich, and started a clean slate aggressively combatting racism. There is no significant veneration of any commanders of the Nazi army in the country. And the flag is gone.
They have every reason to keep it for the reasons described in the article this one parodies. But they did not, because it wouldn’t be very nice to those it marginalized, and it seems cruel and in terrible taste.
Perhaps the South should take note.