Chapter 20 of All Hell Let Loose, ‘Victims’, is proving both fascinating and very disturbing.
For example, something that’s very scary, in light of Trump’s current slide into ever more violent degeneracy, is that ‘… in one of the most highly educated societies in Europe, it was easy to find men willing to murder those whom their rulers defined as state enemies, without employing duress.’
The stance of Trump and his goons, particularly towards Blacks and Hispanics, is blatantly racist and fascist. Equally appalling, is how the Far Right of American politics – now in power – belittles and dehumanises even those of their own ‘tribe’ deemed to be their enemies.
If a relatively cultured people – Germany – can be turned into barbarous killers so easily, how much more so might mobs of moronic MAGA types gladly do the violence incited by those in power?
As Hastings puts it: ‘… there is ample evidence in modern experience that many people are ready to kill others to order, once satisfied that this fulfils the wishes of those whose authority they accept.’
One of the greatest ironies, to my mind, as much of the World appears to degenerate along an Axis of evil and ignorance, under the banners of populist nationalism, is the oh so eager adoption of The Great Replacement idea (GR, henceforth, for brevity’s sake!), not just by right wing America, but around the world (inspiring violent nutters in the US, Europe, and the Antipodes).
Before we even get to the whole GR imbroglio, it’s worth pausing to take note of an incredible example of both the monumental hypocrisy and beyond myopic lack of self-awareness that seems to blight contemporary American culture, such that, given the historical/geographical proximity of the genocide of First Nation peoples*, American diplomat George Ball can unabashedly say: ‘… the idea of massive extermination was so far beyond the traditional comprehension of most Americans that we instinctively refused to believe in its existence.’ A quote cited by Hastings, in his aforementioned ‘Victims’ chapter, on US reluctance to accept the reality/scale of the Holocaust.
But let’s go to France now, and the unlikely seeming origin story of the GR trope, or meme. In its ‘trope’ form it’s the offspring of French intellectual and former poet, Reynard Camus (no relation to Albert, as far as I know?). Adherents of Camus’ GR theory in its bastardised dumbed down meme form, of the far-right extreme-violence variety, would probably – for the most part – be rather put out were they to learn that the originator of their beloved ‘philosophy’ is a gay French poet and intellectual.
*I guess the big chief – sorry! – difference is that the American genocide occurred, relative to the German/Jewish one, in slow-motion.