David Penberthy: Some people need to learn what Nazism really was
Transgender women in sport? Not Nazism. Neither are Covid vaccines. Some people need a good history lesson, writes David Penberthy.
One of my favourite newspaper front pages was the wholly deserved 2005 smash-up by London’s Sun of the hapless Prince Harry over his decision to attend a fancy dress party in a costume that showed neither good taste nor any knowledge of history.
“HARRY THE NAZI”, The Sun thundered above a photograph of the potentially future King kitted out in full Nazi clobber. Here was the great-grandson of the woman who famously stayed put in London during The Blitz so she could “look the East End in the eye”, boozing on with his toffy mates and dressed like he was about to invade Poland.
One of the funniest things about that story was that it came about after one of the other halfwits at this party approached the newspaper offering to sell a photo he had taken of Prince William dressed as a bear at the same bash. He thought that picture was the story, and showing zero commercial acumen and little news judgment, threw the pic of Harry in for free.
The story was a powerful skewering of Harry’s stupidity and self-absorption, two qualities which while briefly suppressed have roared back into public life via his vacuous new existence in California.
It was also one of those rare occasions in the present day where the word Nazi was used validly in the modern context. Here was Harry, dressed as a Nazi. It was a crisp description of what had occurred. End of story.
If only this were the case with the growing modern capacity to bandy about references to Nazis and Nazism with zero comprehension of the period of history that gave us those terms.
Readers will recall that yellow-covered series of “Dummies Guides” books that appeared in the 1980s, offering handy and simple advice on everything from basic car maintenance to the mysteries of Microsoft Office.
Almost 80 years on from the end of World War II, there is a clear gap in the market for a Dummies Guide to Nazism, aimed at those dummies who cannot distinguish the unparalleled horrors of the Third Reich with other lesser issues with which they happen to disagree or people they happen to dislike.
So often these come from the world of politics and can be found awash in social media, principally among those who confuse an orderly immigration program that vets people’s bona fides before deciding whether they can settle here, versus a plot to round people up on the basis of religion and ethnicity, and exterminate them for evermore.
It has always struck me as a reasonably arduous walk from stopping the boats to The Final Solution, but such trifles seem lost among thousands of people on Twitter, even bright and respected people such as the Melbourne lawyer Julian Burnside who thinks nothing of likening Coalition figures to Goebbels.
This election has thrown up some compelling misuse of Nazi allusions, none more so than the anti-trans warrior Katherine Deves in Warringah. I have no time for the rattier excesses of trans politics and think the idea of people who were recently men being allowed to jump in the pool with the girls after taking their first oestrogen tablet is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. But it doesn’t strike me as the number-one issue facing the country today, and nor do I see any real parallels between the trans community and the Nazis, as the obsessive Ms Deves does, or did, on her now-deleted social media posts.
In Melbourne, Craig Kelly was heckled and egged the other day by protesters who told him to “stop hanging around with Nazis”. Now, Craig Kelly might be annoying, but Hitler he ain’t, and nor are his tiny handful of supporters within the la-la-land of the United Australia Party.
In Victoria, Kooyong independent candidate Monique Ryan was forced to apologise after social media posts trivialising Nazism, where she ran a mocked-up meme of Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf that had been repurposed to make it look like a book about Donald Trump.
From this crowded field my favourite would be those deluded anti-vaxxers who protested against vaccine mandates by wearing Stars of David. This stunt really took the cake, elevating the method by which the Nazis forced Jewish people to be identified, with a view to their internment and elimination, to a public health policy used temporarily at the height of a pandemic to drive up vaccination rates and protect people from dying from Covid.
How utterly demented these people are, how devoid of any sense of what has happened in history, to even think they can place themselves within coo-ee of what the Jewish people endured.
Missing some shifts because you’ve read too much crap on Facebook would seem a wholly avoidable predicament. By way of understatement, it is one that you probably shouldn’t compare to Belsen, Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto.
There is actually a Dummies Guide to Nazis. It is called If This is a Man and it has been described, rightly, as the most important book of the 20th century. It was written by Primo Levi and describes his time in Auschwitz after his arrest as a member of the Italian resistance. When Levi died in 1987 at the age of 67, his death was ruled a suicide, as he appeared to have jumped from his apartment balcony. Friends disputed the coroner’s ruling, saying he left no note. Those who argue that he died at his own hand said he was plagued in later life by a conviction that the world had forgotten the truth about what his people had endured. The further we get from World War II, the truer that assertion appears to be, where the unmatchable benchmark for human evil is now the stuff of hashtags and name-calling, cheap shots at opponents, all of it coming from people who if they don’t know, should.
Originally published as David Penberthy: Some people need to learn what Nazism really was
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