[Fwd: militia research]

[Katha Pollitt]

I came across an interesting passage in neal Ascherson's review of
Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Birn's "A nation on Trial: the Goldhagen
thesis and Historical Truth" in the LA Times Book review.
(Goldhagen, as you probably know, maintains that ordinary Germans, not
just Nazis, were enthusiastic perpetrators of the Holocaust, were intent
on exterminating the Jews from the word go, were uniquely anti-semitic
among European nations but miraculously ceased to be so in l945, etc etc
-- a thesis that many book reviewers but virtually NO scholars of the
period agree with).  Anyway, Ascherson's discussion of the appeal of
fascism to Germans has some relevance to our discussion of the militias: 

 " Hitler's platform was made up of wildly different planks,
incoherently looted from Left and Right: hatred of the old German social
order, the promise to overturn the Versailles frontiers,
anti-Bolshevism, nostalgia for rural purities, Anti-Semitism, a program
to overcome mass unemployment, worship of militarism and so forth.  Most
Germans believed in some of these causes;very few indeed believed in all
of them.  But they were all bound together into a single bundle by the
party.  And when the party and Fuhrer vanished in l945, the bundle fell
instantly apart again.  this allowed postwar Germans to plead, absurdly
but not entirely without sincerity: "I believed in an anti-bolshevist
crusade and reconquering Alsace.  but I never agreed with state-run
trade unions or with killing the Jews --so I was never really a nazi!" 

   I'm not equating Mark of Michigan with Hitler (although Hitler too
started out as the head of a small provincial paramilitary
organization).  But just as ordinary, economically desperate people
signed up with the Nazis because they liked some piece of its program
and told themselves the other parts weren't important, AND WERE WRONG,
even so people drawn to the militias, buchanan, and other modes of
rightwing "populism" etc are buying a whole package, even if they think
they're not and even if the package is "wildly contradictory."  The fact
that nazism had "Left" elements -- a jobs program, much anti-elite
rhetoric -- did not mean many Nazis were open to conversion by leftists,
if only the leftists could sit them down and explain that the protocols
of the Elders of Zion was a Czarist forgery. 

best, katha