For those of you who remember the 1960's, amidst all the turmoil CBS gave us "Hogan's Heroes," a sitcom featuring wily American POW's and funny Nazis.
I kid you not. It was in sync with a strand of American thinking about the gut-wrenching horrors of World Wwar II. These included 400,00 dead Americans and more than 1 million wounded, amidst civilian casualties that took over 50 million lives, including but not limited to the Holocaust.
Our homegrown Nazis were of the George Lincoln Rockwell type, crazed and marginal, not to be taken seriously. Maybe if we laugh about it it won't hurt as much, a pattern that reoccurs as late as Mel Brook's classic "The Producers."
Not so much in Europe. World War II and the murderous destruction of peoples and cities are everywhere present, today. There are monuments, cemeteries, street signs, and battlefields wherever you drive or walk. Try the streets of Paris for the signs on school buildings remembering the children taken from there to their deaths.
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These two sensibilities may be starting to clash. Across Europe, there are active political movements, often aided by government, often elected to parliamentary positions that are embracing Nazi ideology, iconography and worse yet, tactics.
There's the Golden Dawn in Greece, government efforts to provide state pensions to Hitler's Waffen-SS veterans in the Baltic states, ideologically inspired mass murder in Norway, and a host of movements especially in the former Soviet Union.
The social context is no secret. Massive immigration of poor non-whites and an economic collapse is a potent brew, making angry voters susceptible to sophisticated and explicit extreme right appeals.
It's sort of hard to believe, from an American perspective. Whether we're still stuck on bumbling Sgt. Schultz, or because our domestic politics simply will not tolerate an embrace of anything Nazi, these movements are remote and hard to believe.
Which took me to Strasbourg, France, last week. I attended a meeting of an organization called World Without Nazism. It's a creation of a wealthy Russian senator, Boris Shpigel and is trying to figure out exactly what's happening, and what should be done.
Various European heavyweights, such as Leonid Kravchuk (the George Washington of Ukraine, who unilaterally declared Ukraine independent of the Soviet Union in 1991) are putting together a profile of resurgent Nazi movements across the world, and the correct response.
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As with everything, it's complicated. Russia is in a series of bilateral fights with its formerly dependent Baltic states — Lativa, Estonia and Lithuania — and has political and diplomatic self-interests in bashing, them. There was visible conflict between Shpigel and Kravchuk about going beyond Nazism and confronting other hate-based movements. The culture wars landed in Strasourg when activists tried, with limited success, to explicitly define sexual minorities as targets of old and new Nazi movements. The American delegation opposed proposals from the organizational leadership to legislate against certain kinds of speech. The proposals were dropped.
But for all the factions and argument, something real was going on. It's certainly possible that resurgent Nazism is a temporary phenomenon that will wither as the economy recovers and Europe adjusts to the kind of ethnic diversity that America embraces. But maybe not. The lesson we learned from Munich and the early responses to Hitler is that we're all better off taking it seriously, declaring ourselves early and responding firmly.
I never, ever thought that in my post-state legislative work I would be meeting with Russians, Ukrainians, Finns, Poles, Latvians and others warning about the dangers of Nazi ideology and movements. I hope it's an unnecessary overreaction. But until we prove that, better an organization called World Without Nazism.
In Hogan's Heroes, the most lovable Nazi was the bumbling Sgt. Schultz. His signature line was "I know nothing, I see nothing."
Never again.
Richard Brodsky is a former state assemblyman from Westchester County. He is now a fellow at the Demos think tank in New York City and at the Wagner School at New York University.