Himmler and Jihad

January 18, 2015 at 1:05pm I spent last night's insomnia watching a disturbing film about Heinrich Himmler, *The Decent One.* The audio is in German, but it's captioned. Based entirely on letters between Himmler and his wife, daughter, parents, and others, as well as his personal journal from student days onward, it's illustrated with candid photos and film, plus contemporary footage. What's devastating is Himmler's ordinariness, even banality. Love letters, self-examination, the incipient plans for the racially pure Germany he envisioned--all give insight into the mind of the creator of the Nazi death machine. He looks winsomely boyish playing with his daughter. Even in state propaganda films he has the look of a boy playing at being a soldier, happy to be included in the game. It makes one wonder if history would have been altered if he hadn't been rejected by the fraternity he pledged at university. The film is also unsettling because of eerie parallels between 1920s Germany and present-day America: a long period of economic recession, a war-weary populace, sharp political division, and rampant conspiracy theories. By "conspiracy theory," I mean an irrational belief that one will not abandon, no matter how much evidence is adduced to dispel it--a definition that applies as readily to radical Islam as to Nazis. Anyone who denies the phony belief becomes part of the vast conspiacy, and, therefore, an enemy who must be eliminated. In a frightening parallel, both the Nazis and Islamists see the Jewish people as enemies, responsible, through nefarious manipulation of world media and finance, for all their problems. Today, anyone who supports Israel is also the enemy. Hence the book-burnings. Torching works by Jews in festive bonfires was one of the first public acts of the newly elected Nazi government. It was seen as a patriotic act, as was refusing to buy from Jewish-owned stores. "Don't put money into their coffers!" was the slogan. Now the self-named Islamic State begins its reign with glorious conflagration of "un-Islamic" books. That is, any work that challenges their phony belief. Remember, anyone who does so becomes part of the conspiracy--an enemy to be destroyed. And so we see the need to murder a handful of cartoonists at a small magazine roughly comparable to an R-rated Mad, just as those who opposed Nazi dogma were sent to concentration camps where, they, too, died. And now you know the connection between the Islamic State and Nazi Germany. The terrorists, too, are ordinary people, fired by a mistaken ideology. They, too, have families back home who love them; they may write tender, playful letters to their wives and children. Still they will kill us. Nazis were easy to recognize: they dressed in sharp uniforms and goose-stepped through the streets. Today's storm-trooper may live among us for years, working, hanging out with friends, going to university, even joining our military. They may even be our own children. Only a small percentage of Germans were members of the Nazi party. Only a small number of Muslims are Islamists. The rest stand by and say nothing, either because they fear the all-too-real reprisals, or because they secretly share in the same false beliefs, or because, like most of us, their own lives are going pretty well and it's not really their problem. It seems the only kind of conspiracy that can destroy us is a conspiracy of silence. As Edmund Burke, that other prophetic Burke, said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." What's missing from that quote is that those who "do something" often pay a price, sometimes their life itself. But what, finally, is the alternative? http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/05/tripoli-library-burned_n_4543928.html Ancient books in a historic library in the Lebanese city of Tripoli have been torched by Islamist, after a pamphlet purportedly insulting religion was found inside one of the books. Security sources say that up to 78,000 books, many irreplaceable ... HUFFINGTONPOST.CO.UK Th The film, The Decent One, is available on Netflix.