Hitler and Trump Against Normalization: Lesson of Munich Post

[kpete]

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.....after Trump’s victory I began to follow the debate over how much deference Trump was owed, how much responsibility he had for the hate speech the alt-right morons cheered. Some found solace in the hashtag #notmypresident. David Remnick seemed to have woken the next morning with an especially felicitous gift of disgust, writing: “The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump — the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory — should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.”

He was joined in that spirit of defiance by Teju Cole in The New Times Magazine, Jamelle Bouie in Slate, Masha Gessen in The New York Review of Books, Charles M. Blow in The New York Times, and, most recently, Charles P. Pierce in Esquire.

It looked like a movement was building. What form it would take was unclear.

But now, a couple months later, the momentum is dissolving. The default position is normalization. Should we be content with that? Or should we resist, be it by taking to the streets or simply by “preferring not to,” Bartleby-style?

While sifting through possible courses of action, I remembered something sad — possibly the saddest thing I had ever read: the last few issues of the Munich Post. They had put up a brave front. Somehow, most touchingly, they had continued the serialization of a novel begun before Götterdämmerung, the way a normal newspaper might in normal times. It was a novel by the elusive, pseudonymous B. Traven, called The White Rose. It’s a novel about corporate greed and land-grabbing in Mexico’s oil fields — a text of protest perhaps more relevant to our current struggle than to the struggles of Germany in the 1930s.

I had to search another Munich archive to find the very final issues of the Munich Post, but they were even more dispiriting than I could imagine. The paper went down fighting a lie, fighting Nazi murderers, refusing to normalize the Hitler regime.

A week after Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, the Munich Post published their regular murder survey under the headline “Nazi Party Hands Dripping with Blood,” enumerating the bloody casualties: 18 dead, 34 wounded in street battles with the SA Stormtroopers.

These are the headlines that followed in daily succession:

“Germany Under the Hitler Regime: Political Murder and Terror”
“Blood Guilt of the Nazi Party”
“Germany Today: No Day Without Death”
“Brutal Terror in the Streets of Munich”
“Outlaws and Murderers in Power”
“People Allow Themselves to Be Intimidated”

The era of normalization had begun everywhere else, but the Munich Post resisted.

The Munich Post lost, yes. Soon their office was closed. Some of the journalists ended up in Dachau, some “disappeared.” But they’d won a victory for truth. A victory over normalization. They never stopped fighting the lies, big and small, and left a record of defiance that was heroic and inspirational. They discovered the truth about “endlösung” before most could have even imagined it. The truth is always worth knowing. Support your local journalist.



https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/normalization-lesson-munich-post/

[dalton99a]

1. "That's where we all went wrong, thinking he was stupid and outrageous,

not canny and savvy and able to play the media like Paganini. The election demonstrated the weakness of a weak democracy, where basic liberties could be abolished by demagoguery and voter suppression."

[BSdetect]

2. You could argue that the media was even dumber than Scrotus?

Sadly that would be my point of view.