“I see you’re a fellow I can talk plainly to, Jaggar,” Waffing said in a deep, bluff voice. “A man much like myself. I like what you’re doing. As I’ve said many times myself, the only way to treat enemies of genetic purity is to smash their skulls.”
From the Iron Dream, by Norman Spinrad
Linda Vester: You say you'd rather not talk to liberals at all?;
Ann Coulter: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days.
From FOX News Channel, DaySide with Linda Vester, 10/6/04
So we've been talking about police protection during the upcoming convention when all those stinky protesters are coming… You know, I'll tell you what works on a crowd like this -- a machine gun, that always works very well...You must have order, you cannot have a civilized society without order and if that means cracking a few skulls, so be it. A good ole boy network is what you need and hand out some ax handles.
Chris Baker KTLK radio morning show, 4/4/08
Most of Norman Spinrad’s
The Iron Dream consists of the posthumously published novel of that famous Golden Age science fiction writer, Adolf Hitler. As any science fiction fan knows, Hitler relocated to the United States shortly after Germany won the war in 1919. His final work was the Hugo Award-winning novel and cult classic,
Lord of the Swastika, a bizarre meld of hard science fiction and high fantasy that tells the story of Feric Jaggar, a genetically pure “trueman” in a post-apocalyptic world polluted with evil, foul-smelling mutants. “Let Adolf Hitler transport you to a far-future Earth, where only FERIC JAGGAR and his mighty weapon, the Steel Commander, stand between the remnants of true humanity and annihilation at the hands of the totally evil Dominators and the mindless mutant hordes they completely control.” reads the intro.
Lord of the Swastika is a retelling of the rise of the Third Reich, as filtered through the lens of an Adolf Hitler who never became chancellor of Germany.
There are many vivid and memorable monsters in “Hitler’s” book – regiments of pinheaded mutant warriors, enormous amoebas covered with rows of fanged mouths, legless pigs, mucous encased chickens… But for readers outside the alternate history timeline in which Spinrad has nested his novel, some of the most monstrous passages can be found in the chapter where Feric Jaggar and his storm troopers, the Soldiers of the Swastika, take the fictional stand-ins for Weimar Republic leaders prisoner:
Only Krull, out of his senile whining arrogance, presumed to address Feric under these circumstances. ‘What is this filthy outrage, Jaggar?’ he wheezed, ‘How dare you -- “
Before the old degenerate could further pollute the atmosphere, the nearest SS guard ended the outburst with a smart backhanded blow across the mouth that left the old pirate drooling blood.
Feric favored this fine young fanatic with a modest nod of approval…
“I will now inform you of the reason for your arrest,” Feric said.
“Arrest!” Guilder cried. “You mean kidnapping!”
A gun butt to the back of the head ended this unseemly outburst….
”I see that it is time to clear the air once and for all,” Feric observed, unsheathing the Steel Commander and raising the gleaming shaft high above his head. He stepped forward a few steps, and with one irresistible strike brought the headball of the Great Truncheon down on the top of Gelbart’s skull, and dashed the Dom’s head to pieces.
With the dominator who had controlled them lying inert in his chair with his putrid brains spattered all over the Council table, the seven remaining Councilors had no further illusions as to the gravity of their situation…
The defiance of men taken prisoner by an armed, lawless band is depicted as contemptible. Striking an old man across the jaw is depicted as admirable. This topsy-turvy presentation illustrates the alien nature, not just of the setting that “Adolf Hitler, Science Fiction author” has created, but of the mindset that the real Hitler enabled.
Lord of the Swastika is presented as having been written in an alternate universe where countless science fiction fans read these passages and were enraptured by them. It seemed incredible in post-war America that anyone could read such a scene and maintain the illusion of Feric Jaggar as a “hero.”
It’s not so incredible today. We’re not as aware in 2008 of how the inverted morality of the Third Reich came to seem normal to so many German citizens in the 1930s. We have deliberately forgotten it.
In 1972, when
The Iron Dream was first published, Nazi Germany was still well within living memory. “Godwin’s Law” had yet to be formulated. Writers still felt there was an object lesson to be gleaned from the rise and fall of the Third Reich other than “Genocide is bad,” and that one of those lessons had to do with the effects of dehumanizing language. Readers of that time would have drawn a direct line from the language used in the quote from “Waffing/Goering” with which I opened this piece to Feric Jaggar’s bludgeoning to death an unarmed opponent a few pages later.
It’s not so obvious to readers today -- not in a new century where the right is trying to redraw Hitler as a liberal. Not where nationally broadcast propagandists like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage use language similar to the rhetoric of Julius Streicher and are paid for it and applauded by legions of enthusiastic fans:
… the scum at CNN, the verminist traitors at MSNBC have gone over to the enemy's side.
5/13/04,Michael Savage
...these big-mouthed, phony scum of the ACLU ... should be put into Abu Ghraib prison.
4/19/2004 Michael Savage
If liberals are not traitors, their only fallback argument at this point is that they’re really stupid.
9/12/2007 Ann Coulter
Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores.
11/16/00 Ann Coulter
Scum, traitors, whores, vermin… No wonder that a tragedy suffered by a liberal or a perceived liberal is frequently met on the right, not with the fellow feeling owed to another human being, but ridicule. It’s the act of a “bleeding heart” to angst over the problems of “vermin” or “traitors.”
Have some women who lost their husbands in 9/11 voiced criticism of Bush and his war? Imply they are enjoying their widowhood, that their dead husbands probably didn’t love them anyway and had wanted to divorce them. Suggest they pose for pornography.
Has an actor afflicted with Parkinson’s made an impassioned and public plea for stem cell research? Accuse him of deliberately exaggerating his symptoms. Do an amusing imitation of him while you’re at it.
Has a young peace activist named Marla Ruzicka been killed in Iraq? Say that it’s not such a sad thing, given this dead girl’s politics. Call it poetic justice.
And those are just examples involving public figures, paid commentators like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Debbie Schlussel. Visit sites like Free Republic, listen to some of the callers to talk radio, and you encounter rhetoric that sometimes does more than merely border on the violent. We haven’t reached the point, as far as I know, where right-wingers are openly applauding someone backhanding an old man across the mouth. We are, however, at the point where
a photograph of a policeman arresting an elderly code-pink demonstrator, gets the following comment on FR without any demurrals from other Free Republic readers:
“I wish I was the arresting officer. I may be on suspension, but giving that witches arm an extra twist and ‘accidental’ baning her head into the all would have been worth it.”
At the end of
The Iron Dream Spinrad added an addendum, an “afterword to the second edition” by “Homer Whipple of New York University.” “Whipple” comments on the clunkiness of the prose, the unconvincing characters, the absurd phallic imagery running through the story, and the “psychotic” violence. But his insight into Hitler’s fiction is limited by the alternate timeline in which he lives, a time where “The Greater Soviet Union bestrides Eurasia like a drunken brute,” and the second world war as we know it never took place. And so the afterword denounces as absurd “the ridiculous notion that an entire nation would throw itself at the feet of a leader simply on the basis of mass displays of public fetishism, orgies of blatant phallic symbolism, and mass rallies enlivened with torchlight and rabid oratory. Obviously such a mass national psychosis could never occur in the real world.”
In 1972 this was an unsubtle bow to readers who knew for a fact that such a “mass national psychosis” is quite possible. Rereading it today, I feel as if I’ve awakened into the world of that other universe, the one where the history of the Third Reich is little more than a fantastic piece of fiction.
We don’t dismiss Nazi Germany as a science fiction novel – we just treat it like one. We have refused to take seriously what it reveals about the ways in which government can manipulate hatred, dehumanization, and violence. We’ve clapped our hands over our ears, squeezed our eyes shut, and shouted “Godwin’s Law,” every time it’s implied that those lessons might apply to us, every time ugly similarities are pointed out, however timidly, however indirectly.
While claiming to be “respectful” of the victims of Hitler’s Nazism, we’ve allowed the same dehumanization that ultimately destroyed those victims to
take root and flourish.
The word for this is not “respect.”
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