Inconvenient Truths

When I was a student, I sat in on a course on German films during World War II. The instructor was an 80 year-old German man whose parents had been forced into sending him to a Hitler Youth camp. I asked him once whether he had seen Hitler in person, and, if so, did he look like how the documentaries have him pictured. Having the respect for knowledge that should be expected from a scholar, he told me that he had indeed seen Hitler in person. The brutal Nazi dictator was authentically smiling during his visit to the Hitler youth.  I was surprised, as I had been brought up with the image of the grizzled grins and terse glares.  To be sure, the victor’s history fits the horrendous crimes committed, but at the cost of objectivity, which any historian should value. The subjective historical portrayal and the German professor’s honest answer led me to wonder what Hitler was really like as a person. Given the atrocities committed by the Nazis, we can expect that history being written by the victors proffers a corresponding warping rather than objective historical reporting. What we in the twenty-first century glimpse of Nazi Germany has undoubtedly been warped akin to how the fabric of space-time is bent by the gravity of an object having a large mass in space. 

About a decade after my conversations with the German professor, I met a 92 year-old American veteran of World War II.  Did the American people know of the holocaust? I asked. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, he answered. Before the U.S. went to war, the European war was something far away. When the U.S. was at war in Europe and Asia, Jewish leaders in Europe asked President Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks that were carrying the cattle-cars to the ovens. Roosevelt, the veteran said, told the Jews that he didn’t have time for that. “Wow, that’s a story!” I said in astonishment. One of the veteran’s daughters asked him how he knew this. “It was common knowledge at the time,” he replied. I had not even known that the American public knew of the gas chambers before the liberation of the camps. Even if Roosevelt wanted to be focused on military objectives because achieving them would mean winning the war, that he felt he didn’t have time to thwart the Nazis from transporting human beings to ovens astonishes me. I asked the veteran if the very language, cattle-cars to ovens applied to human beings shocked Americans during the war. He replied that “surprised” is not the right word for it. He did not characterize how he and other Americans had taken the news, which I found interesting.

Clearly, history leaves important things out, and perhaps even covers them up. Those pesky inconvenient truths are all too easily relegated to see the light of day; someone who happens upon them may display the jewels, but by that time, the knit story is so engrained that the little gems may hardly register. So what if Hitler was happy at times; what he did to his own people was much more important for us to know. So what if Roosevelt didn’t want to get involved in Germany’s internal affairs; he won the war. I think history is generally gray rather than black and white.

A day before I spoke with the veteran, I met a retired librarian who was still working on gay history. Could such a history be written and viewed objectively? I wondered.  He told me of the huge police presence in the weekend’s Phoenix Gay Pride festival and remarked that police in Tucson had physically attacked protesters outside a Trump rally during the campaign. I replied that I had been in the venue, where I saw Donald Trump looking on as a muscular military man was stomping on a protester being led up the aisle by one of Trump’s hired security men. I had wondered why people at the rally were so emotionally angry at “the protesters,” as if they all stood for one thing. Anger at people without any personal contact (the protesters were outside) had stunned me at the time. I leaned over to two undecided women seated to my right, and observed, “This feels like what a Nazi rally must have been like, with people angry at the Jews.” The two women agreed. Then we witnessed the stomping and Trump saying to the protester, “You’re disgusting” over and over as she was being stomped. Then it really felt like a Nazi rally. To the gay historian, I said, “The Germans had been mad at the Jews for a reason; Trump’s supporters at the rally had shotgun anger at an amorphous group of protesters. The Germans were annoyed because the Jews did not consider themselves Germans and thus many rich Jews held back in giving to German causes during the hard times when Germany was paying war reparations from World War I.” The gay “historian” quickly looked at his phone and discovered he had somewhere else to be. So much for objective history. I did stress that the Nazis took the resentment way too far, and that I had no idea whether the wealth Jews in Germany in the 1920's really did constrict giving out of a belief that they were not Germans and therefore had no obligation to help them in hard economic times, but the “damage” was apparently done. I should add that I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the German professor. Unlike the historian of famous gay men, the professor was open to inconvenient truths, for he acknowledged a friendly Hitler many decades after having been forced to go to Hitler Youth. I doubt either the protesters or the Trump supporters at the Tucson rally would tolerate inconvenient truths.

Perhaps as the West has secularized, the belief that truth can be (or is) partial has gained credibility. By implication, inconvenient truth can be regarded as heretical and thus rightly intolerable. To be sure, Christian sects in the West have historically gone to war over contending partisan (i.e., partial) truths even though such things can be regarded as inherently oxymoronic. In this essay, I have probably written something for everyone in the sense that everyone can probably find some statement to be offensive or even provocative. In a world that has outlawed inconvenient truths, I would expect no less. Am I for Hitler just because I report here that he could be happy and even friendly? Am I anti-Semitic because I report that they may have limited their charitable giving to other Jews living in Germany during hard times? Am I a gay-basher because I am critical of the gay historian’s lack of tolerance for the inconvenient truth? Am I against Democrats because I include the veteran’s report of Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to help the European Jews under German control? Am I against Trump and all his policies because I report having witnessed his enabling of violence at a rally? Such assumptions evince a lack of education, given the over-use of reason involved in taking the assumptions to be facts. Just because someone reports something does not in itself mean he or she ideologically believes in the content. For instance, that Hitler was happy visiting the kids in Hitler Youth does not mean I believe in him, his conduct, or his ideology. 

Rather, I believe that history is inadequate where inconvenient facts are omitted for ideological purposes. Admitting inconvenient truths into the history may be assumed to stem exclusively from valuing knowledge, but I think toleration must also be valued. Indeed, that truth goes beyond partiality and convenience must be held as an assumption. I am for inconvenient truths as a matter of principle as well as scholarship.

On the "Wedding of the Century": History Made or Manufactured?

In hyping the royal wedding of William and Kate in the E.U. state of Britain, the media even in other E.U. states applied the title, “The Wedding of the Century” in spite of the fact that the century was only in the second year of the second decade. It is rather presumptuous for people alive at such a time to claim so much for their time, and therefore for themselves. Lest our self-constructed bubble unexpectedly bursts, we might let some air out of our self-constructed balloon in a controlled manner such that our bloated egos can survive without too much bruising.
It is interesting how those of us who were adults in the last decade of the 20th century did not look back to any such weddings around 1911 that might have been labeled then as "the wedding of the century."  I do not even know if there were any such royal weddings back then that might qualify. Having seen the film, “The King’s Speech” a decade into the twenty-first century, I came to know a bit about the British royals of the late 1930s, but even then I could only draw a blank from Queen Victoria to the abdication made out of love. Even in terms of American rather than European history, the twentieth century begins for me at the end of World War I and takes off with the roaring twenties—that opening act ending with the ensuing economic drama in 1929. 
From the standpoint of 2011, it seems a tad bit early for us to be labeling anything in our time as definitive for the upcoming century.  From the standpoint of people who will be adults in the 2090s, people like me are like the people who were born around the time of (or just after) the war between the USA and CSA (wrongly called a civil war as the CSA was a separate country rather than a faction contending to take over the USA) and died of old age during the 1930s or at the time of WWII. Such people were practically forgotten to the people who were adults in the (American) States during the 1990s. That is to say, we who vaunt our events “of the century” will barely register to those people who will be in a position to look back on the century.  I suspect that they will look back to the people who will have been in their prime during the 2050s thru the 2070s.  
Those people who celebrate the coming of the next century will look back to celebrities similar to how I looked as far back as to Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. Even the jazz singer whose mami pierced the silent screen in 1929 is barely on my radar screen—as if the coming of sound in moving pictures was merely the start of the century (as though the previous three decades were projected silently on a blank screen).  
 I do not know much at all about the days of Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt--that is, before World War I. Similarly, adults alive in 2095 may barely know who George W. Bush and Barak Obama were and yet our world (at least in the U.S.) is dominated by discussion about those presidents.  
In the first few years of the second decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Standard Oil Trust to be unconstitutional--being in restraint of trade. At the end of the 1990s, the Glass-Steagal act separating investment and commercial banking was repealed without any hint of the progressive movement that had given rise to the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Corporations had long since won the day.
In 1913, U.S. constitutional amendments were ratified changing how U.S. Senators were to be chosen (state governments no longer being directly in the U.S. Government) and expanding how the U.S. Government could tax its citizens (at the expense of state taxes). By the end of that century, American federalism was nearly invisible—Washington D.C. having become the focal object in terms of policy.
In 1914, World War I began in Europe. In 2011, the last remaining American veteran of that war died. Memories of that war had long since faded—the Austrian-Hungarian Empire having been replaced by the Nazis and Japanese in the world’s collective consciousness.  I suspect that in 2095, 9/11 as “permanently etched in our memory” will no longer be so, just as December 7th had faded from "living in infamy" by 1995. Pearl Harbor was certainly eclipsed by 9/11. In 2011, Pearl Harbor is all but forgotten as Americans feel profound sympathy for the Japanese suffering in the wake of the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami and cheer the death of Osama as justice.
From the standpoint my desk in 2011, I look out onto a vast field of time that is as of yet unknown and utterly undeveloped. I cannot even imagine what will go down in the 2030s or 2040s. That people not yet born and thus yet to be married will look back on that now-empty field as crowded gives me great pause as to the significance of my time and what claims I can properly make concerning events today. In a way, I feel like I am living in a time before time—before memories yet to be remembered even in the same century.

See related essay: "On the 'Wedding of the Century': Royalty as Natural or Exaggerated?"