Frank Perconte: Hey this guy says he’s not a Nazi. All of Germany and I haven’t met one Nazi yet
Band of Brothers 2001
For a long time after World War Two there was an enduring myth that the French Resistance to the German occupation of their country was larger than it was. This myth was advanced for political reasons but the reality that nobody wanted to admit that the vast majority didn’t want to get involved as:
- Finding basic necessities like food was a priority
- It was a great way to get yourself killed
- Until late in the war it seemed unlikely that the Nazi’s were going anywhere
In fact there was a great one line joke in France concerning the “resistance” that I first heard in the 1970’s I recall it went like this:
If everyone who claimed to be part of the [French] Resistance [to the Nazis] had been a member there would have been nobody left to collaborate [with the Germans].
This was similar to a phenom in Germany where you were hard pressed to find either:
- A Nazi
- or
- Anyone who knew what the Nazi’s had done.
It brings to mind a scene in the movie Judgement at Nurenburg, not the famous one between Spencer Tracy & Marlene Dietrich but one where Spencer Tracy’s Character asks the servents at his house Mr. & Mrs. Halbestadt what it was like to live under National Socialism. After making a point of saying how apolitical they are he continues…
Judge Haywood: For instance, there was a place called Dachau… which was not too many miles from here. Did you ever know what was going on there?
Mrs. Halbestadt We knew nothing about it. How can you ask if we knew anything about that?
Judge Haywood: I’m sorry.
Mr Halbestadt: Your Honor, we are only little people. We lost a son in the army… and our daughter in the bombing. During the war we almost starved. It was terrible for us.
Judge Haywood: I’m sure it was.
Mrs. Halbestadt: Hitler did some good things. I won’t say he didn’t do some good things. He built the Autobahn. He gave more people work. We won’t say he didn’t do some good things. But the other things… the things they say he did to the Jews and the rest… we knew nothing about that. Very few Germans did.
Mr. Halbestadt: And if we did know… what could we do?
Judge Haywood: But Mrs. Halbestadt said you didn’t know.
Judgement at Nurenburg 1961
Apparently it was almost impossible to find anyone in Germany who knew anything that was happening at all.
And that brings us to the present day and US universities:
It’s been an ironic week in these expensive bastions of learning. These are places where identifying someone by the wrong pronoun can get you blacklisted but supporting Hamas as they rape women and behead children, that’s was fine:
Zach Kessel has documented statements of support for Hamas from groups at
- George Washington University
- NYU & NYU Law
- Ohio State
- Brandeis (of all places)
- Georgetown
- University of Virginia
- Swarthmore
- University of Illinois
- University of Michigan Law School
- Northwestern
- Columbia
- University of Chicago
- Tufts
- and of course Harvard
These folks were proud to stand with Hamas even when they were beheading babies, and then this happened:
followed by this:
and now this:
Fallout from a controversial statement published and initially signed by about 30 student groups at Harvard University continued Wednesday as two trucks circled Harvard Square for much of the day, featuring the names and photos of students linked to the statement.
The billboard trucks, funded by the conservative news group Accuracy in Media, featured LED screens that changed throughout the day to feature at least a half dozen Harvard students under the words, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” The trucks also linked to a website, HarvardHatesJews.com, which directs users to send messages to Harvard’s board of trustees.
“Tell them to take action against these despicable, hateful students,” the website reads. “Each and every one of these students should be expelled and their student organizations should be kicked off campus.”
And suddenly you have all kinds of Harvard students who where going to be lawyers are suddenly resigning from the student groups and/or claiming they never read the statements before they went out. To wit:
This brings an obvious question:
As a commentator at Instapundit descried this sudden Volte faca
“The lesson is that luxury beliefs vanish the instant the luxury is threatened. How much of our fake politics would turn in an instant if we didn’t have institutional enforcement and narrative policing, and everyone just had to stand on their own behind their own thoughts? What if radical chic consistently cost something? What if tenured communists had risk?”
I predict that by the end of this week students at all of these schools will be saying this.
And by April or May of next year when students get ready to graduate or apply for internships all of these students at these universities will like Germans after 1946 insist they were not political, that they did not know about these student organization or their statements. By the time we get to 2025 there will be so many students and graduates who claim to have been opposed to the statements supporting Hamas there will scarcely have been enough students left to have drafted them.
But whatever happens make no mistake. It was the prospect of future lucrative careers being beheaded over those statements not the reality of Jewish babies being beheaded by Hamas that will be the sudden cause of these denials
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