According to a book published in 2021, back in 2018, Donald Trump said to his Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, that Adolf Hitler "did a lot of good things." Trump has denied ever having made that remark to Kelly or anybody else. It's worth noting that a couple of years before that alleged remark surfaced, J.D. Vance himself had suggested Trump might turn out to be "America's Hitler."
That the U.S. President does not like this comparison is unsurprising. Trump is in his mid-70s, so it's reasonable to expect that he recalls a time in which Germany's WWII führer was reviled around the world for his horrific and barbaric misdeeds, but, for what it may be worth, my sense is that younger generations don't care much more about comparisons to Hitler than to Genghis Khan. Surely, if Trump wouldn't lose a single supporter by shooting a random stranger on 5th Avenue in broad daylight or by bragging about grabbing unknown women by the pussy, it can't be wildly dangerous these days to admit saying that Hitler did one or two good things for his country.
Well....did he actually do anything beneficial? I'm not a historian by trade (or even disposition), but I take it that Hitler certainly rebuilt his country's formerly impressive military and managed to improve one or two things about its economy --although the latter claim may be more controversial. He did manage to take over Austria and also quickly overcame the resistance of the purportedly formidable French army, if those are considered "good things." Let's suppose, however, that he hadn't accomplished any of those militaristic, domination-type goals, and that his effect on his country's economic competence was actually either poor or indifferent. But let's not try to erase any of his many evil, corrupt, barbaric deeds.
Given this type of unvarnished perspective of his regime, could it nevertheless make sense to claim Hitler's reign wasn't entirely bad for the German citizenry? This seems to me an interesting question. Again, if we accept Hitler's predominant responsibility for the Holocaust, the destruction of Germany's legal system, widespread corruption, and all the rest of the savage iniquities associated with his Third Reich, and ignore claims regarding military victories or economic strengthening, can it still make sense to insist that there were polity-wide benefits resulting from his time in office? Could something like a simple swelling of national pride play a prominent part in these benefits? The answer one gives to this question will likely depend on one's views of both ethics and social psychology.
Let me explain. During a recent visit to Germany, I was very taken with the regular public apologies for the country's 20th-Century misdeeds. It was sweet, I thought, for a people to take responsibility for their obvious prior sins. There is very little of that in the U.S.: the Vietnam Memorial lists only the names of the roughly 58,000 Americans who were killed, but not a single one of the million-plus Vietnamese dead. And the idea of "Indigenous Peoples' Day" continues to face vehement pushback because changing the old name of "Columbus Day" is considered woke nonsense by numerous "regular Americans." After all, as the song goes, This is My Country!
No doubt many will say that patriotism does not require one to ignore a country's faults. That may well be; the concept of patriotism is complicated, and I would be one of the last people in the world to suggest that I have a solid understanding of it. But let that matter go for a second and just focus on this apparently simple question: Would you rather live in a place where you're encouraged to feel good about yourself, or one where you're expected to feel guilty (and perhaps needlessly so if we suppose that you bear no personal responsibility for things your country did before you were born)? Again, just that question: if possible, try to leave all the surrounding stuff about genocide and world domination out.
The beating Germany took in the Versailles Treaty is widely thought to have been a contributing factor to its subsequent defiance of external attitudes toward it. Not only did the reparations appear extremely harsh, but the treaty's War Guilt Clause forced Germany to accept sole blame — and populations naturally prefer to feel good about themselves than to be told they alone caused a catastrophe. But it's not just countries. I know several New York Knicks fans whose lives were immeasurably improved when their team recently won the NBA Championship after a long drought. It doesn't much matter to these fans what shenanigans Ownership may or may not have gotten up to over the last decade.#
It may not be entirely rational to "root for the laundry," but it is obviously natural to do so. I have mentioned in several prior writings that Stalin worked very diligently on this "identity problem," something I happen to think is real and likely very hard to fix: certainly, Stalin's cruel and extreme methods didn't manage it. He spent over a generation violently trying to eradicate such sentiments: he burned down churches, took children from their parents, and outlawed all languages but Russian. But the slightest whiff of glasnost and all the divisive and arguably irrational sentiments flooded back. The harsh, even murderous activities did no more good than cutting the hair of Sioux children and "re-educating" them in little American uniforms accomplished in the American West.
Again, people like to feel good about themselves, their country, their "heritage," their ethnicity, their language, their religion, their race, their community team, etc., etc. And it is not at all strange for populations (perhaps not every member, but certainly a very significant percentage of the whole) to think that arranging for them to feel good about themselves cannot be a bad thing. It is thus entirely unsurprising to me that a large number of Germans have just about had it with making apologies, and it seems likely that the AfD will continue to gain strength not only in Saxony-Anhalt but throughout Germany, just as The National Rally, The Brothers of Italy, The Party of Freedom, and Trumpism have in their respective countries.
To conclude this diatribe, it's undeniable that Hitler did bad things. But...did he do any good things? It's not clear to me that he did, but I am probably an outlier here, a crank, even an eccentric anti-homer. I mean, I wouldn't say either that the conquest of Venezuela must be a good thing for the conquering nation or that the Knicks' victory is obviously good for New Yorkers. Do I think flag (or jersey) waving must therefore always be heinous? Can there be no virtuous (or at least harmless) forms of patriotism? Again, I am no expert. I suppose it might be harmless, but I think the answer to the question whether it can also be affirmatively good is fundamentally a function of how one answers the italicized questions above. If, all else equal, it is good for a people to feel good about themselves, then overall well-being of a country's citizenry may be generally improved by "puffing up" oneself in the Hitlerian/Trumpian manner. In fact, it may be beneficial to those in most need of uplift.
It seems obvious to me that neither Trump nor any other right-wing party members around the world today ought to be held responsible for anything the Nazis did in the 1930s and '40s. And even those who find something stirring in aspects of that history aren't, I think, choosing that reaction any more than the rest of us choose what moves us — feelings aren't generally the kind of thing people can just decide to have or not have. Furthermore, the absolute delight exhibited in AfD headquarters on election eve shows that its members have been made much happier by forgetting about the sins of the past. Others around the world will share their glee. So it's hard to deny that many people's lives will seem to them to have been improved by this vote, just as many surely applauded, indeed were made happier by, a number of Hitler's actions in his day.
If pressed, I suppose I myself would resist the proposition that feeling good about oneself necessarily serves as a constituent of the sort of well-being that democracies should strive to increase. But I recognize that such a view may seem passing strange. I therefore leave to my readers the task of examining their own feelings about this matter. Did Hitler really do nothing good even if he made many of his countrymen much happier? If the means to that end were invariably and monstrously evil, does that make the increase in happiness disappear?*
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* Two prior essays (from a total batch of perhaps a dozen or more) in which I discuss matters closely related to those covered here are this and this.
#I hope no one will think I am trying to equate rooting for one's home team with supporting a community that has been (or remains) supportive of things like systemic racism. Far from it. In fact, some (Aldous Huxley, for example) have suggested that engaging or even taking a side in 'team warfare' might be a healthy way of sublimating such natural instincts. Why not be attached to a team from your area, one your parents and grandparents both introduced you to and would have taken a bullet for? Maybe you even hang out with a couple of people who work for this team in some capacity. I absolutely think that is not just natural and (in the absence of victory-parade car-tipping) usually harmless. I just wonder how many local fans the Southampton Football Club has lost since it was discovered that they engaged in substantial cheating last year. For again, the quite natural attitude is It's my team, right or wrong! Anyhow, everybody else probably does it too! Multiply that reflex by a few orders of magnitude and you get a community as resistant to pulling down its Confederate statues as the Daughters of the Confederacy.
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