Hi all! It’s a beautiful Friday here in New England. I’ve got three reviews for you and a Mithra pic. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Bartov, Hitler’s Army
Butler, Gender Trouble
Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Exasperation
REVIEWS
Omer Bartov, “Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich” (1992) – I’m old enough to remember when the “good Wehrmacht” myth still played with people who should know better. It was a Cold War myth, originally, a way to save face while rearming West Germany, but it got mixed up with all kinds of other ideas about war, memory, etc., that seem to make less and less sense the further we get from it. I imagine some chuds out there still hold to the myth, but you gotta figure they hold the harder the more we understand what the Wehrmacht actually was, both because they like to trigger libs (i.e. anyone who knows anything) and because they like what the Wehrmacht actually did, and pretending it was noble is a good way to have your cake and eat it too.
Because it’s pretty clear, now: the Wehrmacht was, as Omer Bartov put it, “Hitler’s army.” Bartov, an Israeli historian who’s currently at Brown, emerged from a variety of tedious fights in the history of the Third Reich — the debate of “intentionalism” (it was all Hitler’s idea) versus “structuralism” (it was all them reacting to/interacting with structures), the “Historikerstreit” where Nazi apologists like Ernst Nolte burnt their fingers by saying the quiet parts loud — waving a simple, undeniable thesis, backed by archival research and affirmed by where more abstract theorizing was going. Namely, if you hate your boss so much, you usually don’t fight the biggest war in human history and kill tens of millions of people when he tells you to, like the Wehrmacht did in Eastern Europe. The war against the Soviet Union was understood as something other than a normal war, even the wars the Nazis unleashed to swallow up countries like France. It was an ideological and racial crusade, extreme violence — even by the standards of an epoch of bloody wars — was always a part of it, and the Wehrmacht embraced it from the beginning.
There’s a lot of historiographical hedging here — Bartov beats the shit out of rival theories of what kept the Wehrmacht together, most of them obvious Cold War snowjobs, at somewhat tedious length — and the meat of the book comes towards the end. This is where you get the letters and the diaries, and the exposition of the totalizing world that the Nazis made in the killing zone in the East. By 1941, most of the men going into the Wehrmacht had lived under the Nazi regime most of their lives. Many of them had been through the Hitler Youth and they all mainlined propaganda. Above and beyond the specific politics, this propaganda insisted that fighting, suffering, obeying, and above all, killing, is what will make the Reich. In many respects, what Nazism aimed at was creating a sphere where that would be a reality, and they only came close in the East. However bad they were to the French or whoever, whatever they had in mind for the Atlantic powers once they got grips on them (rather unlikely), it was the East where the action was.
Probably the most compelling part to me was Bartov’s explications of a peculiar mental operation that a lot of German soldiers did. You can see this operation attested to over and over again in the literature, and you see other conquerors do it too- British, Americans, I don’t want to say it’s universal but it’s common. And that operation is, treating the human condition that these soldiers see as a result of their army’s actions as an indictment on the people they are conquering, and a justification for further violence.
Germans saw inhabitants of the Soviet Union after said inhabitants were subjected to extreme violence. The Soviets they encountered were scared, hungry, hurt, bewildered, dirty, and often far from home. People in that position don’t usually look or act their best. And it seems that more or less the official position of the Germans out there, as revealed in letters home as well as in official orders and dispatches, is that’s just how Slavs, Jews, Roma, etc. are. They don’t even really bother to say “well, we Germans wouldn’t be like that if we got invaded.” They didn’t seem to need that extra mental armature. They saw hungry, ragged wretches, who they had done most of the work to make wretched, and decided that what they saw meant that the people they were conquering were just wretches who deserve what they get (you’d figure the next step would then be “why are we bothering with them” but nobody seems to have gotten there, either, in any meaningful sense). We know what the consequences of that kind of dehumanization look like.
I’m used to stupidity and to cruelty, but that kind of motivated, but seemingly not quite intentional, divorce between cause and effect… That, I don’t really understand. I think it might be important to understand but ultimately not something you can think your way into. This mental habit was in no way confined to Germans between 1941 and 1945. I had to read “American Sniper” for a project a few years back, and that was Chris Kyle’s basic impression of Iraqis. That’s the logic behind the “shithole countries” remark. That’s how the British saw Indians, Africans, and often enough the Irish. That’s how a lot of American cops look at black, brown, and poor people.
It does seem that “official” first world culture encourages that little voice that says “they’re still people/how do you think they got so wretched, dummy?” And it seems that first world fascists can be reasonably defined as the kids who are mad that that voice got installed in their heads and want to kill it, and kill it in everyone else, joined sometimes by those who lack it entirely and are mad that people say they should have it. And, no, “leftists aren’t just as bad.” A lot of the worst leftists atrocities took place precisely when leftists didn’t do the thing they’re supposed to do, and think seriously about the lives of those in front of them. And it just doesn’t happen as often, or as severely, as crimes motivated by this sort of master-wretch dichotomy that seemingly defines the mental landscape of a lot of people in positions of relative power.
This attitude has to be institutional to get the sort of effect you saw on the eastern front, not just “bad apples” or just the SS. Ultimately, it was the logic behind the whole war. It’s one of, maybe the main, or the only, non-logic behind the concept of race in general. It defined the goals of the war in the east and its conduct. It’s why the Germans couldn’t try to move slow, couldn’t try to meaningfully ally with minority nationalities in the USSR or just Russians who hated Stalin and communism, even as, in many cases, such people greeted the Nazis, went to great lengths to join them. All that dried up pretty soon after the initial invasion, with the way the Germans treated the entire population of the USSR. Assholes like Bandera stuck with it out of a mixture of ideological fanaticism and the knowledge that there was no going back. The SS did some of their major killing actions because the Wehrmacht asked them to, after general Nazi policy so badly alienated the (previously grievously oppressed!) people of the USSR that they were willing to risk the worst retribution possible to strike back.
They were all in it together. The attempt on Hitler’s life by a small clique of Wehrmacht officers was a poorly-organized, half-hearted attempt for a few of them to save their own skins, get the Anglos on side to stop the Soviets from coming for them. The Soviets took terrible vengeance on Germany, but you’ll notice Germany still exists, which is more than would have happened to Russia or anywhere else east of Prussia had the Nazis won. Maybe because the logic of dehumanization was so prevalent in the power centers of the world no one really knew what to make of it when they saw what it all led to. Then the Cold War came along, so official historians and social scientists had a new script, and a new motivation to explain away what we saw, to redeem the Wehrmacht and so on. Well. Pretty much anyone who takes history seriously anymore gets that that’s bullshit, in no small part to Omer Bartov here, but who’s to say whether we’ve closed the barn door after the horse got out? ****’
Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990) - One of the things that has bemused me in the last decade or so is how concepts, tropes, and names that were distinctly “grad school” things have slipped the bonds and become something that the sort of people who never took a GRE — and not for the many good reasons not to, usually — have started bandying about. “Critical race theory,” “American exceptionalism,” “ethnostate,” etc. And to look at their work, you wouldn’t figure that Judith Butler would necessarily become this big cultural figure, either, literally a demon figure as far as many chuds are concerned.
There’s a lot of cliches about theory, and most of them have some basis in fact. The unreadability thing is often overstated, but the prose is usually ungraceful and in the case of some theorists, like Homi Bhabha, quite incomprehensible. You wouldn’t read “Gender Trouble” for the prose. Abstract, referring to other writers and their generally abstract concepts, feints towards a more thoroughgoing radicalism and theoretical bet-hedging weaved together, like a new boxer juking around the ring. The funny thing is, Butler can make themselves quite clear when they want to- you can see it in interviews and the like. Well, it was the late eighties/early nineties, high theory era. We all come from decades, like the man says.
Really, it was people taking up Butler’s work — and, predominantly, the first third or so of it, when they state their main case and before they do their exegeses on other theorists — who have made it, and them, something like household concepts/names. Gender as performance, gender as divorced from biological sex, gender as constitutive of our ideas of biological sense (to my mind, more provocatively overstated than what I know of the case would support, but that’s theorists for you). It took people — a lot of them quite divorced from the circumstances of holders of named chairs at Berkeley — applying these ideas to their lives and those around them to make them relevant. There were trans and non-binary people well before Butler put pen to paper, as they’d surely acknowledge. But Butler put a lot of the pieces of a theory of gender performance — the dreaded “gender theory” of chud nightmares — together in a usable package.
Butler also did something important, that might not be obvious, but I’ve been reading stuff from the late eighties/early nineties a lot lately, and it stood out to me. Butler explicitly linked their theorization to a feminist project. Now, it seems obvious, and we have a word for feminists who refuse the idea that gender does not straightforwardly map on to biological sex: TERFs, and they are increasingly aligned with the far right against anything resembling any meaningful feminism. But I don’t think it was necessarily the obvious angle then, and the outraged cries of TERFdom, that destabilizing their precious essentialist concepts of womanhood constitute a betrayal of their concept of where history was going, shows this. It’s not hard to imagine a similar set of concepts, in the hands of a contemporary of Butler’s — a Camille Paglia type, say — delinked from feminism, either explicitly — no transcendent feminist subject, no political movement — or with an insouciant end of history shrug. Among other things, Paglia was generally a more lively prose stylist than Butler. You can see her selling it, maybe.
It sounds silly, and it probably is. I don’t think a non- or anti-feminist critique of gender essentialism would get that far. One thing we’ve seen is that opposition to rethinking gender roles, and the concept of permanent gender roles, is one of those things that unites the contemporary right, something that really drives them crazy, and I don’t think any theorist was, or is, going to change that. And like I said, the thinking we’re seeing now, especially it’s spread beyond academia, has a lot more to do with everyday people looking to, and adapting, these concepts to explain their concepts than with any one theorist. But it was probably a good thing — a better thing than the book as a whole, probably, which isn’t especially new news (can’t ding it for that- it’s thirty-two years old, now) or compellingly written (can ding for that, imo) — that Butler situated this as they did, for all it riled up the easily riled down the line. ***’
Norman Mailer, “The Naked and the Dead” (1948) - For most of my life thinking about literature, I thought of Norman Mailer as one of the great overrated buffoons of American letters. I thought this mostly on the strength of his nonfiction. This included his pseudo-gonzo reportage from riots in Miami and Chicago but the text of his I saw the most was “The White Negro.” People invariably cite this essay in histories of American culture and thought in the late twentieth century, and in the culture-drowned internet discussions about race of twenty-first century- Norman, the archdevil of white appropriation of black culture, along with Moynihan, the devil of pathologization of the black family.
Well, “The White Negro” might be needlessly flogged but it is also, to borrow a usage I dislike, deeply “cringe.” It is genuinely a bad piece of work, and his reportage sucks hard, too, especially when Hunter S. Thompson was around, showing what was possible in the same vein. Mailer’s performance of self after the sixties is impossible to take seriously: bloviating, macho, homophobic, Hemingway without the pretense of elegance. And he stabbed his wife (and pretty much the whole of New York literati at the time, including at least one contemporary progressive saint figure in the person of James Baldwin, signed statements to let him off). That’s the Mailer who serves as midcentury New York literary foil to Gore Vidal, in the minds of internet people with some stake in being literate, little time or interest in reading long old books, and an awareness that Mailer was the straight buffoon and Vidal was the queer guy with the bon mots and the fine taste in enemies.
So I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up Mailer’s first novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” written a full decade and a half before he punched Vidal, stabbed his wife, or ran for office. What I got is actually pretty stellar, and even more impressive considering that this was a first novel from a twenty-five year old just coming back from a grueling wartime experience. It seems like a shame to me, now, that Mailer’s later reputation in many ways overshadows his first book, though Mailer himself can take most of the blame for that.
“The Naked and the Dead” tells the story of an American campaign to take a fictional South Pacific island from the Japanese, part of the “island hopping” strategy. Most of the viewpoint characters are part of a reconnaissance platoon. The island is hot and wet, the men are mostly sweaty, horny, contentious, and when not terrified, bored. We get insight into the private lives of at least a dozen members of the platoon as well as frequent visits to the general leading the campaign and his psychological war with his aide de camp. These include “time machine” sections where we get insight into the men's lives before the war (Gore Vidal sneered at these in his dismissal of this book, saying they were second rate Dos Passos knock offs- Vidal was wrong here, and wrong about the book as a whole, which shows he takes Ls in this game, too).
The plot isn’t complicated. The platoon lands on the island and gets shot at. The platoon hangs out on the island for a while when the campaign stalemates. The platoon gets sent on a cockamamie long-range patrol, ordered and run according to agendas that have little to do with winning the battle winds up determining their fate. Some of them survive, most of them don’t.
More than the plot, the point of the book is the situation and the characters, a study of men — gendered pronoun used intentionally, there are no women on the island (there are also apparently no indigenous people- I’m not sure whether there any islands that big that were uninhabited out there, but whatever) — in an extreme situation around other men. Ever wanted to know what was going on in the heads of all those members of those multiethnic (but no black people) squads of WWII dogfaces, before we decided that generation was too Great to have internal lives? Mailer tells us, by the expedient of throwing them all in with each other and adding numerous stressors.
You can see some of where Mailer’s gendered bullshit later in his career comes from, but in a larval form, arguably a form that could have had a very different growth. The root, in a predictable enough pattern, is in insecurity. All of the men in the platoon, and the general and everyone else, is in one way or another insecure in their masculinity. Even the sergeant who leads the platoon (it’s without a lieutenant for a while), Croft, a self-contained autochthon made of rage and competence, feels insecure, is constantly on guard from challenges to his manliness. The other characters — especially Mailer’s two Jewish characters, who, like him, live in the shadow of the “nice Jewish boy” stereotype (and of raw antisemitism) — don’t stand a chance.
So, they rub up against each other, emotionally if not physically (one way the macho buffoon Mailer of later decades shows himself here is the clear association he makes between heterosexual sex and happiness, if not necessarily wholesomeness, and homosexuality — as represented by the ruthless, mind-game-playing general — and a sinister devaluing of human life). They complain about their wives and sweethearts, and fantasize about female infidelity even as they undertake many of their own. They get in little pissing contests. Much of the action are the attempts of the men to get out of doing difficult and dangerous things, and the way the Army makes their lives worse, whether they manage to get out of the firing line or not.
As a dude who hangs out with a lot of other dudes, it all rang pretty true. The prose was good, with some pyrotechnics in places but little of the pretense Mailer with which Mailer would come to stultify us. It felt honest and immersive. I spent a long time reading this, partially because I’ve been busy (especially in my traditional novel-reading time, evenings after work), but by the end, because I was savoring it. My plan now is to read down Mailer’s oeuvre chronologically to see when he went from this guy to the guy he became. *****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Exasperation
“Dad… taking a picture of me AGAIN? You’re SO lame.”