The cultural figure of The Nazi is revealing.
The Nazi is powerful and accepts no bounds on his power. The Nazi has elegant taste in fashion, design, art and architecture. The Nazi is physically beautiful. The Nazi is unmitigatedly evil.
The Nazi is not real.
The Nazi is a character, an ideal villain for a movie or video game; an edgy outfit for the runway, the street or maybe Halloween; a rhetorical flourish for winning arguments. The perfection of the Nazi’s evil joined with his boundless might, refinement and beauty produces a perfect fantasy of taboo power and desire. While the taboo nature of the fantasy scares most people away from sincerely identifying with Nazis to the point of adopting Naziism, it does make the aesthetic of Naziism supremely attractive.
The Nazi is a profoundly gentile fantasy.
The Nazi does not exist for Jews, who carry in their communities the memory of the ghettoes, the train cars, the death camps, the depilation and tattooing, the showers, the furnaces, and the consumer goods made from our flesh, our fat, our hair. The Nazi does not exist for Jews, who in living memory saw a third of their population incinerated by Naziism. The Nazi does not exist for Jews, whose children, seventy years later are plagued with nightmares of uniformed men coming to kill them, or their family, or to take them away. The Nazi does not exist for Jews, who seventy years later are still confronted with death and destruction by this nightmare at our places of worship, our cemeteries and our community centers. The Nazi does not exist for Jews, who in the Diaspora must live alongside Nazis because our governments do not care, see them as useful tools, or tacitly – even openly – approve of their ideas and actions.
The Nazi does not exist for Jews because we are familiar with Nazis and Naziism in their naked, absolute reality.
But what exactly does The Nazi reveal? Certainly it demonstrates that most people lack in compassion for the victims of the Holocaust and their families. When presented with The Nazi, most people see a villainous character, an alluring taboo fantasy. For those peoples whose families and communities were decimated by the many genocides carried out within the Holocaust, we see a caricature of our suffering.
More specifically, The Nazi lays bare the antisemitic grain of society. In the Nazi mind the Jewish people are the ultimate evil, we are the people who open the gates to other undesirables into society so that we might degrade the master race in spirit and body such that it is weakened and ripened for Jewish dominance. The Final Solution, the Holocaust, was thus orchestrated not simply to cleanse Nazi-controlled lands of Untermenschen, but to annihilate world Jewry specifically. In the gentile mind, Nazis and Jews are an unbreakable dyad – one cannot be mentioned without reference to the other; the Holocaust and Jews are similarly unsplittable – the Porajmos, the mass-murder of Jesuits, various Slavic peoples, LGBT+ people and others classed as “subhumans” are not what most people have in mind when the Holocaust is mentioned, but the Shoah nearly always is (Jews, incidentally, are well aware that it was a mixed-multitude liberated from the camps). Therefore, the Nazi is not merely a caricature of the suffering of those who endured the Holocaust, but a slap in the face of those who numerically bore the brunt of the Nazi’s program of extermination designed specifically to wipe us from existence and grind our memory to dust.
The gentile fantasy of The Nazi – wherever it appears, whoever expresses it – demonstrates gentiles’ inability to experience compassion for Jews in the capacity we are Jewish. Stripped of everything, enslaved, burned to ashes, rendered for soap, in the moment of our most acute suffering we continue to be alien, inhuman in that we are Jewish. Seventy years after a genocide we have only begun to recover from, the image of The Nazi set against the sustained reality of Naziism is a reminder that we are welcome nowhere in the Diaspora. It is a reminder that there is no gentile-dominated state, no nation, no class, no people. no party, no organization that does not see Jews as essentially foreign, unassimilable to its composition.
The Nazi demonstrates that The Jew – another infamous character in gentile fantasy – is condemned to wander, and must always have the bags packed.