"...And then the Frog Jumped Off the Piano..."
4/22/01
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson
It’s the week of April 20th, and certain things happen on this date. It was Hitler’s birthday commemorative (and most people celebrate the 25th of April, when he heroically committed suicide), and the neo-Nazis had their sad little parades–not many people even bother to turn out to jeer them anymore–and they showed up on the net and laboriously explained that the Holocaust never happened, and oh, yeah, a lot of people died in the camps, but it was the fault of the British, who were bombing the food and medical trains just as they were pulling up to the camps. This used to result in people spending hours of their time showing how demonstrably wrong the Deniers were, but now people spot it, give a derisive snort, and point the net nazi wannabees in the direction of one of hundreds of sites on the web that have sprung up with the evidence and the truth about the Holocaust.
It’s also Holocaust Memorial Week, commemorated in Israel, in much of Europe, and throughout much of the world. Here in America, the movie "Schindler’s List" is usually run by television stations, generally PBS. (ABC, to their credit, runs it each year in the late fall, without commercial interruption).
I had seen Schindler’s List when it first came out, and not since. I decided this was a good time to watch it again.
It’s a movie that needs to be seen at least twice, I’ve realized. The first time I saw it, I was too busy trying to keep track of the characters – it was fifteen minutes before I realized that the dandy in the German cabaret was Oskar Schindler, since I had no idea what Liam Neeson looked like. And of course, I was battling a lot of preconceptions about the movie, since it came with more glowing publicity than any other movie ever, and when the hype is that manic, I expect to be disappointed, and usually am. And of course, it was a Steven Spielberg movie, which created a whole other set of expectations.
When you add the complexities and the baggage together, you tend to miss a lot the first time around. Even that first time, it was a great movie, and didn’t disappoint. The second time, it was sublime.
Undistracted by trying to figure out who was who and what exactly was going on, I was able to take in many of the myriad nuances in Spielberg’s masterwork. I had noticed his use of color the first time around, but this time, I noticed the little girl in the red coat’s second appearance.
One thing I was aware of was how careful Spielberg was to show the passage of time. The movie takes place over six years, and you get a sense of the fact that most of the time the victims spent in numb dread. There would be a terrible spasm of dehumanizing against the Jews–first stripping them of rights, then moving them to the ghetto, then to the work camps, and the formation of the death camps, and Spielberg was painstaking in his efforts to show that each event was months, even years apart. Clothing was frayed, actors aged ever so slightly. Looking at some of the children, I believe he shot the scenes with those children in some sort of chronological order. It was exacting stuff. My response after the movie was a very half-hearted attempt to watch something light on TV, followed by a retreat to the computer room and spending a half-hour just staring at a blank Word Perfect screen and shaking slightly. All that. Really Happened.
The neo-nazis were on the web the next day, frantically running their grotesque spin control. I saw one such post on Usenet, and started thinking about time’s inuring effect. The Jews would have time to settle in and adjust to their new, worsened circumstances, and convince themselves that perhaps this was as bad as it would get, and that madman in Berlin might be satisfied now. They had time to learn to ignore the free-floating dread in each other’s eyes.
Today, Usenet posters get accustomed to the vile Nazi lies posted by amoral cretins on Usenet and on the web.
How do you boil a frog? For those of you pinching an eyebrow and wondering if I’m really going to use that hackneyed analogy, yes, I am. Please skip to the next paragraph. How do you boil a frog? One degree at a time. You raise the temperature of the water in which the frog reposes ever so slightly, one degree at a time, and the frog, not noticing the change because it is gradual, and believing his surroundings to be steadfast, simply sits there like George of the Junta in front of a dead teleprompter, and eventually, boils without noticing he is being boiled.
Incrementalism. Time has an inuring effect. If change is gradual enough, we can accept nearly everything. Ideologues who cherish purity of will above all else hate and fear incrementalism. It’s from that sector that you’ll hear such absurd warnings as "If you decriminalize marijuana, the next thing you know, they’ll be burning babies on bonfires!" To them, any action "A" will eventually lead to "Z", provided you just keep enough letters of the alphabet in the middle, and let some time slip by. The incrementalist warnings are always absurd (and not limited to any one sector of the political/social debates, either), but then, the absolute absurdity in human history was the Holocaust.
Kurt Vonnegut, many years ago, wondered why the Jews didn’t just flee Germany, since it was obvious what Hitler intended for them, and was told, "Many of us owned pianos". He interpreted that to mean that too many Jews had too much in their lives that they treasured and cherished and would have to leave behind, and this caused them to rationalize away the threat. In reality, of course, millions did try to flee, but nobody would accept them. After a while, they would put a frog in the tea kettle, and go tickle some Chopin on the ivories. Absurd, absurd to make a Frenchman laugh!
Jews in Krakow. Ordinary people on the internet. Both getting used to slowly increasing doses of poison. I felt troubled.
I honestly prefer to see the nazis spilling their sewage out on the internet. For one thing, they are like staph; they are always around, but usually present no danger to the host organism (in this case, society) as long as that organism is healthy.
A healthy society doesn’t rush to censor. That nazis are allowed to do their little hate fests is a testimony to the general health of a society. That they don’t get anywhere with it is further testimony. And, truth be told, I prefer to be able to keep an eye on those clowns out in the light of day. They flourish when it is dark.
Still, with thoughts of incrementalism in my mind, I couldn’t quite bring myself to blow them off like I had been doing for a couple of years. (Once, in 1995, we had a nazi group called "National Vanguard" attack the liberal areas of Usenet with hundreds of posts, mostly 1,000 word quotes from "Dr." William Pierce and Hitler. I devised a tactic of pledging five cents to the Special Olympics for each post from those people I came across. The mentally disabled also suffered horribly at the hands of Hitler, and the Natvan people were predictably disgusted with the notion that their work resulted in help for what they saw as genetically impure stock. The idea caught on).
So I left a message, terse and dismissive, to be sure, but I felt better than the usual silence.
These pitiful assholes show up every year about this time. It's Uncle Dolf’s birthday and Shoah Memorial Week, and PBS just ran "Schindler's List" last night, so they've got to come out and remind us of the hatred and bitter lies of nazism.
Then something happened. Some people responded to my post, including a couple of hard-right types who started out by saying, "Normally, I wouldn’t be caught dead agreeing with Zepp on anything..."
A substantially larger number reacted independently, and in various ways, savaging the writer, savaging nazism, savaging Hitler. Many contained URLs to sites around the web devoted to maintaining a full and complete history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, or were cultwatch sites that kept an eye on the various neo-nazi groups and debunked their ravings.
It was the biggest response to one of those tiresome clowns that I had seen in ten years.
I don’t even know if "Schindler’s List" was broadcast to those areas and got those people thinking like me. Maybe they just decided "enough is enough". I don’t know.
But I was glad to see that the tactic of the neo-nazis that familiarity would breed acceptance was refuted, and that no matter how deep the differences among the people on the net in the endless debates over abortion, economics, government powers, individual freedoms, drugs, and all of that, we could get together once again to smash evil.
To any neo-Nazis reading this:
Never again.