THOSE WHO FORGET THE LESSONS OF HISTORY . . .
This consensus is convenient for artists and activists who need to make a point about other causes. To underscore the terror they feel, Palestinians tortured by the Israelis compare Israeli tactics to Nazi tactics. Gays imprisoned in the 1960s in Cuban “reeducation” camps refer to them as concentration camps. Fascism as exemplified by the Nazis has become a form of political shorthand. It’s a lot easier to drag out the Nazis and say, “This is what it’s like–now we all understand,” than to tell the contemporary story. It’s the perfect us versus them dynamic.
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Yet in artistic terms this consensus has a paradoxical effect. It can render Hitler cartoonish, and turn his hateful philosophy into a trite, predictable manifesto. Ultimately, comparisons to Nazi Germany are so common that they become meaningless: comparing black South Africans, Southeast Asian boat people, the Kurds, or any other legitimately fucked-over people to the Nazis’ victims doesn’t address the individual horror at hand–but it does diminish the real, unique evil of World War II.
Of course Victoria and John’s Albanian friends–the translators and other intellectuals who are producing her play–feel quite differently. They protest that the Serbs, whose government rules Kosove, oppress them with martial law, suppress their culture and language, and even kill them.
Impotent before the deadly tensions, Victoria and John are forced to consider that the Serb priest may have been right: there can be no peace. It’s not a happy conclusion, not a tidy, hopeful way to end a story, but its truth is reflected in today’s headlines about ethnic wars in Yugoslavia.
