Maus destroys the “just world” fallacy, and that’s just PART of why many Americans don’t want their kids to read it
Obviously antisemitism is the primary driving force behind many Americans not wanting to take a close look at the Holocaust, but that antisemitism is intertwined with the “just world” “rugged individualist” “bootstrap” “anyone can do anything if they work hard enough” philosophy we Americans get shoved down our throats practically from birth, and which is–counterintuitively–also bound up with the same sort of victim mentality that the Nazis preyed upon to rise to power. (I’ll get to that in a minute.)
The just world school of thought holds that people, in general, get what they deserve. If you fail, you have only yourself to blame. Ask any American school child who was bullied, and they’ve heard adults tell them, “Well, you must have done something to make them bully you.”
The truth of the Holocaust as shown in Maus, though, demands that you either a) abandon that school of thought and acknowledge that the virtue (however you define virtue) and hard work and a can-do attitude cannot save everyone, or b) you must decide that those who perished were somehow not worthy of surviving.
The second is, of course, reprehensible, but those are your only two honest choices. And many American politicians have, in fact, blamed German Jews for their fate, claiming that if they had “fought back harder,” they’d have never been rounded up. (And contrary to popular belief in the US, many Jews did fight back, quite effectively. If not for antisemitism, the stories of Jewish resistance fighters would be legendary.)
“Why do you think that never happened in America?” these politicians and pundits say, refusing to acknowledge that is has, in fact, happened more than once in the United States (and is still happening). Would these same politicians have supported Americans of Japanese descent taking up arms against the US government when the US put them in concentration camps during World War II? How about the Trail of Tears? How do they feel about the ongoing war of genocide against the Native American population? Should Native Americans once again take up arms against the US government? How about Black Americans?
You get the idea. (I’m drifting, I know–If this were a formal essay instead of a stream of consciousness rant begun at 5 am because I couldn’t sleep from thinking about it, I’m sure I’d get points taken off.)
But Spiegleman sums this up more elegantly than I.
Just like many Germans in the 1930s and 1940s, a large percentage of Americans have imagined a third choice; if things are hard, it must be because they are victims of some all-powerful (and non-white, or at least not the “right kind of white”) force that has as its sole goal the destruction of “the white race.”
Now, in a sense, they may be victims, just not of whom they think they are–capitalism (the precursor to and incubator of fascism) and its agents victimize all but a lucky few; the Musks, the Gateses, the Bezoses. These white supremacists cannot assign blame to capitalism, though, despite the overwhelming evidence that it and its agents are behind the bulk of their misery, because they’ve been taught that capitalism is the only way they can ever “get ahead” in life.
So who’s to blame? Just who is preventing them from “succeeding” in life? They can’t blame the rich and powerful they worship, of course.
So for Americans in the 2020s, just like Germans in the 1930s and 1940s, it must be that the entire world is ranged against them, led by… who, I wonder?
Oh, of course–it must be the Jews. (And now the Muslims.) The Black people. The Indigenous. The Arabs. The Asians. The Romani. (Because although there are exceptions, the majority of those in this mindset think of America as a white country, just as they thought of Germany as a white country.)
It must be the LGBTQA+ community. (It is no accident that the books in those famous Nazi bonfires were volumes of LGBTQA+ literature and research.) It must be Everyone Who Is Not Us. Everyone not of Our Nationality, Our Specific Brand of Whiteness, Our Specific Religion.
(There’s a reason that conservative Christians in the US have tried to rewrite history to hide that Nazism was a conservative Christian movement that only turned against the Lutheran Church when the Nazis demanded that Lutheran clergy more closely follow famous antisemite and father of Protestantism Martin Luther’s admonition to persecute Jews, and the Lutheran clergy refused.)
In order for white nationalism to survive, it must convince its adherents that–against all evidence–they are the true victims. That their oppression of others is “defense against white genocide.” That’s the only way they can reconcile their imagined superiority with their actual circumstance.
But see, if we teach our children the truth of books like Maus, the truth that might does not–despite US pretension otherwise–make right, that the answer to their problems is not blaming minorities, they might realize that the answer is in accepting the Other and banding together with them in common cause, to refuse to be divided and turned against the one who is Not Like Us.
Because regardless of your ethnicity, religion, gender, orientation, and so on, the only true other is the one who would destroy you for not being their ideal of a perfect, abled, cishet, person of the “correct” race and religion.
And now because I know there will inevitably be the usual fascists and neonazis whining that they deserve tolerance, too, I present you with the words of philosopher Karl Popper, who, much as Spiegleman before, makes my point far more elegantly than I could.
(Or as I sum up Popper’s words, “It is always morally and ethically correct to punch Nazis.”)
