No worse than opening a restaurant called "General Dyer's Cook-out."

You have to take it in context, after all.

Hey what about all the good things Hitler did?

So of some enterprising soul opened "General Tojo's Nanking Restaurant" on Times Square, do you think anyone would even notice?

Well, I remember reading about this:

Friday February 10, 2006 Springtime for Hitler — in Tel Aviv? by marcus eliason the associated press

Bringing “The Producers” to Israel might seem like just another plot twist to Mel Brooks’ Broadway musical about getting rich off a surefire theatrical flop. But it’s for real, in Hebrew — and playing to packed houses....

....On a recent night at the Kameri, in its stunning new home, the audience whooped, roared and applauded at the sight of Itzik Cohen’s grotesquely obese Hitler, Bialystock and Bloom (Israeli stars Shlomo Bar Abba and Dror Keren), and Liebkind, the helmeted, pigeon-rearing Nazi playwright (Elli Gornstein).

The response is in sharp contrast to the uproar that follows concert performances of the music of Hitler’s favorite composer, the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner, and Almagor thinks the reaction to “The Producers” suggests “a certain maturity of Israeli audiences.”

Time has worked its way, he says. “There used to be many more survivors, nerves were much more sensitive. … Today, our best friend in Europe is Germany. Relations are completely normal....

But I also have read a bit here & there on supposed anti-Semitism in India. The thing with that is, though, is that because the government there has been very supportive of Israel, I haven't got enough grasp of such a huge varied country to know if that is simply similar to a lot of lefty sentiment here, simply more anti-Israel in the vein of being against government support of Israel, rather than any stronger anti-Semitism than one finds in the U.S.

Overall, when this kind of issue is brought up, I think immediately of the evils of political correctness, as in death threats against London playwrights who "blaspheme" in their work, some recent now infamous cartoons pro by a Danish newspaper, and a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I believe in a good end result from freedom of bad taste, and good taste, in cultural things.

To argue that this kind of thing doesn't belong in 2nd world or 3rd world countries, because they aren't sophisticated enough yet to "get it" or something like that, is just arrogant. Those who get the "feedback" in such a situation, from what they are doing, bad or good, learn something, as we all do. Nothing wrong with attempting to break boundaries, especially if you're willing to pay the current price for doing so. If they are breaking a law in the culture, well, they have to pay for that, too (is actually the basis of the civil disobedience theory.) If they have to deal with protests about bad taste, or breaking cultural taboos, so be it....some actually seek this out, it is the basis of "avant-garde" art, and it's how cultures are changed, or aren't for that matter.

I should note that your comparison in your question is a bit "apples and oranges." Hitler is an individual around which has developed lots of iconography on the order of being evil incarnate, the anti-Christ type, while the KGB is not. Therefore, much more taboos involved in the one over the other. There were plenty of Russian KGB jokes while the KGB was still around; it had not achieved the evil incarnate rep stage due to efforts at humor to dissipate its power. Using Stalin might get a little different reaction. (Come to think of it, Charlie Chaplin tried to do the "disempower with humor" thing with Hitler...)

They are about the same. Which in my mind is "really bad".

Matthew writes:

At any rate, in my initial post I wasn't trying to say that Nazi kitsch and Soviet kitsch are exactly the same. Rather, I just wanted to note that our conventions in the USA treat them very differently for reasons that are non-obvious and possibly not totally comprehensible to people approaching these questions from a different historical background.

Reasons that are non-obvious? I think your youth is showing Matthew.

16 million Americans served in uniform fighting the Nazis and Japanese during WW-II. American forces suffered over a million casualties in that war including over 400,000 deaths. There are still over 4 million American veterans of that war still living today.

As for Stalin and the Soviets? Without the Soviet armies breaking the back of the Nazis at Stalingrad, Kursk, and a hundred other eastern front battlefields, many more hundreds of thousands of Americans would have died in that war and it would have lasted a whole lot longer.

Hitler and the Nazis were never anything but the enemy of the United States. The Soviets? Sure the cold war was fairly tense during the 50s and 60s but not many Americans ever died at the hands of the USSR. And in the waning days of the USSR relations were really quite friendly in many ways. In the late 80s I was working as a fisheries biologist on board American and Russian fishing boats and factory ships in the Bering Sea along the US-USSR maritime border. The Russians were great fun. A boat I was on was once boarded by a Russian Navy patrol boat. Turned into a big party with the Russian officers trading vodka for the American fishermen's stash of Playboy mags.

During the Mikheal Gorbachev glastnost era I ran into some Russian adventurers in Dutch Harbor Alaska (in the Aleutians) who had built a replica of Vitus Bering's sailing vessels. He was the Russian explorer that explored the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands in the 1740s. These Russians had built these old wooden sailing ships and were retracing Vitus Bering's Alaskan explorations giving slide shows and selling soviet souveneurs along the way to fund their trip. I was so impressed with the cojones that it took to take to the Bering Sea in a rickety little sailing ship that I bought up a big box of pins from them to support their voyage. Lots of hammer and sickle pins, red stars, and other assorted Soviet kitch and gave most of it away to friends back home who snatched it up like candy.

Setting aside all the moral comparisons between Hitler and Stalin because those get tedious. The fact is that Hitler and the Nazis were never anything but the enemy of the United States while the USSR never was. Not really.

Haha, I want to move to Mumbai and open a restaurant called Chez Guevara. That said, I think some of these comments miss the point. There are two differentials at work here: the distinction between Nazi symbols and Communist symbols, and the distinction between ironic use of Communist symbols and actual belief in Stalinism.

The commenters focus on the first distinction. As Samuel L. Jackson might say, "You were saying something about... best intentions. Oh, you were finished? Well allow me to retort." The problem is that Stalinism isn't actually acceptable in this country, putative best intentions notwithstanding. Stalinism also isn't really funnier or less tragic than National Socialism. Yet it's okay to use Soviet symbols for fun, but not Nazi symbols.

I think the answer might be that this country lived under a real threat from Soviet Russia for decades. This had a few effects:

1. The threat of nuclear annihilation was scary, and it was also unrelenting. After a while people turned to humor to cope with it (I was in India during the little nuclear scare in the summer of 2002, and black humor was everywhere).

2. Entire groups of people were accused, in all earnestness, of being Communists or fellow travelers. Terms like "Fascist" and "Nazi" were thrown around, but never as seriously. This meant that Communism had much more ironic potential. Which was convenient, because:

3. The decades in which we faced Communism as a major threat corresponded to a cultural shift in this country toward irony and against authority. The perfect way to tweak authority while being ironic? Using Soviet symbols.

Reasons that are non-obvious? I think your youth is showing Matthew.

They're non-obvious to someone who doesn't live in the United States.

Citing your personal experience in the US of how Hitler was always the enemy and the Soviets weren't always just reinforces his point.

The fact is that Hitler and the Nazis were never anything but the enemy of the United States

And as of 1940, 80% of Americans were opposed to US involvement to help the British.

Not entirely OT: Interesting revelations about the major British espionage operation to sway US opinion.

Without the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, it is not hard to imagine a world where the US and Nazi Europe learned to live with one another. Though I imagine ME oil would eventually have become a flash point.

Although let's leave off any silly neocon allusions, that nonsense is just for the children.

Some more examples:

http://www.iisc.ernet.in/nias/walktoNIAS/walkRMV030.html

I strongly object any even hint of "anti-Israel" being put in the same category as anti-Semitism, as though there is a spectrum with anti-Israel somewhere upon it. It is as though being "anti-Bush" or "anti-Republican" is being "anti-American", and I utterly reject it.

It is generally believed that the Indus valley civilization was pre-Aryan. The Aryans were a bunch of Soma-taking, chariot-driving, conquest-loving guys off the steppes, the first of many (see the Scythians, the Huns, the Turks, the Mongols, etc.). The German belief that they were Aryan is simply nonsense. I have always assumed it had to do with the discovery that there were common linguistic roots for most European languages (including German) and most South Asian languages (including Sanskrit, Hindi and Persian). This linguistic quirk made India and the West seem to be almost magically linked. And as Aryans were legendary early Indo-Europeans, I think the Nazis glommed onto them as a kind of ur-Race. At least this has always been my assumption, because it doesn't really make sense otherwise--there aren't too many blond, blue-eyed Indians.

Arguably 1937 with the USS Panay, and even earlier with the Japanese in China. Do we count the exceptionally nasty Italian campaign against the Ethiopians, with the one moment of almost-glory of the League of Nations?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Some news items:

http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/aug/23look.htm

Hitler lost

So, I have a thing for Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda posters. Estimates vary, but millions of people were killed, imprisoned and tortured in that era. One of the things that interests me with it is the contrast between the bright colors and clear ideology on the one hand, and the complete insanity that they helped inspire.

So, where is there a Cultural Revolution Themed Restaurant?

Beijing.

People who were sent to the countryside to starve and toil in the fields with peasants go there to relive their childhood traumas.

Go figure.

I went there once, the menue covers things that people ate durring the famine - leaves, twigs... not really my thing.

The "People of the world rise up in unison to destroy the American Empire and their Running Dogs" poster?

Priceless.

I came across a t shirt version translated into English in an upscale store in Beijing for $50. I tried to conince the sales lady that she was being overly feudalistic in charging so much, and that she should rectify her thinking in line with Maoist thought, foster revolutionary consciousness and give it to me for $10.

She didn't take it - which is a damn shame. Coolest. Shirt. Ever.

And we oughtn't omit the man who advised his fellow Americans that rather than go to war with Germany, America should join with her and England to form a mighty ''Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.''

The idea that the belief you hold in your mind while you kill - one, ten, millions - is what determines your moral status, is an interesting one and deserves examination. It is this mistaken notion that permits the killing in the name of God. Or atrocities like the deaths of 30,000 Iraqis in the name of establishing democracy there.

The world really has to get away from these belief-based moralities and understand that the morality of an action is determined not just by the end, but also by the means. If the wrong means for a good end has the same effect as the equivalent means for a wrong end, then the two actions are equally execrable. There are no plus points for "I believe in the Savior" or "I believe in Allah" or "I believe in Marx" or "I believe in the Free Market". If you killed in their name, you are a killer, period, and there is nothing redeeming about you.

Well I'll accept Basil Fawlty's judgement: the Germans started it when they invaded Poland.

Go too far back, and you might as well call WWII a tying up of some loose ends from WWI (which is actually how JK Galbraith saw it).

There is a moral difference between deaths caused by Napolean and murders comitted by Hitler and Stalin. I'm sure Napolean committed some murders here and there, but by and large you seem to be talking about deaths caused in wars. He wasn't trying to cause deaths, he was trying to further imperial goals. If this was a trial the crime would be negligent manslaughter rather than murder.

Soviet Communism is a bit different. It was a movement started by people who always believed that mass murder was fine, if it advanced the movement's goals. Stalin was much worse than Lenin, but Lenin was always willing to kill a lot of people when he thought it was conveninet to do so.

He [Napoleon] wasn't trying to cause deaths, he was trying to further imperial goals.

Communism wasn't trying to cause deaths, it was trying to further its political goals. The difference here, between Napoleon/Communism and Hitler is that Hitler caused deaths, qua deaths. The death of the jews caused by Hitler was an end in itself . The deaths caused by Stalin/Communism were deaths caused as a means to some other goal, however noble or nefarious they may have been.

If this was a trial the crime would be negligent manslaughter rather than murder.
I don't think this is morally or historically accurate. Napoleon waged war and caused an immeasurable death and destruction on an entire continent for.... what? Because he was ambitious and because he could? When Napoleon invaded other countries, the deaths he caused were largely murders, especially when you consider the ones fighting against him were merely attempting to protect their homes.

Soviet Communism is a bit different. It was a movement started by people who always believed that mass murder was fine, if it advanced the movement's goals. Stalin was much worse than Lenin, but Lenin was always willing to kill a lot of people when he thought it was conveninet to do so.

Again, the mass murder that Lenin and Stalin advocated was murder used as a means to further specific political ends. Hitler committed mass murder as an end in itself. For communism, murder was a tactic. For Nazism, murder was the goal.

The point I was making is that there is a difference between getting people killed in a war and ordering people killed.

However, these are not mutally exclusive. People can be ordered to be killed, and that may also occur during a war or battle and that act of killing may also further the intended goals of those waging war. So, it certain circumstances, the moral difference evaporates.

The question remains, is there a moral difference between killing someone to further the ends of the intended goals of a war and killing someone to further the ends of the intended goals of a revolution. I think not.

But this only becomes relevant to the discussion at hand if the things that make them communists are also the things that cause them to kill. Otherwise, a fool could make the statement like, "politicians kill more people than neo-Nazi's, therefore politicans are a bigger threat", which is a pretty inane statement.

For Hitler and the Nazis it was about the furthering the "Third Reich" and to establish somekind of warped "Master Race".

Yes. And one of those goals in furthering the Thirch Reich was the elimination of the Jewish people. My point remains that Hitler killed people (Jews) for no other reason than he wanted them dead. Stalin killed people as a means to an end.

Simply naming the goal to eliminate jews "furthering the third reich" does nothing but cloud the argument.

But again his "just wanting them dead" was part of his larger political agenda.  His persecution and mass murder of the Jews (and other ethnic groups) was part of an organized political campaign.  He might have hated the Jews, and "non-Aryans", enough to kill them without reason but to me that is beside the point...both Hitler and Stalin killed civilians in their countries to further political agendas. 

The distinction is in their goals.

There is a moral difference between "violently attacking racial and sexual minorities" and killing people to "institute a communist regime in their locale".

I don't think that really requires elaboration.

They are at the top of a 20th century group that, in my book, includes but is not limited to...

Pol Pot

Pinochet

Francisco Franco

Anybody who uses mass murder of civilians to achieve their political goals are very bad people...

Now mass murder as a result of war MIGHT be open to discussion.  I have heard many arguments that Truman was guilty of that crime for dropping the nukes on the Japanese civilian centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Or just like Hitler fire bombed London and the allies reciprocated with their attack on Dresden.  But all of those attacks had "military objectives" in war time.

Hiroshima is mildly defensible, but both attacks were unnessesary, as the detonation of an atomic bomb off the coast of Japan would probably have scared the pants of the Japanese and forced them to capitulate.

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I think it is a mistake to relate this communist kitsch to Stalin. It is hard to avoid Hitler when talking about Hitler's Cross. I think a restaurant named Stalin's Gulag and Grog would be offensive in a way that KGB bar is not.

Analyzing just the kinds of artifacts that would decorate the two restaurants, would also point to a difference (although I agree that there is something cultural about the threat of the Soviets for the entire cold war that makes adds to the acceptability.) If you were to analyze Nazi propaganda, the goal is generally racial. For communist propaganda, in general, the goal is to aggrandize workers. Despite the similar results of the two ideologies, the actual propaganda that supports them is not equivalent.

I dunno - I think this may be tendentious. 

If Communism worked, wouldn't Stalin be absolved of most of his crimes? What is wrong with religous nuts who kill in the name of God isn't that they kill people in the name of God, it is that they are WRONG that those deaths are beneficial to God and the rest of the world. 

I'd say not, as to Stalin - Kant would say that Stalin's evil consists in treating human beings as means rather than ends; I'd kind of just point to the big pile of bodies.  Moreover, I think that you might say that he could not be absolved of his crimes because Communism as he practiced it could not work: if you kill millions of innocent people to better the material condition of the people, you've failed as soon as you pull the trigger.

(One might argue that, if two or three or ten people died, then you did the right thing, but seems to me that with every comma between numbers, you're claim to be justified diminishes.)

And as to religious-based murders, what's incorrect there is that they are beneficial to God.  But surely, what's wrong about them in the moral sense is the murder part.

If I understand you, you're taking issue with Arun's claim that no immoral act can be justified by the idea that motivates it.  (Is this right?)  I guess that, in this kind of debate, you can always find one contrived case to swing intuitions the other way, make it seem like the thought or belief system behind a particular murder is part of the reason it is justifiable.  But my take on that would be that these are cases where the act itself is no less repugnant, but there was some overriding reason that the person had to do something despicable.

Another might be that, the Allies waged an extremely destructive war to defeat Nazism, Communism fell on its own, sparing the Western consciousness the searing images of its destructive power that we got from WWII.

There is an "Enigma Tavern" in Bletchley Park, England. I wonder if, somewhere in the British isles, is a "Sword and Shield Pub" and if anyone thinks strangely of it?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Of course, getting the West to buy and drive Trabants would be economic warfare, if not an actual sapping of precious bodily fluids.

In the more modern concept of information warfare, it can be oberved "Wars are not won by PowerPoint presentations. Wars are won when you can get the other side to depend on PowerPoint presentations."
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

A couple of additional points on the atomic bombings.

First, when the decision was made that a "demonstration" would not be effective, no one had ever seen an atomic explosion. At the first test at Alamogordo, the scientists of Los Alamos marveled at Enrico Fermi's composure; he used a few scraps of paper to estimate the blast force.

Second, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both on a list of targets drawn up in 1944, finalized by spring 1945 when Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed Kyoto from the list. The ideal target, the targeting committee concluded, was a war plant "surrounded by workers' houses." Tokyo was eliminated from consideration because the destruction caused by previous fire-bombing meant that the full power of the atomic bomb would not be visible.

Third, the military orders relayed to the men of the Enola Gay et al. ordered that the a-bombs be dropped as they became available. There was no separate order from Truman for Nagasaki.

Fourth, the United States gave a guarantee of the emperor's status in the surrender terms. That is, I think, perhaps the most tantalizing "what-if" in the a-bomb saga.

Let me conclude with a recommendation. Leo Szilard, a Polish scientist and emigre who had worked on the bomb, wrote a short story called "My Trial as a War Criminal." In it, he imagined an alternate history in which Germany&Japan won WWII and he, along with all the other scientists, were tried for war crimes for their part in the creation of the atomic bomb. It's an interesting story, particularly for the insight it offers into Szilard's thinking. Oh, and it's published in a collection of his stories, The Voice of the Dolphins. (The title story is my favorite, in part for the unexpected crossover with Hitchhiker's Guide. But that's an entirely different post.)

Fourth, the United States gave a guarantee of the emperor's status in the surrender terms. That is, I think, perhaps the most tantalizing "what-if" in the a-bomb saga.

[note 1] My Japanese is mostly limited to ordering dinner or giving a mostly memorized speech, but I find it fascinating. It's supposed to be such a hard language, but it made me wonder about reincarnation, as in about 2 weeks in Japan, I was amazed at how much I picked up.

When I mentioned it to my ex-wife, I suggested that perhaps I was a shogun, or at least a zen-sensei, in a previous life. She patted me on the stomach and suggested an earlier incarnation as a sumo wrestler. [Toshiro Mifune grunt followed by muttered "hara, hara."]

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Taking these two together, you seem to be saying that the problem is that Neo-nazis threaten racial and sexual minorities, which is bad, while communists threaten third-world peasants, which is okay.

I think its pretty clear that is not what I have implied. Nazi's are a threat to minorites by the very fact of being a Nazi. Nazi's, by definition, are anti-semetic; it is a essential characteristic of Nazism.

Communists, however, do not threaten third world peasants by definition. For example, shortly after the Cuban revolution, many of the peasants profited greatly from Castro's economic program, and this was sustained for about 8 years. While communists may threaten third world peasants now, it is not an inextricable characteristic of being a communist that you must threaten third world peasants.