Vh. Karsten Johansen
"The birthday boys
The teenagers responsible for the Columbine High
School massacre timed it to coincide with the 110th
anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth. Nato justifies its
bombing of Serbia with veiled references to the
Third Reich, and a neo-Nazi group has been linked to
the Brixton and Brick Lane nail bombs. Niall
Ferguson, the leading historian, shows how a man
dead for more than 50 years remains an enduring
force in our lives
....
In other words, the parallels between Milosevic and Hitler, between Kosovo
and Auschwitz, are bad history. Indeed, they are not a great deal more
sophisticated than the fantasies of the Trenchcoat Mafia.
Sad teenage losers dream about being Hitler. In the same pathetic way, sad
middle-aged politicians dream about being Churchill. (Especially erstwhile
draft-dodgers and ex-CND members.) And who can be surprised, when the
middle-aged politicians don so fraudulently the mantle of Churchill, if teenage
rebels respond by donning the trenchcoat of Hitler? Preposterous though the
latter may look in their black coats and combat boots, they are no more so than
Messrs Clinton and Blair sound when they attempt to strike Churchillian or
Rooseveltian chords. All that Bill Clinton has in common with Winston
Churchill is a fondness for cigars.
A week in America is a sobering experience for anyone from Europe. One
suddenly grasps why Clinton is so popular - but also why Americans are so
prone to shoot one another and themselves. For this is a country in which, for
all the efforts of the multitudinous churches, traditional moral values have
been
more or less replaced by the value of stocks and shares. The town of Littleton
itself, where most Columbine High pupils live, has been transformed by the
boom of the 1990s. With its strip malls and fast-food restaurants, its spacious
suburbs and gas-guzzling cars, it is a microcosm of Clinton's America. This is
the kind of place where the parents track the Dow Jones and trade internet
shares via Charles Schwab, while their offspring spend the proceeds in
endless, indefatigable consumption.
Asked to explain the social divisions within their school that might have given
rise to this week's massacre, pupils at Columbine talked almost exclusively in
terms of clothing brands. The Trenchcoat Mafia, it turns out, were mainly
identified as "outsiders" because they did not wear clothes from The Gap and
Abercrombie & Fitch, the stores favoured by the school's hegemonic "jocks"
and "preppies".
Even in the aftermath of the massacre, there was a disconcerting narcissism
about these children. "It's a trip," one Columbine junior was heard to say
of the
frenzied media attention on his school. "It's unbelievable. None of us had any
idea how national this was." One senior television executive said on
Wednesday: "We had some kids on last night who could have co-anchored our
coverage, they were so media-savvy." Planet Dow Jones in April 1999: where
identities have literally become labels and the most intense experiences are
instantly converted into prime-time viewing.
It is too often forgotten that, at root, national socialism was as much a
reaction
against capitalism as international socialism. But where the latter rejected the
unequal distribution brought about by market forces, the former rejected the
moral laxity which appeared to be the accompaniment of materialism.
It is also important to recall that the Nazi party was a party of youth, which
based its electoral success in 1930-33 in large part on its ability to mobilise
young and especially first-time voters. The average age of the party's
membership was more than a decade lower than that of any other German
party. Among the most successful of all the movement's offshoots after 1933
was the Hitler Youth. Images of a clean-cut, anti-materialistic youth, dedicated
to gymnastics and drill, were central to Nazi propaganda. Significantly, the
regime imprisoned the minority of "swing youths" who grew their hair, liked
jazz and dressed like proto-beatniks.
America today combines unparalleled material prosperity with an astonishing
moral laxity personified by its philandering, perjuring President. It is not
wholly
surprising that a few disaffected adolescents find in Hitler an alluring
embodiment of a vengeful alternative to all this. How much more appealing
national socialism must seem to those East European teenagers, not least those
in Serbia, who are only allowed to look at, but not to touch, the cornucopic
bounty of Planet Dow Jones.
This is not to exaggerate the present significance of neo-Nazi groups such as
Combat 18, which will surely always remain on the margins of a society as
historically literate (not to say obsessed) as Britain's.
Nor is it to predict that groups such as the Trenchcoat Mafia in the United
States will ever be more than marginal and ephemeral - so long as Planet Dow
Jones does not suddenly become Planet Great Depression. But it is to
emphasise the potential for a fascist revival elsewhere, and especially in
Eastern Europe, including Russia. We underestimate the disaffection of youth
there at our peril."