From a correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous: Some conservatives have dismissed Frank Rich’s latest column (“The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us“) as just another tasteless outburst from the silliest op-ed columnist in the New York Times‘s stable. They don’t realize it’s a subtle piece of whimsical satire mocking the hysteria of today’s excitable liberals. It’s tedious to explain a joke, so I’ll be brief. The heart of the conceit, a classic reductio-ad-Hitlerum, is this: Rich pretends to believe that American soldiers and intelligence officers have been using “Gestapo tactics.” He claims to think that “The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those ‘good Germans’ who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.” The tip-off is the misuse of the phrase “good Germans.” Rich knows that “good Germans” doesn’t refer to those “who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.” Did many Germans around from 1933 to 1945 really profess ignorance of the existence of the Gestapo? Of course not. Rich is joking here, as if all he (and we) knew of Nazi Germany came from the TV show Hogan’s Heroes and its prototypical “good German,” Sergeant Schultz (“I know nothing. Nothing!”). The phrase “good Germans,” as Rich knows, in fact refers to Germans who did little to try to stop the crimes perpetrated by their government and/or who later disavowed responsibility for those crimes because they hadn’t been directly involved. In this respect, it is of course Rich’s fellow liberals who would be today’s “good Germans.” They are the ones who are unwilling to do anything more serious than hyperventilating in the face of an allegedly Gestapo-like administration. In his conclusion, Rich makes the point with dry wit: “It’s up to us to wake up the somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.” Rich’s real point is this: If liberals really believed the United States were degenerating to Nazi-like levels, and that “there is nothing left to lose,” then they couldn’t sit comfortably in New York and propose nothing more than…waking up Congress to challenge administration policy. In this Swiftian effort, therefore, Frank Rich is really suggesting to liberals that they cool it with the over-heated rhetoric and the Nazi-themed language, and reenter the world of serious policy debate on difficult issues like the treatment of captured terrorists. Wunderbar!
