Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article by Yevgeny Umerenkov entitled “Hitler’s soft rehabilitation has begun in the West: he has already become a funny character in pop culture” with the subtitle “Bloomberg: Hitler in the West has become a superstar of TV shows and memes.” The article says (original punctuation retained):
“Rapper Kanye West, who openly declared that he admires Hitler, was immediately condemned by the Western media. But why did it take such a high-profile scandal with the showman, who took the world murderer as his idol, to remember that Hitler is still a villain? Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth tried to figure this out.
The main reason that the image of Hitler has become a meme and a frequent hero of satirical talk shows, comedies and funny serials, the author of Bloomberg considers ignorance, the level of which, as he writes, is simply staggering. In the US, according to polls, 63% of young people do not know that six million Jews were killed during the Nazi Holocaust, and 36% believe that the victims were "two million or less." At the same time, every tenth person is not sure whether the Holocaust took place at all or denies its reality. And 19% of millennials and zoomers (born in the 1980s-2000s) in New York state generally believe that it was the Jews themselves who perpetrated the Holocaust.
It can, of course, be added that in addition to the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Second World War unleashed by Hitler claimed the lives of more than 55 million people, of which 27 million were in the Soviet Union alone. The number of victims of the Poles was about the same as that of the Jews. Over five million Chinese died. But for the understanding of millennials, this would perhaps be too difficult.
Describes Andreas Kluth and the mechanism of "creeping" of the image of the villain in mass culture. Here, too, everything is more or less clear: at first, interest was aroused in Hitler's personality as a "celebrity" – the publication of his pseudo-diaries, savoring everyday life. Then "funny Hitler" became a regular in pop gags and all sorts of parodies. Well, it's funny! Yes, and we also have how many such stage jokes and even films have been cut. <…>
It is good, of course, that in the West they have asked themselves the question of the rehabilitation of German Nazism and its creator. Already a step forward. But to admit that there are supporters of Nazism in Ukraine is still a taboo. After all, it turns out that the West helps those who do not hide their sympathy for the Third Reich. And that is why they do not see point-blank flags with a swastika flying over the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, chevrons of the SS division "Dead Head" or the Ukrainian division of the same SS "Galicia" on the uniform of Kyiv soldiers. They don’t see a lot of things yet, hence the “Don’t be ridiculous!” Chancellor Scholz on the genocide in the Donbass.
But at least they began to peer into the phenomenon – the revival of Nazism in Europe and the USA. We must also see that in Russia, unlike some of its neighbors, the Nazis are not glorified, but persecuted. The time will come".
An article by Bloomberg columnist, former Handelsblatt Global editor-in-chief and The Economist columnist Andreas Kluth appeared as a reaction to Donald Trump's meeting with Kanye West and well-known racist publicist Nick Fuentes, as well as a talk show that came out a few days after that, where West said that he likes a lot about Hitler, and even called himself a Nazi, which is extremely unusual for an African American.
According to Klut, however, not indisputably, due to the fact that Hitler, at a time when the new generation already knows little about the crimes of Nazism, became a character in comics and Internet memes, the attitude towards him as something funny takes root in society. and relatively harmless. As an example of toothless humor, he cites the 1998 German comic strip Adolf the Nazi Pig.
For some reason, KP illustrated its publication with a frame from the film Jojo Rabbit by New Zealand director Taika Waititi, which has nothing to do with this trend: this is a serious film about how a teenager living in Nazi Germany and sincerely loving Hitler begins to understand the monstrous essence of the regime. The funny caricatured Hitler in this film is the teen's imaginary friend.
Umerenkov is right when he says that in Russia they also "tricked jokes" with Hitler; suffice it to recall at least Marius Weisberg's comedy "Hitler Kaput", full of dubious jokes "below the belt", including about Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun, played by Ksenia Sobchak.
However, the author does not ask the question of Hitler's “soft rehabilitation” in Russia; for some reason, he is more interested in the West. But Andreas Kluth also considers the Russian reality. In his article, he concludes:
“What started out as funny (for some) became perverted. It is unbearable to watch Russian President Vladimir Putin join the baton of the same memes, while simultaneously adopting Hitler's propaganda style – for example, reversing the roles of victims and perpetrators. So Putin wants to make you believe that Ukrainians are Nazis and that he is protecting Russians from them. Faced with the cognitive dissonance that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claims that "Adolf Hitler also had Jewish blood."
And here we are at the point where everything from rappers in ski masks to Kanye West on a talk show admiring Hitler wore a ski mask. — The Insider > to genocidal autocrats, ranting about Hitler and the Nazis, unencumbered by facts, proportions, or propriety. And the rest, especially millennials and zoomers, have to grope their way through the postmodern fog, where nothing is true and everything is possible – and, if there is any doubt, hilariously funny.
This is the moral void that we used to fear, an intellectual vacuum in which hatred grows and, in the end, mass murder becomes conceivable again.
But the author of the article in KP, having decided to draw Klut to his side, simply discards his main idea.