As I watched the violence unfold in Charlottesville, Va., last Saturday, like many, I was aghast. Heather Heyer, a young paralegal, was killed by one of the white supremacist marchers, who, after the march, had gotten into his car and plowed it into a crowd of counter-demonstrators. Protesting something as straightforward as Nazism and race eugenics ought not be a capital offense. It ought to be a nonevent in any society that has any belief that it is moving forward in any shape or form. And not so long ago - 2004 to be exact - when the neo-Nazis used to hold their parades in downtown Coeur d'Alene, it was. No one would dream of supporting that sort of crazy.
But I was not surprised when it happened. One idea, chronically propped up by revisionist historical fanatics, is that some people are inherently, genetically better than others. And while we deal with two in the present - that the Confederate South was full of ladies and gentlemen, and the Nazis had armies of latter-day Supermen - it's certainly not a new idea. It's been used throughout history to justify the domination of one people over an another.
Part of the continued extension of the pathology, unfortunately, comes from current historical narratives that fail successfully to convey the wild human misery that has flowed from this brand of thinking. Some of it is revisionist - in our own community, we have Doug Wilson writing about slavery as a paternalistic, protective institution, when it is well-documented that slavery in the South was as cruel and dehumanizing as slavery ever was. One need only to pop open Wikipedia and read about the infamous Dred Scott decision, issued by the Supreme Court, that said the federal government had no business in deciding that any African-American was a person to realize that the horrific imagery of slavery is not a fantasy of the left.
But some of the history that propels the continued devotion to Nazism is far from revisionist. In movie and book, the armies of the Third Reich have been heralded for their efficiency and embodiment of fighting spirit. There is a perverse longing in many of the history books for the idea that perhaps not the good guys, but the better, more noble people lost. And that has laid in a victim mentality in certain sectors of the white population in America that haunts us to this day.
New history is being uncovered, though, that finally destroys the myth of the ubermensch. In the book "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich," author Norman Ohler documents in detail the reality of early German war victories. As much as anything, it was because the entire Nazi Army was hopped up on meth. And as the war wore on, the entire country, as well as Hitler himself, turned into perverse drug addicts. Hitler fell into an oxycodone and steroid haze, injected into him by his doctor, that facilitated his psychopathic predilections and made the war last far longer than it should. World War II was, in the end, the wildly tragic result of a meth high - not a manifestation of superior humanity losing against the darker races. And the end happened like all addictions do - with a crash.
The reality of our humanity is that we are a diverse, differently abled lot. How this has come to be is complex. It is not rooted in the genes. Rather, it is rooted in how our societies are organized and have adapted. I like Latin guitar, Japanese cameras and Swiss watches. Neither come from a single race of superhumans. They were all created by shared humanity.
My prayer is that we remember this, as we mourn our martyrs and move forward into an uncertain future. Our world is shrinking. There is room for all, but there is vanishing space for any other worldview, if we intend to persist.
Chuck Pezeshki is a professor in mechanical and materials engineering at Washington State University.
