Liberals love to congratulate themselves for being “on the right side of history,” while of course, consigning conservatives to the “wrong side.” But history takes its sweet time unfolding, and liberals are an impatient lot. So they like to retrofit existing history, demanding that people and events be judged according to their modern progressive pieties, and lumping conservatives in with historical villains.
A small, but jarring example: the companion book to last summer’s excellent movie Dunkirk. Judging rightly that audiences (American audiences, anyway) knew almost nothing about the 1940 battle and evacuation, Warner Bros. engaged historian Joshua Levine to present “The History Behind the Major Motion Picture.”
And indeed, the book does a fine job describing the often ferocious and heroic fighting that preceded the retreat to the beach at Dunkirk, and explains the tactical and strategic situation that director Christopher Nolan deliberately didn’t address on film.
But in describing the causes for the war, Levine or his editors decided to take a couple of anachronistic shots at the Trump administration. On page 58 of the paperback edition, ideal young Nazis are described as “Pure by blood, stripped of free will, they were going to make Germany great again.”
Eh, maybe it’s a coincidence. After World War I, the punitive Versailles Treaty, near total disarmament, the incompetent Weimar Republic, the Depression, hyper-inflation, the very real threat of Bolshevism – Germany certainly was no longer “great.” In fact, it was on the ropes, and National Socialism was seen by many as its savior.
But then we come to page 67, an account of young Melita Maschmann attending “a meeting of leaders of the League of German Girls.”
"The sense of being young, of belonging, of loving each other, of sharing a common task – making Germany great again – filled her with overwhelming joy."
Their task couldn’t be “rebuilding Germany,” or “restoring the Fatherland to its former glory,” or any other similar formulation. It had to be “making Germany great again.” That’s about as subtle as a Tiger Tank.
It’s a shame. Nolan’s film was ambitious about many things. Foisting modern political allusions on his audience was, thankfully, not among them.
