The Free Press
There seems to be an outbreak of historical ignorance among TV talking heads. MSNBC’s Ali Velshi denounced Queen Elizabeth II for the British practice of slavery, even though the British Empire abolished it a century before her birth. Tucker Carlson sarcastically asked Piers Morgan whether Adolf Hitler had plans to invade Britain, which, of course, the Nazi dictator did.
And then CBS’s Margaret Brennan outdid them while interviewing secretary of state Marco Rubio during the February 16 edition of Face the Nation. She claimed that Vice President J.D. Vance had delivered a critique of European censorship in Munich while “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
The point, presumably, was that the Nazis had exploited freedom of speech to gather more adherents and destroy democracy under the Weimar Republic. There ought to be a word for a remark like this, which managed to be both sophomoric, in its attempt to play gotcha with Rubio, and moronic in its historical ignorance: sophomoronic, perhaps?
Rubio had the presence of mind to remind Brennan of the truth: “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide,” he said. “The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities. . . . That’s not an accurate reflection of history.”
What could possibly have been going through Brennan’s mind? The lesson of Germany’s descent into genocide during the 1930s and 1940s is the opposite of what she implied to Rubio, as of course she should have known.
The National Socialists took power when Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933. Soon thereafter the party began to assert control over newspapers, magazines, books, art, theater, music, movies, and radio.
On May 10, 1933, Joseph Goebbels—whose sinister official title was Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment—spoke at a rally where Nazis burned thousands of books, perhaps the most powerfully symbolic of all Nazi attacks on free expression. Goebbels was not “weaponizing” free speech; he was systematically destroying it.
Although the Weimar constitution, like that of the United States, had specifically protected freedom of speech, in 1934 the Nazi regime made it a crime to criticize the Führer or his party. Even jokes at their expense were banned on pain of imprisonment or worse.
Hitler took Bolshevik Russia as his template, turning Nazi Germany into a state no less totalitarian than Stalin’s Soviet Union already was. All opposing views were ruthlessly expunged from German society. Meanwhile, Goebbels ensured that radios became cheap enough to enter almost every home, so that the regime could target the population with propaganda to a previously unparalleled degree.
If there had been true freedom of expression in Germany and German-occupied Europe during the Third Reich, the Holocaust would have immediately been exposed and would have been that much more difficult to carry out. Articles in the newspapers and questions on the radio would have addressed what was happening in the “zones of interest” of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. People would have wanted to know where millions of European Jews had been sent, and why they were not responding to efforts to track them down.
Investigative reporters, dispatched by curious editors, could have looked into the persistent rumors about Auschwitz, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, and so horrifyingly and endlessly on.
After a day or two in the nearby town of Oświęcim, reporters from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Der Spiegel might have identified complaints from the local populace about the stench coming from the death camp known by its German name, Auschwitz, and the thousands of truckloads of ashes being dumped in the Vistula—which affected even the regional water table and the taste of local tap water. When the wind came from the south, the stench of the camp’s fuel-fed crematoria could be detected up to 30 miles away.
SS troops who carried out the mass murders knew their letters home were censored, as did the huge bureaucracy that enabled them. Although plenty of Germans and others outside the camps knew perfectly well, in a private, hush-hush way, what was going on, there is a great deal of difference between such an “open secret” and genuine dissemination of the truth.
It was thus the absence of free speech, not its so-called weaponization, that enabled the greatest crime in the history of mankind.
For Brennan to invoke the Holocaust to bolster her criticism of Vance was cheap journalism and bad history. If there is such a thing as the “weaponization” of free speech for political purposes, the CBS anchor’s remark defines it.
Andrew Roberts is the author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny and a Conservative member of the House of Lords.
