Victor Davis Hanson
One characteristic of wokism is the promotion of the mediocre on the basis of ideological correctness—a formula to attract incompetent careerists and toady opportunists. One characteristic of National Socialism that we rarely emphasize was its destruction of merit.
“Jewish physics” translated into the expulsion of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in Nazi Germany. The end of merit-based research and university appointments in physics started early in pre-Nazi Germany with nationalist attacks on Jewish Albert Einstein for his “General Theory of Relativity” even before World War I. It continued through the end of the war and the 1920s, before coming to fruition in the 1930s under Adolf Hitler, the angry mediocre painter rebuffed in all his artistic pursuits.
The Nazi government of the former chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler (I am not picking on chicken farming, only noting it is not a requisite for intelligence and investigatory service), the decades-long morphine addict Hermann Goring, and former farm estate manager and murderer Martin Bormann, along with failed Ph.D. Joseph Goebbels, all applied ideological zealotry and racial and ethnic purity tests to ascertain “merit”—from the military to the government to the schools.
“Nazi science” ensured that past German brilliance was stifled, and opportunists and crackpots emerged in the conundrum of war sloganeering.
In physics, the result was the banishment of about 15 percent of the entire German physics generation of researchers who were publishing two-thirds of all scientific papers in physics, including most of America’s future luminaries and Nobel Prize winners—Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Otto Frisch, Fritz London, Lise Meitner, Erwin Schrödinger, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, and Eugene Wigner.
Even then, the sometime discriminatory U.S. applied no such racial exclusions, quotas, or “affirmative action” set-asides when it came to science. And the result was that brilliant ex-patriates arrived in the West, won appointments on their past work, and de facto created nuclear physics, along with gifted American native citizens. An ensuing 75-year-old near monopoly on physics breakthroughs followed.
In Nazi Germany science languished. Hitler’s ideological idiocy was rubber-stamped by sycophants and mediocrities, resulting in the misapplication of war research, bankrupt strategies, and failures to build effective four-engine bombers, and a sufficiently sized U-boat fleet. In contrast, the ideologically and racially/ethnically incorrect who were banished by Nazi Germany’s embittered minions, fled to the West and used their genius to help jump start the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
“Aryan” or “German Physics” versus “Jewish Physics” set the model of German deterioration in research under the Nazi regime and was replicated in all fields of the arts and sciences.
In my tiny field of classical literature and history, almost all German classical research between 1934 and 1945 is mostly worthless, since it is so often characterized by a toadyish effort to center investigations on the basis of race—not unlike the wasted years between 1992 and the present when much of American classical scholarship was no longer inductive, but deductively used to promote postmodernism, cultural Marxism, and the “critical” theories—from critical legal theory, to critical literary theory, to critical race theory, and on and on.
What will one say in the year 2054 when one stumbles on a classics article of 2023 entitled “The Construction of Manhood and the Cult of Aphrodite” or “The Rhetoric of Transgenderism in Apuleius,” or “Queering the Other in Aristophanes”?
To quote Major Clipton who speaks the last lines of The Bridge on the River Kwai, he will surely say only: “Madness…madness.”
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