[REVIEW] "Fascinating Fascism": Final Thoughts on Watch on the Rhine
I reread Watch on the Rhine to see if, just perhaps, I had misread it the first two times, if perhaps I had been unfair. If anything, it came off worse. There is the by-now standard trope of the anti-Semitic and cowardly French, unwilling to fight and gratuitously anti-American. There is the ludicrously contrived scenario that puts the SS back in the heart of German military life, their first action being the breaking-up of a crowd of protesters who (we learn later) are paid by aliens to sap the German will to survive. There is the overnight transformation of Germany into a high-tech military citadel, outlasting the France that, unlike Germany, in the real world actually has a well-funded battle-tested military not staffed by rejeuvenated nonagenarians. There is the bigoted Israeli refugee who refuses to accept that the SS has a right to redeem itself, and there is a revived Division Charlemagne staffed by good French. By the time that I got where said Israeli refugee pinned on his Judas Maccabaeus SS insignia, I gave up. Watch on the Rhine is a purely contrived scenario that no particular amount of real-world sense, existing largely to show a "good" SS fighting valiantly against the alien hordes in the name of Western civilization.

Why write a book like this? In the afterword, the authors mention that the book began as a bet, which is unsurprising. Once you go deeper into the afterword, you'll discover that this book does have deeper levels of metaphor. The SS is a product of Western culture, they observe uncontroversially enough. More, Ringo and Kratman argue, the ruthlessness of the SS desperately need to be revived by the West in the War against Terror. Softness and traitors within threaten the West; sternness and internal purity will save it. John Keegan wrote more concisely about this sort of thing, back in October 2001 for the Daily Telegraph, though as a historian of the Second World War I think he'd shy away from the SS as a role model. It's hardly as if its atrocities are faked, or as if the SS wasn't intimately involved in the Holocaust, or as if even the more conventional Waffen-SS units didn't commit crimes against humanity. after all.

In the end, Watch on the Rhine is proof of the seductiveness of Naziism, even sixty years after V-E day. Fascism in general has been given a reputation for efficiency, since (as the theory goes) fascist dictators were free to do whatever they wanted without having to bow to their weak and divided subjects. This perception seems to be particularly strong in regards to a Naziism that embraced a post-Nietzchean will to power and claimed to lack of any moral or physical restraints on the exercise of its force. This utter ruthlessness has long been known as a selling point to gearheads and sexual fetishists alike. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 1975 essay "Fascinating Fascism", "[n]ow there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death." The only problem with this, in fact, is that the fascists were less efficient than the corrupt democracies despite their claims, certainly in all the areas that mattered. The SS weren't able to win the Second World War for Germany, after all. Western liberalism might be an ideology of decadents, but it consistently wins wars.

(Earlier, I blogged about Watch on the Rhine here and posted an earlier version on rec.arts.sf.written here.)

UPDATE (10:25 AM) : Crossposted to rec.arts.sf.written.