The men in the audience
The 1972 movie Cabaret is centered around a German nightclub during the rise of the Nazi Party.
In the last scene, the camera pans from the stage to reveal an audience which has grown increasingly full of men wearing Nazi uniforms.
Most of the characters in the film dismiss the Nazis as extremist wack-jobs, which makes the movie a bit depressing for modern audiences who know what comes next.
Casual Nazism
Former internet celebrity Tila Tequila recently posted a picture of herself giving a Nazi salute at a white supremacist gathering in Washington D.C.
The Dallas-based restaurant chain which hosted the gathering has since apologized and donated its profits from that evening to the Anti-Defamation League. Tila Tequila’s Twitter account was also suspended.
There was a similar dust-up in Minneapolis when a German restaurant was outed for hosting Nazi-themed parties.
Although there is a general consensus that Nazi costumes and Hitler salutes are in poor taste, many of my friends are surprised by how horrified I am by these events.
A cultural understanding
I moved to the U.S. from Germany as a child and spent most of my summers back in Germany while growing up.
World War II and Nazism were not discussed often during my summers in Germany. There was however a cultural awareness of how dangerous racist ideology is.
Germans know that a white supremacist regime can turn your entire country into a genocidal war zone. Everyone my age has grandparents who remember bombed-out cities and decades of international shaming. Like the characters in Cabaret, Americans think that could never happen here.
To many Americans, Nazis are historical boogeymen relegated to video games and movies. White supremacist ideals aren’t taken seriously and definitely not viewed as a slippery slope to genocide and war. That is why faux-celebrities like Tila Tequila feel comfortable using Nazi symbols to get attention.
I hope that we get better about calling out and rejecting racist ideology. It’s easy to do when you have someone patently absurd as an Asian girl with bleached hair doing Nazi salutes. But what about those guys in suits claiming to be part of “the alt-right?”
By allowing white supremacists to rebrand themselves as the “alt-right” or “white nationalists,” I fear we are just dancing on the Cabaret stage while the audience fills with Nazis by another name.
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