It’s pretty messed up how much some dudes are into the German side of the Second World War. It’s pretty messed up how much some dudes are into the Civil War, too, but that makes a little bit more sense. If your grandfather fought valiantly to keep black people down — I mean, for states’ rights — I can see why you’ld care about what he did. But very few Americans are descendants of Nazis. So why is there such a thriving culture of Wehrmacht fetishists?

The Myth of the Eastern Front examines just that question, or at least, it sets out to show how much of jerks those fetishists are (the book never uses that term, but let’s not kid ourselves with what’s going on here). The book lays the fetish largely at the feet of the Cold War, which seems pretty logical. After all, who better to turn to for learning how to fight Russian hordes than ze Germans, ja?

Over New Year’s, I stayed at a bed and breakfast in western Virginia. I walked in and found tons and tons of books about England, Germany, and the Second World War — things like the History of the Isles and Goebbels’ diaries. There were also some Jerome Corsi books (that’s the asshole who wrote Obamanation). I nailed down our host as a conservative veteran who served in Germany during either the Second World War or shortly thereafter. Meeting him in the morning, I was dead on.

It’s somewhat amusing that I took this book to that B&B, after realizing that our hosts were exactly the sort of folks that the book was taking to task. In the living room there was a German Christmas village; in the den, as previously mentioned, all those books. On the way out the door, they told us to be careful during the inaugural — one of their friends had been told by a black man at Burger King that he could cut in line because Barack Obama had been elected.

There’s a weird mix of patriotism, conservatism, and racism at work here. I’m sure these folks are deeply mistrustful of liberals because they are in fact communists and they find Germans (and to an extent, perhaps even the Nazis) a bit admirable because they held traditional values of family and honor in high regard. And because they fought communists.

I’ve long thought it weird that Che can be marketed as a symbol of liberation, considering that he was a murderer. This is true of all communist propaganda — the stuff is everywhere in eastern Europe, where it should be reviled. I’ve always thought Nazi kitsch to be taboo, like the neighbor’s Nazi plate in American Beauty. This book is an eye-opener as to how much that’s not true.

What is to be done? Who knows. We are at a time when a majority of Russians believe that Stalin would probably be a pretty decent leader of their nation right now, so the world clearly has greater problems than a few kooks playing war games on the Internet. But as Holocaust revionism becomes more widespread and the long-ignored horrors of the Eastern Front fade further into memory, the dangers of a rehabilitation of National Socialism ought not be taken lightly.

By the way, the reviews of this book on Amazon are hilarious, because many of them are written by the very folks the book takes to task. It’s always amusing to see the reaction of an Internet community to a critical work of old media. This is no exception.

One valid point is raised by one of the commenters, though, and that is that the book tends to come across as very pro-Soviet — enough so that I actually found myself checking to see if it was written by dudes with Slavic names. It seems that there is no such thing as a honest broker.