Eichmann comic book superhero, if Nazis had won ?

If the Nazis had won, would future generations best know Adolf Eichmann through comic books and films?

Nazi Monomyth ?

Know him as an Aryan Superhero, exemplar of the Nazi Monomyth.

One who had dared to act decisively outside the rule of law, to save the world from bad people, when all the civilized democracies had just sat about endlessly debating the the 'Jewish Problem' without ever doing anything about it?

If you enjoy superhero movies, my words might make you uncomfortable.

I am glad - they were intended to.

We would do well to regard Eichmann and the Final Solution as WWII's other superhero and other super-weapon, from the war's other superpower...

why focus on Allied FAILURES of WWII ?

Why not focus on the Axis failures of WWII ?

Why not, you say, use a sawed-off shotgun at short range on a big fish in a small barrel ?

Hum, tempting  - too tempting obviously for all the world's Rogue Boomers - people like Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott : 'we won the war, did nothing wrong, so no need to change nothing, carry on, business  as usual.'

Rogue Boomers with short noses are more than usually handicapped by nature - being so unable to see beyond the end of it.

All three sides* in WWII expected a short cheap war - and all sides were wrong : that is the real lesson of WWII : the naivete easy optimism of pre-war Modernity and Scientism was revealed to all - or rather should have been.

(*Because remember, for a shamefully long time, the majority of the world's population was not at Germany or Britain's side but rather was Neutral.)

We don't have to wait till the current climate change crisis plays out to drawn the needed lesson that there is no pointing denying that there are limits to human abilities to control unpleasant change.

We already had the lesson - and the exam - during the six bloody and long and disappointing years of WWII : when time and time again all sides were told that a technology breakthrough, a new superweapon, would end the war quickly, cheaply and painlessly.

The truth be known, the WWII traffic in super hero instant solutions between children's comic books and senior leaders' Minute books are unceasing ....

'Rogue Boomers' : Running our world ; ruining our planet

When one thinks of Rogue Boomers, one immediately thinks of people like prime ministers Stephen Harper (born 1959) and Tony Abbott (born 1957) --- and not just because they are currently leading the charge (from the rear) against doing anything substantial about man-made climate disaster.

Rather it is something so unexpected about the vivid contrast between their still-baby faces and their totally Old School ways of thinking that humans can control the natural world - thinking we'd might expect more from their grandfathers, let alone their fathers.

Yes, those I call Noir's Children , the most vocal (and regrettably the smallest) segment of the Boomer kids got it, successfully absorbed the dire lessons (on all sides) from WWII , and adjusted their thinking.

But the Rogue Boomers ( the silent majority of my Boomer generation) carried right on as if nothing had changed, still believing in the simplistic old pre-war ways , despite Science (reluctantly) revealing an ever more complicated world.

It was as if they were to be frozen in aspic, forever locked into a time warp with the first generation of comic book super heroes.

Entombed forever within WWII's golden age of superheroes, superpowers, super-weapons and super-easy solutions to controlling unpleasant reality....

'40s Gotham : birthing Superheroes & Noir ...

One can think of Golden Age Comic Book Superheroes as Breen Office pre-approved but Golden Age Film Noir as Breen Office pre-disapproved.

During WWII, Hollywood was not taken over by Allied government censors , contrary to expectations.

Instead Hollywood (Breen Office) censorship methods simply took over the Allied governments.

The bright uplift that Joseph Breen always strived for within the small - virtual - world of major Hollywood  films became something Allied governments tried to fairy dust over all of their nations' activities.

Allied war efforts certainly killed many neutral and occupied nation civilians - hundreds of thousands of them in total.

But you would never see the Allied propaganda efforts boast about these deaths in the way the Axis did about their complete destruction of civilian Lidice's entire population and houses.

But Allied  newspapers and books remained surprisingly free to comment about everything but immediate military operations .

As a result , the front pages (& Hollywood 'war' movies/comic books) had huge but empty war stories , all about Breen Office uplift and how the fiercely determined Allies were united in seeking a quick end to all forms of discrimination.

But those newspapers' same back pages had plenty of tiny but fact-filled items on examples of Home Front profiteering, slackers and racists.

By 1943, this dissonance had led many left leaning film people to start turning out film noirs that hinted at this moral disconnect....

the Super-Modern Era : the hyper-arrogant era of Supermen and Ubermensch

The current term 'Super Heroes', though not the age old concept , first fully emerged at the apogee of the super-modern era (the New York's World Fair ,circa 1939-1940) and have tagged along with us ever since.

Their continuing popularity - and not just among 15 year old boys - is a useful measure of the strength of belief in Super-Modern ideas , 70 years into this era of the post-Modern.

The other measure is, of course, support for the climate deniers.

Their chief funders and cheerleaders are old men (born on both sides of 1930) who were those same young 15 year old boys who first read of the original comic book super heroes.

Gosh Koch : comic books form the deep ideology of the climate denying network ?

Who would ever have thought that ?