on art and punching Nazis

A brief, entirely-unrelated-to-this-post conversation on Mastodon this afternoon got me thinking about an art exhibit that I saw in college and still think about every once in a while. The exhibit was on something along the lines of pop culture and politics, and one of the only two things that I remember from the exhibit (the other being D&D character sheets for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) was a statue depicting an action figure-y Captain America brandishing the severed head of Saddam Hussein. (Picture here—it’s relatively cartoony, but just gruesome enough to not post on the blog).

I went to a relatively conservative college, and while this wasn’t the most controversial piece of art to ever show up in the campus museum, I remember being startled by it at the time. In hindsight, I’m actually surprised that it didn’t invite more controversy for questioning American foreign policy in such a provocative way. Then again, like much good art, that was the point. To take a comic book figure known for punching Nazis in the 1940s and make him the violent representative of 2000s-2010s U.S. military action is a great way of questioning whether something has gone terribly wrong. As a college student, I was pretty middle-of-the-road politically, and I never had strong feelings one way or the other about the Iraq War, but this statue really got me thinking at the time.

These days, I’m fairly skeptical of U.S. foreign policy (especially whenever it involves guns), and so the statue really resonates with me as I’m writing this post, even if I couldn’t tell you the last time I thought about it. Some of that skepticism comes from reading about (and aspiring to) non-violence, though, and that gets me thinking about the Captain America statue differently. Rather than ask “whether something has gone terribly wrong,” I can’t help but question whether 1940s Captain America was also in the wrong.

Before writing any further, I want to acknowledge that “the discourse” around the meme of punching Nazis is knotty. I am sympathetic to criticisms of criticisms of the “punch Nazis” sentiment (not a typo) in that I agree that insisting on polite debate and decorum is often unhelpful when facing political forces that are truly dangerous to our society. And yet, I still don’t know that I can get on board with the “punch Nazis” sentiment myself, because I think there are ways of more actively standing up to those forces that stop short of violence. I think it’s easy for “punching Nazis” Captain America to evolve into “brandishing the severed head of Saddam Hussein” Captain America (as, of course, the United States themselves have demonstrated), and so while I don’t think polite debate is the way to go, I’m not quite comfortable with violence either.

In fact, we don’t even need to go to 2003 Iraq to make this point. I’ve twice visited the Mémorial de Caen in Northern France, both times as part of visiting World War II sites in the area. Both times that I visited the museum, I remember being surprised by its focus on things like the human cost of Allied strategic bombing in Germany and occupied France (see also Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five) rather than the uncritical celebration of the Allied liberation of France that I was expecting. I’ve never been a gung-ho “patriot,” but my visits to Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc during those same trips still put me in enough of a “America, hell yeah” mood that the Mémorial visit kind of took the wind out of my sails. Even before these visits, Kurt Vonnegut’s account of the bombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five had opened my eyes to the possibility that the Allies, the indisputable “good guys” of the closest thing we have to a “good war,” still did terrible things in the name of defeating the Nazis.

So yeah, I get where an eagerness to “punch Nazis” comes from, and it’s hard for me to get too upset about someone landing a blow on Richard Spencer on camera. But as obviously awful as Nazis are, I’m going to admit that once we level up to “bombing Nazis”—and especially “bombing civilians under Nazi control”—I start to get really uncomfortable. This discomfort isn’t straightforward either (for example, far-right Germans also express moral outrage about the Dresden bombing, and I’d rather not agree with them on that point), but it’s enough to make me hesitate.

Captain America muddies the waters further—his Hussein-themed statue reminds me of Leo Tolstoy’s observation that humans all agree that violence is justified, we just can’t agree against whom. Tolstoy’s belief was that if we can’t agree about the circumstances that justify violence, we should try to agree that violence was never an appropriate response. I have to admit that I’m still turning that logic over in my head, but it seems like something to aspire to.

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