Arts & Letters Daily links to a Chronicle of Higher Education article called, “When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler,” hyping a new book claiming Hollywood studios somehow “collaborated” with the Nazi régime in the 1930s to stay in the market. The author claims this is shocking, another historian of the period views the author’s shock as shocking.

Hitler was a fan. Maybe that’s why she vants to be alone.

Several points, first, the requisite Outrage® over a quotation of a glib, vile, ultimately brainless comparison of Republican politics to fascism.

But [USC Professor Steven J.] Ross sees the fascist threat of the 1930s as resonant with our time. During the 1920s, he writes in materials for his book in progress, American Nazis’ “counterparts in Germany looked like fools, until they were not. In 1995 few Americans took the militia movement seriously until Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people. In September 2001 and more recently in Boston, people who many Americans believed incapable of serious acts of terrorism and destruction proved capable of both. The rise of dangerous politicians such as Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Santorum—I call them dangerous because they pit American against American—reminds us of what prescient Sinclair Lewis warned citizens in 1934: It Can’t Happen Here, but only if we remain vigilante in opposing fascism, Nazism, and all political hate groups.”

Everyone got the Outrage® out? Moving on.

First, as we’ve covered, enthusiasm for fascism was widespread in the “low, dishonest decade” of the Depression. Not just among crankish weirdos, but among New Dealers and the Progressive Left generally, as Jonah Goldberg documented at length in Liberal Fascism. It was “scientific,” “modern,” and not tainted with the Bolsheviks’ crimes (many known even then despite their apologists’ efforts) and blanket hostility to private property. Plus, it’s not like the heads of Hollywood studios didn’t have an informal cartel and were concurrently dealing with the U.S. government in a basically corporatist fashion. It’s not like they would have been shocked by Hitler’s economic plans and dirgisme, even if they must have been appalled by his hatred of Jews (especially as many of the moguls were, of course, Jewish and the Nazis explicitly wanted Jewish content out, persecuted Jews employed by the studios, etc.).

Second, as the critical historian says in the article, it’s dangerously misleading to look at people in the ’30s as foreseeing (much less eagerly awaiting) the somehow-inevitable Shoah. While there may have been a couple somewhere, for most people—even most Nazis, one suspects, even many who contemporaneously approved of it—such a thing was probably literally unimaginable until it was put into practice. Hollywood moguls doubtless wanted to keep a foot in Germany, a huge market for and producer of films (remember, UFA was a colossus in the industry). And how many businessmen are willing to hold their noses at things they find deeply offensive in order to make a buck? Ask your local real-estate agent—or even the minimum-wage McDonald’s clerk in a lousy neighborhood.

A hypothetical case: In 2020, events cascade, resulting in (God forbid, one hastens to say) a literal Chinese genocide of the Tibetan people (or the Uyghurs or Inner Mongolians or whomever). The PRC is toppled by a coalition of horrified allied nations in a war that costs thousands upon thousands of deaths on both sides. The Chinese premier of the day becomes the twenty-first century’s epitome of evil, as Hitler became in the late twentieth-century West.

Per Iron Man 3: Not Chinese.

Are therefore China’s contemporary admirers anti-Tibetan mass-murder enthusiasts? Of course not.

More to the point, rather than worrying about “dangerous politicians such as Sarah Palin” who are “dangerous because they pit American against American” (presumably by disagreeing with Professor Ross and absorbing his subsequent projections of bigotry), is this not a slightly more obvious parallel?

Absent a hypothetical genocide which puts today’s China the nightmarish company of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, et al., isn’t brutish, fascist post-Deng China a scummy, nasty clique of gangsters ruling a potential economic powerhouse a lot like Germany in the 1930s, save the latter’s snappy dress sense and lunatic anti-Semitism? We don’t know if the Chinese will start a big war, by design or accident; we don’t know if they’ll ethnically cleanse one of the nations the Han have never liked very much. But businessmen hold their nose and do deals. And Hollywood is at the very front, doing exactly the same things we’re supposed to be scandalized by in the ’30s. They were Jews dealing with an anti-Jewish government, which adds a frisson, and the Holocaust’s shadow gives it a charnel-house air, but a surprise that movie makers make a priority of selling movies?

There are moguls running around this very second fêting and schmoozing the fascist Chinese leadership. American studio heads routinely censor and bowdlerize their products at the behest of the thuggish leaders of a régime that, let us not forget, has already been responsible for the deaths of sixty-five million of its own citizens. (Roughly eleven Holocausts or a second Second World War, give or take.)

Businessmen are rarely the devils liberals portray them as, but they’re almost never saints either, and in their zeal (and joy) in selling widgets, they are as prone to tunnel vision, moral idiocy, and cupidity as the rest of us. The studios worked cravenly with the Third Reich to stay in the German market in the 1930s. Sickening. But shocking? As shocking as their heirs’ working with the People’s Republic to stay in the Chinese market as we speak.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.