They Saved Hitler's Desk!

It was struggle enough for the New Eastcoast Arms Collectors Associates to continue holding gun shows in Saratoga Springs NY in the face of increased uneasiness about the alleged fetishization of firearms and the violent potential of gun enthusiasts. Things got worse for the NEACA this month when people saw that their next show in the Spa City would include an exhibit and auction of a writing desk and accessories believed to have belonged to Adolf Hitler. Under pressure from the Saratoga Springs City Center Authority, which operates the venue, the NEACA cancelled the exhibit and arranged for the auction to take place out-of-state. Concerns were raised about the exhibit following the violence and controversies over Confederate statuary elsewhere in the U.S., but this strikes me as a case where important distinctions can be made.

A desk is an artifact, a literal piece of history, and it is also simply a desk. Nothing about the desk is heroic unless you project something heroic onto it. To the contrary, it strikes me that a curious person might want to see a desk where der Fuehrer might have signed important orders, drafted a speech, or doodled without at all approving of anything Hitler did. The spectator might simply crave the sensation, morbid or otherwise, of being close to history. An artifact is not a monument; it does not exist to honor anyone or anything. To go to the City Center to look at the desk would not be to do Adolf Hitler any honor. I suppose, however, that a "one percent doctrine" prevails among those who opposed the exhibit. The idea that anyone might approach the desk with reverence -- that someone in the building might be a Nazi sympathizer -- probably was the truly unacceptable thing.  There's something paranoid about such anxiety that is not equivalent to the abhorrence one probably should feel over the existence of statues in public squares anywhere in America honoring -- no other verb describes their purpose as well -- the ringleaders of a seditious conspiracy.

Of course, apologists for the statues will argue that the mindset of today's iconoclasts isn't really different from the hysterical attitude of some people in Saratoga Springs. Those apologists will argue that it is paranoid to assume that someone who admires the statues is a white supremacist or neo-Confederate. They may argue further for a distinction, fudged by the President recently, between "history" and "heritage." For the sake of argument, "heritage," the word usually used by statue apologists, entails a value-free (or politics-free) reverence for ancestors who died in war, no different in essence from the monument anyone gets over his or her grave. Whether Confederate monuments ever can be politically neutral is debatable in the face of persistent claims that secessionists and rebels, not to mention slaveholders and their defenders, deserve reverence from no one. Despite that debate, descendants of Confederates will continue to claim the right to honor their kin, if for no other reason than that they are kin. In any event, it should be self-evident that a desk, no matter who used it, is a thing of a different order. There is less reason to see it as inherently idolatrous or offensive than there is to distrust a public statue. While the Saratoga Springs case is less flagrantly absurd than ESPN's recent reassignment of an Asian-American reporter named Robert Lee from its coverage of a Charlottesville basketball game, it's still an instance when the impulse to remove any reminder of evil from a potentially tempting place in public view goes a little too far.