[lopsotronic]

There's a parallel in Maus, where the PoV character runs increasingly into his Holocaust survivor's father's racism, even as he explores his father's threading the needle of 20th century Central Europe[1] . He calls his pa out on it, but for his pa the schwarzers aren't people, so there's no "there" there.

If Speigelman had a slightly deeper historical insight he might have drawn the connection between the byzantine precision of American race law and what Hitler had hoped to accomplish in his own "Wild West". Both end products of the secular wave of colonialism, with Hitler's being at least a hundred years too late, held back by the late stage of German nationhood.

Suffering is no guarantor of virtue. Extremes of violence can brutalize not just individuals but entire peoples. Which is why we should not look to victims as prima facie exemplars, but with empathy and deeper understanding.

[1] the "Bloodlands" of Tim Snyder

[vr46]

That's a interesting observation on Spiegelmann, although I don't know how that could have been incorporated into the story, without him actually challenging his father in that way. There is a reference somewhere that the animal metaphors were inspired by the racial caricatures in American vaudeville and theatre, so there was some recognition there, aside from the complications that animal metaphor itself added to things.

[lopsotronic]

Maus is a great work, and a breakthrough for its genre, but I've always found the animal metaphor troubling for reasons I could never quite pin down.

It was only recently that I realized the problem I have with it: it's a tacit nod towards the broad thesis of secular colonialism (and later of Nazism): h. sap is naturally separated into different scientific kinds. Each acting according to its nature, and of course some of which should never be mingled.

I'm enough of an adult to separate metaphor in a work of art from actual reality, but not everyone is, and that metaphor - if you take it seriously - will have a lot of nasty and all-too-familiar second-order effects. Many of which we would recognize in the harsh lessons of the last century.

Hitler's not a cat, and Spiegelmann's not a mouse. They're humans, making human decisions. Tomorrow I could be Hitler, or you could be Spiegelmann. It can happen to anyone.