"Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond."

The NYT has a third article about that one Nazi/"Nazi" it found in Dayton, Ohio. We're already talking about the first 2 articles, the first one, which didn't make much sense, and the second one, in which the author said the editors challenged him to make some sense, but he couldn't. I said:

But why was he important enough to drag into the spotlight in the first place?.... The answer must be that he serves a purpose for you and the NYT. You could put some effort into self-examination: Why are you using him?

In the comments, Matthew Sablan — anticipating the subject matter of the third NYT article — said:

I don't understand. The NYT takes someone everyone thinks is an extremist and does everything they can to make him seem evil and wrong, and people STILL think the NYT is trying to make him look like a regular Joe? They go out of their way to try and downplay his every day Joe-ness, even burying the fact he wasn't even AT Charlottesville.* Anyone who thinks the NYT is defending or promoting Nazis needs to re-read the piece and figure out how they misread it so epicly bad.

So the readers over at the NYT — according to the third article —  found the story offensive:

“How to normalize Nazis 101!” one reader wrote on Twitter. “I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article,” wrote another. “Attempting to ‘normalize’ white supremacist groups – should Never have been printed!”...

But far more were outraged by the article. “You know who had nice manners?” Bess Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. “The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis.”

One reader characterized the profile of Hovater as "glowing." Why didn't the NYT pick a more obviously evil American Nazi to profile? It says it didn't intend to "normalize" Hovater but to show how "hate and extremism have become more normal" than we want to think. That is, the NYT claims to be showing what is, and the readers are saying Don't do that. You're helping them. You must keep them as monsters, make them toxic.

The NYT says the idea of the article was to figure out "Who were those people" who marched in Charlottesville last August:

We assigned Richard Fausset, one of our smartest thinkers and best writers, to profile one of the far-right foot soldiers at the rally. We ended up settling on Mr. Hovater....

The NYT doesn't say why it picked Horvater. Who else did it consider profiling? And the NYT doesn't admit it did anything wrong, just expresses "regret" that readers were offended. It doesn't even clearly come out and say our job in journalism is to tell the facts the way they are. I guess that's because it would further offend the feelings of readers who are especially fierce in their position that nothing even remotely sympathetic to any Nazi should ever be said.

And while I'm here, I wanted to highlight something chickelit wrote in the comments to my earlier post. Like me, he noticed the photograph — in the first NYT article — of Horvath's bookshelf, a photograph that makes a strong impression because one of the books has a big swastika on its spine. But that book is William Shirer's "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich"!

That must be a Doubleday first edition, because my mother had the very same book. I read it growing up and can't imagine a more first person account of anti-fascism- particularly of the sort that came out of 20th century Berlin. But of course in this NYT hit piece, the effect is to make us believe that Hovator reads Nazi propaganda. Pathetic.

I have  "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich" too and have read it recently (and often reread parts of it). This book is in no way pro-Nazi. Did Fausset — "one of our smartest thinker and best writers" — ask Hovater about that book? Did Fausset even know what that book was? If I'd been with Hovater and looked at that shelf, I'd have said "Oh, you have 'The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich'! How can you read that and feel any admiration for the Nazis?" But all the article says is "Books about Mussolini and Hitler shared shelf space with a stack of Nintendo Wii games," as if Hovater is just a shallow youth, playing games. But the NYT and Fausset are shallow if they did not recognize the significance of that book with the swastika.

Here's how the book looks now, in its 50th anniversary edition:

There's still a swastika on the cover. There's also a quote: "One of the most important works of history of our time." The source of the quote: The New York Times.

And you would think that the NYT and Fausset would especially care about an important work of history written by a man, William L. Shirer, who was a reporter — a reporter who lived through and covered the events. From the Foreword of the book:

With... the memory of life in Nazi Germany and of the appearance and behavior and nature of the men who ruled it, Adolf Hitler above all, still fresh in my mind and bones, I decided... to make an attempt to set down the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. “I lived through the whole war,” Thucydides remarks in his History of the Peloponnesian War, one of the greatest works of history ever written, “being of an age to comprehend events and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them.”...

No doubt my own prejudices, which inevitably spring from my experience and make-up, creep through the pages of this book from time to time. I detest totalitarian dictatorships in principle and came to loathe this one the more I lived through it and watched its ugly assault upon the human spirit. Nevertheless, in this book I have tried to be severely objective, letting the facts speak for themselves and noting the source for each. No incidents, scenes or quotations stem from the imagination; all are based on documents, the testimony of eyewitnesses or my own personal observation. In the half-dozen or so occasions in which there is some speculation, where the facts are missing, this is plainly labeled as such.

My interpretations, I have no doubt, will be disputed by many. That is inevitable, since no man’s opinions are infallible. Those that I have ventured here in order to add clarity and depth to this narrative are merely the best I could come by from the evidence and from what knowledge and experience I have had.

I have such respect for this book, and I would think all journalists would know about it. To not know or to know and still treat it as an object that says "Nazi!!" about some guy in Ohio is just awful.
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* The article is confusing and can leave you with the impression that Hovater wasn't at Charlottesville because the second-to-the-last paragraph says:

The pasta was ready. Ms. Hovater talked about how frightening it was this summer to watch from home as the Charlottesville rally spun out of control. Mr. Hovater said he was glad the movement had grown.

That makes it sound as though he watched the whole thing on TV like most of us. But even more buried, in the center of the article, we read:

After he attended the Charlottesville rally.... Mr. Hovater wrote that he was proud of the comrades who joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory.”

In German, “Hail victory” is “Sieg heil.”