Livingstone is not getting flak for what he said. He’s getting flak for what others said he said. Even at the time, his Labour critics had trouble pointing out the offence, taking to Twitter with vague sentiments like “Ken’s comments have no place in the Labour Party”.
Why? Because they’re true?
I won’t even take issue with what Livingstone said regarding Hitler supporting Zionism. To do so both obscures the truth of the matter, a big enough truth to fell an Israeli government in the 1950s, so poorly was it received. My bigger issue is that any condemnation plays into the hands of those seeking to obscure today.
The zionist project involved setting up a state for Jewish residents in Palestine. There was no Israel in Hitler’s time, so every Jew, by definition, was part of the diaspora, scattered across civilisations. Agree that “before he went mad” complete downplays the pre-1941 persecutions, but that year is when most historians generally concur is the time that mass extermination was proposed as the Final Solution, and most of those point to it not only being a crime against humanity, but also a crime of opportunity.
It could not have been done without the police state and crucially, the size of Nazi holdings at the time. Fatherland, the alternative history book in which the Germans win the war, is all about how that secret was kept and the effort to bring it to the world’s attention. The policy of mass extermination was also meted out to the Russians. Hitler wanted 30 million dead there for his lebensraum in victory. He achieved the former and fell way short of the latter.
It took the Nazis a few months to get all their sweeping legislation in gear. Moreover, many of the crimes that we like to think of as uniquely Nazi were practiced by other countries. Eugenics _still _exists today, with forced sterilisation in many countries, a concept Winston Churchill supported back in the day. We were putting homosexuals in asylums until the late 60s. When assessing the madness of the Nazis, I think we need to discount the stuff their contemporaries did, and not forget that we once did some of the same stuff too.
Even today, I’d argue that we’ve watered down versions of the same legislation. It might not be forced sterilisation, but when poor people are terrified of a third child because their benefits won’t extend to them, I think you can reasonably term that a form of eugenics.
Back to “before he went mad”. I think Ken meant mass extermination, and I think that a fairly decent differentiator between the Nazis and their contemporaries. Every other thing you might want to pull them up for someone else had done recently, or was still doing it.