Divine decadence empowers fascists

Divine decadence empowers fascists

The winner of eight academy awards, the 1972 musical Cabaret examined the social corruption that accompanied the Nazi rise to power.

Inside the Kit Kat Club of 1931 Berlin, American singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) celebrates "divine decadence" with songs like "Mein Herr," "Money, Money" and "Cabaret" while the impish emcee (Joel Grey) mocks the Nazis. Offstage, the promiscuous Bowles seduces gay Brian Roberts (Michael York), and both have intimate encounters with a rich playboy (Helmut Griem).

The sexual exploits come to an end as the playboy abandons both and Bowles aborts her baby with Roberts to pursue her singing career and carefree lifestyle.



The conventional liberal interpretation of Cabaret is that Bowles and her coterie of performers and lovers are creative free spirits who are bravely standing up against the brutish fascists. However, another interpretation is that the Kit Kat Club and its denizens represented all the filth, corruption and anarchy that plagued the Weimar Republic. The Germans gave power to Hitler to “restore morality.”

The true lesson of Cabaret, that decadence provokes fascism, has been lost on Hollywood because the cultural revolution that began in the mid-1960s seems unending. Every year sees another performer, like Chelsea Handler or Sarah Silverman, who pushes the envelope to bring new levels of depravity to the media.

But the reaction is taking place, slowly here but quicker on the other side of the globe, where Islamo-fascism provides a polar opposite to Hollywood. The polar analogy can be taken to another level. The earth's magnetic field is long overdue for a polar shift, in which the magnetic fields are reversed and the needle on your compass will point south. Perhaps we will experience a similar reversal in the “moral compass.” When liberal democracy comes to the Middle East, theocracy will triumph in the United States.

TomT said:

Yo Bob. You might want to rethink cause and effect. My take on the movie was that your moralistic term decadence as a cause of Fascism is way off target. Caberet singers were not those murdered by the millions. In fact, the very opposite of "devine decadence" was the target of Fascists in Germany, Italy and Japan. Their targest were the weak, the humble, the nuclear family, the retarded, the crippled, the shop owner, the factory worker....you get the picture. I think it is a tragic mistake to think that Fascism is some kind of natural cure for decadence.. After all, at the highest levels of the German and Italian Fascist government, their existed their own kind of State Approve decadence.

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The role of decadence in the rise of Hitler is well documented:

“Every kind of sexual perversion was catered to and hotels like the Excelsior and the Adlon hired ‘in house’ male and female prostitutes to entertain the guests. As things grew increasingly dire Berlin threw itself into an orgy of dancing, drinking, and pornography and prostitution with je m’en fous being the order of the day.”

For most Berliners, the city itself “was a living hell.” It was these issues that “ultimately made Hitler’s rise to power possible.”

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/01/29/degenerate-art-before-and-after-nazi-germany-in-berlin/

After World War One, Berlin became a place where behaviour previously thought of as immoral flourished:

• cabarets became known as places where transvestites and openly gay men and women could visit, despite homosexuality being illegal at the time
• prostitution, which had grown during World War One, flourished
• the city acquired a reputation for drug dealing
• organised crime, and gangs called Ringvereine, grew

Weimar’s reputation for decadence and excess did not continue into the Nazi period. The Nazis disapproved of what they viewed as the immoral behaviour flourishing in Germany’s cities. The totalitarian nature of the regime meant that cultural life, such as the theatre, music and film, came under the control of Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. In addition, many of the leading lights of German cultural and academic life were Jewish, and thus left Germany as the Nazis began to restrict Jews’ rights.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zcfxcwx/revision/4