As a Jew, Watching Kanye Glorify Hitler Was Sickening and Heartbreaking

Kanye West’s new video about Hitler is astonishing. A line of Black men with glowing eyes in a dark room, fierce expressions, shaved heads, shouting “N***er Heil Hitler.” Kanye’s voice is crafted like a synthesizer, with a bouncy trap-style lyricism. The melody is kitschy in a hypnotic way—you can’t help but say it’s tight.

Before the video started, I thought about the millions of victims, including my own family, and about what Kanye is doing, as perverse as it may be. You can’t take away his revolutionary nature in diving deep into the taboo of playing with sheer evil. And what drives him to do this? Clearly, his Black national pride, which is no different from white national pride.

Black people, like the Germans, were on the margins of English civilization. Just as the Germans, feeling scientifically and philosophically inferior to the British and their culture, created movements for white supremacy, Black people, feeling inferior to Americans, created movements of Black pride. It’s no coincidence that the great historian Carroll Quigley identified a similarity between Germans and Africans in terms of their late and limping entry into history. In the video, Kanye dresses the angry Black men in animal-like clothing, a nod to the pure animality that the Germans saw in humanity. Some kind of racist attempt to return to nature through such attire - it looks a bit silly, but isn’t there something about this whole thing that isn’t silly?

During the video, it seems that some of the men are genuinely trying, shouting “Heil Hitler” with all their heart, with deep conviction and passion as the camera dramatically pans across their faces. Beyond my curiosity about who these people are who agreed to do this, there’s no doubt that the call is meant to spread Nazism among Black people, led astray by West. The fact that Hitler himself saw Black people as inferior doesn’t matter - his concept of racial superiority serves Kanye’s interests anyway.

The song, which is 2:46 long, ends with a speech in German by the tyrant, set against a relief of a wolf image - one of the central and revered animals of the German Reich, which thought and hunted like a pack of wolves. And that’s probably what Kanye wants from the Black viewers watching him: to become packs of wolves. Perhaps that same murderous, gang-like wolfishness is what connects West, the Black man, to Hitler and the white Germans. Wolves, after all, are colorblind in this sense and capable of uniting various forms of hatred.