If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was the subtle message of Eldorado, a documentary that pretended to inform us about the real-life background sexual milieu to Cabaret and Babylon Berlin, but was really much more interested in promoting its political view that Weimar Germany with its sexual promiscuity, rampant drug use and anything-goes view on “gender” represented some kind of paradise on Earth which we should seek to emulate.
A voice-over told us what to think: “They feel intimidated by this rapid change. The pace of change is a source of frustration to just about everybody. If you’re a radical, then change is happening much too slowly for you. On the other side, if you’re a conservative you’re watching everything that gives your life depth and meaning washed away. And it’s that experience of being threatened by this change that gives fascists fertile ground in which to spread their poisonous ideas…”
Now wait just a second. Even in the liberated twenty-first century an awful lot of us feel uncomfortable at the aggressive promotion of transsexualism by institutions like the Tavistock clinic. Surely this doesn’t make us unwitting dupes of dangerous and unhealthy far-right ideology? Couldn’t it simply be the case that we’re ordinary, reasonable folk who see nothing “progressive” about unbridled progressivism, regardless of whether or not extremists feel the same way?
I found this conflation of small “c” conservatism and fascism not only morally dubious but historically dishonest. It ignored the fact, for example, that in interwar Germany the Nazis were often seen not as the enemy of sexual decadence but its embodiment. Also, it pretended that all those no doubt marvelously exciting clubs that Christopher and His Kind frequented — and later celebrated in Cabaret — were chock-full of transsexuals, which they just weren’t. Yes, there may have been much unbridled homosexuality and cross-dressing. But as the documentary was forced to concede, sex-change surgery was so dangerous at the time that the total number of transsexuals — as opposed to transvestites — in Berlin was just three.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
