Why Is Hitler’s Mustache So Terrifying?
Alongside his Sieg Heil salutes, his petulant manner, his missing testicle, his extreme psychosis, his overwhelming self-pity, and his tendency to froth at the mouth while delivering his hate-riddled speeches, Adolf Hitler was renowned for having a sinister and, how shall we put it, slightly perverted type of mustache.
As all right-minded people know, anyone who sports facial hair is just not to be trusted. The disturbing trend of young men adopting the sort of beards Buffalo Bill would have considered beyond the pale is an uniquely modern illness.
Now once upon a time, a bearded man was a stigmatized man. The bearded “barbarian” was regarded at worst, as a deviant with some sinister secret to hide from the world, and at best, the man with a beard was considered an oath of ill discipline and slovenly ways.
A man with a beard would suggest to all right thinking citizens, that here was a creature, (more than likely nocturnal and prone to self-abuse) with all the hygiene habits of a particularly vile gutter rat and the moral fibre of a stoat. The bearded ones were generally shunned by the enlightened ones who had long realized the diabolical dangers inherent in unsightly facial hair.
In the more refined and restrained days of yore, beards were not cultivated as they are now, but were more something which happened to a man when his guard was down. A man for whom the everyday demands and rigors of everyday life had become a little too much would often grow a beard.
Such a tragic figure would also take to wearing a bright and shiny tracksuit complemented by gravy and beer-stained vest, as if to announce to the world, ‘Yes my existence has become a little frayed at the edges, I have let myself go and now live in a terrible twilight world created by my own fantastical mind.’ In other words the beard had come to symbolize a cry for help from someone teetering on the brink of the abyss.
Think Sylvester Stallone in Rocky IV. His best buddy, Apollo Creed, gets beaten to death by a Russian monster in a boxing match, and what’s the first thing Rocky does. He runs away to a log cabin and grows a big beard. Yet when he’s finally ready to get into the ring and face Ivan Drago, it’s a clean-shaven Italian Stallion that defeats the Russian superhuman and not a bearded brute from the backwaters.
Of course, the dreaded and comical modern apparition that calls itself the “hipster” has made beards acceptable to those clones and drones who clock in daily at a factory called fashion.
Yet, frightful as they are, there is something more sinister than the beard, and that is the dreaded mustache.
The mustache is born when facial hair begins to think of itself as a cut above and gets an attitude. A mustache isn’t what happens when you shave, and it isn’t what happens when you don’t shave — it’s what happens when you want to announce to the world that you’ve got a problem with a capital “P.”
A mustache is a deliberate two-fingered salute to mother nature from a man who’s pretty much saying, “There’s nothing nice about me, and I’m going to prove it.”
Growing a bush of coarse, finely trimmed hair above your lip isn’t clever. In fact, it suggests complete howling at the moon insanity and a complete lack of respect for the rest of humanity.
Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Captain Hook, Vlad the Impaler, Dick Dastardly, Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert Fish, Augusto Pinochet, and, of course, Adolf Hitler have all sported the sort of mustache guaranteed to make you go, “Hmmm.”
Why? What exactly is it with evil bastards and mustaches? According to author Christopher Oldstone-Moore, in his book about the history of facial hair, ‘Of Beards and Men’, Hitler “experimented with different haircuts and mustache trims to get the right effect.”
Just like a mustache, the plot thickens. Hitler was all too aware of the terrible and diabolical power of the mustache and desired to maximize its full effect with the sort of elemental facial hair guaranteed to give you nightmares.
Prior to Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the mustache had long been considered a symbol of strength in the Fatherland. Apparently, Hitler wanted to galvanize Germany by uniting the old and the new in a symbol that the country could rally behind: a mustache.
The bizarre style Hitler eventually settled upon had been big with Germans in the early 1900s but was subsequently dismissed as being too English or American, but to Hitler, it screamed, as Oldstone-Moore writes, “a new German manliness.”
“The famous square of dark hair under the nose became the ideal alternative, It delivered just enough of that forceful distinctiveness that Hitler needed to project an aura of command.”
All these years later, we think of Hitler’s mustache not so much representative of “a new German manliness” but as a symbol of his madness and cruelty.
Mostly however, we see it as just one more reason to point at the deluded little-mustached idiot and laugh.
Originally published at www.inquisitr.com.
