Dr. Henry A. Murray, Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany's Surrender
I haven't
looked into it, and won't do so in the near future as I have other things to
do. But from the little bit I can see right away I will only look into it to
see how close they come to what people like Eric Voegelin or Karl Kraus already
saw in the 1930s. The Americans had Eric Voegelin at their disposal starting
from 1938, but he didn't like the East Coast establishment very much and went
to work in other places. Eric Voegelin explains it very clearly in his 1964
lectures: there were of course quite a number of decent Germans, people who
weren't taken in at all by his so-called charisma and saw him for what he was,
"ein Trottel". When some of those came into direct contact with
Hitler, it was typically a one-time event, Hitler didn't want to repeat it.
That's exactly the William Blake quote on Richard Landes's masthead. ["Always
be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you." - William
Blake, 1796]
The kind
of question I find interesting is how this sort of dialogue could also be
established in public discourse. In other words, how the leaders of the other
powers could have recreated that situation in which Hitler would have been
exposed as "ein Trottel" to the world. A thing that would have
induced decent Germans to feel less helpless. So that they might have been
encouraged to come out with their exact same opinion about Hitler, and would
possibly have been able to simply shame him into resignation. If you think that
that is just speculative dreaming and not applicable to the real world, you
must also realise that you are actually saying that politics always and
everywhere is like war, and that there is simply nothing we can do about that,
at all.
I'm quite
certain that the fundamental reason why foreign leaders did not succeed in
exposing Hitler to the world as an idiot is that they never even thought of
trying to do that. And they never even thought of trying to do that because
they couldn't see him as an idiot themselves. Which says a lot about them,
about politics, and about the crime story that was the nazi-period. And the
same stupidity is being played out again for 65 years now in world politics,
with Israel being just one of the more obvious examples.
Democratic
politics is dangerous. Very dangerous. Especially as long as people are unable
to see that it is not the best available option. Which they aren't as far as I
can tell. In that same café, I met an Englishman with his wife, and showed him
my piece on "Natural law and Nietzsche's discovery of the individual; or
how it is not the madness of the prophet that is the problem, but his
godforsaken self-righteousness and disrespect of the natural law". Asking
him whether it made any sense to him. He said it did. But then immediately
continued saying that it would never be enough, because we live in a society,
and simply leaving people to their own devices is something we definitely
shouldn't do, the law of the jungle would prevail, etc, etc. His wife weighed
in to explain the benefits of social security and publicly funded education. I
tend to be distracted in cafés, and simply forgot to ask them the question:
fine with me, but why don't you give us backward people who would like to go
back to the 13th century the opportunity to opt out of your beneficial system?
Well, as I forgot to ask the question, I can't tell you their answer. But I'm
sure they have one. An answer that is somewhat similar to that of the prophet:
if you're not with us, you're against us, and we will deal with you
accordingly. See how dangerous it is?
There was
another nice girl in that café, working, preparing the food behind a counter,
in an almost transparent light t-shirt showing her bra and beautiful breasts.
When I came back to her to ask for more bread because I was hungry, she started
to do complicated things with gloves on her hands and a pincer, while there was
a whole pile of baguette ends they are apparently instructed to discard right
in front of her. I stopped her: just give me some of those, I like crusts. She
reluctantly dropped the pincer, and grudgingly gave me what I wanted with her
gloved hands. I must find a way to make up with her the next time I'm hungry in that café.
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