Fifth Wednesday Post

The Man with the Moustache

One of the lasting traditions on this blog is that whenever a month has five Wednesdays in it, the commentariat gets to nominate and vote on the subject for the fifth Wednesday’s post. For the last several years now, one of the perennial runners-up has been a straightforward question:  why is it that Adolf Hitler has become such an overwhelming presence in popular culture in the United States, and across the modern industrial West more generally? That’s the one that won this month’s competition.

It’s a far more serious question than it might seem at first glance. Consider the image on the left. The moment you saw it, even before I mentioned this post’s subject, you knew exactly who it was. Can you think of any other historical figure whose image and reputation can be evoked so instantly by two abstract blotches of black on white?  I can’t.  What does it say about our culture that we’ve made Hitler’s face more recognizable than that of any other person—more so than Jesus, or George Washington, or for that matter any of the other mass murderers of history?

No, it’s not that Hitler’s regime killed more people than anybody else’s, because it didn’t. Lengthy and nauseating as the litany of atrocities of Hitler’s National Socialist regime is, it’s second-rate at best compared to the far more ghastly toll heaped up by the twentieth century’s Marxist regimes. The Soviet Union under Josef Stalin slaughtered more people than the Nazis ever did, and presided over a much vaster network of prison camps—the “Gulag archipelago” made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s harrowing novels—including the nightmarish Kolyma mining camps, where the average lifespan of a prisoner after arrival was measured in weeks.

Stalin, in turn, was practically a piker in the mass murder sweepstakes compared to Mao Zedong, whose regime still holds the all-time record for carnage.  Nor did Hitler ever envisage anything as breathtakingly horrific as the plan drafted and partly carried out by Pol Pot and his Marxist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.  Having decided that the great obstacle to a communist utopia was that the people he’d conquered had all been raised in a corrupt capitalist society, Pol Pot launched a plan that would have resulted in the phased extermination of every single person in Cambodia who was older than ten at the time of the Khmer Rouge takeover. Only a timely Vietnamese invasion stopped that plan from being carried out in full.

A very small fraction of what was left of the Khmer Rouge’s victims after Pol Pot’s regime was overthrown.

Furthermore—and this point deserves to be stressed—Hitler’s regime was an abject failure in terms of its declared goals. Hitler wanted to make Germany a great power; his rule put a full stop to Germany’s chances at great power status, and left his adopted nation crushed, humiliated, and divided among its enemies. Hitler believed devoutly that white Europeans ought to rule the world; by crippling the British, French, and Dutch colonial empires just when independence movements in their colonies were beginning to get traction, he did more than any other single person to bring about the end of European global hegemony and the rise of independent nations across the global South. As for his antisemitism, it’s one of the ironies of history that Hitler’s most enduring impact on popular culture is that he made the more blatant forms of antisemitism unfashionable in most Western countries for three quarters of a century.

Nor, finally, was there anything even slightly original in Hitler’s National Socialist regime.  Its economic schemes were borrowed almost without alteration from those of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy, which Il Duce’s henchmen had cobbled together by trial and error in an attempt to copy as much of the Soviet system as possible while still retaining private ownership of the means of production. (Fascism generally is best understood as Communism Lite, an attempt to overcome the catastrophic problems of early twentieth century capitalism without going all the way over into Stalinism.) A great deal more came straight from the Soviet Union; the role of the Nazi Party in German society under the Twelve-Year Reich was borrowed from the role of the Communist Party in Russia, the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls were Nazi versions of the much larger and better organized Communist youth movements, and so on.

It interests me that some people are finally beginning to notice this.

Then there were Hitler’s racial policies. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke pointed out years ago in his brilliant book The Occult Roots of Nazism, those came straight from Ariosophy, a fringe movement of racist occultists in Austria and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  If you know anything about Nazi ideology you already know all about Ariosophy, because they’re the same thing. It’s a matter of historical record that the German Workers Party, the nucleus of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazi Party’s full name), was founded as a political action group by the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), an Ariosophical secret society. The organizational and ideological links are impossible to miss.

That is to say, Hitler and his regime were hopelessly unoriginal; in terms of their declared goals, they rank right up there with history’s most embarrassing failures; and even as a mass murderer, Hitler was second-rate.  Thus it’s reasonable to ask why this malevolent but mediocre figure has been lifted out from among all the other tyrants and torturers of a brutal age and turned into our culture’s favorite icon of absolute evil. It’s a complicated issue, and like most such issues in the genesis of cultural forms, it’s best understood through the lens of history.

The global South has its own opinions about Hitler. This is a brand of ice cream in India.

By 1933 it was as clear as anything could be that the British Empire—the largest empire in recorded history, and also one of the most cruel and rapacious—was in its death throes, burdened by a massive overhang of unpayable debts and an equally massive and dysfunctional bureaucratic state that had long since stopped doing much of anything besides enriching its inmates. The British pound sterling, the worldwide reserve currency of the day and the foundation of global trade, was lurching from one crisis to another, and the mere fact that no other currency was ready to take its place didn’t give it any particular staying power.

That was the year that the Great Depression hit rock bottom.  It was also the year that two of the three nations most likely to succeed Britain as global hegemon got new governments that took power promising a radical break with the policies of the past. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt took charge of the country after the bitterly contested 1932 election, backed by a mass movement that effectively made him president for life.  He proceeded to reinterpret the US constitution in ways no previous politician had ever attempted, centralizing power in the federal executive and giving the national government unprecedented control over economic life.

Run your economy into the ground so that the rich can get richer, and you may end up with this. Are you listening, Jerome Powell?

In Germany, a nearly identical process made Adolf Hitler Chancellor; the great difference was that the German constitution of the time was much more flexible than the US constitution, and allowed the New Germany (as it was called then) to proceed much further than the New Deal ever did.  In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin clawed his way to power a little earlier, cementing his control over the Soviet government by 1930.  Later on, all three would round up their political opponents—Hitler leading the way in 1933, Stalin with the great purges that began in 1936, Roosevelt with a flurry of executive orders and new laws that enabled the once-famous sedition trials of 1941-1944 and the internment of Japanese-Americans in prison camps.

What makes these parallels all the more edgy is that all three men took power in the wake of the same global economic crisis and pursued closely related economic policies in response to it. The US stock market crash of 1929 and the implosion of Austria’s Credit Anstalt bank in 1931 were only the most visible events in the process by which the freewheeling lassiez-faire capitalism of the previous century destroyed itself.  Mainstream economists and media pundits insisted, just as they did in 2008, that the only thinkable response was to shovel money into the hands of the obscenely rich so they could avoid having to deal with the consequences of their own stupidity, while millions of people thrown out of work by the crisis shivered and starved.

There were plenty of alternatives, but the one that caught the public imagination centered on bringing the power of government to bear on the economic realm. That happened to various degrees in the three nations we’re considering. The Soviet Union went the furthest, as Stalin abandoned Lenin’s more moderate economic policies and nationalized all productive assets and economic activity.  Germany underwent a somewhat less drastic process of Gleichschaltung (“coordination”), in which every business of any size was assigned a Nazi Party official to oversee it and make sure that all its activities followed the latest dictates from Berlin.

The NRA logo. Businesses that cooperated with the NRA put this sign in their window. Those that didn’t…had problems.

Here again the United States was the laggard.  During Roosevelt’s first term, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) carried out a tolerably good imitation of Gleichschaltung, but that went by the boards with the compromise that followed the 1936 election, replaced by cozier arrangements that bought compliance from big business with favors from the government. It took decades longer, by way of the creeping bureaucratization of American life, to burden the United States with roughly the same degree of government control over the economy that Hitler managed in a few short months by his more forceful methods.

Then, of course, war broke out. It was by no means guaranteed that the United States would end up on Britain’s side. One of the uncomfortable secrets of prewar society that has been buried in retrospect, in America and Britain both, is the immense popularity that Hitler’s “New Germany” had among ordinary people and ruling elites alike.  Both countries also had no shortage of fans of the Soviet Union in those days. Roosevelt and the faction of the US elite that supported him were Anglophiles, though, and pushed an alliance with Britain; once the war expanded to include Russia, the pro-Soviet faction in America allied with the pro-British faction, and they squeezed the pro-German faction into submission.

That, more broadly, was what happened in global politics as well.  What normally occurs in any political struggle with three players is that two of them gang up on the third, eliminate it, and then start quarreling over the spoils. That’s the history of the twentieth century in a nutshell. What also happens in such situations is that the losing side in that first struggle becomes the rhetorical punching bag for both of the winning parties thereafter—and the more the losing side has in common with the winning sides, the more enthusiastically the punching proceeds.

Carl Sagan didn’t agree with fundamentalist Christians about much, but get him talking about astrology and it was quite another matter.

That can be seen at work in a very different context in American popular culture. Has it ever seemed strange to you, dear reader, that hardcore atheist materialists and devout Christians, who disagree about so much else, both condemn occult teachings such as astrology?  That’s because at the end of the Renaissance, there were three great intellectual movements in conflict—newborn scientific materialism, traditional Christianity, and the occult movement of the time. Once again, two players ganged up on the third and have been using it as a rhetorical target ever since, even as they pursue their quarrel with each other with unflagging zeal.

It’s doubtless necessary to stop at this point and remind my readers that none of the points just made excuse the appalling behavior of the National Socialist regime during its twelve years in power. Neither, for that matter, do they excuse the even more horrific behavior of the Soviet Union during its rather longer history, or—let’s say this softly—the atrocities that US governments have committed around the world and within our own borders. Nation-states do horrible things.  They’re especially likely to do horrible things when they’re clawing their way up the winding stair that leads to temporary global hegemony.

That’s when you start getting jokes like this…

It’s when those grim realities become too painfully clear, in turn, that people start looking for somebody at whom they can point an accusing finger while shouting, “Look at him! He’s much worse than we are!” That’s especially tempting when, as in the present case, the atrocities carried out at the command of the person we’re discussing were in fact worse than those carried out by our own government. The transition from “A is worse than B” to “A is absolute evil and B is sweet innocence and light itself,” profoundly dishonest as it is, is common enough in the presence of a sufficiently troubled national conscience.

The difficulty here is that this act of fingerpointing has consequences.  The psychology of hatred is poorly understood in today’s popular culture; a great many people think that hating something is a good way to get rid of it. Quite the contrary, the more you hate something, especially if you’re hating it as a way to ignore certain things in yourself, the more your own emotional life becomes dependent on it. The more energy you will then half-consciously put into preserving and supporting the thing you hate, so that it will always be available for you to hate.

…followed by political discourse like this.

This shows up even in the most vapid products of popular culture. Look at the way that all the popular hero vs. villain franchises make the villains indestructible and ever-resurgent. It doesn’t matter how often the notionally good guys in the Star Wars franchise whack the Empire, it (or some equivalent under a slightly different name) always pops back up again, strong as ever.  That’s anything but an accident. If you build your identity around fighting evil,  after all, it’s safe to say that you’ll always make sure not to defeat it, so that it will always be there for you to fight.

It’s for this reason, to cite a timely example, that Donald Trump isn’t a has-been today. If American politics had followed its normal course, his election in 2016 would have been no big deal. Populists from outside the political system seize elective office in this country from time to time.  What typically happens is that they have one not very successful term, whatever issues propelled them into office get taken up by professional politicians and absorbed into the system, and business as usual continues unhindered. In this case, by contrast, so many people became so obsessed with hating him that this process could no longer function.

That had several important effects. First of all, the political establishment was so busy shrieking its rage and hatred at Trump that it failed to do anything about the issues that brought him to power.  This guaranteed, in turn, that the issues in question would become more pressing and draw even more support away from the political mainstream and toward Trump and those who aligned themselves with him.  All that ecstasy of hatred poured out onto Trump also guaranteed that he would gain support; the more shrill it got, the more likely it was that everyone who was dissatisfied with the existing order of things, no matter how little they liked Trump personally, would rally around someone the defenders of the status quo hated so passionately.

It never occurs to them that their hatred and rage might be feeding what they think they’re fighting.

There are also subtler factors involved. So many people these days are so subservient to peer pressure, so terrified of the disapproval of the crowd, that I’m not at all sure how many of them realize that hatred can act as an intoxicant and a source of energy to its target. All things considered, hatred is not that far from love; both emotions place the person at whom they’re directed at the center of the lover’s or hater’s world; that much attention, poured out that unstintingly, can be a rush. I have no access to Trump’s private thoughts, of course, but the way that he deliberately encourages his enemies to go into Donald Duck splutterfests of frenzied rage and hatred suggests to me that he’s learned to binge on the emotional energy thus evoked.

All these same points, in turn, can be made of the cult of Hitler in the United States and other contemporary Western societies. No, I don’t think “cult” is too strong a word. In modern popular culture, Hitler started off as little more than a convenient punching bag that both capitalist and Marxist regimes could agree to denounce.  He changed over time into a target for what Carl Jung called “projection of the shadow,”  the process by which a person or a culture refuses to see their own failure to live up to their ideals and attributes that failure instead to some other person or group of people.  Now he’s become something considerably more troubling.

The corporate media has played a big role in feeding the cult, of course.

I don’t think it’s accidental, in other words, that a great many of those people who spend their time denouncing Hitler and Nazism most loudly, and fling these labels at their political enemies with reckless abandon, have started insisting that free speech and other constitutional guarantees of civil rights are bad things that should be gotten rid of.  The gap between hatred and love, as noted earlier, is not as wide as many people assume, and it’s not at all uncommon for one to change suddenly into the other. The return of the repressed is a potent force. So is the craving, especially powerful among those who spend their lives groveling before the idol of peer pressure, to slam all the way to the opposite extreme and embrace the unthinkable.

Thus one of the things that worries me right now is the possibility that the decades immediately ahead may see a revival of Nazism. By this I don’t mean the emergence of some political viewpoint that gets labeled “Nazi” by its enemies—we’ve had plenty of those already, on both sides of the political spectrum—but a literal attempt to rehabilitate Hitler’s National Socialism, or something very much like it, as a modern political stance. Nor do I expect that to come from the right, or for that matter from the extreme left.  To judge by who’s participating most eagerly in the obsession with Hitler these days, I expect it to emerge from the shattered remnants of the corporate liberalism now so obviously slipping toward history’s exit doors.

And of course the Democrats haven’t exactly been slow to contribute to it, either.

Does that seem improbable? Nietzsche, who predicted the ideological wars of the twentieth century decades ahead of anyone else, wrote this three years before Hitler was born:  “the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of tyrants.”  History shows that he was quite correct.  Again, the return of the repressed is a potent force, and there’s another factor involved.  Those who pile unrealistic hopes on democracy—that eternally unsatisfying muddle of compromises whose only advantage is that it’s better than the alternatives—very often end up embracing tyranny once it finally sinks in that they’re not going to get everything they think they want. Combine that with the obsessive fascination with Hitler among today’s corporate liberals and it’s not hard to see a very ugly prospect emerging.

That prospect horrifies me. A political movement doesn’t have to be the worst in human history, after all, to be very, very, very bad. Furthermore, the flaws that led to Hitler’s failure weren’t accidental.  They were hardwired into the core structure of Nazism itself, and any nation that adopts something much like Hitler’s ideology can expect to crash and burn in some similar way. Avoiding that outcome will admittedly require more common sense and capacity for reflection than has had much presence recently at any point on the political spectrum. Still, we can hope.

28 Comments

  1. In Europe I’d expect Hitler’s reputation to be rehabilitated by Muslim and African immigrants and their leftist allies who begin to view Hitler as a anti-colonialist who valiantly fought against the evil evil evil British and French and American empires but lost.

  2. Yes, there seems to be almost an unconscious attraction to Trump in the way so many structure their day around hating him. People are looking for a big daddy figure perhaps because we have spent so much time as a culture in building up the virtues of women while belittling men. The opposite has a way of working itself in around the next bend.

  3. Interesting post, thank you.

    Could you please expand a bit on your comment below?

    the flaws that led to Hitler’s failure weren’t accidental. They were hardwired into the core structure of Nazism itself

    What were these hardwired flaws?

    Thanks,
    Edward

  4. This invoking at the end reminds me of many Venture Capital elites. Peter Thiel coming to mind and his ideas from Zero To One. He eludes often to democracy being a series of compromises and no one getting what they want. He sort of points out that some are better at decision making , planning etc. so they should be doing this and eliminating bureaucratic bloat. I find your last two paragraphs that these ideas might already coagulating in the minds of some in the US.

  5. Well, I think the system of National Socialism already returned after the International Socialism failed.
    Look how the China of Mr. Xi structures the society and economy.
    Seems like somebody there picked up “My Struggle”.
    The state got quite some elements of the 3rd Reich minus the mustache.
    Look at Russia now under Mr. Putin, also here you might find a similar mixture of economy and state, after rejecting International Socialism and pure Capitalism.
    It is back and it looks to be somehow successful implementations in those countries.
    Being a bit too successful, now both countries are made enemies of the crumbling West.
    Nothing is ever new on the planet …..

  6. A truly excellent post! I was particularly delighted to see you point out:

    “One of the uncomfortable secrets of prewar society that has been buried in retrospect, in America and Britain both, is the immense popularity that Hitler’s “New Germany” had among ordinary people and ruling elites alike.”

    When I was still in elementary school in Berkeley in the early 1950s, one of my school friends, now a retired judge in California, was eagerly collecting Nazi regalia. There was a lot of Nazi souveniers in the city at the time, brought back as war souveniers by returning GIs. He liked their image very much.

    (In those long-forgotten days Berkeley was a very authoritarian city, where police surveilence was everywhere. Boys in elementary school had military drill every week on the school playground, under the command of uniformed police officers. The chief of police was the famous August Vollmer, a specialist in advanced means of policing and population control.)

  7. “The Democrats are the real racists” is frequently bandied around by Republicans for the past 40 years. It wasn’t really all that accurate back then, but if the Democrats and their corporate liberals do end up becoming neo-Nazis in the next 40 years then the statement could end up being prophetic.

  8. “Hitler believed devoutly that white Europeans ought to rule the world; by crippling the British, French, and Dutch colonial empires just when independence movements in their colonies were beginning to get traction, he did more than any other single person to bring about the end of European global hegemony and the rise of independent nations across the global South.”

    He did believe that Germany should have its own empire and believed that Germans, with Scandinavians trailing close behind, should be at the top of the heap. I don’t think he cared that much about the British, French, and Dutch empires. White nationalism is an American thing, not a European thing. Hitler was a German nationalist, maybe even a Nordic nationalist, but nothing further than that.

    And yes, Hitler did lose. So, too, did the Japanese. Both of these were underdogs. Hitler was throwing the dice and he knew it. The losers were Germany, Japan, Italy, Britain, and France (the last two of which actually deluded themselves into thinking they were winners). The real winner was the USA. I suppose the USSR could also be considered a winner but they paid a terrible price for winning.

    What was original about Hitler was trying to create an empire in the European heartland. The others had created colonial empires in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

  9. I think that Godwin’s law explains much of Hitler’s continuing presence in Western consciousness…the man is Extremely useful as a rhetorical device:
    “attorney Mike Godwin came up with a simple law: Sooner or later in any online argument, someone will bring up Hitler.
    Today, the 1990 adage known as Godwin’s Law seems more appropriate than ever, as social media has turned civil discourse into a never-ending series of flame wars.”

  10. Thank you again for another thought-provoking post. I’d like to hear your opinion on another facet of Hitler monomania, which is that it makes it much easier to blame one symbolic figure for all the wrongdoing and let everyone else off. While it’s true there was a token effort to round up and bring to justice the ringleaders, it’s also true the Allies deliberately decided not to chase up the issue with the rest of the administration, once it became clear they were going to need the remaining population on side. Whenever you watch one of the (many, many) ‘Rise of the Nazis’ documentaries, you will note a conspicuous silence on how H really did it, because this would put in full public light how large a proportion of normal people are quite happy to either participate in, or wilfully ignore, mass murder.

  11. Fascinating post. It’s intriguing that the emotional energy of hatred can actually be fuel for it’s target. I believe what you are suggesting goes beyond Dion Fortune’s famous maxim that what you oppose becomes locked in place. It sounds like active hate does more than just locking in place but actually causes the target to grow and expand.

  12. Great post. I am particularly taken by the observation that love and hate are nearly the same thing, or at least different sides of the same coin. If you ask what is the opposite of love, most people will reflexively say hate. They don’t grasp that the real opposite of love is indifference. (A fact I’ve known for a long time, having personally spent my life firmly on the indifference end of the spectrum.) When you grasp that key point about the relationship between love and hate, much of what you argue in this post naturally follows.

  13. Anonymous, that’s not at all impossible. I’m amused to think of the splutterfests that will get from European neofascists, many of whom also admire Hitler but loathe Muslim and African immigrants!

    Dennis, that’s a good point. The return of the repressed is a powerful force!

    Edward, there were at least two of them. The first was the Führerprinzip, Hitler’s ideology of charismatic leadership, which played an important role in making the Nazi regime inefficient. It’s the usual problem with Romantic politics, which exalt enthusiasm over organization; if Hitler had taken power over a nation less naturally obedient and organized than Germany, his regime would have fallen apart in a matter of months. The more important flaw, though, was the racial delusion that ran all through Nazism. If Hitler hadn’t had his racial bigotries, his regime wouldn’t have chased most of the good nuclear scientists out of Europe, guaranteeing that the US would get the bomb before the Axis did; it also would have treated the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe as potential allies rather than Untermenschen, thus completely transforming the political calculus of the region and allowing Hitler to use his considerable skills at diplomacy to create a central and eastern European alliance and customs union under German leadership. (It might also have kept him from being so contemptuous of Russia, and thus launching the campaign that did more than anything else to destroy him.)

    Kyle, yeah, that’s among the things that concern me.

    B3rnhard, no argument there. Social democracy and national socialism are the two most widespread political systems in the world today.

    Robert, thanks for this. A lot of people these days really have no idea how authoritarian this country was, outside of certain enclaves, before the Sixties tore things wide open.

    Peter, once you start deciding that people ought to be judged en masse based on their skin color, gender, or other broad somatic classifications, you’ve already gone down that road — and the Democrats have certainly done so. That’s another of the reasons that I worry about today’s corporate liberals becoming tomorrow’s goose steppers.

    AA, I recommend you do more reading in the literature on the long-term plans and global politics of Hitler’s regime. Hitler believed that England was his natural ally, and wanted to see Germany’s land empire and Britain’s maritime empire work together. He envied France its African empire. As for Hitler’s supposed originality in wanting to create an empire in the European heartland, er, I gather you’ve never heard of a guy named Napoleon Bonaparte.

    Davie, to my mind Godwin’s law is an effect, not a cause. Why Hitler? Why not Stalin, say, or some other figure?

    Zachariah, oh, that’s part of why nobody talks about Hitler’s methods, but I’d argue it isn’t the most important part. The most important reasons nobody talks turkey about the rise of Hitler are threefold. First, it’s still a viable path to power, and the current holders of power aren’t exactly eager to see anyone else try it. Second, some of the methods Hitler used are still very much in use on all sides of politics in the industrial world to get and keep power, and it’s not in the interests of those who use such methods to have the rest of us notice what they’re up to. Third, there’s the role of occultism in all this. Hitler was an occultist; so were many other people in the inner circle of his party, including Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess; his party, as I noted in my post, was launched and funded originally by an occult secret society, and Hitler received a great deal of help and coaching in his early days from Dietrich Eckart and other occultists. That’s something nobody in the modern industrial world wants to touch, because it flies in the face of one of the central dogmas of our culture — the notion that occultism can’t possibly be anything other than meaningless superstitious handwaving.

    Samurai_47, good. Fortune’s principle was “what you resist, persists” — it’s resistance, rather than hatred, that she discusses. This is specific to hatred. Energy is energy, and the more energy you pour into hating someone, the more you center your life around that hatred, the more easily that person can take the energy and make good (or bad) use of it. It’s a skill some people figure out by themselves and others can be taught.

    Stephen, that was one of the things I picked up from my teacher John Gilbert. He taught that the opposite of love is apathy, and that hate is simply a distortion of love, not its absence or opposite. It really does make sense of a lot of things in life.

  14. Thank you, JMG. I do not have much of substance to contribute, being perhaps myself part of the problem rather than part of the solution. (I obsess over the guy, and over his party, and over all the other stuff that went with it – the 1941-1944 horrors here in Estonia, the gray misery of Anderson shelters and gas masks and nocturnal explosions over in the 1939-1945 UK – I obsess and obsess, and it gets worth with the passing years.) But I WOULD like to contribute a link which might lighten the atmosphere. Here we see Charlie Chaplin’s mastery of practical NSDAP phonemics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7oQngQA3rM. His impression of the mitteleuropäisch ÜÜÜÜ, at 00:12 or so, is particularly fine.

  15. For those who like to watch videos, I think this would be a good occasion for once again posting a link to Chris Ray Gun’s 2017 song-parody Punch A Nazi.

  16. Thank you for a most timely and insightful essay. I speculated that you might touch upon Jung in this post, and I wasn’t disappointed. Since your last word is “hope,” may I offer one of my favorite Jung quotes:

    “The mystery play is soft like air and thin smoke, and you are raw matter that is disturbingly heavy.
    But let your hope, which is your highest good and highest ability, lead the way, and serve you as a guide in the world of darkness, since it is of like substance with the forms of that world. ” ~ Carl Jung, The Red Book. p. 246


  17. “Godwin’s law is an effect, not a cause”
    Yes indeed. There are a bunch of things which make Hitler more suitable as a rhetorical device compared to the others though, and as you said, others were more effective than he was. The US fought and won a war against him (not so for Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot), the continuing need to repudiate Nazi ideas (the ideas of the others now fading into irrelevance), the greater ease of oversimplifying that war into mere hatred which we justify projecting on “the other”. I know there are many more reasons which I’m missing. Would be fascinating to try to find them all.

  18. Oh, I now think of a further point I could contribute to the discussion around this excellent essay. We might at this historical juncture focus on people who opposed the Reichsführer, and yet did so without going into an Orwellian hate mode. Although I do not know German post-1933 history all that well, I would like to cite one person who arguably mounted such an opposition, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, in Münster. He was calm, he was firm, he stood for the most traditional of German values, he eventually called out the victorious Allied occupation authorities in their turn, and he survived everything. His story is told by a Toronto author whom I used to know slightly when I lived in Canada, Fr Daniel Utrecht, in a book entitled _The Lion of Münster_ (quite recent, and still in print, and available from Amazon; I have read parts of this book, although not all of it). Well, there is that bishop, and there is Corrie Ten Boom (surely commemorated at Yad Vashem) and there is Uku Masing right here in Tartu County, Estonia (I know he is commemorated at Yad Vashem): and above all, there is my dear grandma’s Main Moral Lesson, that no matter what happens, life tends to go on. (Mum and Grandma approaching a Nazi checkpoint as refugees, while lacking papers: Grandma said “We simply will tell them the truth,” to which Mum shrieked, “The TRUTH , the TRUTH – we will be shot if we tell them the truth.” There was no shooting. Or again Grandma dealing with the so-efficient German refugee authorities, in the autumn-or-winter of 1944-1945, near Rostock: “Haben Sie ALLES verloren,” asked the man in authority. Grandma knew exactly what to do, so on came the municipal waterworks, “Ja, ALLES….”, in the then-requisite flood of tears. Mum was hoping in her anxiety that the official would not notice some warm clothes hanging in the coathook part of their room, and indeed the official did not notice. Like I say, life goes on.)

  19. Learning to make productive use of negative energy sounds like an extremely useful skill. It’s not one that I have, though! Whenever I’ve been the object of hatred it has been very uncomfortable.

    Could you explain how that could work? An example from my own life is that I have come to loathe insurance companies. I’m realizing now that I need to tone it down, because it’s just giving energy to the insurance company, it doesn’t change how they do business, and it harms me to get all worked up with animosity.

    But what if I was an insurance company executive? I suppose what I would do would be to focus on conducting business in a way that genuinely helped people by spreading risk. So that would be a focus on building up the positive aspect of the insurance business. I can’t work out how I could possibly benefit from hatred directed toward me.

  20. In case you have not seen this comedy sketch yet…..
    it is hilarious and on topic (becoming what you say you reject.)
    JMG I know you don’t do videos, but you could just listen, it is funny but kind of frightening if you think about the point they are making.

    When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg

  21. “He taught that the opposite of love is apathy”

    It certainly is. Few people seem to grasp that point. “Go now and die in whatever way seems best to you” is such a good line to illustrate the point.

    When the Japanese were rolling through southeast Asia in 1942 they specifically pointed out they were not the British, French, or Dutch colonizers. Then they promptly bungled their public relations.

    The ease at which love and hate can switch is the plot point of the movie “War of the Roses.”

    Good essay. Or course I’ve been demoted from deplorable to garbage, so take that as you will.

  22. If American politics had followed its normal course, there’s a decent chance Trump would not have won the 2016 election. The Democrats could have looked at the twin insurgencies in the form of Trump and Sanders and crafted a set of policies that would appeal to the populists, and the Trump campaign would have imploded: they had a candidate with nor prior experience in politics, fighting his own party’s institutions, and was widely disliked even by his own voters.

    This post gets to one of the very real concerns I have about my country’s future: if there is a shift toward Nazism among the corporate liberals, I think it will happen when corporate liberalism is losing control in the US; but Canada is still governed by it, and the populist movement has not yet been able to shake things up nearly as much as in the US. I’m rather concerned that we might actually come to be governed by the new Nazis, at least until the whole thing implodes quite messily.

    I have plans in place to get out in a hurry if need be, even though I really hope I don’t need to implement them.

  23. One important difference between Hitler and Stalin and Mao is that the latter two kept their crimes against humanity mostly within national boundaries. (Except for Stalin’s Holodomor in the Ukraine, the memory of which fuels the present war.) Hitler crossed national boundaries for his victims. This was against the letter and spirit of the Peace of Westphalia.

    In retrospect that agreement, forced by centuries of religious slaughter, was the ultimate in cynicism. So what if the king next door is preaching a false religion that will get his subjects damned for all eternity? He isn’t preaching to _me!_

    You could argue that Stalin and Mao preached Communism worldwide, and that is a violation of the spirit of Westphalia, if you are willing to call Communism and Capitalism religions.

  24. At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.

    If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.

    * * *

    This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.

    May FJay peacefully birth a healthy baby at home with her loved ones. May her postpartum period be restful and full of love and support. May her older child feel surrounded by her love as he adapts to life as a big brother and may her marriage be strengthened during this time.

    May Hal Freeman’s daughter Marina recover from walking pneumonia.

    May Leonardo Johann from Bremen in Germany, who was
    born prematurely two months early
    , come home safe and sound.

    May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.

    May Kevin, his sister Cynthia, and their elderly mother Dianne have a positive change in their fortunes which allows them to find affordable housing and a better life.

    May Tyler’s partner Monika and newborn baby Isabella both be blessed with good health.

    May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.

    May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.

    May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.

    May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.

    Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.

    * * *
    Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.

    If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.

  25. Thank you JMG for this post and thank you to everyone who voted with me this time. I have been one of those voting for it for a good long time. I have wondered for a long time about our fascination with the corporal. I have a personal fascination with the Second World War but it is more of a straight interested in the war. So thanks very much for this.
    I have two questions first what are the best WW2 books you and everyone can recommend, especially but not exclusively occult related ones
    Second how does one recognize and deal with that which is repressed inside our own selves (and I recognize that that is a big question)?

  26. JMG, et al

    I have been wondering if there isn’t something else moving in addition to this. Over the last few years or so there have been more than a few excellent WWII movies, tv shows and books that have come out. The most recent being Masters of the Air that came out earlier this year. But this has me wondering if this resurgence isn’t an attempt to shore up the underlying founding myth of the Managerial estate. The victory in WWII being the great crusade that required the managerial state to win. Oh and if there is another Hitler you CLEARLY need us to defeat their evilly evilness. So part of the constant refrain of WWII being the good war and Hitler being the bad guy is a useful propaganda tool to shore up the PMCs control.

    Other Dave

  27. Before we go on, a brief note. This morning I’ve fielded, along with relevant posts, a fair-sized flurry of attempted posts trying to drag the discussion away from its topic and into the usual pointless yelling about who was most to blame for the Second World War. Then there are the others who are trying to whip up a squabble about who are *really* the worst mass murderers of all time. Those are not what this post is talking about, and nothing along those lines will be put through. ‘Nuf said.

    With that, let’s proceed with the discussion.

    Toomas and Mister N, thanks for both of these.

    Goldenhawk, and thanks for this! Very apposite words.

    Davie, I think the reasons I suggested might be worth considering in there somewhere…

    Toomas, that strikes me as a very good idea. It’s possible, as your examples show, to face down monsters without becoming a monster yourself.

    Samurai_47, it’s not a cognitive thing — not a matter of ideas in your mind. It’s energetic, functioning at the same level as hunger, lust, or the desire for sleep. I don’t propose to go into more detail, as it’s not exactly something I want to encourage!

    Dobbs, thanks for this.

    Siliconguy, it’s been educational to watch Trump’s supporters jump on that thoughtless comment of Biden’s and make any amount of hay with it. And of course the Babylon Bee was sprinting to try to stay ahead:

    Taylor, I admit that concerns me as well. It’ll be interesting to see what Britain and Canada do if the US breaks away from the neoliberal consensus.

    Paradoctor, I do indeed consider Communism a religion — a civil religion, as discussed here:

    https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2013/04/the-fate-of-civil-religion.html

    Quin, thanks for this as always.

    Will, it’s been a long time since I’ve read extensively on the Second World War so I don’t have anything to offer. As for repressed contents, there’s one essential rule — bring it up into consciousness and deal with it. If you don’t, what you repress will control you; once you do, you can control it. There are plenty of ways to bring it up into consciousness — dreamwork, meditation, journaling, creative arts, and the list goes on — but you can’t leave it down there in the darkness. If you do, it will eat you.

    Other Dave, that’s quite possible!

  28. The best way to exorcise a demon is to laugh at it.

    Hitler
    He only had one ball
    Goering
    Had two but VERY small
    Himmler
    Had something similar
    Poor old Goebbels had no balls at all

Courteous, concise comments relevant to the topic of the current post are welcome, whether or not they agree with the views expressed here, and I try to respond to each comment as time permits. Long screeds proclaiming the infallibility of some ideology or other, however, will be deleted; so will repeated attempts to hammer on a point already addressed; so will comments containing profanity, abusive language, flamebaiting and the like -- I filled up my supply of Troll Bingo cards years ago and have no interest in adding any more to my collection; and so will sales spam and offers of "guest posts" pitching products. I'm quite aware that the concept of polite discourse is hopelessly dowdy and out of date, but then some people would say the same thing about the traditions this blog is meant to discuss. Thank you for reading Ecosophia! -- JMG

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