07-03-2019, 03:15 AM
(07-03-2019, 12:06 AM)taramarie Wrote: I had to look up to see if it was a quote directly from Hitler and yes it is correct. Yes the majority of people in a country are far too absorbed into their own lives to be deeply informed into what goes on and that is when corruption can go on like gardeners with unattended gardens, weeds easily grow if they are not known of and weeded out before it takes over the entire garden. Meaning people need to be well informed voters and well aware of actual lies not calling actual facts lies because it is a convenient excuse to back up a bias.
There is no person I less want to sort as an authority even on a well-documented fact than Hitler. He said things that few wish were true. About everything he ever wrote in Mein Kampf is distressing. Still, despite having so little formal preparation for political power he won dictatorial power and used it in the vilest ways
Hitler was an extreme cynic on human nature -- especially on intellectual laziness. In my experience I have found that thinking can save huge amounts of frustration. It is not a substitute for hard, dedicated work, but it can relieve one of some pointless difficulty and distress (including at the worst, grief). He well knew how politics could work at their worst -- with deceit and demagoguery as he knew in the limited democracy that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The journalist William Shirer wrote much truth, to the extent that it was documentary, in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But he could wax sentimental of stories of the old Vienna that was a fairy-tale world of magnificant castles, Lipizzaner stallions, Strauss waltzes and the glorious music of Mozart and Haydn -- over a more subterranean world. Sure, the anti-intellectualism could be kept in check because such people as the Emperor thought such bad for the image of Austria. The Emperor could limit an antisemite like Karl Lueger; after 1918 there was nobody to fend off the worst. Someone like Sigmund Freud could study human nature and impart upon people today knowledge that makes them unable to think as if it were still the nineteenth century. People like Hitler who had learned alleged lessons about the Jews from Lueger could take such lessons a few steps further... to cattle cars taking helpless people to camps where many would be gassed. Like others, Shirer had likely had a wonderful time in Vienna and waxed nostalgic about it. Sentimentality can impart a bias and confusion into history.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.