07-06-2021, 02:04 AM
(07-01-2021, 09:27 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I was referring to an archived thread, "The Bolshevik Revolution through the Great Patriotic War--a 28-year Crisis Era?"
Men make history, but history also shapes the people who live through it. Thoroughly-bad people like Hitler and Stalin make really-bad history. In the case of Hitler, successful enemies like Churchill and FDR must wage a veritable jihad against him to save their systems.
Hitler was simply evil, and even more as an autodidact on history he missed much. He saw American history mostly as "Cowboys and Indians", which is grossly inadequate. All that one needs to do to realize how distorted his understanding of American history was is to examine the index of Mein Kampf. Significantly missing are Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and (Theodore) Roosevelt. He did not recognize the abolitionist movement or the struggle for the rights of Negroes (the polite word of the time). Most obviously he got the Jews and Judaism wrong. Maybe Jews and Judaism became a surrogate for what he disliked in himself. Rather than recognizing Jews and Judaism as the founders of the ethical morality of Christianity he saw them as impediments to his desires. So Judaism is incompatible with Hitler's megalomania?
Coming from antisemitic families, the more that I heard the garbage that is antisemitism, the more curious I got about Jews and Judaism... and the better they looked. I got to meet large numbers of Jews at one point and discovered how wrong antisemitism was. I'm not much of a rebel, but antisemitism is something against which to rebel. Maybe were I from an Italian-American family of Mafia groupies I might love the Italian component of Western high culture but loathe the Mafia. Maybe if I were from some red-diaper family of Jewish origin I would see something terribly wrong with Commies and concur with Churchill that the solution to the "International" Jew is for that Jew to return to Judaism. About half my ancestry is German or Swiss, and as I confront the Nazi part of German history I recognize that there was nothing wrong with German culture and the Nazi amorality between 1933 and 1945 that Judaism could not have solved. Judaism keeps asking the same questions that it has answered for over two millennia because those questions emerge often enough and among all peoples.
If Hitler so mangled history through his selective learning (a commonplace characteristic of an autodidact) as a basis of a twisted dream that could only implode of its own gross immorality, Stalin made history within the realm of his power a more dangerous phenomenon. Stalin had more formal learning than Hitler, much of it through a seminary, and he turned his knowledge of the pedagogy of the seminary on behalf of something very different from the Georgian Orthodox Church. Much of his writing reflects that pedagogy, and it well fit the elementary level of learning common in the USSR in the 1930's. Until people in large numbers got learned enough to recognize the emptiness of the political catechism of Stalinism , his system would be unassailable. (Note well that all modern despots from Lenin to Mao to Reza II to Qaddafi to Mugabe to Saddam work most effectively with people of elementary-level learning; grossly-illiterate people cannot understand the propaganda, but people excessively learned for it recognize the hypocrisy, hollowness, inconsistency, and hollowness of what they are told. Most despots who have taken charge of a country in which illiteracy is rife have started literacy programs heavy on propaganda. But if people are already fairly-well educated, as in Hitler's Germany, Castro's Cuba, or Pinochet's Chile the despot must debase learning. It is quite possible that Hitler saw a menace in the Jews for their respect for learning (all the better for the refinement of moral law that underpins Judaism, and moral law that undermines an immoral order can only be a menace to an evil cause). Note that the most persistent fascist cause in America, the KKK, has consistently done best among people of minimal learning. If you think that this is simply a fault with white people in America, then consider also the urban gangs: the smarter that one is, the more one loathes them if one is from the ethnic group that predominates in the gangs. Note that support for Donald Trump in America has a strong negative correlation to formal learning. 51% of white college graduates voted against him.
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.