09-01-2022, 03:00 PM
(09-01-2022, 12:49 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Regardless of what your views, I think it's important to remember that a Grey Champion figure could just as easily be someone kinda evil. We could get a Hitler, Mussolini or Mao as easily as a Churchill or Lincoln.
Well (choking expressions as if in a cartoon cell), yes. That figure could present himself as a Grey Champion as a form of extreme arrogance. In some respects Lenin and Mussolini have some of the characteristics of a Grey Champion. They stood for evil causes, though; both were extremely narcissistic. I look at Mussolini and see someone melding the worst traits of an Idealist (arrogance, ruthlessness, and selfishness) with the amorality characteristic of the worst sorts of Reactive types. Mussolini continued the youthful recklessness of Reactive youth, fostering it in others far too late to have turned it into caution.
Lincoln, Churchill, and FDR knew that the only real victory came from leaving those consigned to defeat with no cause for fighting back. That is how the American Civil War and the Second World War ended: with the defeated feeling the sting of defeat but with no cause for striking back. The Axis powers could destroy the hatred of occupied people only by killing them.
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.