http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501347.html<snip> "Frankly, I have never had a hard time humanizing Hitler. Ambition, brutality, hatred, courage -- these are attributes we can all understand. We have a piece of them in ourselves. Lesser sociopaths move around us all the time. We read about them in the newspapers and see them on television. It is not as if Hitler is something unique, unknown to history before, never repeated afterward. He was a man, nothing more -- and someone like him will come at us time and time again. He is the evil mutant of our imperfectible species.
The deeper mystery is the German people. There is, as one sharp historian noted, "a whiff of 'victim culture' about the film" -- the characterization of the Germans as victims of Hitler or, in some cases, of the rapacious Russians. This is in line with some recent German writings in which the inexcusable firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg are emphasized to show that Germans were victims, too -- and the atrocities of the Red Army are cited to explain the ferocity of the German resistance. These things happened, and they no doubt played a role in the remarkable -- and remarkably scary -- German resistance. After all, Germans fought for Hitler to his death and then, in a historic nanosecond, became remarkably good democrats. It is easier to explain Hitler than to explain that."
<snip>
When I read this, this morning, I wondered if Richard isn't trying to wake us up. That this can happen (and might be) right here. All we hear about right now is the poor, victimized, Christian right-wing, and yet we know that they follow anywhere the BFEE wants them to go. In 2002, when Bush started his 'axis of evil' crap, I bought 2 or 3 books on how the German people, common, ordinary people, reacted to the super militarism of the Nazis. The parallels are most striking.
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