re: #22 goddamnedfrank

I’m reading this: Prophets of Deceit, Lowenthal and Guterman, 1949

I’m only two chapters in, but you might find it interesting.

I agree with you about people under-estimating stupidity, though. The Nazis in particular have been carefully re-written as almost supernatural in their malevolence and Svengali-like ability to compel…but they fucking weren’t any of that. Even the “smart” Nazis had glaring blind spots (most having the exact same blind spot: Hitler being a manbaby with a plan as thin as the plot of a dime-store western). You had regular stupid, little-cruel men happy to roll along as long as they were allowed to feel “good,” interspersed with a few clever, crueler men with enough competence to make the rough beast slouch for a years before shitting itself dead.

But at this point…I think that’s deliberate. Making the Nazis scraped-off-the-celluloid baddies covers for so much of the larger fucked-up-ness of Eurasia—the colonialism, the anti-Semitism—and ducks around awkward self-reflection. But it also deflects attention from another possible lesson of Nazi Germany: the fragility of democratic, and even human, norms. A few sociopaths and narcissists slotted into the correct positions tilted the whole fucking system…in no small part because a bunch of tunnel-visioned twats thought they could put a yoke on the nutters and make bank, but also because of a larger group of people who assumed they couldn’t be serious, that at any moment someone clever would come along and make it stop.

It’s easier to invent monsters than concede that our factory-setting basic flaws can add up to unspeakable things.