Indeed there is something upsetting about the socalled greatest culture (in
Europe? anywhere?) cranking out people who kill polish children iwth a
leatherbound edition of the Koenisber "sage."
Likewise the celebrated Himmler's speech which is a quotation of Kant (the
Pflicht speech is what I refer to.)
None of this seems to me to indicate psychpathologies.
If they were to win the war they woud have hanged Fdr, or Stalin, or De
Gaulle.
One interesting point raised by Bruce si why exactly places like Rome
Berlin were not given the same treatment as Nagasaki.
That the whole of Germany should have been razed to the ground was a good
idea, unpopular for many reasons, likewise way too many nazis in many
professions escaped the firing squad (on the subject for those who like to
see assholehood at work, non psychopatholgy, I would suggest "ex
captivitate salus" by C. Schmitt available in many languages
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
palma
Er selbst bevorzugte undurchdringlich Klarheit
On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 2:49 PM <epostboxx@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Re [tangentially]: Hitler ... and psychopathology, or as the following
article puts it, simply, 'lunacy' ...
The following appeared in THE TELEGRAPH (25 Jul 2009); extracted from
Andrew Roberts' book THE STORM OF WAR:
<<***I feel compelled to add here a note of caution to readers: the
following excerpt contains disturbing graphic depictions of the
consequences of being sent into combat inadequately prepared for Russian
winter weather.***>>
Believing himself to be as much an expert in meteorology as in everything
else, Hitler, a world-class know-all, went on to state that "weather
prediction is not a science that can be learnt mechanically. What we need
are men gifted with a sixth sense, who live in nature and with nature –
whether or not they know anything about isotherms and isobars. As a rule,
obviously, these men are not particularly suited to the wearing of
uniforms. One of them will have a humped back, another will be
bandy-legged, a third paralytic. Similarly, one doesn't expect them to live
like bureaucrats."
These "human barometers", as Hitler dubbed them – who don't much sound
like exemplars of the Master Race – would have telephones installed in
their homes free of charge and would predict the weather for the Reich and
"be flattered to have people relying on [their] knowledge". These woodland
folk would be people "who understand the flights of midges and swallows,
who can read the signs, who feel the wind, to whom the movements of the sky
are familiar. Elements are involved in that kind of thing that are beyond
mathematics." Or parody.
Hitler was proud of his own hardiness in the cold, boasting on August 12,
1942, how "having to change into long trousers was always a misery to me.
Even with a temperature of 10 below zero, I used to go about in lederhosen.
The feeling of freedom they give you is wonderful. Abandoning my shorts was
one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make… Anything up to five degrees
below zero I don't even notice. Quite a number of young people of today
already wear shorts all the year round; it is just a question of habit. In
the future, I shall have an SS Highland Brigade in lederhosen."
The horrific results of the lack of warm clothing were truly disgusting.
The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte recalled in his novel KAPUTT how he
had watched the German troops returning from the Eastern Front, and was in
the Europeiski Café in Warsaw when "suddenly I was struck with horror and
realised that they had no eyelids. I had already seen soldiers with lidless
eyes, on the platform of the Minsk station a few days previously on my way
from Smolensk.
"The ghastly cold of that winter had the strangest consequences. Thousands
and thousands of soldiers had lost their limbs; thousands and thousands had
their ears, their noses, their fingers and their sexual organs ripped off
by the frost. Many had lost their hair… Many had lost their eyelids. Singed
by the cold, the eyelid drops off like a piece of dead skin… Their future
was only lunacy."
The full extract from THE STORM OF WAR can be found at
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/britain-at-war/5907564/Second-World-War-Frozen-to-death-by-the-Fuhrer.html
I still struggle to write about some of my personal encounters of the past
25 years: a chance exchange on the street with a veteran of "Unternehmen
Barbarossa" (he must have been one of the 'luckier' ones; at least he still
had his eyelids); with a survivor of the Russian internment camps for
German prisoners of war ("3,000 went in; when several years later we were
released, 800 came out"); with a survivor of one of the German
concentration camps for political undesirables ("there was an outbreak of
dysentery - it was one of the' best' weeks of my internment; the guards
fled from direct contact with us inmates, and 'only' 77 of us died"); and
with survivors from both sides of the Allied bombardment of Kiel (a close
relative of mine - a tail-gunner - was shot down into Kiel Bay and spent
the rest of the war in a German POW camp, returning in broken health to
Canada and alcoholism that plagued him and his family the rest of his life;
my 'Lebensgefährtin's mother - a 3-year-old child - and her mother spent
the last year of the war huddling in one of the bunkers in this city during
such raids); another chance encounter with a Polish woman (who spent the
war in Kiel and survived those raids, although under prohibition of
entering such bunkers; ...)
Evacuations of city neighbourhoods on discovery of unexploded bombs is
still a frequent occurrence here in northern Germany; only occasionally are
teams working on defusing such bombs killed. (20 years ago I personally
lost several years of irreplaceable work when our apartment was broken into
during such an evacuation - the irony that the bomb being then defused may
well have been dropped by the relative mentioned above has not escaped me.
Perhaps this could be seen as a 'minor' form of collateral damage; a
much-delayed 'personalized' version of coming under 'friendly fire.')
I have a friend whose doctoral dissertation deals with the oral accounts
of survivors from both sides of the conflict on the border between Norway
and Russia; by and large those men, if they could 'relate' to anyone at
all, could at best only relate to other survivors - whether from their own
or from the other 'side' ...
It's difficult ... the majority of those 'veterans' are now permanently
silenced ... who will bear witness?
- chrisbruce
P.S. My own feelings about what is sometimes termed 'collective guilt',
'retribution', and so forth? I quite often FEEL (especially after events
'commemorating' Nazi atrocities, when something like public breast-beating
is followed by something like an invitation to refreshments served in the
foyer) that this ENTIRE country (what was left of it - 80% of the city I
live in was in ruins) should have been razed to the ground after 1945 and
the whole population put into camps ...
... and some I know would accuse me of being too soft-hearted, because in
my limited 'imagining' I would see those 'camps' as camps, providing food
and shelter ...
... as I wrote above, it's difficult ...
... and, yet, I also still struggle to maintain belief in some sort of
progress in some sort of 'enlightenment project' ...
"PERPETUAL PEACE - Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch
innkeeper's sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object
mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are
insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream,
it is not for us to decide. But one condition the author of this essay
wishes to lay down. The practical politician assumes the attitude of
looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a
pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state,
inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist
is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise
statesman. Such being his attitude, the practical politician--and this is
the condition I make--should at least act consistently in the case of a
conflict and not suspect some danger to the state in the political
theorist's opinions which are ventured and publicly expressed without any
ulterior purpose. By this clausula salvatoria the author desires formally
and emphatically to deprecate herewith any malevolent interpretation which
might be placed on his words."
- Those are the prefatory remarks of I. Kant's Immanuel Kant's PERPETUAL
PEACE: A PHILOSOPHICAL SKETCH (1795), as translated by Vincent Ferraro,
found at
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm
As some longtime members of this list (or its predecessor) may recall,
after coming to Germany in 1994 I devoted much time to the works of, and
works about, Immanuel Kant. The standard of Kant scholarship in Germany in
the first third of the twentieth century was breathtaking to one introduced
to Kant by English-speaking teachers and through English-language
commentaries written several decades later. Yet in support of the opinion
I have expressed above about 'struggling to maintain belief in some sort of
progress in some sort of enlightenment project' I will reiterate here a
commentary I posted a couple of decades ago on three 'interesting' items.
(They are 'interesting' in the sense of that word as used in the Chinese
curse: 'May you live in interesting times.')
One is a book on Kant published in 1921 by Houston S. Chamberlain, the
Anglo-German racial theorist (and son-in-law to Richard Wagner) who
provided many of what were intended to pass for the 'philosophical'
arguments for Aryan/German racial superiority. Passages in that book on
Kant and his philosophy would not be out of place (and a closer study -
which I do not propose to undertake - may find them quoted verbatim) in
MEIN KAMPF.
The other items are two editions of the same book: a 21-page excerpt from
Kant's moral philosophy published in a [German-language] 'Pocket Editions
of the Philosophical Library' series. The first copy of that pamphlet which
I acquired was obviously a second edition. The last page ends with a
sentence relating the popularity of the series: 'They have found growing
use in study groups and for individual study . . .' - and there in that
later edition the rest of the sentence has been rendered illegible by
'over-printing' with a heavy black line.
The date of publication of the pamphlet is given as 'Early 1945'. The
line which has been 'censored' in that later (presumably post-May '45)
edition is still there to read in the copy of an earlier edition which I
found: 'It has found growing use in study groups and for individual study,
*especially on the front lines.*'
The image of a German soldier fighting on the front lines with those
excerpts from Kant's _Kritik der praktischen Vernunft_ buttoned into a
uniform pocket emblazoned with a Nazi swastika brings a philosopher
convinced of the fundamental and enduring value of Kant's moral theory to
the brink of despair ...
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