[lit-ideas] Re: unhitlering
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2019 08:39:13 -0700
Palma,
Yes but I’m not saying they are psychopaths as individuals. As individuals
they are not completely free, sometimes not even partially free but like bees
in a hive subject to the dictates of the queen. I am seeing a pathology at the
hive level.
By the way, I think the real weakness of my argument is that if the fascism of
WWII was a national or cultural pathology (metaphorically) ; then what example
do I have of a nation or culture free from similar forms of pathology.
Puzzling over that as I just now did, I think it preferable to offer my own
unconditional surrender. You won’t be invading me, I hope. :)
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of adriano paolo shaul gershom palma
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 8:11 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: unhitlering
I beg to differ.
1. if so the japanese are psychopaths by hundreds or hundreds of thousands
2. what I would zero in on is the legitimacy of widening a notion of
psychopathology already not understood (for a recent example, consider the
celebrated Asperger cases, invented by dr Asperger, a nazi too btw)
to something as obscure as the notion of body politic, infected by the speeches
of the demagogue of the day etc.
there is no such pathology, notice how extremely nationalistic places (Armenia,
Tchetchenia, Israel) as long as they don't lose their wars, there is lack of
academic experts who declare them pyschopaths...
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
palma, a paolo shaul םֹשׁ ְרֵגּ
Er selbst bevorzugte undurchdringlich Klarheit
On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 7:01 AM Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > wrote:
And yet what happened in the German body-politic is very like what we call a
pathology when it happens to an individual body. Just because we don’t have a
word for it doesn’t mean we can’t use “pathology” as a metaphor. And the
treatment applied to the German “pathology” was very like that applied to a
disease that must be eradicated by means of medicine and then vaccines used to
prevent its reoccurrence.
In the West, Churchill more than Roosevelt determined the method for conquering
Hitler’s Germany. The war against Japan was considered secondary. The large
American Armies were sent to Europe. The much smaller American Marine Corps
forces were sent to fight against Japan, island hopping, going into the holes
the Japanese soldiers had made for themselves – island after island with few
defeated Japanese surrendering as the Germans were willing to do when soundly
defeated, until all there was was just the main islands remaining to be
defeated, and given the fanatical defenses that had been put up by the Japanese
on the islands that he Americans had conquered in order to get within striking
sight of Japan, the Americans were appalled. The various estimations of the
causalities that would be incurred during the conquering of Japan staggered
American generals and leaders. So when at just that time the atomic bomb
became available to use as a weapon, the decision to use it was made by the
American president – a form of chemo-therapy suitable to the purpose.
Hitler had the same fanatical fight-to-the-last man attitude that the Japanese
did, but his soldiers did not. They would not fight to the last man, or fall
on their swords rather than surrender. They were being defeated in the
old-fashioned Western way even though Hitler chosen, Japanese fashion, to fall
on his sword. Thus, had the atomic bomb been available to Roosevelt before
Operation Overlord, he, unlike Truman later on, wouldn’t have been making the
decision on his own and I don’t think Churchill would have allowed him to drop
it.
The first atomic bomb did not affect the Japanese all that much. The effect of
it wasn’t so very different than the fire-bombing they had been enduring with
stiff upper lips. It hadn’t changed the Japanese intention to fight on until
the Americans finally decided that the cost for continued fighting was too
great and seek a negotiated peace, but America insisted on unconditional
surrender which was unacceptable to the Japanese, but then when the USSR
decided to join against Japan at the very end, that was the last straw. Japan
had no respect for the Russians whom they defeated soundly in 1905. They did
not want to surrender to the Russians, and then the Americans gave them a
negotiated peace even though they called it an unconditional surrender, and
once the fanatical, fight to the death, Japanese warriors had all achieved
their goals died in battle or killed themselves, the Japanese who were left
were happy to become Westernized in more-or-less the American pattern.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
[mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ;<mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
] On Behalf Of adriano paolo shaul gershom palma
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 3:28 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] unhitlering
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 <mailto: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
...
-cb------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
<
http://www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html>
Other related posts:
