Charles2222
Posts: 3993
Joined: 3/12/2001 Status: offline
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kendokabob: I have a related story which perhaps a lot of us have heard about before. In one of the books I read about Hitler, it was said that the generals for quite a while thought he was a genius, How? Because he knew things they did not. He knew things like how many rounds a certain tank carried, things so trivial for a general to know, hence they turn their attention elsewhere, that they could be fooled into thinking he knew more than they. I'm not sure if Hitler did this deliberately to fool them or if he just had an aptitude for quirky details at times.
OTOH, if it were I, I surely would not comment on someone's qualities based on a picture, such as the test you suggested, but what I was trying to say is that at some point or another our country went to such lengths to make Hitler look like a madman, you would never guess that there was anything on Hitler to suggest he could 'appear' nice.
It seems a bit disingenuous to me, to preach that Hitler was the devil, put out all kinds of material to show him ranting at party meetings and what not, but then not to acknowledge that he had a side that made him believeable or trustworthy. I suppose this was done to cover up something else, and that was, like the generals of Hitler (in general [no pun intended] only, as surely there were exceptions) who were fooled by Hitler's eye for minutia, there were mesmorized by Hitler's economic success as thinking that only good people could lift the German economy.
Of course a number of people were fooled by his not coming from aristocracy too and the fact that the WWI Germany was ran by people who were. As I see it, people all too often make quick and easy assumptions about somebody (the tests you mention for example) and then it takes pounding into their heads to get them to change their minds (popular opinion is the gauge for whether someone is good or bad, while the person will be what they are irregardless of that opinion). Obviously a good many of the people in Germany suffered from that affliction as well. The ol' surely Hitler has done some bad things, but surely not anything THAT bad comes to mind.
Considering how the Germans most likely were always flowered with Hitler's better qualities, or in any case trying to make him look good, and the fact that we captured so many of their films, you'd think by now you would've seen more on this pleasant image of Hitler that was going on, but then that would be for us to admit we were largely wrong about him in the first place and the German people weren't just totally evil people who could've destroyed Hitler with their pinky had they so desired. The logic seems to be that their were no innocents among the Germans because Hitler continued to thrive within their own borders, where he should've been easier to detect. OTOH, it was being within the borders itself which was paradoxically a problem, because it was there where the they would be subject to Nazi retaliation, as the good Germans in prison, or executed, found out. There was something to be said for doing the cause of good, and not being in the prisons, but people tend to think cut-and-dry so often, such as those silly tests you mention, that they won't understand a good German didn't have to have been one of those locked up or dead, and still have been good. If all the good Germans were locked up or dead, then how could the culture be turned around? I haven't seen a lot of uprising against evil in a society perpetrated by escapees out of prisons or the dead, which to believe that since the common German was evil because he didn't overthrow Hitler, would amount to (of course it was tried to, by Von Staufenburg etc., and they got the same treatment dissenters got too. Unlike in recent America, they didn't just say "we respect your opinion", when they didn't, and that was the end of it [though of course Von Staufenburg's type of dissent wouldn't be tolerated by any regime]).
As far as I can tell, Nazism was so repulsive after the fact, that people can't deal with the problem that evil always comes with ready-made disguises. If we were to see the disguises that various people believed about Hitler, then we'd have to admit that we could be fooled too (instead pride tells us that only the Germans could be fooled, but then, how did so many Germans get fooled? By thinking they were better etc., the same crime those who judge them by that yardstick are committing). If we could admit that we could be fooled, maybe we'd have to deal with an awful lot of things that we pushed aside and didn't analyze and just took at face value as good or bad based on some pretty flimsy reasoning (again the test you mentioned comes to mind).
phew!
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