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Neoliberal Feudalism's avatar

Great post. The question becomes: with so many competing views of history, with our own biases and perspectives coloring how we view it, is history then *entirely* a Rorschach test? My response to that is yes -- unless we tie our observations into what we see in the present and craft our perspectives based on its *predictive power* for the future. In other words, (1) to start with what we see of observable reality in the present; (2) to draw conclusions from that observance; (3) to look at the past based on those conclusions and then (4) to project those conclusions into the future. If predictions about the future turn out to be wrong, something in one's worldview should be updated; rinse and repeat over time recursively.

This process has drawn me over the decades in a circuitous, recursive fashion to the central bank owners controlling this world, animated by the Demiurge which controls material reality, and the God of light is either absent or entirely spiritual...I like the Preparata theory about Hitler a lot, as it fits neatly into this perspective.

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Jon Cutchins's avatar

Very full thoughts on a rather taboo subject. I appreciate them very much and so will make my own small contribution.

Of the many forces in world affairs there is one that we are trained from a very young age not to notice. It thus has no name that fits it well. I propose Anti-antisemitism. It is a strong defensive reaction based on an absolute Us vs. Them identification. This is one of the reasons why Jewish people remain mysterious and alien to Western Europeans/White Americans. We have no cognate reaction for whatever reason and allow our peer group to be mauled while we stand by like cows.

Anti-antisemitism first enters this story through the Romanovs, widely seen by Russian Jews as being anti-semitic. This seems to account for the prominent place occupied by Jewish people in the Russian revolution, particularly among the Bolsheviks. And much of the international character of early 20th century communism seems to have been driven by Russian Jews recruiting Western Jews for anti-antisemitic purposes, like the Trotsky/Schiff connection, of which the anti-semites make so much. In other words, I believe that this is where Hitler and so many others found the beginning of their international Jewish conspiracy theories.

After WWI was ended, by a British blockade starving the German people out, in addition to the well-known humiliations of Versailles, came the horror which I grew up in the American South calling 'the carpetbagger'. The carpetbagger is that horror which follows defeat in war. He is the man who comes and buys the property of the defeated and their cultural treasures at the sort of prices that you can only buy things from starving people. The carpetbaggers ravaged Germany after WWI to a terrifying degree. Many of the carpetbaggers who showed up in Germany after WWI were Jewish, and even in 1939 after, I think, 6 years of Nazism it has been said that German Jews owned ~30% of real property while making up ~1% of the population. I cannot vouch for those statistics but I suspect that they are broadly correct.

I have not made a study of the early Hitler, but I am familiar with a lot of anti-semites, who make much of these two matters. Hitler's personal anti-semitism, I suspect, began with anti-communism and anti-carpetbagger sentiment, both fairly legitimate, and was somehow displaced from 'these people have done bad things' to 'these are bad people' to 'these people and all of their kin are bad people', official Nazism only picking it up at the last stage. I don't know the subject well enough to know if this was simply the simplification and broad brush of the demagogue or a lazy thinker looking for a scapegoat or something else entirely.

But just as Nazism began in seeking redress for legitimate German grievances before morphing into something horrible, probably not the omnicompetent evil state of fantasy but more likely a state that recklessly created a giant refugee problem and then used increasingly brutal measures to try and solve or even conceal its brutality and incompetence, a situation which we may all get a much closer look at soon, so Anti-antisemitism begins as a legitimate defense of one's kin and then metastasizes such that it acts contrary to its noble original purpose and while perhaps not yet as destructive or evil as Nazism it is certainly a more timely problem.

While you called Hitler the ultimate Rorschach test there is one more apposite in our lives. I mean, of course, Israel. Both Nazism and Zionism seem to inhabit our minds on sort of Manichean terms, by which I mean that they are both seen as either immaculate or infernal. Each is either a hero or a villain with no shading allowed. They are either genocidal apartheidists or they are noble defenders of their people. Once the binary state is chosen criticism of the hero or apologia of the villain are verboten. They both seem like supernatural things either coming down from God or up out of the Pit and are rather singular in my experience.

I will have to reread your post in a few days and think it through again, but I appreciate your willingness to speak in an even-handed and open way about unthinkable thoughts.

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