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.
> 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?
It's not that hard since most of these views immediately collapse upon closer inspection.
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.
Great job teasing out and articulating some very real but scarcely tangible threads underlying historical conflicts and connecting them to the situation we're in today! And "anti-antisemitism" is as good a label as any for a very real, but difficult to name or define at-risk-of-immediate-cancelation phenomenon, that absolutely manifests as a causal agent in some of the biggest conflicts today.
Thank you, but everyone participating in this conversation must now burn their accounts and have facial reconstructive surgery. You will be able to recognize me because my new identity will have the coolest name ever which I have absolutely come up with but can't tell you for obvious reasons. I blame Luc for writing something so interesting that it demanded a response and I blame the world for forbidding us from even seeing such things out of the corners of our eyes.
A great and very well thought out look at the other end of that story was presented by my friend Brian Mowrey over the summer at:
A teleological understanding of history can reveal a lot to us about the controllers of our world, but we need to be cautious not to use it as a reason to misplace blame. For example, Caesar is blamed for destroying the Roman Republic. A close examination of the facts indicate that he was trying to save the Republic and it was his assassination itself that ended the Republic. That is, Brutus and Cicero were the architects of destruction while declaiming all they wanted to do was save it.
Of course, it seems obvious, teleologically speaking, that the dissolution of the Republic was intended at some level of reality, and the programs Caesar might have implemented to the benefit of humanity were thereby terminated. What is heartbreaking is that Caesar himself was so vilified when he may truly have been the greatest human who ever lived.
"What is heartbreaking is that Caesar himself was so vilified when he may truly have been the greatest human who ever lived."
That really does seem to be the way things typically play out -- similar to the hypothetical posed by Glaucon to Socrates of the entirely unjust man who enjoys a reputation for justice vs the just man who is believed by everyone to be vile and unjust -- and that pattern, where evil is called good and good is so easily slandered as evil, really says something about the nature of this realm and the forces that govern it.
Indeed, and even if we look at history teleologically, great men can still stand out as beacons of light for generations to come. Besides, teleology doesn't necessarily mean the future is fixed--maybe if more people had been like Cesar, a different telos would have been activated, so to speak.
I think Caesar is not properly understood - that is probably what he was whispering when they slit his throat.
History is a bitch I reckon.
I wonder why "wierd" is spelled with an "i" before the "e" - I think it makes more sense the other way around - maybe this is what "Caesar" was thinking when they slit his throat.
Luc, I agree with much you say here about perspectives and pre-determination, but I think your reading of Anglo-American historiography is 180 degrees off, and if I may, more than a little moralistically predetermined along the lines that you criticize. Leading into the war, the entire economics profession in the US opposed the passage of Smoot-Hawley (punitive tariffs). Competitive devaluation followed the same logic, and this was understood. So, before the war was even over, those same Anglo-Americans worked to establish the ITO (prerunner to the GATT and WTO) and the IMF to address the question of great power dynamics (and so complicity) that you say the Anglo American story misses altogether. In contrast, it was an obsession of policy makers in the 40s-50s.. Similarly, the resolution of war was rethought, hence the World Bank, nee European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Marshall Plan, both in stark contrast to the resolution of Versailles. Oh, and the founding of the UN. And Schumann and Monet's European Project proceeded on the same understandings that war, at least the recent great wars, were largely a product of dynamics among competing nations, hence the mid-20th century turn toward supranationalism, and the revival of institutions of international governance (the UN and the ICJ) that had failed so conspicuously to stop the first World War, or to avert its sequel. The upshot of all of this, at least in theory if never completely in practice (nothing in practice is complete, to sound Kantian) was a new form of politics, roughly speaking globalization, and specifically "Europe." https://www.davidawestbrook.com/city-of-gold.html
It is tempting to dismiss all this at the present, neo-national moment, but if one is trying to understand historical motivations, and especially telos, one should give credit to the thinking of the participants. As always, your posts are fascinating, please keep up the good work.
Yes, America's role in during WWI is very nuanced, and as far as I can tell, was initially quite sound. I also agree very much with your reading of people's motivations for founding international organizations, and I find it silly for that reason to blame those many bright folks whose impulse it was to find solutions so that wars like that won't happen anymore. However, this is exactly one of those situations that are so frustrating about history: frequently people act in good faith, and even based on a sound (if sometimes naive) understanding, only to see everything subverted and channelled into less than desirable waters. It's quite disturbing to the point one asks oneself if there's anything people (including us) can do. But that would be defeatist, and I think it's still worth for people giving their best shot. You never know when a different telos might be activated based on the right choices!
Luc, I think you would find City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent (yeah, Plato, Augustine, Freud) very interesting. An effort to think about the symbolic grounding of different sorts of politics, especially via markets (what I teach) and the necessity (?) for some sort of uncovering of a post national telos. My biggest, maybe best, book. Apologies for the shameless advertisement.
You have put your finger on the most frustrating to me part of humanity. I call it, 'Most of our problems began their lives as solutions.' and Utopian solutions seem to be the best at causing train wrecks. I can't convince myself that these Utopian projects begin as scams but they all end that way.
" 'Most of our problems began their lives as solutions.' and Utopian solutions seem to be the best at causing train wrecks. I can't convince myself that these Utopian projects begin as scams but they all end that way."
That problem is pretty well explained in "Political Ponerology". Any organization that sets out to solve injustice attracts psychological deviants who believe themselves to be the victims of injustice. They join and begin to slowly subvert the program. Eventually, even the words are subverted to mean the opposite of what they meant at the beginning.
Most of the people who died during the reigns of Mao and Stalin didn't die because of malice but Utopian solutions. The dictators thought that technocrats could plan agriculture better with a systemic approach than yeoman who have been farming for generations. Mass starvation ensued. Ten of millions of people died in both cases.
We are doing something similar in response to dreaded climate change. The USEPA has a plan that, unless you can meet impossible standards, coal power plants and around half of natural gas power plants will need to be shut down by 2035. Once the plant shutdowns start happening in preparation, we will be lucky to have an electric grid that works part of the time; a loss of the electric grid for half of the country for six months (each time that they lose control) is more likely.
This summer, I was on a webinar with a government-affiliated institution promoting this policy. They were talking about how they think they have a Supreme Court-proof methodology. The electric utility industry doesn't think it will be stopped but maybe delayed by (literally) a couple of years.
I was early on the webinar. It was hosted by four young women. Two of them are brand new mothers and were talking about all of the exciting and hopeful things happening in their lives (their babies, both physical and in this EPA rule). They think that they are doing this for the children. But their children will rue this and shake their fists. "How could you be so stupid as to shut down the electric system?," they will ask.
I debated about putting that in the webinar's side bar chat. I didn't. I didn't want to be a jerk. But part of me . . . I don't know. Not be a jerk but also wishing there was a way to let them know that this isn't going to work out the way that they think that it will.
Very true. Personally I suspect that in our case neglect and incompetence will destroy our infrastructure before the watermelons(green on the outside red on the inside) get a chance.
Luc, this was excellent! If someone ever publishes a book collection of the best posts on Substack, this post would have to be in it. Definitely worth multiple readings (as well as a Tonic Discussion)!
You shared some great insights and some important warnings, especially the warning about the dangers of using evil to fight evil and thereby becoming evil yourself. Patterns emerge from the tell-tale signs, spread out across the world and over the course of many generations, suggesting an evil agent that probably plays all sides of our human conflicts. Hitler may have been manipulated by it, but an honest view of history suggests the other interested parties were manipulated by that same dark power, even if in different ways. So that leaves us some cautionary tales to ponder today, when the world seems to be careening towards another inflection point.
How would you fight the agenda of any of the various parties that are being manipulated by the dark power, without succumbing to a similar manipulation yourself? You cannot go it alone; you need allies; and all potential allies are compromised to some extent. I'm reminded of something G K Chesterton said in the beginning of The Everlasting Man: basically if Man has done all he can and created his grandest civilization ever and it's still not enough, if it still has this fatal flaw dooming it to collapse and fall, then if there is a God to intervene, this would be the time for Him to do it. (Chesterton claims this was the case with Rome circa 1 AD -- it certainly seems to be the case with the post-WW2 West). Maybe it's a naive hope, but I don't see much else that could realistically provide a way out. It seems like we're on track to replay the same scripts our species has already enacted, to disastrous effect, likely many more times than our historical records even tell us about. Perhaps we'll soon be seeing more of the realities towards which our religious stories and concepts point, and as the Evil Power drops its mask and acts more openly in our world, I hope and pray the Good Power will do the same. Of course, the Evil Power is adept at presenting itself as "good" and cloaking its agents and useful idiots in counterfeit virtues that fool all but the most discerning.
At any rate, insight and understanding safeguard against deception, and you've shared a great deal of both in this post. Thanks for that!
Thank you, man! And I agree, we seem to be stuck in a prison made of replays, and everything will always be turned against us. Our only hope is the "symbolic field" having positive surprises in store for us, for a change. But it is still up to us to give it the best we got, and it might be more than we realize at this point in time.
Speaking only for myself, Hitler's occult interests are one of the more interesting keys to understanding his personal charisma and "luck". That won't win much favor with today's positivists and science-worshipers but it makes as much sense as anything else. Maybe the magic altered the morphogenetic field, or some such.
In that spirit Jung's essay Wotan offers some convincing hints to the larger historical process.
Hitler's occult interests are strangely elusive in the sources: while it's true that he was in conctact with some of the Thule Society guys, they sort of disappeared afterwards from Hitler's orbit. In fact, Hitler repeatedly mocked Himmler for his occult interests, also Rosenberg, and didn't seem to be really into it. But being in touch with the "occult" can be a much more subtle affair than people realize.
Great work. I especially enjoyed your enjoinder at the end to grasp all the reins instead of clinging to one (or, at least, try to grasp as many as is possible, given our limited time/powers).
It points to the larger problem of overspecialization. It cuts both ways, too. For example, there are people who are very spiritual gifted and insightful, but who severely lack a grounding in the material domain. Without such ground, there isn't really anywhere to launch from. You are just floating, and you lose sight of what it is about ultimate materialism you are even criticizing.
Balance is what's required. We can say that the spiritual takes priority (because, in any sane world it does), but to be utterly lacking in knowledge of the basic, default operations and history of material collisions is to risk losing track of which way is up, or which "side" is which. In such a weightless state, those devils can start to really look like angels and vice versa. The line between the species is very fine, which is why the journey is so treacherous. The goal I think is to see the beauty (including the dangerous beauty) in all of Creation, to both comprehend the machine and detect the ghost in it.
I do enjoy Hannah Arendt sociological explanation of why this happened, which basically is: "empty head is devil's workshop", together with Arendt, Wilhelm Reich also provides an interesting explanation in Mass Psychology of Fascism, so does the people from Frankfurt School.
Weimar Germany was a real mess, it was the result of the failure that the industrial revolution and urbanization. It was after tough periods as well, the war, the failed spartacist revolution... people were in a state of hopelessness back then, jumping in everything, addictions, bohemianism, mysticism, weird ideologies etc etc, not different from today.
What a breath of fresh air in an environment of toxic polemics. I wonder if you have any thoughts on tipping points? The river of history flows through crooks and crevices but at some point it reaches a cliff and the resultant increased surface tension rebounds into adversity. In this regard, the Reichstag fire was the Casus belli for the totalitarian regime. In recent times we've had to have endured some waterfalls that are eroding civil liberties:
911/Patriot Act
Covid scam/lockdowns
Fedsurrection/political prisoners
The question is what will be the event that causes a major sinkhole and can it be avoided? I am pessimistic that democracy will be able to stop erosion probably for all the same reasons that the German democracy could not as well.
'And yet, it was Hitler who won the day: an explicit Anglophile who saw in Britain his natural ally,' The Kaiser was likewise an explicit Anglophile. The global success of Britain's empire likely captured the imagination of most heads of state in the 20th century. The last Tsar of Russia likewise sought to emulate his British cousins. Ignoring the dangers all around him at home in Russia. An oversight for which he paid dearly. As did Hitler and the Kaiser before him. You would never drive your car forward with your gaze fixed upon the rear-view mirror. But it is human nature to persist in fighting the last, i.e. past war. Very few can look ahead, let alone see ahead. But leadership demands it.
It's also interesting how many of those narratives are not mutually exclusive, insofar as they depend on the perceptions of the people making choices even at the time, and the narrative they themselves were working under. As the meme goes - "embrace the healing power of 'and'".
What a great post. I, too, have given thought to just how two people viewing or living through the same events ( such as Covid ) can come away with such varying degrees of what it is they each think has happened.
Your resources, thoughtfully and documented essay has given me much to think about and reexamine.
Well done. When you were discussing the power of his oratory, I kept thinking, in the beginning was the word. But that creative power is neither good or bad, or rather, both. I imagine it as a nation or civilization, the story of it's people becoming like a river of creative energy, and how those of us in that stream have to ride it. Good context for the current nazi conflict here at substack.
You know, I used to wonder how is that so that every ideology has a radical and a moderate version, but Nazism only had a radical one?
Eventually I found the moderate version is best called populism, and I have not noticed it because it has been historically rare.
Politics makes strange coalitions. We know education correlates with income, yet, leftism while absolutely 100% about the educated opinion, seems to be pro-poor. Similarly, rightism tends to be pro-rich, yet generally catering to the uneducated opinion, not noticing that rich people are educated and poor people are not. Really weird!
Populism is the thing that happens when someone notices pro-poor policies are something the uneducated actually like, because they are poor. This does not imply socialism, because socialism is in itself an educated people thing, but it does involve some version of job creation and general concern for the poor. The poor are generally not socialists, but do like jobs an do like fair wages for those jobs, and do like to afford things with those wages, which does end up in a way redistributory. Public works are a good example, or price ceilings etc. These things are not socialism as they cater to uneducated opinions, they are very simplistic ways to improve welfare.
This is such a potent mixture, this is something that obviously gets a lot of votes, that I wondered why it has been historically not more used.
“And so, the truth shall set us free, above all, perhaps, historical truth: if we gain the maturity to have at it from multiple angles at once, while getting over ourselves.” 👏
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.
> 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?
It's not that hard since most of these views immediately collapse upon closer inspection.
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.
Great job teasing out and articulating some very real but scarcely tangible threads underlying historical conflicts and connecting them to the situation we're in today! And "anti-antisemitism" is as good a label as any for a very real, but difficult to name or define at-risk-of-immediate-cancelation phenomenon, that absolutely manifests as a causal agent in some of the biggest conflicts today.
Thank you, but everyone participating in this conversation must now burn their accounts and have facial reconstructive surgery. You will be able to recognize me because my new identity will have the coolest name ever which I have absolutely come up with but can't tell you for obvious reasons. I blame Luc for writing something so interesting that it demanded a response and I blame the world for forbidding us from even seeing such things out of the corners of our eyes.
A great and very well thought out look at the other end of that story was presented by my friend Brian Mowrey over the summer at:
https://unglossed.substack.com/p/transed-and-nationless-the-post-hitler
https://unglossed.substack.com/p/introduction-to-the-post-60s-holocaust
https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-forgetting-of-the-holocaust
https://unglossed.substack.com/p/american-awakening-recalling-the
My surgery is scheduled for Thursday. In the meantime, I will check out those posts!
A teleological understanding of history can reveal a lot to us about the controllers of our world, but we need to be cautious not to use it as a reason to misplace blame. For example, Caesar is blamed for destroying the Roman Republic. A close examination of the facts indicate that he was trying to save the Republic and it was his assassination itself that ended the Republic. That is, Brutus and Cicero were the architects of destruction while declaiming all they wanted to do was save it.
Of course, it seems obvious, teleologically speaking, that the dissolution of the Republic was intended at some level of reality, and the programs Caesar might have implemented to the benefit of humanity were thereby terminated. What is heartbreaking is that Caesar himself was so vilified when he may truly have been the greatest human who ever lived.
"What is heartbreaking is that Caesar himself was so vilified when he may truly have been the greatest human who ever lived."
That really does seem to be the way things typically play out -- similar to the hypothetical posed by Glaucon to Socrates of the entirely unjust man who enjoys a reputation for justice vs the just man who is believed by everyone to be vile and unjust -- and that pattern, where evil is called good and good is so easily slandered as evil, really says something about the nature of this realm and the forces that govern it.
Indeed, and even if we look at history teleologically, great men can still stand out as beacons of light for generations to come. Besides, teleology doesn't necessarily mean the future is fixed--maybe if more people had been like Cesar, a different telos would have been activated, so to speak.
I think Caesar is not properly understood - that is probably what he was whispering when they slit his throat.
History is a bitch I reckon.
I wonder why "wierd" is spelled with an "i" before the "e" - I think it makes more sense the other way around - maybe this is what "Caesar" was thinking when they slit his throat.
Luc, I agree with much you say here about perspectives and pre-determination, but I think your reading of Anglo-American historiography is 180 degrees off, and if I may, more than a little moralistically predetermined along the lines that you criticize. Leading into the war, the entire economics profession in the US opposed the passage of Smoot-Hawley (punitive tariffs). Competitive devaluation followed the same logic, and this was understood. So, before the war was even over, those same Anglo-Americans worked to establish the ITO (prerunner to the GATT and WTO) and the IMF to address the question of great power dynamics (and so complicity) that you say the Anglo American story misses altogether. In contrast, it was an obsession of policy makers in the 40s-50s.. Similarly, the resolution of war was rethought, hence the World Bank, nee European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Marshall Plan, both in stark contrast to the resolution of Versailles. Oh, and the founding of the UN. And Schumann and Monet's European Project proceeded on the same understandings that war, at least the recent great wars, were largely a product of dynamics among competing nations, hence the mid-20th century turn toward supranationalism, and the revival of institutions of international governance (the UN and the ICJ) that had failed so conspicuously to stop the first World War, or to avert its sequel. The upshot of all of this, at least in theory if never completely in practice (nothing in practice is complete, to sound Kantian) was a new form of politics, roughly speaking globalization, and specifically "Europe." https://www.davidawestbrook.com/city-of-gold.html
It is tempting to dismiss all this at the present, neo-national moment, but if one is trying to understand historical motivations, and especially telos, one should give credit to the thinking of the participants. As always, your posts are fascinating, please keep up the good work.
Yes, America's role in during WWI is very nuanced, and as far as I can tell, was initially quite sound. I also agree very much with your reading of people's motivations for founding international organizations, and I find it silly for that reason to blame those many bright folks whose impulse it was to find solutions so that wars like that won't happen anymore. However, this is exactly one of those situations that are so frustrating about history: frequently people act in good faith, and even based on a sound (if sometimes naive) understanding, only to see everything subverted and channelled into less than desirable waters. It's quite disturbing to the point one asks oneself if there's anything people (including us) can do. But that would be defeatist, and I think it's still worth for people giving their best shot. You never know when a different telos might be activated based on the right choices!
Luc, I think you would find City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent (yeah, Plato, Augustine, Freud) very interesting. An effort to think about the symbolic grounding of different sorts of politics, especially via markets (what I teach) and the necessity (?) for some sort of uncovering of a post national telos. My biggest, maybe best, book. Apologies for the shameless advertisement.
You have put your finger on the most frustrating to me part of humanity. I call it, 'Most of our problems began their lives as solutions.' and Utopian solutions seem to be the best at causing train wrecks. I can't convince myself that these Utopian projects begin as scams but they all end that way.
" 'Most of our problems began their lives as solutions.' and Utopian solutions seem to be the best at causing train wrecks. I can't convince myself that these Utopian projects begin as scams but they all end that way."
That problem is pretty well explained in "Political Ponerology". Any organization that sets out to solve injustice attracts psychological deviants who believe themselves to be the victims of injustice. They join and begin to slowly subvert the program. Eventually, even the words are subverted to mean the opposite of what they meant at the beginning.
Most of the people who died during the reigns of Mao and Stalin didn't die because of malice but Utopian solutions. The dictators thought that technocrats could plan agriculture better with a systemic approach than yeoman who have been farming for generations. Mass starvation ensued. Ten of millions of people died in both cases.
We are doing something similar in response to dreaded climate change. The USEPA has a plan that, unless you can meet impossible standards, coal power plants and around half of natural gas power plants will need to be shut down by 2035. Once the plant shutdowns start happening in preparation, we will be lucky to have an electric grid that works part of the time; a loss of the electric grid for half of the country for six months (each time that they lose control) is more likely.
This summer, I was on a webinar with a government-affiliated institution promoting this policy. They were talking about how they think they have a Supreme Court-proof methodology. The electric utility industry doesn't think it will be stopped but maybe delayed by (literally) a couple of years.
I was early on the webinar. It was hosted by four young women. Two of them are brand new mothers and were talking about all of the exciting and hopeful things happening in their lives (their babies, both physical and in this EPA rule). They think that they are doing this for the children. But their children will rue this and shake their fists. "How could you be so stupid as to shut down the electric system?," they will ask.
I debated about putting that in the webinar's side bar chat. I didn't. I didn't want to be a jerk. But part of me . . . I don't know. Not be a jerk but also wishing there was a way to let them know that this isn't going to work out the way that they think that it will.
Very true. Personally I suspect that in our case neglect and incompetence will destroy our infrastructure before the watermelons(green on the outside red on the inside) get a chance.
Luc, this was excellent! If someone ever publishes a book collection of the best posts on Substack, this post would have to be in it. Definitely worth multiple readings (as well as a Tonic Discussion)!
You shared some great insights and some important warnings, especially the warning about the dangers of using evil to fight evil and thereby becoming evil yourself. Patterns emerge from the tell-tale signs, spread out across the world and over the course of many generations, suggesting an evil agent that probably plays all sides of our human conflicts. Hitler may have been manipulated by it, but an honest view of history suggests the other interested parties were manipulated by that same dark power, even if in different ways. So that leaves us some cautionary tales to ponder today, when the world seems to be careening towards another inflection point.
How would you fight the agenda of any of the various parties that are being manipulated by the dark power, without succumbing to a similar manipulation yourself? You cannot go it alone; you need allies; and all potential allies are compromised to some extent. I'm reminded of something G K Chesterton said in the beginning of The Everlasting Man: basically if Man has done all he can and created his grandest civilization ever and it's still not enough, if it still has this fatal flaw dooming it to collapse and fall, then if there is a God to intervene, this would be the time for Him to do it. (Chesterton claims this was the case with Rome circa 1 AD -- it certainly seems to be the case with the post-WW2 West). Maybe it's a naive hope, but I don't see much else that could realistically provide a way out. It seems like we're on track to replay the same scripts our species has already enacted, to disastrous effect, likely many more times than our historical records even tell us about. Perhaps we'll soon be seeing more of the realities towards which our religious stories and concepts point, and as the Evil Power drops its mask and acts more openly in our world, I hope and pray the Good Power will do the same. Of course, the Evil Power is adept at presenting itself as "good" and cloaking its agents and useful idiots in counterfeit virtues that fool all but the most discerning.
At any rate, insight and understanding safeguard against deception, and you've shared a great deal of both in this post. Thanks for that!
Thank you, man! And I agree, we seem to be stuck in a prison made of replays, and everything will always be turned against us. Our only hope is the "symbolic field" having positive surprises in store for us, for a change. But it is still up to us to give it the best we got, and it might be more than we realize at this point in time.
Speaking only for myself, Hitler's occult interests are one of the more interesting keys to understanding his personal charisma and "luck". That won't win much favor with today's positivists and science-worshipers but it makes as much sense as anything else. Maybe the magic altered the morphogenetic field, or some such.
In that spirit Jung's essay Wotan offers some convincing hints to the larger historical process.
Hitler's occult interests are strangely elusive in the sources: while it's true that he was in conctact with some of the Thule Society guys, they sort of disappeared afterwards from Hitler's orbit. In fact, Hitler repeatedly mocked Himmler for his occult interests, also Rosenberg, and didn't seem to be really into it. But being in touch with the "occult" can be a much more subtle affair than people realize.
Great work. I especially enjoyed your enjoinder at the end to grasp all the reins instead of clinging to one (or, at least, try to grasp as many as is possible, given our limited time/powers).
It points to the larger problem of overspecialization. It cuts both ways, too. For example, there are people who are very spiritual gifted and insightful, but who severely lack a grounding in the material domain. Without such ground, there isn't really anywhere to launch from. You are just floating, and you lose sight of what it is about ultimate materialism you are even criticizing.
Balance is what's required. We can say that the spiritual takes priority (because, in any sane world it does), but to be utterly lacking in knowledge of the basic, default operations and history of material collisions is to risk losing track of which way is up, or which "side" is which. In such a weightless state, those devils can start to really look like angels and vice versa. The line between the species is very fine, which is why the journey is so treacherous. The goal I think is to see the beauty (including the dangerous beauty) in all of Creation, to both comprehend the machine and detect the ghost in it.
I do enjoy Hannah Arendt sociological explanation of why this happened, which basically is: "empty head is devil's workshop", together with Arendt, Wilhelm Reich also provides an interesting explanation in Mass Psychology of Fascism, so does the people from Frankfurt School.
Weimar Germany was a real mess, it was the result of the failure that the industrial revolution and urbanization. It was after tough periods as well, the war, the failed spartacist revolution... people were in a state of hopelessness back then, jumping in everything, addictions, bohemianism, mysticism, weird ideologies etc etc, not different from today.
What a breath of fresh air in an environment of toxic polemics. I wonder if you have any thoughts on tipping points? The river of history flows through crooks and crevices but at some point it reaches a cliff and the resultant increased surface tension rebounds into adversity. In this regard, the Reichstag fire was the Casus belli for the totalitarian regime. In recent times we've had to have endured some waterfalls that are eroding civil liberties:
911/Patriot Act
Covid scam/lockdowns
Fedsurrection/political prisoners
The question is what will be the event that causes a major sinkhole and can it be avoided? I am pessimistic that democracy will be able to stop erosion probably for all the same reasons that the German democracy could not as well.
I recommend Toland's "Hitler" biography.
'And yet, it was Hitler who won the day: an explicit Anglophile who saw in Britain his natural ally,' The Kaiser was likewise an explicit Anglophile. The global success of Britain's empire likely captured the imagination of most heads of state in the 20th century. The last Tsar of Russia likewise sought to emulate his British cousins. Ignoring the dangers all around him at home in Russia. An oversight for which he paid dearly. As did Hitler and the Kaiser before him. You would never drive your car forward with your gaze fixed upon the rear-view mirror. But it is human nature to persist in fighting the last, i.e. past war. Very few can look ahead, let alone see ahead. But leadership demands it.
It's also interesting how many of those narratives are not mutually exclusive, insofar as they depend on the perceptions of the people making choices even at the time, and the narrative they themselves were working under. As the meme goes - "embrace the healing power of 'and'".
What a great post. I, too, have given thought to just how two people viewing or living through the same events ( such as Covid ) can come away with such varying degrees of what it is they each think has happened.
Your resources, thoughtfully and documented essay has given me much to think about and reexamine.
Well done. When you were discussing the power of his oratory, I kept thinking, in the beginning was the word. But that creative power is neither good or bad, or rather, both. I imagine it as a nation or civilization, the story of it's people becoming like a river of creative energy, and how those of us in that stream have to ride it. Good context for the current nazi conflict here at substack.
You know, I used to wonder how is that so that every ideology has a radical and a moderate version, but Nazism only had a radical one?
Eventually I found the moderate version is best called populism, and I have not noticed it because it has been historically rare.
Politics makes strange coalitions. We know education correlates with income, yet, leftism while absolutely 100% about the educated opinion, seems to be pro-poor. Similarly, rightism tends to be pro-rich, yet generally catering to the uneducated opinion, not noticing that rich people are educated and poor people are not. Really weird!
Populism is the thing that happens when someone notices pro-poor policies are something the uneducated actually like, because they are poor. This does not imply socialism, because socialism is in itself an educated people thing, but it does involve some version of job creation and general concern for the poor. The poor are generally not socialists, but do like jobs an do like fair wages for those jobs, and do like to afford things with those wages, which does end up in a way redistributory. Public works are a good example, or price ceilings etc. These things are not socialism as they cater to uneducated opinions, they are very simplistic ways to improve welfare.
This is such a potent mixture, this is something that obviously gets a lot of votes, that I wondered why it has been historically not more used.
“And so, the truth shall set us free, above all, perhaps, historical truth: if we gain the maturity to have at it from multiple angles at once, while getting over ourselves.” 👏