Dec 17, 2023·edited Dec 17, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
'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.
It would seem that the proper approach to viewing the world is from the position of true or false. Introduction of good-bad or right-wrong to our narrative entangles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
'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'".
I recommend Toland's "Hitler" biography.
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.
This needs to be a book.
Great post Luc! It’s always a pleasure to read things that are both written well and profound in their substance.
It would seem that the proper approach to viewing the world is from the position of true or false. Introduction of good-bad or right-wrong to our narrative entangles
us in the delusional world of hyper reality.
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.