I’m asking myself that question while watching the documentary on Leni Riefenstahl “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” (it may be, and probably should be the the other way around.)
Most of those close to Hitler never really said their piece to any cameras before they died, and certainly not 50 years after the war, not that I know of, not outside of a war crimes tribunal.
It’s really interesting seeing how she want from a dancer (by today’s standards, I might add, a pretty bad one; no callback for her from Alvin Ailey), to a rock climber, scaling steep rock faces barefoot with no rope on camera, and surviving literal avalanches on film, to watching Hitler at a rally and finding him on the lectern, and in person, “hypnotizing”. He cast a spell, in her view, and of course many, many people have said that.
She’s a nice old lady in this film, who was really a strong woman, and proto-feminist. That’s precisely why Hitler liked her: she was constantly doing dangerous, difficult things. Goebbels apparently, on her account, wanted her for his mistress. This sounds plausible, since he did eventually have an affair with another German actress. Goebbel’s diary says she went out with them socially, regularly, but as she says, he WAS the master of lies.
But I keep hitting pause on the film. I keep looking at the storm troopers, at Hitler, and trying to grasp how such a monstrous thing happens.
If you will pardon the word, I think the Germans of 1933 felt like the n—–rs of Europe, and Hitler promised redemption. If I could put the whole thing in one phrase, as succinctly as I can, I think that is what I would say. Where there was shame, loss, economic hardship, and many real war wounds from WW1–from starvation, from combat, from loss of loved ones, from overwork–he promised a ready path to not just recovery, but getting back at all the bastards who put them there.
You have to screw your brain into this mindset, to get how all that happened.
I have long made lists of films I want to watch. It was on Netflix, but I cancelled my Netflix DVD account after they made that awful film about the Central Park Five. So I use a combination of the library, and just buying the films outright. This one I bought, as VHS.
But apparently I’m going, now through a list from when I watched, I think, the Sophie Scholl movie. I get a lot of ideas from the previews. In any event, I watched Night and Fog last week, by Alain Desnais, which ANYONE who wants to call the detention camps on our border “concentration camps” needs to watch. It’s short, only perhaps 35 minutes, and well worth the time.
I watched Nanking, which I think is a must see for most people, and certainly anyone who has never heard about what happened there. Watching it, it occurred to me that there is no equivalent to that in any war our soldiers have ever fought. We have never been rapists. We have never been mass murderers for the fun of it. We have never committed the sorts of crimes nearly every other nation on Earth has committed, and particularly the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans, the Russians, the Turks–actually, the list is pretty much every nation on Earth. Britain, I’m not finding anything, other than the OBVIOUS fact that they felt the need to invade nearly every fucking nation on Earth, with all the death from battle and starvation that implies.
Eye of Vichy is on the list also, about German propaganda in occupied France.
Propaganda is a hugely important topic. When anyone is GENUINELY talking about truly fake news, like CNN, like MSNBC, like the New York Times, they are talking about propaganda. Characteristically, the propaganda organs started the meme that everyone else was propaganda. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
Jacques Ellul, as I commented likely 5-10 years ago, wrote a masterpiece on it, which is properly translated PropagandaS. There are different sorts. I considered for a time writing a long piece on propaganda like the others on my Goodness Movement website, but abandoned it, I think, for lack of energy. It’s a huge topic. I do think I’ve quoted him at length though here from time to time.
But here is the point I would make: nobody does anything which makes no sense to them. If you want to understand them, therefore, you have to understand their logic, their premises, their “facts”. This is the only reliable path to understanding, and I will stipulate as an absolute principle that when we are dealing with human behavior, there are no real mysteries. This is cop out. Everything is comprehensible, even if odious, even if foreign to our every instinct.
Ponder, as another example, the practice in some mountain areas of Pakistan of gang raping women who are believed to have committed sexual indiscretions. There is a logic to it, likely a sinister logic, which relies on repressed sexual instincts, a cultural conditioning which views women as objects to be owned, and some traditions which stem from a thousand or more years ago. Who knows how common incest is in such places? Who could protest, who could protect the girls (and boys, for that matter, although that seems more an Afghani thing).
Human evil is something to be understood, fought, and eventually teased out of all human societies. The worst mistake you can make, though, is to think you know all you need to know, and that the solution is simple. It is never simple. Nothing is simple in dealing with most deep forms of human behavior. Trauma is not simple. Lust is not simple.