I was dreamin when I wrote this. Forgive me if it goes astray.
Friday, October 16, 2020
Trump / Hitler
As I may have mentioned previously, I find comparisons between Trump and Hitler invidious. I have also considered such observations to be largely irrelevant because they seem to elevate Trump to a level of power and authority which I like to think he does not possess.
On the other hand....
Well. I've been reading Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad for the past couple of weeks. And right around the mid-point of the novel--which is 500 pages in, by the way--Hitler comes onto the stage. And there were some interesting details given about Der Führer which sounded very familiar.
First, when two German officers are talking about Hitler, one of the officers comments about "the ignorance of political charlatans who think that demagogic bluster can substitute for military logic and who choose to ignore everything that German generals had learned in the course of a lost war."
“There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.”
“I know more about offense and defense than they will ever understand, believe me. Believe me. Than they will ever understand. Than they will ever understand.”
“I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.”
“There is nobody who understands the horror of nuclear more than me.”
There's also a narrator's interjection which tells us that "the Reich's unwritten code did not allow even close friends openly to recall conversations so dangerous and misguided."
Sen. Lindsey Graham called President Donald Trump a "race-baiting xenophobic bigot" in 2015 but in 2018 claimed that he had "never heard him make a single racist statement."
A bit later on, Grossman is talking about Heinrich Himmler--architect of The Holocaust--and notes that "his terrible power sprang from only one source – his passion to execute the will of the man whom, as if they were both still students, he had just been addressing as du. The more blind and unquestioning his obedience within this office, the more limitless his power outside it. such a relationship, however, was not easy to maintain. Only by means of constant alertness could Himmler demonstrate the appropriate flexible, emotionally committed obedience. He needed to avoid all suspicion of freedom of thought, but it was equally important to avoid any suspicion of obsequiousness, that sister of hypocrisy and betrayal."
A little bit later Grossman adds, "this was a world where reality was without reality, where the only reality was the mood of the Führer, his whim of the moment."
Well, there's lots of material to choose from on this one, but this
And lastly (for the nonce, anyway), there's this comment on Hitler's habit of interrupting someone who is speaking:
"Forester had been afraid that Hitler would interrupt him, that he would ask a great many questions. He had heard about Hitler's impatience, his way of posing seemingly random questions that made one lose the threat of one's thoughts. When the Führer was particularly irritable, speakers had sometimes been thrown into total confusion, with no idea how they were meant to reply."
P.S. Of course, as soon as I posted the above I read another one which I thought was a must have item. To wit: Footnote 216 tells us this bit of history: Franz Halder (1884-1972) was chief of staff of the capital Army High Command from 1938 until September 1942. After receiving intelligence reports that Stalin could muster as many as 1.5 million men north of Stalingrad, Halder told Hitler that Paulus's 6th Army was in a potentially catastrophic position. In response, Hitler threatened to replace Halder. Halder resigned - to be replaced that same day, 24 September, by Kurt Zeitzler." At the risk of invoking a terminal level of redundancy...sound familiar?
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