Why? Because never
before in my life as a citizen have I been confronted by certain troubling
parallels. Man, do I feel that I need to have my wits about me.
They (the
parallels) wouldn’t be in such sharp relief were I not devouring the book, “The
Nazi Séance” by Arthur Magida.
Which caused me to
pull down from our shelves Bill Shirer’s classic, “The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich.”
Shirer’s tome
begins with this epigraph:
“I have often felt
a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in
the individual and so wretched in the generality.” – Goethe
And the foreward
ends with this:
“In our new age of
terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first
great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little
madmen pressing an electronic button.”
And some choice
fragments, quotes from “Nazi Séance:”
“[Our leader] is a
holy gift for people who needed the comforting rumor that a messiah had been
sent to lift them from their suffering, their pain and their sorrow.” (from
John Toland’s “Adolph Hitler)
As a young man,
the anti-hero in “NS,” Jewish magician-entertainer Erik Jan Hanussen, ne
Herman Hanussen, observes:
“It is like this
always in life: the bolder one wins.”
And …
“If a life is
constructed on a lie – and on a lie that is eminently successful – why pay
attention to the truth?”
Berliners, in
Hanussen’s view, were of a superior kind, preferable to the “mawkish Austrians,
the perverse French, the boring English and the stupid Americans.”
Hitler was a
devotee of 17th century mystic Balthasar Gracian, to wit, “The truth,
but not the whole truth. Not all truths that can be spoken.”
What Hanussen
would suggest, to be a showman first, “Mix a little mystery with everything,
and the very mystery arouses veneration.”
Next: Running for Your Life: Endless Summer
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