Running for Your Life: Troubling Parallels

Head-in-the-sand folks are driving me to sobriety.

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