People think they know what evil is. But it's funny how often they misidentify evil, or downplay evil when it's directly in front of them. People judge best with hindsight, when everyone sees what has happened and the details are no longer deniable. Hitler wasn't immediately recognized as evil by society. It took time for people to see what he was. In the 1930s, when Hitler was on the rise, only a concerned minority could see in advance what Hitler represented and where Hitler was headed. And even when Hitler's crimes were shown to the world, many people didn't want to believe that those crimes were committed, or that Hitler knew about them. We have the recent case of the British historian, David Irving, and the whole school of "revisionists" and Holocaust deniers.
What is most interesting, I think, is that Hitler wrote and spoke about his plans in advance, so that anyone who was curious, anyone who bothered to study his pronouncements, could see what he intended. Of course, Hitler told many lies and covered himself with deceptive statements to throw people off. But his core philosophy was clearly spelled out. He promised to eradicate the Jews from Europe. He talked about taking the lands in the East. He believed in the victory of the strongest. At the same time, he was committed to a conspiratorial interpretation of history (while his entire career was a study in conspiracy). The fanaticism, narcissism and demagoguery of Hitler, combined with a specific set of irrational ideas and false claims, led directly to a world war in which more than 50 million people were killed. The man epitomized evil. He exemplified the very pattern of twisted ambition, and nearly everyone acknowledges this, even to the point of trivialization.
An interesting biography of Hitler was compiled by the Soviets at the end of World War II. They had captured Hitler's closest associates and interrogated them at length. From these interrogations they put together a portrait of the man, and gave it to Stalin. This book was not intended for the public. It was written for Stalin alone, and it revealed the psychology of the ruthless dictator. Hitler was an incredibly selfish person with a lust for power. He was an actor, a fraud, a murderer and a neurotic. The book has now been published and translated into English as The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin from the Interrogations of Hitler's Personal Aides.
It is of interest, I think, that Hitler occasionally expressed his admiration for Stalin. Especially he admired the way Stalin got his bureaucracy to carry out orders. We all know, of course, that Stalin ruled by fear. He arranged many executions. He sent millions to work camps. Stalin had spies to watch his spies, and possessed information about what everyone was doing. So people had to do what Stalin said, or they risked death. Stalin was therefore like a god. He knew everything, at least in theory the system allowed him to know more than any other person. The Stalinist system therefore was able to take and hold certain objectives. It was not economically efficient in the sense of a free society, but it was administratively efficient. And competition between state firms, when permitted, allowed the Russians to produce great weapons in large quantities, including the atomic bomb. It is only natural that Hitler admired Stalin's methods. Richard Overy tells us, in the Foreword of The Hitler Book, that Stalin admired Hitler's purge of the SA in 1934 (the so-called "Night of the Long Knives"). "Hitler," sighed Stalin, "what a great man! That is the way to deal with your political opponents." (That is, to kill them.) And we can see, after the assassinations of Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya last fall, that this view is shared by the present occupant of the Kremlin.
It was Stalin's notion that he and Hitler would've made an invincible pair. Toward the end of World War II, when Hitler was coming to terms with his many errors, Overy says that Hitler pondered "what the two men might have done between them if, 'in a spirit of implacable realism,' the two had set out to build a 'durable entente.'" One only has to look at the Russian-Chinese "Friendship Treaty" today to realize that murderers still know how to cooperate. The lesson of World War II has not been lost on Moscow and Beijing. A totalitarian partnership between two great countries can accomplish many things because everyone is afraid of a new and unpleasant conflict. The West cannot imagine a war against a powerful combination like Russia and China. Even more significant, they have added India and Brazil to their alliance, and are engaged in economic warfare against the United States.
It is also clear that the West isn't prepared to do anything serious to curb the outrages of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The stationing of a few ABMs in Poland or the Czech Republic isn't helpful at all. This has only given the Russian president a pretext for rearmament and for breaking out of the INF Treaty. Because of this useless deployment of half-developed interceptor rockets, Putin blames the U.S. and NATO for what he does next. "They are provoking us," he says. "They are threatening Russia." NATO's military capability is in shambles. It cannot realistically threaten anyone. Its members are divided, and there are military budget problems. Nevertheless, Putin says it is a great bugaboo and announces the necessity of Russian rearmament. After Russia has received hundreds of billions worth of aid and loans from the West, including technical assistance and food, the deployment of a few defensive missiles on NATO's Eastern frontier suddenly justifies massive war preparations. And guess who made these preparations possible? Guess who gave Russia the tools to rearm? Oh sure, the West is out to get Russia. Then why did the West build Russian power these past 15 years?
In building their power, Hitler and Stalin understood that their opponents were at a disadvantage. The West wants peace. It believes in freedom. Democratic countries accommodate socialists and peace activists. The totalitarian ruler assassinates his rivals and critics. There is no peace movement in China or Russia. Think about this for a minute. It's highly significant. The West becomes bogged down in controversy while the totalitarian moves secretly forward with his military preparations. You would think that people would rise up and smash a tyrant. George Bush smashed the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, but now George Bush is a villain and not a hero. Think about that, as well. And we ought to ask what happened in Beijing when people stood up to protest the communist regime almost two decades ago? Tanks rolled over the protestors. And what happened after that? It was the same in the Third Reich. Hitler killed his opponents, destroyed Germany's democratic constitution and governed in a lawless fashion. And what did the Western powers do? Stalin starved the Kulaks, arranged Kirov's murder and purged the Red Army. But people closed their eyes. They denied the seriousness of the problem. If Hitler and Stalin had not turned against each other the West would not have survived.
The sad truth is, we refuse to recognize evil because we don't want the responsibility and the risk involved in fighting evil. To see a great evil makes one responsible for doing something. The moral choice is clear. If you see a baby crawling towards a cliff, you have a responsibility to pull the baby from danger. What sort of person would argue that the baby's safety is not your responsibility? We all know what is expected of us under the circumstances, and the problem of great political evil forces us into the realm of responsibility. And so, I believe, it is to avoid responsibility that we are so willing to confuse the moral issues by dwelling on the errors of Western governments while we ignore the totalitarian East. Have we forgotten what totalitarianism signifies?
How about hundreds of millions of dead: by famine, war and forced labor. Look at Saddam Hussein, for example. His two chief heroes were Hitler and Stalin. He killed hundreds of thousands of people, and the only reason he didn't kill tens of millions was due to the small size of his country, and his lack of opportunity. Nonetheless, he committed acts of military aggression against two neighboring countries. He used chemical weapons on civilians. His people suffered decades under a regime of arbitrary arrest, torture and murder. And so, when the Americans arrive and put women's clothing on Iraqi prisoners we are instructed to lament the horror of American power. Saddam didn't force men to wear dresses. He cut off their testicles, or ran electricity through them. I am sorry for being graphic, but one must say such things to the adult children of our time. There are scales of comparison, and too many fools don't know how to weigh things at all..
What if the world had acknowledged Hitler's evil in 1933? How many lives would've been saved? How much destruction and loss and heartache would have been prevented? This only goes to show that we've learned nothing from the twentieth century. We are prepared to repeat all our old mistakes - from the Great Depression and the world wars themselves. Deep down the U.S. president knows that his "partner" in Russia is a dictator who murders journalists, who uses radioactivity to poison critics in the West, and yet President Bush will not say that Putin is a dictator. President Bush will not say that the Chinese leaders are killers who mowed down their own people in Tiananmen Square. He cannot say it, because appeasement is king and George W. Bush is in the doghouse. America has compromised its economic system and therefore its political system.
Goethe once said, "Despite all the powers closing in, hold yourself up." And yes, even now, there are powers closing in. They are closing in on the free world. They want to eradicate freedom. They are here in our midst, in our very universities. These powers are firmly entrenched in foreign capitals - in Moscow and Beijing, Tehran and Havana. And these forces recognize each other, and see that there is a common cause between them. Listen to what these people are saying, and note where they are coming from. There are voices today, just as there were in 1936. There are environmental fascists, socialists, minority racists and America-haters. Do we remember what such voices signify? Promising freedom they will deliver the exact opposite.
Do we sense the danger? No. We are busy clinging to a high lifestyle. We want to enjoy the good things. We spend money we do not have. We borrow and encourage an entitlement mentality in our young people. We've lost our thrift. We no longer believe in duty. And now we haven't the time or the energy to recognize enemies (foreign and domestic). For those who think the U.S. is playing the "great" international game, I have news. The U.S. isn't playing at all. The U.S. doesn't have a coherent strategy and doesn't possess institutions capable of coming up with one. We are fighting a war "against terror" while the big enemies with the big battalions set us up for the kill. America is not as powerful as people generally think. Military power is often misunderstood because of its complexity. You see, even if Russia and China are weaker than the United States (and that is debatable), their ruthlessness grants them a kind of power that we cannot master. It is the power that every dictator builds upon.
World War II began with a pact between two major dictatorships. In 1939 Hitler and Stalin joined together to destroy Poland. Isn't it possible that the next world war will involve a similar pact between dictators?
People do not read history as they should, and do not recognize the pattern of tyranny, the classic behaviors of a tyrant. They look at someone like the American president, and they dislike what he is doing, or they think that "wicked oil companies" are behind him, or other such nonsense, and they imagine they are seeing the evil of their time at work. But there is neither moral nor strategic sense in their view. The totalitarian left exists in every country, and it exists in America. The oil companies merely bring you cheap energy, with increasing friction from environmentalist groups.
You think the bad policies of Washington are evil? How lamentable, indeed. Like the Germans before Hitler, we are so busy vilifying Weimar that we fail to see the rise of the black swastika and the red star. The American Republic is imperfect and its policies are not what they should be. But this does not mean there aren't worse policies out there, and worse countries. A short while ago the defense spokesman of the British Conservatives, Mr. Liam Fox, told the House of Commons that Russia was rapidly rearming while "the eyes of the West have been elsewhere." Now let us consider on which side our bread is buttered. And let us also consider what this Russian move signifies.
