That a Nazi flag would be flying over a Palestinian village near a Mosque should actually be less shocking than the fact that so many are shocked by it.
This story has actually had about half a day, twelve hours, to get around the web, but it looks pretty stupid by every public relations and rhetorical guidance possible. As with Syria calling up the ghosts of the Soviet Era, stringing up a Nazi flag on a power line in a refugee-controlled area of the West Bank (where the heck was “the occupation” when that obscenity unfurled?) awakens the racist ghosts of Germany’s woeful Nazi Era.
Some people cannot but help fight old battles in their heads until they erupt in a reality that has only to teach them all over again why those old battles have indeed grown old and irrelevant.
Posted here with thanks to my private correspondent in Lithuania and to YouTube’s “Edup12” for bringing this and more to light.
The study of “malignant narcissists” and how they do what they do has a complement in inquiry into the character of their enablers and their followers. The above is longer than a “sound bite”, but hang with it: it has many things to say about evil and its seductions.
The case for pathological narcissism and its characteristic defensiveness and obliviousness to others — and to reality, socially, sometimes physically — only becomes more clear as this filter borne of comparisons and observations becomes itself more resolving; then too, the charismatic effects of what may present as a happily grandiose mania may become more clear to those endangered as its targets or, far worse, enthralled by its recklessness and the first appearance of its excesses.
Traudl Junge was about 13 years old in 1933 and all of 25 when she found herself sharing the bunker in which Hitler committed suicide.
And here is a kicker — I didn’t like the cut of the film sent by way of Lithuania, and so went looking, briefly (in the way of the web), for another look at a part of André Heller’s Blind Spot documentary (source picked up from John Hooper’s reporting in The Guardian in 2002).
It’s different.
(Source: http://youtu.be/h5igDo-KJJo)
And yet much the same.
The second clip, early on, explains the voice-over appearing in the first (reaction shots Junge’s watching her own interview on a monitor).
And now — again, in the way of the World Wide Web –something really different:
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