And the other guy. And BackChannels hopes the “other guy” proves an American and very, very cool about it.
Despite the conservative grousing about it, we need our United Nations.
Despite “everything being negotiable” — but is everything really negotiable? — Syria needs peace and a program for detoxifying from old Soviet Era poison (including its famous promotion of anti-Semitism); and Ukraine needs to remain sovereign across all of its designated lands.
And NATO and the United States of America represent a necessary and unified concept for the defense of democracy and freedom in the world — real freedom, not state-approved bunk fashioned out of some idiot’s totalitarian mixture of intimidation and patronage.
As always with dictators, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies well to ethically, morally, and spiritually vacuous systems of power.
A fast glance online suggests that Stalin and Hitler hated one another and bought into their own heady non-aggression pact for practical (even if delusional) purposes.
Of course, in the BackChannels way of looking at some politics through the lens of related psychology (see “Malignant Narcissism” and other ideas in “Anthropolitical Psychology” on this blog), one may view Stalin and Hitler as two malignant narcissists explosively engaged with one another. It was not a pretty site, that World War II, but the basis for affinity between the two dictators in shared anti-Semitism, anger with the greater world (it’s always against them, non?), the “paranoid delusional reflection of motivation“, and so on may have less visibly bonded the two just as today Putin, Assad, and Khamenei would seem to have wildly different state interests while yet sharing in the creation of greater chaos, destruction, and injustice in the world (for confirmation, just ask any Syrian refugee you happen to meet).
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: