The Well Run Dry: Adolf Hitler

Sunday, March 14, 2021

Солнечный свет

Sunshine go away today

I don't feel much like dancin'

Some man's gone, he's tried to run my life

He don't know what he's askin'

When he tells me I better get in line

I can't hear what he's sayin'

When I grow up I'm gonna make it mine

These ain't dues I been payin'...

- from Sunshine by Jonathan Edwards (a 1971 blast from the past!)

I am still busy with the kind of work that pays bills, so I will have to postpone the continuation of my posts on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) by Gene Sharp. But I want to comment today on something I came across while researching the material for my most recent post in the From D to D series.

That post drew from a book by Basil Henry Liddell-Hart titled, The Strategy of Indirect Approach. That book was inspired by Liddell-Hart's experiences in World War 1, both as a combatant and and an observer. And because this book was written in the 1940's, Liddell-Hart reserved the last chapter for a commentary on the opening events of World War 2. That chapter is appropriately titled, "Hitler's Strategy." Liddell-Hart holds up Adolf Hitler as an outstanding example of the power of the indirect approach to warfare, saying that "The peaceful Powers have suffered a lot from 'missing the bus' through their slowness to gauge what he [that is, Hitler] would attempt next."

Liddell-Hart comments that this "missing of the bus" is a strange thing given the fact that before his ascent to power, Hitler spelled out exactly both the general strategy and the specific methods by which he would attempt world domination. Through his autobiographical Mein Kampf and his public speeches, Hitler laid all his cards on the table. Of particular note is the fact that Hitler sought to disarm and disintegrate his opponents as much as possible through means that did not involve actual war, so that when the time for arms actually came, a military victory could be achieved with the least possible cost. To quote Hitler, "People have killed only when they could not achieve their aim in other ways ... There is a broadened strategy with intellectual weapons ... Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself."

A key method of destroying enemies from within consists of understanding and playing on the weaknesses of the great men of the nation one seeks to conquer. Liddell-Hart therefore described how Hitler used this method to destroy the Weimar Republic in order to install himself as the supreme leader of Germany and the Nazi Party as the sole political instrument of Germany. But what is more disturbing is how Hitler then used the same methods to undermine the other nations of Europe. Among the things done to implement this strategy are the following:

Support of the emerging fascist government of Italy
Support of General Franco's successful overthrow of the Spanish government
A series of relatively bloodless military victories against militarily inferior neighbors. These military moves were made under the pretext of answering the call for help made by supposedly oppressed German minorities and sympathetic partisans in these countries.
From page 306 of Liddell-Hart: "To prepare the way for his offensive, he [Hitler] sought to find influential adherents in the other country who would undermine its resistance, make trouble in his interest, and be ready to form a new government compliant to his aims. Bribery was unnecessary - he counted on self-seeking ambition, authoritarian inclination, and party-spirit to provide him with willing and unwitting agents among the ruling classes." (Emphasis added.)

It is this last point which I want to emphasize. When the members of a polity are decent, moral people, this moral and ethical purity is a source of strength even if the polity may be militarily weak. But when there are members of the polity who seek to make themselves great by trashing their fellow human beings, they expose themselves to the possibility of being trashed in turn by a power greater and more skillful than themselves. That power is itself a power of darkness, and it finds an open door of assault when the darkness within it calls out to the darkness of the great men of the polity - and finds a ready answer. (This, for instance, is how Hitler almost destroyed Josef Stalin.)

So it is that the darkness within Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin has called out to many of the great men of the West and has found a ready answer. For the strategy and the strategic moves of Putin's Russia have been in many ways an almost exact mirror of the opening moves made by Adolf Hitler over 80 years ago. I would like to suggest that among Putin's most "willing and unwitting agents" are many members of the Republican Party, the white American Evangelical/Protestant church (see this also), and the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.

In mentioning Putin's close relationship with many of the leaders of the white American evangelical/Protestant church, I want to be clear that I do not believe for a moment that Putin is actually a Christian. Nor do I believe he has any noble spiritual motives. But I do believe that Putin, like Hitler before him, is an embodiment of the kind of global hegemon which the world will see in the perhaps not-too-distant future, a ruler described thus:

And in his place a despicable person will arise, on whom the honor of kingship has not been conferred, but he will come in a time of tranquility and seize the kingdom by intrigue...And after an alliance is made with him he will practice deception, and he will go up and gain power with a small people... (Daniel 11:21, 23; see also Daniel 8:23-25)

Could Putin then be "da man"? может быть; кто знаете?

P.S. If you want to read more of my posts on Russia, the following are a good place to start: