During WWII we all know Hitler as the ultimate madman and evil person. However, in many videos from The Great War and Between 2 Wars Indy mentioned how this or that event affected Hitler’s view on something. I may be way out of course here to speculate, but it almost seems that he had a potential to be a good (or normal) person (if only they let him be the artist in that academy, right, lol?) and at time world around him was really crazy, so many horrible things happening on a regular base, did all that affect him in starting to hate this or that type of people or thinking one race is superior to another, etc… It kinda feels that many people around him, given the same amount of power, would be just as crazy, cruel and megalomaniacal. Well, I guess Stalin isn’t really much different. I’d like to hear Indy’s opinion about how much he things surrounding events affected Hitler and changed his character to what we think of him today. Thank you.
I’m no expert on anything, but I’ve been studying on and off the Great War and its aftermath for nearly two decades. I think we deeply underestimate the spiritual catastrophe WWI was to Europe. It wasn’t just modern conservatives like me that look back with longing to Le Belle Epoch. I think one of the reasons the German officers especially Manstein wouldn’t kill Hitler wasn’t ‘Honor’ per se, but they’d seen so many horrors by their own side and the Communists, that loyalty to one’s government and superiors was the one thread of morality they had left, the one thing keeping them from the derangement of moral nihilism and becoming something like Stalin and Mao.
The 19th century presented a world of savages and civilized men, and the civilized men knew who they were and tried to conduct themselves accordingly. The 20th century was an era of monsters, and the first time, I think people started to accept the idea that Humans were the Real Monsters.
I mean look at this series, many of these episodes are hard to watch, could you imagine living through all of this, day by day and not undergoing severe moral agony, and understanding that the bd people were either self-serving nihilists, like Goering and possibly Heidrich or fanatical murdering shrill, nasty scum like Himmler and Gobbles? What keeps you from being that? A clear head and DUTY.
Play your part as best you could, follow your orders and it is your duty. Even if others do evil things, even if you do evil things under orders, you played your part correctly. It’s a very traditionally Christian moral stance of how to be good in a world that is corrupt and unjust.
Although this was written in 1952 by CS Lewis, admittedly a staunch Christian Apologist, I think it begins to illustrate the thinking and moral dilemmas of his generation, Hitler and Stalin’s generation, and the change of pace and shattering of worldviews: