Wherever you go, when the subject of conversation turns to hideous, mind-boggling acts of evil, you will often find people leaping to conclusions. Whether those conclusions are about the perpetrator or the circumstances, generally, those conclusions form part of a psychological defensive reaction.
You see, in the backs of whatever kind of minds they have, Human beings do not want to believe in what they are capable of unless it suits them. In the uneducated, ignorant mind, Human beings are not capable of murdering people in large amounts or leaving their own children to die painfully whilst they go and play bingo. Sadly, not only does the reality run in the opposite direction of this belief, it runs in that direction at a speed that an Olympian would be proud of.
Essentially, when a person of a lesser cognitive capacity encounters a person, or the memory of a person, that they really do not want to be associated with in any possible context, they need to demonise that person or persons. They need to make it seem as if the person in question is of a different species to them, lest there be any possibility in the minds of witnesses that they could have anything in common with the person. This instinct is somewhat connected with the deep desire to connect a group disliked by the beholder with a person repulsive to the beholder. Adolf Hitler, ironically, liked to tell Germans things along the lines of how those baad, nasty Jews were going to storm their houses, kill the children, rape the cat, and so forth. (No, not literally, but for all intents and purposes…)
Which is ironic, when you sit and think about it, because the number of people one encounters from all walks and during all stages of life that try to tell one that Adolf was mentally ill (“crazy”, “psychotic”, et cetera) is amazing. I even sat and listened to one high school teacher try to deliver what sounded like a very under-informed version of what syphilis does to the Human brain. But here is the thing. When one reads an informed, researched biography of Adolf Hitler, a very different picture emerges. The virulent anti-semitism that he displayed, for example, was really commonplace throughout not just Europe but the entire world, and would remain so for years after the end of World War II. The belief that a Jewish conspiracy was sucking the life out of Germany for nefarious purposes might sound delusional, but delusions brought about in the midst of extreme adversity, and ones common to the culture one grew up in at that, hardly qualify as evidence of insanity.
Believing that murdering millions of people, including children, is the right thing to do because an imaginary voice told you so, is insanity. Believing that murdering millions of people, including children, because you have somehow convinced yourself that they or people who are associated with them by genetic commonality is the right thing to do, is perfectly sane. Wrong as all hell, and worthy of damnation in the strictest, harshest sense, but as sane as an episode of Dastardly And Muttley In Their Flying Machines looked to children watching televisions in 1969. And if you think I am talking out of my hat, then I can assure you that the four psychiatrists I have associated with as a friend or associate will back me up on this.
Narcissistic personality disorder, a disorder characterised by overestimation of one’s abilities and an excessive need for affirmation, is the one diagnostic label that matches Adolf Hitler’s behaviour closely enough to meet the standard for posthumous diagnosis. His behaviour after the failed Valkyrie bombing also demonstrates commonality with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But neither of these things, in and of themselves, meet the legal definition of insanity.
If you were wondering why I just spent all of that time explaining this, it is so you understand the following: Adolf Hitler was just an ordinary man, no different to me, Ed Wood, or Bob Dole. But when one is fishing for explanations or justifications of utterly inexplicable behaviour, it takes a certain mindset to really hunt for the explanation that fits the facts. As opposed to the one that sits comfortably in the mindset of the person who proclaims to be seeking explanation. At the point where I tell people that Adolf Hitler was a sane man who just happened to believe some very incredible things about himself, the world, and people he saw as enemies, the audience would have broken of into two groups. One, the people who stammer and scream “no he’s not! no he’s not!” et cetera ad nauseum. Two, the people who stop and listen to my reasoning, and learn something from it.
Ever since the dawn of the Human species, we have been constantly searching for ways to explain away things we find uncomfortable about ourselves. In one scene of an otherwise abominable adaptation of the videogame character known as Lara Croft, the titular character is asked if she has ever looked around at the people around her and seen a billion people the world could do without. Because of problems with Human consciousness that I have talked about previously, such as the Monkeysphere (a phenomenon which severely limits the number of other Human beings we are able to see as actual people), there are very few Human beings who have not done that.
Hell, I have done it myself in the past. I likely still do. Because on a planet with more than seven billion people on it, the idea that any one individual can absolutely see all of the other people as actual Human beings is pretty laughable. Hell, during medieval times, the idea that any one person in a village saw every other person therein as a Human being was pretty far-out. But the thing is, the more aware we become of things that other people did thousands of miles away or at times in the past, the more we find ourselves hitting our heads against this wall.
And a side effect of hitting our heads against this wall is that we find ourselves unable to believe in the full extent of our species’ inhumanity to itself. When we are taught as children that a small group of men ordered the deaths of approximately ten million people, we react by rationalising the reason that a small group of Humans would want to do this to another, larger group of Humans. Group A were really space aliens, demons, monsters, and so on. However, this does not come close to describing the reality.
The prevalence of seemingly random acts of inhumanity on the part of one group of Humans towards another, the sheer number, is extremely solid evidence that only a small percentage of those can even partially be blamed on mental illness. And even, then, there are pretty much always conjoined factors such as neglect on the part of society that play a more important part. Also important is the fact that Adolf Hitler achieved a level of success in the art and science of politics that few individuals have enjoyed before or since. You can explain that by appealing to narcissism, but people who have broken from their reality to the extent that people like Jürgen Bartsch (the German serial killer, not the German bassist), or even less powerful examples like Axl Rose, have demonstrated something both fortunate and unfortunate about political science. Specifically, mental illnesses are prohibitive towards success in politics. Even Adolf’s success in politics proves this point to an extent. Again, teachers in school tried to convince my peers and I that Hitler won his place in the German government by sweet-talking the people of Germany and making promises he had no intent of keeping. There is truth to that, but the reality is that not only did his appointment as Chancellor have nothing to do with the people, he enjoyed an almost unbroken string of luck along the road to power.
Even narcissistic personality disorder does not help in the art of diplomacy. As described in the linked biography, Adolf made many overtures towards other world leaders with the intent of either bullying them into granting him his desires or sitting idle whilst he bullied other leaders. This worked on nations like Czechoslovakia or Austria, and it even worked for a little time on Great Britain. But Great Britain in the 1930s was a lot like I am now. People like Adolf could feign a punch at it once or twice and get it to cower, but after the third or fourth time, Great Britain began to swing back. And in the bare light of Adolf’s limitations as an organiser or strategist, his plan to bully the world into giving him the land he wanted began to fall apart.
Attempts to associate the mentally ill or the autistic with this or that “baad” individual for the sake of making them all look “baad” or in order to explain their actions without thought, to be blunt, are cowardly acts. Even today, when the ceiling placed over people who are not of the right race or social background in the majority of societies is one of glass, the mentally ill and autistic remain whipping boys. I have spoken a great deal about how offensive I find separationistic language, and you can see a good reason for it in such films as As Good As It Gets. Even in the moments of the film where the central character’s Humanity is demonstrated and acknowledged by other characters, everything is phrased to ensure the audience understands he is Human in spite of what he is. Because the powers that be would never want anyone other than norms to possess Humanity because of what they might be.
The underrepresentation of the mentally ill in political science today is a disgrace. Health, both research and services, in general have often been a whipping boy for politicos who seem to think that meeting some imagined goal for penny-pinching is the yardstick by which performance is measured (as opposed to giving taxpayers what they pay for). Even today, when one goes to a hospital, one can see slogans plastered on cars or windows proclaiming that nurses or even doctors are not a luxury. And the segment of health services that always cops it the worst, the one that gets hurt worse than any other, is mental health. This is because mental health is a bit like AIDS, diabetes, or cancer. The vast majority of people only consciously think about it when it starts to affect them.
There is also an aspect that a lot of people do not think about when they attempt to demonise people that they do not approve of. When you strip one person of their Humanity, you also at least partly strip their opponents of same. In videogames, for instance, when players are encouraged to think of the enemy as inhuman monsters (the X-Com franchise is a good example), all of the individualisation of the toy soldiers you have to prosecute your side of the war cannot make them seem any more “real”. Even in World Of Warcraft, the irritatingly poor writing of one side of the faction battle makes the other less compelling to deal with. And if you think I am thinking of one side or the other, you are mistaken. Notice also how that in poorly-written war films such as The Green Berets, the absolute refusal to even acknowledge a sliver of Humanity in the enemy makes the heroes look like a bunch of utter dickheads.
Contrast this with more recent war films or television series like Zwartboek or Band Of Brothers. In the latter, after discovering one of the numerous sites around Europe in which Jews were left to die like flies, one of the soldiers in Easy Company has a confrontation with a German who continually protests that he is not a Nazi. The episode is set in Germany, so the camp is definitely a starvation and disease camp as opposed to a gassing camp. That said, after listening to one of the German’s protests, the soldier, played by one Eion Bailey, asks the German baker if he [the German baker] is a Human being. This is an incredibly powerful moment in the story. Not just because the American soldier asks what the audience is thinking, whether the German baker means to tell him that they never smelled the stench that the camp is making. But because the soldiers, who have already been through so much during the rest of the series, are clearly breaking and losing all faith in Humanity as a whole.
Many scenes in these two productions, and they are just a couple out of many that have similar elements, explore the manner in which the Germans, soldier and civilian alike, behaved during the closing days of the war. Or the aftermath, for that matter. German civilians even had to contemplate which of the two enemies descending upon their homes they would rather surrender to. (The Allies were regarded as the better choice, as the Russians were burning, looting, and raping pretty much anything in their path, at least if the accounts I found are to be believed.)
The biography of Adolf Hitler is a litany of what-ifs. The question of what if one of the people who had shut all of the doors on Adolf during his formative years had kept a door open or steered him towards what he wanted to be as a young man is one that every person in certain parts of society should be asking. But then there is also the question of what our world would look like now if Adolf had gone through life as an artist or interior decorator rather than falling into politics by accident.
But then, as this article demonstrates, the life of Adolf Hitler has become fodder for liars wanting to prove any political or social point, regardless of whether they would otherwise have a leg to stand on. There is a law often quoted on the Internet called Godwin’s law, which states that in any argument, the first side to invoke Adolf Hitler in any manner automatically loses. There is merit to this law, as generally speaking, when a comparison to Adolf Hitler really is valid, the person one is comparing with Adolf Hitler offers many, many other points of bad behaviour that the person making the argument can go to first. Autism Speaks, for example, can be labelled bad simply on the basis that they proclaim they speak for everyone on the autistic spectrum when they flat-out refuse to listen to a singular word that the autistic have to say.
But this law also does us a grave disservice because not only is the comparison between Autism Speaks and Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party apt, it is warranted and should be brought to the attention of any government that will give Autism Speaks the time of day. It can be fairly stated that Suzanne Wright and Autism Speaks, who once openly stated on their website the “prevention” of “cases of autism” to be their goal, differ only from Adolf Hitler in the level of success they have achieved in carrying out their ambitions (six million put a very big dent in the Jewish population of the Europe of 1945). Even the levels of opposition they face or faced are pretty similar. Just as one could tell who was properly informed or a Human being about what was going on in Europe by how they responded, so too can one tell how decent a person is by whether they give Autism Speaks the time of day.
So Autism Speaks, just like what I refer to as Repugnantthugs, have only one real option left open to them in order to muster support. Hence my belief that if it turns out Autism Speaks tried to solicit arrangement of a school shooting in order to demonise the autistic, it would not surprise me in the slightest. You see, for far longer than it has been trendy to print (or film) lies about the autistic, the gun ownership lobby has been running their mouth off with lies about gun control advocates. The lie that the Jewish population of Germany could have done a thing to stop the Nazi government from dehumanising them if they had been armed to the teeth is a classic example of that. In one argument on Fudgebook, I guesstimated that even if the Jews numbered five million, being armed could not have stopped the Germany army from carrying out the Nazis’ evil intent.
Turns out, I was off by a factor of ten. The census gathered on June 16, 1933 puts the Jewish population of Germany at 505,000. That is right. Five hundred and five thousand. The total population of Germany at this time was ~67,000,000. Sixty seven million. Let us do some creative number adjustment in order to accompany the NRA’s lunacy to its logical conclusion. Let us assume that the entire 505,000 Jews in Germany were armed and knew how to effectively use their weaponry. Let us assume further, still, that of the 66,495,000 total remaining German population, only the 37 percent that constituted the Nazi party’s peak share of the vote would oppose their overthrow of the German government in order to protect themselves. That is still 24,603,150 people to be fought by a total of 505,000. There are circumstances in which the 505,000 can win, but an overthrow of established government and its infrastructures is not amongst those.
Also worth noting is, as the image to the left of this paragraph states, when the Black Panthers wanted to carry firearms in public during the 1960s, and then-governor Ronald Reagan wanted to sign a law restricting people from doing so, the NRA were all about it. This is because the NRA, an organisation predominantly consisting of rich white men, were terrified of the idea of “darkies” being able to respond with force in the event of feeling grievously mistreated. You see, the NRA does not want the general public to be armed. Good lord, no, that would not fit their agenda and worldview. They only want what they call the right people to be armed. Namely, rich white brats with an excessive sense of entitlement. In the 1960s, the idea that black folks could protect their life and liberty through the use of lethal force was terrifying to them. So when I openly proclaim that it is the autistic who need firearms to protect themselves from normies, not the other way around as normies like to claim, measure that against the weight of the 1967 Mulford Act and the NRA’s support thereof.
A moronic crybaby act that I will address at another time takes issue with my belief that not only should abortion be legal, it should be mandatory in a weighted sense. The reason I mention it here is because one would think that with my support of drastic population reduction, I would be all about the unrestricted access to firearms. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that, much like IQ tests or scholastic aptitude tests, gun registration systems are inherently biased in favour of the normie. And guns, regardless of what bullshit the NRA can come up with, make it far easier to kill another Human being than does any other weapon readily available to the average working citizen. This can be seen in a simple study of suicide statistics. Guns account for the smallest fraction of actual attempts, but the highest fraction of successes. In a society where guns are restricted to armed services, murders tend to involve a much bloodier and physically exhausting effort. I am sure that the semi-famous former standover man Mark “Chopper” Read would agree with me when I say that any hard-hearted fool can kill a man using a gun, but it takes real art to knife a man in the face and neck dozens of times without getting a drop of blood on oneself.
Unfortunately, in this age where anyone can have an opinion, and have it broadcast, without going through the vetting process of qualifying it, minority groups have to work twice as hard at countering the attempts of others to demonise them. Fortunately, the same tools that allow broadcast without qualification make this somewhat easier. It is just the getting heard part we need to work on.
I Still Find It So Hard... 