People are always picking and choosing when to act like art, entertainment & media has no political power & I’m so tired of it. A Tweet by Bree Newsome who identifies as artist – grassroots organizer – free black woman – proud wife & mama – removed sc’s confederate flag in the name of Jesus on june 27, 2015

Hitler was one of the first great rock stars. He was no politician, he was a great media artist. How he worked his audience! He made women hot and sweaty and guys all wished they were the ones who were up there. The world will never see anything like that again. He made an entire country a stage show. Said David Bowie after he and Mick Jagger had seen Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, fifteen times.

I’ve been reading Hitler and The Power of Aesthetics by Frederic Spotts and it is fascinating. I recommend it if you are at all interested in World War II or how Hitler came to power although it isn’t really about either one. It is about Hitler as an artist and the power of that art, especially performance art. As far back as I can remember being told anything about Hitler, it was that he was a buffoon. I don’t think I have ever been shown a movie clip of Hitler speaking except to demonstrate that he was a foolish little man.

That is ad hominin thinking at its purest. Hitler was evil, he was a narcissist and a sociopath, and, after he was in power, increasingly out of control and out of touch with reality. At twenty, he was a powerless evil man, and how he became a demi-god is fascinating. As I type this, I can hear myself getting defensive to an imagined “Why would anyone want to read about that little evil man?” so I’ll resort to quoting Timothy Snyder: It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.

This book was written – or, at least, published – during the Trump Administration and there are times when what Hitler did seems to resonate with what Trump did during his 2016 campaign, especially in terms of his rallies. In both cases, they have been criticized and ridiculed for their use of language but in Hitler’s case – and probably Trump’s also – his use of language was thought out and practiced. Hitler admired Llyod George, the Liberal Party Prime Minister of England, for the primitiveness of his language which Hitler thought connected him to his followers. Hitler’s speeches were all emotion, he didn’t lay out programs, he charmed his listeners and they adored him. According to William Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich who saw Hitler in Nuremberg in a 1934 rally, They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.

I started this blog post just before Putin launched his attack on Ukraine which has sucked up most of my bandwidth and stalled me out. But I did find this book fascinating and wanted to comment on it so I can get it off my desk. I also want to comment on the isolation and paranoia of autocrats. Hitler and Putin are very different men but there are commonalities worth looking at. One of them is the arc towards isolation that all autocrats seem to follow.

Humans are social animals and, to a certain extent, that socialness is what keeps us sane. Bumping into other people – not physically but emotionally and developmentally, at least – is what sets boundaries and keeps us coherent, it enables us to be in a relationship with our fellow travelers. People who amass great power sort of step out of normal societal rules, they do not follow the conventional wisdom, they are, almost always, sociopaths. It becomes increasingly easy for them to think they are the only one who is right and everybody else is wrong, that has been the case up to that time after all. Their advisors become sycophants and the only reality they see is the sociopathic leader’s reality which they reflect back to them. As their reality drifts away from our common reality, the sycophants follow them, and the sociopath is free of checks, leading him into a fantasy land of his own making.

As late as Spring of 1945, as Germany was imploding, Hitler was in his bunker, moving imaginary armies around on the situation board and refining models of his plans for rebuilding German cities as grand displays of the power and longevity of the Third Reich. I don’t think that Putin has reached that level of delusion yet, but he clearly thought taking Ukraine back into the Russian fold would be easier than it has turned out to be and his army is clearly not as well trained and equipped as he imagined. I’m beginning to think that, with enough support, Ukraine has a chance in this war.