It is one of the oldest pieces of wisdom in conflict. Every successful military leader, every good chess- or poker player, every successful electoral politician, everyone ever in a conflict situation (as we are all sometimes) should have that maxim "pasted on the inside of his hat". So it is not surprising that Soros, being a very smart fellow, looked closely at Hitler, presumably the better to resist similar characters (there will always be such, alas) in his future. Indeed, anyone who is concerned with Nazism (and it's possible re-occurrence, which is not an inconceivable event as the world spirals into economic chaos and the inevitable enormous social dislocations coming) has to read "Mein Kampf". In it Hitler clearly laid out what he meant to do, and how he meant to do it. And he came awfully close to succeeding; but for his own fatal lack of judgment he could have won all his wars. The main military mistakes being: misjudging the strength of the USSR, failing to support Rommel's drive to the Suez Canal and beyond, not being prepared to follow up the quick defeat of France with an invasion of nearly defenceless Britain, and above all, unnecessarily declaring war on the US after pearl Harbor, which his treaty with Japan did not require him to do. It's possible that his monomaniacal drive to destroy the Jews also led him to mis-allocate resources to that end rather than in more strategically useful directions, not to mention depriving his economy and research of the talents of many Jewish experts: many of the men who developed the A-Bomb for us were refugee Jews from Hitler's Europe.
Much of his book is the tedious ranting of an auto-didactic, power-mad sociopath who found what he was pre-disposed to believe in various writers...but the pages on propaganda and the use of deception and outright lying (e. g. The Protocols of Zion, a well-exposed forgery) and PR is crystal clear, as he openly acknowledges his debt to American advertising for many techniques. Had he had to hand the power of television, who knows what he might have accomplished (among other things, putting me in a gas chamber)?
The raw materials for an American fascism are lying around us everywhere, not least in the frothings of Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin. Neither of them has the craftiness to be the leader of such a development, but rest assured that there are some out there who just might. If the economy really collapses (as it could if, say, the Mad Hatters of the Tea Party succeed in blocking the raise of the debt limit and so throwing the US into default and destroying the world's credit system) that possibility becomes ever more plausible. And Mr. Soros is a ready-made hate figure around which such a movement would happily coalesce.
No comments:
Post a Comment