I recently spent a month away from work on paternity leave. My second son was born in a hurry, ahead of schedule, due to my wife becoming acutely preeclamptic the night of October 12th. If you’re unaware of preeclampsia, it’s a condition that can develop in pregnant women that causes their blood pressure to elevate to dangerous levels. My wife’s blood pressure the evening my son was born via c-section was averaging 190+/100+. These are extremely high blood pressure levels, and if any person, not just preeclamptic pregnant women, sustains a blood pressure this high for too long they will invariably have a stroke. My wife’s blood pressure was extreme that night, but it wasn’t nearly as extreme as the policies of the Nazi party in Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
You may be wondering what my son’s birth, wife’s preeclampsia, and Adolf Hitler have in common? The face value answer to that question is “nothing at all.” But if you could have been a fly on the wall of my paternity leave you might find yourself connecting dots right now……
Having a newborn in the home is no doubt a joyous occasion. It is also a grueling suffer-fest for the parents. In my experience, newborns, like house cats, tend to be very active and noisy in the late evening, and then calm and relaxed in the daytime. This feature of newborns is very upsetting and feels to me like a defect of our species. Of what use is it to species survival that with regularity an infant will scream it’s brains out night after night and then sleep like a peaceful little angle the entirety of the next day. Don’t predatory large cats hunt in the late evening? New parents are up all night tending to the unrelenting demands of the infant, and the next day laid up on the couch too exhausted to do anything productive. This facet of raising a newborn is the reason I am now able to draw a link between my infant son’s birth and Adolf Hitler, and it’s not because his needs in the late hours make him, in a metaphorical sense, like an oppressive dictator…. Ney, my son is not like Hitler in any way, (at least as far as I can tell, every parent has the potential to birth the next Hitler, and when you have an infant you can’t know that you didn’t just birth the next Hitler.) and I only draw the connection as a product of being exhausted on the couch unable to nap, and thus deciding to watch countless obsessive hours’ worth of War 1 and World War 2 documentaries. To be candid, my obsession with World War documentaries didn’t end when I left paternity leave, I’m still watching them. The more I watch the further down the hole I get, but I don’t think this has been wasted time. I’ve learned an incredible amount about the era that I wasn’t previously aware of and have gleaned parallels between the state of the world then, and unfortunately, how it is now.
World War 1
In my opinion World War 1 is the dumbest most pointless undertaking in all of recorded human history. The events that sparked the initiation of the war when compared against the horror and destruction of the war itself, were infinitely trivial. 20 million people were killed in World War 1 and the event that spurred this war into existence was the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a secret Serbian nationalist group called the Black Hand. If you learn up about the assassination, you’ll discover that the Black Hand botched the initial assassination attempt, gave up, and then in the process of going home accidentally ran into the Archduke on the street and was able to pull off an ad-hoc assassination. The Austrians then declared war on the Serbians, then the Russians on the Austrians, on and on until everyone was fighting everyone over the death of 1 useless archduke. The two things I’d like to point out about the assassination of the Archduke were that it was carried out by an extremist nationalist group, and a major element of random chance was involved in the success of the assassination. Extremism and random chance when combined in the right mixture lead to catastrophe. Why were so many Serbians mad at the Austrian Empire? I didn’t investigate it, but if I had to guess I would assume that there was some degree of economic oppression taking place, and the Serbian’s, who were not Austrians, felt as though they deserved sovereignty over themselves and the conditions that they lived in.
The event that started the war was dumb. The way the war was fought was even more dumb. Charging into barbwire laced fields in the direction of multiple machine gun nests over and over for 4 straight years feels to me like the purest form of insanity. If I was a general overseeing an army, I might reconsider my strategy after the entire first wave of troops I sent charging across no-man’s-land failed to return from their charge. It’s strange to me that none of the commanders of any of the WW1 armies stopped and thought to themselves “huh, that didn’t work.”?
WW1 ended when the German’s surrendered to the French. As I understand it, the Germans were running out of fighting resources and didn’t have a lot of options other than to surrender considering the French were being replenished with men and supplies by the English and Americans. The terms of the surrender can be viewed as somewhat harsh. Germany had to surrender vast sections of their territory, had to pay hefty reparations to the allied powers, had a head count cap placed on the size of their standing army, and was to assume blame for the war itself. I’m sure that there were more conditions, but those are the important ones I know of.
For Germans, especially the ones that fought in the war (like Adolf Hitler), acceptance of the terms of surrender was seen as an act of betrayal against the German people at the hands of German leadership. Not many Germans were pleased with the surrender and this resentment would persist from the end of WW1 up to the point that Hitler assumed power.
There were a couple undesirable side effects caused by the terms of the surrender that manifested in post-World War 1 Germany. The first most important side effect was that the massive reparation payments made by the Germans to the allies created extraordinary hyperinflation, the kind where the cost of a single loaf of bread skyrockets to 1 billion dollars (marks at the time in Germany). The second undesirable side effect was the manifestation of the widely held belief of the German people that their sovereignty as a nation was being unjustly infringed upon by the allied powers. These two items combined to produce a sense amongst the German’s that they were being oppressed, and it’s not necessarily a stretch to say that they were being oppressed as punishment for losing World War 1. Diminished sovereignty over their own affairs, coupled with economic issues stemming from the terms of their WW1 surrender created the widespread perception of oppression that eventually gave birth to the Nazi Party.
The reason I’m writing this article is to point out that oppression is the catalyzing force that time and time again precedes the genesis of extremism. It was exactly the oppressive societal conditions of post-World War 1 Germany that created the space for a person like Hitler to evolve. Whether or not the German people were truly being oppressed is up for interpretation, but I don’t think the factual provability of oppression is important, a group only need perceive that they are being oppressed to start adopting extremist ideas and behavior.
In present day America the MAGA movement and the Woke movement are both tremendous examples of movements that have spawned out of perceived oppression. It’s fair to say that both movements have their origins in what they perceive as oppression being pressed on them by the other group. Neither group has faced any actual measurable oppression, MAGA folks I assume are mostly perturbed by the ever-changing economic conditions of the country and the idea that ideology stemming from the Woke crowd is eroding the foundation of culture and beliefs that make America a great place to live. The woke and their LGBTQIA2S+ friends can’t seem to invent enough ways to be offended and feel oppressed, all the while no members of this population are actually oppressed in any systemic way. The legalization of gay marriage in the 2010’s saw the end of any group dependent state sponsored prohibition on legal activity. There are no definable groups being disparately oppressed in any way by the state in the US. It is, however, quite clear to me that we’re all being oppressed equally these days by, I assume, the regulatory capture and corruption of our government at the hands of huge multi-national corporations, and if the Maga folks and the Woke folks would only realize that the actual source of their perceived plights was originating from the same place, we might someday soon see a world where America was in fact great again.
Making Hitler
Hitler’s road to power was not a straight path, it was a meandering road full of failure, bad ideas that didn’t work, time in jail, failed attempts on his life, and spectacular moments of chance. Additionally, there was nothing remarkable about Hitler that would point at any reason why he committed the atrocities that he committed. I’ve heard that he grew up in an abusive household and that somehow that made him inclined towards violence and hate. I haven’t found anything that substantiates this claim. By all accounts his mother adored him, he adored her, and he personally describes his father as a hardworking, ambitious gentleman. If anything, he should have entered adulthood as a sniveling week willed mama’s boy. I’ve also heard it claimed that he hated the Jews so fervently because he was rejected admittance to art school by Jewish administrators. While it is true that he was rejected from art school, there’s no evidence that this rejection was the source of his hatred of Jews. As far as I can tell antisemitism was a popular idea amongst nationalist groups in 1920’s Germany, and Hitler’s antisemitism likely developed because of his participation in early Nazi gatherings. In other words, his antisemitism was engendered through repeated exposure to the antisemitic rhetoric of the people he was around, and similarly the motivation to marginalize, then imprison, and finally exterminate the Jews seems to have predominately been the agenda of Hitler’s henchman Heinrick Himmler. It was Himmler, bending Hitler’s ear, that lead to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. I’m no historian, so I apologize if I have misunderstood the dynamics within Hitler’s regime, but the factuality of my historical recanting isn’t critical to my point that Hitler was an average middle-class German who came from a loving home, who through external extremist influences developed into what is possibly the most evil man that has ever existed. The man is proof that normal humans when subjected to extreme conditions for too long can become abnormal humans that behave in extreme ways.
Hitler was sent to prison early in his Nazi career for attempting a coup on the local Munich government. At the time of his imprisonment the Nazi movement was still in its fledgling stage but had been gaining in popularity, due mostly in part to the poor economic conditions Germany faced after World War 1. In ordinary circumstances Hitler would have received the death penalty for his treasonous actions, but the court granted extraordinary leniency because the Nazi movement, it’s messaging, and Hitler himself had grown somewhat popular in the region. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison but only served 9 months. 2 relevant events occurred while he was imprisoned, the first was that he wrote Mein Kampf and the second was that the German economy improved substantially. When he left prison the Nazi movement had withered, and it’s messaging had less appeal to the German people at large. Extremist messaging doesn’t have great appeal to ordinary people when their lives are going well. (What a shocker!) Nazism may very well have died on the vine at this point if not for the Wall Street stock market crash of the early 1930’s. American debtors called in the loans they had made to Germany which reignited inflation in the country and crashed the economy again. Nazism in Germany only grew after the Wall Street stock market crash, but if the stock market crash hadn’t occurred, Nazism and Adolf Hitler would likely have faded into obscurity.
The Fog of World War 2
Hitler was nearly assassinated at a rally in a beer hall at the onset of World War 2. The attempt failed because of fog. Hitler was supposed to Travel form Munich to Berlin after the rally, but the weather necessitated that he take a train instead of the planned flight. This itinerary change required him to depart from the rally sooner than he otherwise would have in order to catch the train. 13 minutes after he left the beer hall a bomb exploded behind the podium he had been speaking at. The explosion killed a bunch of people in the beer hall and dropped that section of the building on top of where Hitler had been standing.
Hitler wasn’t congenitally evil, Nazism nearly collapsed on a host of occasions, and bad weather saved Hitler from having a building fall on his head. Hitler’s genesis into the evil dictator we know today would not have occurred if not for a myriad of chance occurrences.
Oppression + Extremism + Random Chance = Horror.
Scape Goats
Random shit will continue to happen for the rest of existence, there’s nothing to do about that, but people won’t become extreme if they aren’t being oppressed. The US and other western countries are currently realizing a marked uptick in extreme ideologies on the right and the left. Which begs the question, if oppression creates extremism, who is oppressing us? The oppression being experienced in the US in 2024 feels a lot like dark matter. We can’t see dark matter and we only know it exists because whatever it is exerts gravitational forces and the matter that we can see. We are seeing the birth of extremism, but the source of oppression is confused and misunderstood I believe. MAGA people aren’t oppressing Woke people, and Woke people aren’t oppressing MAGA people, but both groups have somehow been hoodwinked into believing that the other is the source of all their problems, even though both seldom live in the same communities. The masses of people that prescribe to these ideologies mostly live in different regions of the country. How are Oregon Liberals oppressing Alabama Conservatives and vice versa? That doesn’t make any sense, but the perception of this being the case is very real across the nation.
The Nazi’s used the Jews as a scape goat with which they tagged the blame for all the ills and misfortune faced by German people of the day. Simultaneously as the Nazi’s were systematically villainizing the Jews, they were also creating secret police, perfecting the art of wire taping, spying relentlessly on their own people, and absorbing news outlets to convert them into state propaganda pushers. The Jews in Germany were people’s neighbors, friends, and coworkers. The Nazi party villainized them as a means of masking their own villainous behavior. Which makes me wonder if throughout time nefarious state actors have fostered hatred of outgroups in order to push forward fascist policies? Is it possible that these sorts of tactics are being executed today in modern democracies? Germany was a democracy at the point Hitler assumed power….
Here is my proposition. The narratives that have created tension between the right and left in modern day America, that have galvanized and propelled the extremist elements of both sides of our political spectrum, are nothing more than state approved propaganda aimed at causing American citizens to villainize one another. I contend that whenever you hear a message that makes you feel ill-will towards other groups in our society, you are being made to feel that way by propogandists elements within the power structures of our country. This propaganda can be sniffed out in any narrative or policy that makes you feel discontent towards your neighbor. Do not be fooled into hating your neighbor. The truth of them is that no matter what ideologies they’ve been fooled into believing, the heart of their true beliefs and desires are the same as yours. Your neighbor desires safety, economic stability, and peace. Your neighbor wants to spend as much time as they are able with their loved ones. They want to sit around the fire drinking wine and laughing. They want to live their life without interference from the government and the powerful. Everyone you have ever met and will ever meet at their core wants these things. How they feel about abortion, gun rights, gay marriage, racism, immigration, trans issues, and the like are superficial in comparison to their desire to be happy and connected to their fellow humans. Again, do not be fooled into hating your neighbor, they are the same as you.
My grandfather passed away a few weeks ago at the end of 2023. He was born in 1932. His birthdate would have made him 13 when World War 2 ended. He was very recently a human that was alive and old enough to remember World War 2. World War 2 seems as though it was an eternity ago, but it literally just happened. I fear that we have been lulled into believing that we have matured as a species and that the events of the Second World War could never happen again. Maturity, if it exists in the first place, isn’t a parameter of the equation that leads to atrocity and all the elements required for atrocities to occur are currently in place and thriving in every powerful country. We are the children of the people that carried out all the horror of the Second World War, how can we believe we are beyond these varieties of awful behavior when we were raised by the people that carried them out?
Atrocity/horror = Oppression + Extremism + Random Chance.
DylanPearce.org 
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