« Defence of the realm - Part 2 | Main | A question of trust? »
September 09, 2004
The tyrant's human face...
It is very interesting to see the reaction among the cognicenti and the liberal left press to the previews of the new film on the last days of Hitler. Almost mass hysteria in their rage at the fact that he is shown as a "caring", sick and disillusioned man succumbing to his infirmities. Why the outcry? The main reason for the outraged criticism this film has unleashed, is that it destroys the cardboard cutout two dimensional monster image that the left love to hate. It replaces it with an image of three dimensions, one which we all recognise could be the man next door!
There is nothing in the film that wasn't already known about Hitler, his love of routine, his rather strait laced views on sex, marriage and fidelity. What is new, is seeing them alongside his almost casual orders to troops to go out and die, to the camp commanders of the concentration camps to step up "production" and the ordinariness of so much of his daily routine. It has tended to be lost in the image projected in the last fifty years that this man was not a complete moron, he was not an ignoramus either. While he lacked a great deal in terms of formal education he had read extremely widely and was a very knowledgable commentor on art and architecture. He was also not the complete idiot he is often portrayed as in military matters either - something that emerges as soon as a proper study is made of his briefings with his General Staff.
There is no sign of the slurring speech, or the spittal sprayed rantings, this is a picture of a man who is erudite, sane and in full control of his thoughts. That is waht seems to disturb the left liberal lobby the most.
The problem here is that most people prefer to see him as an aberration, something out of the ordinary, a madman, a freak. They don't like the thought that he was an intelligent, caring (to those he liked or approved of!) and reasonably ordinary man. That makes the "monster" one of us!
We have the same problem whenever we examine any of the other tyrants our species throws up at regular intervals. Joe Stalin could casually order the extermination of a few thousand people "for the greater good" - then go home to his loving daughters and share a convivial meal with them. He liked nothing better than to be surrounded by children and to be able to play games, tell stories or read books to them. Yet his contemporaries were terrified of him. Nor is he unique in this behaviour, there are many other examples of such behaviour.
Ghengis Khan was one such, capable of huge kindness and savage brutality. His descendent Tamerlane, who ruled an Empire from the Aegean to the heart of India, and to his small circle of family and friends was the epitomy of kindness and compassion. To his subjects capable of unspeakable tyranny. As Stalin's most recent biographer has pointed out, the humanity of these tyrants is what makes them even more frightening. It is their very humaness which destroys the illusion of a species of "inherent goodness and peace".
In another equally revealing glimpse of the heart of a tyrant, we are now able to see behind the smile of Chairman Mao, a vision afforded by the translation of a book by his personal physician. This reveals another aspect of the monster, this time a man with a voracious sexual appetite - for teenage girls. Somewhere along the line this monster caught venereal disease, and never even paused. His physician ended up having to expend an enormous amount of energy treating the girls this venal man infected. But it is very revealing that his government ensured that wherever he went there were a plentiful supply of young women available to satisfy his seemingly insatiable apetite for sex. Yet, among his own family he projected the image of a caring, loving father figure.
It is important that the world see and understand the full picture of these tyrants and their modern equivalents. It may be uncomfortable for many to see just how like the person next door or the loved parent in the livingroom they are. You simply cannot assess a tyrant by one aspect of their picture only. Even Osama bin Laden has a reputation as a loving, caring father and an equally caring leader of his "troops". Perhaps if we understand this aspect of the tyrant, we may begin to understand how to avoid falling under their control.
The insight into the side of Hitler seen by his closest friends brings into perspective just how this man managed to become so influential and so widely accepted. Perhaps it is time we grew up and accepted that there is a tyrant lurking within the best of us. Some of us have the moral background and the restraint to refuse to allow it to exercise itself - but whenever any man rises to a position of power without that restraint, or within a system which does not have the stability or the systems to restrain them - you have the monster loose.
Posted by The Gray Monk at September 9, 2004 09:34 AM
Comments
This reminds me of the comments made by some people about Pilate being treated sympathetically in The Passion. He wasn't a 'religious fundamentalist' type like Caiaphas, instead he was a familiar-seeming guy who probably loved his wife, worried about his political problems and agonised a bit about condemning an innocent guy to death. I find it a little scary just how easily some people proceed from 'ordinary/familiar' to 'sympathethic' and thence conclude this implies 'not such a bad guy after all'.
Posted by: Atlantic at September 10, 2004 06:40 PM
Good point, but I think that, particularly with the sorts of figures such as Hitler, Stalin, Pilate, Cearcescu and so on, knowing how "ordinary" they were to those "close" to them actually helps us all to understand better just how close to us this sort of bestiality is. This is really where our "moralism" comes through - most of us would never dream of ordering or taking the steps any of these people did - our consciences (the mirror perhaps of our indoctrination as children into views of "right and wrong") would stop most of us. That, perhpas, is what is wrong with so many of our violent youth today, no one is ensuring they have that "moral" foundation.
Pilate was a man of his time, history also tells us he wasn't a particularly able administrator and that he went on to make a worse job of his next and last posting. A lesson for us all perhaps?
Posted by: The Gray Monk at September 15, 2004 11:28 AM