This is a thorough analysis as always, except that the comparison with Hitler rests on some shaky assumptions. Hitler is often portrayed as crazy, irrational, and megalomaniacal, and while it's true that he displayed some of these aspects, to reduce the events that led to WWII and the Holocaust to Hitler's "crazy/evil" character would si…
This is a thorough analysis as always, except that the comparison with Hitler rests on some shaky assumptions. Hitler is often portrayed as crazy, irrational, and megalomaniacal, and while it's true that he displayed some of these aspects, to reduce the events that led to WWII and the Holocaust to Hitler's "crazy/evil" character would significantly obscure the underlying causes and conflicts of these calamities. In his two-volume "Hitler," the historian Ian Kershaw makes a good case that Hitler was a rather unremarkable individual--more a product of crazy times, e.g., WWI, ensuing collapse of the Austrian-Hungary Empire, the turmoil of the 1920s, etc., than their chief instigator. Plus, in the first 2-3 years of WWII, he led the war effort quite capably.
That's not to exculpate him from the horrors he helped inflict, but a broader view (often lacking in today's daily mainstream analyses more designed to elicit clicks, but fortunately otherwise characterising this piece) would make it less likely that efforts designed to fan emotions and incite feelings of retribution take hold. Such broad view would help direct more attention to the fact that a lot of today's conflicts are actively fanned by those who profit from them, such as weapons makers, and--unfortunately still under the radar--many news media.
As the writer David Loy says, our age is afflicted by three collective "poisons" (which feed on each other): institutionalized greed (e.g., driven by a never satisfied hunger for ever-increasing profits and consumption), institutionalized ill-will (manifesting as national and international militarization), and institutionalized delusion (promoted largely by profit-making news media but now also by content platforms such as Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube). All of these poisons can be seen at work in the mounting crisis in Europe.
This is a thorough analysis as always, except that the comparison with Hitler rests on some shaky assumptions. Hitler is often portrayed as crazy, irrational, and megalomaniacal, and while it's true that he displayed some of these aspects, to reduce the events that led to WWII and the Holocaust to Hitler's "crazy/evil" character would significantly obscure the underlying causes and conflicts of these calamities. In his two-volume "Hitler," the historian Ian Kershaw makes a good case that Hitler was a rather unremarkable individual--more a product of crazy times, e.g., WWI, ensuing collapse of the Austrian-Hungary Empire, the turmoil of the 1920s, etc., than their chief instigator. Plus, in the first 2-3 years of WWII, he led the war effort quite capably.
That's not to exculpate him from the horrors he helped inflict, but a broader view (often lacking in today's daily mainstream analyses more designed to elicit clicks, but fortunately otherwise characterising this piece) would make it less likely that efforts designed to fan emotions and incite feelings of retribution take hold. Such broad view would help direct more attention to the fact that a lot of today's conflicts are actively fanned by those who profit from them, such as weapons makers, and--unfortunately still under the radar--many news media.
As the writer David Loy says, our age is afflicted by three collective "poisons" (which feed on each other): institutionalized greed (e.g., driven by a never satisfied hunger for ever-increasing profits and consumption), institutionalized ill-will (manifesting as national and international militarization), and institutionalized delusion (promoted largely by profit-making news media but now also by content platforms such as Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube). All of these poisons can be seen at work in the mounting crisis in Europe.