This last week we went down to Skidaway Island, near Savannah. They've got a very nice campground there - with clean comfort stations and large, level campsites with 30 and 50 amp connections. We got down there Tuesday, left on Sunday. Saturday the weather was getting iffy, so we did our museum tours that day.
We visited the Mighty 8th Air Force Museum. It's kind of badly laid out - but the exhibits are exceedingly good, especially one that ran you through a preflight breifing, a maintenance/groundcrew briefing, and then a simulated mission. If you ever get into the area, I'd highly recommend it. Don't go expecting a quick walkthrough, however, or a lot of planes on static display. They DO have an ME-163 on display, and I got a fair number of shots of that. But I was looking at it and going "Nope. No way." The pilots of THAT thing didn't have steel balls - they were pure titanium.
They also have an excellent display on the lead-in to WW2, with the major emphasis on Germany's change from a relatively peaceful (note, I DID say 'relatively' in the sense that a determined man who's been battered will stop fighting until he gets his wind back...) country into a nation that conquered most of it's neighbors and was making a grab for more real estate. It also detailed some of the more 'interesting' things accomplished along the way, like the mass murders condoned/encouraged by Hitler of anyone who didn't fit his 'perfect vision'.
And I had to explain a lot of that to the little guy. And you know - it's hard to really explain how a country would go off the deep end and follow someone like Hitler. It's difficult trying to explain the concept of the charismatic leader, and how bad the people of Germany needed to boost their self-esteem after WW1. (Hmmm. Self-esteem...)
And it's hard to explain how - even after a lot of Germans recognized just HOW evil they were getting - the people of Germany just kept sinking down and making it worse.
Because to them - it didn't smell evil at all.
Evil is a very subjective concept. Did the German High Command consider themselves evil? How about Hitler? Did he wake up one morning and go "I think I'll come up with the most evil ideas I can, and implement it - causing death and destruction of millions!" (And be advised, any comments equating the Iraq or Afghanistan campaigns with Germany's land grabs will be read, thoughtfully considered for spin and accuracy and then either summarily deleted or made into the subject of a derogatory post because you can't tell your head from a hole in the ground.)
No - I don't think they deliberately turned to evil, like Annakin Skywalker. Instead, at the time, they were trying hard to get Germany back on its feet and an industrial base rebuilt. In the middle of the Depression. With hellacious penalties imposed upon it for WW1, AND missing the lost manpower that died in the trenches. And the way they chose arguably worked pretty well... but they lost control.
It didn't smell evil when they started. That's something to remember. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions (and not because there's a shortage of bad ones) and what would be good in limited amounts (nationalism, socialism) goes all pear-shaped above a certain critical mass. And I'd say that particular point was hit right aound 1937... but that's just me.
J.
Comments (2)
I (somewhat selectively) re-read Herman Wouk’s ‘Winds of War’ recently. An amusing feature Wouk sprinkles through the book is excerpts from a (fictional) ‘operational analysis’ of World War 2, written by ‘Armin von Roon,’ a retired German general. It’s amusing to a reader familiar with the history of the war because ‘Roon’ sticks (mostly) to the facts, but applies ferocious amounts of ‘spin’ to them to push the points of his own agenda: That Churchill and Roosevelt actually forced Hitler to war. That the German army had no part at all in the Holocaust. That the Wermacht came out of the Russian war with its ‘honor’ intact. Reading ‘Roon’s’ comments on the Wannsee Protocol, though, turns the amusement to nausea.
In the novel, the protagonist – ‘Pug’ Henry, a U.S. naval officer – pushes to have Roon’s rationalizations published in the ‘Proceedings’ of the Naval Institute as an object lesson for U.S. officers in how easy it is to go step-by-step into the pit.
Posted by RNB | April 15, 2008 8:19 AM
Posted on April 15, 2008 08:19
A few points to ponder:
The idea that conquest for the sake of conquest is evil is a fairly recent thing in Human affairs. No Roman emporer or medieval king would have had any cause to denounce Hitler's ambitions.
The idea that strangers are to be considered just as Human, and just as deserving of equal treatment as your own friends and family is also a new thing- sort of. The circle of "strangers" that an individual regards as fully Human has been expanding. Today, an educated westerner generally beleives in equal rights and fair treatment for all people, while those from more "tribal" backgrounds still hold to the idea of "rights for me and mine, to hell with the others!"
Germany simply was late to the game on both of these concepts. No one would have thought Hitler's morality to be at all unusual had he been lived in the steppes of central Asia, or Africa. He could have ruled in 7th century Byzantium and he would be nothing more than a mention in the history books. But Central Europe in the mid 20th century was the point of impact between post-enlightenment values and pre-enlightenment values, with modern industry thrown in to raise the stakes. THAT made Hitler exceptional- not his amorality, but the fact that he brought it into collision with the modern world, where it had no place. It really is the same collision happening now in the Islamic world.
Ben
Posted by Ben | April 15, 2008 4:18 PM
Posted on April 15, 2008 16:18