12 Comments

ScottR:

In Germany in the 30’s they called the “civillian” corps “Brown Shirts.”

Jul 20, 2008 - 6:27 pm Michael Lonie:

Obama promises to work for a world without nuclear weapons and to shut down “unproven” antimissile defense systems (which judging by the Dems’ activities and statements over the last couple of decades means all of them). Apparently he does not have the wit to realize that these two goals are at odds with each other. If he wants a world without nukes he had better have a good, working, layered antimissile system up and running. One reason is that as the number of nukes declines the marginal utility of a small number of them rises.

If the US has so many nukes that we can turn Iran into a radioactive parking lot with a fraction of them Iran will be much more deterred by our arsenal than if we have 200 and they have 100. Since they can do almost as much damage to us as we to them, they can use nuclear blackmail and threats against us. This is especially true if we think they are crazy and don’t mind being destroyed if they can gain their goal of killing Americans/Jews/Wahhabis in return.

If, on the other hand, the Iranian Mullahs know that 90 percent of their missiles will be destroyed before hitting their targets if they attempt anything, and they cannot be sure which ones will get through, they will be less likely to rely on such threats. Or if they try to do so, we can treat such threats with the contempt they deserve.

It is curious that the Democrats have always opposed defending the country from nuclear attack. One can only wonder why. It’s not because such systems do not work. The closer they get to working, the Dems still furiously opposed them. Apparently they regard any idea Ronald Reagan ever touched as being polluted by Reaganite cooties.

Jul 20, 2008 - 8:40 pm ForNow:

Fuller and more accurate transcription of the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl32Y7wDVDs. In bold, a key word accidentally omitted by Power Line.

– …I’m the only major candidate who opposed this war from the beginning and, as president, I will end it.
- Second, I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems;
– I will not weaponize space;
– I will slow our development of future combat systems;
– and I will institute an independent “Defense Priorities Board” to ensure that the quadrennial defense review is not used to justify unnecessary spending.
- Third, I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons;
– to seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons;
– I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material;
– and I will negotiate with Russia
— to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert;
— and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals…

Jul 21, 2008 - 9:55 am Sheryl A.:

I agree totally with Roger Kimball. Obama understands exactly what he is saying. As a classic narcissist, he just believes his own intellect and grandiose ideas are just beyond the comprehension of us dumb folk in flyover country with our guns and our God.

It is a truly pivotal time in our country. If Obama is elected president we are all in real danger of losing this great republic for which our bravest and brightest have fought to preserve, protect and defend.

God help us.

Jul 21, 2008 - 6:10 pm Shawn S:

One of Obama’s platforms is that he’ll negotiate with the Russians to take IBCM’s off hair trigger alert. I think that’s great but I hate to break this to Obama , we negotiated with Russia to take ICBM’s of hair trigger alert over 20 years ago. The INF treaty was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987
Hasn’t he read anything on the subject since Carter was in office?

Jul 25, 2008 - 11:11 pm Norman Douglas Clemo:

Dear Roger,
Your article of July 18,2008 concerning Barack Obama’s revealing qoute and its implicit threat of totalitarianism in the USA , together with Charles Krauthammer’s comments about Obama’s narcissism have prompted me to highlight some observations about Hitler’s and Stalin’s narcissism as setforth in Alan Bullock’s ” Hitler and Stalin : Parallel Lives ( see below ) .
I would appreciate your comments .

Yours sincerely,
Norman D. Clemo
Cape Town
South Africa

pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball
Obama and the culture of narcissism: A few questions from Charles Krauthammer

Noting that “There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics,” Charles Krauthammer has a few questions about Barack Obama:

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

HITLER AND STALIN : PARALLEL LIVES

by ALAN BULLOCK

pageIO
STALIN: 1879-1899 HITLER: 1889-1908

IV

Hitler has naturally attracted the interest of psychiatrists, and several

studies have been published paying particular attention to his relationship

with an over-protective mother and a domineering father, a common

enough pattern in the German-speaking world at the turn of the century

and one which Freud saw as the origin of an Oedipus complex.7 Most

historians, however, have found difficulty in placing too much reliance on

psychological ‘explanations’ of Hitler, for two reasons. The first is the lack

of reliable evidence, forcing the psychiatrist into an excessive reliance on

speculation and arguments from analogy. The second is that, even if one

accepts that it helps to describe Hitler (or Stalin) as a man suffering from

the delusions of a psychopathic, a schizophrenic or a paranoid personality,

how does one distinguish between the normally crippling effect of such

disorders, as encountered by psychiatrists in their ordinary practice, and

the extraordinary measure of success which Hitler (and Stalin) achieved

in translating their delusions into a terrifying reality?

In the present state of the art - and of the evidence - the best course

appears to be to treat any claim to a comprehensive analysis of Hitler and

Stalin with scepticism, but to make use of particular insights which may

be thrown up in psychological studies. Two examples will make clear what

I mean.

The first is Erik Erikson’s ‘identity crisis in adolescence’ which he

places, in Hitler’s case, between his first rejection by the Academy in

September 1907, when he was eighteen, and his second in October 1908,

a period also marked by the shock of his mother’s death. According to

Erikson, if a young man or woman fails to overcome the crisis of adolescence

and establish an identity, serious psychological damage will follow.

Erikson argues that this is what happened to Hitler, who remained ‘the

unbroken adolescent who had chosen a career apart from civilian happiness,

mercantile tranquility and spiritual peace’.8

The second is Erich Fromm’s argument that the cause of the conflict

between Hitler and his father was not, as Hitler claimed, his refusal to

accept his father’s wish to see him become a civil servant, nor, as the

Freudians claim, an Oedipal rivalry for the love of his mother. Instead,

Fromm sees Hitler’s failure at high school as due to an increasing withdrawal

into a world of fantasy, and his quarrel with his father as a rejection

of the father’s unwelcome attempt to bring him back to a sense of reality

and make him face the question of his future. The affection his mother

Klara had lavished on him in his first five years was to encourage a sense

of his own uniqueness - as in the case of Stalin. Fromm argues that

both men, despite the differences between them, were classic cases of the

narcissistic personality type.9

‘Narcissism’ is a concept originally formulated by Freud in relation to

early infancy, but one which is now accepted more broadly to describe a

personality disorder in which the natural development of relationships to

the external world has failed to take place. In such a state only the person

himself, his needs, feelings and thoughts, everything and everybody as they

relate to him are experienced as fully real, while everybody and everything

otherwise lacks reality or interest.

Fromm argues that some degree of narcissism can be considered an

occupational illness among political leaders in proportion to their conviction

of a providential mission and their claim to infallibility of judgement

and a monopoly of power. When such claims are raised to the level

demanded by a Hitler or a Stalin at the height of their power, any challenge

will be perceived as a threat to their private image of themselves as much

as to their public image, and they will react by going to any lengths to

suppress it.’°

So far psychiatrists have paid much less attention to Stalin than to

Hitler. Lack of evidence is part of the reason. There has been no parallel

in the case of the Soviet Union to the capture of documents and interrogation

of witnesses that followed the defeat of Germany. But more important

is the striking contrast in temperament and style between the two men:

the flamboyant Hitler, displaying a lack of restraint and extravagance of

speech which for long made it difficult for many to take him seriously, in

contrast to the reserved Stalin, who owed his rise to power to his success,

not in exploiting, but in concealing his personality, and was underestimated

for the opposite reason - because many failed to recognize his ambition

and ruthlessness. Not surprisingly, it is the first rather than the second

who has caught the psychiatrists’ attention. All the more interesting then is

the suggestion that underlying the contrast there was a common narcissistic

obsession with themselves.

There is one other insight, which Stalin’s American biographer, Robert

Tucker, has adopted from Karen Horney’s work on neurosis. He suggests

that his father’s brutal treatment of Stalin, particularly the beatings which

r.e inflicted on the boy, and on the boy’s mother in his presence, produced

the basic anxiety, the sense of being isolated in a hostile world, which can

tead a child to develop a neurotic personality. Searching for firm ground

a which to build an inner security, someone who in his childhood had

experienced such anxiety might naturally search for inner security by form-

-g an idealized image of himself and then adopting this as his true identity.

“From then on his energies are invested in the increasing effort to prove ————- .

CHAPTER TEN

Stalin and Hitler Compared

Late 1934

Stalin: aged 54-55 years

Hitler: aged 45 years

I

In a famous course of lectures on the philosophy of history at Berlin

University, a hundred years before Hitler became Chancellor, Hegel

pointed to the role of’World-historical individuals’ as the agents by which

‘the Will of the World Spirit’, the plan of Providence, is carried out.

They may all be called Heroes, in as much as they have derived

their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm regular course

of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed

fount, from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface,

which impinges on the outer world as on a shell and bursts it

into pieces. (Such were Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon.) They were

practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking

men, who had an insight into the requirements of the time - what

was ripe for development. This was the very Truth for their age,

for their world…. It was theirs to know this nascent principle,

the necessary, directly sequent step in progress, which their world

was to take; to make this their aim, and to expend their energy in

promoting it. World-historical men - the Heroes of an epoch -

must therefore be recognised as its clear-sighted ones: their deeds,

their words are the best of their time.1

To the objection that the activity of such individuals frequently flies

in the face of morality, and involves great sufferings for others, Hegel

replied:

World history occupies a higher ground than that on which morality

has properly its position, which is personal character and the

conscience of individuals. .. . Moral claims which are irrelevant

must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and

their accomplishment. The litany of private virtues - modesty,

humility-, philanthropy, and forbearance - must not be raised

against them.2

So mighty a form [he adds elsewhere] must trample down many

an innocent flower - crush to pieces many an object in its path.’

Whether either Hitler or Stalin ever read these passages or not, they

describe very well the belief which the two men shared, that they were

marked out to play such a role, and therefore exempt from the ordinary

canons of human conduct. And this belief, in turn, provides the basis for

a direct comparison between them.

The end of 1934 is a good time at which to pause and make such a

comparison, for two reasons. With the tension between the SA and the

army settled, and the succession to von Hindenburg secured, Hitler had

consolidated his hold on power, and from then on any comparison between

him and Stalin can be made on more equal terms. The other reason is

that 1934 was a watershed for both men, and this makes it possible not

only to look back and compare their careers up to the end of that year,

but also to look forward and establish pointers for the future.

Hitler saw himself as called on by Providence to rescue the German

people from the humiliation of defeat and the decadence of Weimar; to

restore them to their rightful historic position as a master race, and to

guarantee it for the future by creating a new Germanic empire in Eastern

Europe. Stalin saw his mission as ending the centuries-old backwardness

of Russia, turning a peasant society into a modern industrialized country

and at the same time creating the first socialist state in the world. Neither

task could be carried out without countless material and human sacrifices,

but on the stage of world history on which they were actors the cost had

never counted. History would justify and forgive them, as it had forgiven

their predecessors - provided they were successful.

The process by which these convictions took possession of their minds

remains a mystery. In the copy of Napoleon’s Thoughts found in his library,

Stalin had marked the passage: ‘It was precisely that evening in Lodi that

I came to believe in myself as an unusual person and became consumed

with the ambition to do the great things that until then had been but a

fantasy.’4 Neither Stalin, however, nor Hitler, ever pinpointed a similar

moment of revelation. In an earlier chapter* I explored the connection

between such beliefs and narcissism, the term used to describe a psychological

state in which the subject becomes so absorbed in himself that

nobody and nothing else in the world is real by comparison. Narcissistic

personalities are convinced of their special qualities and their superiority

* See pp. 10-12.

over others, and any threat to this self-image - such as being criticized,

shown up or defeated - produces a violent reaction and often a desire for

revenge.

Even if such a connection is accepted, it still leaves unexplained why,

out of the multitude of cases where narcissism has been a factor, in these

two alone it should have produced so exceptional a psychological drive,

giving each a sense of an historic mission, proof against disappointments

and failures, guilt and remorse, scepticism and opposition, lasting a lifetime,

carrying both to extraordinary peaks of success and even, in Hitler’s

case, surviving defeat.

Inability to do more than speculate about the origins of this conviction,

however, does not invalidate the hypothesis, for which there is a mass of

supporting evidence, that this was the cardinal fact in the careers of both

men, unaffected by the great differences in temperament and circumstances,

or by their identification with irreconcilable ideologies.

In Stalin’s case the conviction encountered two obstacles, one of which,

but not the other, affected Hitler too. What the two men had in common

was the fact that both began from the bottom, with no natural or inherited

advantages. Stalin had a start over Hitler in knowing what he wanted to

do before he was twenty. Even so, for the next eighteen years he spent

more than half his time in prison or in exile. Hitler was thirty before he

found his vocation, not in art, but in politics, and discovered that he had

a gift for speaking in public. To anyone who came across either of them

before the age of thirty a suggestion that he would play a major role in

twentieth-century history would have appeared incredible.

The material obstacles to a political career for Stalin were more than

compensated for by the stroke of luck which brought him from exile in

Siberia to a place in the revolutionary government before the end of 1917.

But the experience of the first half of his life, living on the margins of

society, often in the company of thieves and other low-life characters -

becoming, to use a Georgian word, a kinto, ’street-wise’ - left psychological

handicaps from which he was never to free himself. He emerged as a

rough, coarse, difficult man, whose original motivation as a revolutionary

was coloured far more by hatred and resentment than by idealism, who

neither gave nor inspired trust, believing (as Trotsky put it) ‘that wellorganized

violence was the shortest route between two points’. Another

inheritance, perhaps from his Caucasian background, was his vindictiveness,

his unfailing memory for an insult or injury, with an implacable

determination to be revenged, however many years might pass .

Jul 26, 2008 - 6:07 am

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