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To: Ev Reeman
Hitler was a madman whose brain was being rotted away by syphilis.

That Hitler had "issues" is beyond dispute but madman is a dangerously dismissive term used to describe a man who came very close to winning the war.

15 posted on 09/16/2010 11:45:12 AM PDT by fso301
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To: fso301

I hear you, and it is indeed profoundly dangerous to dismiss madmen. Some form of madnesses do not reduce a man’s power to do evil: rather they enhance them.

Hitler was (debatably) a paranoiac monomaniac who ruthlessly gained control of the German War Machine.

His madness made him more dangerous and capable. Whereas if he had believed he was a goldfish, he wouldn’t have been dangerous.

We can see this again today. Ahmadinejad is Hitler’s heir: a genocidal realist, paranoid and monomaniac. Is he safer because he is monomanically focused on destroying the Jews? Is he less able to do evil because he is a ‘magical’ thinker who believes that he is the central figure of Islamic prophecy?

Indeed not. We recognize that both men were less than men in certain ways: e.g. their reduced insight. But they possess (or possessed) the very qualities that make a man dangerous in war - and pitiable in peace.


17 posted on 09/16/2010 12:05:17 PM PDT by agere_contra (...what if we won't eat the dog food?)
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