On kindness and curses - a diatribe against fascism

Winston Churchill praises Adolf Hitler to a limited extent in his (Churchill's) 1935 book Great Contemporaries. Why? Hitler's politics were partly responsible for rebuilding Germany in the 1930s. Where Hitler went wrong was not in reducing unemployment to zero, not in restoring German prestige, not (despite today's environmentalism) in building the world's first motorways, people's cars, efficient insecticides to stop the spread of diseases (ahem, together with other organophosphates, such as nerve gases), practical rocket technology (ahem, the V1 and V2 missiles were a step beyond American pioneers like Goddard, because although the blueprint for the V2 is almost exactly - and by coincidence due to the constraints of the physical and engineering factors necessary in liquid fuel rocket design, not plagarism - a scaled up version of Goddard's final rocket), nuclear fission (discovered in Nazi Germany, not in America), etc., etc.:

'The story of [Hitler’s] struggle cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome, all the authorities or resistances which barred his path.... Thus the world lives on hopes that the worst is over...' - Winston Churchill, Great Contemporaries, quoted online here.

Of course the date is key, 1935. The Manchester Guardian newspaper reported the first concentration camps in Germany for Jews and many others deemed unworthy, if I recall correctly, a year later, in 1936. So Churchill was writing at a time just before the worst of the Nazi abuses, although of course they had begun with brownshirts raiding Jewish premises as early as 1933.

The importance of this episode and its relevance for a study of the effects of nuclear weapons is the pacifist case, that if we disarm - as Germany was supposed to have been disarmed by 1935 - we are guaranteed peace. The pacifist case is that enforcing disarmament is a technicality, and the first thing to do is to disarm ourselves to show goodwill and encourage others to follow.

Although America and Britain had not completely disarmed by 1935, there had been massive military cutbacks, mainly stemming back to the world economic crisis of 1929. Governments had in effect cut back military expenditure, not so much out of popular pacifist sentiment (although with the memory of the First World War - then known as the Great War - still rife, pacifism was then widely seen as common sense), but out of economic necessity.

What is the risk that such a series of events will arise in the nuclear age, leading to nuclear warfare on a large scale? The problem is clearly there in Churchill's 1935 essay on Hitler: until a dictatorial political leader commits genocide, you can't tell what he/her might do for certain, but you can pick up clues about her/his intentions regarding other cultures, and neighbours. Hitler had certainly made it clear in his 1920s Mein Kampf (at least in the German language edition - the English edition authorised by Hitler in the 1930s had many of the more extreme sentiments edited out for political expediency) that he blamed German defeat in the First World War on a Jews and others who he considered to be polluting German culture and politics.

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Hitler's fascism is based on the false concept that diversity leads to weakness, and purity leads to strength. Of course purity leads to a cloning, orthodox mentality at some stage, which suppresses dissent. However, for a brief spell, a fascist regime can outrun democracies because the dictatorial leadership - while still relatively sane (before too much corruption and 'shoot the messenger' philosophy isolates them from reality) - can make the regime proceed at breakneck speed. Rearmament in Germany was achieved this way, thanks in part to a clever system of pre-tooling factories and preparing arms production blueprints so that factories can be almost instantly switched from producing peacetime goods to armaments.

This is why Germany rearmed so quickly, and also explains why fascist regimes in general go through a brief spell of very high technological progress, when their scientists are freed from the shackles of financial limitations and other political problems. Hence, the USSR not the US was the first to put not only a satellite into space (Sputnik in 1957) but was also first to put a human into space (Gargarin in 1961). It took a very expensive and carefully managed Apollo programme by the US to regain the ground by putting the first people on the Moon in 1969.

So although dictatorships, by freeing technological and scientific infrastructure from their usual burdens, can produce a brief spurt of progress exceeding that possible in a democracy, in the longer run it is at least sometimes possible for democracy to win over dictatorship, although the cost is likely to be massive. On the issue of what defines fascism, try this:

‘Fascism is not a doctrinal creed; it is a way of behaving towards your fellow man. What, then, are the tell-tale hallmarks of this horrible attitude? Paranoid control-freakery; an obsessional hatred of any criticism or contradiction; the lust to character-assassinate anyone even suspected of it; a compulsion to control or at least manipulate the media ... the majority of the rank and file prefer to face the wall while the jack-booted gentlemen ride by. ... But I do not believe the innate decency of the British people has gone. Asleep, sedated, conned, duped, gulled, deceived, but not abandoned.’ – Frederick Forsyth, Daily Express, 7 Oct. 05, p. 11.

This definition lumps together virtually all the serious issues under one banner, so it is very efficient, including both the dictatorial USSR and the dictatorial Nazis as 'fascists'. This may sound wrong, because the USSR claimed it was morally superior, but remember that the USSR murdered in excess of 20 million, compared to 6 million by the Nazis. I don't really want to ge into the issue that the Nazi-USSR so-called 'peace pact' led them to both invade Poland from opposite sides at the same time, the Nazis sending Jews to concentration camps and the USSR murdering the soldiers by making them line up and them shooting them. (This USSR-Nazi alliance would have continued, possibly leading to some kind of joint USSR-Nazi fascist world domination, if Hitler had not decided to invade his ally the USSR by surprise attack.)

Going back to the issue of nuclear weapons effects, America did not drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 as tests or experiments, because it had already done the tests and experiments in the laboratory and at Alamogordo, New Mexico, when a nuclear weapon was detonated on 16 July 1945. It knew perfectly well what the effects would be, from that test data. The heights of burst over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deliberately selected to allow maximum range of blast, heat and initial radiation injury, while avoiding local fallout.

What is a heresy more than the domestic successes of Hitler, is the fact that nuclear weapons effects were well known when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The errors in the effects data were relatively trivial. They knew what would be produced, including the risk of firestorm in Hiroshima, because Pacific USAF commander General LeMay (who was in ultimate control of the bomb drops) had developed the 1,000 bomber firebombing strategy in Japan based on Paul Tibbets (who was in charge of the 509th nuclear bomber group, and was also the pilot of Enola Gay, dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima) experience of incendiary attacks in Europe. To be clear, the pilot of the B-29 who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima had actually informed General LeMay of the high explosive to incendiary ratio (bomb mix) used in Europe to deter civil defence and firefighters (high explosives) so as to allow other bombs to start mass fires in old wooden dwelling areas of cities (incendiaries). This led to the firestorms in many Japanese cities in 1945. Tibbets had been personally given (by Oppenheimer) all the nuclear effects data from the Trinity nuclear test, and was able to negotiate the strategy.

Kindness or cruelness? Tibbets makes it clear in his autobiography, The Tibbets Story, that the death figures in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - even if you assume that there were a vast number of Korean workers and Japanese soldiers present to boost the casualty toll - the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was totally trivial in comparison to the firestorm effects at Tokyo and in daily combat in Burma, the Pacific, and the expected invasion of Japan. (Everyone agrees on the percentage of people killed in each city or at any distance from ground zero, but there are vast differencies in casualty figures which are due to assumptions about the population before the bombs fell, ie, the Americans took minimal figures based on the solid data in the detained food rationing records, while the Japanese assume that the populations were several times bigger, so that most people were living on a starvation diet by sharing rations with unregistered persons; if the latter is indeed true, you can see why the LD50 for radiation was so low in the cities, and why moderate burns injuries in conjunction with radiation killed so many more people than are established on the basis of burns and radiation data at Chernobyl.)

So on balance, when you see the immense total number of victims of the ongoing Pacific war involving Japan, and the total number of cities totalled and civilian casualties caused, dropping the bombs did end the war and it did end the ongoing troubles. The issue is that the effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often exaggerated by pacifists for disarmament reasons, by the military and politicians for maximising the efficiency of nuclear deterrence (which after all is a perception based psychological concept), and by the media for the purpose of selling films and journals. The result is that people end up being taught that the only serious bombing in World War II or in Japan was Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when in fact the areas burned out and the casualty tolls from those nuclear bombed cities are mere trivial in the big picture of carnage.

So the moral is really, not to get into a World War in the first place if you can. It is not a matter of merely banning nuclear weapons, despite all the popular media hype which sells the contrary message that disarmament will cure all fascism and genocidal problems and create utopia, etc.

Kindness is the most abused propaganda term ever. One person's self-confidence is viewed by another as arrogance. But one person's kindness is judged on the person's looks, their wealth, etc.

Nobody poor and ugly who pesters others for a better world is likely to be judged kind by anybody, more likely they will judge such a person selfish in the extreme.

However, someone rich and beautiful who does the same thing is judged the essence of kindness, at least by the politically expedient media/politicians.

So it was with Jesus, who is widely held to have started Christmas. Actually, he didn't, it's a Pagan festival (hence Santa, Christmas Trees, Sparkling lights, presents, mince pies, turkey).

Jesus was attacked by popular fascism. He was judged and sentenced as an unkind and selfish egotistic person who, because he hated the corruptness of orthodox religion - the money makers in the Temple, and the sale of animals for sacrifice, etc. - and drove out corruption with a whip, was crucified.

How can such a person be kind? Well, there are some people today who say Einstein was kind. That wasn't exactly what Poincare thought. Kindness is relative, depending on what you choose to open your eyes to, and also what you choose to dismiss as being junk.

The beautiful TV star - a big time journalist or politician, etc. - who says a nice word about someone ill, will fill the next days papers with their photos, and increase their book sales and speech contracts beyond belief. Everyone will be genuinely impressed at their humility to stoop so low as to do something kind!

Of course, at the other end of the scale are the bitter people who thing - insanely - that nuclear weapons which 'created so much suffering' by ending World War II and deterring World War III, are totally unkind and evil. But of course people wanted Jesus crucified, so mass insanity is nothing new, really. The idea that people have evolved so much more logic in 2000 years that they now don't make stupid mistakes is just at odds with evolution, which indicates that much longer time scales will be required, and is also at odds with recent history of wars, genocide, etc.

This is why "controversy" - which is largely down to people using the same words to mean different things, or different words to mean the same thing (one person being "arrogant" to someone and "self-confident" to another) - can merrily continue to be used as an excuse to maintain status quo.

Anyone who puts forward objective facts and hard, solid evidence which end the "controversy" is simply blacklisted and banned from contributing those facts and that solid evidence, which naturally would upset the current mindset of the bigots in charge of society.

President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have objectively done some good by getting rid of Saddam from Iraq, and hanging him will send out a very kind message to the world's other genocidal dictators, a message that all their bleating and noise won't count for anything.

Fascists rely on the media and fellow-travellers and corruption. There is of course a lot of this in President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, as evidenced by their eagerness to get into a war using falsified claims in an area where oil is being produced, and their total couldn't-give-a-damn attitude towards other dictators in other countries across the world, who as as bad or worse than Saddam.

However, if they at least hang Saddam, it will send out a strong deterrent message. The message will be: no matter how much cash you stash in Swiss bank accounts, there is a chance - albeit a slim one - that you will be brought to justice and will end up being hung, not relaxing in a protected jail being fed and exercised regularly like some kind of prized pet.

That's kindness. Not kindness to Saddam or his fellow fascist murderers, but kindness to everyone else who has an ounce of compassion for his victims and the suffering he has caused.

Dr Dorothy Rowe is a psychologist and I want to comment briefly on two of her books which were published when I was aged 11 and 13, respectively:

Depression: The Way out of Your Prison (Routledge, 1983) and Living with the Bomb, can we live without enemies (Routledge, 1985).

The first book is very good and worth reading by many people. I had a spell under the weather when a kid at school (aged 5-15 say) because of a hearing problem (only hearing low frequencies) which caused speech defects, which didn't exactly make my life much fun amongst fascist fellow kids, who thought it disgusting/hilarious, while the medical profession carefully took many years over diagnosing the problem, and fixing it.

So I found Dorothy Rowe's book about depression very helpful, particularly (in view of my Catholic upbringing) the her description of the Christian notion of God as being a complete 's***', a person/being which is extremely extravagant to in making stars and galaxies but doesn't actually give a d*** about human affairs. While I disagree with many of Dr Richard Dawkin's religious ideas, I like his description of the natural world as a place of barbarity in which millions of animals are always eating one another in the jungles. (It is not a beautiful world, unless your idea of beauty is akin to Adolf Hitler's or, even worse, Joseph Stalin's.)

However, Dorothy Rowe's other book, Living with the Bomb, is almost as depressing as the other book is enlightening. Her view of war is that it is created by an innate human desire to hate strangers, which conveniently for the time of publication (1985) is politically expedient to the far left, blaming Hitler's enemies as much as himself. On the other hand, there is a desire for the crowd to hate strangers, in the sense that my inability to speak properly at school made me hated. But I don't think that hating strangers had anything to do with the causes of World War II or World War I, or the Cold War, which was not a hatred of strangers, but a hatred of genocidal dictatorship and suppression of liberty, or in the case of the First World War, plain greed.

Regards the Second World War, you have to ask the difficult question of 'who started it?' from the pacifist context: Britain declared war on Germany after Germany invaded Poland. Germany did not go around declaring war first on us. It is the corrupted historian who claims that! You get into terrible arguments with bigots over this, who are sure that Germany started the war. In effect they did if you think that Hitler thought that he was automatically forcing Britain to declare war by invading Poland. Actually, Hitler hoped that Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (whom Hitler had personally met at Munich in 1938 over tea and cakes, where Chamberlain appeased Hitler after Hitler's aggression, in return for a peace pledge from Hitler) would choose pacifism and let Hitler go about invading places without starting a war.

A heresy it may seem, but a fact it is: Hitler wanted world domination peacefully, if he could get it. His idea of war was not throwing bombs about, but sending his enemies into slave concentration camps to be worked to the bone, before being thrown into incinerators and burned, or used in warped scientific experiments to find out the effects of a sudden vacuum, or immersion in freezing water, on human beings.

The whole idea that war is the biggest terror, and that bombs are the threat, is just crazy. Why won't people see the plain fact: weapons aren't clearly defined. A gas chamber is just a room filled with gas. There is no need to have weapons of mass destruction to slaughter millions. How many people can a stick kill? Or a stone? Or a machete? We know from recent genocide in Africa that guns and bombs are limited in what they produce. It is fascism, not weapons, which are the number one problem. The H-bomb is not going to wipe everyone out, more likely it will deter the worst of fascism, but simpler, older weapons could be used in a world war if the world were disarmed of nuclear deterrence. But of course that is heresy. So don't listen!

Update 1

Dr Mario Rabinowitz has very kindly emailed me his perceptive comments about the problems:

'It is unbelievable that a second rate intellect like Hitler could rise to power at a time when Germany was at its zenith and led the world in Science, Mathematics, Literature, Music, and the arts in general. Perhaps it goes to show that in the real world MPQ (manipulative practical quotient) is more important than IQ.

'One of the greatest mathematicians, David Hilbert, stayed and survived through the Nazi regime. When asked how he managed to do it, he said that to survive he had to act as crazy as those in power.

'Your words near the end of your essay, "There is no need to have weapons of mass destruction to slaughter millions. How many people can a stick kill? Or a stone? Or a machete?" reminded me of a poem "The Conquerors" by Phyllis McGinley that I memorized as a youth. As I recall, the beginning and the end go something like this:

"The Conquerors" by Phyllis McGinley

It seems vainglorious and proud
of Atomic man to boast aloud
his prowess homicidal
while with rude stones and humble spears
our sires at wiping out their peers
were almost never idle...

Though doubtless now with shrewd machines
we can blow the world to smithereens
more tidily and so on
lets give credit where credit is due
their ways were course, their weapons few
but ah! how wonderously they slew
with what they had to go on.'

Update 2

There seems to be a sequence with three steps to fascism:

(1) stereotyping individuals into groups by category, with/without rational justification.

(2) prejudiced irrational dislike of particular groups of stereotyped individuals.

(3) bigotry by attacking individuals you perceive to be members of disliked stereotypes.

The first step is commonplace and regularly used in the media without comment. Individuals don't usually complain when they are introduced in a stereotyping way, by saying their religion or race or other personal characteristics which usually just aren't strictly relevant. You'd complain if you were introduced as a person 'who wears glasses' or who 'doesn't wear glasses', unless you are visiting an opticians or similar, where it would be relevant. Even then, it is not a stereotyping issue, because everyone's eyesight details are different.