1 result for (book:nome AND session:852 AND stemmed:end AND stemmed:never AND stemmed:justifi AND stemmed:mean)
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
He believed in heroic characteristics, and became blinded by an idealized superman version of an Aryan strong in mind and body. To attain that end, Hitler was quite willing to sacrifice the rest of humanity. “The evil must be plucked out.” That unfortunate chant is behind the beliefs of many cults — scientific and religious — and Hitler’s Aryan kingdom was a curious interlocking of the worst aspects of religion and science alike, in which their cultish tendencies were encouraged and abetted.
The political arena was the practical working realm in which those ideals were to find fruition. Hitler’s idea of good was hardly inclusive, therefore, and any actions, however atrocious, were justified.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
Hitler preached on the great value of social action as opposed to individual action. He turned children into informers against their own parents. He behaved nationalistically, as any minor cult leader does in a smaller context. The Jews believed in martyrdom. (Pause.) Germany became the new Egypt, in which their people were set upon. I do not want to oversimplify here, and certainly I am nowhere justifying the cruelties the Jews encountered in Germany. You do each create your own reality, however (intently), and en masse you create the realities of your nationalities and your countries — so at that time the Germans saw themselves as victors, and the Jews saw themselves as victims.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
The nation served as an example of what could happen in any country if the most fanatical nationalism was allowed to go unchecked, if the ideas of right were aligned with might, if any nation was justified in contemplating the destruction of others.
You must realize that Hitler believed that any atrocity was justified in the light of what he thought of as the greater good. To some extent or another, many of the ideals he held and advocated had long been accepted in world communities, though they had not been acted upon with such dispatch. The nations of the world saw their own worst tendencies personified in Hitler’s Germany, ready to attack them. The Jews, for various reasons — and again, this is not the full story — the Jews acted as all of the victims of the world, both the Germans and the Jews basically agreeing upon “man’s nefarious nature.” For the first time the modern world realized its vulnerability to political events, and technology and communication accelerated all of war’s dangers. Hitler brought many of man’s most infamous tendencies to the surface. For the first time, again, the species understood that might alone did not mean right, and that in larger terms a world war could have no real victors. Hitler might well have exploded the world’s first atomic bomb.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
(10:27.) At what expense is “the good” to be achieved — and whose idea of the good is to be the criterion? Man’s pursuit of the good, to some extent now, fathered the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts. Politically, many today believe that Russia is “the enemy,” and that therefore any means may be taken to destroy that country. Some people within the United States believe fervently that “the establishment” is rotten to the core, and that any means is justified to destroy it. Some people believe that homosexuals and lesbians are “evil,” that somehow they lack the true qualities of humanness [and therefore need not be treated with normal respect]. These are all value judgments involving your ideas of the good.
(Pause.) Very few people start out trying to be as bad as possible. At least some (underlined) criminals feel that in stealing they are simply righting society’s wrongs. I am not saying that is their only motive, but in one way or another they manage to justify their activities by seeing them in their own version of the good and the right.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
True individuals can do much through social action, and the species is a social one, but people who are afraid of their individuality will never find it in a group, but only a caricature of their own powerlessness.
End of dictation. I have not forgotten the scientist’s letter. We will work it in.
(10:41. Now Seth came through with a little information for Jane and me, then ended the session at 10:45 P.M. “When the session started I had no idea at all that he was going to talk about Hitler and Germany,” Jane said. “None at all. But I did know he was going to go into the good and the bad.”
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
1. Hitler’s espousal of a German-Aryan superrace is an excellent example of how a leader can subvert history to his own ends. Anthropologists do not assign any validity to “Aryan” as a racial term. In Nazi eyes, Aryans were the non-Jewish, Caucasian, “Nordic” descendants of the prehistoric peoples who originally spoke the hypothetical parent language of the Indo-European language family. The Aryans flooded into India, the Middle East, and Europe from southern Russia and Turkestan. Hitler idealized their waves of conquest in his own racist philosophy, attempting to trace German origins back to Aryan ancestors.