Secret_History

Chapter 12: Out of Time 599
those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to
life. They will become merely a dream in the “past”. People who pay strict attention
to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the “Future”.
Human beings are both fascinated and repelled by what is called “evil”. The
fascination stems from the fact that “good” people find it difficult to comprehend
how evil can exist in a world that is allegedly overseen by a benevolent and loving
creator. And so, they struggle to identify it, quantify it and understand it.
Throughout history, different individuals or groups of individuals have been
labeled “evil” by the “authorities” of the time. In our own period, we often find
that the mass media will display photographs of murderers with the caption, “The
face of evil”. The viewer shudders with fear and thanks his lucky stars that such an
individual is not a part of his of her life!
At the top of the list of the 20th-century’s most evil people, we find an ordinary
looking guy named Adolf Hitler. Like George Bush, he was more comical and
absurd than frightening. There are many surviving photographs that show him
dandling babies and fondling pets.
Nevertheless, when we gaze upon these old photos of Hitler, our perceptions are
automatically conditioned to produce that frission of fear: this is HITLER, the
Face of Evil. We see, in retrospect, that the dandling of babies and scratching the
dog’s ears were undoubtedly the propaganda of the time. We know that because
we know the history of what Hitler did.
What we all tend to forget is that Hitler could not have come to power and
committed Germany to its policies of war and genocide without the tacit consent
of the German people and without the rest of the world turning a blind eye to what
was going on in Germany. In a certain sense, this makes the entire world
responsible for the crimes committed in Germany.
Would the German people have been so susceptible to Nazi rule if there had
been a concerted effort on the part of other peoples to assist them in waking up, in
seeing their folly?
Why did everyone think “it’s not my business”, most particularly those
governments that could have acted more strongly to curtail the rising power of
Hitler? How much responsibility do they hold for the 65 million deaths of the
Global Holocaust that was World War II?
Knowing that the German people were the foundation on which Hitler stood, his
soldiers and workers and assistant killers, is one thing; understanding how it came
to be is another.
If other countries did not forcefully object, surely the German people thought
that the direction Hitler was taking them was at least their own solution to their
particular problems, even if not exactly the solution other countries would have
chosen.
There was no real concensus of rejection of the Nazi ideals conveyed to
Germany in an effective way and, certainly, the German people were suffering a
variety of serious internal problems to which Hitler’s answers seemed to be good
ones.