Norman Stone, Introduction: Diary of a Man in Despair (trans), 1970
Germany 1936
As in our case, a misbegotten failure conceived, so to speak, in the gutter, became the great prophet, and the opposition simply disintegrated, while the rest of the world looked on in astonishment and incomprehension. As with us hysterical females, schoolmasters, renegade priests, the dregs and outsiders from everywhere formed the main supports of the regime. A thin sauce of ideology covered lewdness, greed, sadism, and fathomless lust for power, and whoever would not completely accept the new teaching was turned over to the executioner.
As with us, Spartan laws were promulgated
to control the miserable plebs, but these did not apply to him and his
followers. As with us,
there were street meetings and ‘voluntary contributions’, refusal of
which meant proscription. As with us, the masses were drugged:
folk festivals, useless construction, anything and everything, to
keep the man in the street from a moment’s pause to reflect.
I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious
apes, and I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this
same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years
ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself
to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its
shame for the shame that it is.
I am neither an occult nor a mystic. I am a child of my time
despite all forebodings, and I hold strictly to what I see. But there
is a frightful riddle here, and I come back again and again to what
appears to me to be the only answer to it. What I saw gliding by there, behind the fence of his mamelukes,
like the Prince of Darkness himself, was no human being. That was a figure out of a ghost story.
Doesn't this explain how all of this could have happened to a basically orderly and hardworking people, without resistance from those dedicated to the
good in life, in the same kind of grim and incalculably vast cosmic
convulsion which from the first day of the Hitler regime has not
only brought strange crawling things to
afflict this old earth, but has also in some unfathomable way
turned on its head concepts like mine and thine, right and wrong,
virtue and vice, God and the Devil?
I had poured out over me every one of the political platitudes in his
book. I know you will appreciate my sparing you, future reader, all
the dogma. It was that little-man Machiavellianism by which
German foreign policy became a series of legalised burglaries and
the activity of its leaders a succession of embezzlements, forgeries,
and treaty breaches, all designed to make him appeal to the assortment of schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and stenographers who have
since become the true support and bastion of his regime as a
fabulous fellow, a real political Genghis Khan.
With his oily hair falling into his face as he ranted, he had the
look of a man trying to seduce the cook. I got the impression of
basic stupidity , the same kind of stupidity as that of his crony, von Papen — the kind of stupidity which equates statesmanship with
cheating at a horse trade.
Notwithstanding his meteoric rise, there is absolutely nothing
that has happened in the twenty years since I first saw him to make
me change my first view of him. The fact remains that he was, and
is, without the slightest self-awareness and pleasure in himself, that
he basically hates himself, and that his opportunism, his immeasurable need for recognition, and his now-apocalyptic vanity are
all based on one thing - a consuming drive to drown out the pain
in his psyche, the trauma of a monstrosity.
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947
Time is a flat circle.
Once again we are in a time when monstrosities walk the land, with the appearance of that which is human, but with an emptiness that exists only to consume.
Stocks slumped and came back.
Gold and silver were under pressure.
VIX fell.
Oil rallied sharply this morning and then was sold off back into the red during the day.
When their hands come for us, for their bailouts as they always do, what will we do when they come next for our children and our grandchildren, as history suggests they will.
Nothing is never enough for history's insatiable monstrosities.
Have a pleasant evening.
