https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3UrYdgniNck
Solzhenitsyn said famously, you know, one man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny. And well, and we’ve seen examples of that. I would say Gandhi did that to some degree. Martin Luther King did that to some degree. Solzhenitsyn certainly did that to a great and remarkable degree. And so these things clearly happen and one word of truth will outweigh the whole world. It’s like, well, how can it not? Because the truth is immutable and final. You have to censor truth. But it’s also the case that an unjust ruler can cause enormous destruction to innocent people. So I mean, I don’t think we have to conclude that they’re all- But he can’t do it alone. Right. An unjust ruler alone- Well, wait, but his point is right. I mean- There can still be innocent victims within the collective. Right. Which is why it shouldn’t be collected. I don’t believe there would have been a Holocaust without Hitler. I believe many Germans are guilty, not all, but many. But I do believe that Hitler made the Holocaust possible. I think they would have called forth another Hitler. With regard to a Holocaust or with regard to World War II, they’re not the same things. It wouldn’t have been the same Holocaust. Right? I mean, so one of the things I really learned from Jung, because he studied Hitler in great detail and what he accomplished, let’s say. So Hitler was a very powerful orator, but he was also a very powerful listener. And Hitler was resentful for a variety of reasons. He was also obsessed with order and disgust. He’s a very strange person. So he had his particular idiosyncrasies that made the Holocaust what it was. But then when he spoke to people, he was like a comedian in the negative sense. So I think I told you guys this story the other day. Jimmy Carr, the comedian, before he goes out on his world tours, he goes and does 50 shows, and he tries out his new material, and all comedians do this. And he tells jokes, and some jokes no one laughs at, so he gets rid of those. But the jokes that people laugh at, he keeps. And so Hitler spoke spontaneously, and he watched the crowds. And every time the crowd went roar, he’d think, yes, one. And then the crowd would roar about something else, he’d think, two. And soon everything he said made the crowd roar. And the crowd is a conscience-less mob. And so the conscious, conscious-less mob called out the devil in Hitler. Why? Well, the Germans were angry. Well, why? World War I, there were brutalized men everywhere. The Versailles Treaty, the absolute collapse of the economy, their wounded pride. They had reasons to be bitter and nihilistic. And so there was a deep longing for a target, a target, a reason, an external reason. It was the Jews, it was the gypsies, it was the people who are different. They’re responsible for this. And so, and Hitler could, he gave voice to that. He gave voice and emotion to that. And so maybe without Hitler, it wouldn’t have happened. But maybe another populist would have come along and done something equivalent in a slightly different direction. Didn’t Jung also make the point that it was only possible in Germany because Germany was the most evolved, I’m using the term not literally. Well, they were the furthest away from their archetypal roots, right? It was the most philosophers. It was the most conductors, right? Only at the peak of civilization can you be so far removed from the shadow that the shadow can overtake you. Well, he certainly believed, Jung believed that part of what drove the Nazi spirit forward was the re-sacralization of the political. So Germany had collapsed into a godless, materialist atheism in some real sense. And so that brought forth a deep longing for the archetypal gods and Hitler provided that. Orwell knew that. I mean, when Orwell started to warn about the Nazis, one of the things he warned about, he was so courageous, he said, you underestimate these people. They’ve harnessed these primordial forces of spectacle and blood and fire and beauty. They’ve rekindled the ancient gods and Jung thought it was Odin on the war path again in some fundamental sense. And so the reason Germany was prone to that, I suppose, is because they were the farthest along the technocratic, materialist, atheist path. And so they had this longing for a return to the, in some real sense, to the pagan gods. Well, you know, those who don’t remember history are doomed to- Be possessed by it again. Right, right. And in some ways it’s like- The Nazis knew this. It’s not like they didn’t play with pagan imagery constantly. Absolutely, the iconography was very clear. But it doesn’t work if you’re close to real pagan industry, if it’s still interwoven in your life, if you still have, you know, your roots go all the way down into archetypes and ritual. I suppose the Germans in some sense would have been most prone to the temptations of the Luciferian intellect too, because they were extremely successful in their towers of Babel. The figure of Faust looms very large in German art and literature from, obviously from Goethe onwards, but the Mephistophelian pact is just really fundamental to German culture and German consciousness at the time. You sell your soul to the devil, not so much for knowledge in some sense, but for power, right? And that can be technological power, but it’s not knowledge. And all of the other things that were being promised in the late 20s and early 30s in Germany, absolutely. But artistic power, it was the power in the elites, it was in the arts, it was in philosophy, it was in music composition, it was in everything. You could also see that given that Germany in some sense was at the pinnacle of that civilization, the fact that they were so profoundly defeated and then humiliated was also a, what, but that produces a wounded pride in narcissism. And that’s certainly part of the Luciferian spirit. So, but that idea, look, here’s a good example of that. So when police were interviewing children when they were investigating the satanic daycare accusations back in the 1980s, the children would come up with absolutely hair-raising tales of satanic ritual abuse, like young children think, well, where do they get that? Well, often what would happen was that a child with a mother who is a paranoid schizophrenic or bordering on it would start to get delusional about what people might have been doing to her child when she left them in the daycare. Now, she was guilty because she left them in the daycare and now she’s wondering, oh, I left my children with strangers, what could they be up to? And then because she was bordering on psychosis, she’d have these incredible delusional fantasies. And then being disturbed, she’d start to bother her children. It’s like, does anybody do anything to you? And children partly construct the way that they react to the world by looking at whether what they say grasps the attention of adults. And so the child would be struggling to find the words that would satisfy the mother’s curiosity and struggling with that. And then they’d go to sleep at night and have a dream. And the dream would get nightmarish. And that’s because the dream was trying to model what it is that the mother was calling forth out of them. And then you could run that for a couple of weeks and the child would be telling all sorts of horrific stories. And then the police would come in and they’d investigate in relationship to the children. And they’d get even more grotesque and catastrophic fantasies out of the kids. And then they’d think, well, the kids couldn’t be inventing this, but they weren’t. They were co-inventing it. And this is what happened in some sense to Hitler under the sway of the German people. It’s like he was willing, he was already, he had his flaws, many of them, right? Many, many wounded narcissism being not paramount among them because he was also very orderly and disgust sensitive. Which is funny because he had separating gums. So it’s like poor guy. Yeah, yeah, well, right, right, right. He was like, you know, vile in certain senses and then overcoming it and scouring, but he is a worshiper of the- Homeless and slogs and Jews- Yes, exactly. With his own like disdain for his, you know, twisted psyche. And for his own mortality. And he was a worshiper of the will. He was perfectly proud that he could stand like this for hours and land in the back of a car. He regarded that as a signal, signal evidence of his discipline and conscientiousness, you know? And so, and so, but in any case, you know, Hitler was willing to go exactly where the mob took him and was already motivated to go in a very dark direction. He’d been rejected. Was it by the Vienna School of Art three times? He was a struggling street artist. He’d been brutalized by World War I. He was a decorated war hero. I think he was the only survivor of part of his platoon because a grenade blew up all of his friends when he was off doing something peripheral. And so he had a survivor’s complex as well and an idea that he had a destiny because of that. And then he was homeless, as you pointed out. And of course, the communists were threatening Germany at the time and there were reason to be paranoid about that. And it was all set up for a perfect storm, but Hitler definitely allowed the mob to call forth the darkest fantasies possible out of the recesses of his sword. In light of that, I’d like to read to you what Heinrich Heine, the great German poet, wrote exactly 100 years before Hitler came to power. And this is so relevant to our themes of the need for God and religion. So this is a secular Jew writing this, the great German poet Heine, Heinrich Heine. Christianity, and this is its greatest merit, has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered? The frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman, the cross, is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably, then a play will be performed in Germany, which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent walk in the park.