Can all of us be monsters? The lesson of Nazi Germany.

Related to this article, neo liberal economics is the work of monsters. Of the mafia. As someone said, the issue is not ideology in the US, but that the US is an ideology. American exceptionalism is deeply embedded in our culture and now that Trump has shown us who we really are, we might face ourselves.

I began my strange path to a comment after reading Corey Robin's review of a film which had been off the radar screen for 40 years.

On Marcel Ophuls’ The Memory of Justice

The 6 hour film has been brought back to life on HBO

That said, there are four things about the film that make it worth watching.

First, there’s documentary footage there I’ve never seen, and it can be revelatory. I’ve read many times, for example, about how Göring dominated Nuremberg. But I never really had a sense of it, till now. I’ve read many times about how Robert Jackson, despite his (justifiably) luminous reputation as a rhetorician here at home, was tongue-tied by Göring’s rhetorical mastery during the cross-examination. It’s something else to see it on screen.

How much of Bernie's success was due to rhetorical mastery? Plato put down rhetoric but Aristotle in his academy spent 1/2 of the day on rhetoric.

Second, and relatedly, in some of his interviews, Ophuls does capture something you simply couldn’t have known merely by reading. For example, Dönitz, in his interviews on camera, exhibits not only the prickliness and the defensiveness you might expect, but also the haplessness. He defeats himself on screen—similar to what Arendt describes Eichmann doing at his trial—but which it’s hard to get a sense of, merely on the page.

McLuhan "the medium is the message" - how much of the dialogue is dominated by images, TV, on line media? And we see Trump defeating himself while the establishment democrats go after straws like Russia hacked the election and have not understood how Hillary defeated herself.

Third, once you get to part 2 of the film, which deals more aggressively with how the postwar generation grappled with Nazism—there’s an extended focus on actors in Germany, both during and after the Nazi era, that’s just chilling; likewise, Ophuls’s interviews of wife, who was the daughter of a Wehrmacht officer, are almost cruel in their demand for and receipt of clarity—the documentary comes into its own. This to me is the heart of the film: the presence of the past (no surprise, given The Sorrow and the Pity.)

When are establishment democrats going to have the clarity before and after Trump to grapple with what they have become which is to be players in the coup d'etat which has happened?

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The article provided a link to Robert Paul Wolff. I sorta remembered his name but by following the links I did recall seeing him with works with Marcuse and other critiques of the left from a Marxist position. The article by Corey above provided a link to an article by Wolff.

Kierkegaard noted that the truth is boring.

Did I, after being a proud radical for a couple of years at Berkeley in the 1960's, accept the "truth" that the USA democracy was doing well, and progress was going great, and busy myself with work and other causes and largely ignore politics for 40 years until W Bush made politics important and I worked on the Kerry campaign in OH in 2004. Was I lulled by letting the good times roll ...

Maybe one of Trump's accomplishments is to make the truth NOT boring. Maybe that has led to unprecedented participation in politics today.

From Wolff's 1969 article "On Violence"

Everything I shall say in this essay has been said before, and much of it seems to me to be obvious as well as unoriginal. I offer two excuses for laying used goods before you. In the first place, I think that what I have to say about violence is true. Now, there are many ways to speak falsehood and only one way to speak truth. It follows, as Kierkegaard pointed out, that the truth is likely to become boring. On a subject as ancient and much discussed as ours today, we may probably assume that a novel -- and, hence, interesting -- view of violence is likely to be false.

That was written almost 50 years ago. Today our world is infused with violence. Is Trump going to start a nuclear war to avoid being charged with fraud?

But also, the sentence about "truth" is no longer so clear and solid.

The next paragraph includes Wolff's approach a philosopher and I went wild highlighting text

But truth is not my sole excuse, for the subject before us suffers from the same difficulty that Kant discerned in the area of [602] metaphysics. After refuting the various claims that had been made to transcendent rational knowledge of things-in-themselves, Kant remarked that the refutations had no lasting psychological effect on true believers. The human mind, he concluded, possessed a natural disposition to metaphysical speculation, which philosophy must perpetually keep in check. Somewhat analogously, men everywhere are prone to certain beliefs about the legitimacy of political authority, even though their beliefs are as groundless as metaphysical speculations. The most sophisticated of men persist in supposing that some valid distinction can be made between legitimate and illegitimate commands, on the basis of which they can draw a line, for example, between mere violence and the legitimate use of force. This lingering superstition is shared by those dissenters who call police actions or ghetto living conditions "violent"; for they are merely advancing competing legitimacy claims.

Related to this article, the beliefs about neo liberal economics are no longer legitimate to many

ON VIOLENCE