Watching Ahmadinejad
So I get home from work, flip on MSNBC, and who do I see?
I'm listening to him speak in an interview with Brian Williams, and I'm struck first and foremost by how calm and rational he sounds. He's looking me in the eye and saying things that are completely untrue, and yet it all sounds strangely believable. I find myself thinking one damning question - "Is this what it would have been like to watch Hitler?"
I once read a book entitled Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth by Gitta Sereny, which I find relevant to this discussion. Albert Speer was Hitler's chief architect and one of his best friends. He was smart, loving, responsible, caring, considerate, etc... A solid guy. The book is about his struggle to come to terms with what was done in his name and how badly he was misled by Hitler.
It's always been tempting for me to think that if I were a citizen of Germany in the 1930's, then by God I would have resisted the SS. I wouldn't have been racist, I wouldn't have condoned bigotry, I would have fought for the rights of Jews and had a clean conscience. However, reading this book forced me to challenge my simplistic assumptions. In Speer you have a shining example of humanity, a person who one would never think would be taken in by a lunatic like Hitler -- and then he is taken in. Which begs the question - "how?"
Hitler is perceived in our culture as the shouting, gesturing madman from the Nuremberg rally (Speer designed the famous Cathedral of Light at the rally) - which is true. However, there was much more to Hitler than just that. That persona worked when he was working a mass audience of uneducated workers and SS men. However, what I find very interesting is that Hitler won over the intellectuals first. To do that, he traveled to their universities, put on his tweed jacket and his eyeglasses, and gave sedate little erudite speeches to the skeptical professors. He was quite successful at it, and this is precisely how he pulled in Speer.
This is where Ahmadinejad comes in. To me, in the interview tonight he was attempting to play the American public. He was attempting to give a quiet, rational argument for his actions. He was attempting to do what Hitler did so well, and it gives me the creeps.
In the photo below, Speer is on Hitler's right. Let's not repeat his mistake, shall we?
posted by JM @ 4:21 PM
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