Conjuring Adolf Hitler and the narrative of German guilt

"Conjuring Hitler" by Guido Giacomo Preparata is a difficult, but interesting read (excerpt with the content of "Conjuring Hitler"). Mr Preparata does follow a lead on understanding the Nazis that a number of economists uncovered. The problem during reading much of the book is that the author has chosen a compelling story over more grounded analyses that puts things in place at the conclusion of the book. This is no slight conspiracy narrative as it might seem before reaching the final verdicts.

The German narrative on guilt from the Nazi-era is heavily shaped by finding a comfortable solution in forming a specific narrative of guilt and excuse. I know few humans, who would not shape their feelings of guilt likewise, even more so if you consider the massive media impact of bad Nazi-portrayal film imports that are very entertaining. Kudos in this part to "Inglorious Bastards" by Quentin Tarantino for waging a battle on the Nazi-film concepts and to German! actor Bruno Ganz in "Der Untergang"/"Downfall" for highlighting the human being Adolf Hitler, who ruthlessly shaped himself into an impersonification.

Hitler and the NSDAP
There's little that is not known about Hitler and the NSDAP, like "Woyzeck" by Georg Büchner, the compilation can make a difference in perception.
The NSDAP was a movement that wanted to be a party and the jobless Reichswehr snitch Adolf Hitler did see the opportunity to become someone if he joined them. He was not the only person to gain influence in this heterogeneous agglomeration with political and other goals. Much like the state of the state, this party was not united by one clear-cut ideology. Hitler created both, the final Nazi ideology and the unification of the state under one official ideology. In both cases, he had to bring ideas expressed by him into the mindset of others, lots of others. This task was helped by money, science and technology. From earliest times this was a massive field test of all kinds of manipulation techniques the new science of psychology had without any bonds. Amassing humans and exposing them to an expression of ideas was just one of the ways to garner acceptance from people, who would be rather unconvinced individually. The speech patterns were part of a show at human gatherings and consequently lose their appeal out of context. All this required money, lots of money and the NSDAP was intent on winning big one time and having elections never afterwards. They gambled and their opponents tried to conduct a war of attrition by holding successive elections. When NSDAP votes went down, they were integrated into the Reichs government, although it was a legal somersault to make the stateless manipulator Hitler a German citizen. During all this time Hitler not only defeated his opponents by better capability at psychological warfare against the Strasser brothers, but via his connections to big industry to finance the rise of the NSDAP. It's not known how stable this NSDAP would have been as an elected party because the votes were specifically accumulated to end all voting and all accountability. As usual people vote for a party, but not necessarily share all their goals with them, rather they want to push goals that are important to them.

Money money money
As soon as the NSDAP was in power, they went about to organize a giant burglary. It started with all kinds of Germans they wanted disowned and dead and was meant to end with similar measures applied to the Eastern Europeans. The benefits should be invested into arms and armour that would make it impossible to take away the loot and make the Anglo-Saxon sea powers negotiate peace with the new über-power of Eurasia.
It started with all kinds of Germans. Despite much research and theorizing, the Aryan-type research could not explain to the population a convincing and verifiable way to tell Jews apart from Aryans. Due to this obvious failure of the whole science, the big yellow stickers were needed. Even today, someone with similar intent has no other solution available. Jewish identity was established by ancestry of Jewish confession with no idea about ancient conversions to Judaism. It didn't matter, it was not about "genetic purity", it was a religious war against fellow Germans. The goal was to get money to finance armaments which should bring in more money by taking away possessions outside of Germany.
The awful lot of money gained through the Aryanization served as benefits for the propertied unaffected Germans to keep quiet about the strange Mefo-bills that financed a massive armament push with an impressive backing on paper that was thin air in reality.
One can see the pretty exhaustive thought control from arts to introducing the "Volksempfänger" radio for propaganda as one big push to keep the immoral nature of the government hidden within plain sight by reality denial. The reality denial was constructed around material gains and social control.

Central Europe and Central Africa - not far apart
It will be easier to understand the Reich and their deeds if you look at the Rwanda genocide, the strategically important mineral Coltan and the resulting Congo Wars that have been ravaging for decades. These are human errors repeated again and again with a very similar blueprint of greed trumping moral feelings in an environment of indoctrinated righteousness with soldering and violence as economic chances to better one's life at the expense of others.
It's a failure of being capable to improve as part of a cooperating human network. Role models do have quite an impact by developed countries showing high levels of consumption. But visiting these places shows the astonished foreigner that they have less inclination towards extreme forms of visible conspicious consumption such as mobile electronics, cars and clothing in order to be something with disregard for own their well-being in the living space for example. Expressed social stratification by show-off consumption patterns becomes less significant, the more the cooperation value of a human network goes up and the more people do contribute of their income to collective efforts (grudgingly wherever you go, but to differing degrees of becoming illegal at certain levels).

To be continued.

Judgement of Paris, a German painting from 1939

NS-Kunst und Kultur is an informative German homepage (in German) about the different arts in the Third Reich. They use Ivo Saliger's painting "Judgement of Paris" to highlight the Nazis' ideal of painting female human bodies. This image of Saliger really got me going, with some background knowledge, you notice a timeless message. The digital copy of the image under discussion is from http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/98005505/index.html

http://schikelgruber.net/saliger.html provides a good overview on the biography of Ivo Saliger and some of his works. This man was capable of creating art and their statement on this image neatly sums it up:
"The breathtakingly absurd Judgement
of Paris (1939), which shows Paris as
a Hitler Youth in shorts, choosing
between three strapping specimens of
Aryan womanhood."

The depicted Paris looks astonishingly like Josef Goebbels. The very propaganda minister, who decided on the future of German artists. The depicted women are not Greek Goddesses competing for beauty and bribing a mortal human in order to gain an unfair advantage. They are typification of Aryan womanhood sexually offering themselves to the propaganda minister. Josef Goebbels liked his job, there were lots of wannabe (film-)starlets, who tried to sleep with him in order to gain promotion.
Today, the ever-adapting Josef Goebbels would probably also have a satisfying job, perhaps even in the media&arts business.

War chariots: human relays and car-borne infantry

It is a widespread perception that the so-called battle taxis were war chariots used to transport one heavily armed warrior to the fight and retrieve him again with the same vehicle. The warrior was not necessarily the owner of this device, but selected by the owner. Queen Boudicca's revolt or the Trojan war are memorable stories with such chariots that seem to differ from Egyptian ranged combat use of chariots.

I see no compelling reason in the ancient sources to negate the option of using such a chariot to drive in sequence more than one warrior to a battle scene. A tandem of two warriors would work much better than one due to an optional delivery of a replacement to protect the retrieval of a tired, endangered or wounded warrior. There is neither any convincing support in the primary sources for such a common sense approach.
Switching chariot warriors might have been common in various chariot fighting systems. These men performed demanding physical tasks, including ranged combat. If performing at their utmost, they would tire sooner than the horses, rendering a very expensive technical system much less effective without comparatively cheap human relays.

The difference between riding and chariotry, both known since the early days of horse domestication, is the better capability of pulling a load on wheels than carrying one on the back.Chariots give heavier loads or better endurance per horse with a technology intense solution. Many communities mastered the step from donkey cart to horse chariot with much communality of parts. The position for riding on horseback is different from the one taken above the hindquarters of a donkey, but the donkey seat is still depicted on Assyrian reliefs. The horse was probably seen as a war donkey that had quite extraordinary fodder requirements and was no economic solution for anything except warfare and fast transport.

Heavily armoured combatants with more training and increased mobility by riding/pulling animals were often used to reinforce lighter armoured infantry formations as required. Anglo-Saxon huscarls are such an example. The chariot is one means to cover such distances. Density of heavily armoured men necessary and available per area of combat would influence the degree of benefits provided by a fast transport. The effort spent on the vehicle can be used to increase the number of heavily armoured warriors instead.
Owning a chariot and equipping outstanding warriors seems like a typical approach of highlighting prestige by an aristocracy. A war fighting system can be entrenched not only in cost calculations, but in political system calculations of visible euergetism for a community.
That is certainly not the only option to use such troops, but it offers a heterodox view to reread the maryannu-stories, Iliad and the Irish sagas.

The chariot was dropped from the inventory in favour of heavy cavalry that was more versatile and less expensive. The reports of riders dismounting for combat should not be overemphasized. There is a tradition of recognizing specific military advantages throughout the ages. Mounted men could again and again find themselves in a more perilous position on horseback than on foot.

Switching sides (Left or right handed or something else? Part 2)

In "Left- or right handed or something else?", I highlighted the problem of finding skills and their lateralization in order to know how to use them.
Switching hands is concerned with the problems of people who have forever irreplaceable lost a limb, more specifically the hand with or without the whole arm, and now have to adjust.
Person with some degree of cross-laterality can confirm that using an object with both limbs enables them to have a kind of skill flow that feels to enable a very complete cooperation of skills lateralized on different sides. They may still feel more comfortable with specific stances that require a certain laterality to perform more within one skill field and are less capable if switching these positions. Ice hockey has left and right sided sticks with corresponding advantages in wing positions with players often being suited more for one or the other side. The skill flow can nevertheless be utilized by mentally using the non-existent limb in an imagined auxiliary grip to enhance performance.
This can result in mental stress if the condition of a forever irreplaceable lost a limb is not given. Humans can handle stress, drummers can temporarily switch their dominant hand, but an overdose of mental stress can induce critical system failures in every human.

What happens to skills that are not used on that side?
It seems to depend.
Very unequal capability of eyes to provide the brain with usable images can lead to a loss of function by the eye that does provide information of limited to no use in comparison to the better eye. The loss of function goes along with a grab of ocular dominance on all kinds of skill by the over performing eye. In order to maintain bi-ocular sight, temporary eye patches that reduce visual recognition ability of the better eye get prescribed.
Persons who were forced/convinced to use their non-preferred hand for writing, and often for every other possible task, can use their original preference under new settings or when they figured out their own mental construct for acting like that. There are claims that they do have some kinds of confusion problem due to this set up.
I presume, the difference is what the brain decides to do about these situations. The reported confusions can be attempts to tackle issues in a way the biological brain still sees as opportune that a cultural adaption of the mind tries to overrule.

Laterality - asymmetry for organization and its effect on the ability to switch
A perfectly symmetric human looks perfect and - scary. One of the first art lessons.
Humans with malnutrition tend to have more tendency for asymmetry.
A high degree of symmetry is perceived as attractive.
Current left-handers have more symmetric arms than right-handers.

Lateralization is the development of sidedness, mammals and other animals have all degrees of asymmetry spreed over all features of their bodies. For humans, this asymmetry gets always most pronounced by a stronger development of the right side and there is hardly any measurably more pronounced development on the left side. Situs inversus is the rare case of the opposite. There is a correlation between left lateralization and symmetry and right lateralization and asymmetry. The lateralization program itself seems to be an organization function that gives different symmetry or asymmetry values to everything throughout body and brain. These differences do not necessarily lead to any kind of cross-dominance.
They are presumably helpful for organizing self-perception. The skills that are derived from these kinds of asymmetries are not located somewhere left or right or in between. Under the influence of the lateralization program, the pronunciation of features is pulled from the default setting on the extreme left to the right with accompanying increase in asymmetry. In the default setting left with its high degree of symmetry, the skill values for the right side are less likely to reach a level that makes use of a range of specific skills impossible.
All kinds of cultures have been able to reach very low levels of reported left-handers, none has been able to achieve similar low levels of right-handers.Prior left hand dominance provides an adaptive advantage if being compelled to switch.