Wooden-headedness, Banality, and Sycophancy: Insights from Albert Speer

One does not have to call a neocon a Nazi to discern troubling parallels in the way rigid ideologues and fawning enablers of various stripes think and act. A close reading of Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich may provide some insights into the workings of ideologically-driven (in contrast to empirical, fact-and-reality-driven) minds and their consequent decision-making.

Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern recalls Barbara Tuchman's diagnosis of "wooden-headedness" from her magnificent March of Folly. Link: http://www.truthout....

Below the break let us draw on Speer's insights as an insider to help us count the ways that wooden-headedness, banality, and sycophancy can intersect to create the perfect policy disaster.

(Portions cross-posted at DailyKos.)
THEN:

In his speech to the editors in chief of the German press Hitler described what he considered to be the proper method of propaganda for creating war readiness: 'Certain events should be presented in such a light that unconsciously the masses will automatically come to the conclusion: If there's no way to redress this matter pleasantly, then it will have to be done by force: we can't possibly let things go on this way.

AND NOW:
Can one imagine a more accurate description of the Bush administration's drumbeat of bogus propaganda leading up to the "preemptive" invasion of Iraq? "We can't possibly let things go on this way." The ultimate piece of fear-mongering came from Condoleezza Rice on CNN on September 8, 2002: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Act II is the current propaganda campaign against Iran and Syria.

THEN:

His illusions and wish-dreams were a direct outgrowth of his unrealistic mode of working and thinking. Hitler actually knew nothing about his enemies and even refused to use the information that was available to him. Instead, he trusted his inspirations, no matter how inherently contradictory they might be, and these inspirations were governed by extreme contempt for and underestimation of the others.

AND NOW:
This passage seems to describe to a "T" Bush's and Cheney's misperceptions of reality and utter contempt for those with differing views. Listen to Bush's strident shouting from the stump. Watch that perpetual sneer on Cheney's left upper lip. Note the neoconservatives' inability to understand the distinction between the transnational, medieval, Sunni Wahhabist Islamic fundamentalism of al Qaeda on the one hand and the leftist, secular, modernizing (and yes, brutal), Baathist state-centered regimes of Syria and (formerly) Iraq on the other.

THEN:

With a minimum of effort we can liberate Persia and Iraq. The Indians will hail our divisions enthusiastically.

In keeping with his character, Hitler gladly sought advice from persons who saw the situation even more optimistically and delusively than he himself.

AND NOW:
After engineering a debacle in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Rice and their remaining neocon enablers still seem to dream of trying to do the same for Iran and Syria, presumably with the same sort of "minimum of effort" required for Iraq. India is not on the list of enemies, but the neoconservatives seem to have little doubt that Iran and Syria would "hail our divisions enthusiastically."

THEN:

Our generals are making their old mistakes again. They always overestimate the strength of the Russians.... Besides, how badly Russian officers are trained! No offensive can be organized with such officers. We know what it takes! In the short or long run the Russians will simply come to a halt. They'll run down. Meanwhile we shall throw in a few fresh divisions; that will put things right.

Now he scoffed at the various services, calling them all incompetent, and, growing more and more heated, attacked intelligence in general.

AND NOW:
Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld (now Gates) hardly seemed inclined to pay much attention to the sobering assessments offered by senior U.S. commanders and intelligence officials before the war in Iraq, or now during the occupation and escalating insurgency. Bush and his administration seek to blame bad intelligence for the fiasco in Iraq, though the administration clearly went out of its way to cherry-pick intelligence of dubious credibility to make the case for its preemptive war.

The latest tactical band-aid to treat the growing insurgency in Iraq is to "surge" 21,500 troops into Baghdad and Anbar Province for an indefinite period. And they seem to be seeking a pretext to attack Iran and Syria, for example, by occupying the Iranian Consulate in Irbil, Iraq, by authorizing U.S. forces to kill Iranians in Iraq, and by grossly overstating the significance of weapons of possible Iranian origin found in Iraq.

THEN:

The departure from reality, which was visibly spreading like a contagion, was no peculiarity of the National Socialist regime. But in normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world.

AND NOW:
Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al. stubbornly insist that Iraq is salvageable, and that democracy is just around the corner. They continue to fantasize that the invasion of Iraq will succeed in imposing Western-style secular democracy throughout the Islamic world, even if much of the Islamic world happens to reject Western values and in the face of evidence that the occupation of Iraq has brought hordes of new, fanatically committed recruits to the jihadist cause in Iraq and throughout the Islamic world. And through their agitpop microphones Bush, his apparatchiks, and their enablers in the media have taken to referring to all Sunni insurgents in Iraq as "al-Qaeda," as though they were under the direct control of Osama bin Laden himself.

Gen. David Petraeus, the latest (and perhaps last) happy talker to try to manage the occupation of Iraq, is playbilled as America's top counterinsurgency expert. And what is his novel approach? Petraeus has shifted the emphasis from primarily offering the insurgents mobile American convoy targets to offering them numerous small American contingents of neighborhood-deployed targets--all of which, of course, need to be resupplied by convoys. The insurgents are thereby presented with the most attractive of both possible target types. Heckuva job, General.

THEN:

On July 26, 1944, Hitler boasted to the heads of industry: "All I know is that unprecedentedly strong nerves and unprecedented resolution are necessary if a leader is to survive in times such as these and make decisions which concern our very existence.... Any other man in my place would have been unable to do what I have done; his nerves would not have been strong enough."

At any rate, the more inexorably events moved toward catastrophe, the more inflexible he became, the more rigidly convinced that everything he decided on was right.

I can only explain Hitler's rigid attitude on the grounds that he made himself believe in his ultimate victory. In a sense he was worshipping himself. He was forever holding up to himself a mirror in which he saw not only himself but also the confirmation of his mission by divine Providence.... He was by nature a religious man, but his capacity for belief had been perverted into belief in himself.

I often feel that we will have to undergo all the trials the devil and hell can devise before we achieve Final Victory.... I believe that he who fights valiantly obeying the laws which a god has established and who never capitulates but instead gathers his forces time after time and always pushes forward--such a man will not be abandoned by the Lawgiver. Rather, he will ultimately receive the blessing of Providence. And that blessing has been imparted to all great spirits in history.

The church is certainly necessary for the people. It is a strong and conservative element.

AND NOW:
Bush, after spending most of his adult life as a binge drinker and failed businessman, purports to be "born again," lists Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, and claimed to Bob Woodward to be on a mission to do "the Lord's will in Iraq." He is now apparently a teetotaler. He and his strategist, Karl Rove (who does not claim to be a believer), appealed to socially conservative evangelical Christians to ensure the Republican victory in 2004.

Lt. General William G. Boykin, still the deputy undersecretary for defense in charge of intelligence (a position one would hope would be filled by someone prepared to view reality in a detached and rational way), purports to be an evangelical Christian. He boasts of telling a Muslim warlord in Somalia in 1993: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." Boykin has gone in his Army uniform to a Sunday circuit of evangelical congregations to proclaim that the war against terrorists is a war against Satan, and he tells the congregations that George W. Bush is in the White House because "God put him there."

Bush and Rove clearly view the evangelicals, followers of medieval bigots such as Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, as part of the Republicans' base of social conservatives, and Boykin has served as a point man with the mission of whipping up their righteous fervor.

As a nod to his base, Bush ended his call for a further "surge" into Iraq with an invocation of the "Author of Liberty." Is that phrase some kind of subtext understood in the Deep South, Bush's last remaining political bastion?

It seems as though Christian fundamentalist religious nuts are the mirror image of Islamic fundamentalist religious nuts. 

THEN:

But as soon as setbacks occurred he suffered shipwreck, like most untrained people. Then his ignorance of the rules of the game was revealed as another kind of incompetence; then his defects were no longer strengths. The greater the failures became, the more obstinately his incurable amateurishness came to the fore. The tendency to wild decisions had long been his forte; now it speeded his downfall.

AND NOW:
Staying the course sometimes results in driving the Humvee over a cliff.

Bush, Cheney, and Rice have put on their neoconservative blinders and have shut themselves away in their ideological bunker. They seem incapable of acknowledging any error or accepting any blame. But will their downfall come with sufficient speed to avoid further catastrophe?

Fortunately for us, sixty-five years ago the willfully ignorant and incompetent leaders were on the other side. Imagine the fix we would have been in had Hitler and his fawning sycophants possessed not merely their overweening arrogance and malevolence, but also sound strategic judgment and the ability to solicit sage advice.

But at the same time reflect on the morass in which we find ourselves now, under an eerily similar style of faith-based, virtually authoritarian, ideologically-blinded leadership, hell-bent on "staying the course."

We can't possibly let things go on this way.

Indeed, we can't.

**Footnote on the Nuremberg Tribunal:

Before long our political elites may find themselves compelled to grapple with the precedents of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Remember the first two counts in the Nuremberg indictments and subsequent verdicts:

(1) Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War

(2) Crimes Against Peace, including the launching of an aggressive war

For a very readable (and short) account of the Tribunal, see Justice at Nuremberg by Robert Conot (Carroll & Graf Publishers, April 1999), now out in paperback.

Here are two pungent quotations cited by Conot. The first is from the head of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, to a dinner companion:

My dear lady, we have fallen into the hands of criminals. How could I have known that?

The second is from Hans Frank, the German Governor of Poland during the war:

To think we lived like kings and believed in that beast! Don't let anybody tell you that they had no idea! Everybody sensed that there was something horribly wrong with this system, even if we didn't know all the details. They didn't want to know! It was too comfortable to live on the system, to support our families in royal style, and to believe that it was all right. May God have mercy on our souls!.

At least Frank, monster that he was, was able to feel at the end some remorse--unlike most of his codefendants, who remained True Believers all the way to the gallows.

Wooden-headedness, banality, sycophancy. Were the war criminals tried at Nuremberg so intellectually flabby because they were ethically neutered?

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