A Comparison

I recently read through for the second time Victor Davis Hanson’s 2017 book The Second World Wars, a book I have mentioned here previously. It’s a good 600 pages and well-written, so well worth a second read if you like that sort of book, as I do. It is not a history of WWII, but rather more of a post-mortem. What decisions were made, by who, and were they wise at the time – or not, and did they turn out well – or not.

I have noticed on the second reading that VDH is slightly repetitive, so it could probably have been less than 500 pages with some tougher editing, but that is a minor complaint. It is hugely interesting and I have learned a lot from it.

This article is not really about that book, however. It is about one small thing in it, in a chapter titled Supreme Command, which looks at all the major wartime national leaders. How they came to decisions, what those decisions were, and their overall strengths and weaknesses, as seen by VDH, looking back from 2017.

Before I tell you the bits I found interesting, a caution. Ever since he entered presidential politics, more people than anyone could count have referred to Donald Trump as either ‘a fascist’ or ‘another Hitler’.

I want to put on the record my view that all such references are bullshit. People who say or write that typically have no idea what is fascism, and comparing him to Hitler is a way of saying they think he is an asshole. They just think ‘fascist’ and ‘Hitler’ is a worse label than ‘asshole’, and so they go with that. I am happy to agree that, based on the evidence I see, Donald Trump is an asshole. If assholes were disqualified from office, it would be hard to fill most government positions.

Ok, that said, I am going to quote here some sentences from Hanson’s discussion of Hitler as a leader in his book.

Without a moral sense, Hitler assumed that those weaker than himself were ethical only in word as a substitute for strength in deed. For someone who bragged about willpower and the unconquerable spirit, Hitler counted only on the power of things, not of ideas and human emotions.

Then later on the same page:

Hitler also suffered from the symptoms of the autodidact: superficial knowledge without depth or audit, energized by a forceful character dulled by a lack of subtlety.

An autodidact is someone who is self-taught, but it is the symptoms of that which I see so clearly in the current president of the USA.  Superficial knowledge, no depth of understanding of anything, including the US government, and no audit, meaning no internal (or external, for that matter) checks on what he believes to be true.

A forceful character? Sure, that’s what made him successful on TV, but a lack of subtlety? There should be a photo of DJT in the dictionary next to the entry for ‘subtlety; antonym’.

There’s my thoughtful Hitler/DJT comparison for you, but it is about personality, not political beliefs or world view. Had DJT and Hitler ever met I predict they would have hated one another. And I add as a footnote that this is indeed my comparison. VDH never mentions Trump once in his book. He has more interesting and important fish to fry.