[Firstly, sorry for taking so long to get to the Comments. I didn't know I had them! I've fixed the appropriate options now, so they should appear as quickly as they used to.]

It’s been a very interesting yet tiring series of days for me. I meant to do some more writing on “The Turk” (my current wip) but got caught into a long series of hopscotching articles that led from structural engineering to global monetary systems; from electromagnetism to a recently released book called “Liberal Fascism”.

I am not a fascist. Quite the contrary. And that makes it doubly important for me to read and understand the opposition. But the result of all that somber self-education is a form of mental shell-shock and I was somewhat happy to have, in the end, stumbled across a light-heavy 1941 article by a woman named Dorothy Thompson, and published in Harper’s magazine, that still followed the general mood of my ponderous journey but happily offered to shoulder some of the burden itself.

Dorothy Thompson was an American journalist, expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. Harper’s printed an essay by her in 1941 entitled “Who Goes Nazi?“. It’s a kind of parlour game, she tells us. A mental party exercise to analyse the attendees and guess who would “go Nazi”. She says, for example, that:

Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation–the
generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work–a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

And so she goes, one by one, around the various people at her hypothetical gathering and dissects them. Have a read of the article. While I don’t agree wholeheartedly with all of Thompson’s analyses, I do agree with her more than I disagree. I think she leaves out, for example, the Deceptive Do-Gooder, but I can’t work up the energy to progress this thought right now. Maybe later. Reading her smooth style of writing, you feel you are being spoken to by a friend. And so the last paragraphs are all the more telling:

[T]he frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success–they would all go Nazi in a crisis..

…Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t–whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

If something in you resonated to what Thompson wrote, go to her Wikipedia entry and scroll down to her Quotations. You’ll find more food for thought there.