How and Why we Delude Ourselves Into Thinking that Hitler was smart.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, famed (former) psychologist, the only Daily Wire employee sadly absent from Lady Ballers (apparently he is in the post credit scene I did not watch), and very serious person has oft opined about “the genius of Hitler”. But you don’t need to pay $100 for a Daily Wire + streaming subscription to hear someone extol the genius of Hitler, or even just peddle the opinion that he was a relatively smart and shrewd guy. You often hear how he was a “brilliant orator” — a phrase often used to describe actual smart people like John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson stands firm on the claim that “you can’t say he wasn’t a good artist”.

I can. This is crap.

It’s lifeless, dull, and flat, just like the mind of the man who made it.

Hitler’s own Press Secretary talked about how dumb he was. He laid about until 11am, when he might finally decide to work. He spent the “morning”, now afternoon, scanning the papers for mentions of his name. And, let me tell you, he was getting talked about a lot. You think telling a domestic violence joke on a comedy special will you press, try doing a Holocaust — wall to wall coverage. Then he would attend to some of his affairs, while leaving the bulk of his work unfinished. He was narcissistic, rude, and did not handle criticism well. He only wanted praise.

This wasn’t simply a consequence of him gaining power, and becoming corrupted. His intellectual laziness extended to his younger years where he said some variation of “there is nothing anyone could teach me that would be worth learning” to a young man trying to befriend him. He was standoffish with people, and weird. He didn’t socialize well. He had a strange fixation on his cousin. Many things that in today’s world you would hope get flagged by some counselor or something.

Picture of a genius.

This is even ignoring his litany of strategic blunders — putting it mildly. The fact that he would often consult what one might basically consider to be horoscopes to make his decisions. He even dismissed atomic science as “Jew science” — and started his book burning campaign by going after scientific literature.

By what metric does one consider someone smart? He lost the war, and killed himself in a blunker. I’m sure that was not what he told the kindergarten teacher he wanted to be when he grew up. He was weird and totally anti-social. Is that intelligence? He lacked the ability to grasp basic atomic science, something most high schoolers in good schools, and almost all overseas in developed nations have an understanding of. Is that intelligence?

Of course many will point to the fact that many Nazi officials tested high on IQ tests — and I will get to that. But, of course, for obvious reasons, Hitler’s IQ cannot be measured, it’s all over the back wall of a bunker in Germany.

Is suicide intelligent? Philosophical questions to ponder there.

Despite any compelling evidence to the contrary, like so many other myths, why do we believe this one.

His oratory skills. See he hypnotized people like a Grateful Dead concert. I bet those Nazi raves were real parties. I was choosing something to watch tonight and I was thinking about a Paul Thomas Anderson film or Hitler’s speeches. Considering I don’t like beating my head into a wall from hearing stupid people blather, I went with Boogie Nights. Think I made the right choice. He was an overdramatic actor — not some master manipulator.

Hitler was, of course, an Anti-Semite and racist, but, that wasn’t really unique to him, now was it? There was a sizable percentage of the United States population at that time that saw Jews as non-white, and often scourges on society. In Germany, many people harbored Anti-Semitic resentment that long predated Hitler. The Nazis staged “Passion Plays” (a stage version of Passion of the Christ) because it was a dog whistle to very committed Catholics and Christians who saw the Jews as being the murderers of Jesus. Hitler was one of many Anti-Semites, otherwise he would have found so many willing to go along with him.

The ones he got to go along with him were mostly layabouts and kleptocrats. He ran the government poorly, if at all in many cases. He let private industry raid the coffers. He did all these things because he was lazy, and pushed the meaningful work on the sycophants he surrounded himself with.

I can’t imagine many extolling the brilliance of a CEO who ran his businesses like that. Not anyone with any credibility. Well, maybe I can, actually.

Hitler’s image as a genius autocrat, and a brilliant orator was crafted by the Nazis. They crafted an image of him as those things — he was not those things. Those rallies were careful stagecraft on the part of the Nazis as a whole.

Many well many Liberals, and even many left-leaning people buy into this mythologizing. That despite Hitler’s election being Undemocratic — he still carried 30% of the electorate — more than enough by percentage to carry a Presidental election.

To address the elephant in the room, no none of this is being done to draw parallels to Trump specifically. This is showing the amount of people, probably in every western nation, that would fall into the demographic of voters, who would elect a man like Hitler.

So why do we depict him as smart? Cunning? Sometimes even suave or savvy? Why do we see him as a calculating genius we are but mere peons too?

Because then he tricked us. This isn’t really who we are. C’mon. We don’t do this stuff on purpose all the time. Right? That was in the past. Movies, and culture, and smartphones fixed all that, or will, obviously. What are you talking about? I mean that’s how smart he was. The Germans were really sad later. And a lot of them had high I.Q.s…so…

Ignoring all the assumptions smuggled in by my little aside there.

If Hitler really hypnotized a populace, he sure didn’t hypnotize all of them? Many open, and violently, and bravely, resisted. Were any of them intelligent? Is resisting a dictator who is going to genocide you and your entire family not like a really intelligent decision? It was even my own gut instinct to mention the bravery of that, but not the intelligence first. Weird, huh? I mean I know many would probably concede Oscar Schlinder is a very intelligent man, but I almost think they would attribute that intelligence to his business acumen.

He was a hypnotic speaker would only hypnotized 30-something percent of the German people. Can you imagine going to a hypnotist and he hypnotizes two of the six people on stage and he’s like “well, it was 66% off tickets”.

He tricked us, right? That’s the lie we always tells ourselves. We’re these hyper-evolved apes, with souls actually, souls, these ephemeral things inside us that are pure like baby angels. We can only be corrupted. That’s how this is supposed to work. But what if it doesn’t? What if Hitler was just the dumbest guy, who would say and write the stupidest shit, who appealed to the lowest common denominator? No way, right? The system is supposed to weed someone like that out. I.Q. tests and junk. We live in a meritocracy we’re told.

What could be the reason that every modern day fascist leaders sound so dumb it makes your ears bleed? Could it be because they have fallen so far from their heights in the 1940s, like they’re some aging rock band. Or could it be that they were always stupid.

But surely some genocidal maniacs are smart? Ted Bundy, who only made it into law school because the Governor, a Republican, wrote him a letter of recommendation after he was a delegate — was obviously smart. Meritocracy and everything.

I concede, that some genocidal maniacs are smart. Nothing to me sticks out to be about King Leopold as particularly stupid. He was calculating and methodical, and got out before he was caught. He went back and did a ton of philanthropy and become known as “The Builder King” in Belgium — which I’m told is the Alabama of Europe. I guess I’m burying the lead here — he genocided 20 million Congolese, to get rubber. Rubber was hot at the time! On the skin — we’ll get to that. But, I mean, it was a big commodity.

So how do you get it? Well, King Leopold II, smart guy, comes up with a strategy. See you can’t get a lot at once — so you need a lot of people. That’s going cost a lot of money to employ those people, so forget about the employment part. This is your colony, bitch.

You hack at the trees containing rubber. To do that you get the involuntary workers to hack at the trees until the rubber affixes to their skin, burning it. Then you hack it off. Their skin. Then repeat the process. If anyone resisted they were shot. The Congolese army they employed was instructed to bring back a hand of everyone they killed. If they didn’t have the bullet and a hand, they were killed. I, personally, would have gone with paperwork or digital tracking — but computers didn’t exist back then.

You would also have the magistrates of the colony rape families for good measure. Really up the psychological torture to keep the involuntary workers in line.

By the time his ten years were up in the Congolese the dialect they were reduced to speaking, the only one remaining following the genocide of the majority of their population, was the equivalent of America being reduced to only speaking the Boston accent.

While I doubt King Leopold even considered anything remotely close to Hitler’s ambitions, something he didn’t do, that Hitler (and Stalin, and Mussolini to a lesser extent) did do is kill a large amount of “white” people. Either white passing, or simply “white” even by the strictest of definitions. He killed Germans. He killed “his own kind”. King Leopold killed “others”.

Belgians extol the genius of King Leopold II. Still to this day. And they should. He did it, and got away with it. He didn’t die in some bunker. He died in Brussels. He died a very rich man off his endeavors in the Congo.

While not often about King Leopold directly — much is made in cinema about white men going to the Congo, or places in Africa, or African like mythical countries, as if they are just minding their own business, or harmlessly exploring, or maybe a worst, poaching an animal. Not committing genocide, usually.

Hitler’s genocide was mechanized and quick. Perhaps the fault of his ambitions and inability to run the government, or perhaps simply the inevitability of when modernity meets a mind as small as Hitler’s was. The man who said no to atomic energy. He was more than willing to say yes to the modern technology he lived with. King Leopold, who existed many decades prior, lacked so much of that technology — what would he have done with it? Extend human rights to the Congolese? Not, hardly.

Did King Leopold trick anyone? Some have tried to claim in retrospect the Belgium government was furious with him — color skeptical there, buddy. The truth is the population back then would have been blissfully unaware of it — the vast majority of them at least. Whether they would have agreed to or not is another matter.

The idea that Hitler was a smart, or somewhat smart, or just not a total dullard who lucked into power because of biases deep seated in our political realities and personal lives is one of the great faery tales we tell ourselves. We continue to elect these people because it is exactly who we are. Many of us are just animated by racism, fear of the unknown, unresolved fears of death that manifest in a myriad of ways. Hitler didn’t games the system, it propped him up when he appeared.

He showed, in my humble opinion, no signs of being someone worth listening to.

Ever try reading Mein Kampf; it’s gobble-dee-gook. Just some bitch made, whiney ass bullshit.

Maybe you shouldn’t listen to me because I too am a failed artist like Hitler, and apparently most fascists, but in my opinion art failures are almost never about skill, they are always about intelligence. Anyone can draw well enough to do a dumb little Sunday funny style comic — it’s having the creativity and intelligence to do something that works at your skill level. In my opinion, it’s very difficult to find a dumb artist, because art is a collaborative process where you need to be able to take criticism, be self-reflective, spend a lot of mental energy unspooling ideas, and you have to be willing to redo things many times, often for no reward. Hitler had none of that.

I brought up Lady Ballers at the beginning there. Synergy, guys. I bet you thought that wasn’t making a comeback, but it is. Can’t wait for the sequel.

I watched it. I won’t say how, but I watched it. It’s bad.

But it’s bad in a very particular way. It’s ramshackle. Scenes that need extras don’t have them, or have too few. The script is about these “Global Games” but lacks the scope of feeling global, leading to a conflict where what’s presented seems more like a budding rec league than the “Olympics Games” (not used for copyright purposes). Meaning they didn’t even put in the effort to rewrite the script in coordination with the locations they got and limitations of their filming abilities. To me it comes off like an Evangelical Church comedy skit done for a congregation, on a million dollar budget.

Which is weird because the movie cost 7 million, and is mostly employees of The Daily Wire. Should be really cheap to make given the output. So my crazy conspiracy theory is it was just a money laundering scheme cooked up by the star Jeremy Boering. Kind of like Springtime for Hitler in Germany, but it worked this time, a play from The Producers about how much of a dumbass Hitler was.

The movie was made by layabouts and kleptocrats. The product is lifeless and dull. It feels thoughtless. Like someone rolled out of bed at 11am and sashayed on set to film a home movie. It’s lazy. It’s dumb.

The movie doesn’t feel collaborative at all. Featuring mostly static shots on people saying their lines and then cutting to the next. Almost like the cinematographer didn’t plan out the shots, and they just did standard coverage and some pick ups every day.

No way this movie cost 7 million dollars.

The movie also treats a black team as “others”, considering the Lady Ballers are all white.

This is the formula isn’t it. Like a bad movie you’ve seen a dozen times, only worse.

It’s starting to feel like all that mythologizing about evil deceivers, who are just way smarter than any of us, and routinely trick our monkey brains is just not true. We like it this way, don’t we?

Naw. The guy who tried to invade Russia without coats in winter is a genius.