HBD Wimp-Centered View of History

Well, it's true that he portrays Hitler as product of unique circumstances above all, but isn't this justifiable? For all his charisma, Hitler would've been irrelevant in pre-WWI Germany. He doesn't denigrate Hitler's abilities IMO and stresses his unique connection with the German people.

There is not enough expansion, in the entire secondary literature on Hitler, of this single short remark by Liddell Hart first made in 1968:

I really recommend Alan Clark's book on Barbarossa, he does a good job of debunking the caricature of Hitler as a bungler who kept brilliant generals from achieving victory.

This thread reminds me of an essay called " Big Business and German Politics" by Ernst Nolte, a post-war German historian. He recounts how the German officer class were fairly dismissive of industrialists and financiers, the scions of the industrial/financial urban middle classes who had emerged in the 17th and 18th century.

Men like von Hindenburg and Rommel had an understanding of social status that went beyond mere wealth. Service held more weight than wealth.

Compare with the current 'celebrity' class where people are famous because of wealth. The Clintons, Kanye and some NYC banking gangster all hamming it up in the same room as equals. Cash, it seems, is king.

The wimps' only crime is taking the world as it is: observing who has social capital, what they do with that social capital, and the terrible costs of it to ordinary men (like themselves), as well as to Western Civilization as a whole ... and logically concluding that a very different sort of man ought to be in charge. BAP's analysis is correct, but also missing the wimps' point.

I could argue that BAP's heroic, creative, conquering "Aryan" type no longer exists in any meaningful sense in the Western world. Certainly they no longer constitute a power elite, so their virtues are wasted. You're more likely to find men like that in ISIS: highly motivated to spread across the entire world, impose themselves upon the weak and depraved, and build something of power and glory. You're more likely to find the equivalents of the old epics playing out between ghetto street gangs: an aristocratic/warrior culture that prizes swagger, courage, and hardness above all else fueling endless petty striving for reputation and trophies. But since this striving plays out in a world already built and full (rather than a world made new by the passing of the Ice Age ... or the forging of bronze), it is rendered irrelevant and will be remembered by nobody.

That, or men like that who exist today are no longer cloaked by a haze of romanticism, and are seen for what they really are: just another kind of animal - in this case, a predator, who does not embody any values other than acquisition of wealth and power by any available means. BAP admits that the epic heroes and the empire builders were essentially pirates. The Iliad is the story of a bride abduction. Tain bo Cuailnge is the story of a cattle raid. The conquistadors were impoverished minor nobility whose only goal was getting rich. And what culture has ever looked fondly upon pirates? Hell, even our degenerate age can only do it by reinventing them as sexless proto-commies who were “punk” before it was cool.

I also observe that BAP has written about a life cycle of imperial peoples: they expand but are in time assimilated by their own subjects, collapse into decadence and miscegenation, and once extinct they rule from beyond the grave only as long as their subalterns choose to perpetuate the imperial institutions… and the future belongs to the bovine peasant peoples, who endure despite conquest after conquest. If our goal is to preserve our race and our culture, and if that goal is worth pursuing for its own sake, then how would one explain the contradiction between these two mandates: self-preservation and imperial expansion? Though the Jews seem to have found a happy median: they have diligently conserved their tribe over 2000 years since the destruction of their temple and their dispersal into exile, yet have spread over the entire face of the earth and have built a shadow empire where even nominally free peoples labor and fight for the Jews rather than themselves.