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 Do-Gooders
Gone Bad
Diese Knalltüte Horst Mahler
geht mir doch nicht aus dem Sinn. Abgesehen davon, dass an seinen
politischen Positionen die Kongruenz linker und rechter Sozialismen
so deutlich wird und auch junge Menschen lernen k ö n n t e n, dass
diese Spinnereien in freiheitsfeindlichen Totalitarismen enden, bleibt
der Mann auch menschlich ein Rätsel. (Übrigens finde ich es nicht gut,
dass Michael Friedmann ihn wegen des
Hitlergrußes angezeigt hat. Das wertet Mahler auf und rückt ihn erneut
in den Mittelpunkt. Aber Friedmann hätte sich wahrscheinlich auch mit
Adolf Hitler getroffen – um ihn hinterher anzuzeigen)
Zurück zu Mahler, also lese ich noch mal seinen Werdegang auf
Wikipedia.
Der Mann hat zwar eine Lebensgefährtin, aber keine Kinder. Da
fällt mir das erste Kapitel des neuen Buches von
Bill Bonner
zu ein: Do-Gooders Gone Bad. Tatsächlich,
Entwickler politischer Ideen haben keine Familie, keine Kinder. Sie
können vor sich hinspinnen, weil auf sie zuhause keine Frau mit Sorgen
wartet, keine Kinder die Hausaufgaben erklärt haben wollen. Weil
keine Glühbirne gewechselt, der Rasen nicht geschnitten werden muss.
Und wenn sie welche haben sind es disfunktionale Familien, also
Familien ohne Zusammenhalt (allenfalls zu Propagandazwecken). Die
Schwere des täglichen Seins wird nicht empfunden, die Realisierung
politischer Träume kann praktisch nicht erprobt, nicht überprüft
werden. Lenin hatte keine Kinder, Hitler auch nicht,
Trotzki zwar eine Frau, aber sie spannen gemeinsam. Diktatoren
haben gelegentlich viele Kinder, aber dann entwickeln sie keine die
Menschheit verändernden Ideen. Saddam zum Beispiel schrieb
lieber Liebesromane. Und Kim Jong-il hat zwar etliche Gören,
aber die Juche-Ideologie hat ja auch nicht er sich ausgedacht.
Auch Claudia Roth will die Welt
beglücken,
Renate Künast hat klare Vorstellungen von Kindererziehung und
ebenso Alice Schwarzer. Keine von denen hat je einen
verschmierten Kinderpopo gewischt. Also hängen sie rum und brüten
Ideen aus. Ideen für andere. Für die, die Glühbirnen wechseln und
Pampers besorgen. Danke ich kann verzichten.
Es gibt also einen Zusammenhang zwischen familiärer Verpflichtung und
Weltverbesserungswünschen. Genauso wie es einen Zusammenhang zwischen
Körpergröße und Komplexen gibt. Kleine Leute müssen sich halt
beweisen. Bernstein war klein, aber hat großes gemacht. Er
verstand es sein Talent positiv zu kanalisieren. Sein Mangel an
Körpergröße aber hat ihn vermutlich durchsetzungsfähig gemacht.
Kim Jong-il trägt Plateausohlen um größer zu sein. Aber außer
Rücksichtslosigkeit und Grausamkeit hat er nichts was in Erinnerung
bleiben wird. Und dann gibt es noch die
Impotenten. Die beißen in den Teppich wenn sie sich ärgern und statt
die Hände im Schoss aktiv werden zu lassen setzten sie sich an
den Schreibtisch und schreiben „Mein Kampf“.
Zurück zu Mahler. Der hätte entweder eine Familie gründen oder
mehr onanieren sollen. Dann wäre uns sein Irrsinn erspart
geblieben.
Hier also das
lesenswerte Buch. Als Einstimmung das erste Kapitel:
Chapter 1
Do-Gooders
Gone Bad
All reformers are bachelors.
--George Moore
It is a shame that the world improvers don’t set off some signal
before they go bad, like a fire alarm that is running out of juice.
Maybe some adjustment could be made. Instead, the most successful of
them -- such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler -- actually gain
market share as they get worse. Their delusions are self-reinforcing,
like the delusions of a stock market bubble; the higher prices go, the
more people come to believe they make sense. hier
weiterlesen
The do-gooders who never catch on, of course, are hopeless from the
get-go. Take poor Armin Meiwes. The man thought he had a solution to
the problems of poverty and over population. He was, no doubt,
discussing his program with Bernard Brandes just before the two cut
off Brandes’ most private part and ate it. Then, wouldn’t you know it,
Brandes died, either as a result of blood loss from the butchering or
as a consequence of Meiwes slitting his throat. And then the press
made a big stink about it, branding Meiwes the “Cannibal of
Rotenburg.” But Meiwes was not merely a pervert; he was an activist.
“We could solve the problem of over population and famine at a
stroke,” said he, according to testimony in the Times of London. “The
third world is really ripe for eating.” But wait, a fellow omnivore
thought he saw a flaw in Meiwes’ utopia: “If we make cannibalism into
the norm, then everyone will start eating each other and there will be
nobody left.” “That’s why I’m not keen on eating women,” replied
Meiwes.
It seems never to have occurred to either of them that just perhaps
not everyone would want to be eaten. Or that maybe people would find
being eaten even less desirable than having to stand in line or drive
around looking for a parking space or the other symptoms of what they
took to be planetary overcrowding. Still, anthropophagy might have
solved the problems of over population and under nourishment in a
single slice. And if his recipe for planetary improvement had not been
interrupted by the polizei, who knows what might have happened?
But now the poor fellow is in the hoosegow making do with hamburger.
The same thing happened to another of the world’s do-gooders gone bad,
Saddam Hussein. We don’t know much about the Butcher of Baghdad, but
his defense was little different from that of all ex-dictators -- he
thought he was building a better world. Iraq is, after all, a wild and
wacky place, with different tribes and religious groups ready to cut
each other’s throats. At least that was Saddam’s story. Without his
firm leadership, he claimed, the country would have been a mess. We
think of another great world improver, Il Duce, a clown who thrashed
around in typical do-gooder claptrap, looking for a theme that would
bring him to power. When he finally got into office, he found a new
program better suited to his ambitions: Put on silly uniforms. Strut
around telling the masses that you’re recreating the glory of ancient
Rome. Spend a lot of money. So many people came to admire the man that
he began to think himself admirable and to believe that his program
might actually work as advertised. Then, he invaded Abyssinia . . .
And the bull market in Benito Mussolini was over.
Blue Bloods in Black Shirts
But while Mussolini’s star was on the rise, it claimed some strange
followers. One of the strangest was carried away, with thousands of
other old people, in the unusually long, hot summer of 2003 -- Diana
Mitford. She was the woman who married Oswald Mosley, and at their
wedding in 1936 were some of the most important people of the age,
notably Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.
Of all the stupidities into which a man can fall, the stupidity that
Oswald Mosley launched headlong into was one that was especially vile.
With money supplied by Mussolini, he organized Britain’s
“Blackshirts,” an organization much like the Nazis in Germany.
National Socialism was supposed to be the wave of the future, but
Mosley’s group couldn’t seem to come up with anything more original
than going into London’s East End and beating up Jews. Most Englishmen
were appalled. When World War II broke out, the Mosleys were interned
as security risks. Though they were set free after the war was over,
they were told to get out of town. They then joined their best
friends, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, in France, where they
lived out their remaining days. Diana herself lasted into her 90s.
Diana was not only smart; she was among the world’s great beauties.
She was said to be the prettiest of the Mitford sisters, which was
tough competition, and even in her 90s, she posed for Vogue magazine
and she still looked good. She was “the most divine adolescent I have
ever beheld: a goddess, more immaculate, more perfect, more celestial
than Botticelli’s sea-borne Venus,” wrote a friend.
Really, it is almost too bad she wasn’t dumb. She might have glided
through life and been a joy to all who saw her. Instead, she married
badly . . . Which is to say, she fell in love with Mosley, who was an
idiot, and threw her lot in with him. Later, British counterespionage
agents came to see her as the greater threat. “The real public danger
is her,” said a report. “She is much more intelligent and more
dangerous than her husband.”
Of course, she was not the only one of the Mitford sisters to go bad.
They were almost all too smart for their own good. Their synapses
fired right, left, and overtime . . . And took them in strange
directions. Sister Unity, like Diana, took up with the Nazis. Sister
Jessica took an equally radical course, but in a different direction;
she became a Marxist. It seems as though a smart person will go along
with almost anything, no matter how preposterous. “I don’t
understand,” said Lord Redesdale, father of the Mitford girls. “I am
normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than
the other.”
While Hitler was praising Diana and Unity as “perfect specimens of
Aryan womanhood,” the other sister, Jessica, known in the family as
Decca, was plotting to buy a handgun with which to kill the Führer.
But it was Unity who actually used a pistol -- on herself. She shot
herself in the head and died in 1948. What had become of the sweet
little girls raised in Swinbrook? How could normal people produce such
extraordinary characters? How could such divine little angels turn
mad?
We have no ready answer. But a friend tells us of a book by Riccardo
Orizio, an Italian journalist, who hunted down and interviewed former
dictators. Dead ones, of course, did no talking, but a surprising
number seem to remain among the quick. His book, Talk of the Devil:
Encounters with Seven Dictators, includes conversations with Idi Amin;
Jean Bedel Bokassa; Wojciech Jaruzelski; Nexhmije Hoxha (who, with her
husband Enver, ruled Albania for nearly 50 years until his death);
Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier; and Mengitsu Haile Mariam, the
Marxist-Leninist dictator of Ethiopia.
What is clear from the conversations is that they are all as mad as
Diana and Oswald Mosley. Yet they all insist that whatever evil they
may have done -- mass murder, starvation, grand larceny -- they were
only making the world a better place. And none of them regretted or
repented anything, except for the tactical “mistakes” that got them
booted out of their countries eventually.
At least Diana Mitford Mosley had no blood on her hands. And, after
four decades of peer pressure, she did finally admit that her wedding
guests were not the nicest folks you could have to a party. “We all
know he was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible
things,” she said of Hitler in 1994. “But that doesn’t alter the fact
that he was obviously an interesting figure. No torture on Earth would
get me to say anything different.”
Diana Mitford Mosley -- may she Rest In Peace . . .
Copyright © 2007 William Bonner and
Lila Rajiva |
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