Forgiving Hitler

and questioning the narrative of WWII

In this I examine the spiritual, psychological and geopolitical reasons to forgive Hitler, not by absolving his guilt but by questioning the WWII official narrative. As the personification of evil, is Hitler a scapegoat for a systemic brutality that didn’t end with Germany’s defeat? I question the cause of the anger invoked by questioning the Holocaust and how it relates to 'triggers' of questioning the narratives of 9-11 or the CoVax. I end by looking at the hope and possibility for social change when we give all people the same benefit of the doubt for their integrity that we’d like them to give to us. It can lead to asking real questions like, “What would cause me to do the same?” And if I can’t imagine doing the same under any circumstances, should I believe that someone else did?

The question of good and evil is something I always go back to, and I like defining my terms: to do good is to alleviate suffering, to do better is to enable people to alleviate their own suffering; to do bad is to cause suffering, and to do evil is to force others to cause suffering. I see actions as potentially evil but not people. As I say on the back of my book, I believe people are inherently good and when they behave badly, systems are to blame.

The paradox of evil is an ancient debate among theologians called The Theodicy Triangle, which I talk about in my episode of that name. It names three points that can’t all co-exist: God is all-good, God is all-powerful, Evil exists. If God created evil, God must be evil. If evil exists without God creating it, evil must be God. The only other possibility is that evil does not exist.

My go-to spiritual text is A Course in Miracles, which presents the premise that the world exists in our One Mind, rather than our separate minds existing in the world. This world is our collective delusion, our nightmare, but we are the dreamer, not the figures in the dream. This goes to what I call the Reality Triangle of the only three possibilities: 1. God is a monster 2. There is no God or 3. There is no world.

Hitler is the personification of evil. In any debate of whether evil exists, the answer is “Hitler … duh!” If God created Hitler as evil, we have to go back to 1. God is a monster. If Hitler is evil without God creating him evil, then 2. evil is God, stronger than God and the ability to inflict pain and suffering is the most powerful force in the world since people would rather die than be tortured. Only by entertaining the possibility of 3. that the world doesn’t exist, is it possible that evil—forcing others to inflict pain and suffering—isn’t the strongest force in reality.

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If the world is our dream and Hitler is a figure in our nightmare, what does he represent? Jungian analysis would say that everything—a monster, a house, a shoe—is really ourselves. What does Hitler symbolize? Is Hitler a projection of guilt we’re trying to hide? Is that why the prospect of forgiving Hitler arouses so much anger?

Forgiveness is the basic practice of The Course, but it means something very different. To see someone’s guilt and then forgive it is to reinforce both their unworthiness and your superiority. The Course is a more radical practice of seeing innocence, of seeing that there’s nothing to forgive.

I think of the word forgiveness as giving forward the benefit of the doubt that the person has as much integrity as I have. So if they’re doing something dysfunctional or destructive, why? What could cause me to do the same? So it’s understanding, first, exactly what’s been done and then why, from the perspective that the person is me born into a different circumstance—there’s nothing about me that would cause me to do any different. When we forgive, we’re always forgiving ourselves.

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Now I’d like to look at the psychological impact. As I mentioned in CJ Hopkins & the New Normal Reich, my wake-up call was re-reading Elie Weisel’s Night when it was assigned to my daughter in high school. I read the passage, “Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes ... children thrown into the flames.” [32]

When I read this as an adult, it was apparent that it couldn’t logically be true. If the Germans had ripped babies out of their mothers’ arms and thrown them into a flaming ditch, the crowd would have immediately realized they had nothing to lose and done everything to overpower the guards. If you’re herding people docilely to their doom, it would be the stupidest thing you could do. And Germans are nothing if not logical.

When I started questioning this, I found a website called Elie Weisel Cons the World that starts with the lack of the tatoo he said he got at Auschwitz. The author recounts Elie’s autobiography, when he writes about meeting with the Rebbe of Wizhnitz:

“The conversation became more relaxed. He asked me about my work. He wanted to know if the stories I told in my books were true, had they really happened. I answered not too convincingly: ‘In literature, Rebbe, certain things are true though they didn’t happen, while others are not, even if they did.’” [275]

In 1968, Legends of Our Time, Wiesel tells the story of that same visit to the rabbi this way: The Rebbe is troubled to learn that Wiesel has become a writer, and wants to know what he writes. “Stories,” Wiesel tells him, “…true stories”:

About people you knew? “Yes, about people I might have known.” About things that happened? “Yes, about things that happened or could have happened.” But they did not? “No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end.” The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: That means you are writing lies! I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself: “Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred.”

Without doing this research, however, the passage was self-evidential as false. Night has been assigned reading since I was in high school, 50 years ago, as the most eminent eyewitness account of the Holocaust. Every student in the US and every teacher who assigned it has read this book, and none of them have questioned it. That means they’ve been taught not to think, not to engage, to accept what they’re told and not see what’s in front of their face. What they accepted instead was the flawed character of Germans, who could turn into monsters.

Propaganda isn’t a lie, it’s lies and truth woven together. When you find one thread that you know to be a lie, you need to pull on it until it unravels the whole. Then you can sort out what’s true from what’s false.

I think that cognitive dissonance leads to accepting what viewer Lyndsey MacPherson calls ‘the glossy brochures of the official narratives’: 9/11 and how jet fuel could melt steel at freefall speed. JFK’s assassination. The CoVax and mask psychosis (sic). In all of these we face cognitive dissonance between what we see with our own eyes and what we’re told to see, and we choose not to see it. I’m not going to do that. This is what I see, you tell me why I’m wrong but you can’t just reject it.

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On a psychological level, where does that conflict come from? What I’ve always told my daughters is that you can’t create conflict, you can only surface where it’s buried in someone’s mind. If there’s no conflict there, they just dismiss what you say without emotion. In the video I tell about a personal incident with my daughter, and finding out her anger about me bringing up CoVax complications was related to her fear that I was right and there was nothing she could do about it.

In all instances when we’re ‘triggered’ and the person has no power over us, and what they say doesn’t change anything, I think we need to look at where the anger comes from. In this case, can hatred of Hitler be anything but virtue-signaling? It’s not only approved but mandatory to show you’re a compassionate, caring person. There’s no social risk, only in the opposite direction of not joining in.

When I bring up discrepencies in the Holocaust narrative, someone might say, “Do you know I’m Jewish?” or “I have Jewish friends” or even “I knew people who had tattoos from the camps.” In other conversations that might be “I knew people who died in 9-11” or “Someone I love died from Covid.” Questioning the narrative is seen as an attack, adding insult to injury. But these should be the people who most want to know what really happened, like a murder where the wrong culprit was executed. Is it worth the closure if the actual perpetrator (or system) is free to kill again?

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What are the geopolitical implications of the WWI narrative? By assigning guilt to the German people and imposing debt and unpayable reparations, Germany was turned into a labor and resources colony. The resulting, inevitable hyperinflation inflicted genocide by starvation on the people.

The narrative of WWII is that the good guys won, the bad guys lost. By dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US claimed the ultimate victory even though Russia really won the war—a war that Churchill sacrificed Poland to provoke, stating that he wanted Germany and Russia to “bleed each other dry” and refusing to intervene too soon. Germany claimed Poland was persecuting ethnic Germans in order to surround them with enemies, which parallels Russia’s reasons for intervening in Ukraine today.

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Now let’s look at the implications of the WWII narrative on system design. In my episode on CJ Hopkins, I quoted economist Henry CK Lui:

The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began.

For commenter Sage Hana, this “Called to mind an explanation for how The Nazis were able to ‘turn things around’ so quickly. About 11-m. mark or so gets into this. It's pretty dark, but then again the entire four hour documentary is. Basically rich people who own the world have a long history of playing both sides, like a War Credit Default Swap.” 

This video ties a lot of different pieces together, from JFK to 911 to Auschwitz and its US funding. On Satanic rituals, I have no doubt they exist. If I wanted to make people do my bidding and never talk about it, I’d certainly have them do the most repulsively immoral and humiliating acts and get it on film. But do Satanic rituals have power? I don’t entertain the possibility. If you’re going to imagine supernatural powers, they might as well be on our side. Why use your imagination to paralyze yourself?

One of the things the documentary states is that the Autobahn couldn’t have been built without foreign investment. But unless they needed foreign materials, the system of sovereign credit could pay for all labor and domestic materials. This dramatic example of the power of sovereign credit has been blocked by the Hitler narrative, and I think it’s something we’re going to need when we all become Weimar.

And last, I want to talk about hope and possibility. If people are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems are to blame, we only need to change the system. We don’t need to change people or make sure the good guys win. We can trust that other people want the same things we want and, with a working system, they’ll be as fair and generous to others as we would be ourselves.

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For more, here’s The Reality Puzzle and the Propaganda Playbook:

I look at reality as a jigsaw puzzle that requires both the masculine and feminine sides of the brain to solve--the masculine-analytical "does it fit?" and the feminine-intuitive big picture. I apply this to my poster of Mesoamerica Resiste! from the Beehive Collective that uses wind-up chattering teeth to represent tourism and vampire bats for indigenous midwifery. Kennedy's book gives historical context to the 1910 puzzle piece that changed medicine from strengthening the immune system to germ warfare. I examine the mechanisms of manipulation and list three rules of the propaganda playbook: 1) name things the opposite of what they are, 2) it's easier to lie big than lie small, and 3) the best defense is a good offense.

and Socio-Spirituality and Small Scale Sovereignty:

I define socio-spirituality as looking with open-eyes at the reality in the world and questioning with an open mind the reality of the world. I distinguish its purpose, not as giving comfort, but giving the power to change the world. Its one dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else, followed by four beliefs and one suspicion. How these relate to small scale sovereignty is the topic of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire.

and the episode mentioned, CJ Hopkins & the New Normal Reich:

In Through the Looking Glass, Margaret Anna Alice interviews playwright CJ Hopkins about his Substack, The Consent Factory Essays, and his book, The New Normal Reich. She asks eight questions that I summarize and respond to, on the cultural zeitgeist and reality vs. "reality". I raise questions about the original Third Reich, and whether we've been told the truth. Mattias Desmet is discussed and which came first, totalitarianism or mass psychosis. I quote from A Course in Miracles and why more people are psychoanalyzing humanity as one consciousness than ever before.