As Howard Bloom likes to say, "I believe that they believe it, even though I find it very hard to believe that they believe it."
Goebbels believed what he said below. He and Hitler and Himmler imagined that Jews were in power everywhere--that they controlled the world. Therefore, in order to save the universe--every single Jew had to be destroyed.
The great historian,
Jeffrey Herf, understands and writes about the (shared) paranoid delusion that dominated Nazi Germany.
However, in 2007 Jeffrey and I were having a having a conversation at the
Annual Conference at Millersville University at which each of us had presented. I said, "Yes, you are correct about the Nazi's psychotic delusion. So you could say that during the Nazi period, the entire German society was psychotic."
He walked away!
He couldn't bear the idea that an entire society might be psychotic. Many people have trouble with this idea. Why do we find it difficult to conceive that entire societies might be psychotic?
