I have interviewed real Nazis, including the personal aides of Ribbentrop and Goebbels, men who worked at the Reich Chancellery with Hitler, as well as torturers and officers of Argentina’s genocidal dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s.
These killers all considered themselves the victims of imaginary all-poweful entities, world Jewry, godless Marxism. They, and not the people they murdered, were the real victims of history, each and all told me. This self-ascribed victimhood empowered them to commit mass murder.
Assigning imaginary power to harmless groups they outmatched in every way, satisfied their desperate need to feel wronged, without actually putting themselves in harm’s way, without actually becoming real victims.
Again: The Nazis and Argentine perpetrators I interviewed, all condidered themselves, and not the people they murderered, to be the real victims of history. Time and again I heard them rap on this theme.
Their hand on a red button with the power to obliterate human civilization, Russia’s new “Z” faction similarly attempts to convince us that it is they who are weak and under assault from Ukraine, while they proceed to bomb Ukraine out of existence.
What I finally concluded was that the apocalyptic crimes committed by these deranged totalitarians were unrelated to the political and strategic arguments they put forward as their motivation. They simply needed, for their gruesome satisfaction, to brutalize other human beings.
With their dead eyes, oblivious to the suffering they caused others, protected inside their victim bubble, these powerful men - invariably men - hit out at the defenceless groups that they claimed endangered their existence.
They cannot stop themselves, they can only be stopped. And the destruction they cause is really a perverted plea for help. For all their bluster, it is their own destruction they seek, in the solitude of their bunkers, dragging as much of the world down with them as possible.
