Column

On December 18, 1940 Adolf Hitler signed the most important directive in the history of mankind. Directive No 21 approved plans for a Nazi invasion of Russia, codenamed Operation Barbarossa.

In his book The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Richard Overy quoted Hitler as saying at the time: “The German Wehrmacht must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign.” The campaign, which eventually began on June 22, 1941, would last four years and result in the deaths of 24 million Russians and over 10 million Germans.

Hitler had many reasons for going to war with his erstwhile Eastern ally, most were born of paranoia (though some were justifiable) and extreme racism, the remainder was simple folly. Hitler had only to look back to 1812 when Napoleon’s formidable Grand Armee began its long and devastating retreat from Moscow, to know that the conquest of the frigid Russian wastes though the dream of many a conqueror, was also the graveyard of innumerable armies.

Hindsight, they say, is 20-20, but if that’s the case then humans suffer from chronic blindness. History charts our follies, missteps and shattered delusions; it helps us map debacles that have quaked through our eras. But what it doesn’t do is help us learn from them. The fault lies within us.

In our quest to battle the unbeatable, outthink the hive, and outrun the wind we fail to see that which is so evident. We stumble over obstacles we knew were there all along, it’s just that we chose, in our stubborn naivete, to ignore them.

The lessons of Vietnam seem all but lost in the quag of Iraq and Afghanistan; the tribulations of Kashmir swept away in the desolation of Chechnya; and the trials of Nuremburg bogged down in The Hague. And in Copenhagen, Kyoto has been ground into a memory of failure on a catastrophic scale.

These lessons may not always be buried in the distant past or in labyrinthine textbooks, they may be prowling around yesterday, or the week before. Our sight is selective, our egos vast clouds that block out the light of realisation.

We fare no better in our personal lives, men and women philander knowing fully well the possible outcome if found out…but we’re human, so naturally we presume we’ll never be caught. We kill expecting that the barbaric death penalty doesn’t apply to us.

We’d be a lot worse off if our one greatest fear didn’t keep us in check. It is this fear that turns rational beings into believers, habitual adulterers into silent sleepers, and nihilists into hipocrates with a smile. It is the fear of repercussion; that fatal comeuppance.

Hitler did not have that fear, nor did Caesar, Napoleon, Hannibal or Theodoric. But Marcus Aurelius did, and so did Asoka and Frederick.

You and I have it in spades, and that’s what makes us, or at least make the attempt to, keep on society’s straight and narrow. Repercussion is doled out by our peers, often misled by perverse anachronists. Friends can spin on a moral dime and turn into executioners, bosses into tyrants, lovers into succubi. Repercussion is a terrifying thing.

All that talk about ‘genuinely nice people’ is a load of rodent droppings. There are no nice people, only fearful ones. And the ones that have the testicular fortitude to spit in the face of this fear, aren’t smart, they’re just deluded. In the end you can’t battle the unbeatable, outthink the hive, or outrun the wind. You’re only human…deal with it.