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Johan Leman, 3 May 2022

“The psyche of the masses and the psyche of a child show very similar reactions. You really cannot imagine the ideas that feed the masses and set them in motion as childish enough. Real ideas, in order to become historical forces that set the masses in motion, generally have to be simplified first to the level of a child’s capacity to understand. And a silly delusion, shaped in the heads of children during ten years and hammered into them for four years, may very well make its way into politics twenty years later as a deadly serious ‘world view’.” (pp. 23-24).

I take the above quote from Sebastian Haffner’s book, The Story of a German 1914-1933. (2000, going back to an original, then unpublished manuscript from 1939).

We must ask ourselves whether these are not again processes that have been going on for several years and that help to explain the success, close to us, of movements such as ‘Schild en Vriend’ and the like, and that are now also at play in Russia, for example, to make many people there so uncritical of what is going on in Ukraine.

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