Michael Prescott's Blog

Cool

A possible basis for the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Greek myth of Phaeton, has been found.

The culprit? An asteroid.

HT: Hot Air.

A depressing book

In his historical overview From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart traces the origin of some elements of the Nazi social philosophy to strands of social Darwinism, and even to Darwinism itself. Since Darwinism has become a highly contentious political issue, let me immediately be clear: Weikart is not saying that Darwinism leads inexorably to the Holocaust, or that Darwin and his early supporters were proto-Nazis, or that Hitler could not have come to power without the influence of Darwinism. His thesis is more nuanced than that.

Basically, he is saying that the aspects of Hitler's program involving racial purification were inspired by generations of German intellectuals who applied Darwin's ideas to social and racial issues (as Darwin himself had done, to a certain extent, in his book The Descent of Man). In other words, Weikart sees the roots of the Holocaust in such trendy turn-of-the-century ideas as eugenics, voluntary and involuntary euthanasia, selective abortion (with "inferior" races or classes being singled out), and forced sterilization. He also finds some (not all) roots of Nazi militarism in the increasingly heated rhetoric in German intellectual circles about "racial struggle" and the need to purify the population through war.

It's a fascinating but inevitably depressing book. Scores of German thinkers, many highly influential in their day, are quoted or paraphrased as they advocate ideas that, to any normal mind, are simply appalling. The extermination of whole peoples is casually advanced as a valid geopolitical goal based on supposedly impeccable "scientific" reasoning. The value of human lives is estimated according to various allegedly "scientific" criteria, with the less valuable lives consigned to the grave -- for the good of the race, of course. In these armchair discussions of genocide, we can almost hear the distant tread of jackboots, can almost smell the charnel houses of the death camps.

But don't take my word for it. Here are some representative quotations. The first is from Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's greatest champion in Germany, the man who coined the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and worked up a series of heavily doctored woodcuts to prove it. Musing on the plight of a handicapped child -- one of the dreaded "inferiors" who threatened the evolutionary progress of the race -- Haeckel observed:

"A small dose of morphine or cyanide would not only free this pitiable creature itself, but also its relatives from the burden of a long, worthless and painful existence."

Is this immoral? Not at all, says Austrian sociologist Ludwig Gumplowitz. Quite the opposite:

"To comply with the obvious will of nature is the highest morality: With a perceptible voice nature calls back into its bosom those who are sick and weary of life. To follow this call and to make space for healthy people filled with zeal for life is certainly no evil deed, but rather a good deed, for there are not too few people on the earth -- rather too many."

Gumplowitz, at least, was no hypocrite. He followed his own advice, committing suicide by cyanide.

Adolf Jost reasoned, "There really are cases, in which, mathematically considered, the value of a human life is negative." August Forel pose the rhetorical question, "Is it really a duty of conscience to help with the birth and even the conception of every cripple, who descends from thoroughly degenerate parents? Is it really a duty to keep alive every idiot (even every blind idiot), every most wretched cripple with three fourths of the brain damaged?"

Needless to say, Forel's answer was no.

"One cannot avoid the thought that it might be better to quickly dispose of useless, corrupt and dangerous individuals, instead of supporting them till death in jail," pronounced Alfred Hegar.

Anyone troubled by such prospects need only subject his sentimental feelings to the hard logic of evolutionary science, as framed by Friedrich Hellwald:

"Science knows no 'natural right.' In nature only one right reigns, which is no right, the right of the stronger, violence. But violence is also the highest source of law, since without it [i.e., violence] legislation is unthinkable. I will in the course of my presentation easily prove, that properly speaking the right of the stronger has also been valid at all times in human history."

That is to say, might makes right -- and now "science" proves it! And what is a greater demonstration of this principle then victory in war? Thus Heinrich Ziegler could argue,

"According to Darwin's theory wars have always been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human species, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally lower or morally degenerate peoples must give place to the stronger and the better developed."

War then serves the great purpose of culling the herd and allowing evolution to advance. "If our consciousness of our people allows the fit to oust the unfit from this planet, so that high culture increases," Klaus Wagner wrote, "then there is progress on earth."

Note that science, properly understood, has nothing to say about the values or progress in any ethical sense. These enthusiastic Darwinists were mixing categories -- assuming that progress, in the sense of evolutionary adaptation to changing conditions, is somehow equivalent to moral progress. By this means they claimed to have discovered a scientific foundation for a new ethics, which would supplant the old Judeo-Christian ethic of concern for the weak and downtrodden. With this new ethical calculus in mind, they could easily quantify the value of any particular human life. As Haeckel noted toward the end of World War I:

"A single well-educated German warrior, though unfortunately they are now falling in droves, has a higher intellectual and moral value of life than hundreds of the raw primitive peoples, which England and France, Russia and Italy set against us."

This wasn't just Haeckel's private opinion, mind you. No, it was a scientific fact! Or so he and his fellow intellectuals of the same stripe ardently believed.

The new ethos was harsh. Some of its proponents did not shrink from this truth.

"Whoever it may be, he must stride over the corpses of the vanquished; that is natural law. Whoever shrinks back in hesitation from this, deprives himself of the chance for existence," wrote social Darwinist Robert Byr.

And there would be plenty of corpses to stride over. Whole populations would have to go. Oscar Schmidt assessed the situation calmly:

"If we contemplate the ethnology and anthropology of savages, not from the standpoint of philanthropists and missionaries, but as cool and sober naturalists, destruction in the struggle for existence as a consequence of their retardation (itself regulated by the universal conditions of development), is the natural course of things."

Schmidt was not the only "cool and sober naturalist" to oversee "the natural course of things." There was also Ludwig Buchner:

"The white or Caucasian human species [sic] is ordained to take dominion of the earth, while the lowest human races, like [native] Americans, [aboriginal] Australians, Alfuren, Hottentots, and such others, are proceeding toward their destruction with huge steps."

And the Frenchman Georges Lapouge:

"In the next century people will be slaughtered by the millions for the sake of one or two degrees on the cephalic index [i.e., measurements of the cranium that supposedly indicated intellectual advancement]... the superior races will substitute themselves by force for the human groups retarded in evolution, and the last sentimentalists will witness the copious extermination of entire peoples."

Some Darwinists were content to let nature take its course to the gradual, bloodless extinction of native populations. Others preferred to lend nature a hand and speed up the evolutionary process by making war on the natives and exterminating them wholesale. Otto Ammon observed:

"In its complete effect war is a good deed for humanity, since it offers the only means to measure the powers of nations and to grant the victory to the fittest. War is the highest and most majestic form of the struggle for existence and cannot be dispensed with, and thus also cannot be abolished."

Others steered a middle course, thinking it best to leave the natives alive for the time being, while they could be profitably exploited, but mandating their destruction once they became superfluous. Eugen Fischer:

"Therefore one should guarantee to [native peoples] only the measure of protection that they need as a race inferior to us, in order to survive, but no more, and only so long as they are useful to us -- otherwise [allow] free competition, which in my opinion means [their] demise! This viewpoint sounds almost brutally egoistic -- but whoever thinks through the racial concept in the points portrayed in the above section on 'Psychology,' cannot take any other view."

Klaus Wagner foresaw a global race war among Europeans, Asians, and Africans, and warned darkly that only one of the three would be left standing.

"Only one group can remain as ruler. The two others will be destroyed, where they are in the way of the stronger race, and enslaved, where they can serve them... We Germans have the power to destroy and smash the might and future of the two other groups, if we clearly see this necessity, vigorously arm ourselves, and keep our blood pure..."

This sounds a lot like mere nationalism, but intellectuals like August Forel perceived a higher purpose.

"Which races can be of service in the further evolution of mankind," Forel asked, "and which are useless? And if the lowest races are useless, how can they be gradually extinguished?"

This was the intellectual climate in which Adolf Hitler came of age. These ideas were circulating in academic books, including medical texts. They were prominently discussed in political and sociological journals. They were common, not only in Germany, but throughout the Western world; there was a flourishing eugenics movement in the United States. But it was in Germany that the social Darwinist idea was most widely accepted and most vigorously championed. Hitler was not much of an intellectual, but he could have imbibed these ideas from the right-wing, racist newspapers he read daily, and from a variety of other sources.

We can hear the echo of the fanatical Darwinists quoted above in Hitler's own writings and speeches.

"Decisive [in history] is the power that the peoples have within them; it turns out that the stronger before God and the world has the right to impose its will. From history one sees that the right by itself is completely useless, if a mighty power does not stand behind it. Right alone is of no use to whomever does not have the power to impose his right. The strong has always triumphed... All of nature is a constant struggle between power and weakness, a constant triumph of the strong over the weak."

"A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong."

"[The proper worldview] by no means believes in the equality of races, but recognizes along with their differences their higher or lower value, and through this knowledge feels obliged, according to the eternal will that rules this universe, to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker. It embraces thereby in principle the aristocratic law of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual being. It recognizes not only the different value of races, but also the different value of individuals... But by no means can it approve of the right of an ethical idea existing, if this idea is a danger for the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethic."

"There is only one most holy human right, and this right is at the same time the most holy duty, namely, to take care to keep one's blood pure."

Materialists never tire of citing the Spanish Inquisition and other horrors as proof that religious or spiritual tendencies are dangerous. They seem somewhat less inclined to examine the dark side of their own belief system. Darwin's ideas, however true or false they may ultimately prove to be, laid the foundation for generations of intellectuals who advocated the extermination of so-called "inferiors," whether individually or en masse. Moreover, the conflation of evolutionary progress with moral progress gave an ethical veneer to these inhuman proposals. It only remained for an ambitious and ruthless demagogue to snatch up these ideas and use them for his own purposes. The wait was not long.

Render unto Caesar

I've been reading Adrian Goldsworthy's bio of Julius Caesar, and it's produced very mixed feelings in me. Goldsworthy himself clearly admires Caesar and sympathizes with him. Though he does not deny Caesar's more inhumane acts, he tries to place them in the context of Roman society at that time. I'm afraid I can't quite be so forgiving. To me, Caesar is something of a monster - a man who engaged in systematic warfare for most of the last fifteen years of his life, beginning with a series of largely unprovoked attacks on the Gauls, continuing with an entirely unprovoked excursion to Britain, and culminating in a civil war that tore Rome to pieces and ended the Republic - the longest lasting system of representative government on earth up to that time.

And why did he do all this? Goldsworthy makes no bones about it. Caesar did it for power, for prestige, for "auctoritas" and "dignitas" - authority and dignity. He wanted to be the "first man in Rome." His ambition was boundless, and it could be satisfied only by first annexing Gaul as a new Roman province rich with slaves and raw materials, and then by destroying his political opponents when they tried to rein him in.

Make no mistake: The Gallic wars, the two ill-conceived British invasions, the civil war itself - all were fought to feed Caesar's ambition. The conquest of Gaul made him rich and influential, a hero of the people. The invasions of Britain, which served no practical purpose, enlarged his personal mythic status. The civil war was the outcome of Caesar's refusal to surrender his "imperium" - his generalship - and face a possible trial for alleged misconduct during his earlier consulship. (As long as he held the imperium, he could not be prosecuted.)

Had Caesar been less monstrously ambitious, he would have been content as governor to rule the parts of Gaul that were already in Roman control, perhaps with an occasional foray into enemy territory when circumstances required it, but without any master plan of "pacifying" the whole region. His "pacification" resulted in an untold number of deaths - Plutarch claims that one million Gauls died during the eight-year campaign and another million were sold as slaves. Caesar's troops burned whole villages to the ground, set fire to crops so the people would starve, raped and pillaged (sometimes with their general's encouragement), and provoked battles at will. Though Caesar could exercise clemency for tactical reasons, he was not above cruelty; in one case, after a besieged town surrendered to Roman troops, Caesar ordered that every warrior have both hands hacked off. In another case, he refused to allow Gaulish refugees - women, children, and old men - into his camp, preferring to watch them starve to death outside his lines.

In the civil war, he again exercised clemency when it suited his purposes, and he does deserve some credit for it; but there would have been no war in the first place if he had agreed to disband his troops and lay down his imperium, as age-old custom demanded. Had he been successfully prosecuted, he would have gone into exile, a rich man living in comfort and ease. Yes, he would have been banished from Rome and deprived of the ultimate political power he sought ... but he would have saved the Republic and prevented the deaths of many thousands of his fellow Romans. Yet the idea of making this sacrifice apparently never crossed his mind. He was more than willing to throw away any number of human lives, even Roman lives - which were valued more highly by the Romans than the lives of Gauls and other "savages" - willing to lay waste to Italy and destroy the republican form of government, all to feed his insatiable appetite for prestige and power. He is, in many ways, the ego incarnate, in all its rapacity and single-minded devotion to self.

What makes it somehow worse is that he was not a stupid man. Far from it; he was highly intelligent, erudite, a polished orator, a masterful prose stylist, a crafty and remarkably efficient general, and a man of consummate charm. He had every gift nature and learning could supply, but he wanted more. He wanted to crush anyone who stood above him or even as his equal. He wanted no peers. And so he enslaved the Gauls and eventually cost his own people their liberty for centuries to come.

With all of that, how can I have any mixed feelings? Well, there is another side to the story - namely, that Julius Caesar remains one of the most fascinating historical characters on record, someone who has captured the interest of poets and playwrights, novelists and historians, for more than two thousand years. Had he been gentler, less ambitious, more self-effacing, he would have been a better man, but perhaps not such an interesting man. He created vast tragedies for the Gauls and for the Roman people, and he even became a tragic figure himself - but there is something hypnotizing about tragedy. We may not like Caesar, but few men have ever dominated their times as he did.

A couple of years ago Matthew Cromer suggested to me that we can look at the world as a story told by God, with every human being cast as a character in the story. Just as an author can get lost in his own story and start to identify with his characters, just as the characters may take the story in directions that the author himself didn't anticipate, so we can see the world as a kind of gigantic ongoing exercise in role-playing, with the mind of God expressing itself through a cast of billions of characters, and each character unaware that he or she is a player in a larger drama, the outlines of which are largely unseen. (At least, I hope I have expressed Matthew's idea accurately.)

I kept thinking of this as I read Goldsworthy's book. For the Gauls trampled under the hooves of Caesar's cavalry, or for the Romans terrorized by the anarchy of the civil war, there would have been no such high-flown thoughts. But when we look back from a distance of two millennia, we do see - and enjoy - the drama of Caesar's story, even as we disapprove of his ambitions and methods. World history would be a more peaceful narrative without men like Caesar, but also a duller one.

So perhaps there are two ways of looking at Caesar. We can judge him as a man and find him badly wanting in decency and human kindness; and we can enjoy him as a dramatic figure, larger than life. He is both a badly flawed man and a marvelous work of art, no less than Shakespeare's Hamlet or Michaelangelo's David. And we can see his victims in the same way - as dramatic players in their own right.

There's a famous statue from the ancient world called The Dying Gaul. The Greek original (now lost) dated back more than two hundred years before Caesar's conquests, but the Romans reproduced it, and it's the Roman copy that survives. The Romans saw in the figure of the dying Gaul some quality of heroism and tragedy. We can see the same qualities in Caesar's victims and in Caesar himself. And if we had a God's-eye view of history, would we see every human being that way, and would the story, with all its twists and turns and shocks and horrors, finally stand revealed as a master Author's grand design?

For want of a nail ...

... the kingdom was lost.

It seems odd to me that the crew wouldn't have forced open the locker to get the binoculars. Still, an interesting story.

A just-so story

In continuation of my last post, I offer this modest dramatic piece.

----

"Is That So?"A one-act play by Michael Prescott.

Scene. Winston Churchill's office circa 1939-1941.

Curtain rises to reveal WINSTON CHURCHILL seated at his desk, puffing on a cigar with a beatific, meditative expression.

An AIDE enters.

AIDE: Mr. Prime Minister, the Germans are invading Poland!

CHURCHILL (shrugs): Is that so?

AIDE exits. CHURCHILL continues smoking. Some time passes.

AIDE reenters.

AIDE: Mr. Prime Minister, the Germans are on the march against Norway and Denmark!

CHURCHILL (shrugs): Is that so?

AIDE exits. CHURCHILL continues smoking. Some time passes.

AIDE reenters.

AIDE: Mr. Prime Minster, the Nazis  have taken Paris!

CHURCHILL (shrugs): Is that so?

AIDE exits. CHURCHILL continues smoking. Some time passes. Distant EXPLOSIONS are heard.

AIDE reenters, out of breath.

AIDE: Mr. Prime Minister, the Luftwaffe are bombing our factories!

CHURCHILL (shrugs): Is that so?

AIDE exits. CHURCHILL continues smoking. Some time passes. AIR RAID SIRENS are heard.

AIDE reenters, his arm in a sling.

AIDE: The damned Krauts have blockaded us! They're launching air raids on our population centers!

CHURCHILL (shrugs): Is that so?

AIDE exits. CHURCHILL continues smoking. Some time passes. AMBULANCES are heard.

AIDE reenters, limping and covered in soot.

AIDE: Bloody bastards have bombed Coventry!

CHURCHILL (shrugs): Is that so?

AIDE exits. CHURCHILL continues smoking. Some time passes. FLAMES appear in the office windows. SCREAMS, SHOUTS, and SCATTERED GUNFIRE are heard.

AIDE reenters, his uniform in tatters.

AIDE: Hitler's forces are invading by air and sea! They're everywhere! We're doomed!

CHURCHILL (shrugs): Is that so?

AIDE exits. CHURCHILL continues smoking. Some time passes. The sounds die away, replaced by an ominous SILENCE. Then faintly the MUSIC of "Deutschland Uber Alles" is heard.

AIDE reenters, badly bloodied and bruised.

AIDE: Someone to see you, Mr. Prime Minister. I'm afraid he has no appointment.

ADOLF HITLER enters with three of his OFFICERS.

HITLER: Churchill, I am pleased to take possession of your office and your country. My men will now take you outside to be shot.

CHURCHILL (shrugs): Is that so?

Two of the OFFICERS lead CHURCHILL off-stage. A GUNSHOT is heard.

HITLER seats himself triumphantly at the desk. The remaining OFFICER salutes him.

OFFICER: Reports from the field confirm that all of England has fallen, my Fuhrer. You are the  master of Europe. Soon you will be the master of the world!

HITLER picks up Churchill's cigar and stubs it out.

HITLER: That is so!

MUSIC grows louder as the curtain falls.

The Lindbergh case

One of the most sensational criminal cases in American history was the fatal kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby boy in 1932. The case remains controversial to this day, and I had always assumed there was some real doubt about what had happened. Recently, however, I did a little reading on the subject and was surprised to discover that for the most part the resolution of the case was pretty straightforward. There really shouldn't be much controversy at all.

The major bone of contention involves Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a young German who was illegally in the United States. Hauptmann's English was poor, making it difficult for him to defend himself, and his nationality made him the target of widespread prejudice. For this and other reasons, some people have always insisted that Hauptmann did not receive a fair trial.

And this may well be true. The jury was quite likely predisposed to find Hauptmann guilty and took only a few hours to do so. Nevertheless, it is a big leap to go from saying that the trial had some irregularities to saying that Hauptmann was actually innocent.

Let's look at the evidence against him.

A large portion of the ransom money was found hidden in Hauptmann's garage. Hauptmann was known to have been spending the money; in fact, it was traced back to him through one of the purchases he had made. (The serial numbers on the bills had been recorded.)

Hauptmann's handwriting matched the handwriting on the ransom notes. His characteristic misspellings, some of which were quite eccentric, also matched the misspellings in the notes.

A homemade ladder with a hinge mechanism was used in the commission of the crime. Hauptmann was a carpenter. A diagram of a ladder of exactly this type was found in one of his notebooks. Some of the wood used in the ladder was purchased at the lumberyard that Hauptmann frequented. Another piece of wood came from Hauptmann's attic; one of the attic's horizontal crossbeams had been cannibalized to complete the ladder.

Hauptmann had a criminal record in Germany and had escaped from prison before coming to the United States. One of his crimes was burglary. He committed the burglary by propping a ladder against the side of the building and climbing in through the second story window -- exactly the modus operandi used in the Lindbergh case.

A man named John Condon was used as the go-between in the ransom negotiations. Condon's address and phone number were found a written on the wall of Hauptmann's closet. Hauptmann admitted that the writing was his and had no coherent explanation of why he had written down the information.

John Condon identified Hauptmann as the man with whom he had negotiated.

Hauptmann had been absent from his job on the day when the ransom payment was made and quit his job the next day, claiming he had come into a large amount of money by playing the stock market.

There was more evidence, but you get the idea. People who insist that Hauptmann was innocent have to claim that all of the evidence against him was manufactured or manipulated in some sinister way. It's essentially the argument used by the O.J. Simpson "dream team" of defense lawyers. Maybe if Hauptmann had been able to retain a dream team of his own, he would have been acquitted, but it's hard to say that justice would have been done.

If there is so much evidence against Hauptmann, why does anyone continue to defend him? I think there are four reasons.

First, Hauptmann went to his death refusing to confess, even when the governor offered to commute his sentence to life in prison if he would take responsibility for the crime. Hauptmann's defenders say that only an innocent man would take such a stand. But there are other possible reasons for his intransigence. He might have genuinely preferred a quick death to the prospect of spending the next fifty years in a prison cell. Or he might have feared that his wife, who was never arrested, would become the target of retribution by accomplices in the crime if he began to sing.

This leads us to the second point of controversy: Did Hauptmann act alone? Here his defenders have a legitimate point. There is a considerable amount of evidence suggesting that more than one person was involved in the kidnapping. Hauptmann may have taken the fall for his associates. But of course, this doesn't make him innocent; it only means that one or more other guilty parties escaped justice.

Third, some of Hauptmann's defenders are politically motivated. Charles Lindbergh became famous -- or infamous -- as an isolationist on the eve of World War II, insisting that the United States stay out of a European war. For taking this stand, he was denounced in some quarters as a fascist or a Nazi sympathizer, though he does not appear to have been particularly enamored of Hitler. He simply felt that Russia and Germany should be left to fight it out between themselves, while the US stayed on the sidelines. This was a fairly popular position at the time; the nation committed itself to war only after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, people who regard Lindbergh as a proto-Nazi are inclined to see the worst of him in all respects; they go so far as to suggest that he killed his own baby and then conspired with the authorities to frame Hauptmann. Needless to say, there is not a scintilla of evidence to back up this claim.

Finally, we cannot discount the natural human tendency to want the "crime of the century," as the Lindbergh kidnapping case was dubbed, to be as dramatic as possible. Bruno Hauptmann was an insignificant figure, and some people simply find it hard to believe that a nobody like him could be responsible for the crime that captured the attention of the world. It just had to be more complicated than that, they think.

But it probably wasn't. Even if Hauptmann had one or two people helping him, an objective look at the evidence shows that he was deeply involved in the crime. It was no grand scheme concocted by a criminal mastermind. It was a poorly conceived and ineptly executed plot that ultimately failed, resulting in the demise of little Charles Lindbergh Jr. and sending Bruno Richard Hauptmann to his death in the electric chair.

For more info:

Lindbergh, A. Scott Berg

The Lindberg Case, Jim Fisher

The Cases that Haunt Us, John Douglas and Mark Olshaker

Late Antiquity

In the latest issue of National Review (February 27, 06), there's an interesting review by Christopher Levenick of Rodney Stark's The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.

I haven't read this book. What caught my eye was the reviewer's use of the term Late Antiquity to refer to the Dark Ages.

If you think about it, "the Dark Ages" is a pretty tendentious way of characterizing a historical era. I suppose the term derives from the widespread illiteracy of the period, which has left historians somewhat "in the dark" about exactly what happened then. But the term also implies that this was a particularly backward and uninteresting time, when nothing of note happened. Was it?

Levenick writes that Stark

... recounts in considerable detail the evolution of humble business enterprises run by medieval monks into the thriving commercial city-states of Renaissance Italy. More suggestively, he traces these developments back to the so-called “Dark Ages.”

Along with a growing number of historians, Stark is inclined to view Late Antiquity as a period of remarkable commercial expansion and technical ingenuity. Measured against the Parthenon or the Coliseum, things like windmills, horseshoes, chimneys, water-wheels, stirrups, compasses, eyeglasses, swivel-point axles, and mechanical clocks may not seem particularly impressive. Nonetheless, such was the era’s humbler, but ultimately more consequential, scale of invention. The absence of large states may have invited external invasion, but it also spurred competition and fostered creativity, setting the stage for the global predominance that first became apparent in the 16th century.

Let's take another look at that list:

windmills

horseshoes

chimneys

water-wheels

stirrups

compasses

eyeglasses

swivel-point axles

mechanical clocks

Not bad for the "Dark" Ages, huh? I hope the more neutral - and more accurate - term Late Antiquity catches on.

Hitler's oddities

Although the subject of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany is undeniably depressing, there are some interesting tidbits of information that I've picked up in my recent reading on the topic. Here are a few odd facts I gleaned from the excellent little book A Concise Biography of Adolf Hitler, by Thomas Fuchs.

• Hitler never learned to drive.
• The Volkswagen Beetle was developed during Hitler's reign, and the design was based in part on Hitler's suggestion that the car should look like a beetle.
• Hitler compulsively sucked his fingers and chewed his fingernails when offstage.
• He was known for his extreme flatulence.
• A woman whom Hitler attempted to seduce later reported that he had stripped naked and begged to be kicked.
• Psychological profiles of Hitler written during his lifetime suggested that he probably achieved sexual orgasm by having women urinate and defecate on him.
• He was drawn to teenage girls even when he was in his late thirties.
• His first serious girlfriend committed suicide.
• His longest relationship with a woman was with Eva Braun, who twice attempted suicide.
• Hitler and Eva Braun were married in 1945 in Hitler's bunker; they killed themselves 36 hours later.
• Hitler was an insomniac who typically stayed up until 4 or 5 AM and slept until eleven o'clock in the morning.
• Among Hitler's unconventional medical remedies were enemas (self-administered) and leeches.
• Hitler had an insatiable taste for sweets; he consumed two pounds of chocolate a day and drank copious quantities of hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream on top; he also devoured pastries and cakes.
• He was afraid of haircuts.
• He insisted on shaving himself because he would not allow someone else to hold a razor near his throat.
• He wore only pre-tied neckties.
• He wore full-length underwear even in hot summer weather.
• Hitler's close associate Hermann Goering, known for his prodigious girth, sometimes ate as many as ten lobsters at a single meal.
• The name Adolph is a contraction of the archaic German words Altha and Wolfa and means Noble Wolf; Hitler used the alias Herr Wolf during his early years when he wished to avoid recognition; he named his favorite German shepherd pup Wolf; he named his field headquarters Wolf's Plan, Wolf's Lair, and Werewolf; he was particularly fond of the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?," which he often whistled absentmindedly.
• Although popular legend claims that Hitler consulted astrologers before making military decisions, the truth seems to be that he had no particular interest or belief in astrology, at least until his final days in the bunker when, insane, he did turn to horoscopes for reassurance and inspiration.
• A photo sometimes shown of "Adolf Hitler's corpse" is almost certainly an image of some other German man who simply bore a passing resemblance to Hitler; in fact, the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun were set afire by Hitler's followers after their joint suicide; the cremation was not entirely successful, and the charred remains were confiscated by the Russians when they took Berlin. After being definitively identified by dental records, Hitler's remains were properly burned. The Russians did not release this information until 1968, and in the meantime many legends sprang up to the effect that Hitler had escaped Germany and had been seen in Argentina or Spain or working as a waiter in Bavaria.

I'd meant to end my post here, but when I went to the Amazon sales page to get the book's URL, I noticed some reader reviews that I found appalling. Here's an excerpt from one:

This book is endorsed on the front cover by some Holocaust organization, and on the back by some Jewish Press guy. Do you think it's an unbiased book that puts out information and let's you make up your own mind about the man? Nope.... This book is Jewish slander passed off as a biography. Want to know how paranoid these people are? I remember when Passion of the Christ came out, they were scared there would be riots and backlash against them. And in stores sat the newly released dvd Schindler's List. Coincidence? I think not. They will remind the rest of us to the end of time, and will put it in your face that Hitler was a monster and that's all you need to know. That's the take home message of this pitiful book.

And another:

This book was a poorly compiled regurgitation of Allied World War II propaganda. The author had an incredible bias against Adolf Hitler and it gushes out in every chapter.... Unless you want to read a book that is dedicated to Hitler bashing, I would stay away from this one. You will learn absolutely nothing, except disproven lies, from it. I am not quite sure how people can get away with publishing such discredited information and call it history.

And one more, this one from a reader in Stuttgart, Germany:

The author of this book set out to write about a subject he apparantly didn't understand. I don't know what his sources were, but if his readers actually believe most of the things he has written here as "facts", then they are as naive as he is. It is a small book full of hearsay and fabrications ...

If the last-quoted reader didn't know what Fuchs's sources were, she could have tried flipping to the back of the book, where Fuchs cites his sources for every detail. There are 38 pages of endnotes, plus a bibliography listing approximately 100 titles.

It is true that Fuchs 's repeated reminders that Hitler was evil can be a trifle heavy-handed, but to call the book fabrication, hearsay, propaganda, lies, or worst of all, "Jewish slander," is groundless and, in the last case, unconscionable.

And God forbid that anyone should have a "bias" against Hitler or consider him a "monster" or engage in "Hitler bashing!"

I guess the sad truth is that even today, Adolf Hitler still has his fans.  And that's the oddest fact of all.