If you have noticed how the Thought Police of SocJus, and various Leftists, Morlocks and Posthumans, regard all their foes, from Sad Puppies to Christian to Conservatives to Libertarians, to Caucasians and to Males as being simultaneously too stupid, foolish, weak, confused, and mentally crippled to be worthy of the time and effort needed to spit on us, and yet, at the same time and in the same sense, so clever, cunning, diabolical, overpowering, patient and ruthless as to justify that any blow struck against us by fair means or foul must be struck, truth, honesty, courtesy, and humanity be damned if it slows the blow.
Now, how can we be ants, easily crushed, if we are giants, terrors who footfalls shake the world?
Tom Simon, in addressing the question, has the good sense to quote GK Chesterton:
It’s the Prussian disease, as described by G. K. Chesterton inThe Appetite of Tyranny (from which Mike Flynn quoted on this very blog a few days ago). Here is an excerpt:
In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.… it seems to amount to saying, ‘It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you.’
The spokesmen of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating this entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. … [In] is his more recent order to his troops touching the war in Northern France.
As most people know, his words ran, ‘It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French’s contemptible little Army.’
The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality; the train of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space.
If French’s little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies.
If all the skill and valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once.
He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing.
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