Ideal

 

Hoffer was an atheist, but he writes a lot about the demagogue, guru or ruler of a mass movement offering the true believers of his movement an ideal devil to hate. Could this be that Hoffer is subconsciously a believer, that an all-powerful foe to hate gets the assembled masses revved up to target the monster and enemy, is actually a demon? Who knows.

 

Hoffer, on Pages 91 and 92 of his book, The True Believer, Hoffer writes about devils, and I respond to what is written.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                                     67

 

It seems that, like the ideal deity, the ideal devil is one. We have it from Hitler—the foremost authority on devils—that the genius of a great leader consists in concentrating all hatred on a single foe, making even ‘adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category.’ When Hitler picked the Jew as his devil, he peopled practically the whole world outside of Germany with Jews or those that worked for them. ‘Behind England, stands Israel, and behind France, and behind the United States.’ Stalin, too, adheres to the monotheistic principle when picking a devil. Formerly this devil was a fascist; now he is an American plutocrat.”

 

My response: It matters not if the person or group of people assigned the title “devil’ is guilty or innocent. The result is the same: centralized hatred of one devil unites the true believers better than any other motive.

 

H: “Again, like the ideal deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent. When Hitler was asked if he was not attributing rather too much importance to the Jews, he exclaimed: ‘No, no, no! . . . It is impossible to exaggerate the formidable quality of the Jew as an enemy.’ Every difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting.”

 

My response: Note how Hitler blamed his “devil” for everything and this sweeping bias and oversimplification gave the cause easy answers and always there was someone to blame.

 

H: “Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.  Hitler found it easy to brand German Jews as foreigners. The Russian revolutionary agitators emphasized the foreign origin (Varangian, Tartar, Western) of the Russian aristocracy. In the French Revolution the aristocrats were seen as ‘descendants of barbarous Germans, while the French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans.’ In the Puritan revolution the royalists ‘were labeled ‘Normans,’ descendants of a group of foreign invaders.”

 

My response: One of the problems with collectivists and their prioritizing group rights is that the group rights of the majority and native are upheld, while those group rights of minorities and foreign, are so downgraded and watered down, that these “devils” make the majority coalesce together as the “devils” are attacked, destroyed.