Adolf Hitler

culture

Plato

world

nationality

American

political ideology

libertarian

innovator in the field of

libertarianism

occupation / innovator as

journalist

sociologist

essayist

autobiographer

cause of death

natural causes

biographer

is so ruthless because he had got the idea from the US. Americans, he said, are the great rope and lamppost artists [i.e., lynching] of the world, known of all men as such. He was using the same methods against the Jews that we used against the loyalists of ‘76, the Indians, the Chinese on the Western coast, the Negroes, the Mexicans, the Filipinos — every helpless people in fact whom we had ever chanced to find underfoot (1941).

At the outset of the German Government's movement against the Jews, an American visitor asked Herr Hitler why he was making it so ruthless. The Reichskanzler replied that he had got the idea from us. Americans, he said, are the great rope and lamppost artists [i.e., lynching] of the world, known of all men as such. He was using the same methods against the Jews that we used against the loyalists of ‘76, the Indians, the Chinese on the Western coast, the Negroes, the Mexicans, the Filipinos — every helpless people in fact whom we had ever chanced to find underfoot.

is a process of learning a great many things and then forgetting them, such that the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them... and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning. Albert J. Nock

's lesson was basically this: you can't tell anybody anything they don't already know.

[I]n my early manhood I learned to respect ignorance, to regard ignorance as an object of legitimate interest and reflection; and as I say, a sort of unconsidered preparation for this attitude of mind appears to have run back almost to my infancy. Moreover, when I got around to read Plato, I found that he reinforced and copper-fastened the notion which experience had already rather forcibly suggested, that direct attempts to overcome and enlighten ignorance are a doubtful venture; the notion that it is impossible, as one of my friends puts it, to tell anybody anything which in a very real sense he does not already know. It seemed extraordinary that this should be so. Nevertheless, there it was; and apparently no one could give,—certainly no one, not even Plato, did give,—any more intelligent and satisfying reason why it should be so than I could give; and I could give none at all.

is such that the most incomprehensible thing about it is that it is at all comprehensible.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible. Albert Einstein

Albert J. NockThinkers

Albert J. Nock