"A childish illusion fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later."
- Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir
Haffner grew up in Germany between the World Wars and saw the Nazis rise to power. He lived through WWI as a schoolboy. He, like many children of his generation, became obsessed with the war. The daily army bulletins, detailing the day's battles, became an intensely fascinating game to him.
After the war, there was revolution. He played with his friends in the streets among the barricades. They wormed their way into the battle zones, the sound of machine guns and artillery echoing in the deserted streets around them.
Then came the hyperinflation. Everyone's savings were wiped out. For his generation, this meant endless wild parties, as his friends spent their money as fast as they could get it, because it wouldn't be worth anything at all by the end of the day.
The events leading to the rise of the Third Reich were complex, but Haffner explains that these were the factors that made it psychologically possible, perhaps even inevitable - the decoupling of the emotions of war from war's physical consequences:
The truly Nazi generation was formed by those born in the decade from 1900 to 1910, who experienced war as a great game and were untouched by its realities
Far from the front lines and the violence, these children picked up the excitement and the savage emotional currents of conflict. They became addicted to its powerful emotional satisfactions, far more intense than anything peacetime could offer. That, says Haffner, formed a generation primed for the dark vision of fascism.
What have the children of America been absorbing for the last generation?
...The viewpoint of the Patriot missile homing in on its target, dead in the crosshairs, a clean hit, a puff of smoke, a win, a perfect video explosion, no heat, no screams, no smell of burning flesh...
...The jingoism of FOX News, rah rah, our heroes, fierce fighting, making progress in today's battle in Our Central Front of the War on Terror...
...Troops tall and powerful, rifles pushing a family of cowed Iraqis aside in their own home, stomping through foreign living rooms and kitchens in dusty boots, the not-American babies cowering away and crying...
...Shooting it out in the video streets of Mogadishu or Left Behind Manhattan, killing, killing, killing, until the enemy are all dead and rapture or the war is won...
...The talk radio blustering bullying voice, smearing attacking hating liberals, gays, minorities, feminists, foreigners, ratcheting up the level of bile, of insult, wallowing in that lush emotional violence, and all without risk of a single punch thrown or an ugly scene nose to nose with some stinking cut-and-run traitor...
...In the classroom, the game of brownshirt gotcha played with secret glee, liberal professors you'll be sorry for what you said, scribbling down their words to inform against them anonymously to Campus Watch...
War and tribal hatred as a game, the players untouched by blood or pain or suffering.
What do children who grow up in an environment like this turn out to be like? I don't think we're going to have to wait twenty years to find out.