a study in ourselves...

[acroyear]

excerpts from today's Richard Cohen column about the new "last days of hitler" movie, Downfall:

"Downfall" is a powerful, engrossing film, much praised for showing the often-caricatured Hitler as -- and I am quoting innumerable reviews here -- "a human being." It makes you wonder what, up until now, people thought he was.

...

Frankly, I have never had a hard time humanizing Hitler. Ambition, brutality, hatred, courage -- these are attributes we can all understand. We have a piece of them in ourselves. Lesser sociopaths move around us all the time. We read about them in the newspapers and see them on television. It is not as if Hitler is something unique, unknown to history before, never repeated afterward. He was a man, nothing more -- and someone like him will come at us time and time again. He is the evil mutant of our imperfectible species.

...

This quality of the Germans during the Third Reich, this quality of the Chinese during Mao's Great Leap Forward, this quality of the Cambodians or the Rwandans or -- in 1937-38 -- the Japanese in Nanking, resides in us all. This, really, is the great lesson of "Downfall" and of history itself.

It is good to humanize Hitler because a man, after all, is all he ever was. But once you strip him of any extraordinary powers, once he is reduced to mere human being, you have to confront the fact that where he madly led, people serenely followed. This -- not Hitler -- is what's chilling about "Downfall." It amends Alexander Pope, who said that the proper study of mankind is man. Yes. But the proper study of man is mankind.