imagine being the dorks that got put next to hitler lmao
Hitler did change the world alright. Not for the better (quite the oppositie actually), but he did change it.
I’ve seen this technicality before, but it always feels hollow to me.
Like yeah, hitler changed the world, but he was an opportunist at the right place at the right time when his style of rhetoric and politics appealed to a country going through the aftermath of a world war and the Great Depression.
He didn’t change the world because of something clever or intrinsically special about him. He wasn’t special at all. That’s what makes fascism so dangerous.
To describe him as a supernatural outlier of a person builds a myth that the things he did could only happen under the influence of a single charismatic person.
Putting him on the list and the cover gives him credit he doesn’t deserve.
He didn’t change the world because of something clever or intrinsically special about him. He wasn’t special at all.
No one is. Like the OP said. Great man theory, the magazine.
Just the other day I had been looking for an excuse to complain about this:
This is offtopic, but the way that people whitewash the Weimar Republic by talking about Hitler like he was a wizard who cast a spell on Germany doesn’t just have the effect of obscuring the political-economic conditions of fascism and its connection to long-standing European society, but further feeds into a fetishistic reverence for Hitler that encourages modern readers to hang off his every word to try to understand how the magic works, effectively working to spread his speeches even further than they would otherwise spread and lending a gravity to everything he says because, as far as many liberal histories were concerned, what he said was literally magic. It seems like a choice of characterization deliberately made so that the sins of the past can happen all the more easily for having already happened once, rather than protecting society from it using our past experience with it.
Coverage like this rag provides is functionally carrying water for fascism by mystifying its causes
