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Don't give me the 'true statement' bit son. All statements are true in their being statements.
"Gravity is a hoax."
Is that now true in that it's a statement?
or
Todd says "I have never told the truth in my life, this statement included."
is this true as well - in that it's a statement?
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Hitler didn't really become a symbol until he was over-- the swastika had to suffice.
Hitler was a symbol before his death.
Within Germany he represented National Socialism incarnate in the same sense that Buddha is buddhism incarnate.
He was also the authority of the German state incarnate:
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Auctoritas is the latin word for authority. According to Benveniste, it comes from the verb augeo ("to augment"): the auctor is is qui auget, the one who augments the act – or the juridical situation – of another. The English word "Author" also derives from auctoritas and augeo.
Auctoritas is used in Roman law to design the Senate's authority, as opposed to potestas ("power") or imperium, which is detained by the magistrates or the people. In the private domain, auctoritas is the auctor's characteristic: the pater familias "authorizes", that is validates and legitimates, his son's wedding in prostate. Auctoritas is a juridical power to validate, legitimate another act: in itself, it has no sense, as it has to be related to this other act. In other words, law (more generally, right) doubles and recovers life in a dialectic relationship.
Philosopher Giorgio Agamben has demonstrated the relationship between the Roman auctoritas, Max Weber's "charismatic power" and Carl Schmitt's tentative to produce groundwork for the national-socialist Führertum doctrine. Sovereignity was first defined by the pseudo-Archytas, he shows, as "living law" (nomos empsuchon), which direct equivalent in the 20th century is doubtlessly the Führerprinzip: the Führer is "living law", according to this theory of sovereignty – which may explain – Agamben doesn't directly refers to that, but it can be deduced from his work – why no written order of the "Final Solution" have been found, apart from the 1942 Wannsee Conference. As "living law", the Führer is distinguished from gramma, or written law, as auctoritas differs from the magistrates' observance of written law. The Führer has no use whatsoever of "written law", as he is – in Nazi theory – himself the incarnation of law.
There was even an odd attempt to argue that National Socialism is the only true government of the people, arguing the Führer gives a voice to the true, unspoken needs of the
Volkgsemeinschaft (Community of all Germans within the boundaries Reich; though at times also meant all Germans/Aryans throughout the world as well).
Abroad he represented (at least to the magazine Time) "..the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom - loving world faces."
Other observers abroad called the sum of National Socialism from 1933-1938 the 'German Renaissance', and over 1,000,000 men volunteered for the
Waffen-SS, the armed branch of the Nazi Party. The majority (app. 600,000) came from countries other than Germany and Austria. And most joined during the invasion of Russia. If someone is going to move from their homeland, face of possibility of total ostracization, and volunteer to fight in the largest and most barbaric land conflict in human history [the Russo-German struggle in WWII] they must be fighting for principles, for ideas. Did anyone read the written ideas of the party? Not many.
Mein Kampf is long and thoroughly boring, and most people of the time considered another text, Myth of the 20th Century by Alfred Rosenburg, to be the official comprehensive expression of the NS-ideology anyway. This tract is longer, and more boring.
It's been pointed out that the Fascist government of Italy collapsed after just a few American shells landed off the coast - but Germany fought for six years against four empires territorially larger than itself. 1,000 European cities were firebombed, unspeakable atrocities occured in the East, and still there wasn't the same willingness to surrender seen in the First World War.
People didn't volunteer, ration, struggle, and sacrifice (oftentimes everything) because of the written ideas of the party, or the posters, or the flag or the swastikas, or the sloganeering - they did these thing because of the personalities behind the ideas, primarily the personality of Hitler and all it symbolized - whether he symbolized to the average man in the street the new resurgent Germany, the dream of a Europe united by a single vision, philosophy, and leadership (the so-called
Neuropa), or simply undiluted opposition to Communism.
It was the
spoken word and fixation on this symbolic person that entranced and possessed them.
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I shouldn't take the piss in front of impressionable youngsters who call themselves "The truth" I'm a bad, bad influence. Like ritalin on rats.
Give a dog a bone.
(O man, I am a faizi ater all! :D)
A character who has increasing difficulty concealing their womanishness the longer a debate goes on? Could hardly agree more. ;P