When I was growing up in the 1960s, I met many concentration camp survivors. Honestly, their survival wasn't about a search for meaning. It was about survival. Sometime one had to lie. Sometimes one had to steal. Sometimes one had to do risky things. Having a skill often helped. The Nazis would keep you alive for that skill, at least for a while. Some survivors, and there is lots of obvious survivor bias in this, developed theories and ideas to themselves going. A surprising number of people knew about the Trachtenberg system of speed arithmetic developed by a survivor who solved mathematical problems to keep sane. It's a decent enough system, but no one used it even in the years before calculators. It was developed to keep one man sane. I wouldn't overly analyze a survivor's writing about how they survived or necessarily accept it as truth. A lot of the story of World War II is people doing what they had to.
I read Shirer's book as a teenager staying at a Borscht Belt resort in the Jewish Alps. I'd take the book and a rowboat out on Lake Charles and read. It was a teenager's way of avoiding people. Lake Charles has since been drained and the hotel we stayed at long gone. It was an excellent book, a chilling tale of the rise of the Nazi reich and the war in Europe. I often wondered if something very similar would have happened if Hitler had never been born, and I concluded that it would have all happened without Hitler. It's not like there was a Hitler in Japan. There were fascists, drunk on the power of the modern state, machine warfare and political repression. Then, as now, and as in the Civil War, there were people with a grievance and a means of expressing that grievance violently. That was all it takes.
It's easy to underestimate what appear to be decadent societies. That was one of the lessons of both wars. The civilian North beat the militarist South. The effete Allies beat the brute strength of the fascists. All that talk and bluster was no match for military strength. We are thousands of years from single combat. For millennia, wars have been won by the groups that could convince those fighting that the fight was worthwhile, the ones who could organize and turn ordinary citizens into effective soldiers. The Romans weren't better fighters than anyone else. They got their asses kicked reliably. Their strength was in convincing their allies to want to throw their lot in with them. It might look like weakness, but that has long been the source of real strength.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, I met many concentration camp survivors. Honestly, their survival wasn't about a search for meaning. It was about survival. Sometime one had to lie. Sometimes one had to steal. Sometimes one had to do risky things. Having a skill often helped. The Nazis would keep you alive for that skill, at least for a while. Some survivors, and there is lots of obvious survivor bias in this, developed theories and ideas to themselves going. A surprising number of people knew about the Trachtenberg system of speed arithmetic developed by a survivor who solved mathematical problems to keep sane. It's a decent enough system, but no one used it even in the years before calculators. It was developed to keep one man sane. I wouldn't overly analyze a survivor's writing about how they survived or necessarily accept it as truth. A lot of the story of World War II is people doing what they had to.
I read Shirer's book as a teenager staying at a Borscht Belt resort in the Jewish Alps. I'd take the book and a rowboat out on Lake Charles and read. It was a teenager's way of avoiding people. Lake Charles has since been drained and the hotel we stayed at long gone. It was an excellent book, a chilling tale of the rise of the Nazi reich and the war in Europe. I often wondered if something very similar would have happened if Hitler had never been born, and I concluded that it would have all happened without Hitler. It's not like there was a Hitler in Japan. There were fascists, drunk on the power of the modern state, machine warfare and political repression. Then, as now, and as in the Civil War, there were people with a grievance and a means of expressing that grievance violently. That was all it takes.
It's easy to underestimate what appear to be decadent societies. That was one of the lessons of both wars. The civilian North beat the militarist South. The effete Allies beat the brute strength of the fascists. All that talk and bluster was no match for military strength. We are thousands of years from single combat. For millennia, wars have been won by the groups that could convince those fighting that the fight was worthwhile, the ones who could organize and turn ordinary citizens into effective soldiers. The Romans weren't better fighters than anyone else. They got their asses kicked reliably. Their strength was in convincing their allies to want to throw their lot in with them. It might look like weakness, but that has long been the source of real strength.