Alan Bullock: Hitler

     Alan Bullock. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962) A re-read. See my first review  About the only things to add are, first, that Hitler suffered from Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
     In his Epilogue, Bullock points out that Hitler was a European, and that the malaise that he embodied was not unique to Germany. He writes Hitler’s idiom was German, but the thoughts and emotions to which he gave expression have a more universal currency. Quite so, and the rise of the far right, of ethnic nationalisms, of the paranoia triggered by the globalisation of our world, show that these thoughts and emotions are never far below the surface.
     Bullock ends his Epilogue with  [Hitler] was in revolt against ‘the System’ not just in Germany but in Europe, against the liberal-bourgeois order, symbolised for him in the Vienna which had once rejected him. To destroy this was his mission, the mission in which he never ceased to believe, and in this, the most deeply felt of his purposes, he did not fail. Europe may rise again, but the old Europe between the 1789, the year of the French Revolution, an 1939, the year of Hitler’s War, has gone forever – and the last figure in its history is Adolf Hitler, the architect of its ruin. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice – If you seek a monument, look around.
     The European Union is an attempt to refashion that liberal bourgeois polity. Brexit is an attempt to repudiate it. It’s ironic that the liberal democracy that refused to surrender to Hitler in 1942 is now the carrier of the same infection, and the one that came to England’s aid is sick with it.
     800 and some pages, and oddly enough a page-turner. Recommended. ***