One silver lining to the current Covid-19 lockdown has been the ample opportunity it has provided for catching up on my reading list. As a consequence, I recently completed Norman Mailers “The Castle in the Forest” which chronicles a fictional account of how Adolf Hitler, was groomed from a very young age by the Maestro (Satan) through one of his employees Dieter.
Throughout the book Dieter records how he had to carefully nurture evil in young Adolf for maximising his propensity for evil in the service of Maestro and avoid any attention from God and Angels whom Dieter called DK (Dummkopf) and Cudgels.
The horrors perpetrated by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime are a testament to how successful Maestro was in achieving his insidious goals.
However, I could not help thinking that despite some spectacular short term gains, Maestro’s success quickly turned into unmitigated disaster culminating in the suicide of Hitler and the collapse of Nazi dream of a Thousand Year Reich.
After reading the book I found myself speculating if Maestro had stopped hatching his evil plots after the failure of his Hitler project. It seemed highly unlikely considering that even his biggest ever failure to tempt Jesus, over two thousand years ago, had not deterred him.
History of evil teaches us that it survives by continually mutating like a virus into more deadly strains, forever learning and improving. If true, it is not difficult to imagine a sequel to Mailers book having a storyline something like this (I might one day be tempted to expand this with further details!),
Satan’s Hitler Fiasco Debriefing
Agenda: To analyse and identify reasons for the failure of the Hitler Project and Future Planning.
Date & Time: 7 December 1945 0.00 hours
In Attendance: Maestro Satan – Chief Evil Officer (CEO), Screwtape – Senior Abominable Demon (SAD), Dieter – Middling Abominable Demon (MAD) and other regional Senior Infernal Demons (SID’s).
Minutes of the Meeting
Maestro Satan opened the meeting by declaring that Project Hitler had failed due to its conception as a one person enterprise when in hindsight it was clear that world dominance required an evil unifying idea more than one very evil Hitler. . He asked his acolytes to actively discourage individualism and promote the cult of tribalism, group think and socialism, all of which discouraged dissent and encouraged a banal herd mentality. In pursuant of this goal, he demanded that all future projects be led by group leaderships, or politburo, to carry out his dirty work. .
The Maestro acknowledged that it was impossible for evil to flourish without effective control of propaganda tools. Complimenting his staff for their success in total control of the German media, he exhorted them to think global for future projects. .
The Maestro demanded that to ensure total victory an all-out war be declared to weaken all pillars of civilisation including institutions, educational system, family, marriage, morality, and religion. . Basking in the insidiousness of his plan, he further elaborated that destruction of long held beliefs and traditions, under the guise of progressivism or political correctness, was a prerequisite for their victory. . He emphasised that his troops actively encourage the abandoning of ancient wisdoms in favour of ill-conceived Utopian fads which created the vacuumnecessary for evil and chaos to wreak havoc on societies. .
Screwtape, a senior demon first unmasked by CS Lewis, took the podium to proudly proclaim that he was overseeing the development of some technologies to dumb down people. On being asked for details he mentioned that this included something called social media and smart phones both of which offered the potential of recruiting and enslaving the whole of humanity.. . He also mentioned the development of a popular communication tool with a limit of 280 characters. This, he said bursting with pride, would prevent the communication of complex ideas and greatly limit the power of critical thinking making the teachings of their mortal enemies like Socrates, Plato, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Gandhi totally redundant. . Holding him as an example, the Maestro commended Screwtape for his ingenuity and commanded him to speed up the progress of his project. ..
There was unanimous agreement that the Nazi experiment had proved brute force to be of limited use since it could easily be countered by the opposing forces. Maestro commanded that future campaigns be firmly founded on subterfuge for enslaving people through ideology, lies, greed, power, and corruption leaving brute force as a weapon of last resort.. .
Maestro strongly criticised Dieter for not purging all of Hitler’s humanity which left his sense of honour, loyalty, and love for the Fatherland intact. He commanded that all future leadership recruits be carefully vetted for being totally unscrupulous, treacherous, corrupt, adapt at lying and willing to sell their souls for pieces of silver. .
Still basking in the glory of praise by the Maestro, Screwtape added that in the same way as Dieter had been successful in recruiting Noble Prize winning scientist Fritz Haber, the father of chemical warfare, to develop chlorine gas and other deadly gases for trench warfare in the First World War, he intended to co-opt the technology companies for perpetrating evil on the world.. . With a devilish grin he explained that to achieve this goal he was collaborating to develop a future trend called “Globalism” which was a cover, and steppingstone, for Maestros goal of global dominance of evil and putting DK and Cudgels in permanent retirement. . He explained that the task was made easier by the arrogance, greed and hunger for power by the scientists and technocrats which made them willing participants in the service of Maestro’s surrogates at the Politburo. .
Satisfied with the progress of evil in the world and relegation of DK and Cudgels to a position of insignificance, Maestro made a steely promise of a specially nasty place in hell for any of his senior staff who failed him again.. .
The meeting came to an end with loud and raucous chants of Heil, mein Führer! and Sieg Heil!
On emerging from my reverie where I dreamt up this fictional account, I was hit by a thought with the power of a thunderbolt –What if the above scenario was a fact and not fiction?
The First law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Does this apply to the energy of evil as well? Is it possible that the enormous evil energy generated during the rise of Hitler, and fascism, did not die with their defeat but merely went into hiding?
In hiding, this evil might have spent the past 75 years licking its wounds, mutating, consolidating, and regrouping waiting for the right time to pounce again on an unsuspecting world. This time with greater ferocity having expunged all its past errors!
To prevent the repeat of this gruesome past it is imperative that we do not blindly depend on the media, intellectuals, and politicians to warn and protect us. They totally failed us during the ascendance of evil, which peaked during the last two great wars, and will most likely fail us again.
We must be forever vigilant for the tell-tale clues which evil always leaves in its wake of chaos, nihilistic confusion, and large scale human suffering. The agents of evil make assiduous efforts to disguise these clues with rational and fallacious arguments embedded in the human psyche through the powerful tools of propaganda, censorship, misinformation etc.
We need to be specially wary of the seductive offerings from the servants of Satan which are always cleverly masked as liberating tools, while hiding their real purpose of eternal enslavement!
We must remember that Satan, almost certainly, will use deception instead of brute force, as a weapon of choice in his next attempt to destroy civilisation. To fight this existential threat, we must be ready to use, the most effective antidote to evil – Truth.
Like a great teacher once said, “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free“.
We will muse and further explore this in the context of Covid-19 in my next blog?
