{"id":35005,"date":"2018-02-05T01:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T06:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35005"},"modified":"2018-01-16T09:26:13","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T14:26:13","slug":"qotd-the-age-of-hypocrisy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/02\/05\/qotd-the-age-of-hypocrisy\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Age of Hypocrisy"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Hitler (one cannot mention him without the subliterates mouthing, \u201c<em>Reductio ad Hitlerum<\/em>!\u201d \u2014 not realizing that they are quoting Leo Strauss) was the great enabler. He gave cover to all lesser evils, including the greater of the lesser ones; and thereby retired all the prattling politicians from the Age of Hypocrisy, which he closed. Now all the baddies seemed good, by comparison, and everyone needed a baddie of his own, or they would get one assigned from Berlin.<\/p>\n<p>The Age of Hypocrisy re-opened, of course, with Hitler\u2019s death, when political discourse again softened. (Hypocrisy is the padding on the madhouse walls.) But for a twelve-year run in Germany, and shorter periods wherever their shadow fell, Hitler\u2019s Nazis erased hypocrisy.<\/p>\n<p>This is what Karl Kraus meant, when he said that the Nazis had left him speechless. For decades he had exposed the lies and deceitful posturing not only of politicians in the German-speaking world, but among their immense supporting cast of journalists and fashion-seeking intellectuals. He was the greater-than-Orwell who strode to the defence of the German language, when it was wickedly abused. He identified the new \u201csmelly little orthodoxies\u201d as they crawled from under the rocks of Western Civ \u2014 the squalid, unexamined premisses that led by increments to the slaughterhouse of Total War. He was not, even slightly, a revolutionist; he had no argument against anyone\u2019s wealth or status, even his own. Rather, through savage satirical humour, with language untranslatably precise, impinging constantly upon the poetic, he undressed the false.<\/p>\n<p>He had seen the First World War coming, in the malice spreading through the language; in the smugness that fogged perception; in the lies that people told each other, to preserve their <em>amour-propre<\/em>; in the jingo that lurked beneath the genteel. After, he saw worse.<\/p>\n<p>David Warren, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidwarrenonline.com\/2016\/06\/07\/the-decline-of-requirements\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The decline of requirements&#8221;, <em>Essays in Idleness<\/em><\/a>, 2016-06-07.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hitler (one cannot mention him without the subliterates mouthing, \u201cReductio ad Hitlerum!\u201d \u2014 not realizing that they are quoting Leo Strauss) was the great enabler. He gave cover to all lesser evils, including the greater of the lesser ones; and thereby retired all the prattling politicians from the Age of Hypocrisy, which he closed. Now [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1118,7,41],"tags":[86,969,480,400],"class_list":["post-35005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-germany","category-history","category-quotations","tag-criticism","tag-hitler","tag-hypocrisy","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-96B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35005"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41814,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35005\/revisions\/41814"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}