I watch scary movies.

Bad things happen in scary movies…but it’s fake bad.

It’s an imitation of bad.

I guess that it’s still bad, though….but…I know it’s fake.

I don’t know much about Hitler.

That’s real bad.

He was bad.

But…Germany needed a hero.

They were scared after WW1.

They were chastened.

Their economy was in the toilet and the world was turned upside down….so when Hitler came along and started spouting off all his crap, they bit down hard and went along for the ride.

He was their ticket to better times.

He had a plan to put them back on top of their game.

He had a plan to make Germany great again.

He even tried to incite people to take over the government!

This was at an event called the Munich Putsch where he tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic.

They put a gag order on Hitler, then, and told him he couldn’t talk to the German people in public….told him to shut up and stay away from everybody…put him in jail to make sure that didn’t happen.

He wrote Mein Kampf while he was in jail.

(That’s like the intellectual version of a great set of weights out in “the yard”…giving him some quiet time to write his “masterpiece”.)

So…I guess he was in jail for a number of years? From 1923 to 1927?

(That’s what I’d call a “well researched” blog, huh?)

Anyway….the economy in Germany was in the toilet after the first World War….then OUR economy crashed in 1929…and our banks failed….and we called in the loans we’d made to Germany to rebuild their economy…and Germany’s economy went down the toilet even farther…and by this time, Hitler could yell at all the Germans again….(AND THE JEWS WERE THE PROBLEM (!!!!) …and you know what the guy did from then on out.

They let him out of jail….he had his book finished….and it all hit the fan when he could once again speak to the hearts of a scared and angry Germany.

I don’t suppose that calling in all those loans made us very popular with the Germans, either.

People who are scared do stupid things.

We do stupid things to protect what we think someone else is trying to take away from us.

Fear doesn’t do much to build empathy.

You don’t want to walk a mile in another man’s shoes if you think the other guy stole your shoes and has been walking around in them for a while.

That whole “in jail” thing is fascinating to me, though.

They tried to stop this monster from communicating his brand of sedition.

They didn’t want him to insight a riot.

(I’m being silly, now, of course….I know how to spell “incite”….I just thought it was funny how the two different words are spelled…)

Incite.

You don’t get a chance to be too insightful when you’re being inciteful.

You’re too busy being hateful to be insightful.

I don’t know too much about Hitler.

He was a great speaker and was popular with the German people when they were going through a hard time.

I don’t know if he ever had a moment, though, when he said, “Who? Me?!! I didn’t tell them to light the furnace! I didn’t tell them to do that! It was all rhetorical….that stuff I was saying…I didn’t….WHO? ME?!!”

Man….Hitler was really popular.

Who saw that coming?