In 1943, the head of OSS, William Donovan, commissioned a psychological evaluation of Adolf Hitler. Dr. Henry A. Murray produced a report entitled Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, With Predictions of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany’s Surrender. One of his key findings was that Hitler had been treated unfairly by his father and had developed an unhealthy psychological relationship with his parents. He loved his mother but despised her weakness. He hated and wanted revenge on his father but, being impotent to gain such revenge, turned all his father’s traits into virtues, and all his mother’s traits into vices. I don’t bring Hitler up because he was a genocidal maniac that was responsible for the Holocaust. I bring him up because he was a human being, just like the rest of us, that could be evaluated psychologically to predict what he would do next.
As, for example, the following:
3. (a) Self-Vindicating Criminality. – Paradoxical as it may seem, Hitler’s repeated crimes are partly caused by conscience and the necessity of appeasing it. For having once set out on a life of crime, the man can not turn back without reversing his entire ground for pride and taking the humiliating path of self-abasement and atonement. The only method he has for subduing his mounting guilt is to commit another act of aggression, and so to prove, as it were, by the criterion of success, that his policy is favored by fortune and therefore justified and right. Failure is the only wrong.
This is, at its base, the problem we have, as a nation, with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. They have set out on a life of crime, not only in their unilateral decision to invade Iraq (and all the psy-ops that required), but in their relationship with the Constitution. The signing statements are the perfect example of this. They establish the intent of the Executive to act outside of the law. When caught breaking the FISA law, they simply ask for their crime to be legalized, and then write signing statements on the law that assert it doesn’t pertain to them anyway (that was their ambition, anyway).
And how should we expect them to react to their abject failure in Iraq? “[The] only method [they] ha[ve] for subduing [their] mounting guilt is to commit another act of aggression.” That’s the truth, people. Dick Cheney may seem soulless, but he is human, and he has to deal with remorse. And he is not constituted to deal with it in a healthy way. Neither is his flunkie sidekick of a President, who was dominated by his mother and intimidated by his father’s success. Bush may be the polar opposite of Hitler. He was treated unjustly by his mother and loved his father. Being impotent to enact revenge on his mother, he turned all her traits into virtues and all his father’s traits into vices. Who knows? I’m not Bill Frist, and I cannot do remote psychological evaluation.
All I know is that our leaders are sick in their mind. They are sick and they have over 600,000 souls on their conscience for a failed policy. And that isn’t good news. It isn’t good news because “the only method [they] ha[ve] for subduing [their] mounting guilt is to commit another act of aggression, and so to prove, as it were, by the criterion of success, that [their] policy is favored by fortune and therefore justified and right. Failure is the only wrong.”
