One of the great mistakes people make when taking advice or information is the make the assumption expertise in one field confers some sort of basic level of competence in another. Because someone is a talent astronomer does not mean that understand the dynamic of nuclear war, because someone is a gifted businessperson does not mean that understand the complexities of governance, and yet this sort of transference of expertise happens again and again.
Recently I came across a YouTube video explaining that Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian Academic with advanced degrees in psychology did not understand Nazism. Watching the video, which utilized clips from Peterson 2017 lecture series Maps of Meaning, specifically, lecture 11The Flood and The Tower, I suspected that the clips had been taken out of context. The sheer level of error in the statements by Dr. Peterson seemed beyond belief for a person with a university education.
They were not out of context.
Here is the section of the lecture, just over five minutes, where Peterson diverts from the subject of the lecture to speak about Nazi Germany.
Here are my major objections to Peterson’s opinions.
1) ‘Hitler should have enslaved…’
The Nazis most certainly enslaved their ‘undesirable’ (Jews, Homosexuals, Roma, etc.) Even knowledge gleaned from popular culture such as Schindler’s List should be enough to make this basic knowledge. For those with just a little more understanding of history there is also the famous legend above the gate to history’s most infamous of death camps, Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Sets You Free.’ The Nazis worked to death the people in the camps and those that could not work they murdered. The V2 factories in addition to raining death on London and other allied cities also boasted one of the most lethal areas in the concentration camp system. It is shocking that a university professor is ignorant to all of this.
2) ‘… Win the war and then…’
Peterson’s argument that the Nazi’s should have won the war and then turn to murder ignores several critical factors. First and foremost is that the Nazi’s anti-Semitism was centered to their political and cultural worldview. The elimination of all Jewish people and influence from German culture, German Life, and German lands had been a stated goal for some time. Quite simply for the Nazis murdering of the Jewish population was a victory condition. It has also been argued and with some validity I think that the Nazi accelerated the mass murder as a way to keep the German’s population food rations higher. The lesson of the First World War where Germany was effectively starved into submission was one ruthless applied to the Second World War.
3) ‘… Significant military resources…’
The military resources diverted to the Nazis campaign of mass murder had no material effect on the war’s outcome. German intelligence seriously underestimated Soviet military strength and with the manufacturing base moved east beyond the war’s destruction, coupled with American entry into the war, doomed German to defeat.
4) ‘ … Fascistic societies are Fascistic at every level…’
Peterson referred to Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary German and the Holocaust. I have not read this book but there are a number of good reviews and takes on this work. What is clear is that Goldhagen’s thesis is that Germany held a particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitism that primed the German population to be turned easily murderous. That’s an interesting and not undisputed hypothesis but it is not the same things as declaring a society, much less the German society, as Fascistic at every level.
As a political philosophy Fascism was founded in1915 and I am not sure how you replace an entire culture in just a dew short decades. I think it’s much more reasonable to think the Peterson is misrepresenting Godlhagen’s work. The poison of Anti-Semitism is far older than either Fascists or Nazis and it was merely a tool, a lever, by which the Nazi managed their murders and they found more than enough willing help far beyond Germany’s borders.
5) ‘ … Why do we assume that? …’
Perhaps the most stunning assertion in the entire digression is that possibility that Hitler never planned to win the war and that he actual aim, whether he was aware of it himself or not, was chaos and mass destruction. Certainly, in some case, on individual actions it may be best to determine actual motive from repeated outcomes, but applying this framework to single outcome events such as winning or losing a war strikes me as quite a stretch.
I do not think it was the Kaiser’s intent to destroy the German Empire but that was the outcome of World War I.
I do not think it was the intent of the Japanese government to subject their home islands to destruction and occupations but that was the outcome of World War II when they brought America into the conflict.
I do not think it was the intent of the rebellious Confederacy to end slavery but that was the outcome when they started the American Civil War.
I do not think it was Gorbachev’s intent to dissolve the Soviet Union but that was the outcome of his Glasnost policies.
It’s perfectly reasonable to accept that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to win the war and carry their murderous prejudices across all of Europe and beyond.
Expertise is not transferable and when someone moves beyond their field of training and specialization it is wise to subject their opinions and ‘facts’ to scrutiny.
