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Why Do They HateUs?
It's common in this country to view tyrants - Hitler, Tojo, bin Laden - as crazy or idiots or, simply, full of hate. But they're not solely that. They base their murderous acts on philosophy - wrong-headed philosophy, but philosophy still. Here's a look from the New York Review of Books.
One of the early critical books about Nazi thinking, by Aurel Kolnai, a Hungarian refugee, was actually entitled The War Against the West.[2] Nazi ideologues and Japanese militarist propagandists were fighting the same Western ideas. The West they loathed was a multinational, multicultural place, but the main symbols of hate were republican France, cap-italist America, liberal England, and, in Germany more than Japan, the rootless cosmopolitan Jews. Japanese propaganda focused on the "Anglo-American beasts," represented in cartoons of Roosevelt and Churchill wearing plutocratic top hats. To the Nazis "the eternal Jew" represented everything that was hateful about liberalism.
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