Robert Whealey, in his post of May 31, has criticized me as follows:

"Clare Spark is demanding too much.  No historian, Bullock, Fest, Weinberg,
or Kershaw can manipulate his readers toward some specific "moral" result
that Spark seems to want.

The historian can select the facts to paint Hitler in dark light, but not
totally evil.  The objective historian also must explain why so many
Germans, Soviets, French, British, Americans, Italians and Japanese were
taken in by him for so long.  Historians must deal with a multiplicity of
causes to explain World War II and the Holocaust."

I do not see where in my previous message there was any indication of a
desired "specific moral result", to be attained through manipulation of the
reader. My goal was to raise a question that is not often discussed: the
possibility that structuralist social theory (as devised by various
sociologists, usually Leninists or social democrats) destroys the
possibility of resistance to illegitimate authority by its formulation of
what "the masses" are supposed to be like in a "democracy." That is, "the
people" are easily duped by demagoguery. In a yet earlier message I alluded
to the aristocratic and irrationalist explanation of the triumph of Nazism
as "the revolt of the masses." I could have said more about Hitler as the
Man of the Crowd, the very embodiment of mob society, and that has been an
influential portrait disseminated by persons who have generally identified
themselves with "the people."

Then, in the next paragraph, Whealey goes on to allege that numerous
countries (presented as if each was a person) were "taken in" by Hitler, a
fact that must be explained by the historian sensitive to "a multiplicity of
causes." This is the discourse of postmodern pluralism, even ethnopluralism,
where individuals are subsumed in groups, and where no conclusions can be
reached because some group or other would be offended. Such a discursive
practice, however, hardly conforms to my idea of the historian's
responsibility to citizens of would-be democratic republics. I would like to
know, were the various rulers of the societies mentioned by Whealey above
"taken in" by the Master Manipulator, or were they calculating political and
economic interests at every stage of the game?

Which reminds me, was there any mention whatsoever in the CBS film we are
discussing of the behavior of the leaders of German Social Democracy and
German Communism while Hitler's evil star was rising, let alone in the
crucial period of 1930-34?

And is it not possible to examine and publicize the ideological premises of
the various attempts at writing (or avoiding) Hitler biographies to date,
noting how one or another approach has affected public policy? And we might
not also examine the possibility that the politics of the postwar academy
(i.e. the displacement of "scientific history" by "cultural history") have
had something to do with the despair and paralysis I described in my last
message?

I can't imagine why these questions and suggestions of mine should be even
controversial, or maybe, sadly, I do.

Clare Spark

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