Quotes from James Hawes

In the summer of 1913, Kafka bangs endlessly on about 'necessity,' that favorite concept of every German since Hegel who ever planned to do something morally dubious.

It's a seminal moment in the history of Germany and Europe. Stopping at the Elbe is not a normal military-political decision; it's one dictated by higher powers. Crossing the Rhine is fine; but the Elbe marks the end of reasonable ambition.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. Edmund Burke, Speech to the electors of Bristol, 1774

We must be mad, literally mad as a nation… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre… As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood. Enoch Powell, 1968

The high hopes of the 1960s were over. Old taboos had been broken down but no new codes of conduct were ready to replace them. Football terraces became battle-zones. Alcohol and drug consumption rose dramatically. Graphic violence – almost always WW2-themed – and soft porn went mainstream. Men like Jimmy Saville and Gary Glitter discovered that if they just got on the telly, they could do whatever they liked.

Anyone who thinks of the Germans as a naturally bellicose people should recall that Prussia-Germany was the only one of the continental powers in the run-up to 1914 whose elite seriously feared that if they had their war, their people might refuse to fight it.

Anger has become their default emotion and emotional defence system. It is part of the 'hard-man' toolbox, but it can also turn inwards with many men exercising anger on themselves, being quick to self-criticise and put themselves down.