Page 49 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

how society should be organized, how individual lives should be lived, how culture should be developed. This is the old Platonic belief in the philosopher-kings, who were entitled to give orders to others... To this I have to say that no better excuse, or even reason, has ever been propounded for unlimited despotism on the part of an elite, which robs the majority of its essential liberties. Someone once remarked that in the old days men and women were brought as sacrifices to a variety of gods; for these, the modern age has substituted new idols: -isms... Monism is at the root of every extremism.”89
Ultimately, in Plato and Hitler, as in King Priam’s reign, as in Nazism, and their Masters of Death, only a single, coherent reality is to be known: Autocracy or Totalitarianism. Only a totalitarian state can fulfill Hitler’s epistemocracy and meritocracy founded on utopian, transcendental aesthetic ideologies drawn from the realm of the eternal true and ideal, evocative of Platonism.
By pursuing the return of his beautiful Margareta of German Romanticism and Classicism, and by striving towards the rebirth of a beautiful and glorious neo-classical utopia, Hitler, too, loses sight in pursuit of her golden-haired beauty. His quest for beautiful Margareta paradoxically turns to war, and his ascent to the Promethean, Faustian, or Superhuman, paradoxically ends in a plummeting descent to the infrahuman. Thus, to pursue his sublimely beautiful Romantic German
89 Berlin, Isaiah. The Power of Ideas. Ed. By Henry Hardy. USA: Princeton University Press, 2000. 14.
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