Quote of the Day (Eric Hoffer, on Why ‘The Ideal Devil is a Foreigner’)

“Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry. Hitler found it easy to brand the German Jews as foreigners. The Russian revolutionary agitators emphasized the foreign origin (Varangian, Tartar, Western) of the Russian aristocracy. In the French Revolution, the aristocrats were seen as ‘descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans.’ In the Puritan Revolution the royalists ‘were labeled “Normans,” descendants of a group of foreign invaders.’”— American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)

 No movie or fiction will scare me this Halloween quite like this analysis of political fanaticism. Thirty-five years after its author's death, it bears rediscovery and reflection...