Thomas Mann on leader-scoundrels refusing to admit they are wrong

    -- and thus they prolong their wrong ways, making us all victims:

It might be said that we are judging Germany by an unfair standard if we refuse to admire its current desperate struggle, its refusal to accept defeat, its resistance to the last man, the last bullet and the last drops of blood, or to recognize the heroism enshrined in this. History has always celebrated this kind of ultimate resistance as memorable and heroic –- and now all of a sudden, for Germany, it is held to be meaningless or criminal. This line of argument is false. The perpetuation of the war by Germany beyond defeat to annihilation has nothing to do with heroism, but is in fact a crime committed against the German people by its leaders. The people’s suicidal struggle is not voluntary but has been extorted through moral and physical terror –- by rulers who pretend that the Germans are bleeding for their honor and self-preservation, when the fact is that they are giving their utmost and more for the survival of the scoundrels who drove them into this war and who refuse to abdicate at any price, including that of Germany’s absolute ruination.

    (From Thomas Mann’s March 20, 1945, BBC broadcast to Germany, reported in the September 16, 2011, issue of the Times Literary Supplement, page 7.)
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