The Princess and the Pea

In the official version of Stalin’s life story, his father was a drunkard who beat him regularly. In fact, according to Simon Rees, writing in Military History (“Historians are still trying to sort out the dark private life and strange death of Josef Stalin,” October, 2003, p. 18), “his home life as no worse than that of the other poor people of Gori.”

In the official version of Hitler’s life story, his father was a drunkard who beat him regularly. In fact, according to Karl Dietrich Bracher, in his detailed study The German Dictatorship (NY: Praeger, 1970, p. 58), “The father was not a chronic alcoholic, but, rather, a comparatively progressive man with a good job.”

Rather, there is reason to suppose that both Hitler and Stalin were pampered by their mothers. Stalin was an only child, his three older siblings all having died in infancy. One might expect he was especially valued by his mother for this reason. His father was largely absent during his childhood, having moved to another city for better work—leaving little counterbalance to an over-indulgent mother.

Hitler was supported by his mother throughout his early adulthood, with apparently no need to work for a living. “After the death of his father,” Bracher writes, “his mother afforded [him] … two-and-a-half years of idleness.” (p. 59). Bracher refers to her as “over-indulgent.”

Of course, no one can know for certain; but this may shed some light on the current naïve faith among social workers that the abused go on to abuse, and the bullied go on to bully. For such claims are always based on asking questions of current abusers, or of current bullies. If one has a fixed habit of blaming others for everything, and pushing one’s bad feelings off onto others, isn’t one likely to do exactly the same thing here? Isn’t a bully or a psychopath automatically going to claim to have been bullied or abused themselves?

Yet the truth is likely to be the opposite—when one is accustomed to being treated very well, one expects it. Receive anything less, and one is liable to consider oneself hard done by. The traditional fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea contains a great deal of folk wisdom. When one is pampered for long enough, any inevitable ill feeling is liable to be interpreted as oppression. The truly oppressed, on the other hand, are more likely to remain silent—through long habit.

This also explains feminism. Women have traditionally been pampered, not oppressed. Men have traditionally been told to buck up and shut up.