Monday 16 March 2009

S is for...Strange Attraction

I went to a Fancy Dress party just before Christmas. The theme was the second World War and off i went to the fancy dress shop and hired a Hitler uniform complete with fake moustache and all the Nazi bits and pieces. When i got to the party, the majority of men were either Hitlers, SS officers or run of the mill Nazis.
It seems that on some sub-conscious level we are fascinated by the bad and evil ones throughout history.
Given a history book we will read about Genghis Khan, the Vikings, Napoleon or Vlad the Impaler before we turn to the pages about Gandhi, Mother Theresa or the Suffragettes. We just seem drawn to read and find out about just how evil mankind can be before we discover the kind and caring side of our history.
Don't know why, maybe a psychologist could explain it and probably it wouldn't be very nice to read why i and most of my male friends would choose to dress up as our one time enemy rather than our very own Tommy's.
Must be more to it than they had a better and more distinguishable uniform although if you did glance back through the history book, the ones doing the invading and slaughtering did have distinctive uniforms from the horned helmets of the Vikings to the jack boot and swastika of the Nazis.
If there were two television shows on at the same time, one about Josef Mengele and one about Walt Disney, i would bet a pound to a penny that the Mengele documentary would get the most viewers.
Maybe it is something deep down inside of us that just draws us to the evil side, not admiration but a fascination of us humans at our most ruthless.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

...the ones doing the invading and slaughtering did have distinctive uniforms from the horned helmets of the Vikings to the jack boot and swastika of the Nazis.

I think it was Joseph Goebbels who said that American soldiers had no esprit d'corps because their officers dressed them like peasants. I guess it just goes to show that the character of the soldiers matters more. Look at the Russians during WWII.

Falling on a bruise said...

I would say certainly the most important matter is the character rather than the uniform, just seems the bad guys had more memorable ones.

Cheezy said...

I think we just like to do the silly walk, and bark out ZE ORDERS VITCH MUST BE OBEYED!

Anonymous said...

Herr Cheezy,

Das ist alles.

Q

Falling on a bruise said...

The silly walk and talking like Herr Flick from Allo Allo is compulsary.

Kos said...

Hey stranger...
It's that time again!

Anne said...

Thanks for subbing, Paul. You're a brave soul!