Self-focussed

Being exclusively self–focussed is surprisingly common, especially amongst driven leaders, and leads to a kind of obsessive selective perception. Everything is seen purely in a way that placates the leader’s own interests. This was true of Hitler’s ability to choose what he saw and experienced in Vienna. And it was true of his “predecessor”, Kaiser Wilhelm – here is Röhl “The Kaiser had an extraordinary capacity for seeing the world, not as it was, but as he wished it to be. In the summer of 1903 Philipp Eulenburg wrote to Reich Chancellor Bülow from on board the Imperial yacht:

“Being in contact with the beloved master for weeks on end opens the eyes of even the less initiated – and he too is then shocked by the fact, which becomes more apparent all the time, that H M sees and judges all things and all men purely form his personal standpoint. Objectivity is lost completely, and subjectivity rides on a biting and stamping stallion”.

In 1927 the Crown Princess wondered how it was possible that such a clever man ‘could lose all sense of proportion and say the most fantastic things and even believe them. At a certain moment there is absolutely nothing more to be done with the Kaiser, he closes his eyes to every reality and then believes in the most impossible connections. He is and remains a riddle’. A graphic example of Wilhelm’s propensity for literally swearing that black was white if it suited his psychological requirements is his verdict in 1923 that he had been wrong to warn Europe against the ‘yellow peril’.

“At last I know (he said)what the future holds for the German people, what we shall still have to achieve!.... We shall be the leaders of the Orient against the Occident! I shall now have to alter my picture ‘Peoples of Europe’. We belong on the other side! Once we have proved to the Germans that the French and English are not Whites at all but Blacks…. then they will set upon this rabble.”

A man who could categorise the English and the French as negroes of course had little difficult in designating Jesus of Nazareth as a ‘non–Semite’ nor in claiming that he ‘had never….. been a Jew’.”

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