i just find the idea that hitler having these subliminal almost-breakthrus about his own vision of the world being confounded at something like, [reading it again] a war enemy not showing its hand when it knows its people are desperate and that the enemy can have ears anywhere, maybe that rail line doesn’t need to be known about. Maybe it’s not reasonable to assume your newest map reflects a full picture of reality. Almost conceding maybe his idea of the value of these people is based on bad assumptions, but between the insane coctail of drugs he was on, and being powered by purely irrational things, he never got all the way there long enough for it to manifest as anything but brief confusion in private.

it’s the allegory of the cave but it’s an idiot doing genocide and fighting a two front war and just assuming that reality is wholly reflected by the information brought to him and the worldview within his mind.

there’s probably an element of the “mapmakers can’t keep up” too, because we know how intense soviet industrial action was at this time, but I am seeing a man who assumes he is culling a herd of swine, because he did think like that, and being challenged but not having his ontological priors at all broken by the challenge lol