"The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than to a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one."
--Adolf Hitler on winning the support of the German people. Mein Kampf, 1925

Almost 100 years later, it is good that we are no longer subject to being preyed upon due to our simplicity as a society, state, nation, culture, species, or otherwise-organized group of individuals.

In the Winter of 1941, with the Germans at their doorstep threatening to overrun Moscow, Stalin planned and pulled off a daring feat of showmanship: a full-scale military parade in Red Square. This stunt at this critical time acheived sensational results, inspiring such patriotic nationalism as to aid in pushing citizens and soldiers beyond the brink of normal human endurance in order to stand against the advancing force.

Nationalistic pride in a time of war with actual barbarians at the gate... Yes.

Nationalistic pride today, with facts that contradict a bombastic and divisive exaggeration of barbarians... Questionable at best.

"We build too many walls and not enough bridges."
--Isaac Newton

"There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect."
--Ronald Reagan

"When we begin to build walls of prejudice, hatred, pride, and self indulgence around ourselves, we are more surely imprisoned than any prisoner behind concrete walls and iron bars.
--Mother Angelica

If we build a wall, are we on the inside looking out? Or are we on the outside looking in?

"Today I am at the head of the strongest Army in the world, the most gigantic Air Force and of a proud Navy. Behind and around me stands the Party with which I became great and which has become great through me..."
--Adolf Hitler, as part of his speech declaring war on the United States, December 11, 1941. It was also in this month of December that his troops, mere miles from Moscow, were being pushed back, never to come closer to Moscow or Victory again - the beginning of the end.

Big Lies - Big Parades - Big Walls - Big Declarations - Hubris.

In that winter of 1941, Stalin was eventually able to move past his hubris by listening to his intelligence sources on the ground, enabling him to call for Siberian reinforcements which helped to turn the tide. It was at approximately this same time that Hitler, surrounded by yes-men, and believing in his destiny and invincibility, and having no actual front-line intelligence that reached him, followed his hubris and declared war on the United States, further solidifying the beginning of the end.

The Greek word for what typically follows hubris, is "peripeteia" - meaning a dramatic reversal of fortune.

In this Winter of 2017 in very different circumstance, 76 years after one leader, (suffering from hubris and a lack of intelligence), began a slow spiral into collapse and infamy, we are again presented with hubris on the world stage; we are again forced to patiently wait for peripeteia.