Andrew StroehleinKnut Hamsun, a Norwegian writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.
In 1943, he sent Joseph Goebbels (Hitler's propaganda minister) his Nobel Prize medal as a gift.
FediThing 
Good grief... apparently Hamsun wrote a eulogy for Hitler after his death calling him "a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations" 🤮
How does someone so intelligent become so far removed from reality?
Mónica@FediThing @andrewstroehlein I always struggle with understanding that. If a person is indeed smart in a field, how can they lack so much empathy? Is empathy independent of your intelligence?
Woozle Hypertwin@nottern @FediThing @andrewstroehlein
Could it be a deeply racial/ingroup mindset? Like, "justice" means "our group (aryans. whitepeople, Christians, whatever) gets to rule like we deserve, without interference from other groups who aren't really people anyway"? I mean, if they simply cannot imagine people outside their group as being people, then maybe it makes an ugly kind of sense?
@woozle @nottern @andrewstroehlein
Yeah, that sounds the most likely explanation unfortunately 😞
(But even that's sort of weird as Hitler had invaded and occupied Hamsun's own country.)
@FediThing @nottern @andrewstroehlein Another characteristic seems to be that they don't really care much about consistency... a lot of it seems to come down to just "follow the leader", and the group-identity thing is only one tool that fash leaders use to start their base all rowing in the same direction.
@FediThing @woozle @andrewstroehlein True. What's us and what's them may be anything. It's kind of hard to think that everyone is us, even trying to be as empathetic as possible
@nottern @FediThing @andrewstroehlein
We should probably be teaching kids better ways of thinking about these issues. [makes mental note for after the revolution]