re: #181 William Lewis

Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “Hun Speech” is a lovely (not) example of the egotism that drove German colonial thinking at the time and all of it’s folly. I sometimes wonder what might have been had he not been crippled by the circumstances of his birth.

It would be hard to tease out what parts of his eccentricity were heritable traits and what were developed as a consequence of his upbringing.

They did absolutely insane stuff to him as a kid as part of “medical” treatment to make his short arm normal—at one point, a treatment was sticking his arm in a freshly-killed horse, I shit you not. But on top of that he was brought up in the Prussian military tradition and went through all the discipline and hazing that was just considered a normal aspect of making a German noble….you know, the old “isolate and brutalize the boy-children to make them martial.”