In one of the videos you posted on another thread one of the critics interviewed spoke of Captain Ahab of being an almost "Hitlerian" tyrant. In this one, they touch on "why we fail" to successfully confront tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin or Mao.
I have read Moby Dick more than once. The Ahab/Hitler analogy was not lost on me, and seems remarkable in that Melville could not have dreamed of Hitler, or even Stalin and Mao, who willfully murdered whole populations. A bad ruler to Melville and his contemporaries was something like Bush the Frat Boy, who neglected his duty to keep the people of his country safe from natural disasters or organize relief when a disaster strikes, started dubious wars for his own glory and touted the supremacy of the elite over the common people. In other words, they were the Bourbon Kings of eighteenth century France, whose fate was a rather bad one.
Yet the chapter of Moby Dick that most struck me in that aspect was omitted in the videos of this series that I've watched so far. That was where Ahab nailed a Spanish doubloon to the mast and decreed that it would go to the man who first sights the white whale. Growing up, I always had a fascination with history. One of the great mysteries of history, at least to me, was how the German people could have taken Hitler seriously in the first place. Reading Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich didn't answer any questions for me, only provided reasons for why nobody should have found Hitler appealing. When I was in my twenties, I read Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock, which did more than any other book I've read before or since to answer that question.
Bullock's Hitler was a smooth talker. He promised Germans the realization of a long term goal in which, under his leadership, they would be the masters of the earth. Stalin and Mao promised the people of the old Russian Empire and China a new utopian order in which they would live in perfect peace and happiness because all social class distinctions would be eliminated and, with that, all human conflict would become a thing of the past. The future thus envisioned was, for each of these leaders, Ahab's Spanish doubloon nailed to the mast. This should also explain how free market fundamentalists, i.e., today's financial and industrial robber barons, manage to get support from some of the common people whom they are fucking over with mortgage fraud and low wages.
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