Thomas Mann's War Against Hitler

"He declared that the country’s essential mission was battling the decadent Western democracies. Mann, who believed France and England were intent upon foisting doctrines that were “foreign and poisonous to the German character,” held that the profundity of its culture meant that the German nation was itself fated to transcend mere politics. Mann went to town:"

> I myself confess that I am deeply convinced that the German people will never be able to love political democracy simply because they cannot love politics itself, and that the much decried ‘authoritarian state’ is and remains the one that is proper and becoming to the German people, and the one they basically want.

The observations and facts all would fit nicely into an effort to cast Mann's intellectual mission in a negative light. Tying him to russia as the closing paragraph for no discernable reason? Suggesting his ideas were self-aggrandizing? Suggesting that he was trying to induce a system of false-belief through myth-matking? They're all observations thrown together without comment or an assertion of a common thread, and represent a remarkably cherry picked subsample from the book that supposedly forms the core of the article.

It feels like an opening salvo in an ad hominem attempt to dismantle a core figure in anti-Nazi thought? Coming from a journal intimately tied up with the neoconservative movement.

(Yeah, that's also an ad hominem, but the point about the article stands: it's barely coherent and the things it's suggesting form the start of an unsettling attempt to frame a narrative.)