Honestly, this story about a history professor who pretended to be a neo-Nazi is just too completely freaky for words. The professor says that he was moved to join the National Socialist Party for research purposes — because “any attempt to understand a group, a movement, or an individual psyche, would have to include becoming, as much as an individual can, the subject under study.” Notably, he doesn’t actually say that he learned anything particularly noteworthy in this process of ruining his reputation.
I found the story via Orson Olsen, who noted: “This is generating some disbelief. It shouldn’t. The notion that a historian besotted by the delusions of PoMo does this in pursuit of aomething like ‘authenticity’ is the only thing that makes sense.”
Indeed.
