Public Opinion 1.1.2.7

This ideal Joffre was compounded out of the victory won by him, his staff and his troops, the despair of the war, the personal sorrows, and the hope of future victory. But beside hero-worship there is the exorcism of devils. By the same mechanism through which heroes are in-carnated, devils are made. If everything good was to come from Joffre, Foch, Wilson, or Roo-sevelt, everything evil originated in the Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin and Trotsky. They were as om-nipotent for evil as the heroes were omnipotent for good. To many simple and frightened minds there was no political reverse, no strike, no obstruction, no mysterious death or mysterious conflagration anywhere in the world of which the causes did not wind back to these personal sources of evil.

Quelle

Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann, 1922.