On Mon., Jan. 26, UFPPC's book discussion group will examine Guido Giacomo Preparata’s Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (Pluto Press, April 2005).  - - This volume, by a professor at the University of Washington, argues that “Hitler's extraordinary rise to power was in fact facilitated — and eventually facilitated — by the British and American political classes during the decade following World War I."[1]  --  Digging Deeper meets Mondays from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Mandolin Café (3923 S. 12th St., Tacoma).  --  POST-DISCUSSION CRITIQUE:  Conjuring Hitler is a full-blown conspiracy theory, accusing “the Anglo-American establishment” of world-historical crimes and attributing to it the successful management of world events since about 1900.  --  Virtually every event in British politics in the 1920s and 1930s is held to have been a sham behind “stock masks” (231).  --  As the white supremacist and anti-Semitic web sites that have taken up discussion of Preparata’s volume suggest, Conjuring Hitler, with its oracular style, is a fine example of what Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous November 1964 Harper’s Magazine essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”  --  Hofstadter wrote:  “In the history of the United States one finds it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.”  --  Hofstadter noted that “this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good.  But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style.”  --  In Preparata’s case, we have a “sound demand” (that national and world politics be liberated from the overweening influence of finance capital) advocated in the classic paranoid style.  --  In this case, a spectacular effect (the rise of Nazism) is taken to require explanation by an elaborate intention that is then asserted as an efficient cause.  But history depends on evidence, and there is little of that here, despite the apparatus of scholarship (which reveals itself to be quite thin when scrutinized, despite the impressive length of the bibliography).  Hofstadter again:  “A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.” ...