Speaker: How to Look Good as a Nazi
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they same was said of Peter Cook
They laughed at Einstein!
Yes, and they also laughed at Bozo the clown.
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To throw a party themed around the darkest period in German history is as fitting as having a 'Stolen Generation' ball in Darwin ("Bring your black and your white mum"), or a 'Killing Fields' piss-up with a Pol Pot look-alike contest at the Cambodian cultural centre.
In my home country, only a right-wing white supremacist would ever don Nazi outfits of any sort.
Also, this is dodgy, because we aren't in Germany, so acting as if we were is a bit daft. Especially given it isn't like anyone thinks the Lincoln students are pro-Nazi; they're literally the kind of farm boys from New Zealand that went to fight the Nazis when it was a live issue. Probably not politically aware, but hardly wee Kyle Chapmans.
I don't think this was Lincoln's finest moment, but it's a dodgy offensive joke at worst, not comparable to yer actual neo-nazis or such. (Likewise the Klu Klux Van, although I think that was really much more likely to be taken seriously, given that there was a reasonably serious car with the bloody Confederate flag on it there too.)
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[forgive me for jumping in without reading the 100-odd preceding posts]
There is an interesting article on Ars Technica on Nazis as demons. It talks about the fact that in US culture (and NZ too), particularly among the young, Nazis are Bad Guys without redeeming features. I guess Indiana Jones has a lot to do with this, and Wolfenstein 3D too.
In many ways, Nazis have the same cultural status as zombies (and, in fact, Nazi zombies turn up all over the place). Perhaps therein lies the problem: people dress up as zombies all the time.
(a side story: A former flatmate of mine once ran a one-off roleplaying game where the bad guys were undead Nazis. He put together a soundtrack for it to add atmosphere, and I helped him burn it to CD. A German friend later discovered the soundtrack in my music library, including at least one track of nationalistic Nazi music that is today banned in Germany...)
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A tsumani today and dudes going to the beach to surf a wave that caused such damage....
That's only inappropriate (as opposed to slightly dangerous) if you have a particular worldview. The tsunami is a consequence of geophysics - it doesn't have intrinsic evil. To think that surfing it is any wronger than surfing any other water is just superstition.
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George Darroch - the Rapanui deforestation is just *not* humans behaving stupidly: there is good archaeological evidence that good ol' kiore was bizzay, and also bizzay eating the seeds and nuts of the established flora. That poaaibly was what Maps was referring to.
That aside, it is an excellent post (and site) and the wee troll (for I suspect it to be very young - it has all the hallmarks of a teenaged Aspie nerd cousin of mine) was left making his byebyes in a quite heart-engaging fashion.
If you like trolls.
Which - o I dont need to say it eh? -
Well, yes. When we tried to explain World War II to our girls, we started with the Treaty of Versailles.
I'd take it back to the Congress of Vienna myself. As much as anything the horrors of WW2 were caused by the mess the European powers made sorting out the post Napoleonic chaos and the alliances that followed. But, sure, Hitler used Versailles as a bogey-man, although Germany was ripe for extremism after WW1 whether Versailles existed or not. If he'd not used the rather fanciful 'stab in the back", he'd have found another demon.
You're talking about something that died in 1945 in the rubble of Berlin.
Except that many (most?) Nazis were fairly quickly rehabilitated after WW2, and even those who were jailed were mostly out and often in positions of power and authority from the 1950s onwards. Most camp guards died peacefully in their beds in the 60s-90s.
I have a lot of German friends here in Bali (there is a very large German community) and we've talked of this. My understanding from what i've heard is that many of that generation went to their graves rather unrepentant, or in some denial.
Oh sure, those Lincoln students were making satirical political commentary on Nazi self-importance and the complex layering of the Final Solution.
The first wave (and parts of the second and third for that matter, but they had little to do with me) of the punk thing here in NZ used a fair amount of Nazi imagery in our posters and artwork. I can try to justify it on the aesthetic level (yes they had the best design and the reason we put SS cufflinks on the cover of the first Suburban Reptiles single was simply because we loved the stylised S). But mostly of course we used the imagery to shock, and gain media coverage. It was designed to offend which it did and I'm still not sure how I feel about that some 30 years later. I grimace a little and wish we hadn't.
There was no attempt on our part to align ourselves with any right wing movement and we made very sure that we distanced ourselves rather quickly (and dropped the imagery after it had served it's shock purpose) from any rightist political posturing.
But I'm still uncomfortable about what we did after all this time and can't use the excuse that we were de-powering the symbolism.
I feel for the Balinese though..their swastika, a symbol of peace, was taken from them. It's still widely seen here on buildings, temples, and in art and they remain bemused when tourists react, as they often do, at hotels called Swastika Lodge etc. I guess it's with some irony then that they use Nazi styled coal shuttle helmets on motor-bikes, and available in shades of pink, powder blue, lime green, and everything in between.
Japan
They may not have apologised as verbally as they should but they have as a nation spent vast sums in many of the formerly occupied Asian territories by way of reparations and still do. They have, for example, completely rebuilt the washed away beaches of the parts of Bali where they landed in 1942, at no cost to the island.
But I was still rather taken aback by the young Japanese girl selling Death Railway postcards by the River Kwai bridge a couple of weeks back.
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I wonder if any of those Lincoln students went along on crutches or in wheelchairs to make 'satirical political commentary' on the 200,000 or so disabled people who were also killed by the Nazis?
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Quite. Lest we forget:
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Is it too late to write in appreciation of this post? It's all very well put and one cannot but enthusiastically agree.
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Is it too late to write in appreciation of this post? It's all very well put and one cannot but enthusiastically agree.
And a very belated thank you from me, too, Anke
Except that many (most?) Nazis were fairly quickly rehabilitated after WW2, and even those who were jailed were mostly out and often in positions of power and authority from the 1950s onwards. Most camp guards died peacefully in their beds in the 60s-90s.
This does trouble me. The way so many committed nazi's were spirited away to a new life in the US, for example, to work on the space program. Effectively they were given a free pass.
It's also clear from the reading I've done that the new neo-nazi movements in the US were largely funded by older nazis who were still living out their lives as "ordinary, decent" citizens in West Germany.
Thinking about Mengele escaping scott-free is still enough to raise my blood pressure seveal degrees.
However, the entity of the German State has made long-term and on-going efforts to rehabilitate itself, even if quite a few of it's citizens don't want to go along with it.
Japan may not have apologised as verbally as they should but they have as a nation spent vast sums in many of the formerly occupied Asian territories by way of reparations and still do. They have, for example, completely rebuilt the washed away beaches of the parts of Bali where they landed in 1942, at no cost to the island
I did not know that. Thank you.
Nice Swastikas
Oh, you want swastika redemption? Then allow me to
show you the crazy.In my soul's upward flight, I had entered the womb of the sacred. This inner light was a swastika of creative energy -- the source of all life! This is how I began my lifelong search for the historic truth about the swastika and my journey to detoxify it from the sins of the Nazis -- my journey to re-sanctify it. Because , if there was an image that represented the gods for me from this point on it was the swastika. Yes, I choked big time on it because I was a little boy during the war and some of my Polish relatives were in Auschwitz. They were going crazy because I was telling them that this hated swastika which had killed millions of people was a sacred symbol for God.
My dreams were my guide:
A radiant holy man showed me glowing symbols of the Eternal. One of them was a swastika. He said, "Take this as your sign and redeem it so that it will strike love in all hearts that behold it." He then marked a white swastika on my throat with his finger so that I would be able to speak the truth about it. I choked, as I knew what hatred was stricken in all hearts by this sign and what an impossible task lay before me! This unleashed a flood of swastika dreams, hundreds of playful swastika dreams. I thought of the torture, the racism, and the cruelty of the Nazis which looking at the swastika invoked in me. But my dreams insisted on calling the swastika "Angel Power" in reference to its spiritual meaning: I went upstairs to an art studio. All the woman's paintings were nude self-portraits in a pose imitating a Swastika.
Um, yeah...
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new neo-nazi movements in the US were largely funded by older nazis who were still living out their lives as "ordinary, decent" citizens in West Germany.
Crap. That should have read new neo-nazi movements in Germany
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Oh, you want swastika redemption? Then allow me to
show you the crazy.Ah, remember him/her from Juxtapoz many years ago. But Man-Woman is crazy? Whatever the case, he/she's worth an infinite number of Mengeles. Or Lincoln twits.
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Pretty sure Kyle Chapman has left Christchurch for the North Island somewhere and I doubt he'll stand for Council again.
http://nudewhite.blogspot.com/2007/10/pie-crisis-in-christchurch-nz-as.html
Chapmans on the far right (of the picture).
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The way so many committed nazi's were spirited away to a new life in the US, for example, to work on the space program. Effectively they were given a free pass.
And much more than that, they remained the judges, police, elected representatives, civil servants, miltary and industrialists of Germany, especially in the west. De-Nazification was largely a fiction after an initial rush. Simply put, the Allies couldn't have run the country without them so a blind eye was increasingly turned.
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The Vatican gave Josef fucking Mengele the passport that enabled him to flee to South America. His protector, Cardinal Siri, was very nearly made Pope - he lost narrowly to Pacelli.
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Man-Woman is crazy? He/she's worth an infinite number of Mengeles
Agreed. So let's say merely mildly eccentric.
And much more than that, they remained the judges, police, elected representatives, civil servants, miltary and industrialists of Germany, especially in the west. De-Nazification was largely a fiction after an initial rush. Simply put, the Allies couldn't have run the country without them so a blind eye was increasingly turned.
Yes. but thinking about it, it's hard to see what else the allies could have done? Try large percentages of the population for war crimes? Put them all in jail?
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Yes. but thinking about it, it's hard to see what else the allies could have done? Try large percentages of the population for war crimes? Put them all in jail?
Wasn't this one of the main criticisms of the US's handling of post invasion Iraq? They got rid of too many Baathist party civil servants, army, etc, and thats why the country fell apart after the initial fighting was over... There was no-one to run the place.
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Yes. but thinking about it, it's hard to see what else the allies could have done?
Good question. In the years I spent in Australia I made a number of East European friends and acquaintances, and was initially surprised by those who had aging relatives with dodgy collaborative pasts living in suburban obscurity. From the "broken" Slovak former SS man to the unrepentant Croatian Ustaše uncle there was no sense of repentance, particularly during the years of the cold war, when being demonstrably anti-communist was an unquestioned virtue.
The case of Wehrmacht General Reinhard_Gehlen seems to be fairly typical of those who were able to leverage valuable intelligence skills and information to gain favourable treatment from their new overlords. Like Kriegsmarine chief (and Hitler's technical successor) Karl Dönitz, Gehlen had no demonstrable connection with the holocaust, which presumably would have precluded him from being politically rehabilitated.
Dönitz was convicted of war crimes at Nuremburg and served ten years, while the vastly more useful Gehlen, with his carefully secreted stash of microfilmed records from his time as head of intelligence on the Eastern front, promptly became head of West Germany's spy bureau, and went on to be awarded that country's highest civil order.
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I have a lot of German friends here in Bali (there is a very large German community) and we've talked of this. My understanding from what i've heard is that many of that generation went to their graves rather unrepentant, or in some denial.
I'm about to spend a week with the German father-in-law, who is coming to see his new grandson. I'm rather nervous - last time he came he had clearly been hanging out with a lot of old Germans (he recently divorced my mother-in-law and shacked up with a German lady), and came loaded with reading that I could only describe as bizarre apologist conspiracy theories.
I had been warned by the family that he was peddling this tripe so I avoided all his attempts to discuss it, but he became more and more insistent, mistaking my tolerance/reticence as agreement. Finally he cornered me on the last day and told me I didn't have an open mind, and I gave him my mind (in a way that I thought was fair and diplomatic) leaving him in tears of rage and denial. It was very unpleasant.
Apparently he was not always this way. It seems as if a lifetime of being picked on for being German has driven him to this strange irrational defensive corner, and only now that he has electively killed any need to be polite to his (mostly French-Australian) family, his long festering suppressed beliefs are coming out, and they're quite nasty to behold.
That's why, to a certain extent, I have sympathy for this post. I don't think rubbing people's face in crimes that they had no part in (he was a small child during the war) themselves serves any purpose other than to strengthen their prejudices and alienate them. It's actually a pretty nasty thing to do, to demonize people, and it is no surprise when they figure they might as well join the demons if they're going to be assumed to be demons anyway.
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For whatever it's worth, WW2 Wehrmacht veterans have been accorded associate membership status of the Australian Returned Services League since at least the 1960s. Perhaps understandably in the light of Australian experience, a similar arrangement has never been accorded to Japanese.
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I'd take it back to the Congress of Vienna myself.
The birth of the modern world is widely set at 1789 aand the French Revolution. That is where I would date the historical chain of events that led to the great coalition wars of the first half of the 20th century, and we are still living in that era today. Hence the famous quote attributed to Mao when he was asked he thought of the French Revolution: "To soon to tell".
It should be remembered that if you take the Balkan wars as the first skirmishes of the Great War and Russo-Polish & Greco-Turkish wars as the last gasps of the Great War then that first cycle of fighting lasted for over a decade. If you date the second round of fighting from the Spanish civil war in 1936 to the communist victory in China in 1949, the second cycle lasted thirteen years.
I mention this because this is the context that de-Nazification has to be set. Most of the hardline true believers - the "militia movement" types - were dead in 1945. Killed being heroic warriors in the Waffen SS or just shot out of hand as prisoners by the Allies (the Soviets killed most of their prisoners anyway, and it was a lucky SS prisoner who made it out of the battle zone in the west, and and good riddance to bad rubbish I say). The Nazi survivors knew it was over, and the rubble of their shattered cities and Marshall plan stripped them of any political credibilty. The rest of the Germans - and the western allies - just wanted war and killing to be over, even if that meant some went unpunished.
The fate of the "useful" Nazis who were rehabilitated to fight the Cold war was not typical of the fate of most Nazi's after 1945. Most Nazi's were collectively punished until around the cold war really kicked in from circa 1952 onwards, a period of seven plus years where many were denied any work except as labourers. While Germany was being rebuilt, this more than anything meant that when they did re-emerge as citizens, the ex-Nazi's were largely shut out of the new bureaucracy and political institutions. They may or may not have been unrepentant, but they were also totally impotent.
Perhaps the most telling commentary on the near total marginalisation of serious Nazi's post WWII is the battle of Dien Bien Phu is sometimes called the "last stand of the Waffen SS", because so many of them wound up in the French Foreign Legion. Killed by an Asiatic in the service of the country that forced the Versailles Treaty on Germany. Who said history doesn't have a sense of Karma?
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There is an interesting article on Ars Technica on Nazis as demons. It talks about the fact that in US culture (and NZ too), particularly among the young, Nazis are Bad Guys without redeeming features.
This might be true in video games (I wouldn't know) but the opposite's increasingly true in films. Plenty of Nazis with "redeeming features" in Valkyrie, Downfall, Inglourious Basterds and The Reader. Too many redeeming features in some cases ...
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For whatever it's worth, WW2 Wehrmacht veterans have been accorded associate membership status of the Australian Returned Services League since at least the 1960s
I didn't know this. Disgraceful that it happened. I suppose one has to give the RSL the benefit of the doubt and assume that because of the cold war the widespread participation and complicity of the Wehrmacht in genocide and crimes against humanity in the East, the Balkans and Italy was not known.
After the fall of France demonstrated the genius of Hitler and validated his beliefs the brutalism of Nazi philosophy entered deeply into the German soul. German civilians - and the military even more so - knew and/or broadly approved of Nazi crimes untl the rain of Allied bombs and defeat in the East caused them to start to fear the consequences of those beliefs. For that reason alone no one who fought for the German armed forces in WW2 should be in anyway rehabilitated as combatants. Ever.
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Too many redeeming features in some cases ...
I don't think it hurts to remember that it wasn't vampire-zombie-demons that caused the Holocaust; it was normal human beings. A lot of them probably did have redeeming features. Whether these films are achieving the correct balance of normality vs. horror is another question, but it doesn't hurt to be nuanced. Or you forget that it could happen again.
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