Carpooling is for Patriots!

Student hassled by school officials over ceramic Hitler mask project.

"A Stonington mother is concerned the personal beliefs of a teacher and school superintendent are why her son initially received a failing grade on an art project depicting the face of Adolph Hitler. School officials changed their stand on the issue immediately following an inquiry by the Daily Press Wednesday." READ MORE

Stories like this are always amusing. People get so worked up over political correctness that nobody even knows the definition of offensive anymore. It seems like schools, in particular, are the worst. Americans are so sensitive to things that might offend someone, somewhere that everything winds up on the hit-list. I'm glad the student stood up for himself and his first amendment rights.

Hitler's Little Helper

Abandoned in Germany at the age of five this English boy joined the Hitler Youth, helping attack Jews. Only when he came to Britain did he confront his guilt - and discover his mother's was even greater

What did you do in the war, Mr Briscoe? Ask this gentle, 73-year-old Englishman, a former woodwork teacher, father and grandfather, living out his retirement in the peaceful Suffolk countryside, and the answer is shocking: "I joined the Hitler Youth.

"I was the proudest boy alive when I first put on my black shorts and brown shirt and made a solemn oath that dedicated the rest of my life to the Fuhrer."

READ MORE

This just in: Ahmadinejad NOT Hilter... He's worse

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 in News, Iran by Laurence Vance|

He is worse than Hitler, at least according to Victor Davis Hanson and the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry.

We already knew that Hanson was a crazed warmonger, but in a speech earlier this year at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar (as reported in Hillsdale’s April 2007 Imprimis), he stated (after he said that Ahmadinejad wants to destroy Israel):

Let no one doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of peaceful global adjudication of nuclear proliferation and pose an unending threat to civilization itself.

And from the March/April 2007 issue of Israel My Glory, published by the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, we read:

But annihilating the Jewish state is merely a warm-up. Although the lynchpin of Ahmadinejad’s crusade is a first-strike success against his near neighbor Israel, the next move is westward to Europe and then on to finish off the hated United States.

Another piece in Israel My Glory quotes Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that “unless the United States stops Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, America has only two to five years left.”

So basically, unless the United States attacks Iran now, Iran will destroy the entire world. Right.

4-20 roundup

Looks like Hitler's birthday was newsworthy for much of the world. Here's what I scrounged up on Google:

White supremacists are holding a rock concert in Wellington tonight to commemorate Adolf Hitler's birthday. LINK

Hitler's birthday, a date of terror... but some high schoolers see April 20 as a day to smoke marijuana LINK

Students locked in over Hitler birthday LINK

Man honours Hitler - naked LINK

Man honours Hitler - naked

Vancouver - A Canadian man was arrested after he was found walking around naked with a swastika taped to his body to mark Adolf Hitler's birthday, police said on Friday.

Police officers in Nanaimo, British Columbia, said they were called to the scene by concerned residents.

The man told them he was "honouring Hitler's birthday".

He was detained and would undergo a psychiatric assessment.

Hitler was born April 20, 1889.

"Although the swastika symbol causes some concern and is usually associated with hate and the Nazi regime, in this instance this male posed no threat to the community," said police.

Ois Guade zu Deim Geburdstog Hitler!

Hitler will survive.

Lots more videos here.

Nazi Hunter's Room

An Israeli gallery will be offering a mat representing Adolf Hitler's skin as a big game trophy at Art Cologne, the major modern art fair, which has been shifted from the northern autumn to spring. The artwork, entitled Nazi Hunter's Room, by Israeli artist Boaz Arad, will be priced at €35 000 at the German fair, which began yesterday.

Ferry says sorry for lauding Nazi iconography

By Karen McVeigh
Tuesday April 17, 2007
The Guardian

Bryan Ferry has apologised for remarks he made praising Nazi iconography. The 61-year-old singer sparked condemnation from Jewish leaders after he was quoted in a German newspaper describing the aesthetic behind Nazi Germany as "just amazing".

In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, Ferry also revealed that he calls his studio in west London his "Fuhrerbunker". He said: "My God, the Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves. I'm talking about Leni Riefenstahl's movies and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass parades and the flags - just amazing. Really beautiful."

The singer, who is also a model for Marks and Spencer, issued a statement yesterday in which he said he was "deeply upset" by the negative publicity his remarks had caused. It added: "I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused by my comments on Nazi iconography, which were solely made from an art history perspective. "I, like every right-minded individual, find the Nazi regime, and all it stood for, evil and abhorrent."

Jewish leaders, some of whom had called for Marks and Spencer to reconsider Ferry's contract, welcomed his apology. Lord Janner, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, said: "I'm very pleased he's apologised. My view is that the matter is now closed." Nick Viner, the chief executive of the Jewish Community Centre for London, said: "He's made an apology quickly and responsibly. It goes a long way to mitigate his original remarks."

Bryan Ferry's site

Isreal: Muslim inspired Hitler to Holocaust.

I found this today on the Isreali Insider. The author ties Muslim Jihad in with "The Final Solution." Though it appears to have historical backing, it seems like yet another case of inciting emotion through comparison. While the author only talks about one Muslim, the Mufti of Jerusalem, the intent is to create a comparison between Nazis and Muslims in general.

... Nazis incorporated the Moslem idea of Jihad -- the impulse for total destruction and complete annihilation in the spirit of a Holy War.

...Eichmann's meetings with the Mufti at the trials for Nazi leader in Nuremberg, wrote a book entitled THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM, published in 1947, in which Pearlman noted that the Mufti instructed Eichmann that the way in which the Nazis could best persecute the Jews was to do so slowly and in stages, so as to catch them unaware of the next stage of persecution.

Full Article

Warewolf Women of the SS, dir. Rob Zombie

Meanwhile: A green springtime for Hitler

By Alex Beam The Boston Globe

BOSTON: In anticipation of Earth Day, everyone wants to do his bit. Leonardo DiCaprio is vamping on an Icelandic glacier for the cover of Vanity Fair, alongside a Photoshopped polar bear. In the same issue, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rants and raves about the un-green-ness of George Bush's EPA, while he and his family work overtime to scuttle a renewable energy wind-farm project located a bit too close to the family manse on Cape Cod.

Elsewhere, Levi's is selling "ecojeans," the perfumer Lancome is supporting reforestation projects, and the private air carrier Cerulean Jets is eliminating its carbon emissions by going out of business. No - sorry. That would be too practical. Instead, the jet-setters are buying carbon "offsets" from a power company in Vermont.

Everyone is doing their bit. Me, I am reading the important book, "How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich."

I know what you are thinking. I have fallen for a hoax. No one in their right mind would research and publish a book stating, "The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature." Or: "The Nazis did in fact impact the landscape in ways far out of proportion to the short twelve years they were in power."

But in fact, three professors - Franz-Josef Bruggemeier of Freiburg University, Mark Cioc from the University of California/Santa Cruz and the University of Maryland's Thomas Zeller - have done just that.

It is undeniably true that Adolf and his crew were A-number-one landscape-impacters. London got plenty impacted by the Nazis' environmental outreach program, as did cities like Leningrad, Stalingrad, Dresden and Berlin. According to this book, the Nazis had big plans for spreading their green ideology eastward into Poland, Ukraine and Russia. "In the vast territories conquered in the east . . . they saw the opportunity to create a better, greener, future, combining racist and environmental thinking," the authors write. How sad that the East European Jews didn't go along with the program! What soreheads.

It's incredible that anyone would actually publish sentences like these: "The Nazis, however, were not interested in turning Germany into a tree farm"; "World War II was the opportunity that many modernist landscape architects had been waiting for"; or, "In the end, everyone . . . agreed that it was the wrong moment to embark on any projects with organic farming."

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.

To be fair, I did learn a lot. I already knew that Hitler was a vegetarian with a taste for nonalcoholic beer, but I didn't know that SS boss Heinrich Himmler also eschewed meat or that Hermann Goering had a "sincere interest in forest conservation." The Nazi party secretary Rudolf Hess was a devotee of organic gardening. Did you know that there was an organic herb garden at Dachau? Marvelous! It's depressing how many historians insist on dwelling on the negatives.

Co-author Zeller directed me to some reviews. " 'How Green Were the Nazis?' is a must for those who want to be introduced to the controversial relationship of Hitler's regime with the natural world," says the Web site Humanities and Social Services Online.

Striking a more realistic note, another reviewer comments that "the articles collected here provide little evidence that the Nazis were, in fact, sincere environmentalists."

No strangers to self-praise, the authors claim that their work "offer(s) a more nuanced and historically richer answer to the question, 'How green were the Nazis?' than previous efforts." I love the word "nuanced," which, like "layered," always ends up on the tongues of pseudo-intellectuals. Here, nuanced means "intellectually indefensible."

But perhaps I am being too harsh. Maybe all of World War II should be re-examined through a green filter. Think of the eco-carnage in the Ardennes forest as General George Patton and his brutish Third Army attacked the German environmentalists with their exhaust-spewing, tree-crushing tanks! Didn't they know the Nazis were just trying to create a big national park between the Atlantic and the Urals?

How green was Caligula, anyway?

Alex Beam's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

Hitler/Bush Parallels?

Hitler was never elected to power by a majority. He only received 30.1% of the vote in the election of 1932, Through a series of manoeuvres he was eventually designated chancellor in 1933, then declared a state of emergency, and ruled Germany by dictate from that time on:

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0403a.asp

I strongly recommend a read of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer mentioned in this website, which to my knowledge is still the classic account of the Nazi horrors. The reason that I mention Hitler here is that dictators ever since have imitated the Nazi tactics: brutal rule, murder and torture of enemies, “big lie” propaganda games to con the public, etc. And, yes, there are some echoes in the Bush presidency. Guess who is his Joseph Goebbels? Of course this parallel is somewhat exaggerated. But lest we forget, the Nazi strength lay in funding by major corporate powers, e.g. I. G.. Farben combined with a Lumpenproletariat of racist unskilled workers facing the inflation and unemployment induced by the crash of 1929.

The drive for imperial domination of the resources of others — so-called Lebensraum (Living room) and the Drang nach Osten (drive to the East) have parallels in the neocon compulsion to impose U.S. military domination on the Middle East. And echoes there certainly are of an attack on a specific religion — a designated ‘enemy’. I doubt that it can happen here. But the parallels are there and not to be taken lightly. Will Iran be our next evil ‘enemy’ to be attacked — and possibly our own ultimate Stalingrad? Certainly the rest of the world notes these parallels. Hopefully the U.S. will regain its national sanity with the next presidential election.

“A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope.” (Livy cited by Machiavelli)

By Ed Kent

Argument lacking substance? Just add Hitler

Every day, there's a pile of new news stories that mention Hitler. Today's search points me to this article which compares global warming to Hitler:

"Those charts ``tell us there's a danger in the future,'' said Belgian delegate Julian Vandeburie, who is in the science policy branch of his government. Vandeburie compared the world's current situation to the Munich peace conference in 1938, when Britain and France had a choice between confronting Hitler and appeasing him: ``We are at the same moment. We have to decide on doing something or not.''

And then there's this story from Fort Wayne, Ohio in which a city councilman is compared to Hitler for trying to get a smoking ban put into place:

"One of the posters show Fort Wayne City Councilman John Crawford with a Hitler mustache alongside Saddam Hussein. Another poster shows him at a Nazi rally."

I call bullshit. These people are being just like Hitler. Godwin's law in action?

The big list of Nazi Exploitation Films

I found this great page with just about every Nazi Exploitation film in existence. A really great resource for finding the most obscure titles. http://www.handsoftime.com/she/thenazi.html

G8 host city lists Hitler as Honorary Citizen

German authorities have been embarrassed by the revelation that the town hosting June's G8 summit still includes Adolf Hitler as an honorary citizen. The town council in Bad Doberan will meet today to remove Hitler's name from the roll of honour. More than 4,000 towns and cities awarded Hitler the title of honorary citizen during the Nazi period. Most revoked that honour after 1945 but not Bad Doberan, the small resort on Germany's northern coast, which became part of East Germany after World War II. With world leaders due to arrive in June, the local council has suddenly realised that having the Fuehrer in the book of honour does not reflect well on the host town.