Adding to what others have already said, we do not have to wonder what would happen if Germany’s Jews had guns and numbers and a tradition of organized violence. Nazis hardly started with the Jews. First they had to deal with the German Communist Party.
Where Jews were for the most part a random selection of middle class Germany, the Communists were a different story. German Communists had an organization and violent ruthlessness that rivaled Hitler’s gang during the Weimar era. In fact the entirely legitimate threat of a revolution in Germany (they tried a few times and nearly pulled it off once) goes a long way to explaining why German nationalists and business leaders would play ball with an obvious nut like Hitler in the first place.
So yes, the Communists were spoiling for a chance to make the brownshirts come take their guns from their cold, dead hands. When the brownshirts got ahold of state power, first in Bavaria and then everywhere, they did exactly that. And then there were no more Communists in Germany.
Therefore we can take home this particular lesson: as long as regular people run the government you can get away with a lot of MOLON LABE bullshit, because most people prefer to avoid a bloodbath. Fascists don’t mind a bloodbath at all. If Obama really were the tyrant that the tea party says he is, you know how we would know? All those morons playing dress up at the Bundy ranch would be dead.
Chris
If Obama were a fascist, the Bundy bunch would be on his side.
AnderJ
Molon labe? Ovama? Auto-correct much?
coin operated
I kid you not…I made the exact same point when this all went down, and one of my kool-aide drinkers on facespace replied “No, because the good patriots in the Army would stand up against Obummers illegal orders and not fight!”
greennotGreen
Did all these people who think they can take on the U.S. government in a fire fight see Red Dawn as teenagers and think it was a documentary? So a rag tag team of Jewish Wolverines could have vanquished the Nazis when it took the combined efforts of most of Europe, the USSR, and the U.S. to do it? People who have such faulty cognition are exactly the people who shouldn’t be allowed to have guns.
beltane
It’s also worth considering that if German Jews had engaged in acts of armed resistance to the Nazi regime, the Fox News types of the 1930s would have taken this as a sign that all Jews were terrorists who should be deported from the USA and sent back to the Eastern European country of origin, even if the actual country of origin no longer existed.
beltane
American conservatives absolutely adored the Nazi party’s brutal suppression of the Communists.
Major Major Major Major
I don’t even know what’s gone wrong right now.
But I know enough to say fuck these guys.
Botsplainer
Every man, woman, child, dog and rat in Afghanistan had AK-47s and RPGs under the Taliban, and look how that worked out.
MattF
Finished Timothy Snyder’s ‘Black Earth’. In which he makes the point that most of the killing in the Holocaust occurred in places in Eastern Europe where the Nazis had destroyed the state– and had not replaced it with anything. In fact, Snyder does a case-by-case examination of what were the deadliest areas in Europe, and they were all places where the state had been destroyed.
This country’s very own right-wing nihilists are all, they say, ardent fans of liberty, but they’re kinda vague about exactly how widespread communal violence would be prevented in their libertarian paradise.
gene108
@AnderJ:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_labe
I had to look up Molon Labe. At first I though it was an acronym because all caps.
@coin operated:
You do realize the gun nuts in America live in their own fantasy land? And are happy and proud of it.
I mean look at The Great Ammo Shortage of the fall of 2008 to Spring/Summer of 2009, when gun nuts decided Obama was coming for their guns and decided – in the face of the greatest economic crash in 80 years – to buy up all the ammo gun stores carried, despite the fact Candidate Obama said he would do nothing to change gun laws one way or the other.
I do not know how to handle the whole gun issue today, when one side bases their decisions on imaginary internet rumors.
Schlemazel
@coin operated:
That what the folks in Tienanmen Square thought. Thats what the folks in Ukrainia thought, thats what the folks in Tahrir Square thought. I doubt it would work out well for the nutters here when it didn’t work well for people with real grievances.
OTOH there is a layer of crazy in the officer corps that preached (both literally and figuratively) against Clinton and I assume Obama so there might be some people who would resist crushing the Bundy morons. But ti wouldn’t last.
gene108
@greennotGreen:
Did they see “Red Dawn” all the way to the end? Swayze and Co. struggling to get by in most of the movie and things did not get better.
Maybe they saw the “Terminator” and though since John Connor smashed Skynet with what seemed little more than small arms, the Jews should’ve been better armed 80+ years ago in. Europe, because it all comes to rewriting history via time travel.
Ben
This age old argument made by the gun nuts is just plain stupid. I heard a military guy on TV that served 3 or 4 tours in Iraq point out that he had personally seen well armed militias shit their pants and drop their weapons when a Blackhawk showed up on the scene. The teahadists just don’t seem to understand that no amount of handguns or rifles (even automatic ones) is going to protect you from big ass military kinetic weapons. Period. Carson is proving to be the most extreme of all the candidates… oh, and he’s a f’n liar as well.
gene108
@Ben:
You think the gun nuts want to be limited to just small arms?
A lot of them would love to be able to arm and equip themselves as well or better than the military.
OzarkHillbilly
@gene108: The ammo shortage continues. .22 LR (cheapest, most common ammo, used for everything from hunting squirrels and rabbits, to dispatching poisonous snakes, to target shooting and just general plinking) is all but impossible to find.
beltane
@MattF: You’ve raised one of the most important points. I’d like to add that two of my great-grandparents were from a town in the Carpathians in what is now SW Ukraine. The population was roughly 40% Jewish with the rest being a mix of ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, and Romanians. The local Jews actually did have an informal armed militia to protect against drunken tourists looking to harass the Jews there. It was, of course, useless against the Wehrmact, and the region experienced one of the highest death rates of the Holocaust, with very few Jews surviving long enough to even make it to one of the extermination camps. The Poles of the area fared almost as badly, many being murdered by machete, Rwanda-style, by pro-Nazi partisans.
The GOP can take their pro-Nazi historical revisionism and shove it up their dirty asses.
Iowa Old Lady
@gene108: True, but a Blackhawk would break their budget, just as it and similar equipment are breaking the country’s.
Matt McIrvin
@Ben:
Oh, come on! I can speak from personal experience that even the Cabal hovertanks on Mars just have bigger health bars. Plink away at ’em from decent cover and you can whittle that sucker down with a scout rifle. Especially if you can get a super attack in once or twice.
OzarkHillbilly
Amid reforms, municipal court traffic cases and revenue plummet in St. Louis County
Police departments in St. Louis County dramatically backed off traffic enforcement, and municipal court revenues fell nearly 40 percent across the county over the first seven months of this year, according to state court data analyzed by the Post-Dispatch.
One of the biggest turnarounds was in Ferguson, which the U.S. Department of Justice singled out in March for running its police department as if it were a collection agency for its municipal court.
Data from the state court system indicated that Ferguson filed 1,330 traffic cases in its municipal court from January through July of this year, down from 7,031 in the same period of the year before. That’s a decrease of 81 percent. And nontraffic cases, such as occupancy code violations, were down 86 percent.
Ferguson’s municipal court saw its revenue fall by 58 percent compared to the same period last year.
amk
amazing how the kkklowns ratcheted up godwin’s law from blogospheres to actual political platforms.
beltane
@amk: And the media lets them get away with it, and in a sense promotes it, and it will come to be accepted as The Truth by a large segment of the American public.
klokanek
Dude. You’re a scholar. Show your work and smack some links up there as support! One for Molon Labe would also be nice. :)
amk
@beltane:
To go godwin, even goebbels must be turning in his grave. Or turning just jealous on how the present day rw’ers have it so easy.
cmorenc
OTOH, the opposite proposition that Gandhi – like pacifism would have been effective against the German Nazis is equally delusional as the idiots who claim that personal firearms or local private Jewish militia would have. Back in the Vietnam War era, I once attended a teach-in led by famous folksinger Joan Baez and two guys whose name escapes me at the moment, but t I recall that they were well-known figures back then in the anti-war movement. In the Q&A session following Joan’s talk to us advocating peaceful Gandhi – like resistance to the Vietnam War effort – I asked her whether that tactic would have been effective by Jews against the German Nazis (because one of the other lecturers had, of course, alluded to the US government being Nazi-like in its war effort) – and I recall being flabbergasted as a 20yo to hear her claim that yes, it would have been just as effective as it was in India against the Brits with a sincere, straight face.
Point is, although it is ideological conservatives who are the more ape-shit delusional today, idiotic thinking about Nazis, guns (or lack thereof) has at times afflicted elements of the left as well. Baez was very famous back in that era.
beltane
@cmorenc: Yes, I have met people who believe the answer to every thing is to “send healing energy”. None of those people is a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, nor was Joan Baez back in the day.
beltane
@amk: All the right-wingers of today have to do is fart out some bit of abject stupidity and the media will glorify it with a “Maybe he has a point. Here is a panel to discuss both side of this important issue.”
Roger Moore
You know who else tried to violently overthrow the Weimar government? If the German nationalists and business leaders were willing to deal with Hitler, it wasn’t because he was an alternative to violent overthrow of the government; it was because he was in favor of overthrowing the government in a way they liked.
JPL
@beltane: Wasn’t it Chuck Todd who said journalist should just report the news, not challenge it?
boatboy_srq
@gene108: There’s a very powerful myth in Reichwing circles of the lone hero, or the hopelessly-outmatched small team, who can work miracles. It’s not new: John Wayne is probably the most classic example, though there are those who make out Stallone as the same type (one reason, perhaps, that the Governator was so initially popular was that people saw in him the same sort of things as were present in Wayne: instead they got a relatively-moderate Austrian expat who had very different ideas of conservatism than they did, and they were promptly disappointed). The idea that winning wars, or engaging existential threats, takes a massive machine with tens of thousands of well-trained people is alien to their mythology. This is why we keep getting “conservative reformers”, why they constantly refer to the federal government as “broken”, and why the railing against Big Gummint gets so loud: the size of the federal bureaucracy, the need to work with colleagues who don’t always (or often) share their views and objectives, and the necessities of maintaining the systems they never (claim to) see are completely beyond them. It’s also a good part of Tentherism: the ideal of the small government and the simpler conditions of the 1790s make for easier governing because all those systems simply would not exist and they would be more able to achieve their goals without resistence or bureaucratic inertia.
Gator90
The Holocaust was the Jews’ own fault for not being gunslinging badasses. You know what’s anti-semitic, though? Saying something critical of Israel.
OzarkHillbilly
@boatboy_srq:
I detect a flaw in your theory.
Baud
@cmorenc:
To think we came this close to nominating her for president.
PurpleGirl
@MattF: Early on the Nazis, based on a euthanasia program for the mentally disabled and ill, discovered that the German people (via the Catholic Church) did not like the idea of killing people. They decided on two things — Hitler’s name could not be attached to any program officially and that any thing along the lines of extermination should take place outside of Germany itself. Therefore, as Germany took over lands in Eastern Europe, that is where they built the death camps and tried different methods of extermination.
Matt McIrvin
@boatboy_srq: People like to hold up Barry Goldwater as a guy who was way saner than today’s conservatives, but I keep thinking about that quote “I have no interest in streamlining government, for I wish to reduce its size.” If your program is to burn it all down, you’re not going to even try to make it work properly. That’s contrary to your aims.
Gex
@Botsplainer: yeah, how DO the revanchists on the right square their belief that the U.S. military is the mightiest in all of history and can win any war with the idea that random armed people can defeat the military?
Baud
@Gex:
Why assume they feel any compulsion to do so?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Perhaps someone should send Carson a list of the failed Jewish revolts against Nazis. Having a gun doesn’t work so well when the other side has an organized and well equipped army. I believe that was one of the reasons the Zionist wanted a state of Israel so the Jews would have an army of their own.
Chris
@greennotGreen:
Yes. That is to say, I think the general story of La Resistance Beats Evil Empire has become so ingrained in our pop culture in the last half century, during the same period of time that the American public grew more and more divorced from anything resembling war, that a lot of people really do think they could totally take down an Oppressive Police State with nothing but some guns, an A-Team Montage and a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits. Much the same way the proliferation of Dirty Harry type movies has these same people convinced they could outdraw and gun down a Bad Guy With A Gun.
It’s unfair to these movies, many of which do at least try to hammer home the notion that it would really suck to live through that in real life, but most of these people seem to think it’d be an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.
Baud
@Chris:
I can totally see Ben Carson saying “I love it when a plan comes together” if he wins the nom.
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
That’s also where most of the people they wanted to kill were. For all the horror at the extermination camps, they weren’t where most of the people killed in the Holocaust died. Most of them were either shot out of hand or died slowly of disease and starvation in the work camps.
Betty Cracker
@Gator90: O/T, but isn’t it Great. To. Be. A Florida Gator!
Ryan
We all remember that oldie but goodie from 2008, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” Seems rather quaint today.
Germy Shoemangler
Isn’t this latest controversy just Ben Carson selling a different type of snake oil?
Because isn’t he really just a snake oil salesman?
I saw this recently, his fake cancer cure:
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/presidential-candidate-ben-carson-shilling-for-mannatech-with-his-own-alternative-cancer-cure-testimonial/#disqus_thread
GregB
From my cold dead hands clinging onto a gun near my small shriveled penis.
-Updated NRA Slogan
beltane
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: None of the resistance movements in occupied Europe, heroic as they were, achieved any real success. Every partisan attack against the Germans was countered by reprisals against the civilian population that were brutal to the extreme, truly the stuff of wingnut fantasies.
tsquared2001
@beltane: OMG – so funny and so true. It is somewhat of a caricature but, eventually, we WILL see a panel discussion debating the heliocentric model versus the geocentric model. Like the fallacy of peak wingnut, there are no depths to which the modern media will not sink.
ETA: as long as money is involved.
greennotGreen
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m not sure I understand what the flaw is in boatboy’s theory. The fact that so many conservatives think wars can be won without a massive war machine is why they thought Iraq would be a cakewalk. Why, if just a few scrappy Americans armed with rifles and God on their side can win against the Russians/Koreans/Skynet/invaders from Mars, then the mighty US military should be able to completely overthrow the bad guys and pacify a country in a few days.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
See also economics. They believe that the world is moved by Galtian supergeniuses who singlehandedly come up with every last thing their company’s ever produced, and the rest of their gigantic company is just sort of… there? Because, like fast cars, huge mansions, and loose women, it’s something Galtian Supergeniuses are just supposed to have? As opposed to being a gigantic machine in which everybody, ultimately including the CEO, is just one of the cogs that make it all work.
peach flavored shampoo
@PurpleGirl: The Nazis dont seem like very nice people.
debbie
I in no way whatsoever support what Carson and others are saying about Jews arming themselves, but I have to take exception to this:
There was nothing random about this. As I know everyone knows, Jews served as the collective scapegoat for centuries. Perhaps it was this history, and not being surprised at being blamed, that should be seen as the reason for the Jewish community’s slowness to react. “What, this again?”
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Goldwater was the last time a conservative ran an honest campaign. Not any less batshit insane, but honest, and “on the issues:” he admitted frankly and openly that he was going to cut everybody’s government checks because he believed on philosophical grounds that they shouldn’t have them. He got a McGovern-level shellacking for his troubles, and ever since then conservatives have learned to run on vague cultural resentments instead. Although nowadays, some of them in the primaries are crazy enough to be heading back in a Goldwater direction.
Chris
@Baud:
I suppose I started it, but goddamn it. You just ruined a catchphrase I loved from a TV show I loved.
greennotGreen
You know how many have said the conservatives are all about projection? And you know how they often blame Hollywood for all sorts of societal ills? I just realized that this is due to their own gullibility: they’ve swallowed whole every Manly Man Conquers the World myth. (I guess those myths were just crammed down their throats.)
Schlemazel
@PurpleGirl:
Seriously? I never notice the Church having much of a problem eliminating Jews during earlier eras.
OzarkHillbilly
@greennotGreen:
Who is the biggest promoter of the Pentagon? Who is it who hates the sequestered driven cuts to the defense budget? Who wants to add 34** more carriers to the Navy? 7,000** F-35s? More tanks? Etc etc etc?
Defeating Sadam’s army WAS a cakewalk. What wasn’t was the occupation that followed when the Iraqi’s did not greet us with sloppy wet kisses as liberators and shower us with oil and petro dollars to pay for the invasion.***
** total exageration as I do not know the actual #s, just that the costs will be in the millions of trillions of $.**
***remember that canard? I still laugh at the absolute delusion of those fools.
Joel
What scares me about Carson is that he makes Trump seem reasonable.
tsquared2001
@Chris:
“that the American public grew more and more divorced from anything resembling war”
There was an interesting Nerdland discussion Sunday morning that addressed this very point. Easy enough to be Audie Murphy when all you know of war are Audie Murphy movies.
RSA
@Chris: It can make you overconfident, having bulls-eyed womp rats in your T-16 back home.
OzarkHillbilly
@greennotGreen: Oooopps- forgot this part
Haven’t you learned yet that cognitive dissonance is no obstacle to the conservative mind?
tsquared2001
@greennotGreen: Conservatives are on their knees getting those myths shoved down their throats and they LIKE it.
bemused
On schedule is the right wing outrage about the movement to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day. Nine US cities including Minneapolis and St. Paul and several MN communities have done this. Rightwing commenters are really upset that liberals want to “demonize” Columbus.
Always, always downplaying, ignoring uncomfortable historical facts and rewriting them to fit their own fantasies.
Gator90
@Betty Cracker: Considerably greater than it has been lately. Dunno how the rest of the season will play out, but it’s nice to be able to get excited again and feel like the program is in good hands.
SFAW
@beltane:
Are you trying to say that Nazis weren’t like those lovable guys like Schultz and Klink in Hogan’s Heroes? But I saw it on TV, it must be true!
greennotGreen
@tsquared2001: Hahaha!
Seriously, though, I think one of the characteristics that predisposes someone to be a conservative is a need for reality to be black and white. “This is the way things are. The good guys wear white hats. Truth, justice, and the American way.” The myths feed that need for certainty.
I don’t know whether those of us who are progressive are just more comfortable with uncertainty and shades of grey, or are we just more in touch with reality which insists on being filled with continuums.
SFAW
@Chris:
And that’s why you should vote for Baud! 2016
ETA: OK, Baud, now where’s my 5 bucks?
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: Better than being a Mizzou Tiger.
gelfling545
@Baud: Yes, we had not reached the point, at that time, at which entertainers were to be considered the best possible candidates. candidates.
greennotGreen
@SFAW: Somewhat OT:
In The Big Chill one of the characters says about life, “No one said it was going to be fun.” I quoted that to my sister, and she replied,”Yes, they did!” And she’s sort of right. When we were growing up in the early sixties, TV showed us Donna Reed, Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet. After that, real life can be a rude awakening. I don’t think the proper response is to simply choose a different set of TV shows for guidance, or to rail against those who live in color instead of black and white.
Patrick
@bemused:
Shouldn’t they also be outraged that it is Columbus Day and not Leif Erikson day…
SFAW
@bemused:
Coming soon to a wingnut station near you: “I think all them Injuns should get Green Cards or H-1Bs if they want to work here! If not, they should go back where they came from!”
boatboy_srq
@OzarkHillbilly: However much the Reichwing reveres the DoD, there’s a thread running continuously through their mythmaking that it only takes a handful of Really Special Heroes to achieve their ends. They may pump trillions into the MIL – but at the end of the day it’s not the 7th Fleet or the 82nd Airborne that wins their mythical battles but one guy with a fvckton of munitions, one ship with just the right captain, or one squadron of pilots who are magically able to hit their targets when everyone else misses. Independence Day, Battleship, Pacific Rim, Rambo… all their great heroic battles may use the big MilInd machine, but there’s never the great mass of warriors who get celebrated – just a handful of those Extra Special people.
I’m not saying that they don’t deify the armed forces – just that their myths don’t revolve around the big military structures that are necessary to their battles anywhere near as much as the handful of Genuine Ahmurrcan Heroes that they convince themselves win the battles all by themselves.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
And yet, to hear the wingnuts tell it, Obummer has destroyed the Armed Forces of the United States.
Schlemazel
@greennotGreen:
One of the mass killers of the early 70s (Richard Stark? I forget) when asked why he did it said, “My mother was not like Donna Reed”
I know my family life was nothing like Father Knows Best or Leave It To Beaver & thought we must be broken. When I got older I discovered nobody is like that and “broken” is normal.
tsquared2001
@bemused: I was at the protest when the Washington football team played in the Super Bowl at the Dome.
Clyde Bellecourt called out a black Washington fan walking by: How would you like a team named Nig? The fan almost lost his mind – was ready to throw down despite the police presence.
To be honest, I was shook. How could that fan NOT see the parallels?
Chris
@greennotGreen:
Co-signed.
tsquared2001
@greennotGreen: Well, this particular progressive is completely okay with continuums, conundrums, perplexities and nuances – all that good shit.
Life can be a wonderful tapestry. It is the whole fucking point of living.
tsquared2001
@Patrick: Leif Erickson Day is October 9th. No WAY that guy gets two days.
Belafon
@tsquared2001: I tried showing my mom the parallels between racism and sexism and she couldn’t see the connection.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
And whenever they meet a soldier or veteran who doesn’t fit their mythical image, they spit on him. It’s why Donald Trump could diss McCain for having gotten shot down and have every one of his supporters with the little “Support Our Troops!” ribbons go wild. The fact that that’s what happens when you’re at war isn’t something they’re interested in registering; it messes with their little fantasy that if only we’d cut Rambo loose and “let him win,” Vietnam would be ours.
Woodrowfan
@tsquared2001:
The Washington Redskins should play in a league with the San Francisco Chinks, the Newark Wops, the Chicago Polacks, the Cincinnati Briars, the San Antonio Wetbacks, the Boston Ofays and the Atlanta Colored Boys. Gad. I live in the DC area and despise that damn team and its racist name.
boatboy_srq
@SFAW: Agreed. But all they mean by that is that the likelihood that those Real Ahmurrcan Heroes are drawing unemployment instead of learning to fly the planes and shoot the guns that are needed to defeat today’s Great Evil is higher, and that by not sending the US armed forces everywhere that Bad People are doing thing so they can shoot/bomb/nuke/whatever the bad guys the likelihood that the Real Ahmurrcan Heroes will have their shot is nearly impossible. not that the DoD is somehow destroyed.
OzarkHillbilly
@boatboy_srq: Again, the conservative mind is on a first name basis with cognitive dissonance. They can hold 2 opposing thoughts in their mind and feel absolutely no discomfort. Kind of like standing on an overpass waving an America flag with one hand and a Confederate flag with the other. Or having a “Don’t tread on Me” bumper sticker they got after sending $35 in dues to an organization who’s main backers do exactly that every day. Like declaring themselves to be ‘pro-life’ while celebrating the execution of yet another murderer. Or saying they are fervent believers in Freedom of Religion and then going to an anti Islam protest. Or telling Gov’t to keep it’s hands off their Medicare. And it goes on. And on. And on.
Of course, conservatives aren’t the only ones afflicted with cognitive dissonance.
Matt McIrvin
@bemused: The funny thing is, Columbus Day started out mostly as a holiday celebrating an immigrant community, Italian-Americans. It turned into an official holiday as a kind of outreach.
These days, we have enough actual Italian-Americans who have done great things that it’s probably superfluous to celebrate this Genoese guy who did terrible things for the monarchs of Spain.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: The single most remarkable thing about the all-volunteer armed forces the US employs today is that the Real Ahmurrcan Heroes the Reichwing worship are simultaneously those Other People that the US would be better off without. The career military are disproportionately POCs, disproportionately following the career because their opportunities in uniform are better than those in the private sector rat race, and not infrequently coming from Those Neighborhoods. They’re superhuman – and they’re disposable.
tsquared2001
@Belafon: Lessons from my Dad: that is how The Man wants it. You can NEVER have anybody connecting the dots.
Woodrowfan
@boatboy_srq: empires like to use the “uncivilized” folk from the borders of their society as troops.
AnderJ
@gene108: I stand corrected and informed :)
greennotGreen
@OzarkHillbilly:
Like declaring themselves to be ‘pro-life’ while celebrating the execution of yet another
murderer.person convicted of murder whether guilty or not.FTFY.
bystander
@OzarkHillbilly: Or a Wash U. Bear.
Li’l Luke Russert just told us that Ryan may take the SOTH if the “conservatives” will agree not to gangteam him the way they did Boehner. “Conservative” because they can’t say ” batsh*t crazy” on tv? They sure love to euphemize for these nuts.
He then extolled the virtues of Ryan and how he did an awesome job producing budgets that actually got passed by the House. Li’l Luke failed to mention the repubs hold the House and the budgets failed except as target practice by real economists.
SFAW
@OzarkHillbilly:
Both sides do it?
Cervantes
@cmorenc:
Some questions:
1. What is “Gandhi-like pacifism”? What is “peaceful Gandhi-like resistance”? What specific actions did Gandhi advocate in the face of British depredations?
2. Whatever Gandhi advocated, how was it different from (or similar to) what Jews did in Nazi Germany?
3. Was Gandhi ever asked about what Jews in Nazi Germany should do? What did he say?
4. How did you deal with these questions while formulating the one you posed to Baez? How did Baez deal with these questions while answering yours?
boatboy_srq
@OzarkHillbilly: Oh, no argument on the cognitive dissonance part. It’s all too obvious. I guess going out to see The Martian (Regal cinema; Fox picture. Ugh.) over the weekend hammered home to me how thoroughly the RWNM drives the Lone Hero phenomenon.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
More on this –
Krugman’s blog had a great post a few years ago (which I can’t find anymore) about the myth of the American heroes taking on the Vast Faceless Enemy Military Machine with nothing but balls and awesomeness (think Indiana Jones attacking a battle tank with a horse, whip, and six-shooter) and how ingrained it had become in our pop culture… but how, in real life, it was usually the opposite. In the Civil War, in World War Two, in the Gulf War, it was the U.S. Army that drowned its opponents under a never-ending deluge of weapons and ammunition that Just Kept Coming no matter how many you destroyed.
Also: as much as I hate the movie otherwise, I still think the beginning of Gone With The Wind has one of the best commentaries on the wingnut mentality. When all of Scarlet’s family is itching to go to war and show those GodDamYankees how Real Men fight, and Rhett Butler mentions that the North is full of these things called “factories” that produce things called “guns,” “cannons,” and other military supplies. “Well, what difference does that make, sir, to a gentleman?” “I’m afraid it’s going to make a great deal of difference to a great many gentlemen!”
boatboy_srq
@Woodrowfan: One reason I’m becoming persuaded that the Draft is necessary after all. If it’s their sons/daughters/husbands/wives going off to fight they might just stop and think for a minute.
Cervantes
@tsquared2001:
Try asking people to imagine a soccer team in present-day Germany called the “Munich Jewboys.”
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: The Bowe Bergdahl incident really depressed and appalled me. Never mind the question of whether the guy was a deserter; maybe he was. That was properly a matter for the court-martial.
But they didn’t want him to get a court-martial. These people who fly POW-MIA “Bring Them Home” flags all over the place immediately decided that we should have made an exception for this American soldier, and just left him to die, because he and his family were off script. They smeared his family, too, wrote stupid stuff about how his dad looked like a terrorist for having the same beard as Phil Robertson. And it was even an immediate turnaround from the situation prior to his return.
As far as I can tell it was mostly because his folks went on TV and thanked Obama.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Schlemazel:
I think you missed PurpleGirl’s point. The invalids and mentally disabled who were killed by the Nazis under “Action T4” weren’t killed because of their ethnicity, they were killed because they were a drain on the resources of the state. In retrospect, they were lab rats for the Nazis to test out the most efficient methods of mass killing that they later put into effect in the extermination camps.
And, yes, religious groups in Germany complained about Action T4, which is why Jews and other “undesirables” were whisked away and disappeared rather than being openly shot on the streets of Berlin. Germans (and other “civilized” Europeans like the French and Dutch) were okay with Jews, Gypsies, etc being permanently disposed of as long as they didn’t have to see or think about it.
Cervantes
@Matt McIrvin:
Appalling is exactly what it was to me as well.
On the other hand, there’s not a lot these people do that isn’t.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
I guess that’s a little better than the “Nuremberg Judenraus.”
tsquared2001
@Woodrowfan: I had a summer job where I supervised a group of Native Americans and the office where I picked them up at had the NCAI poster with those same logos.
Like with alcoholics, it was a moment of clarity.
OzarkHillbilly
@greennotGreen: Yep. I meant to correct that and forgot. Thanx.
OzarkHillbilly
@SFAW: Oh definitely. I’ve been caught at it a time or 2. It’s embarrassing but necessary if one is going to learn to critique one’s own arguments before opening the mouth.
tsquared2001
@Cervantes: I was in Kansas City recently and had the opportunity to visit the Negro Baseball Hall of Fame. The Alabama Black Crackers jersey really made me laugh. Bitter laughter but laughter nonetheless.
Cacti
There was also a real example of armed Jewish resistance to the Third Reich.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
From April 19 to May 16, 1943, about 1,000 fighters from various resistance groups rose up to oppose the liquidation of the Ghetto, and their forced relocation to the Treblinka death camp.
It was crushed ruthlessly, at a cost of about 17 Germans killed and 93 wounded.
Amir Khalid
@Cervantes:
Well, FC Bayern München, which had Jewish management, coaches, players, and fans, was known as a Jewish club in pre-World War II times, and was targeted by the Third Reich because of that association.
Woodrowfan
@boatboy_srq: I agree. of course it’s easy to agree now, I am well past draft age and then some. but I do worry that the volunteer military had added an unhealthy distance between the people and the armed force sin many ways.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
I had a conservative phase as an early teenager (blame the phase of reading too many technothrillers and the like). This kind of behavior was one of the earliest, possibly the earliest sign that warned me to get away from that ideology. In Tom Clancy novels, it might be liberals who hated the military, refused to serve, and spit on those who did. But in real life? The people I saw spitting on Max Cleland, on John Kerry, on Al Gore, were all wingnuts, wingnuts who were rallying enthusiastically behind draft-dodgers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Paul in KY
@MattF: They put the camps in Eastern Europe because:
1) Most Jews were in the USSR
2) Poland was rabidly anti-Semitic.
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: You were a bad 20 year old to ask a stoned folk singer to think, man!
tsquared2001
O/T but Sideways is one really stupid movie. Virginia Madsen is the only likable character and even she needs a slap upside the head.
greennotGreen
@tsquared2001: Remember the Fighting Whites/ Fightin’ Whities of University of North Colorado? Their name became so popular that they sold enough tee shirts to endow a scholarship for Native Americans. The point being, it’s difficult to insult those with secure social standing and power. Perhaps Native Americans’ reaction to various references to them as sports mascots would be different if their experience in American culture were one of unalloyed success, if everyone saw Native Americans as strong and brave and smart and there were no downsides. Is anybody complaining about the New England Patriots? The UMass Minutemen? The Fighting Irish? The Minnesota Vikings? No, because those all represent people who came out on top.
Some guy
The tripe up above is the most ahistorical reading of the German CP I have read in ages. The ghost of rabid anti communism never really leaves the liberal wing of American Democratic Party consensus, it just morphs into new, more “truthy” historical avenues. Feh!
Go Gators
cmorenc
@Paul in KY:
Well, it was a sincere question asked by a stoned 20yo who can’t sing even in the shower, asked of a stoned folk singer who definitely could sing like an angel in front of large crowds. A very naive, if very principled angel she was at that time.
coin operated
@gene108:
Yes…I do. I didn’t have a “you gotta be shitting me” emoji readily available then or now.
BobS
@beltane: The Nazis relied on their collaborators in Ukraine, the homegrown fascists of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), to sweat the details of the liquidation of Jews and Poles in that country. Following the war, the anti-Communist operatives of the OUN (who had fled Ukraine for Germany when the Soviet Union took back western Ukraine) became valuable assets for the OSS/CIA, which sponsored the immigration of many OUN members (as well as other European fascists/anti-Communists) to the US (& Canada) where, with financial backing from the CIA, their propaganda (in the form of newspapers, historical societies, lectures, etc.) have transformed those murderous fascists into heroic anti-Communist freedom fighters.
Today a resurgent OUN, led by Mykola Kokhanivsky (who favors the suspension of democracy in Ukraine and the establishment of a nationalist dictatorship), is just one of a network of fascist/ultranationalist organizations that have thrived in Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and were instrumental in the Maidan coup in 2014, a coup of course cheered by the right in the US (with the notable exception of some of the clearer thinkers like Daniel Larison) as well as many on the left who are only too happy to support whatever foreign policy folly a Democratic president contrives.
Patrick
@tsquared2001:
I think you missed my point. Columbus, who wasn’t first to discover our part of the world has a federal holiday named after him. Leif Erikson has a proclamation day. Big whoop. They should be demanding Leif Erikson has a federal holiday named after him. If they were consistent in their beliefs…
coin operated
@Schlemazel:
What my kool-aide drinking friends don’t understand is that by the time Bundy happened, Obama the Tyrant would have been in office for 6 years and would have already replaced anyone in the officer corps that didn’t side with him as Oppressor in Chief.
gvg
The American Revolution had a bunch of amateurs beat the Great Power of the time Britain for it’s freedom so you have to take that into account. Of course, the facts were we were acting in concert with many other rebels not as individuals, the colonies hadn’t been as profitable as investors had wanted (the spanish found gold) and Britain had a rival closer at hand that was pretty actively aggressive at the time and France actually helped fund us in order to cost Britain. This screws with the facts that I can’t think of another historical example and I am sure it was hopeless for the German Jews.
Another problem for a Jewish resistance is they would not have had covert assistance from the general population which was pretty anti sematic in the first place. Another reason so many died, was there was no good place for them to go. Other countries didn’t want them and the nearest got invaded. Recall that America famously refused a whole ship load that roamed around trying to find refuge and then ended up returning to Germany, with death for many. We were pretty antisematic ourselves before the revelations after WWII. Some of our actions since are real guilt. they used to teach us about it in school. I wonder if they do now?
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Throughout the 1930s, as removals increased, a few individual priests voiced objections but the church itself, through its leaders, said next to nothing. At the time of the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, Cardinal Bertram told the archbishops that the church should not comment on “measures directed against an interest group which has no very close bond with the church,” Cardinal Faulhaber told the Bavarian bishops that the Catholic Church had more important things to be concerned with. The morning after the November 1938 nationwide pogrom in which hundreds of synagogues had been burned and destroyed, about 20,000 Jews had been arrested and 36 Jews were killed, and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were pillaged, Provost Lichtenberg of Berlin publicly offered prayers for the persecuted Jews, but the bishops of Germany said nothing at all.
At what time did the Catholic Church publicly (or privately for that matter) complain about the extermination programs against any group?
Cacti
@BobS:
Bob old bean!
Still fighting the good fight for Vlad and Novorossiya, I see.
Cervantes
@SFAW:
Years before Kristallnacht, some enterprising Nazi made up a board game called Juden Raus!
(“Raus!” means “Out!”)
cmorenc
@Cervantes:
You ask some excellent questions about my Q&A encounter with Joan Baez, but not only was that long ago and far away, but as noted in my reply to Paul in KY above that was a question asked of a stoned folk singer by a stoned 20yo, and so the exact details of the question and answer are…a bit fuzzy, but the gist of my question and her response I gave in an earlier post is dead-on accurate, so memorable was the moment even though I don’t remember exact details. She was a hippie goddess to people like me back then, and so I vividly recall being taken aback by the glaring naivete of her answer (but I still retained a crush on her back then anyway).
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@BobS:
Why am I not surprised to see you spouting ahistorical propaganda? Perhaps you need to read some of the latest scholarship about the Holocaust and the Einsatzgruppen rather than relying on Russia Today for your information:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/blood-and-soil
Chris
@Cacti:
YOU’RE A FASCIST.
Just getting that out of the way.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: Movies from the 30s, and from the period between after the WW2 jingoism died died down and before Morning-in-America herofests, were a lot more pragmatic in their coverage of such things. Another reason to despise the Reichwing: the dumbing-down of the cultural dialogue.
Schlemazel
@coin operated:
Please don’t try to bring rationality into this! I remember the nutbags claiming 3 generals had boarded a plane for Washington and were going to physically remove Clinton from office but that Clinton had the plane shot down over the US. This was all hushed up by the liberal media of course.
Pointing out things like “who shot the plane down if the military was all set for a coup?” or “How did this plane wreckage manage to fall to earth and have nobody anywhere see it?” made their little heads pop.
beltane
@gvg: Pre-war Jewish agitators against the Nazi regime would have been regarded as Bolshevik terrorists by both the British and American public, not to mention the German public. Just look at the reaction of white America to Black Lives Matter to see how well even a rhetorical battle against racism is tolerated by a racist majority.
tsquared2001
@greennotGreen: No, I was completely ignorant of a team called the Fighting Whities. Own your privilege, University of Northern Colorado – own that shit.
That said, I will probably giggling over that name the rest of the day. Picturing a logo of ragged tightie whities right now
Schlemazel
@BobS:
Does the “S” stand for “steel”?
A little Russian joke
beltane
@Patrick: Leif Erikson Day sounds fun. We can all run around wearing Viking helmets.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Schlemazel:
They complained about the extermination of the mentally ill and disabled in Germany. Is that not a “group”?
I’m not going to defend the actions of the Catholic Church towards Jews in WWII, because their actions (and non-actions) are indefensible. The sole comment is that they did complain about *the disabled* being executed, which was part of what led the Nazis to choose to export Jews and other undesirables for murder rather than doing it openly.
Frankensteinbeck
@bemused:
How dare anyone not want to celebrate a man who preferred nine year old girls when he shipped Native Americans back to Europe as slaves.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Cognitive dissonance does not mean what you think it means. This is one of those cases where a popular misunderstanding is so strong, it has corrupted the Wikipedia page. Ask any psych professional: Humans believe contradictory things as a base state, and have to work to spot and fix inconsistencies. The ‘Ben Franklin effect’? That is actual cognitive dissonance. It’s an example of basic irrationality, not basic rationality.
Matt McIrvin
@Cervantes: When I visited Germany in 1991, I remember TURKEN RAUS being a disturbingly popular thing to scrawl on walls and bridges.
BobS
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Of course Nazi eugenicists took their inspiration from the late 19th & early 20th century American pioneers of the movement. Hitler’s ‘successes’ were lauded by leading American eugenicists.
tsquared2001
@Patrick: I think you missed that it was a remark made in jest. Plus, fuck those norske torskes sonsabitches. Being from Minnesota, I am surrounded by that nonsense.
SenyorDave
@SFAW: Are you trying to say that Nazis weren’t like those lovable guys like Schultz and Klink in Hogan’s Heroes? But I saw it on TV, it must be true!
I see nothink
Hogannnnnn!
bemused
@Chris:
I agree. I see this play out in my most kind-hearted, rational, intelligent Republican friends. These are not ignorant people. They tend to be more fearful of things that I consider minor in importance and don’t give a second thought to. They have a more difficult time adapting to change especially if it veers too far from their yes/no, black/white belief that the world has always worked “this” way and how it should always work.
I’m getting more and more convinced there are differences in DNA, amygdala or other brain functions that we are born with.
RobertB
@cmorenc: Joan Baez’s version of “Joe Hill” on the Woodstock album is pretty good, though, stoned war protester or not. :)
Chris
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
I don’t know if this was the entire Catholic Church or just parts of it, but I remember reading that there were quite a few of them who took in Jewish children and swore to God with their fingers crossed behind their backs that they were Catholic orphans so the Nazis wouldn’t take them…
… And then, when the war was over, refused to return these children to their parents, lest their now sanctified Catholic souls be endangered by exposure to Jewish ungodliness.
Belafon
@gvg: We were doing crappy until the French came over and taught our troop how to act like an army.
? Martin
@Cacti: People miss the real lessons from Warsaw. After the uprising started, German forces went door to door and killed every civilian in parts of the city. They then burned the city to the ground. 150K-200K civilians were killed in retaliation. And that was part of a familiar pattern. A year earlier the German forces executed every male over the age of 15 in the town of Lidice, sent the women and children to concentration camps and were gassed, and the town was burned and leveled. This was in response to an SS commander being killed by Czech resistance forces.
Jews weren’t the only ones to not fight back. The consequences of resisting were severe. Germany got the message out early – ‘you may be able to kill a few of us, but we are a massive army and genocide is within our capabilities’. France gave in because they knew the German army would have had no qualms about executing a million civilians and burning Paris to the ground. Had nothing to do with whether or not the civilians had handguns.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
Well, it’s actually an abbreviated version of “heraus,” which in itself has been used improperly from time to time (i.e., used instead of “hinaus.”) “Aus” is the part of it that means “out,” by the way.
Aren’t you glad you asked?
Be that as it may: I didn’t know about that game. Depressing.
Patrick
@tsquared2001:
Sorry. Too early on a Monday morning…
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@boatboy_srq:
Examination of the costs of WWII was quashed within a couple of years of the end of the war with the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations into whether Hollywood was “prematurely anti-fascist” (which the studio heads used to try and unsuccessfully squash the then-nascent Writer’s Guild and other unions). You have “The Best Years of Our Lives” and that’s about it.
tsquared2001
@Schlemazel:
“At what time did the Catholic Church publicly (or privately for that matter) complain about the extermination programs against any group?”
Shorter: never.
BobS
@Cacti: Yep, that’s what I’m doing. By the way, aren’t you that same guy who was accusing me of fighting the good fight for Ho Chi Minh, Daniel Ortega, Slobadan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein?
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@BobS:
And the Nuremburg Laws were based on Jim Crow laws. As far as the Nazis were concerned, they were merely improving on what other “civilized” countries were doing when they chose mass slaughter.
The U.S. was still legally but involuntarily sterilizing mental patients and the retarded until the 1970s.
PurpleGirl
@Schlemazel: I forget what the the program was called but it involved establishing a school/hospital for the mentally disabled and mentally ill. The Nazis used it as an experiment in how to kill people. When it was figured out what was happening the Catholic Church loudly objected to it. Even one of Hitler’s distant cousins was killed because of her mental disability at the “school”. They were killing fellow Germans and the Church objected to that. This project wasn’t against Jews per se but against “undesirables”.
tsquared2001
@Patrick: I’m just happy I can engage with you good folks, because normally, I am just a Balloon Juice lurker.
And now, I have outed myself.
beltane
@Belafon: There was also a widespread belief among British elites that India would be a far more profitable addition to the Empire than the American colonies.
The only things that could have stopped the Nazi killing machine were 1) Complete and total military defeat; 2) The overthrow of the Nazi regime by the German people. Since #2 did not happen, we were left with #1 and the loss of tens of millions of lives.
Cervantes
@cmorenc:
That’s all fine — and sure, it was obvious — but what it means is that we can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever from that episode about anything Gandhi may have said or its applicability to Jews in Nazi Germany.
Anyhow, I’ve always liked the Baez sisters, and their parents, too.
scav
@Belafon: You Forgot Poland! Casmir Pulaski helped too.
SFAW
@Schlemazel:
Wouldn’t it be “C”? Or, if you’re making the joke I think you are, “D”?
tsquared2001
@Belafon: The whole Freedom Fries crap during Iraq: The Sequel really pissed off my inner historian. Without French assistance, who know what accents or language we would be speaking now?
BobS
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Thanks for the link to the “latest scholarship” of the New Yorker, but it doesn’t exactly disprove the reality of Ukrainian fascism, either then or now.
Chris
@tsquared2001:
Without the French to help us gain our independence, our language might never have evolved to the point where a Belgian food was erroneously labeled as French.
beltane
@tsquared2001: Without French assistance we would probably have a Canadian style health care system. It seems the French have really hated us all along.
SFAW
@scav:
And YOU forgot that guy what built a bridge in NYC!
Tadek Gesundheit, or something like that. I think they pronounce his name a little differently on the traffic reports, something like “Goes-to-Costco.”
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Our culture has almost totally forgotten the lobotomy craze of the mid-century US. Your local doctor could do it with an ice pick, if your wife was too emotional!
Belafon
@scav: Thanks, adding to my memory list.
tsquared2001
@Chris: Hahahaha. Oh, that made me chuckle.
@beltane And this one too! The Frogs – what can you do?
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: I think you were ‘disrupting the narrative’ or to put it in mellowspeak ™ ‘harshing the buzz’.
Woodrowfan
@beltane: @bemused: I have noticed the exact same thing. “Doesn’t X bother you?” they say.
um, nope.
the type of people for which pressing 1 for English is disconcerting.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@BobS:
It’s 1941. Germany has invaded the USSR. Which brutal, murderous dictator do you choose, Hitler or Stalin?
There is not a third choice, so please defend Josef Stalin as the clearly superior moral choice in that situation, keeping in mind that Stalin killed at least twice as many of his own citizens as Hitler did, many millions of them in “rebellious” areas like Ukraine.
boatboy_srq
@Mnemosyne (tablet): In today’s sorry-excuse-for-dialogue, that makes Fascist the new Commie, yes?
Paul in KY
@? Martin: Wasn’t just any SS Commander, was Reihard Heydrich, head of the NSDAP, a very evil subset of the SS & intelligence services.
Thank God he was very narcissistic & drove around in an open car.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Frankensteinbeck:
There’s a new book out about Rosemary Kennedy that’s really heartbreaking. The lobotomy that her parents forced on her also impaired her mobility and put her in a wheelchair. Her siblings never knew what had happened to her until Joe Kennedy died and they were able to track her down.
Roger Moore
@beltane:
Once the Nazis were well in control, #2 was extremely unlikely; the people who didn’t like the Nazis were living in constant and justified fear of the Gestapo, to the point that active resistance was all but impossible. About the only way the Nazi regime was going to be overthrown from within was by a military coup, and that wasn’t going to happen until the military was facing inevitable defeat anyway.
bemused
@Frankensteinbeck:
This same commenter ranted writing:
Why treaties matter–but all lives don’t matter–but the 2nd Amendment doesn’t matter–but only black lives matter and several more predictable wingnut grudges.
When he attended a university, he claimed he worked to help increase preparedness, retention and graduation rates of American Indians interested in STEM degrees. At the same time, he said he has nothing against Native American/Indigenous American/Whatever Politically Correct Indian Day but he had never heard from his American Indian “friends” that it was a top priority of theirs.
No dissonance or condescension going on with this guy.
I have a pretty good idea how he feels about MLK day.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
Which are both liberal affiliations, apparently
father pussbucket
@Roger Moore:
I salute you, sir.
BobS
@Mnemosyne (tablet): So what you’re saying is that the OUN were actually just the good, live-and-let-live variety of European fascists (and really, weren’t most of them?), who just had the misfortune of getting in the middle of a turf war between Stalin and Hitler? Your insights are invaluable, you being familiar with the “latest scholarship” and all.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
And some of the reason Ukraine was rebellious at the time is because Stalin had recently engineered a famine there that killed several million people. And the Russians wonder why so few of their former imperial possessions see them favorably today.
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne (tablet): I would pick Stalin, as the ideology he operated from was less evil than the Nazi ideology, IMO.
This is sort of like choosing between tetanus & diphtheria.
Cervantes
@SFAW:
That’s all good. I was just trying to clarify in response to your invocation of “Nuremberg Judenraus.”
About that board game, Juden Raus!: It was set in Dresden. “Gelingt es Dir 6 Juden rauszujagen, so bist Du Sieger ohne zu fragen!” (“Chase 6 Jews [out of the city] and you win the game!”) Also: “Auf nach Palästina!” (Off to Palestine [with them]!) After Kristallnacht, the publishers, well, let’s just say they made a killing, by offering the game for sale at a hefty discount.
If (or when) you’re in New York, you can see a copy of the game board on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, near Battery Park.
Needless to say, we’ve had our own repulsive entertainments here in the US. Do you by any chance remember the board game from the ’50s called “Gunsmoke”?
celticdragonchick
@Woodrowfan:
You forgot the Philadelphia Bohunks, the New York Dagos, the LA Spics (I heard that all the time as a kid in California), the Miami Raft Jockeys, the San Diego Scratch Backs, and the Seattle Tomahawk Chuckers.
If we put half the energy of dreaming up racial insults into something useful. we would be far better off.
celticdragonchick
@Cervantes:
yeah, we had that in our house when I was a kid.
Frankensteinbeck
@Paul in KY:
That is a hard, hard choice. Stalin was less hungry for world conquest, although not by much. On the other hand, his ideology was actually worse, and the deaths by famine and destruction he wreaked on education and economic infrastructure in Russia are hard to imagine. Mao was even worse than that, but only mildly expansionistic.
Chris
@celticdragonchick:
Racial Slur Database reveals that virtually every ethnic group has a slur that consists of “[insert item stereotypically associated with that group] n*gger.”
Which 1) is a grand testament to how UNimagibitive racists are and 2) is a whole commentary on the role our culture assigns to black people right there.
Paul in KY
@Frankensteinbeck: I don’t think his ideology was worse at all. When you look at it on paper, a complete rejection of predatory Capitalism & having everyone live as a giant commune was surely less repugnant than Deutchland Uber Alles & extermination of the untermenschen.
At least it is to this old hippy.
Joseph Nobles
Columbus Day is a product of lobbying by Italian immigrants. Leif Erickson Day replacing it would not really be the same thing. How about making it Philip Mazzei Day? Never heard of him? He’s the guy that first said “All men are created equal” to Thomas Jefferson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Mazzei
SFAW
@Cervantes:
Amazingly enough, not every attempt at humor (of a sort) needs an excessively pedantic response. Especially if you’re not going to get it right.
I guess, at some level, I’m appreciative of the historical stuff. But sometimes you remind me of the observation regarding “Is anal-retentive hyphenated?”
Adam L Silverman
@beltane: We forget that in the 1938 elections somewhere around 2/3 of everyone running for office at the local, state, and federal levels ran on openly pro-fascist and/or pro-NAZI and/or anti-Semitic and/or isolationist and/or nativist platforms. And that we were only about five years on from a clandestine attempt to silently overthrow FDR’s Administration by pro-fascist business interests and corporate leaders who sought to leverage the anger within veteran’s groups over their treatment in regards to the delayed WW I bonus payments. Fortunately Major General Butler wouldn’t play ball.
Adam L Silverman
@Botsplainer: Yes, but… Different understanding of how to fight and what to fight for and when to fight. Until an external threat emerges, it is very hard to get the various and different Pashtu khels to cooperate.
BobS
@Frankensteinbeck: Fortunately Hitler spared Roosevelt that “hard, hard choice” (it’s my understanding advisers were split on using a coin toss or rock-paper-scissors to decide) by declaring war on the US.
Adam L Silverman
@Schlemazel: My informed take on this is that without a genuine emergency and threat to/on American soil, the active and reserve components would not go along because they are prevented, by law, from active operations on US soil. The Guard is a different beast because of Title 10 versus Title 32, but here too I doubt that the military would go along with being used as a force to impose tyranny in/on America.
Adam L Silverman
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Here you go:
http://listverse.com/2013/08/19/10-incredible-cases-of-jewish-resistance-during-the-holocaust/
knock yourself out.
Frankensteinbeck
@Paul in KY:
That was Lenin’s ideology. Stalin’s expanded to include repudiation of all science, the inherent evil of the educated, an all-inclusive ‘the ends justify the means’ where humans as individuals had no value except as part of the Communist Struggle, the duty to forcibly bring the rest of the world under the heel of Soviet rule, the inferiority of various ethnicities, and of course ‘they’re all out to get me, so I will kill them first’. Stalin was a piece of work.
I understand that this is a tough choice compared to Germany destiny being rule of the world, the absolute supremacy of the Aryan race, and a few select groups, Jews in particular, being inherently evil and deserving of genocide.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: If you think you’ve lived through it before and you think you know how to survive it, you do what you usually do. And it works until it doesn’t. This time it didn’t. Resistance can also take different forms. It doesn’t always have to be violent resistance. Many tried to keep families together. Or at least get younger members out of harms way. All of these different types of responses count as resistance, even if they’re largely ignored.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
Cite? Not questioning/disagreeing, just had never heard of that, thought it would be interesting to read about.
gocart mozart
@gene108:
Libya has several well armed completely unregulated militias and no Obama supported government is gonna tell them what’s what. How is that working out?
BobS
@gocart mozart: An “Obama supported government” is how Libya arrived at that state.
Adam L Silverman
@Cacti: And the Ghetto was then immediately liquidated and the remaining 50,000 or so Jews sent to the camps and only a handful survived the war.
With the exception of the Bielski brothers, the subject of the movie Defiance, none of the resistance movements had anything but fleeting success and all of them, other than the Bielski’s group, ultimately gave way to the overwhelming superiority of the NAZIs leading to the deaths of themselves and those they were seeking to protect.
Adam L Silverman
@gvg: The American Revolution had external support. The French provided embedded personnel, such as Lafayette, to serve as staff officers, as well as logistical support. We also had Hessian mercenaries fighting for us as well.
The ship you’re referring to was The Haganah Ship MS St. Louis. It originally tried to make port in Cuba, where several of the refugees on board had relatives. After Cuba turned them away they tried to make port in several places in the US and where turned away at all of them. Several European governments agreed to take them in. Of the 900 plus people aboard, including over 200 children, with the exception of those that were granted asylum and refugee status in the UK (around 200), the remainder perished in the camps.
cmorenc
@Paul in KY:
Well, isn’t that the job of 20yo, to “disrupt the narrative” of purportedly authoritative adults (i.e. anyone who seems old enough to no longer be a similar-age peer to us) – except the ones we’ve latched onto as our gurus (until enough bullshit begins visibly peeking through that we decide maybe it’s time to search for a mo’ better guru?)
Thankfully, many of us outgrow this phase when our critical thinking skills and life experience makes us more accepting of the fact that other people can have worthwhile wisdom even while their thinking is significantly flawed in some respects. The GOP does seem short of people with this quality, however.
piratedan
@greennotGreen: well then that makes the current GOP process a lot easier to handle if I just think of the current GOP as a modern day version of F Troop
Rupert Murdoch as Sgt. O’Rourke, Roger Ailes as Corporal Agarn, Mitt Romney as Captain Parmenter, Sarah Palin as Wrangler Jane, our MSM as the Hekawi Tribe…
Cervantes
@SFAW:
Now you’re being silly.
Anyway, I’m out.
Adam L Silverman
@? Martin: I think you may be confusing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising. The latter occurred several months later and was undertaken by the Polish Home Army. In the former they did liquidate and burn the ghetto. In the latter the NAZIs essentially reduced and razed the city.
Paul in KY
@Frankensteinbeck I’m talking about the ‘ideology’ on the books. A lot of what you are stating is Stalin’s personal malevolence (IMO).
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: I’m fine with your comments. Evidently, you threw Ms. Baez off her game with your question.
Adam L Silverman
@SFAW: For the midterm election positions of candidates or for the attempted silent coup?
The latter is delineated in both the biography of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, as well as a couple of other books/articles specifically on the topic. If you do a search for Butler you’ll find it. On the former, I’ll have to poke around later and find it.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@BobS:
No, I’m saying that OUN had a choice between Hitler and Stalin, and it was not the simple “Pick Stalin, duh!” choice you seem to think it was.
Communism and fascism were in opposition to each other, and everyone had to pick sides. The US picked a watered-down version fascism but ended up having to fight the fascists anyway. War is like that sometimes — you end up fighting the people you have the most affinity for.
Though I’d be curious to find out how you think OUN is currently running everything in Ukraine when they keep losing elections. Or is this more of that All Ukranians are Nazis, so therefore anyone elected in Ukraine is a Nazi by definition slight of hand that you love so much.
Hint: declaring that everyone who opposed the USSR was by definition a fascist was how they ran things for decades, and it’s fascinating that you’re still falling for the same old Soviet propaganda now that Vlad is the one wrapping it in pretty paper for you.
SiubhanDuinne
@tsquared2001:
One of the best “Aha!” moments I ever had was when I realized that I was perfectly comfortable hanging out with ambiguity.
BobS
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Yeah, today it’s Vlad doing the gift wrapping, when just the other day it was Saddam, and before him Milosevic, and Noriega, and Ortega, and Ho Chi Minh. As you might have noticed, this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered that simplistic, either-or understanding of the way things work (by the way, don’t forget to lose the gum before you attempt walking).
Please, if you wouldn’t mind, point out exactly where it was I wrote the “OUN is currently running everything in Ukraine”. (Hint: making shit up hollows out an argument).
john fremont
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I also remember a lot of right winger friends eating it up of how Rumsfeld was schooling the media about how the Army will roll up on the Saddam dead enders in Iraq just like we did back in 1945 against those German “Werewolf” units. I asked some of those guys then, how well.do you think you guys could do? They sort of brushed off the question.
john fremont
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I also remember a lot of right winger friends eating it up of how Rumsfeld was schooling the media about how the Army will roll up on the Saddam dead enders in Iraq just like we did back in 1945 against those German “Werewolf” units. I asked some of those guys then, how well.do you think you guys could do? They sort of brushed off the question. @Chris: Also too, don’t forget the Nuge! !! Ted Nugent.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: I suspect that if the US had allied with Hitler instead of Stalin, Stalin would still have won in the long run, and the result would have been Communist Europe at the very least (after a longer and bloodier war).
Consider: many of the crucial scientists in the Manhattan Project were European Jews, Jewish-descended people or otherwise fleeing the Nazis. Where would they have gone, if the US had been Axis? Maybe they just would have died. Maybe they would have gone to Russia. It wasn’t a nice place for Jews to go, but Stalin wasn’t a dummy. One difference between his promotion of scientific crackpottery and Hitler’s was that when the physicists said things like “let us talk about quantum mechanics or no atom bomb for you,” he actually listened.
Bill Murray
@bemused:
and in, South Dakotas, a whole state neighboring Minnesota, today is Native American Day
Bill Murray
@Betty Cracker:
you mean with Will Grier suspended for a year?
RobertB
@john fremont: As a teenager in the 70’s, I was a big Ted Nugent fan. I don’t recall much of anything about his politics. but I wasn’t following politics much back then at age 16. I remember he used to brag on his draft-avoiding story, he was big into bowhunting, and he bragged on being the Alpha Male of his band (even though he had his rhythm guitarist doing a lot of the lead singing).
Fast forward to 2015, and now he’s in contention for Biggest Asshole On The Planet – and there’s a _lot_ of competition in that field. I always wonder if I should still like “Stranglehold”, even though it’s Ted.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
I guess I was looking for both, but the Butler pointer is a good start for me. Thanks!
BobS
@RobertB: Yes, you should still like Stranglehold. It’s a good song, even though it’s Ted Nugent. It would definitely be on the relatively short list of good songs by musicians who are right-wing assholes.
Paul in KY
@Bill Murray: Typical cheating Gators. I should have known when their QB ran for a touchdown while holding one of our guys in his mouth like a chew toy.
For shame, Betty!
Schlemazel
@SFAW:
It was a Stalin joke. Stalin was “Steel”
Others:
I can’t find any reference to an official church complaint about the institutionalization of “defectives”. As with the Jews there were scattered priests who complained (and some ended up paying the ultimate price) but I can’t find any record of the German bishops or the church as an institution complaining. I have looked but am going to need references please.
Adam L Silverman
@SFAW:
Here’s a couple of quick links to stuff on Butler. The primary manuscript/book on the failed coup:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Plot-Seize-White-House/dp/1602390363/ref=pd_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0SGZ8YD4QYJPHKJPHQJ0&dpID=5104A3yFm4L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR107%2C160_
A review of the book:
http://www.eclectica.org/v1n1/reviews/wharton_plot.html
For pro-fascist attitudes in the 20s and 30s, start here:
http://www.amazon.com/Under-Shadow-War-Larry-Ceplair/dp/0231065329/ref=la_B001IXO838_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444675076&sr=1-5&refinements=p_82%3AB001IXO838
https://books.google.com/books?id=7ccjJauxjlIC&pg=PA196&lpg=PA196&dq=were+the+platforms+of+candidates+in+the+1936+US+elections+pro-fascist&source=bl&ots=IOoyaQ3wEm&sig=3qdJfDkTpknO0pb7OTu6KrkvRYk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBGoVChMIkrms4sm9yAIVhTweCh2s7wlJ#v=onepage&q&f=false
For the candidates positions, there’s this:
http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1965033100
about covers everything from the 20s through the 60s.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/23/us/how-nazis-tried-to-steer-us-politics.html?pagewanted=all
though it deals more with events going into the 1940 election.
What you’re looking for is material on the American Liberty League, which was behind the failed coup that Major General Butler foiled:
http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/how-fdr-took-forces-wealth-and-power
http://web.mit.edu/21h.102/www/Primary%20source%20collections/The%20New%20Deal/American%20Liberty%20League,%20New%20Deal%20vs%20Democracy.htm
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=american_liberty_league_1
And Father Coughlin’s Christian Front (the Crypto-fascists):
http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/THR-CF7.PDF
http://forumonpublicpolicy.com/spring09papers/archivespr09/fein.pdf
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005516
http://www.jta.org/1942/01/11/archive/investigation-of-christian-front-asked-by-anti-nazi-league
An interesting side note – it was Coughlin who came up with/coined the term politically correct. He told his followers that when they were speaking with people that may not also be crypto-fascists that they were to be politically correct in their speech until they could determine if it was safe to speak freely about their beliefs and positions.
A lot of this was caught up in, quite simply, reactionary responses to the New Deal:
http://tdl.org/txlor-dspace/bitstream/handle/2249.3/164/04_rctns_nw_dl.htm?sequence=7
You’re also looking for stuff on The America First Committee – who supported Lindbergh’s political activity, though they formed up in 1940, so a bit later:
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1643.html
http://www.cfr.org/world/america-first-committee-history-lessons/p28925
http://www.americanfreepress.net/Defend_America_First_Booklet.pdf
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Belafon: The French? What about Baron von Steuben?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@BobS:
Sure, let’s take a look at your comment. I’ve highlighted the relevant parts:
Your claim is that the OUN is “resurgent” and that right-wing groups were “instrumental” in overthrowing Yanukovych in 2014. So are you now claiming that you *don’t* really think it was a fascist coup?
I know it’s hard to believe, but other countries sometimes do things for reasons other than the US sponsoring coups. Strange, but true. Ukraine has a very long history with Russia that makes them hostile to Russia, and pretending that the hostility was somehow engineered by the US or the CIA is ahistorical and pretty stupid, frankly.
If you want to defend Russia destabilizing a sovereign country and trying to retake Ukraine by force (or at least the parts they want most), go ahead and defend it, but don’t pretend you’re somehow opposing US hegemony by your knee-jerk support of Russian hegemony. Russia’s actions are not automatically Good because the US’s actions are Bad.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@BobS:
Sorry, I missed your Milosevic reference the first time around. Poor, innocent Slobodan:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5165042.stm
But, hey, I guess he wouldn’t have had to kill all of those Bosnians if the US hadn’t forced him to do it, amirite?
BobS
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Jesus, you’re fucking long-winded. Once again, where did I write the “OUN is currently running everything in Ukraine”? And, since you’ve foolishly chosen to double-down, why are you substituting “fascist coup” for “Maidan coup” and asking me to defend your substitution? Are you simply a careless reader or do you just make shit up because it’s easier for you to argue with strawmen?
Hint: “instrumental” = “serving as an instrument or means in pursuing an aim or policy”.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
BTW…last night, resident jackass Steve from Antioch accused me of being a sock puppet of you.
Something about our “hysterical accusatory and fact free” arguments that we both use against him.
I took that as a complement.
BobS
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Yep. Because everyone knows (at least the simple-minded, anyway) there was only one bad actor in the Balkans.
BobS
@celticdragonchick: Yeah, now that you mention it, long-winded and hysterical.
john fremont
@RobertB: I liked the Nuge too back then growing up back in the early 1980’s and yes I was once a member of the NRA. I left all of it behind in the last ten years although I still enjoy Free for All and Great White Buffalo when I hear it on classic rock radio. When it comes to Ted hyperventilating his political opinions I like to borrow a quote from Joe Walsh, Shut Up and Play Your Guitar!
Feudalism Now!
@SFAW: Thaddeus Koskiusko?
Original Lee
@Joseph Nobles: How about Amerigo Vespucci Day? He drew the first maps of this part of the world.