When I was young Germany was beautiful. It was pedantic, of course, but well-governed, clean and safe. Germans, despite their often unduly good reputation abroad, are not especially intelligent people. They merely found what they could do well and focus all their efforts on doing that. My grandfather received only a very basic education but made do. For over fifty years he worked as a mechanical engineer. My grandmother received a similarly basic education. As a woman of her generation, she faced restrictions on which careers she could pursue but she spent decades working as a designer and seamstress. My grandfather built several houses with no need to rely on anyone’s help. He came up with a concept and saw it through from early sketches to the last layer of paint. He could do this before the invention of calculators or engineering software. My grandmother could design, cut and sew dresses by hand without needing anyone’s advice or assistance. My mum is a theatre nurse. Then again, she sat her Abitur when it still meant something and read medicine.
Most Germans were not especially affluent, either. They mostly led modest, frugal lives. Most were proud people despite their limited means. Yards were kept tidy and grass cut short. Gardens were small, but pretty. It was all a bit twee. It was all more than a little pedantic. Still, it was a predictable, if dull, life. Like many Hunnish children I grew up enamoured with Sweden largely due to a continuing fondness for Astrid Lindgren’s books. I shamelessly continue to read and re-read books such as Barnen i Bullerbyn, Emil i Lönneberga, Karlsson på taket, etc.
My younger life in Germany was an idyll, especially when compared to the American Hell I was forced to endure. Each return to Germany felt like a resumption of a life interrupted. That was always my life, even if I was so frequently uprooted from it. But now, an idyll has turned into a wan dystopia. I knew that Germany was changing, that things there were not as they used to be even a handful of years before. Germany wasn’t what it used to be. Things were not too bad, though. There were new problems, each year there seemed to be more, but they were problems that elicited grumbling rather than protest. I knew last year that Germany had lost the plot.
When I briefly returned to the country in July I couldn’t be arsed to leave my room. I bought what I needed to for my planned move to China but little else. Everything was too depressing. Germany has become grimy, gritty. It was only too easy to tell which side of the Luxembourg/Hunland border I was on. Luxembourg remained clean and well-kept. Hunland was slightly depressing, run-down and dirty. Much of this is Merkel’s doing. For the sake of maintaining a veneer of fiscal probity her various coalitions have cut funding to even the most basic maintenance. Unless, of course, it’s Berlin or some other part of the much-missed DDR – not amount is too much for that! Is the Kiel Canal crumbling? Oh bother, no worries. Are roads in Baden-Württemberg in a miserable state of repair? Sorry, mates, no money for that! Berlin’s new airport? Oh, infinite funds are available for that! A palace that was destroyed during the Second World War? Oh, that can be re-built! No worries, money can be found for that! The Karl Marx House in Trier, one of the city’s most (in)famous sites and a lucrative one at that is in dire need of repair? Oh boffer, can’t find money for that – one must understand, we need to build a new tent city for every Syrian/Pakistania/Bangladeshi/Egyption/Algerian/Nigerian/Ivorian/Eritrean/Iraqi/Albanian/Serb/ Macedonian who might want a free place to stay!
The scandalous reports emanating from Germany over the past week do not surprise me. Nor does it surprise me that the German media colluded with the government and Germany’s PC Mafia to attempt to cover-up the extent of Germany’s spiral into the abyss. I was treated poorly there – my British accent was off-putting, my Anglo-Saxon scepticism and healthy disrespect for authority did not go over well. I could bugger off to England, the sooner the better. The Allahu Akbar Brigades are pushing their luck. More than a few Germans were grumbling about them before this. I fear that this will all end in tears – in Hunland and in Sweden, wherever this was allowed to spiral. I look to my impending return to Europe with dread. I hold Yankeeland in as much contempt as ever. It is and will remain the only country I despise as much as China, but I no longer feel safe in Europe.
Boadicea's Chariot 
What a shame. I see problems back home – like the effects of Euroimmigration on the cities – but the British spirit persists.
Btw how come you speak Hun with a British accent?
Janus: after 2004 there were some tensions with Euro-immigration in Germany as well. Germany, like Italy, is traditionally a land of emigration. There was some modest immigration in the post-war era, of course. “Guest workers” from Turkey, Italy, Greece and Spain but it was still manageable. Within a generation or two Italians, Greeks and Spaniards integrated fairly well and by the third generation there was little to any difference as many had married Huns, anyway. The Turks have proven to be far more difficult but it was still manageable. There were some difficulties in the early 1990s when Germany saw an influx of ethnic Germans, especially from Russia, who often could not speak German or, when they did, spoke an archaic version of it that wasn’t easy to understand. For all intents and purposes they were Russians and, of course, “refugees” from the collapsing Yugoslavia. German towns still had a sense of community and continuity. People grew up knowing each other with a modest number of people moving in and out. After 2004, this started to break down rapidly. It wasn’t horrible, but it felt very, very strange. Germany, unfortunately, doesn’t really have a “spirit”. It had a sense of order and probity, but it always lacked something.
I grew up speaking German and English and the two have merged somewhat. Because I was largely educated in English and speak English are more frequently than German, my German has taken on a very strong English influence in grammar and pronunciation. I speak British English with a residual German accent and that’s influenced my German. I never picked up a California accent. Whenever I speak California English Californians assume that it’s a joke if they even recognise it at all.
Wurl doomed!
Christopher, My first three schools were in Germany ( Hamburg and Cologne) unfortunately we lived in a British forces gulag and I didn’t learn German, or at least only a smattering. However a residual effect of this is that whenever I go to Germany (not for ten plus years now) I feel at home.
What you report as happening there now is very sad but borne out by one of my neighbours who’s mother was German. He frequently visits Germany and reports a gradual decline, I guess this started when Khol re United East and West Germany at the fall of the Berlin Wall. I recall reading somewhere at the time that this was the same as England suddenly having to digest twenty Liverpools………..one is quite bad enough.
Where all this will end is anyone’s guess.
No Fuhrer riding to the rescue this time I guess…..???
Look out, there’s a Scouser about!
I lost my local intonations at the Grammar. Interestingly I read recently that upper crust accents are similarly smoothed out – at Eton College!!
I’m going to say here what I wanted to say on the Nova Scotia blog.
I have a tremendous respect for the way Germany has acknowledged the attempted annihilation of 6m. European Jews. This is in stark contrast to Japan which consistently refuses to recognise the full extent of its treatment of Asians, whom the the Japanese thought were sub-human. We, Europeans, have generally ignored those crimes as we have also ignored the 5.5m non-Jews brutally murdered in Germany under the Hitler regime. I’ m also ashamed that no one has thought to condemn those crimes as vigorously as those against the Jews.
Why have we not? We do have to acknowledge that the West looks after its own – and the only reason that International Jewry has been able to use the Holocaust to further its own interests is because a) it is united b) has a huge economic influence on Western economies, and c) because it is able to use the guilt of centuries of anti-Semitic feelings in European civilisation to get what it wants. To be honest, I have to say – Good Luck to Them – if you’ve got a edge to improve your situation – use it! But I’m sad that we have ignored others who also suffered – our fault – not theirs.
The most appalling modern-day consequence of Nazi Germany is, as far as I’m concerned, the West’s refusal to criticise any other belief system or culture. This has led a situation whereby Governments have called their own indigenous populations Right-Wing Fascists / Nazis for daring to say that they want their culture and their way of life to prevail over the cultural beliefs of foreigners who do not accept the values of the country in which they have chosen to live.It is not wrong to stand up for those rights and beliefs that our ancestors fought and, in some cases, died for.
Germany may be trying to overcome its image of being racist, but I do not think it has lost its arrogance of thinking that it knows best and that rest of the world should automatically follow where it leads. Merkel must have known that her comment that all Syrian, et al, refugees would be welcome in Germany meant that they would be free to move to anywhere in the EU. How dare she say that, without reference to other EU members? She knew full-well that her decision had an impact on other EU countries, less willing or less able to cope with the army of illiterate, unemployable, arrogant young men marching into Europe?..
As you know, Jazz, I’ve known people who survived the Holocaust and known others whose families were killed-off in death camps. — Christopher.
Two recent articles from South Africa
The first is about a billboard, erected by the opposition DA political party. It says “More people jobless under Zuma’s ANC and ‘counting..”
The ANC has reacted by calling the party racist stating “in their narrow view, unemployment in this country is caused by a black government”
http://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2016/01/07/ANC-claims-DA-billboards-are-racist
The second discusses a move to make racism a crime. The government hopes to use Germany’s Holocaust laws as an example.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/stnews/2016/01/10/Jail-the-racist.
Watch out for the “Great Race Wars of the 21st Century”, coming to a town near you.
I didn’t bother watching your video clip, Jazz. I was too busy wondering why the Nazis kept records of all those, Jews and others, who died in the gas chambers, if in fact they didn’t. It was the Nazi mania for keeping records that enabled the prosecution of some of them as well as the meager comfort to those searching for any family survivors to find out the dates of death.
Exactly, Sheona.
I think one thing we can all agree on is that it is the victors who wrote the history of WW2 and the Holocaust. It is, therefore, a given that the facts have been distorted. The question is, by how much.
Boadicea, our resident historian, insists that one has to go back to the original documentation in order to arrive at the facts. In the absence of that, and I am assuming that the overwhelming majority of commentators worldwide have never been anywhere near the Nazi records, assuming also that those records actually exist, one has to use logic to come to any conclusion. Logic dictates that it is and has always been in Jewish interests to make the Holocaust appear as horrific as possible. The Jewish ethos is not one that allows bygones to be bygones. Logic, therefore, also dictates, that events were and continue to be exaggerated.
As somebody who grew up and lives in a country that has witnessed a radical change in control, it is shocking to see how history gets rewritten.
Jazz: by the standards of the Communist Bloc East Germany had a highly functional economy. That was not a very high standard. Germany’s best economists warned Helmut Kohl that Germany could do one of two things: re-unify or go on a European monetary union. Kohl ignored everyone and even forced a Bundesbank chief out for challenging his decision to pursue both despite the overwhelming case not to.
Another effect of re-unification is that Germany’s bureaucratic and political cultures became strongly influenced by the East. Germany was always pedantic, but it wasn’t as back-biting, sleazy and even abusive as it is now. Germans are once again emigrating in large numbers. Several of my relatives would love to emigrate if they had the chance.
Boadicea: Jews are survivors. Until 1948 there was no true “home” for Jews, like the proverbial fiddler on the roof it was always a delicate balancing act No matter if they were well-integrated, as they were in Germany, or forcefully segregated as they were in Russia pogroms were never far away. Things weren’t much better in North Africa, Ethiopia and the Persian Gulf. Israel was born in the wake of the destruction of European Jewry and rapidly became a Sephardic-majority state when North African and Middle Eastern Jews were forced to leave their homes, often with no notice. Jews are accustomed to having to justify their existence. I understand it can be annoying for many, but there aren’t as many people who were as persistently persecuted as the Jews.
What I fear most is that when public patience snaps things will be far worse than we can imagine. Lessons are quickly forgotten. Europe is under siege and these arrogant young men are only provoking matters past what they can imagine. The liberal order that’s dominated Western Europe since the end of the War is crumbling. Some of it is welcome, but Europe’s demons are re-emerging and it’s difficult to keep them in check.
Germany today is much like it was before the First World War. It’s largely a modern and liberal state that’s by far the most powerful country on the continent, but it isn’t quite hegemonic. It has the self-assured self-righteousness of a pedant, albeit one that is no longer what it used to be. Germans continue to have an ill-founded sense of self-importance and delusions of grandeur. I find it all too off-putting. Merkel has been in power for far too long and Germany’s relative prosperity has given her an undue influence over the continent. She truly believed that she could say “we will do this” and all Europe would heed her call. When more and more countries started to openly defy her she started to lose the plot. She’s not used to being refused.
Sipu: the ANC are growing desperate. They ruined South Africa and cannot accept responsibility.
Sheona: agreed.
Sipu: if you want to research Nazi records you are perfectly able to do so. Virtually everything is readily available and, in recent years, increasingly accessible via online databases. The vast majority of Nazi sites are open to the public and you can visit them if you choose to. There’s no conspiracy.
Somewhat ironic that the Jews are responsible one more time for the current happenings in Europe.
Without Germany’s collective inherited guilt trip I doubt very much the wogs would have been given free rein to invade en masse and rape and pillage their way across Northern Europe!
Genghis Khan must be.spinning in his grave that others achieved his objective quite so easily.
It appears to me that whilst Europeans are still indulging in their angst over the Jews the Iranians are tooling up to finish the job in situ. The likelihood of Iran nuking Israel appears to be growing closer by the day. One wonders what Europe will do with their invasion of wogs when there is no Middle east to which to return them? Final solutions spring to mind. People never learn. Too much emotive drivel and not enough pragmatic reasoning guarantees the same mistakes made over and over again.
Bo, the West looks after its own? You have to be kidding in Europe.
Christopher I think that you are quite right to be afraid for and of Germany now. The prognostications are not good. I thought it quite inconceivable that the police there pepper sprayed and used water cannon on Pergeda, their own people but stood by insouciantly and let wogs riot and molest white women on New years Eve! Disgusting. The sooner vigilante groups do the job the better! What about a nice re run of St Bartholomew’s Eve? (With minor religious alterations!)
Christopher, one thing you must acknowledge that the USA has got right, no ‘refugees’ appear to have been bought in here as yet. may Trump carry on right to the convention, a most effective’ ginger’ to the other candidates.
I swear that the whole thing is more ‘Revelations’ by the minute.
CO: I take it you haven’t heard about the Iraqi refugees arrested for plotting terror attacks in California and Texas last week? Obama is flying them in by the aeroplane. Take off your rose-coloured lenses. The USA isn’t any better off than Europe.
I don’t see how Jews can be blamed for this. Self-loathing Europeans have done far more damage to themselves. Jews have also been targeted by the Allahu Akbar Brigade with the tacit support of the far left and far right in Europe over the past two decades. Many French Jews are fleeing to Israel because of them.
In Sweden vigilante groups are popping up like mushrooms. Swedish police have tacitly admitted that they can no longer protect people and that they need to arm themselves and band together. It’s growing difficult to keep pepper spray and blank guns with pepper spray bullets stocked in Germany as women are buying them up. Cologne is a watershed moment in modern German history. The political establishment has been discredited, “niceness” is discredited. There are still a number of left-wing Germans with their heads in the sand, but it’s growing increasingly obvious that this isn’t working. There will be local elections held soon in Germany — we’ll are nearly certain to see a radical departure from post-war political norms.
I thought that California business was with long term immigrants not recent arrivals?
Interesting that pepper spray is legal in both Sweden and Germany? Not of course in the UK unless smuggled in.
CO: they arrived in 2009 but were part of this wave. There are also thousands of Syrians who have crossed illegally from Mexico. They generally enter through Honduras and pay smugglers to take them to the US. Americans are very good at being deluded. The US is just as vulnerable, they just lie about it better.
Handguns are legal in Sweden so long as people take the proper courses and join hunting clubs. There has been rapid growth in those! Swedes have taken to burning down any building bought by the state to be used as housing for invaders. In Germany firearms are more difficult to possess than in Sweden, but any legal weapon is now effectively sold out.
Yes I had heard of the arson route and very sensible too! Stops it dead before it starts. I gather that has happened in Germany too. Whilst you may well be correct about the USA. I think it is less a case of self delusion and more likely the govt and media conspiring to keep the population ignorant of the facts. Also I suspect any wog turning up here is less likely to cause public disturbance knowing the predilection of the police to shoot first and ask questions later, plus too many citizens now carry arms in public. It is noticeable how many more citizenry are wearing side arms openly even in this neck of the liberal die hard woods! obviously that is not going to stop the real mad jehadi type attack but would certainly deter low level molestation.
It becomes increasingly obvious that all western govts are repressing the truth of wog outrages in their respective countries, they are absolutely terrified of it kicking off big time in terms or retaliation by the native population. No way they could control it and would the armies be prepared to shoot their own people anyway? got my doubts in the UK after Cameron and his merry band’s treatment of their forces.
Frankly is this purports to be so called democracy, the sooner it is replaced the better as a political system.
Christopher, why are you editing my posts so that the text is entirely yours ?
CO: a number of buildings were burnt to the ground in Germany as well, true. The amount of civil disobedience is truly heart warming. With each new assault public patience with the Allahu Akbar Brigade is closer to snapping. With each increasingly pitiful defence/excuse made my the Powers That Be the less credibility they have. I sometimes doubt the intelligence of the low when they continuously try to launch terror attacks in the Republic of Texas. The chances that they won’t be shot PDQ are virtually nil. I disagree about Americans, though. Americans are the only people who can be in equal measures paranoid and convinced of their superior security. I do agree, however, about the mendacity of the political class and its media allies. They’re both hated and utterly discredited. It makes me happy to be in the countryside. Nothing of the sort really happens here and problems are of the small-town variety, not the global.
Jazz: I do not give quarter or space to Holocaust Denial.
“Jazz: I do not give quarter or space to Holocaust Denial.”
Christopher, if you have removed those comments to protect yourself from the possibility of future prosecution in Germany, then I can understand your doing so. But if you have done it because you have a totalitarian approach to speech censorship, then you have shown yourself to be a fraud.
Sipu: A fraud? That’s rich coming from a man who has shown nothing but contempt for Africans but continues to live there. I could call you a raging hypocrite, but I shall refrain. Is it totalitarian? It’s my blog and my family were lucky to escape the Holocaust. I’ve known far too many people who were not quite so lucky. I have never removed a post before, no matter how strongly I disagreed with it. It was a vicious lie that was entirely beyond the pale. If Jazz wishes to post it on his blog he has every right to do so. If he posts it on your blog, or anyone else’s blog and that blogger chooses to ignore it/accept it/agree with it that is a personal decision. There are things that are well beyond the pale and cannot be accepted for personal reasons. I will not let my blog become home to Holocaust Denial.
The rules of this site are quite clear. An author has absolute control over his / her posts and can remove any comment or part of a comment if s/he finds that comment unacceptable. There is no point in complaining and the author also has the right to refuse to discuss why the comment has been removed.
I, personally, am at an absolute loss as to how anyone can possibly deny the Holocaust. It is one of the very few events in history that has an overwhelming and sickening amount of evidence – from the personal accounts of the victims, through eyewitness reports and photographs of the liberators of the camps to the meticulous records of those who willingly acted as perpetrators of those crimes.
It is not, actually, necessary for every single person to return to original documents. If sufficient people have seen / read and considered the data and arrive at the same conclusion that seems to me to be sufficient for most of to accept their account of the past. In the case of the Holocaust, there is ample evidence in the public domain to support the fact that it did happen, exactly as stated. Or do these deniers think that thousands of people laid a false paper-trail and got hundreds of Hollywood actors to ‘fake’ the films that were taken at the time?
I don’t think that Holocaust denial should be a criminal offence. Like all bans, it does no good – The West is reaping the result of years of banning any discussion on the cultural differences between indigenous and migrant populations right here and now. But I’d like to stick all these deniers in a cell with the films of the the camps playing continually, give them nothing but accounts of the atrocities to read for at least six months. Oh! and I’d feed them an Auschwitz diet.
Boadicea: thank you.
The Second World War is fertile ground for historical research and writing. However many people have written about it and continue to write about it the true horror of the Holocaust is yet to be fully revealed. Records concerning the worst of the worst crimes are sometimes still classified and it will be some time yet before they’re released.As you said, successive generations of serious scholars have filled in missing pieces with new records as they became available but they’ve only expanded the already extensive catalogue of grotesque brutalities.
There aren’t many Holocaust survivors alive now. The handful still able to talk about their experiences as much as possible to try to ensure that it’s never forgotten. I’ve met a number of them. They spent their childhoods in concentration camps. Some watched their entire families killed in front of them, others watched their relatives, their friends slowly waste away. Am I to believe the fancies of dedicated anti-Semites over the memories of those who survived? I don’t think anyone sensible needs the answer to that question.
I do not believe in criminalising thought. No matter how heinous, people should not be gaoled for their ideas. That doesn’t mean that all ideas are equal. Those who push the truly heinous should not be free from censure. Censure is not “totalitarian”. Western societies became far too tolerant after the end of the Second World War. They became so permissive, especially in Europe, that they allowed themselves to be over-run by those with absolutely no respect for Western civilisation. What I fear now is that the situation is spiralling out of control quickly. In 1913 war seemed a million miles away. In 1932 no one really believed that within a decade Europe and Asia would be torn apart by a war even more brutal than the one that everyone believed would be the “war to end all wars”. The Mexican writer Mariano Azuela wrote of the Mexican Revolution: “La revolución es el huracán, y el hombre que se entrega a ella no es ya el hombre, es la miserable hoja seca arrebatada por el vendaval…” “Revolution is the hurricane and the man caught up in it is no longer a a man, but a miserable dry leaf tossed about in the maelstrom”.
C, your fellow prophets of doom proliferated during the Cold War. Britain always pretended immunity but little Denmark was in a real funk. As a student in the early ’60s I was very aware of the US/USSR stand-off and the CND movement.
Janus: I lived in West Germany during the Cold War. The USSR and USA waged their proxy wars and had their diplomatic spats, but both sides were relatively constrained by the mutual understanding that any war would result in the destruction of both. At the moment it seems as if no one is in charge and instead of admitting that there were grave errors made over the past few years far too many people in positions of power prefer to find excuses if not accuse moderate people with legitimate concerns of being Nazis or Xenophobes. Order can still prevail, but Europe’s borders must be secured and ne’er-do-wells cannot be allowed to remain.
Christopher, I’m not a ‘holocaust denier’, I would just like to know what happened, I suspect that we have not been told the truth.
You give “no quarter”. Gosh! I’m quaking in my boots.
The truth is that you’re not interested in the truth, because you find it uncomfortable.
Jazz, your latest comment is insulting and inappropriate. Christopher, of all the cherished colleagues here, is the most meticulous about truth. Get rid of your obvious prejudice.
Janus, Christopher is as meticulous with the truth as makes him comfortable and you’re very similar.
And you, my ‘friend’, have no standards worth a dime.
Jazz: you believe what you wish to believe. Please read Boadicea’s comment posted at 6:54 AM on 11 January and take it to heart. The Holocaust is far too well documented. Perhaps you’d care to remove your tin-foil cap and read a properly researched work?
I do not like the word genocide, far too emotive.
There have been so many in our history of the world and yet they are mainly ignored but for one.
Carefully given its own name, it is unrelentingly ground into all and every facet of Western life. It is only to be expected that some, getting so utterly fed up with hearing about it, begin to doubt the whole affair at least as it is currently depicted.
Why this endless search for a truth?
Dead is dead. No one wants an intimate accounting for the hundred million or so that managed to get themselves killed one way or another in WWI.
No one wants the names and addresses of the dead in the Rwanda crisis.
So why the obsession with the Jews? Because they force it down our throats endlessly, probably thus ensuring that it will happen again!
It really is not worth arguing about, nothing will change what happened.
As far as I can see jazz never said he was a holocaust denier, he just wanted to read the works of someone that was. Surely not a major crime? Many are going to read the new issue of Mein kampf, are you going to accuse them of being Nazi? Does reading the Bible make you a Christian or the Koran a raghead?
Knowledge is not conversion. There really is no need to get personal about it all.
Tina: Jazz can read and think whatever he wishes to. He can post whatever he wishes to on his blog.
The Holocaust was the first continental genocide. It was carried out so quickly, so efficiently and so ruthlessly that it shocked Western society to its very foundations. The Second World War remains a highly emotive era. How many films are still made about it? You live in Sub-Canadian North America, have you ever watched historical programming? Over half of it seemingly focuses on the Second World War. In China a number of television films and dramas, all execrable, are set during the Second World War. Whenever a German politician baulks at throwing more money into Southern Europe the Greeks and Frogs get on their hind legs and begin squealing about the Second World War again. You’re not exactly fond of Jews, but they’re far from the only ones interested in squeezing every last drop of blood out of the Second World War.
I already discussed my stance on this issue in detail and see no reason to do so again. He brought up something that most find heinous and he was rebuked as a result. If he wants to pretend to be a victim that is his decision.
I can’t agree with you historically as it being the first.
Armenia, Ukraine pogroms. Albigensians, St Bartholomews Eve, just to name a few.
Agreed it was the biggest and most efficient.
I rarely watch WWII movies, most of them are hideously inaccurate tosh. Plus in my generation I regard them as current affairs, not history.
I agree you have the right to edit unrestrainedly but I do think you over-reacted a little.
Maybe this is a quintessential difference between how Germans and British see the whole thing? From what I gather the German population has been ground into the dirt on this subject for 60 years plus. We haven’t, especially the older amongst us. None of us had WWII included in our history syllabuses, history generally stopped at the outbreak of WWI for anyone now in their 60s and 70s. You have to be about 30 before you got the Hitler diatribe included in the history course. And sadly misrepresented it was too. Should have seen the rubbish my son was treated to in so called history. I used to annotate the teacher’s misrepresentations. They sure loved me at his school! Anything I hate it is revisionism.
Jazz is ‘comfortable’ with nonsense. What is that called? Childhood? Fanaticism? No wonder he has no respect for academics or their rigorous regard for evidence.
PS I’m quite sure jazz does not see himself as a victim, you have to be young to see yourself as such, not the hallmark of our generation!
British WASP tradition is far too stoical to indulge in such utter claptrap!
janus, I really cannot see why you being so personal and abusive to jazz, you really are making yourself look somewhat juvenile and very intolerant. For heaven’s sakes, leave it at that!
Can we not agree to differ ?
Academia is not a religion as yet!!
CO, chill, gal! I’m not being abusive – I’m repaying in kind! 😱
Moi, intolerant?
CO: No, of course it wasn’t the first genocide — it was the first continental genocide. It wasn’t in one country, like the Armenian Genocide or an inter-tribal war like Rwanda. It spread from France to Greece, Finland to Italy and was centrally planned and executed. I criticised links that Jazz posted and was promptly subjected to ad hominem attacks. None of my responses to his attacks were even remotely as harsh or abrasive as his. He can dole it out, but he can’t take it.
I had to pay for the Second World War with my own blood. It wasn’t the Jews doing it, the Jews — including some who survived Auschwitz, were far more gracious. No, it was the god-awful pack crowding in that pustulent boil south of Canada. I’m bloody well sick of hearing about it, too — but I also understand just how easy it is to turn fallacies and lies into an accepted historical narrative. We both despise revisionism, so why are you defending someone who is pushing just that?
I didn’t think he was defending it, merely curious to read an alternative, albeit flawed, version.
What on earth happened in California then? There are millions of Germans living here in the USA that don’t seem to have any trouble at all. I personally know quite a few up here.
Attention! There is a site rule which seems perilously close to being broken: Attack the argument – not the person.
Rubbish.
Visiting the villa on the Wannsee where the conference on the Final Solution took place, one sits at the table round which the Nazi administrators sat, or one very similar, in the room which was used. There is no need to worry whether one is hearing the truth or not, since careful minutes were taken. It was the sheer cold-blooded attention to detail that was so horrifying. Train loads of victims were being brought from the different countries which the Nazis had invaded. The word “Jew” was never mentioned; neither were Roma, gypsies, homosexuals or opponents of the regime. They were all items to be shipped from A to B. The worry was whether B had the capacity to liquidate enough within the time frame. What about the number of trains required? Rolling stock was also needed to transport troops and materiel at the same time. Everything had to be properly organised, including the stocks of gas.
This was certainly the best organised mass murder so far. I think the others that have been mentioned were rather ad hoc. And it was the mass of documents the Nazis created that has ensured that this horror is still talked about in such detail. One Austrian made sure that neither his name nor his title was ever mentioned.
CO: I already gave a detailed account about what happened in California. Here’s a link for you:
https://charioteers.org/2015/02/08/living-with-huns-vii-equal-in-germany/
I have little sympathy for the US — it’s the only county I despise as much as China. I’ve already learnt never to trust the lot. I’m not keen on signing contracts with them or making more than $20,000 per year as I would only be penalised.
Sheona: Hannah Arendt described this as “the banality of evil”. Her comment has regularly been taken out of context and turned into a cliche due to misuse, but its original meaning is still the truest description of the Holocaust. It was so dull, so boring. Himmler and Eichmann were not inspiring figures. They were drab, albeit highly efficient, bureaucrats. The destruction of nearly 12 million people was conducted in the same way that sheep would be transported from Pembrokeshire to Dyfed. At that level there was no point in trying to see groups, much less individuals. Groups were only created for the sake of convenience at the local level. Sinti are given one sign, dissidents another, Jews are given their emblem, socialists are given theirs. There is no real doubt about it because, as you said, everything had to efficiently organised and co-ordinated. The Third Reich had only limited access to materials and could not afford to suffer prolonged disruptions. The Soviets, British Empire and United States had a greater ability — especially with co-ordination — to triumph in a prolonged conflict for that reason.
Boadicea: I’m frankly at a loss as to why this discussion turned as vicious as it did. I never intended for it to be about the Second World War. I try to avoid making personal attacks but I won’t willingly be attacked, either. this just goes to show how powerful the Second World War still is.
Yes I remember it now, tend to forget these things these days, sorry.
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CO: I am often stubborn, incorrigible, dogged and abrasive but I am not irrational. I’ve never had the chance to see the world through rose-tinted lenses. I’ve often accused of being too cynical, to pessimistic despite rarely being proven wrong. But I am not unfair in my judgements and pronouncements. If I make mistakes I will admit to them. If things change, get better I will acknowledge that. I’m intellectually honest, if impatient with bollocks. I know that there are some good people in the United States. I also am aware that many Americans are as disconcerted with the sheer nastiness and abusiveness that’s grown only too prevalent in the United States. My workmates broadly agree with my complaints. Right now, things are not too bad for me in California. I still have my position as a professor’s assistant. With a second part-time position I could easily live in a state of genteel poverty with very little stress. My expenses would be so low, in fact, that I could easily go on holiday to Australia/New Zealand, Hong Kong/Taiwan/Japan or Japan/Korea and the United Kingdom/Scandinavia in alternating years. If I had a position with seasonal leave, I could visit more than one in a year. But I’d never leave this rural county. I’ve taken my lessons, even if some are the wrong ones. I do not trust anyone or anything here. I’m do distrustful, in fact, that I am unwilling to take the risk of even going to a place where I’d have a well-paid position. Better a cashier than an official, rather a service station employee than a consultant.
Sorry, Boa. Not even my fight! 😡
Janus: this discussion quickly went off topic and quickly became very, very nasty. I appreciate your support.
Christopher, you can be as nasty to me as you like, as long as you don’t mind getting the same in return. What pi55es me off is when people try to corral a debate within their own comfort zone, and then disparage those not similarly constrained.
As far as WW2 and the Holocaust are concerned, I’m 75% certain that we’ve been comprehensively lied to and I’d just like to get somewhere near the truth.
When some years ago I first read Irving I felt (much as you appear to) very uncomfortable, but nevertheless there was a nagging thought in the back of my mind that he was telling the truth, time and further reading has reinforced that.
The truth does set you free. Once you’ve accepted your first unpalatable fact the others come along quite easily.
Jazz: that’s on your conscience, not mine. You seem to want to believe in Holocaust Denial — not because there is any real proof we’ve been lied to, but because you wish to. That is your right and I certainly won’t advocate that you be legally sanctioned for holding those views. You should not, however, pretend to feel wronged or slighted when you attack me and I return in kind. David Irving is a recognised liar. Every great historian of the era says something largely similar. There is far too much documentation, far too many accounts and far too many minutes to challenge the narrative as we’ve been told on the scale of the nearly 12 million killed in it. Your condescending comments about needing to set myself free are noted in the same way that one is reminded to refer to Bruce Jenner as Caitlyn Jenner.
Christopher, “….That is your right and ,b>I certainly won’t advocate that you be legally sanctioned for holding those views…“
Gosh that’s big of you, but feel free to report me to the German authorities, maybe they’ll issue a European arrest warrant ?? Although I’ve never actually denied the Holocaust because I don’t know enough to have an opinion either way.
….and my conscience is just fine thanks.