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Javier E

Should we even go there? Historians on comparing fascism to Trumpism | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nald-trump-historians-trumpism

fascism hitler resistance democracy

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • “What are the necessary social and psychological conditions that allow populists of Hitler’s ilk to gain a mass following and attain power?”
  • “There are certain traits you can recognize that Hitler and Trump have in common,” Ullrich says. “I would say the egomania, the total egocentricity of both men, and the inclination to mix lies and truth – that was very characteristic of Hitler.”
  • Like Trump, “Hitler exploited peoples’ feelings of resentment towards the ruling elite.” He also said he would make Germany great again. Ullrich also notes both men’s talent at playing the media, making use of new technology and their propensity for stage effects.
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  • “I think the differences are still greater than the similarities,” he says. “Hitler was not only more intelligent, but craftier. He was not just a powerful orator, but a talented actor who succeeded in winning over various social milieus. So not just the economically threatened lower middle classes which Trump targeted, but also the upper middle classes. Hitler had many supporters in the German aristocracy.”
  • Trump was also democratically elected, while Hitler never had a majority vote. “He was appointed by the president of the German Reich.” Then there’s the fact that Trump does not lead a party “which is unconditionally committed to him”.
  • “A further obvious difference is that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, as Hitler did with the SA, which he used in his first months after coming to power to settle scores with his opponents, like the Communists and Social Democrats. You can’t possibly imagine something similar with Trump – that he’ll be locking Democrats up into concentration camps
  • “Finally, the American constitution is based on a system of checks and balances. It remains to be seen how far Congress will really limit Trump or if, as is feared, he can override it. It was different with Hitler, who, as we know, managed to eliminate all resistance in the shortest space of time and effectively establish himself as an all-powerful dictator. Within a few months, there was effectively no longer any opposition.”
  • “Hitler profited from the fact that his opponents always underestimated him,” Ullrich explains. “His conservative allies in government assumed they could tame or ‘civilise’ him – that once he became chancellor he’d become vernünftig (meaning sensible, reasonable). Very quickly it became clear that was an illusion.”
  • “There were many situations where he could have been stopped. For example in 1923 after the failed Munich putsch – if he’d served his full prison sentence of several years, he wouldn’t have made a political comeback. Instead, he only spent a few months behind bars, [having been released after political pressure] and could rebuild his movement.”
  • The western powers made the same mistake with their appeasement politics, indecision and indulgence. “In the 1930s Hitler strengthened, rather than weakened, his aggressive intentions,” Ullrich says. “So you could learn from this that you have to react faster and much more vigorously than was the case at the time.”
  • llrich also contends that if Hindenburg, the president of the Reich, had allowed Chancellor Brüning, of the Centre party, to remain chancellor to the end of 1934, rather than responding to pressure from conservatives to dismiss him in 1932, “then the peak of the economic crisis would have passed and it would have been very questionable whether Hitler could still have come to power”.
  • At the same time, Hitler’s ascent was no mere fluke. “There were powerful forces in the big industries, but also in the landowning class and the armed forces, which approved of a fascist solution to the crisis.”
  • If fascism “now just means aggressive nationalism, racism, patriarchy and authoritarianism, then maybe it is back on the agenda,” Bosworth continues. But today’s context is fundamentally different
  • Today’s “alt-right” agitators “live in a neoliberal global order where the slogan, ‘all for the market, nothing outside the market, no one against the market’ is far more unquestionably accepted than the old fascist slogan of ‘all for the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state’”.
  • Schama is clear: Trump is obviously not Hitler. “But, you know, if you like, he’s an entertainment fascist, which may be less sinister but is actually in the end more dangerous. If you’re not looking for jackboots and swastikas – although swastikas are indeed appearing – there’s a kind of laundry list of things which are truly sinister and authoritarian and not business as usual.”
  • Schama also points to deeply worrying messaging, such as “the parallel universe of lies which are habitual, massive, cumulative”; the criminalization of political opponents; the threat to change the libel laws against the press and the demonization of different racial and ethnic groups, going as far as proposing a Muslim registry.
  • “What is that if it’s not racially authoritarian?” asks Schama. “If you want to call it fascist, fine. I don’t really care if it’s called that or not. It’s authoritarian, you know, ferociously authoritarian.”
  • Don’t ignore what people vote fo
  • f you’re of German heritage, it’s hard to understand how so many people could have bought Mein Kampf and gone on to vote for Hitler. Maybe no one really read it, or got beyond the first few pages of bluster, or took antisemitism seriously, you tell yourself. “Or they liked what he said,
  • “I think one of the mistakes this time around would be not to think that the people who voted for Trump were serious. They may have been serious for different reasons, but it would be a big mistake not to try and figure out what their reasons were.
  • Hitler presented himself as a “messiah” offering the public “salvation”, Ullrich points out. With austerity and hostility to the EU and to immigrants riding high, there is fertile ground for European populists next year to seduce with equally simplistic, sweeping “solutions”.
  • The problem, in Mazower’s view, is that establishment politicians currently have no response
  • “The Gestapo was piddling compared with the size and reach of surveillance equipment and operations today,
  • “Very belatedly, everyone is waking up to the fact that there was a general assumption that no government in the west would fall into the wrong hands, that it was safe to acquiesce in this huge expansion of surveillance capabilities, and the debate wasn’t as vigorous as it could have been.”
  • “Now, there is a lot of discussion about allowing this kind of surveillance apparatus in the wrong hands,” he adds. “And we’ve woken up to this a bit late in the day.”
  • Ullrich calls crises, “the elixir of rightwing populists”, and urges that politicians “do everything they can to correct the inequalities and social injustice which have arisen in the course of extreme financial capitalism in western countries”
  • Jane Caplan, a history professor at Oxford University who has written about Trump and fascism, highlights the want of “dissenting voices against marketisation and neoliberalism
  • The failure to resist the incursion of the market as the only criterion for political utility, or economic utility, has been pretty comprehensive.
  • Paranoia, bullying and intimidation are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. They are also alive and well in our culture today, where online trolls, violent thugs at rallies, threats of expensive libel action and of course terrorist acts are equally effective in getting individuals and the press to self-censor.
Javier E

'Eichmann Before Jerusalem,' by Bettina Stangneth - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alem-by-bettina-stangneth.html

nazi holocaust moral reasoning anti-Semitism wwII

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in many ways mirrored Eichmann’s own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, nonideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt’s insights — that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder — remain pertinent.
  • as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” her critical — albeit respectful — dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist.
  • Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the “little man” portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him. As Stangneth observes: “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”
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  • Like many Nazi mass murderers, he possessed a puritanical petit-bourgeois sense of family and social propriety, indignantly denying that he indulged in extramarital relations or that he profited personally from his duties, and yet he lived quite comfortably with the mass killing of Jews. This was so, Stangneth argues, because Eichmann was far from a thoughtless functionary simply performing his duty. He proceeded quite intentionally from a set of tenaciously held Nazi beliefs (hardly consonant with Arendt’s puzzling contention that he “never realized what he was doing”). His was a consciously wrought racial “ethics,” one that pitted as an ultimate value the survival of one’s own blood against that of one’s enemies. He defined “sacred law” as what “benefits my people.” Morality was thus not universal or, as Eichmann put it, “international.” How could it be, given that the Jewish enemy was an international one, propounding precisely those universal values?
  • In the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann cynically invoked Kantian morality, but as a free man in Argentina he declared that “the drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.” Kantian universalism was diametrically opposed to his racially tinged völkisch outlook. He had been a “fanatical warrior” for the law, “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate,’ ” and which had nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. From a surprising admission of German inferiority — “we are fighting an enemy who . . . is intellectually superior to us” — it followed that total extermination of the Jewish adversary “would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples.”
  • She documents the almost incredible lack of interest, inactivity, even cover-ups by the numerous groups charged with bringing Eichmann to justice. It now appears that by 1952, German intelligence services — and to some degree Jewish and Israeli bodies — were aware of Eichmann’s whereabouts, yet for various political reasons did nothing to apprehend him. Remarkably, Eichmann actually drafted an unpublished letter to Chancellor Adenauer proposing to go back to Germany to stand trial. Convinced of his blamelessness, he felt sure that he would receive only a light sentence and, like many other Nazis at the time, go on to live a comfortable German life. The story of Eichmann before Jerusalem is thus also a tale of missed opportunities to hold the trial in Germany and create a genuine new beginning in an era that wished the dark past would simply go away.
  • no future discussion will be able to confront the Eichmann phenomenon and its wider political implications without reference to this book. To what degree the man’s biography is unique or exemplary of mass murderers in general remains, of course, an open question.
qkirkpatrick

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Breakfast with Frost | Women in WWII - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...4220089.stm

history WWII Women culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Women like Nancy Wake, who was parachuted into France and worked for the French resistance undermining the German occupation.
  • The Gestapo codenamed her The White Mouse, she was given the George Medal at the end of the war in recognition of the lives she saved and the risks she took
  • Here at home. A lady in Kent who, a farmhouse nearby was just razed to the ground, what did she do? She got children out from underneath that rubble. Another lady who is living in Wales at the present time was driving petrol in the East End of London, given to fire brigades so that their punts could still function and take care of fires. And the doodlebugs were coming down! Women in Coventry did a splendid job, Liverpool, all over the country. Some in uniform, as I say, a lot who were not.
  • qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16
     
    Women during WWII
qkirkpatrick

Fascism and Freedom - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...23929

fascism politics history US

shared by qkirkpatrick on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Fascism is not just something of which you disapprove . . . nay, not even if that something involves the military.  The things that the US did to its POWs can be very, very wrong without rising to the level of the Gestapo.
  • Similarly, the fact that Hitler liked government health care is really totally irrelevant to this discussion, thank you so much for not bringing it up.   Hitler also liked cream puffs and dogs.  Shall we get rid of anyone who shows similar predilictions?  Not all forms of state intervention in the economy are fascist. 
Javier E

Nazis Killed Her Father. Then She Fell in Love With One. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-nazi-keurig-krispy-kreme.html

germany nazi corporation complicity moral obligation populism culture politics responsibility

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Peter Harf, who joined the company in 1981 and became chairman this year, and whose own father was a Nazi, said he never really bought the idea that the organization had nothing to hide.“I knew the stories they told,” he said. “It didn’t smell right.”
  • 12, as JAB was acquiring high-profile coffee brands and drawing global attention, Mr. Harf pressed the family to open its archives to an independent scholar. By 2016, Paul Erker, an economic historian at the University of Munich, took on the task.
  • Only now, 74 years after World War II, are the family and the company grappling with their dark and complicated history.
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  • Its employees — there are 180,000 around the world — have reported that customers accuse them of “working for Nazis
  • Mr. Harf noted that he lived in three places — New York, London and Milan — where nationalism and ethnic division were on the rise. For most of his long career, he said, he considered shareholder capitalism to be value neutral. No longer. In the age of Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini, he said, businesses can no longer pretend that they are operating in a “value-free space.”
  • “This is once again a time when everybody needs to take a stance,” Mr. Harf said. “I’m very scared of what’s happening.”
  • the men gave the company a makeover in keeping with Nazi principles. By the time Hitler took over, Benckiser already housed a Nationalist Socialist Company Organization — a worker council that sought to uphold Nazi ideology. It later became a “model NS plant.”
  • “Reimann Sr. and Reimann Jr. were not just opportunistic followers of the regime,” Mr. Harf said. “They were fully signed up to the Nazi project.”
  • In 1933, it employed 181 people. As an important supplier to the food industry, Benckiser benefited from the Nazi system, more than tripling sales over the next decade. Mr. Reimann Sr. served as president of the regional Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which helped orchestrate the Aryanization, expropriation and expulsion of Jewish businesses
  • starting in late 1940, the Reimanns routinely took advantage of forced labor: men and women taken from their homes in Nazi-occupied territories, as well as prisoners of war, who were allocated by the Nazis to farms and industrial companies across Germany.
  • It was around this time that Emilie Landecker started working in the accounting department as a clerk
  • According to Mr. Harf, Benckiser’s use of forced laborers grew so fast that she would surely have been aware of the abuses.
  • By 1943, 175 people, or a third of the total work force, were forced laborers, most of them from France and Eastern Europe. Benckiser operated two labor camps, one of them overseen by a brutal foreman, Paul Werneburg, who had been with the company since 1910. On his watch, female workers were forced to stand at attention naked outside their barracks, and those who refused risked sexual abuse. Workers were kicked and beaten, among them a Ukrainian woman who also cleaned in the Reimanns’ private villa.
  • During a bomb raid on Jan. 7, 1945, Werneburg threw dozens of workers out of a camp bomb shelter. Thirty were injured, and one died. As word of Werneburg’s brutality spread, even the local Nazi office in charge of allocating forced laborers reprimanded the Reimanns for mistreating their workers.
  • Ms. Landecker would have witnessed it all, said her son, Wolfgang Reimann, in an email. “She lived through the horror show happening in our own company,” he said. “She probably sat in the very bunker when Werneburg threw out the workers.”
  • Mr. Reimann Jr. wrote a letter to the commanding officer on Sept. 22, dismissing allegations that he had been an “early and enthusiastic Nazi” as mere “denunciations” — and insisting that he was in fact a victim of the Nazis.
  • It worked. While the French initially barred Mr. Reimann Jr. from continuing his business activities, American officials overturned the judgment, classifying him as a “follower” of Nazism, rather than an active Nazi himself.
  • In 1947, the wealth of the Reimann family totaled 686,000 Reichsmark, or approximately $2.4 million in today’s money. Over the decades, the fortune grew in step with Benckiser and its successor companies, and today the family’s worth is estimated at €33 billion. On one recent list of the wealthiest families in Germany, the Reimanns ranked second.
  • Ms. Landecker was at work at Benckiser when the Gestapo came for her father.It was April 24, 1942
  • A few weeks later, one last letter arrived from Mr. Landecker, but only the envelope has survived. It shows that he was interned in block III 416/2 in Izbica, a ghetto serving as a transfer point for the deportation of Jews to the Belzec and Sobibor death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
  • Mr. Landecker did two things that would prove prescient. He made sure his children were baptized Catholic, like his late wife. And he officially transferred to them his main possessions, including the family apartment, so that they could not be expropriated.
  • “We fought for five years only to have an age like this,” he wrote, referring to World War I. “I hope you, my dear children, remain well-behaved and good, and keep loving me, even if you suffer because of me.”
  • he had a brother and sister-in-law. “Aunt Pauline has written from America,” he wrote that December. “She is trying for us, maybe things will work out.” But there wasn’t enough money. Mr. Landecker was not allowed to work, which meant that Emilie, still a teenager, became the family’s only earner.
  • he wrote his last letter to Bavaria.“My dear Gerdele,” he wrote. “As you can see, I’m still here, but not for long. Today I learned that my departure is on the 24th of the month — in two days. So this is the last letter that you receive from me from here or perhaps ever. We don’t know what is waiting for us.”
  • “You won’t be able to marry here in Germany,” he continued. “Learn languages!! You have your future ahead of you — don’t waste it.”
  • No one knows when exactly their love affair started. But in 1951, their first child was born
  • Two more followed. Twice a week, every Sunday and Wednesday, Mr. Reimann Jr. would leave his wife and visit Ms. Landecker.
  • years later, she admitted in a letter to Mr. Reimann Jr. that she always missed not being his wife — and not having a regular family
  • Ms. Landecker was a quiet woman. She did not speak much. But her children say that despite everything, she loved their father. “I never understood why,” said Wolfgang Reimann. “He was not very lovable from my perspective.”
  • “My mother never said anything,” Wolfgang Reimann said. “For the longest time, I believed it was her personality.” But he has changed his mind. “If I had to live with the love of my life, as my mother did, and this person was also responsible for the terrible things that happened during the war, I would not have spoken much, either, I guess,
  • the Reimanns channeled much of their wealth into JAB. In recent years the holding company has spent billions to become a rival to the likes of Starbucks and Nestlé by buying chains including Panera Bread, Krispy Kreme and Pret A Manger. Last year, it also helped Keurig Green Mountain buy Dr Pepper Snapple for nearly $19 billion. JAB also controls the cosmetics giant Coty, the owner of Calvin Klein fragrances
  • “When I heard and read of the atrocities committed at Benckiser, sanctioned by my grandfather, I felt like throwing up,” said Martin Reimann, 30, who is a grandchild to Ms. Landecker and Mr. Reimann Jr. “I cannot claim that I was very interested in politics before. I was just living my life. But after what happened, I changed my mind. I have to do something. In our family council, the younger generation created a little bit of a rebellion.”
  • By renaming its foundation after Alfred Landecker, the Reimann family is bringing back one name from the millions killed by the Nazis. But it is also explicitly linking the memory of crimes past to today’s fight to preserve the values of liberal democracy.
  • “What we can learn from history and how we can learn from history is at the core of this foundation,”
  • “This is not just about researching and remembering the past,” he added. “It’s about stabilizing and maintaining democracy today.”
  • Mr. Harf, JAB’s chairman, agrees. He said he had recently read “The Order of the Day,” a historic novella by Éric Vuillard set in the years before World War II. One scene takes place in February 1933, when Hitler and the president of the Reichstag encourage 24 German industrialists to donate to the Nazi party. The businessmen — representing companies that are still prominent German corporate names, like Siemens, Bayer and Allianz — duly open their wallets.
  • Mr. Harf said it made him think that not enough voices in business were speaking up against the re-emergence of nationalism and populism in Europe and the United States.
  • Every time business leaders make decisions, he said, they should ask, “What does this mean for our children? What does it mean for the future?”
  • “In history, businesses have enabled populists,” he added. “We mustn’t make the same mistake today.” Then he quoted the Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal: “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”
  • He added, “As the successors and descendants of people who committed horrendous acts, it is vital that our generation accepts what has happened, that we do whatever we can to bring tolerance and equality to the communities in which we live
bluekoenig

The secret student resistance to Hitler - Iseult Gillespie - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

history culture crisis nazi germany the white rose teded hitler

shared by bluekoenig on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 16 Jan 20
     
    This is a video about The White Rose movement in the 1940's, a secret college group that dispersed leaflets to encourage Germans not to support Hitler. The two siblings who lead it had been part of the Hitler youth and questioned Nazism later in life. In college, they found a group of students who shared their ideas and printed leaflets that they spread across Munich. The students were later reported to the Gestapo by a janitor who witnessed their crimes and were put to death by the government.
anonymous

Pope Pius XII: Vatican records show he knew Nazis were killing Jews during Holocaust - ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...an-pope-pius-records-holocaust

history

shared by anonymous on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • The long-awaited opening of Pope Pius XII’s wartime records lasted only a week before the coronavirus outbreak shut down the Vatican archives. But that was long enough for documents to emerge that reflect badly on the pontiff accused of silence during the Holocaust, according to published reports.
  • German researchers found that the pope, who never directly criticized the Nazi slaughter of Jews, knew from his own sources about Berlin’s death campaign early on.
  • But he kept this from the U.S. government after an aide argued that Jews and Ukrainians — his main sources — could not be trusted because they lied and exaggerated, the researchers said.
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  • They also discovered that the Vatican hid these and other sensitive documents presumably to protect Pius’s image, a finding that will embarrass the Roman Catholic Church, which is still struggling with its coverup of clerical sexual abuse.
  • “If Pius XII comes out of this study of the sources looking better, that’s wonderful. If he comes out looking worse, we have to accept that, too.”
  • Pius XII, who headed the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958 and is now a candidate for canonization, was the most controversial pontiff of the 20th century. His failure to denounce the Holocaust publicly earned him the title of “Hitler’s pope,” and critics have for decades asked for his wartime archives to be opened for scrutiny.
  • The pope’s defenders have long argued he could not speak out more clearly for fear of a Nazi backlash, and they cite his decision to hide Jews at the Vatican and in churches and monasteries as proof of his good deeds.
  • The chain of events goes back to Sept. 27, 1942, when a U.S. diplomat gave the Vatican a secret report on the mass murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. It said about 100,000 had been massacred in and around Warsaw and added that an additional 50,000 were killed in Lviv in German-occupied Ukraine.
  • The archive included a note confirming that Pius read the American report. It also had two letters to the Vatican independently corroborating the reports of massacres in Warsaw and Lviv, according to the researchers.
  • The research team also found three small photographs showing emaciated concentration camp inmates and corpses thrown into a mass grave. A Jewish informer had given them to the Vatican ambassador, or nuncio, in neutral Switzerland to send to the Vatican, and the Holy See confirmed reception of them in a letter two weeks later.
  • It has long been known that the Catholic Church — possibly with covert U.S. assistance — helped ex-Nazis, like the Holocaust bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele or Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, flee to South America. These men were anti-communists, and Rome and Washington considered communism their enemy.
  • Other questions Wolf wants to research are Pius’s relations with U.S. political and intelligence networks during and after the war, his role in promoting European unity, and his thoughts about allying with Muslims in a campaign against communism.
  • Answers to these and other questions could also influence a drive by conservative Catholics to have Pius declared a saint.
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