hitler stuff

[karcy]

I bought a copy of Mein Kampf. Never wanted to buy it before, it's like buying something called "Diary of a Serial Killer" or something. (And now, you too, can be privy to the Voice of Evil! At 20% discount if you purchase another book from us!).

But I'm teaching The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in school, and the more I read about the Holocaust the

Comments

[underlankers]

Where things really get interesting is that there were Nazis that predated the Nazi Party, both a German and a Czech party in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. That and Hitler was originally sent to spy on the Nazis instead of actually creating the movement. The most ironic thing to me about the Nazis as a movement was that in the last elections held before the end of WWII in Germany they still failed to get a majority of the vote, and this before the Enabling Act when they had the full power of the stat at their beck and call.....

[karcy]

Well, I'm not particularly keen on the origins of Nazism, which seems to me like a pretty standard nationalist big government. I was more interested in the undercurrents that permitted the Holocaust to happen. There'll always be debate as to how much 'ordinary Germans' were complicit in the events that led up to the Holocaust.

[underlankers]

The undercurrents that led to the Holocaust are actually rather simple from a historical viewpoint: Hitler invaded the USSR, got deep into the USSR, had control of most of Europe's population, and took methods used on disabled Germans to use on Polish, Soviet, Yugoslav, Romanian, Hungarian, French, Italian, and Dutch Jews. No WWII or alternately the Soviets throwing Hitler right back over their border and no Holocaust. The Soviets do even slightly better in 1941, no Holocaust. The Soviets smash Army Group Center in front of Moscow, perhaps no death chambers and arguably no gas vans as there will go the Nazis for the rest of the war.

The Holocaust and Hitler's overall genocidal plans were the direct result of the USSR's failure to defeat the invasion in 1941 in a serious sense before the Battle of Moscow.

[karcy]

I think your interest and my interest in this is different.

[scatteredgray]

Boy in the Striped Pajamas was such an intense movie. I pretty much regretted watching it. Or at least, regretted watching it to the end.

When the Holocaust comes up and people are all, But how could it happen, I always wonder if they don't notice how intense some of the hate-mongering is regarding race, religion, sexuality (the Ugandan gay death bill is what I'm thinking of here specifically.) etc, and the amount of people who are supportive/receptive of that hate mongering.

[karcy]

Yeah, I was really hit by how pervasive de-humanizing stuff is everywhere, and how often I've just let things that bother me by because I didn't want to start a fight among friends or something. The religion thing bothered me a lot, because it's where I encounter most of the stuff that feeds that 'dormant evil' thing, and where I'm the least effective in responding. There's so much dormant de-humanization going on everywhere. Who's to say that, if anyone of us were caught in a war under severe economic hardship, we wouldn't think "okay, get rid of the vermin who've been leeching on us all this while

[scatteredgray]

I don't know that the "dormant evil" is actually all that dormant. I think it's more that there's usually some kind of check in place, that prevents people from acting on it in or at least limits the ways they can act on it.

The slaughter of Chinese-Indonesians during the riots in 90s is the same sort of evil, just less organized, for example. The more recent movement here to "Eliminate the Ahmadiyah to prevent horizontal conflict." (As if it's not clearly top-down majority-oppressing-a-minority conflict.)

These guysThe gay death bill in Uganda I've already mentioned. (Which is a bill to make being gay punishable by death, and to punish anyone who doesn't turn in people who they know are gay. It's basically a gay genocide bill

[karcy]

I'd forgotten about the attacks on the Chinese Indonesians in the 1990s. But then again, the 1990s was a time of pretty intense Mahathirism, so it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the news was filtered.

I don't know why the names of the people who said 'Happy Nigger Day' aren't revealed. It's only what they've already put up in public, anyway.

You're right on the dot about religion. It's really hard to unhinge prejudice within religious communities because the people in it have aligned what they are currently thinking with their idea of correct religious teaching. I don't think it's an identity thing, I think that when you think 'concept x is aligned with my deity's idea of goodness', it's really hard to tell someone 'look, concept x is wrong'.

Mein Kampf

[ext_991882]

Yeah,i bought a copy too last month and just had a time to flip thru 1st chapter when he was struggling to achieve his dream as painter, and goes to Austria.

Well, i guess a part of him want to be "known", a part of him that doesn't let go the suffering that he once struggled become a demon that ate him in his entire life. Well, scary that it co-exist in everyone else, could exist in me too.

-HN

Re: Mein Kampf

[karcy]

Hey, I'd just like to say that it really makes me uncomfortable when you trace me down on my blogs but don't respond when I reply to you.

I don't know if you got it, but I tweeted you back to ask how you came to find out about my Tumblr.

Re: Mein Kampf

[karcy]

Okay, sorry for the last comment lol ^^;;;. I just got your reply tweets.

Re: Mein Kampf

[ext_991882]

Haha..i google "Earth Groaning" and it directed to your tumblr. So i browse thru ur tumblr and found it a very rare piece, not from what you reblog, but from ur self-quote,self-write up. I've been searching for this for so many times,sadly in Msia, it is less. Haha.

Well,hope you can share more. :)