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e32d551
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"[ :] Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. 's thought was not taught in Germany; was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, , and were alike despised by the National Socialist regime. Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms - the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome - if it's an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of , that says that he's doing God's work and executing God's will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making
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evolution
science
albert-einstein
barbaric
fascistic
fuhrer
mein-kampf
superstitious
separation-of-church-and-state
einstein
nazi
charles-darwin
sigmund-freud
freud
pope
vatican
nazism
catholicism
united-states
hitler
darwinism
darwin
fascism
jewish
germany
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Christopher Hitchens |
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e1f905a
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"My faceless neighbor spoke up: "Don't be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve." I exploded: "What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet? His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily: "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people."
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history
genocide
holocaust
hitler
jews
germany
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Elie Wiesel |
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c05ceab
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So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the or of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an and a and a , who had married to and had a copy of Marilyn's conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in and Annie Navasky's front room, with and as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
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shakespeare
india
religion
annie-navasky
arthur-miller
bar-and-bat-mitzvah
best-man
budapest
desecration
eritrea
marilyn-monroe
martin-amis
morocco
prague
religious-conversion
robert-goldburg
steve-wasserman
synagogues
tunisia
victor-saul-navasky
jewish-question
david-rieff
rabbis
temples
spinoza
normality
einstein
istanbul
security
salvation
poland
jewishness
eastern-europe
kurdish-people
middle-east
damascus
iraq
debate
atheism
islam
antisemitism
jews
germany
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Christopher Hitchens |
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6dfaaee
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The Germans sell chemical weapons to Iran and Iraq. The wounded are then sent to Germany to be treated. Veritable human guinea pigs.
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p122
persepolis
satrapi
iran
iraq
weapons
germany
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Marjane Satrapi |
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0d2ece0
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Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
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enlightenment
progress
irony
lies
socialism
literature
humanism
politics
faith
religion
science
truth
apoliticism
berlin
bought-priesthood
cape-coloureds
eurocentricism
george-hw-bush
german-people
groupthink
left-wing-politics
margaret-thatcher
munich
personality-politics
polytheism
potus
radical-politics
tribalism
xhosa-people
zulu-people
ronald-reagan
sectarianism
monotheism
solipsism
argument
critical-thinking
self-pity
self-love
south-africa
totalitarianism
journalism
right-wing-politics
george-orwell
soviet-union
united-states
conviction
orthodoxy
los-angeles
film
individualism
atheism
hedonism
thomas-mann
populism
russia
communism
postmodernism
cold-war
germany
literary-criticism
euphemism
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d43d3e3
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Fairy tales for adult readers remained popular throughout Europe well into the 19th century -- particularly in Germany, where the Brothers Grimm published their massive collection of German fairy tales (revised and edited to reflect the Brothers' patriotic and patriarchal ideals), providing inpiration for novelists, poets, and playrights among the German Romantics. Recently, fairy tale scholars have re-discovered the enormous body of work produced by women writers associated with the German Romantics: Grisela von Arnim, Sophie Tieck Bernhardi, Karoline von Gunderrode, Julie Berger, and Sophie Albrecht, to name just a few.
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feminism
germany
fairy-tales-for-adults
magical-stories
stories
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Terri Windling |
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2bd7cd4
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Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.
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fear
nazis
paranoia
tension
germany
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Erik Larson |
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31a88fd
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When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine , George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one. In one sense, the argument over 'Holocaust denial' ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organising principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany , or 'Jew-free.' Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalised and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended--to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia--this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically 'unfit,' whether Jewish or 'Aryan,' was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic 'Nuremberg Laws.' Most ominous of all--and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbours--Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland. None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, 'deniable.
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holocaust
holocaust-denial
jewry
nazi-germany
nazism
george-orwell
world-war-ii
antisemitism
germany
|
Christopher Hitchens |
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6037b67
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Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry... Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.
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war
poetry
british-overseas-territories
cars
cavalry
churchill
englishness
german-army
german-empire
infantry
kaiser
kaiser-wilhelm-ii
silesia
sylvia-plath
upper-silesia
wrocław
british-empire
germany
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Christopher Hitchens |
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00790ca
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*** A SMALL ANNOUNCEMENT *** ABOUT RUDY STEINER He didn't deserve to die the way he did.
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liesel-meminger
markus-zusak
the-book-thief
germany
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Markus Zusak |
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827ae31
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There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.
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war
history
hitler
world-war-ii
germany
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Erik Larson |
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ae3d1f2
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Where Hans Hubermann and Erik Vandenburg were ultimately united by music, Max and Liesel were held together by the quiet gathering of words.
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liesel-meminger
markus-zusak
the-book-thief
germany
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Markus Zusak |
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543297e
|
Warner laces his boots and sings the songs and marches the marches, acting less out of duty than out of a time worn desire to be dutiful.
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war
werner
german
duty
germany
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Anthony Doerr |
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62cdd5c
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*** A SMALL ANNOUNCEMENT *** ***ABOUT RUDY STEINER*** He didn't deserve to die the way he did.
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liesel-meminger
markus-zusak
the-book-thief
germany
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Markus Zusak |
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d6ab5de
|
Democracy--here and in Britain and France, it hasn't been so universal a sniveling slavery as Naziism in Germany, such an imagination-hating, pharisaic materialism as Russia--even if it has produced industrialists like you, Frank, and bankers like you, R. C., and given you altogether too much power and money. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy's given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
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money
workers
united-states
dignity
power
democracy
russia
germany
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Sinclair Lewis |