Tag: nazi

Reminder: Holocaust victims weren’t killed in ovens…

I hate to go and ruin the fun in historical acts of genocide, but this seemingly minor detail of a myth is one worth straightening out: victims of the Nazi’s weren’t killed in ovens.

This historical correction comes on the heels of a quote getting buzz by critics of Mike Huckabee who, in a condemnation of the Obama administrations nuclear deal with Iran (a nation dedicated to “wiping Israel off the map” in one way or another).

The actual quote isn’t anything remarkable, but got a lot of coverage because of the specific holocaust reference he used.

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.”

As a political story, this doesn’t interest me because there’s no reason it should. The Left tried to exploit it as a big deal. It was misconstrued as every Nazi-related analogy is. Other 2016 Primary Republicans had to play the “agree or disagree with what the Left says is a big deal” game (Rick Santorum said right-on – Jeb Bush said tone it down). Huckabee doubled down on the sentiment. blah blah blah.

But what no one is mentioning in any of the coverage is the misleading history in the comment. Jews weren’t “marched to the ovens” in the holocaust. Ovens weren’t a method of slaughter.

It’s an easy mix-up to make since the holocaust is known for mass killing and mass body burning, so skipping over the part where the bodies were dead and mashing it with the part where people were murdered in unconventional methods is a common jumble. I used to be one of the mixer-uppers. Around 2008 when I was baking a pizza and I opened the lid, causing the wave of heat to hit me in the face, I had an immediate empathic PTSD-style flashback of how holocaust victims had to have felt dying this way. Everyones worst way to die is burning, and even if you’re not claustrophobic – the addition of being in a casket sized space is a tremendous horror. Everyone who has had a loved one cremated has had their mind go to the morbid “what if” thought of their own death being misdiagnosed somehow and waking up just as they were being put into the crematory oven. *shudder*


Survivors of the Dachau concentration camp demonstrate the operation of the crematorium by preparing a corpse to be placed into one of the ovens. Dachau, Germany, April 29-May 10, 1945. Credit.

But if there’s a bright side to horrific senseless mass murder, there is the comfort that this didn’t happen in the concentration camps of the holocaust. Back when I had my pizza vision, I looked up how many people died this way and could only find one or two instances of a prisoner being put into a crematorium oven alive as a special punishment.

I blame for this myth, the intentionally-offensive joke regarding exactly this connection between the best thing on earth (pizza) and the worst thing on earth (burning alive) that goes “Q: What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A: the pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.” Womp womp. But you’ll be shocked to find out that the normally reliable factually rigorous nature of anti-semitism has, in this instance, failed on accuracy. Idk about you, but I did Nazi that coming.

But for real, guys: Victims murdered by the Nazi’s were shot or gassed to death en masse. Their bodies were carried to crematoriums afterward. Yet a lot of people, evidently a 2016 Presidential candidate included, seem to think mass oven killing went on in the holocaust.

While Huckabee didn’t explicitly state the historical inaccuracy, it’s implied in the term “marching to the door” and he continued the implication that people were murdered by ovens when commenting on the comment afterward:

“When I talked about the oven door, I have stood at that oven door,” he said. “I know exactly what it looks like, 1.1 million people killed. For 6,000 years, Jews have been chased and hunted and killed all over this Earth, and when someone in a government says we’re going to kill them, I think, by gosh, we better take that seriously.”

It’s the Iranians who used the word Holocaust first, Huckabee said, and refused during the negotiations to recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

“They refused to tone down their rhetoric and said the Holocaust did not exist and that they’re going to wipe Israel off the map,” he said. “When people in a government position continue to say they’re going to kill you, I think somebody ought to wake up and take that seriously.”

Not withstanding dopiness of his Appeal to Authority fallacy in saying he saw the ovens in person (and I saw them on a Bing search alongside disturbing juxtapositions of actual ovens. So what?)…

 

-the rest of what he said is at least accurate. Iran brought up the holocaust first so if someone thinks the Obama deal with Iran empowers the enemy-state (as it does) then it’s not a wildly off base comment – just in-artfully stated (he should have said that it potentially makes such a march, not that it does).

 

Glenn Beck news site writer is confused about political orientation

Glenn Beck is best known for his chalkboard writing Professor imitating monologues/speeches/sermons/whatever you want to call them, explaining political ideology and their representation in history and current events. Evidently though, he needs to send one of his writers for his news website The Blaze, Jonathon M. Seidl a few of his courses.

In a post titled Is the Oslo Gunman Really Right-Wing?, Seidl contests the claim by pointing to a Daily Mail article which opens its profile on Anders Behring Breivik with some information that allegedly “would seem to shake up any simple explanation of who he is or what he believed”:

The man responsible for the massacre in Norway was a member of a Swedish nazi forum which encourages attacks on government buildings.

It was also revealed by local police that he had extreme right wing views who hated Muslims.

According to Swedish website Expo Anders Behring Breivik is a member of ‘Nordisk’ which has 22,000 members and focuses on political terrorism.

[…]

[His Facebook profile] also listed interests such as body-building and freemasonry.[Emphasis added]

Okay? Despite lefties liking to call people on the right Nazi’s or claim that Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi) movement movement was a right wing movement, the truth is that elements of both were involved

Next in the list the Blaze posted from the Daily Mail is uncited “right wing views” and Muslim hatred, where again – bigotry is not a qualifier anywhere on the political spectrum. After that is membership of a group that “focuses on political terrorism”. Again, not an ideology factor. True, it is more common on the left (presidential assassination, animal liberation, eco terrorism) than the right (the only conservative terrorism I can think of are the 8 or 9 people who have attempted or succeeded in abortion shootings or bombings) but “what is more frequent within” is not the same as what “is” or what defines an ideology.

And lastly, The Blaze puts in bold his activity in freemasonry, which is a culty conspiracy kindov thing often associated with Nazi’s. In fact, Hitler included in his declaration of war against America that FDR was allegedly a Freemason.

So far, that doesn’t add up to anything. Nazi + anti-Muslim + Nordisk + freemasonry adds up to kook. not right or left wing kook. So to decipher whether he is right or left in his belief system (which I acknowledge is a completely academic pursuit anyway, having no actual value), you have to go outside of these examples.

The Blaze however, does not. The Blaze says immediately after the list above (emphasis mine):

That’s certainly a mixed bag. And some of that information would seem to hint at a possible extreme leftist position, perhaps anarchism, would it not? It certainly doesn’t reflect the views of a conservative Christian, as he claimed to be.

The last part is right – he clearly wasn’t a “conservative Christian” even if he thought he was, but that isn’t what is being alleged. The allegation is that he was a far right wing extremist and anarchy is a far right extreme, not left. The far left extreme is Communism.

The error caught my interest only because Beck himself is so passionate about these differences. For someone who takes such care and effort to broadcast the differences between right and left, having the opposite of those definitions on your truth-news website is kindov a big deal.

For future reference, I’ll text-map the left/right divide for you (start in the middle and go left for more state control over the individual and right for more personal freedom):

Communism <– Socialism <– Liberalism <– POPULIST –> Conservatism –> Libertarianism –> Anarchism

 

Disney does Anne Frank…maybe

I’ve been loosely following the development of this ever since I heard the news that Disney had hired David Mamet to write a screenplay for a film adaptation of an Anne Frank story. They later rejected it because it was “too dark” (wtf?) and didn’t focus on Anne enough…or at all. wait what? eh-yea… Apparently Mamet was all “mm. ya. Anne Frank. cool chick. – hey, what iiiif… we doooo… *THIS*…instead..ya?” and wrote a screenplay not about the teenage author of the diary he was assigned to write about, buuuut… about “a contemporary Jewish girl who goes to Israel and learns about the traumas of suicide bombing.” okay.. but what? Would it have been released under the title “How the Diary of Anne Frank made me think of this other neat story I think should be told”?

Made me remember some of the comments I saw on the DailyBeast – “What’s next? Giget Goes to Auschwitz?” – “Anne Frank the musical To be followed by The Diary of Anne Frank On Ice!?” Reminds me of the Saturday TV Funhouse SNL sketch of a Disney version of Titanic that included a preview of Anne Frank singing “I’m gonna write a novel some day”.

Is this what we have to look forward to?…

Anne Frank

More proof that I’m on a version of The Truman Show and that everything revolves around me came this afternoon when I saw FoxNews.com’s front page headlining the existence of a short clip of Anne Frank on Youtube, which is the only footage of her that exists. I’ve had an Anne Frank obsession the last week and a half that won’t end until I know every relevant detail there is to know (which is how these things go) and have been watching and reading as much I can.

Synopsis of the story: The Frank family knew shit was going down and started planning to go into hiding in the annex of Mr Franks business building (a company called Opekta which sold a kit to make home made jam). They had to bump up the move after eldest daughter, Margot Frank was sent a summons to report to a work camp. “Fuck that” was the obvious response, and the family moved into the annex attic that night, taking whatever they could carry without looking suspicious and wearing several layers of their clothes since they couldn’t be seen with suit cases.

They were joined shortly afterward in their hiding place by family friends Mr and Mrs Van Pels and their teenage son Peter. Later, their dentist and friend Fritz Pfeffer (see my companion piece to this post I wrote for BetweenShowers.com here) was added after in inquiring to Miep Giess, one of the office workers who brought the hidden families food and supplies, on a place to hide.

Anne’s father, Otto Frank was the only one to survive.


This is one of the few television interviews Otto Frank gave. Sitting in one of the rooms of the Secret Annex, he is talking about his surprise at the things Anne Frank wrote in her diary. Her thoughts on life, her self-criticism: this was not the daughter he had known

Things I learned that everyone should know:

-The “E” at the end of her name is not silent. Her name is pronounced Ann-eh. kinda like “Anna” but with an ehh instead of the “uh” sound an “A” makes.

-If only whoever betrayed the family (no one knows who made the anonymous call to the Gestapo that gave the tip) had waited a month, Anne and maybe more probably would have survived (Anne died one month before the camp was liberated).

DEATH:

-She suffered. Her last months were pain filled in every sense, starting with seeing her precious diary thrown away by the German police as they ransacked the attic and ending with her death among piles of sick, dying and bodies in the infirmary hut at the camp where she died 3 days after her sister.

-If Anne had not been infected with Scabies (a skin infection caused by mites burrowing into your flesh), her whole family most likely would have lived. 1) because her mother and sister were selected to leave the death-work camp they were in and go to an actual work camp where most of the slave laborers lived but Anne was denied due to her scabies infection and her sister and mother chose to stay with her. and 2) Anne’s expected cause of death, Typhus, was caused by the scabies.

-If Anne had known her father (whom she was closest to) were still alive, I bet she too would still be alive. When the family arrived at the camp, families were immediately forced apart into 4 groups: first the men and women were separated and then each split into either off-to-the-work-camp or straight-to-the-gas-chamber. One of Anne’s friends who ended up in a neighboring camp from her heard from Anne that she believed her father was put into the straight-to-the-gas-chamber group and died that night. She (accurately) believed her mother to be dead and her sister Margot died while Anne was taking care of her. Anne died 3 days later, evidence would suggest, because she just gave up. Her whole family was dead and there was no light at the end of the pitch black hell tunnel she was in, and she just let her illness claim her. If she had known her dad was alive, I believe she could have hung on those 4 more weeks to be liberated.

Donlad Duck – Der Fuehrer’s Face

A German brass band (including Hirohito on sousaphone and Mussolini on bass drum) marches through a small German town (where everything, including the clouds and trees, is decorated with the Nazi swastika), singing the virtues of the Nazi doctrine. Passing by Donald’s house, they poke him out of bed with a bayonet to get ready for work. Because of wartime rationing, his breakfast consists of stale bread, coffee brewed from a single hoarded coffee bean, and a spray that tastes like bacon and eggs. The band shoves a copy of Mein Kampf in front of him for a moment of reading, then marches into his house and escorts him to a factory.

Upon arriving at the factory (at bayonet-point), Donald starts his 48-hour daily shift screwing caps onto artillery shells in an assembly line. Mixed in with the shells are portraits of the Fuehrer, so he must interrupt his work to do a Hitler salute every time a portrait appears. The pace of the assembly line intensifies (as in the classic comedy Modern Times), and Donald finds it increasingly hard to complete all the tasks. At the same time, he is bombarded with propaganda messages about the superiority of the Aryan race and the glory of working for The Führer.

After a “paid vacation” that consists of making swastika shapes with his body for a few seconds in front of a painted backdrop of the Alps, Donald is ordered to work overtime. He has a nervous breakdown with hallucinations of artillery shells everywhere. When the hallucinations clear, he finds himself in his bed—in the United States—and realizes the whole experience was a nightmare. The short ends with Donald embracing a miniature Statue of Liberty, thankful for his American citizenship.