The Germany-based “digital entrepreneur” Spartacus Olsson can be found in YouTube videos discussing historical subject matter. In one video he describes a historical figure and how he ruled a country: This leader was seen as “The almighty savior of the people.” His “legacy” was to be the main ideology of his cult of personality. He was a “ruthless autocrat,” the instigator of conflict. “He will leave behind a lasting image of a strong state driven by cruel strength, mindless obedience and brutal order.” It is a system of governance “based on deconstruction of the state, deliberate chaos, individual interpretation of vague directives, and violent escalation.” He has no use for either legislative bodies or court systems; his word is the “law.”
Yet
who is really “in control” of the state…“Is anyone really in control?” the
leader himself wonders. “I’ve totally lost sight of the organizations of the
party. When I find myself confronted by one or the other of these achievements,
I say to myself ‘By God, how that has developed!” The leader is also “notoriously
anti-bureaucratic.” He “rarely visits cabinet meetings and seldom puts pen to
paper. When he rules he often does so through ambiguous spoken directives…he is
not involved in a lot of policy-making, and he doesn’t really know the details
of what happens in his ministries, One aide writes how ‘he dislikes the study
of documents. He took the view that many things sorted themselves out on their
own if one did not interfere.’”
The
only capacity for governance he did have was to “set the popular agenda,” which
he had done by first inflaming listeners at rallies with nationalist rhetoric
and popular racial and political prejudices, and then by “a system of
escalation, where those with bolder and harsher methods with more visibility
and short-term success gained the most praise and attention. Anything that
works toward the ultimate goal can’t be bad, right?”
If
you were told that Olsson was speaking about Donald Trump, you might agree with
this assessment of Trump and his system of governance aided and abetted by
sycophants eager to please him, and fanatics with their own personal agendas
that they were allowed to pursue so long that it fell in line with the “popular
agenda.” Of course, he was not talking about Trump but Adolf Hitler, but to
quote the philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it”
Meanwhile,
Gina Carano, former MMA participant and actor in the Lucasfilm series “The
Mandalorian,” was fired not because she was a right-wing nutcase who opposed
mask wearing and supported voter fraud conspiracies, but for this social media
post:
Jews were beaten in the
streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because
history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point
where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government
first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any
different from hating someone for their political views?
The last sentence was what must have “outraged” people,
because everything she said before it was absolutely true, whether people want
to face reality or not. Given the scenes from the Capitol building riots where
there were calls for the blood of Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, if someone of left-wing affiliation had said
this, surely those same people who were “outraged” at Carano would instead nod
in grim recognition, right?
But I suspect that the truth could equally be that
people—both the perpetrators and the victims, and their descendants—remain
extremely sensitive about the subject, and because they are so, they are bound
to repeat those mistakes, and I do include Jews as well, because they refuse to
see that even one of their own—Stephen Miller—is using the same terminology the
Nazis used to demonize and dehumanize a whole group of people. Look at Fox
News’ Laura Ingraham; now that Trump is out of office, she is back to doing her
racist railing against Hispanic migrants; why should we be offended by white
nationalist Trumpist rioters trying to overthrow democracy in this country,
when the real “threat” is all those “Mexicans” who have allegedly since the Mexican-American
War been working to undermine and
destroy the American “culture”?
Now
let’s look at some history. At the end of World War II, U.S. troops in Germany prevented the destruction of Gestapo files in Würzburg.
Upon examination it was discovered that there were only 28 agents assigned to a
region with a population of nearly 1 million people. 80-90 percent of the
“crimes” in those files were reported by ordinary
citizens. The main job of the Gestapo was sorting out all those
denunciations, many if not most of them lodged against non-Jewish Germans. It
turns out that people had less to fear from the Gestapo, but from their own neighbors
and co-workers.
The Irish Times tells us that while “The Gestapo was
a key element in the Nazi terror system” that “conjures up a nightmare image of
an all-powerful Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ style secret police force keeping the
German public under constant surveillance. In reality, the Gestapo was a very
small organization…Most rural towns had no Gestapo presence at all. The Gestapo
was underfunded, under-resourced and over-stretched.”
“It’s been estimated that only 15 percent of Gestapo cases
started because of surveillance operations. A far greater number began
following a tip-off from a member of the public. Every allegation, no matter
how trivial, was investigated with meticulous and time-consuming thoroughness.
It’s been estimated that about 40 per cent of these denunciations were
personally motivated.”
Most cases were of the following nature, of a man who was
listening to a foreign radio station for “alternative” news:
Peter
Holdenberg, a 64-year-old disabled bookseller, who lived in Essen, was accused
by his neighbour Helen Stuffel of this offence, which carried a prison sentence
of up to 18 months. She had listened at the wall of Peter’s next-door
apartment. She said she could clearly hear him listening to BBC programmes
during the evening. Another neighbour, Irmgard Pierce, corroborated her
allegations. Holdenberg was brought in for questioning by the Gestapo on
December 10th, 1942. ‘This is all a conspiracy,’ he complained. ‘I’ve had
trouble with Stuffel in the past and Pierce always backed her up.’ He depicted
the allegations as foolish gossip. He was not anti-Nazi at all. The ordeal of
his arrest and confinement in a Gestapo cell was obviously deeply traumatic. On
the evening of his arrest, Holdenberg was found hanging in his cell. He died in
hospital on the following day, without ever regaining consciousness. His
denouncer had caused his death.
“The Gestapo
came to realize investigating false allegations was wasting a great deal of its
time. As a letter, dated August 1st, 1943, from the Ministry of Justice in
Berlin put it: ‘The denouncer is the biggest scoundrel in the whole country.’”
But by then hundreds of thousands of ordinary, innocent people had been
imprisoned and tens of thousands killed simply because they were not
sufficiently “patriotic.”
This
week a judge in Poland found guilty of libel two historians, Professors
Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, who wrote in their book Night Without End that a mayor of one Polish
town, Edward Malinowski, ”had betrayed the whereabouts of a group of 22 Jews to
German soldiers. The group was subsequently executed.” The deceased
Malinowski’s niece, the 80-year-old Filomena Leszczynska, brought forward a
civil libel suit against the historians, based on a 2018 law passed by the nationalist legislature
that made it a crime to make “false” claims against the Polish people in regard
to the Holocaust. Malinowski had been acquitted of crimes against humanity in a
1950 trial, based on the testimony of a Jewish woman who wanted to “thank” him
for not denouncing her and instead having her sent to a prison labor camp; but
in a later interview, she stated that she “realized that [Malinowski] was an
accomplice in the deaths of several dozen Jews who had been hiding in the woods
and had been turned over to the Germans.”
90 percent of Poland’s Jews were
killed during the Holocaust, and few want to “relive” that time if it means
examining the culpability of non-Jewish Poles. In fact, anti-Semitism was a
growing problem in pre-war Poland as it was in many European countries. Poland
itself was not a national entity through the 19th century, its land
absorbed by Germany and Russia, and was “recreated” after World War I, and it
sought to define itself in Catholic nationalist terms, which meant purging as
much as possible Jews from the cultural life of the country. In an article entitled “The Truth About
Poland’s Role in the Holocaust,” The
Atlantic wrote that
As German authorities implemented killing on
an industrial scale, they drew upon Polish police forces and railroad personnel
for logistical support, notably to guard ghettos where hundreds of thousands of
Jewish men, women, and children were held before deportation to killing
centers. The so-called Blue Police was a force some 20,000 strong. These
collaborators enforced German anti-Jewish policies such as restrictions on the
use of public transportation and curfews, as well as the devastating and bloody
liquidation of ghettos in occupied Poland from 1942-1943. Paradoxically, many
Polish policemen who actively assisted the Germans in hunting Jews were also
part of the underground resistance against the occupation in other arenas.
Individual Poles also often helped in the identification, denunciation, and
exposure of Jews in hiding, sometimes motivated by greed and the opportunities
presented by blackmail and the plunder of Jewish-owned property.
Cases of anti-Semitic action were not
limited to abetting the German occupation authorities. There are
well-documented incidents, particularly in the small towns of eastern Poland,
where locals—acutely aware of the Nazis’ presence and emboldened by their anti-Semitic
policies—carried out violent riots and murdered their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps
the most infamous of these episodes was a massacre in the town of Jedwabne in
summer 1941 when several hundred Jews were burned alive by their neighbors.
More difficult to unpack is the tangled history of the southeastern village of
Gniewczyna Łańcucka. In May 1942, non-Jewish residents of the town held hostage
some two to three dozen local Jews. Over the course of several days, they
tortured and raped their hostages before finally murdering them.
What
happened in Poland also occurred in other countries occupied by the Germans,
who were aided by anti-Semites emboldened to carry out their own vendettas
against not only Jews, but against non-Jews with whom they either had personal
issues, or because they were so fanatically ideological that they thought it
was their “duty” to denounce those they did not believe were “patriotic” or loyal
enough to the state. So let’s review again what Gina Carano wrote:
Jews were beaten in the
streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because
history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point
where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government
first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any
different from hating someone for their political views?
Was
she right, after all? It is certainly more correct to say that what we heard
and saw leading up to January 6 is history repeating itself. Since it would be a true
statement in that context, it is those who are “outraged” who should be
“censured” for being both ignorant of history and for being mired in
self-denial.
And
there is one other thing that should be pointed out. This country does have a
history of genocide—that of Native Americans, whether it was through the transmission
of disease or actual massacres. In what is now the U.S., there was an estimated
pre-1600 indigenous population of anywhere between 2 to 10 million; by 1900 it
had been reduced to a little over 200,000. Those people didn’t just disappear
into thin air; they “disappeared” for one reason, and one reason only—the
“infestation” of uninvited European “guests” who decided to stay.
And
“snitching” by “patriots” still goes on. If you happen to be a member of that “ethnic”
group against which that Laura Ingraham has resumed her fascist-style harangues
as being a "murderous invasion” and a “cultural” threat, then
everything you do is “suspicious” and subject to “denouncement” to the “authorities” or employers, even if you
are an American just like they are. Of course if you are not, there is always
the ICE, this country’s version of the Gestapo, to be “denounced” to. “Human
nature” never really changes, and to one degree or another, history always
repeats itself.
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