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2009-02-01 Home Front: Culture Wars

Steyn - Europe has taken over the Holocaust

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Posted by Glomotch Thavise2856 2009-02-01 00:00|| || Front Page|| [1 views ] Top

#1 "Europe has taken over the Holocaust"

I guess that's only fair - they perpetrated it, after all.

Posted by Barbara Skolaut">Barbara Skolaut 2009-02-01 00:53|| 2009-02-01 00:53|| Front Page Top

#2 That was one of the foreseeable consequences of the transformation from the EEC (in theory a purely economic organisation) to the UE (a political one). As the uofficial motto of thde UE was "Europa uber alles in der welt" (Europe above everyone else in world"), the Holocaust was something to be pushed aside as it put in question the moral right of Europeans to strive for world leadership. One of the corollaries was the demonization of Israel: if Israelis were montser then the Holocaust was a less horrible thing. Sooner or later the top-down induced Euopean patriotism wil lead to a rehabilitation of Hitler as a defender of Europe against "aliens" ie Russians and Anglo-Saxons. Remember Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler aka Count Dracula is a hero in Romania despite the tens of thousands Romanins he had impaled.

Posted by JFM">JFM 2009-02-01 06:08|| 2009-02-01 06:08|| Front Page Top

#3 Europe: a three cornered race between Muslims, Fascists, and Putti.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2009-02-01 09:23|| 2009-02-01 09:23|| Front Page Top

#4 For a long time I was eager for Mr. Wife to be offered another assignment in Europe. I have not been, these last years.

Posted by trailing wife ">trailing wife 2009-02-01 09:27|| 2009-02-01 09:27|| Front Page Top

#5 In truth, I saw this "reaction" coming decades ago, with the "overuse" of the Holocaust for leftist agenda points. The exact moment was when the "meme" stopped being "3 million Jews and 3 million others", and was changed to "6 million Jews".

When even children pointed this out this change, they were cursed for pointing it out, as if they were somehow defending the Holocaust or being antisemitic.

In other words, the same kind of people who today demand political power because of Man Made Global Warming, co-opted the Holocaust for leftist political purposes.

In the US, they wanted Americans to feel guilty for the Holocaust, because only in that way could they get political compliance out of Americans.

This was asking for trouble. And in Germany, the left used the Holocaust as an excuse to stifle the teaching of history or politics. To a great extent this directly lead to a lot of the Neo-Nazism they experience today.

The bottom line is that the Holocaust really isn't that special in the horrors of the 20th Century. It should be seen in context with the Armenian genocide, the Stalinist horror, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Red Khmer killing fields, even bloody Africa, etc.

The Nazis weren't special, either. Snazzy uniforms don't change the essentially nasty tyrannical character of their regime, or distinguish it from the equally verminous other murderous regimes.

Germans have been made to remember the Holocaust, and had they not been, they would be like the Turks are today about the Armenians--in denial. But otherwise, the last blood of the Holocaust has been drained by the political left. It now belongs to history.

I see no reason to distinguish or condemn Zionism, either. The Jews wanted their country and they fought to get it and keep it. And now they are willing to protect it. And that is all the legitimacy they need. America itself has no greater legitimacy.

If anything, Zionists should be criticized for not finishing the job, and being done with Arabs and Muslims for good.

Posted by Anonymoose 2009-02-01 10:27|| 2009-02-01 10:27|| Front Page Top

#6 Excellent analysis Anonymoose.

Posted by Besoeker 2009-02-01 11:25|| 2009-02-01 11:25|| Front Page Top

#7 nonymous

It was never 3 million Jews and 3 million otrhetrs. But 6 million Jews and four million others.

Alos tehre was something very special in the Nazis. Even witg Stalin you could escape by toeing the Party line. The Nazis killed new born childre,n and they didn''t do it in the anger of a pogrom but camly, in cold blmood and following a plan. That is very specific.

Posted by JFM">JFM 2009-02-01 11:33|| 2009-02-01 11:33|| Front Page Top

#8 And the Kulaks was ambiguous?

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2009-02-01 11:43|| 2009-02-01 11:43|| Front Page Top

#9 Don't forget the Gypsies. Smaller overall population but also a specific target of cleansing. And tossing in the Japanese activities from 1905 (starting in Korea) on to 1945 to the list of man's inhumanity to man.

According to a poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 per cent of Germans are "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews"

Any different than the guilt game about slavery in America which always ignores that slavery was common in the world when the United States paid the blood price of 250,000 white Northerner to get the 13th Amendment put into its Constitution? That was in a population one tenth the size of today. Can anyone imaging a war in which the casualty count today would be 2.5 million? And yet that kind of sacrifice is never honored today, just buried for one group's political power and influence by harping on something that was rectified over a hundred and forty years ago.

Posted by Procopius2k 2009-02-01 11:51|| 2009-02-01 11:51|| Front Page Top

#10 That particular conflict did not begin with "slavery" as it's central theme. History has undergone a bit of a rewrite there as well I'm afraid.

Posted by Besoeker 2009-02-01 12:01|| 2009-02-01 12:01|| Front Page Top

#11 That particular conflict did not begin with "slavery" as it's central theme. History has undergone a bit of a rewrite there as well I'm afraid.

That particular conflict began with slavery: this and no other was the reason te Southv seceded., And for the Northern side, most people were not ready to be killed for abolishing it, but when you read the letters from Union soldiers what they defended was notn teh Union but "our magnificent form of government", one of whose essntial postulates is that when you lose an election you smile, congratulate your opponent, obey the law and wait for the next election. BTW, without the Rebellion, Linclon would have never been able to get the required majority of state legislatures agreeing to abolish the Constitution.

Posted by JFM">JFM 2009-02-01 12:38|| 2009-02-01 12:38|| Front Page Top

#12 Agree completely with JFM. I thought we had beat that horse to death here a couple of years ago. I think it takes 400 years, 5 life times, before a historical event can possibly be looked at objectively. When I was young the cry was, "Save your Confederate currency. It will be good someday." Not so much any more. A great tragedy for all involved. And we are still paying the bondsman's price.

The fianal destruction of the Constitution did not occur until the 16th-17th amendments.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2009-02-01 12:55|| 2009-02-01 12:55|| Front Page Top

#13 This debate may never end but Lincoln's purpose was to save the Union.

Executive Mansion,
Washington, August 22, 1862.

Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.

I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable [sic] in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

Yours,
A. Lincoln.

Posted by Besoeker 2009-02-01 13:20|| 2009-02-01 13:20|| Front Page Top

#14 As a follow-on, it is my fervent belief that the practice of slavery was a blight upon the nation from it's very beginning. It represents a contradiction to the very precepts of Christendom and is every bit a sin today as it was then. It continues to be a blight that keeps on giving as it plagues the generations. In the final analysis, there is nothing "cheap" about "cheap labor."

Posted by Besoeker 2009-02-01 13:39|| 2009-02-01 13:39|| Front Page Top

#15 Besoeker

I knew that letter and since the subject was what the Union soldiers wee ready to die for, it is irrelevant since Lincoln didn't do the dying. What matters is what soldiers wrote home and they wrote about preserving the form of government ie the thing about governmnt of the peeople, by the people, for the people not the Union for the sake of it.

Posted by JFM">JFM 2009-02-01 14:33|| 2009-02-01 14:33|| Front Page Top

#16 So tiring to read this nonsense again.

Yes, Lincoln's direct purpose was to save the union. That was his top priority. That said, both he and the Confederates knew that if the union were saved, slavery would eventually wither and die -- and probably soon. That is why the states of the Confederacy seceded: They knew that secession was the only way to maintain slavery. If the union remained intact, slavery would have soon died in an increasingly "free-state" union.

The supposed dicotomy between saving the union and freeing the slaves is nonsense designed to salve the consciences of descendents of men who fought to enslave other men.

If there had been no slavery, there would have been no secession and no war.

If Lincoln had saved the union without freeing a single slave, they would have been freed soon.

The civil war was all about slavery.

Posted by Some guy">Some guy 2009-02-01 14:39|| 2009-02-01 14:39|| Front Page Top

#17 But, whatever the outcome, it's hard to see that they would be any less comprehensively a wrecked people than they are after spending three generations in "refugee" "camps" while their "cause" is managed by a malign if impeccably multilateral coalition of UN bureaucrats, cynical Arab dictators, celebrity terrorists and meddling Europeans whose Palestinian fetishisation seems most explicable as the perverse by-product of the suppression of their traditional anti-Semitism.

Excellent summary.

The distortions about the Holocaust and the Civil War for political purposes spring from the same sin: find some justification, however illogical, to support one's own prejudice and hate.

Posted by mom">mom 2009-02-01 16:43|| idontknowbut.blogspot.com]">[idontknowbut.blogspot.com] 2009-02-01 16:43|| Front Page Top

#18 When I was young the cry was, "Save your Confederate currency. Nimble Semble.

http://www.csanotes.com/1861_notes.htm

T-36
Cr278 $5 Center shows Commerce seated on a bale of cotton with a sailor on the left side--(3,694,890 total notes issued) Printed by J.T. Paterson & Co. in Columbia, SC. UNCUT CSA SHEET XF++ $3450

Posted by Besoeker 2009-02-01 17:40|| 2009-02-01 17:40|| Front Page Top

#19 It is my opinion after extensive reading of the accounts of the people involved that South Carolina secedded because of the promise by the Republican Party to impose a tarrif of 48% on all imported goods. This would have bankrupted all Southern buisnessmen as did the Tarrif of 1832. This ment that if I sent 1 million dollars of raw materials to England and then took delivery of 1 million dollars worth of finished goods I would pay the US Government $480,000. No buisiness person could stay in buisness. When one of his Cabinet members said, "Why don't we just let the South go?" Lincoln said, "Let the South go? My God, man, who would pay our Tarrifs?" The South accounted for 80% of the Federal Coffers.

Posted by Deacon Blues">Deacon Blues 2009-02-01 18:54|| 2009-02-01 18:54|| Front Page Top

#20 Nonsense to all, the Civil War was all about establishment of a monstrous hegemony through the expropriation of civil liberties to that abomination of Federal powder, Lincoln.

Posted by Jaique Johnson2117 2009-02-01 19:00|| 2009-02-01 19:00|| Front Page Top

#21 ION EUROZONE, PAKISTANI DEFENCE FORUM > SARKOZY IS RIGHT TO FEAR US: FRANCE FEARS RISE OF THE [New] LEFT - REVOLUTION [France/National, Euro]!? COMMUNIST-LED FRENCH, PAN-EURO REVOLUTIONARIES, ANARCHISTS, TERRS, etal. = "EXTREME LEFT" REACTIONISM-VIOLENCE [but weirdly and mysteriously NOT the ULTRA-LEFT ]???

*SAME > BRITAIN-UK > MOSSAD HIT ON LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE?; + RENSE > INTERNET CALL FOR ALL WORKING MEN/LABOR WITH SKILLS TO JOIN PROTESTS [Strike] + RISING DEFICITS FOR A SHRINKING WORLD ECONOMY.

Posted by JosephMendiola 2009-02-01 19:45|| 2009-02-01 19:45|| Front Page Top

#22 Amendment 13 - Slavery Abolished. Ratified 12/6/1865.

1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Posted by Procopius2k 2009-02-01 19:47|| 2009-02-01 19:47|| Front Page Top

#23 The South accounted for 80% of the Federal Coffers.

So how did the Federal government cope after the destruction of southern industry and exports after 1865?

Posted by Procopius2k 2009-02-01 19:49|| 2009-02-01 19:49|| Front Page Top

#24 Nonsense to all, the Civil War was all about establishment of a monstrous hegemony...

I see the Ron Paul ~~short~~tour-bus has made a stop.

Posted by Pappy 2009-02-01 22:03|| 2009-02-01 22:03|| Front Page Top

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