To: Gib Bogle who wrote (2923 ) 12/28/2005 7:32:43 PM From: Maurice Winn Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217750 Gib, I thought "Did I write that?" as you seemed to be quoting me and I wondered if I'd mistyped or you'd cut something out of context and indeed, you are making up your own quote from somewhere else. I shall ask Google to see where you got that quote. "Hitler was a good bloke" Well, it surprised me, but Google has such quotes, but not from me. Where did you get the quote? I think you made it up to fit your comments. Naughty, naughty. You should re-read my excellent, fine and perspicacious post. But you were right on the comment that I <enjoys being provocative, challenging what "everybody knows" >. I find it annoying that people are so self-righteous about joining the holier than thou club: "I'm cool too, coz I know Hitler was really bad too and so were those horrid Japanese ... and let's ignore that China's monsters were as monstrous". I dare say Lt William Calley's victims were as terrified as those of any Japanese marauder's. Being run over by a tractor driven by a Red Guard wouldn't have been much fun either, but that doesn't serve xenophobic power-grabbing so that's brushed under the rug. Meanwhile, let's ignore the likes of Yiwu the Mad who seem to think they can take over Taiwan without making ugly holes in people. They advocate just what SoT and others bleat about, yet get a free pass while the smugly self-righteous dribble out of both sides of their mouths about how bad guys long ago were really mean and it's horrid to put such things on scales of 1 to 10. We have to drool like Pavlov's dogs at the sound of the Adolf bell and the tinkling of Japanese bayonets. But remain dry at the sound of war drums beating in preparation for carnage yet to come, which might be stopped. Ringing their Pavlovian bells is fun, albeit provocative. Some people might even think instead of merely drooling. Here's one Google quote, about Adolf as a good bloke: <GarfieldLeChat14-04-2004, 10:21 AM Garfield, as I said above, I'm aware of it, and I'm not championing him either. I just think it's as reductive to dismiss him as a 'murdering bastard' as it is to buy into the British Bulldog/Battle of Britain myth uncritically. The five years in the war don't make him an unassailable legend/hero, just as the five years between Gallipoli and gassing the Kurds don't make him an irredeemable bastard IMO. I'm against catch-all historical labels as the reality is usually much more complex and ever more subjective as those who were alive at the time die off. the thing is what you are basically saying is Hitler was a good bloke who got the German economy back on it's feet built the marvelous network of motorways and roads transit and transport systems across Germany, and was the right man for the job. oh those Jews and others he killed well never mind about that the fact remains he did great things for Germany. if you used that argument people would think you were being off the map in offensiveness scales, right. well in effect your Churchill argument is the same. Outside of Britain Churchill was a monster, the only possible way to ignore this would be to be some kind of flag waving patriotic loony!! (or not to know your history) to quote AA Gill not know for his anarcho syndicalist rhetoric Churchill was a man who met a moment, and the moment was much shorter than he's given credit for -- about six months. He made four speeches, all of which were derivative of Shakespeare and Macaulay. Everything else about his wearyingly long public life was self-serving and disastrous: he was a terrible self--publicising hack; he was a loathed soldier; he was the worst First Sea Lord we ever had. A staggeringly inept Home Secretary, he was wrong about absolutely everything he set his sights on. He was responsible for the Dardanelles, the worst disaster of the First World War. He sent soldiers to shoot Welsh miners. He put field guns on to the streets of the East End of London. During the General Strike, he was so rabid that he had to be kept out of government, because he wanted to machine-gun bus drivers. Later, he was the worst sort of empire loyalist, desperate to hold on to India, and racist about Gandhi, that naked little fakir (frankly, if you had to choose the greater ma n between Gandhi and Churchill, there's no contest). He sent the Black and Tans into Ireland. He'd have bankrupted the country by returning us to the gold standard; he gave away large areas of eastern Europe to Stalin. And he was responsible for the disgraceful but forgotten war of intervention to support the White Russians at the end of the First World War. Altogether, he represents everything I find most dispiriting, snobbish, philistine, proudly anti-intellectual and stubbornly backward-looking about Britain. > You asked <where is the good in that? > Since it wasn't me who said Hitler was a good bloke, I'll leave it to you to answer the question or ask whoever said that. Thinking about good blokism, Adolf was a vegetarian, and that's a good thing. So there's one good point. We could check with PETA about whether being a vegetarian is good and whether Adolf was better in that regard than cattle ranchers who jam cattle onto nasty feed lots. Or chicken eaters and egg eaters who de-beak and cage and kill fowl. Or people who "mules" merino sheep [cutting their backside skin off in a bloody mess to avoid fly strike]. By demonizing past "monsters", people forget the banality and prosaic normalcy of evil and find themselves inadvertently supporting it, yet again. They kid themselves that they aren't part of the problem. They are. Most people are quite authoritarian and kleptocratic and like tribal territorial dominance hierarchies, which is why they go on voting for them around the world. Just as Adolf's supporters did. Yiwu the Mad is a fine example, right here in SI. Mqurice PS: We can all whine about our ancestors being maltreated by some foreign evil-doers. That's just how life was for umpty thousands of years. Conquest and sadistic genocide were par for the course. Being invited for dinner by Maoris in the 19th century wasn't necessarily a good thing.