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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


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.



To: Gib Bogle who wrote (2923)12/28/2005 7:45:37 PM
From: TobagoJack  Respond to of 217750
 
he also enjoys being wrong
but is otherwise not having a good time dealing with teotwawki journey :0)



To: Gib Bogle who wrote (2923)12/28/2005 10:30:37 PM
From: Maurice Winn  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 217750
 
Let's get the quote here for closer inspection: <Adolf was a good bloke too and I'm sure had some good points. Heck, he was voted in with democratic fervour, and democracy is generally accepted as being a good thing so Germans must have seen some good things about him. >

Gib, note the inference that because Germans voted for Adolf, using democratic principles, which are generally considered to be an excellent thing, [not by me], Adolf was ipso facto a good bloke. Which is not to say that I think Adolf was a good bloke. It surprises me that people could [who have read more than part of one of my rants over the decades] think that I think that Adolf was a good bloke.

That statement was a snide reference to the now-common thrall of most, including most in SI I dare say, to the wonderful, impeccable, adulation of democracy, which is being kindly donated to Iraq as we rant [whether the Sunni minority likes it or not].

My point was that accepting democracy as a good thing means we are all obliged to accept that those elected, whatever their vicious, thieving ideas, such as Adolf, are good blokes, at least in part and certainly in part large enough to garner the support of most people. Therefore, such an electorally successful person has good points, as defined by the majority.

That is as dangerous an idea now as it was then. Majorities are as mindlessly rabid now as then. We will find out, one way or another, yet again, just how rabid, vicious and thieving the majorities are. Some would say we are finding out, with not so many Americans now feeling so gung ho about their decision to deal with Saddam and his noocular bombs [made up by "military intelligence", Dick Cheney, King George II and Team America], as the bodies and maimed come home, and the treasury drains.

I suppose sarcasm/irony don't come across very well without close reading. Those looking for headline cliches grab the first idea that floats past.

Just for the record, without ambiguity, irony, sarcasm or jest, being straight, with no equivocation, to make it clear, surprising though it might seem to you, TJ and those who seek truth, I am, fair dinkum and cross my heart, one of those who think Adolf was a bad man. I don't really think he was a good bloke.

Neither do I think Japanese soldiers killing civilians or others during their invasians and conquests were good blokes [I know that most people will have trouble believing that, but there you go - the world is a strange place].

I won't mention Yiwu the Mad's plans and ideology here.

Mqurice