A route well travelled, a destination known

One's from Nazi Germany, laughing at desperate Jewish people kicked out of their homeland and trying to find other countries to take them in. The other is from yesterday's Daily Mail. The Daily Mail's historical support of fascism is well known.

“My dear Price, [G.Ward Price, Chief Correspondent] I am glad you have become a director of the Daily Mail, and I am sure that your very popular and widely circulated newspaper will continue to be a sincere friend of fascist Italy. With best wishes and greetings, Mussolini" Benito Mussolini, 1926

"I urge all British young men and women to study closely the progress of the Nazi regime in Germany. They must not be misled by the misrepresentations of its opponents. The most spiteful detractors of the Nazis are to be found in precisely the same sections of the British public and press as are most vehement in their praises of the Soviet regime in Russia. They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call “Nazi atrocities” which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence such as are inevitable among a nation half as big again as ours, but which have been generalized, multiplied and exaggerated to give the impression that Nazi rule is a bloodthirsty tyranny.” - Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, 1933

The Telegraph talks about Rothermere's more personal support for Hitler here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1484647/When-Rothermere-urged-Hitler-to-invade-Romania.html

Rothermere's descendant and current owner of the Daily Mail, Jonathan Harmsworth, is domiciled in Monaco in order to avoid paying tax in Great Britain. Here is a piece from Private Eye on where he really lives:

( Read more... )

What kind of a world is it when a fascist supporting organisation, owned by those who love their country so much they'll do anything to avoid contributing to it, can't even use ideas from its nazi mates to deride enemies? If James Cagney can call someone a 'dirty rat,' what's so bad about using rats to describe people we hate? After all, I am sure Harmsworth wouldn't mind me calling him a rat, he is too minted and too powerful to care. But I never would call him a rat because rats are clever sensitive sweet creatures, and they are an aspiration too far for him or indeed, his readers.

I don't think this vile nonsense will lead anywhere; I think we will find peace because this kind of stuff is truly ridiculous and we know it. There's real goodness in the hearts of ordinary people. But if we do surrender to Rothermere Rot through fear or anger or historical ignorance of what it means to let this stuff seep into one's self and country, we deserve what we get.

The Panzer Fan

Was he a Nazi? I was never quite sure.

He was an aged man, in a group of rational people, and I knew his first name, but not his last. It was a long time ago. The night drew in, we were all eating and drinking beside the fire, when he started to murmur to me about the Holocaust.

'Where are all these bodies then?' He said to me, 'Show them to me!' As though I carried witness statements and signed confessions from the camps in my handbag.

'You think that everybody lied? You think that hundreds of eye witnesses just made it up?' I remember edging away from him.

He started to mutter about Rothschildes and Americans and the Jewish Conspiracy. 'Ah you had to hear us,' he said, very deep in his cups. I was sober, more sober than I had been at the start of the conversation, 'To see a room full of bikers humming the Panzerlied...' he started to hum something, and waved his finger in the air, gently conducting music only he could hear, 'Even you would have been stirred!'

'Were these people not arrant traitors, as well as worse things?' I asked in as mild a voice as I could manage, given my anger. He didn't answer. He just carried on humming his old stupid song, and I crossed the room to speak to some others and ask, wonderingly, how such a man came to be in our company. He was the friend of somebody's friend's relative or something. I did not see him again.

The man was in his late 60s when I met him, far too young to have seen action in WWII, I think. He and his biker mates probably got the song from Battle of the Bulge, and used it to fuel their warboys fantasies.

I recall sitting back at the fire when he was gone, with people tapping their heads about him. I recall his eyes that looked as sane as anyone else's, a contrast to his faded mind, and my relief that he was an absurdity, an anachronism in this kinder world.