I don't know, maybe mr mike knows, or mr jgm2, they are - in deference to our newly acquired compulsory Frogness - hommes du monde and have probably visited the Land of the Rising Sun but it seems to me that they already have miserable, pathetic, little lives, the Japanese; scurrying about obediently,
with smog masks on their little, toothy faces; saying the company prayers five times a day;
doing the company exercises;
their economy is in constant recession, their prime ministers, like ours, are all fucking crooks, they are force-fed raw fish and are shitting themselves every time the wind blows on their paper houses, just in case there's a tsunami or an earthquake or a nuclear plant meltdown - and that's before people like me remind them of how their honourable filthy bastard ancestors treated British POWs. And then there's all the mutated babies and generational cancers caused by Uncle Sam's
their economy is in constant recession, their prime ministers, like ours, are all fucking crooks, they are force-fed raw fish and are shitting themselves every time the wind blows on their paper houses, just in case there's a tsunami or an earthquake or a nuclear plant meltdown - and that's before people like me remind them of how their honourable filthy bastard ancestors treated British POWs. And then there's all the mutated babies and generational cancers caused by Uncle Sam's
crewcut psychobastard aircrews
dropping atom boms on them.
You'd think they'd have enough to deal with,
poor little toothy bastards but no,
Ahmed the HeadChopper has captured a couple of them and wants two hundred million bucks to hand them over.
Frankie Hollande, the cock-waving French president, coughs up for his blokes when they're captured and so do the wops,
Frogs and Eyeties don't even like being killed in the line of duty, never mind being captured and killed on l'oliday and both are the world's best-known benders-over.
Dunno about the Dutch, they ran a mile from Srebrenica,
When it's Spring, again, we'll bring, again
Cowards from Amsterdam.
drove like fuck away, at the double, leaving all those Muslims to die, so you can bet that they'll have paid up quietly, more than once;
Hey, bro', every time I see yo' ass
the more yo' head look like a joint a ham.
Thank you, sir.
'sonly Dave HamFace and Barry, Chief Torturer of the Free World, who refuse to pay, and I'm not too sure about Barry, actually; if it was an exceptional American hostage a deal would be done, as it would, bet your arse it would, if Prince Harry Hooligan fell into the wrong hands. But I understand that Dave and Bazz are busy advising prime minister TojoSanyo that he mustn't pay, that he should be like Britain.
And not do deals with terrorists.
I am sure there will be some surviving Brits who quite understandably will be unmoved by a pair of Nips losing their heads to sharp blades but most of us won't. I never tire of saying that John Donne wasn't lying, no man is an island, each man's death diminishes me, especially when a few scraps of worthless electronic money would save them.
Manic, fucked-up, frightened, superstitious, suicidal, living down their in Earthquake Alley, only porno-comics for distraction, threatened by the Chinks, their kids constantly raped by American troops, coughing their fucking lungs up, too many teeth, the Japs have enough to deal with. They should stop posturing, pay the money and get these poor fuckers home.
LAWNFORCEMENT, MIDSOMER STYLE.
This is very strange. The Filth in Sussex, in one of those Midsomer Murders locations, are giving five or ten or however many it is thousands of blokes the opportunity to eliminate themselves from a murder enquiry by providing police with DNA samples.
Now, the fact ot the matter is that anyone - me, for instance or you - against whom the police have no evidence is already eliminated and need not eliminate himself, further, it is a condition known as innocence; it is the job of lawnforcement to catch murderers; it is not the job of the citizen to prove his innocence.
To prove that he didn't murder Mrs Valerie Graves.
And the other fact of the matter is that even if, as seems likely, thousands of decrepit, immurderous assholes
Well, nothing to hide, nothing to fear,
that's what I've always said;
only too happy to co-operate with the police;
does my beard look good in this?
Yes, it is actually, my first time on telly.
Of course, it might well lead to a role in Midsomer Murders.
Splendid series, splendid.
Filmed round here, y'know.
conscientiously and pompously march themselves along for self-elimination from something in which they are not, never were and never will be involved we can be sure that the person or persons responsible for the murder will, obviously, not, leaving DCI Filth
Opportunity to eliminate myself?
Go and fuck yourself.
with only about another thirty-five million suspects, all of whom should, without delay, engage in a national self-elimination from the murder of Mrs Graves process; although even that won't help, because by the time every bastard's been swabbed, Matey will be in Argentina.
And the other fact of the matter is that even if, as seems likely, thousands of decrepit, immurderous assholes
that's what I've always said;
only too happy to co-operate with the police;
does my beard look good in this?
Yes, it is actually, my first time on telly.
Of course, it might well lead to a role in Midsomer Murders.
Splendid series, splendid.
Filmed round here, y'know.
conscientiously and pompously march themselves along for self-elimination from something in which they are not, never were and never will be involved we can be sure that the person or persons responsible for the murder will, obviously, not, leaving DCI Filth
Opportunity to eliminate myself?
Go and fuck yourself.
with only about another thirty-five million suspects, all of whom should, without delay, engage in a national self-elimination from the murder of Mrs Graves process; although even that won't help, because by the time every bastard's been swabbed, Matey will be in Argentina.
DCI Filth has given solemn copperspeak assurance that all the innocent DNA-ers will have their samples destroyed, after a while, maybe.
And if they believe that, they deserve to be framed for murder, like so many before them, hundreds and hundreds.
DCI Tom Barnaby, from the real Midsomer Murders'd have no truck with this shit.
Y'know, Joyce, I've always said that coppering was for coppers, it's not a community encounter group, specially not for the sort of oddballs we have here, in Midsomer.
Is that a wrap, doctor?
DCI Tom Barnaby, from the real Midsomer Murders'd have no truck with this shit.
Y'know, Joyce, I've always said that coppering was for coppers, it's not a community encounter group, specially not for the sort of oddballs we have here, in Midsomer.
71 comments:
The Russians have the right idea with these Religion of Peace hostage-takers.
Go in hard and kill every last one of the fuckers. And if the hostages die - well, that's just bad luck.
The last thing you want to be doing is handing these fuckers $200m to go and buy more fucking guns and explosives.
But we have already given them more weapons than one could imagine, the Russians, us, he Frogs, the CIA; we gave them to mr saddam, the Russiansvand the CIA gave them to mr talimam, back when he was mr mujahadein, the Pakistanis give them to mr taliman, the Hymies give them to anyone who'll bashnthe arabs, the Chinks give them to anyone and the House of Saud-Bush-Clinton-Obama-Windsor gives them to anyone who'll help them keep their poxed-up arses on theirbgolden thrones.
We should pay the money if for no other reason than that these drawn-out headchoppings further empower the likes of Westminster to hector, bully, corral and abuse us for their own rotten, crooked failures, some treacherous Oxbridge fairy in MI5, cracking the obedience whip over our heads. When you think of what we have given GlobaBank then a few million to Ahmed is neither here nor there and properly recognises the value of our lives over that of fairyland fiat currencies which don't even exist outside of Christine la Vache's diseased imagination, rotten old crow.
The headchoppers don`t need to buy any weapons: the Iraqi 'army', kitted out and 'trained' by us must have left them a fucking arsenal full when 30 000 of them, two divisions legged it from Mosul when a few hundred bandits and goat rapists drove into town.
I`m glad, Mr Ishmael you noticed the insolence of the Blue Brethren in Sussex, cheeky fuckers. Who in their right fucking mind would voluntarily trust their DNA to them ?
The DNA panto is another version of the scripted dramas we have to endure with the CPS grandstanding on prosecutions and self-congratulatory bollocks from the police after every trial (or at least on the occasions when they haven't fucked the case up). The co-opting of the idiot populace into Crimewatch.
As you know, I blame Dame Esther for all this, the invention of The Television Public and with that the horrible performances we now get from every conceivable type of victim, bystander and, of course, the always heroic emergency services.
Head-chopping lover jihadi wotsisname (let's call him Tool for now) is no more of a Muslim than I am a Catholic. Mr Tool's mission is to sow as much fear, trauma, and hatred until you start begging to join the crusade to slaughter with relish those damn Mos-lames, the fucking backward barbarians that they are. Natch!
From the look of things, Mr Tool's mission is nearly accomplished.
I thought her dameing, mr bungalow bill, together with Tracey May's scrapping of the enquiry an overwhelming, impertinent endorsement of establishment paedophilia, pissing in the faces of the once little children, now grown old in bitter defilement. I have bottles of champagne for the deaths of such as Rantzen.
Yes, I think something like that, too, ms suki; he and Eric Pickles, working to the same end; shouldn't be all that difficult to kill or capture a gobby Brummie, running round the desert, in full view, should it?
But then they could have always, at a moment's notice, killed Marty Kneecaps or Gerry the Nonce Adams. And didn't.
Lots of people, mr yardarm, queueing round the block, they were.
Maybe the Japs should send some of them 'Ninjas' out there. They'd fit right in with the Jihadi dress code and could pass unnoticed - wouldn't even need to get changed - then administer justice to 'Jihadi John' ('we can see you English Johnny') with a single stroke of the Katana. Banzai!
The Imperial Japanese flag you showed, Mr I, is still used by the Japanese Maritime 'Self Defence' force as their naval ensign - the only concession they made was to swap their officers' katanas for western sabres.
I don't agree with you about paying the ransom money Mr I, or for that matter, any special forces soldiers risking their lives. I am sorry for those folks and their families but they went there at their own risk. If they had been sent by their government then that would be different and an attempt should be made to rescue them one way or another. I wouldn't go to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the Moslem world, apart maybe, for Turkey, Oman or the UAE - not even in the company of the whole lot of Andy McNab, Bear Grylls, Ray Mears, Weetabix Head (his ex-missus - surely most dangerous of all..) or 'Jet' out of 'Gladiators'.
Re: the DNA thing - you couldn't make it up. Presumably once they have eliminated the entire male population bar one (better add in trans-genders and diesel dykes for good measure in the interests of equality and diversity) whoever's left is guilty? WTF & we are paying these fuckwits?
Must be nearly time for my medication now...
It is not strange that Jihadi John (bless, eh) has asked for 200mill for the lives of the 2 Japanese. This is just the sum recently mentioned as being about to be forthcoming in "aid" - doubtless to the other side. What confuses is that Isil/Isis/IS - whatever they are called today - make their day-to-day money by under the counter oil and gas sales. This must be a fancy trick. Oil and gas not lending themselves to being smuggled about like a few thousand hooky ciggies, and oil and gas have chemical profiles which can be traced. And so it must all be being nodded through by some someones. And the Saudis and their strange price suppression. Just who are they undermining? Putin? Isis? The Frackers? Or are they just having a high old time stuffing the lot of them?
Mr I; never been to Japan, and certainly will never go. Not enough nukes dropped on them IMHO.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for hostages, many of them "journalists" out to further their careers, or sundry do-gooders out to atone for some imagined crime they committed.
I went into the sahara desert in Libya about 35 years ago on the back of a camel - my arse and groin are still recovering from the pain. Lots of facinating Roman ruins and relics of the Afrika Corps. Its sad to reflect that suck an interesting journey can never be repeated now.
Re the 200M: how will this be paid? Not much point having pqallets of dollar notes in the desert, but surely a bank account and electronic transfer is out of the question?
Cui bono? Someones making a killing out of this (no pun intended).
My old boy was getting ready to bomb the Japs but luckily the atom bombs meant he didn't have to sit in a gun turret waiting for a one-sided duel with Wing Commander Fuchida. One of my dad's former colleagues preceded him to the Eastern theatre, was taken prisoner by the Japs and was murdered in a POW camp by having boiling water poured down his throat.
-richard
We have, on several occasions, excoriated mr tdg's recreational martyrs, be they journos or pop-up aid workers but there is another, more general point to be made and that to governments washing their hands of citizens imperilled abroad by the extra-legal actions of effectively stateless criminals and in so doing seeking to make moral and political capital from their neglect of their citizens on the entirely spurious grounds that it is nobler in the mind to let hapless nobodies die than to do deals with terrorists - especially as we make deals and worse with terrorists constantly.
The sum demanded, mr mongoose, is the equivalent to a sum which pacifist Japan has pledged to the War on NigNogs and your point about oil having a fingerprint underscores my own, that we could trace andvkill this lot, if we wanted to, were they not proving so useful, in so many ways, as does mr mike's observation - some ransoms have been paid, how and to whom?
And I would no more visit Japan than I would have my picture taken at Auschwitz; mrs ishmael's father, RAMC, cleansed one of the camps, and his friend was flown home from the Far East, weighing six stones, having worked on the Jap railways, all the more reason, I suggest, that modern-day Nippon raise high the roofbeams of its humanity and bring these blokes home,whatever the cost. And then, if hey want, send in the Ninja clowns.
That's bad shit.
It might be due to my limited experience of ex-servicemen, mr richard but I do feel that those in combat against the Japs were more deeply wounded, shocked-for-life, by their experience than were those fighting Hermann and I have, therefore, conflicting views about the atom bombings - and, indeed, the firebombing of Dresden. Is formal ultimate war against civilians ever OK; were the crimes of Germany and Japan so great that we could legitmately enlist Satan against them and their unborn children?
I agree with your general point about governments not "washing their hands of citizens imperilled abroad by the extra-legal actions of effectively stateless criminals" but these are not hapless tourists who've inadvertently wandered into the wrong part of town Mr I. According to the media (we'll have to take that at face value I suppose...) the journalist went with the express intention of interviewing the jihadis and the other guy seems to think he's a member of the 'A Team'. A line must surely be drawn somewhere...
The Nips deserve all they got, and more. First, the population swore allegiance to the Emperor - I don't regard them as civilians in the normal sense. They would have faught with their little bamboo sticks dipped in shit to the last man if we had been forced to invade.
But secondly, their Bushido code, and the unspeakable horrors they carried out, not just on the Allies, but even more so on the SE Asians - the Thais and Chinks - deserves only revenge.
A very wierd people both physically, historically, and currently.
The Chinese absolutely loathe them, from what I understand, hardly surprising after the shit they pulled in the 30's.
JG Ballard always struck me (from interviews etc) as a kind and thoughful man, and he had no problem about the A bombs - he and countless others would have been slaughtered or starved if it hadn't happened, as far as he was concerned. I know what you mean about Dresden etc but our queasy hindsight is a luxury of victory, which would probably not have been achieved without ruthless aggression to match that of the enemy; it's always stuck me as a grim irony that we'd have lost without the help of an even nastier nutter than Hitler, and I don't mean Uncle Sam.
verge.//
Ah yes. The Japanese…incorrigible they are…incorrigible. Built our stuff for a while they did. Seem only to export torture gameshows and porn with sea creatures these days. They eat raw fish…nothing wrong with that if it floats your boat. They also put it inside their women which…well make your own judgement on that.
Had a few nasty scrapes over the last few years though..makes you wonder… Still Uncle Sammed to fuck though. The Yank corporation proving grounds for shite that might make its way to the European or American markets.
A country whose only real resource is its people is highly likely to be fearful of its neighbours and economic sanctions.
Those two with their head on the block…I’d say pay up. Set up a sting to dupe the swordsmen into taking the cash package and send in Andy Mcnab.
What’s the DNA thing? I’ve been away for a while. Sounds interesting.
Those Millions aren't going to any ninja swordsman, they are going to the production company that has to keep this endlessly entertaining Blockbuster going. Shooting on laceration doesn't come cheap you know. What with CGI and stuff...
This show is certainly keeping me entertained. Tiny knives cutting heads with minimum blood spatter...Riveting stuff.
What? What's that? What economic depression?
Suki
I meant "shooting on location" , though "laceration" seems just as apt.
Suki
All that is axiomatic, mr verge, as is the fact that they started it Hermann and Tojo and were a thoroughly bad lot. I think I saw a JGB. interview along those lines and I have spoken, before-before, to survivors of the Jap camps and every one of their words rang true.
It is also true that from Planet Hindsight all things are possible but what is the point of victory unless we do question the methods which delivered it; in what way is Camp Delta, in extra-jurisdictional Cuba, different from the Bridge Over The River Kwai; isn 't it, in fact, ten times worse because we and the cousins have no formal Mediaeval mindset guiding our barbarism, we just make it up?
From my house, 1930s German Lutheran ministers rowed up and down the Sound, checking its depths, for the U-boat attacks they knew were coming, in a few years, upon the British Fleet, in Scapa Flow and Kapitan-Leutnant Gunther Prien duly sailed past the bottom of my garden and sank the Royal Oak.
All those dead matelots and marines, their ghosts bobbing about, just beyond my shore, they died precisely so that I, when I came, could criticise the armed forces, if I wanted to, otherwise we could have parlayed with Herr Hitler, as many wanted to and done a deal.
The fire bombings are a moot point, aren't they, some argue that they stiffened German civilian morale and actually prolonged the war. And isn't that exactly what happened with us, during the Blitz?
The bombings of Germany and Japan may well have been deemed necessary, but that doesn't mean they were and it doesn't make then any less monstrous
The end justifying the means is sinners' logic, the mindset we claimed to be fighting, the mindset to which we so hastily and consistently subscribe.
Warriors, Bushido, Aryan or WASP-redneck, they'll torch the planet. For all the right reasons.
One time I saw a ghastly photograph, ms suki, it was of two Balkan nutters sawing the head off a third and they were making heavy weather of it with a big fuck-off logging saw.
On the other hand, I had some butchery training long ago ago and I am confident that I could swiftly and neatly sever a human head with a small boning knife, it is only a matter of feeling a way between two vertebrae and nicking a nerve, As long as they keep still, that is, the chopees.
We may have mentioned it here before but Philip K. Dick's "Man In The High Castle" was a meditation on just this question; he sets the story in an American West Coast under Japanese occupation following Axis victory, and while there is a "wow-man" trippy element to things whereby throwers of the i-ching get to suss that they are living in a fictional universe, the more affecting point seemed to me that there is always, inevitably, a kind of moral defeat in victory, because of what gets done to win it.
One of his characters is an artisan potter, whose ceramic masterpiece is praised by a Japanese businessman; the Jap then proposes mass-production, and the artisan is appalled. "You have insulted me", he says, in a moment of exquisite ethical jujutso. The Jap realises he can't take umbrage (or worse) as this would be a denial of his own cultural best practice. Ah so...
God help us, but you're not wrong when you predict the slogan of apocalypse will be a bright-eyed, grinning, "Right Thing To Do."
verge.//
Your butcher skills sound impressive Mr Ishmael. Maybe you can stand in for JJ when he takes a vacation ;-) . Joking aside, I am against all type of violence. That shit makes me burst into tears.
Suki
I should add that sometimes I share the moral certainties expressed above by mr mike and mr richard about the Japs and my occasional redmists about the Germans lead me to arguing that every last man, woman and child of them should have been put to the sword and the nation dismantled and erased from history, the Krauts, after all, were far more sophisticated, far more complicit than the Jap peasants, worshipping their God Emperor. And even though I wasn't even born at the time my genocidal rage at the Hermanns demonstrates my own moral defeat in victory. No success like failure, eh?
I will seek Man In The High Castle, thanks, mr verge.
We were talking, recently, about how, in quantum physics, the act of observing something changes it and I was talking about the Native Americans' view that the photographer and his craft stole their souls. I have managed to avoid seeing these murders so there is a sense that......not that they didn't happen, just that they remain gratefully abstract. I managed not to see Mr Saddam Hussein being hanged and Mr Mohamar Gadaffi being skewered up his bottom; these events happened, of course, but I didn't, by watching them, participate in them
That is not to say that none should watch atrocity but before we abolished hanging we abolished it happening in public.........I don't know what is served by these broadcasts, save a coarsening of public sentiment; there are times when Decency averts her gaze.
Alas for your tears Mme Suki and also for 'Decency' Mr I:
http://redhillcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/1364342040642.png
A steady and relentless visual and auditory diet of violence and other filthy manifestations of human beastliness can and does changes you. It brings you down to its level. Yes, it steals your soul, if you had one to begin with.
The very fact that the media is very choosy about the kind of gore and filth it dispenses, shows that it is but an instrument for social engineering.
Suki
Look out if you will for a guy called Hoess - peace activist, historian, journalist. Witness really.
He found out some time in his teens that his grandad was that Hoess - the one that ran Auschwitz. There aren't many worse starts in life than having your grandad the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world. Anyway, Hoess is doing his little bit to be a different sort of German. So all hope should not yet be abandoned.
That photograph of the man perched at the lip of the corpse pit just about to be shot by some Nazi oaf, the one you found the other day, was very affecting. He's sort of calm but was probably despairing. I've noticed that with others on the edge of dying violently, including Saddam, they have a resignation which I always find remarkable because I think I'd be shitting myself - I suppose many do in fact.
I agree about not watching these snuff videos but that's what the drone operators make too, them and the SkyDeathNews people. Will Self had a typically wordy piece on all this in the Guardian just before Christmas which nevertheless had some good stuff in it. I'm too inept to link I'm afraid but it was called something like We are all Passive Consumers of the Pornography of Violence. He always gets in the way of what he wants to say does Mr Self but it's worth a look.
I had a great time in Berlin, all five times I have been there. I have only warm feelings for the wonderful people I met there. I certainly never have confused the sins of their forefathers with the present germans. I know too well how fucking easy it is to put a whole nation into a trance given the right circumstances. How easy it is to manipulate an exhausted nation into acting irrationally and against their better judgement. The German people were ripe for a savior.
It can just as easily happen here. What needs to be retained is not that the Germans were bad, but how did they get there so easily. There are familiar signs there.
Suki
Suki
Eric Linklater wrote about Prien's attack in some detail; he was stationed there at the time. I think the book's called "A life of adventure".
As for the Japanese and Germans, if you get someone who thinks they have the right to order people about and enough people believe them, then there's trouble.
-richard
There is no spinning the fact that evryone in Germany, at the time, was complicit, ms suki, from KrystalNacht onwards, the extermination of the Jews was a national movement, the transportation and disposal of millions of people around Europe simply cannot have gone unnoticed, nor can the sieizure and recycling of their clothes, hair, limbs, teeth, spectacles and jewellery, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people were involved in these processes, they must have told millions more, German industry was run with slave labour, how could that be invisible; the engineers and guards on the death trains, the station staff, all these heartless fuckers, did they go home at night and say, Nein, Liebschen, Ich cannot sprechen about mein day at ze office, is classified, Heil Hitler, Ah, sauerkraut, mein favourite dinner. The whole ghastly, hideous shower of hateful bastards was guilty by commission, error or default, no use hanging a handful of SS men, not when the whole nation is criminal. Germany should have been dismantled and parceled-up among those nations she had invaded, maybe the Jews could have had Bavaria. They're on the march again, anyway, German nationalists, now the Muslim is the new Jew/Nigger/Faggot; how long until the firebombs flare, uber alles?
One of his kin is my doctor, mr richard, Linklater. I haven't come across that book, but I live the movie everytime I look through the window and when I think of previous occupants, here. Bizarrely, there is a strong affinity, here, still, today, with Norway, from Viking times and I sometimes wonder if the ten-thousand-year DNA Orcadians, back then, huddled in their stone houses, married to their cousins and eating smoked haddock from the chimney really saw the Grand Fleet as just another set of invaders, y'know, same as they view me.
As to your other point, there does seem to be a renewed appetite among us for being bossed about, so many keen to be dragooned by the clueless Sid Faridge, it's him, they like, not his policies, just his postures and what they would call his charisms; bad breath, I would call it, and smelly socks.
No, I am not trying to spin anything. I am saying that what happened in Germany then can happen anywhere given the right circumstances. I am not going to keep punishing their descendants forever.
As for the rise of fascism, it looks to me that it happening all over Europe, not just in Germany. You don't have to German these days to be a Nazi scum.
Suki
I was thinking about Will Self, thinking that very thing, just the other day. I had been watching AN Wilson, doing one of his loveletters to royalty, in the person of Queen Vic and noticing that despite his vaguely eccentric scholarship he never gets in the way of his subject, Self, however, and the ghastly Amis do, constantly and I can entertain neither of them.
I studied Of Human Bondage for A level and I remember reading Somerset Maughm's A Writer's Notebook, in which he waspishlt said that Of course he read the dictionary for thirty minutes, each morning; he was a writer, you see, and words were his tools, the more of them one had in one's toolbox, the better job one could do. I disagreed with him, then and I still do, and I think he was just shitting people, anyway; I recall no evidence, in his books and stories, of him importing vast tracks of linguistic esoteria and it is, especially for a storyteller, a fool's game, breaking your reader's concentration with recondite polysyllabia and making him feel stupid, where's the point of that, bollocks, isn't it? Will, though, cannot help himSelf, the gobby cunt, can he; he would have us cower, believing that our conversation, compared with his, was grunting Neanderthalese, he probably has a Smack-shrivelled penis and seeks compensation in eassaying wordplay he thinks dazzling even though it is just showy and counter-productive, the opposite, in communication terms, of clever; Look, Listen, I'm so fucking clever that even I have to look-up what I'm saying, what fucking chance do you have?. And Martin Teeth is even worse.
If I need a dictionary to understand someone well they can just fuck off and try harder.
There is a wealth of those images, especially from the Hitler war but also from Vietnam and from Uncle Sam's Great Lynchin' Heritage, although in some of those the perpetrators appear more dead than do their dangling victims. In the millions of words here and the thousands of images there might be a a coupla dozen such and they are there because they had the same impact upon me, poor, poor pitiful me, as they had on you. I am conscious of the corrosive pornographising of our discourse, be it Esther Rantzen's popularising of shocked outrage, be it the Cruelty TeeVee of that cuntish barrowboy, Sugar or be it Robert Maxwell's office whore, Ann Robinson? There is an infinity of participant-eliminating talent or quiz or task-orientated shows, in which cruelty and self-humiliation are the Speciality of the Broadcasters' House, Big Brother's game is encouraging you to make a spectacle of yourself and showing it to an eager nation; almost makes my occasional selection of snuff-snaps appear worthy.
History is written by the victor
No, that's not what I meant, the ongoing punishment of descendants, even though that was Germany's approach to Jewish infants and foetuses. I meant that the geo-political scrambling for advantage after the Fall of Berlin was so cynical that punishment was relegated to a few show trials whilst oher criminals were flown out to join the NKVD or what became NASA. There is no arguing with the fact that the massive, overwhelming majority of Nazi criminals evaded judgement and got off Scot-free and that those guilty by collusion and silence benefited from the humanitarianiste largesse which you today espouse.
If you do believe that any nation can and might again engineer such horror then what would have been improper in making a memorable example of Nazi Germany by dissolving her? And it is wrong to conflate my regret that that didn't happen with a non-existent urge for the ongoingn persecution of modern Germans.
It is their lot, however, modern Germans, to be reminded of the sins of their mothers and fathers, it's not as though I want them herded into camps, tortured and gassed, burnt alive, garroted, their babies experimented upon, all to the strains of Fur Elise.
And Germany, anyway, is just a political arrangement, very recent, both in its reunification and in its original Junkers-Prussian aristocratic horseshit, if ever a nation can be said to have failed then surely, in the name of God, a hundred million corpses is proof that Germany did. Fuck that forgiveness shit, the fucking place should have been torn down, its peoples dispersed and resettled.
I don't know if you were here, ms suki, in the time of Fred and Rosemary West. Not like Nazi-Germans or anything, they were just depraved, serial sado-sexual killers of mainly young people, about a dozen, I think, a coupla minutes' work for Hermann's grandfather but decades for Fred and his Mrs. When they were eventually nicked and dealt with, their house, 11, Cromwell Street,was demolished and a garden built. Quite right, too.
Now, I'm the most liberal man in cyberspace, me, I don't want to hang anyone, I'm not keen on imprisonment, I think we need fewer borders, not more; I live modestly and privately, I plant trees and hedges, I don't eat animals and I try to and mostly succeed in being polite, especially here. But that Nazi shit was the worst thing ever, it degraded me, as a human being, it still degrades me to see that photograph which mr bungalow bill mentions, we did that, we white Europeans, I am made wretched snd I wasn't even fucking born; and I don't give a fuck that some other ancient despot may possibly have been as bad, as far as I'm concerned there has never been anything in human history as bad as Nazi Germany and in the interests of Humanity, Decency, Mother Earth and all her creatures, especially the granddaughters of the SS, we should have knocked down Germany, obliterated it, hosed it down and builtt a garden where it stood, pour encourager les autres.
If only we had, ms suki, if only we had acted properly the scum you now fear and revile would have received a very different message.
Yes, mr doug shoulders, Henry Ford was correct but only up to a point, up to the point of mechanical and electronic reproduction sytems enabling us to see history as it happens or shortly afterwards. Even though most hacks are just slags, embedded, as they call it, stooging for one set of generals or another, some of them are OK and we now see Atrocity, digitised in full, not just perpetrated by Sambo or Ahmed but by The Queen's Own NancyBoys Regiment and the Hunnerd'n'First Airborne, too; not so easy, these days, to pull the wool over History's eyes.
One of the few hangings I have seen, mr mongoose, that of Auschwitz Hoess, they did him on the much-used Auschwitz gallows and it was a long-shot, from above. I daresay there will be close-ups, somewhere. He was a loving family man with kinder und liebschen and I wondered, when I saw it, what would his descendants make of Grandad dancing on the air, briefly?
I suppose the lad is doing the only thing he can do, although he could have gone and changed his name, struck another match and started anew. That would have been best, the fuck with keeping that family name alive. Gut morgen, mein namen is Hoess, Jah, Jah, ze Auschwitz Hoesses, nein, nein, nicht apologising, in effery family ist eine sheep schwartze, jah, is gut, Ich habe eine gefeltefische sandwiche fur mittegassen every day, is the least Ich can do, in memory of all ze Juden vot mein granpapa gassed und hanged und burnt in ze oven und tortured und skinned alive und clubbed to death, only not ze vuns vot could play ze violin, fuck, nein, zey got to play ze Beethoven und de Schubert lieder vur ze members ov ze SS who vas, in ze day job, killing all ze Jewish kinder, is no point in throwing ze Jew in ze oven, not ven he can playb ze great German music, he vas eine commandant of ze great culture, mein granpapa. Nein, nein, ve do not say zat any longer, ist verboten, nein, nein. Ach du lieber Gott, du hast persuaded me, only just ze vun time. Einz, zwei, drei: Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!
Jah, vas gut, sehr gut, vas it gut for du, alzo?
Fuck me, Jesus, the grandson of the Auschwitz commandant, I wouldn't want to be in his head. And. nor should you, mr mongoose, them old dreams, they're only in your head.
Why was my comment deleted? Was it offensive?
In what way? Apologies if if I offended anyone, but I fail to see why.
Suki
Sorry, ms suki, moved the wrong glass on the ouija-pad and removed your comment by mistake. I don't mean to be unnecessarily argumentative but we do learn from example, not generally states or statespersons, hey never learn but citizens, as citizens we learn and incrementally we force change, Chartists, Levellers, antislavers, Tolpuddle Martyrs, trade unions, suffragettes - all if these coalesced around exemplary citizens espousing what were then seen as radical heresies, often at the cost of their own lives; things do get better, things are better but we must continue to argue forvchange.
The crux of my argument vis a vis Nazi Germany is that a properly global united nations authority would be - and should have been - empowered to dismantle any nation which so behaved. I have not urged the evaporation of anyone, indeed, on the contrary, in this very thread, I have questioned such actions, over Japan and Germany.
For large numbers of people to live together we must have the rule of the Law and if enough wrongdoers behave so badly or permit their leaders to behave so badly why should they not forfeit their statehood?
It would be a lesson swiftly learned. No, you can't gas trainloads of people, and if you do we will make you stateless, outcasts, begging shelter of your neighbours and never mind a post-war settlement or terms of surrender. Best you just don't round-up people and gas them, in the first placd, understand? Simple, really.
Don't fret, ms suki, in all these years I have deleted two or three comments, out of whatever it is, twenty thousand or so, and those with a heavy heart. I am doing this in apple and the touch screen is as miserably unforgiving as its maker, that hideous, grinning cadaver, Mr Steve Odd Jobs, the freaky bullyboy, skinflint and megalomaniac, may Satan eternally single-out his scrotum for th white-hot needle treatment.
Yeah you had me worried there for a sec Mr Ishmael. I thought you've gone all Charlie Hebdo on me. Thankfully, you're just crap with technology. :-)
Suki
Have recently had occasion to read Going Solo by Roald Dahl about his fighter pilot experiences in Egypt and Greece and something of his pre-war life working for Shell, I think it was, in Africa. Another strange one, Roald, but humane. His prose is very simple and I found it refreshing to see how he managed the story with apparently no effort at all. I thought it was very effective. Also showed how brave those pilots were with inadequate and too few planes and dimwit superiors.
Maugham was not at all self-consciously literary I don't think. My favourite writers of that time, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene also come to mind, were first of all craftsmen and regarded themselves as such. I think writers like Self and Amis jnr (unlike his father) are really critics masquerading as novelists.
Contrary to your policy proposals for the re-alignment of Germany, not unreasonable in my view, the yanks did the exact opposite with the Marshall plan. They decided to build Germany up (as a buffer against the Soviets).
The truth is the Hermanns have never been a master race - they always lose in the end. Their current, temporary, ascendancy in Europe is on the coattails of the Marshall plan.
Same with the Nips; if the yanks hadn't decided to build them up after WW2 as a strategic staging post against the chinks the Nips would have reverted to their 17th century feudal existance.
The irony in all this global geo-politicing by the yanks is that they simultaneously decided to begger the UK and strip it of its Empire for good. There was no writing off the war debts - au contraire, they demanded payment in full, with interest.
Maugham, yes, mr bungalow bill, two As, I had forgotten and I agree, very workmanlike and accessible. Maybe, in his notebook, he was just being arty-farty; he was a proper old-time queer, wasn't he, with a companion, probably he was just being precious, read a dictionary for half-an-hour a day; as, like the NewPeople say, if.
I've often mentioned, here, his story about the verger who gets the sack because he can't read and write; he leaves, prospers, marries well and much later makes a large donation to the church from which he was sacked. Gosh, what could you have been if you had been able to read and write, asks the current, grateful vicar. I could still've been the verger of this church. I thought he was a kind of Thackeray of his day, OHB's shrewish Mildred could have been Becky Sharp.
All I know of Waugh is Brideshead Revisited and I read that only after the TeeVee series, so it was always a bit of a confusing read, and one rehearsing themes - Marchmain's elastic Catholocism, anyway - which I then didn't understand.
I read loads of Graham Greene, during one period of illness but I can't remember a word of it and for some reason I have always been a bit lairy of children's writers like Dahl, wasn't there something about him, one of kids complained?
Self and Teeth don't even deserve the title of critic, they support nothing, they advance nothing, they are just showy self-promotionalists. I quite liked Money, for its novelty, but I only have to see Teeth to experience a Hermann Goering moment.
Yes, the special relationship always seemed to me to be worse than paedophile slavery, us being the slaves. What is it about Uk politicians, from Churchill onwards, that they kneel so readily before Uncle Sam? They have all done it, Macmillan, Wilson, Thatcher especially, Blair. And Gordon Snot was a particular embarrassment with Ted Chappaquiddick, getting the rotten old cunt a knighthood.
People, who shall remain nameless, are often happy to blame the unions for what was in effect the Uncle Sammery you describe, Germany and Japan were completely re-tooled post-war, by Marshall while we were beggared by our TransAtlantic cousins and worked-on with antiquated plant. Pax Americana, my arse.
I tend to agree with your view, Mr I, that there was mass complicity in the Nazi 'project' by the German population (and not just the Germans...) though much of this was probably of the 'passive' rather than the 'active' kind. Once the Nazis achieved a critical mass of power, standing up to them became a suicidal act as some, perhaps not many, courageous Germans found out (not only the individuals but also their families - that's how Totalitarianism 'works'). However I am not sure that "the fucking place should have been torn down [most of Germany was already 'torn down' - 'incinerated' might be a better term] peoples dispersed [many of them already were] and resettled [eventually and quite a few to the bottom of the Baltic Sea]. Where would the remaining sixty odd million Germans (c. 7 million of them were already dead thanks to their Fuhrer's efforts) have been 'resettled' to and how? At the end of the War, most of Europe was shattered, there were millions of refugees and mass expulsions of whole populations (particularly Germans from Eastern and Central Europe). We must also consider the legacy left by the understandable migration of a few hundred thousand of the surviving jews from this nightmare to what they perceived to be their historic homeland (with all the consequences for today's world). If Hitler had a grave he would surely be laughing in it.
As for the "geo-political scrambling for advantage after the Fall of Berlin", yes but what should the 'West' have done? Lain down and waited for the Soviet steamroller to flatten what was left? We owe the world we live in to Uncle Sam & the Marshall Plan, such as it is and for all its faults (and yes, Mr I, they are many and legion). Its a better place than the one that was created under the shadow of Marshal Stalin - its no accident that Pegida's support is strongest in what was once the DDR (in many respects that was a continuation as much as it was a replacement of the former Nazi regime).
I agree with Suki about Berlin, though I have only paid one visit, but it is a fascinating, atmospheric if haunted place. The Stasi Museum gives an idea of the nature of the DDR regime (and maybe the one that preceded it too).
Mr SG: General Patton who led the Allied armies in Europe did not want to stop at Berlin. He argued strongly for carrying on into Russia. Whilst the Russians had vast numbers of men and tanks, they were in fact living off the land at that point and had no supply line to speak of. Patton reckoned he could have rolled them in 2 weeks. The Germans could have been resettled in far-flung Russia.
Mr Mike, that would have been one hell of a car crash! Just as well Eisenhower sacked him. Many Germans were 'resettled' in 'far-flung Russia' - few survived.
The Royal Oak, newly commissioned, she engaged the Kaiser`s High Seas Fleet at Jutland in 1916. Aren`t there still some Imperial German battleships, down there in the Flow, scuttled in 1919, too deep to have been salvaged back in the twenties ?
Britain went skint in both world wars and the Yanks crafted that as a weapon against us but we played along. Debt fetishists, as you say, Mr Ishmael.
I wonder what shape those great Leviathans of war are now in. Perhaps some day they will be dredged up from the deep...
Partly poetic language, mr sg, torn-down figuratively, spiritually, above and beyond the frightful military onslaught. Patten was mad but all generals are mad and at least he was a winner and maybe an attack on Stalin would have saved many lives in the long run; your guess is as good as mine, and didn't Ike, in his Beware the Military Industrial Complex speech, come to regret the Cold War? An attack on Russia is the answer to your question about the Allies lying down. Resettlement needn't have been immediate, could have taken years, much of it in the territory formerly known as Germany. I don't know how these things are done but give me the civil service for a month and I
would soon have an idea. And as I said at the start and above it is not so much about a physical dismantling and removal but about confiscating nationhood, destroying malevolent identitu. Maybe there were a few resisters but they were all killed anyway, weren't they so we would have been talking about tens of millions who supported Hitler, voted for him, fought for him, exterminated for him and then, went it all went wrong all bleated Not me, guv. The thing about totaliarianism is that you shouldn't go for it, and the majority of Germans did, otherwise none of that shit would have happened, would it?
There are diving trips to the remaining German ships, mr yardarm. Might be on youtube.
HMS Hampshire is the real mystery ship, carrying Kitchener to treat with the Russians, she sank, off Birsay in odd circumstances, armed troops being deployed to prevent locals trying to rescue survivors, MOD disinformation, rumour and sigh; a sore subject, here, a century on.
Certainly Hitler was able to achieve a critical mass of power in Germany but he never won the support of a majority of the German electorate. He did badly in the November 1932 election losing both vote share and seats in the Reichstag. In the March 1933 election the Nazis saw a surge in support but this was thanks to funding from big business and a massive campaign of political violence and intimidation against the SPD and KPD. Storm troopers roaming the streets like packs of wolves breaking up SPD and KPD meetings and the burning of the Reichstag (which was wrongly attributed to the Communists - losing the KPD further support in the election and to later enable Hitler to orchestrate the annullment of their 81 seats in the Reichstag which paved the way for him to obtain the 2/3 majority he needed for the Enabling Act which gave him absolute power). In my view Hitler gained power through foul rather than democratic means but granted he gained the support of a large and powerful enough minority to bully and hoodwink the rest into a position of 'compliance'. But all of this is academic and we must deal with the world as it is and not how we might like it to have been. Personally I think the best thing Germany and the other remaining strong eurozone economies could do would be to pull out of the euro which would facilitate a massive devaluation of the currency and give the Southern European economies a fighting chance of restructuring and rebalancing their economies away from debt fuelled consumption.
Also regarding Patton not wanting to stop at Berlin - he never reached it the Russians were there first and by some considerable margin. As to whether the Allies could have pushed the Red Army back - I would question that from both a military and political standpoint - at the very least it would have taken a hell of a lot of explaining both to the troops and the folks back home (once the war in Europe was over there was huge pressure from the American public to leave and complaints from soldiers over the perceived slow pace of demobilisation - albeit it was actually conducted swiftly). Then there was the bigger picture to consider. At the time of the Battle for Berlin, Japan remained undefeated and the atom bomb untested and unproven. Therefore there was still a potential need to mount a conventional assault on the Japanese mainland - something I daresay the Americans would have wanted and probably needed Soviet support for. The Cold War did not set in until 1947 and by then the US had withdrawn most of its troops from Europe and the Soviets had their own bomb by 1949.
It is, as you say, academic, now, and I could make your argument as well as you could make mine, we both know what is in the public domain about these events and characters, although I am sure that both of us are as informed by the entertainment industry as we are by what is known as history, and in the term entertainment I include things like The World At War series, which we, mant of us, treat as gospel and a host of other, lesser shows. Having said that, I don't much disagree with your summary of the facts, just your interpretations and emphases; you say, for instance, that a minority of eligible voters together with big business elected Hitler, the first time, and he was therefore illegitimate - like Thatcher, Major and Blair; and neither Gordon Snot or CallHimDave were elected at all. Thatcher was corrupt, a friend to the childbeaster; a stupid, greedy, skriking baggage who went to war at the first opportunity and attacked and beggared sections of society whom she disliked and her vile trickle-down Reaganomics firstly haven't worked and secondly have turned the country into a money-laundering centre for organised crime, in which ordinary workers cannot afford to live in the capital city which they serve and maintain, how's that for a democratic defecit? Fewer people voted for her and her vile spivs than didn't, yet she assumed a mandate to criminalise the country.......to be continued
continues...........the point is that the supremacy of so-called parliamentary democracy is a moot point, even if you accept Churchill's dictum that it is the least worst system - although in doing that we close our minds to the possibilities of devising a newer, better system- even if you accept that members of legislatures are spurred by nobility and the urge to public service, which couldn't be further from the truth, the responsibility in such a system, here, or in thirties Germany, is to not let the fuckers in. As to the waging of a popular war, I have never read or heard of anthing which suggested that the Blitzkrieg and the annexations were anything but hugely popular with the overwhelming majority of Germans, maybe they were manipulated by a Nazi Kelvin McKenzie, into jeering Gotcha! as British ships went down, maybe there were tens of millions of them, hiding, listening to Winnie, on the BBC, Mein Gotting, saying, zis var, is fucking awful, please make it stop und go avay. But I very much doubt it. Hitler gave them jobs, pride and they adored him, enogh of them to enable him to set the world ablaze.
Your defence of a civilian population against a megalomaniac is one I would normally applaud, mr sg, and you make it sincerely and forcefully, I just don't think they were all that civilian; he spoke to the bad parts of them and, for him, they marched and killed and gassed. Business as usual, thereafter, should not have been an option. We must differ, ageeably.
Touche Mr I! Actually I don't think we see it all that differently. I do not think that Hitler's rise to power was 'illegitimate' in a technical sense but rather that he skillfully exploited both legal and non legal methods to subvert, corrupt and ultimately eliminate the democratic process and in this he was supported by fellow travellers and useful idiots in other parties. As for his support among the German people, well there was enough and no doubt this grew once the economy began to improve and clearly there must have been a sizeable proportion of the population willing to get their hands dirty for the Nazis to have done what they did on the scale that they did it. Also, War is often popular when you are winning it. What is also interesting is what happened once hostilities ceased. Despite fanatical resistance by the likes of the SS and Hitler Youth, once the surrender was effected and the remaining German forces still in the field mopped up there was nothing - no resistance of any note among the civilian population, no sign of Hitler's 'werewolves' offering the unconditional resistance promised by Werner Naumann. Maybe war weariness and / or fear of reprisals and / or something in the German psyche. Also the whole thing had been centered on Hitler himself - a massive cult of the personality - the oaths of personal loyalty to him etc. Once he was dead, it was dead - no point in fighting on. Still, this is historians work and they have been all over this stuff for decades and I am not sure that a consensus has been reached so small wonder that there are different interpretations of these matters amongst the likes of you and I, Mr I. However, I enjoy and appreciate the opportunity to debate this and the myriad of other issues that emerge from each of your postings - it is always interesting to see where they will lead. And sorry - I've been a bit of a dog with a bone on this one - I shall give way now!
P.S. With reference to the German psyche I think I've found it:
http://howtospendit.ft.com/health-grooming/53643-spa-junkie-on-buchinger-wilhelmi
I have a few health issues and have been contemplating something radical then recalled reading it. A bargain at c. 4,000 euros for the week eh... Dr Mengele, all is forgiven.
Some heavy shit on, at the moment. Auschwitz, The Forgotten Evidence, One of the C4s.
Ah I missed that. I was watching the excellent 'Spiral' on PBC4. Season Five & still fuck good.
Interesting, Mr Ishmael, I hadn`t heard that about the Hampshire. All I know is Kitchener, en route to Russia lunched with Jellicoe on his flagship, Iron Duke. A storm was raging and Jellicoe altered Hampshires course for less buffeting on leaving the Orkneys. She sailed and went slap into a mine, laid by a U Boat a few weeks earlier, part of their preparations for what became the Battle of Jutland but that`s interesting about troops preventing rescue.
I will ree-surch it some more and report back in post form, mr yardarm but it is true that troops kept rescuers from the shoreline at gunpoint, rescuers of ancient seafaring stock, very willing to have a go; it is true that the whole thing was wrapped in secrecy and that there were conflicting reports as to whether the explosion was outwards or inwards, sabotage ot mine, as I said, a source of continuing anger, here and an early exposition of conspiracy theory.
Shame you missed that, dry as dust, it was, little of the usual Yiddish melancholy violin, just the eye witness accounts of the vastness of the Auschwitz operation, how it funnelled tens of thousands of slaves seven kilometres down the road to the IG Farben factory; how starving men were forced to run, with 25kilo bags of cement on their backs, worked to death and replaced by daily trainloads of new victims, separated, immediately upon arrival from their wives and children who, if they were lucky, were quickly stripped and gassed or, if the gas chambers were too busy, shot and burned alive in a makeshift firepit. The very Devil, those fucking Germans, the very Devil.
I have watched a lot of this stuff, on C4, but in its detachment and in the shockingly matter of fact accounts of two male and two female survivors, by its acknowledgement of the inclusion in the Final Solution of all sorts, homosexuals, intellectuals, gipsies, trade unionists - dissenters, like we, here - and especially by the use of RAF aerial photography Auschwitz, The Forgotten Evidence, shed the customary weeping and wailing and presented, instead, a master class in documentary-making, revealing Cruelty's ability to harness itself and ride, like a plague, through Decency.
Thanks Mr I. I will keep an eye out in case it comes round again.
Mr SG
Try this link,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k3-wxLvQwg
Thanks Mr Inmate
I'll check it out.
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