Brendan Simms, Hitler

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Brendan Simms, Hitler: A Global Biography.

Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich.

Nazi Salute Video at Pacifica High School in Garden Grove

I don't know why these kids do it. I guess they simply haven't been taught the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Nazi acts by youth loom over increasingly diverse Orange County":

In March, social media blew up with photos of a group of partying students from Newport Beach and Costa Mesa giving the Sieg Heil salute to a bunch of red plastic cups arranged into a swastika. School officials immediately condemned the images, notifying parents across the district what had happened and what they planned to do.

The same month, school officials in Garden Grove were alerted to a group of Pacifica High School students raising the Nazi salute while singing a Nazi marching song at an off-campus athletic event.

Pacifica High administrators kept their situation quiet — which worked until this week, when the months-old recorded Snapchat video exploded online after it was sent to the Daily Beast.

Since Monday, Garden Grove Unified School District officials have learned of other videos and multiple allegations of students engaged in hate speech. The district has opened an investigation.

The students’ motivation and identities are unclear. But the images in Newport and Garden Grove reflect both a rise in such incidents nationwide and a conflict more specific to Orange County: tension between a rapidly diversifying populace and racist elements deeply seated in its history.

In September, at a football game in predominantly white Aliso Viejo, the visitors from a predominantly Latino high school in Santa Ana were met with signs of “Build the Wall” and “We love White,” according to the Santa Ana principal.

And white supremacist groups like the Rise Above Movement are giving a new voice to the bigotry of the skinheads and peckerwood gangs that long haunted Huntington Beach, Anaheim and working-class parts of the county. The group attacked counter-protesters and journalists at a rally in support of President Trump at Bolsa Chica State Beach in 2017.

The eight-second video from Garden Grove shows about a dozen Pacifica High school boys standing in what appears to be a banquet room giving the stiff-armed salute used in Nazi Germany, as the song “Erika,” written by German composer Herms Niel during Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power, plays in the background. At least one of the boys appears to sing the lyrics. One boy gets up and leaves, and another quickly drops his arm and sits down.

The video, taken before the start of an athletics banquet in November 2018, was originally shared among a small group of students on Snapchat. High school administrators learned of the video four months later and addressed the situation internally with the students appearing in the video and their families, Garden Grove Unified spokeswoman Abby Broyles said. School district officials did not know about the video until it surfaced Monday.

The students involved were disciplined, but officials declined to discuss the consequences they faced...

It was an "off campus" event. Seems like the First Amendment protects their speech, although that's no defense for it.

Still more.

Max Hastings, Armageddon

At Amazon, Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945.

When Stalin Faced Hitler

Summer reading, at Foreign Affairs.

And don't miss Kotkin's incredible two-volume biography, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.

Stephen Kotkin discusses Hitler, Stalin, and how the German-Soviet non-aggression pact fell apart.https://t.co/t5K4ZTI9TE

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) July 17, 2019

Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power

At Amazon, Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power.

Statement: United States Holocaust Museum Rejects AOC's 'Concentration Camps' Analogy

There's little that makes me loathe leftists more than their constant attacks on political opponents as Nazis. Any rational, knowledgeable person knows that what's going on at the Southern border bears little resemblance to the Hitler's exterminationist programs against the Jews. But leftists aren't rational; they're ideological, and attacking your opponents as genocidal murderers, apparently, is the main way hateful progs can fire up the base and maintain political support.

It's all despicable.

At the U.S. Holocaust Museum's page, "Statement Regarding the Museum's Position on Holocaust Analogies" (via Memeorandum).

And linked at the center's page, "Why Holocaust Analogies Are Dangerous."

Video here, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Calls Out U.S. ‘Concentration Camps’."

And her pathetic defense after coming under vociferous criticism:

Tim Bouverie, Appeasement

One of the earliest books I can remember on the appeasement policies of the Western allies before World War II is from Telford Taylor, who was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after the war.

See, Munich: The Price of Peace.

It seems there could be little that's new of this history, but nevertheless British journalist Tim Bouverie is out with a new account. See, at Amazon, Tim Bouverie, Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War.

Every young person should know this history, so even if Bouverie doesn't break much new ground, it's vital for new generations to learn the lessons, so good on him for writing this book.

Hitler's in the Charts Again

That's the name of the Exploited's hit song, here.

And, apparently, at the L.A. Times, "Fascism is on the minds of book buyers — and publishers are taking notice":

Gang: I've been thinking about, reading around on, and working on this story for months -- runs in LA Times on Sunday https://t.co/zAvTC8Rxgp

— Scott Timberg (@TheMisreadCity) May 3, 2019

Remember “The End of History?” Elizabeth Drummond, who spent the 1990s studying at Georgetown University, recalls Francis Fukuyama’s groundbreaking essay well, which announced "an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” The Soviet Union had just collapsed in a peaceful devolution, Germany was reunified as Champagne popped alongside the crumbling Berlin Wall and democracy seemed to be inevitably settling across the globe like a gentle rain. Politicians in the U.S. talked about a smooth and comfortable “third way” between Left and Right.

“There was a lot of optimism,” Drummond remembered. The topic of her studies — European Fascism of the 1920s and 1930s — seemed distant in both time and place.

But a quarter-century later, things look a bit different. Around the world, democracy appears to be losing ground to authoritarian populism in places like Hungary, Poland and the Philippines. Neo-Fascist, anti-immigrant movements brew in much of Europe and the United States. American politics is polarized in a way it’s not been in a century. And whatever’s going on in Venezuela, Turkey, Russia and North Korea, it’s hard to describe them as democracies.

Today, the subject of Drummond’s research no longer feels like a black-and-white film from decades ago.

“When I was a grad student, I didn’t think the link between past and present would be this strong,” says Drummond, now a professor at Loyola Marymount University. “One of the challenges of teaching history is to make it relevant. But I’m not sure modern European historians ever wanted to be this relevant.”

One of the challenges of teaching history is to make it relevant. But I’m not sure modern European historians ever wanted to be this relevant.

Drummond is not alone in seeing these connections. College students, book buyers and newspaper columnists are taking a renewed interest in the bad old days of interwar authoritarianism, as well as books about threats to the present. Several scholars have even started a crowd-sourced website called The New Fascism Syllabus.

The last few years have not been great for democracy around the world. But they have been, for people who write about or teach the subject, good for business. As a book review from the Washington Post put it, “Fascism is back in fashion.”

Despite parallels like attacks on the press, racial scapegoating, demonization of opposition parties, or the constant sense of alarm dictators rely on, no credible observer says that Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the leaders of Brexit or Vladimir Putin are replays of Hitler or Mussolini.

But some in the literary world are taking more direct looks at authoritarian regimes of the past and present, while trying to imagine the future.

In the immediate aftermath of the election of President Donald Trump, a number of novels about authoritarian states — George Orwell’s “1984,” Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 book “It Can’t Happen Here,” Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” in which the demagogue Charles Lindbergh defeats President Roosevelt – saw their profiles rise. Some even returned to the bestseller list. Readers continue to consume authoritarian fiction – British author John Lanchester has a new dystopian novel called “The Wall,” inspired by American insularity and the Brexit vote.

Other writers have been perceptive to the global political shifts. Recent books — Pankaj Mishra’s “Age of Anger,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die” — have become steady sellers and regular references for political commentators.

We never fall twice into the same abyss. But we always fall the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread.

Charles Hauther, head buyer for Los Feliz’s Skylight Books, says globally focused books like these sell better than anti-Trump tomes, and some old texts about authoritarianism are returning. “‘Anatomy of Fascism’ is back in style,” Hauther says of the Robert Paxton title from 15 years ago.

Some books — like Madeleine Albright’s ”Fascism: A Warning” from 2018, informed by her family’s flight from Nazi-occupied Central Europe — have a personal angle. Some aim for a mass audience, like 2017’s “On Tyranny,” by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. Others — “Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany,” by Claremont McKenna College historian Jonathan Petropoulos, or this year’s “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism,” by political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart — are scholarly but also readable for a general public.

Authors are also searching for root causes, like Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist and YouTube star interested in the “authoritarian personality” and co-author (with Marc Hetherington) of “Prius or Pickup?” Even more broadly, London economist William Davies writes in the new “Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason” that these shifts are caused by that fact that truth and rationality itself are now under assault.

Ziblatt cites income inequality, the lack of civics education and the disappearing of public spaces as potentially increasing the erosion of democratic norms. “The main way democracies die used to be military coups,” says Ziblatt. “Now it’s elections.”

Teachings on totalitarianism

Students have been intrigued by Nazis and Fascism for decades, but their interest has surged alongside global changes taking place from Beijing to Brazil. Ziblatt offered a Harvard class on the subject last autumn: 150 students applied for 12 spaces. When he originally offered the course, in the wake of George W. Bush’s wars in the Middle East, he called it, “Is Democracy Possible Everywhere?” Now, after the failure of democratic nation-building in the region and the widespread eruption of authoritarianism, he jokingly refers to it as, “Is Democracy Possible Anywhere?”

Students are not only enrolling, they are making connections between what they study and what they read in the news. It was exactly those parallels that drove Eva Baudler, an LMU junior whose grandparents were German resistance fighters, to take Drummond’s course on Nazi Germany. The first day involved watching a short film about the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va...

More.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Nazi Swastika at Newport Harbor High School Kegger Party

This is mind-boggling to me, but then, it's almost 75 years since the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis. Perhaps there's something to the effect of "historical amnesia" among today's youth. Still, the education system is doing Generation Z no favors. Sooner or later folks have to take responsibility, and some of these kids at the party could have their futures seriously effed up.

At the Los Angeles Times:

Teens involved in swastika party apologize as outrage grows. ‘My actions were disgusting’ https://t.co/6dZfYjXtXt

— L.A. Times: L.A. Now (@LANow) March 5, 2019

“Ignorance is the soil from which evil takes root. When we get to a point where it’s elected officials appearing in blackface in younger days and younger people today making light of the Holocaust, it shows an incredible stressor on the civic fault lines” https://t.co/NS77ss2f6W

— Hailey Branson-Potts (@haileybranson) March 6, 2019

When Kaitlyn saw the Snapchat photos of fellow Orange County teenagers posing around a swastika made of red Solo cups, she immediately posted a screenshot to social media, expecting outrage.

Instead, she got a mixed response. Some people were offended by the display. But others said they were more surprised by the outcry — arguing that students, some posed with their arms raised in Nazi salutes, were just joking.

“How can these kids who have been educated about [the Holocaust] still find it funny?” said Kaitlyn, a 17-year-old student at a private Jewish school in Irvine.

The Holocaust is a standard topic covered in history classes, and “The Diary of Anne Frank” is often required high school reading. But with time, knowledge of the Nazi atrocities among young people has decreased. And some darker ideas are filling the void.

A study commissioned last year by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany showed that 66% of U.S. millennials did not know what the Auschwitz concentration camp was. Four in 10 millennials thought 2 million or fewer Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust; the actual number is around 6 million.

For people born after 2000, post-millennials, the Holocaust feels less real, as they’re less likely to hear from the ever-dwindling number of survivors and WWII veterans, said Edward Dunbar, a UCLA clinical professor who has researched hate crimes and violence for two decades.

“These forms of atrocities are fading far into the distance for young non-adults, adolescents and teenagers, and it’s no closer than the Civil War would be for them,” Dunbar said.

Brian Levin, director of Cal State San Bernardino's Center on Hate and Extremism, said revisionist history about issues like the Holocaust can eventually lead to hate crimes.

What’s most disturbing about incidents like the Costa Mesa party last weekend, he said, is that most of the students likely are not “hardened bigots” but that Nazi symbols have become so mainstreamed that their meaning has been diluted.

“What’s scary is that there’s far more ignorance in America than evil, but ignorance is the soil from which evil takes root,” Levin said. “When we get to a point where it’s elected officials appearing in blackface in their younger days and younger people today making light of the Holocaust, it shows an incredible stressor on the civic fault lines.”

The Orange County incident comes as hate crimes are spiking nationwide. From 2014 to 2017, anti-Semitic hate crimes rose 54%, according to the FBI.

Particularly alarming, experts on hate and extremism said, is the rise in incidents on school campuses. In California, there was a 65% increase in hate crimes on elementary and secondary school campuses from 2012 to 2017, according to a report by the state’s Department of Justice.

There has been a huge jump in recent years of reported “papering” incidents on high school and college campuses, with hate groups posting fliers with slogans like, “It’s OK to be white” and “protect your heritage,” Levin said.

The Orange County teenagers, who were attending a Costa Mesa house party, were far from the only ones to have invoked Nazi iconography or gestures.

In December, students at Matilija Junior High School in Ojai lay down on a field in the shape of a swastika and shared a photo in a group chat that included racist comments. In 2016, a sophomore at Shadow Hills High School came to class dressed as a Nazi on Halloween, and the school held sensitivity training after pictures of her circulated on Twitter and Snapchat.

High school students in New Jersey, Florida, Kansas and Georgia have been punished in recent years after posting photos of a beer pong-style drinking game called “Jews versus Nazis,” in which teams arrange plastic cups in the shape of swastikas and the Star of David.

After Kaitlyn, who did not want her last name used out of concern she would be targeted online, posted screenshots from the party, a friend texted her screenshots showing a Snapchat conversation among some of the students at the house that night. They were making insensitive jokes about the Holocaust.

“Yaaaa no, phones gonna die,” one student wrote. “Just like the Jews.”

The students had titled the conversation “master race.”

One said to be at the party posted an Instagram story with what initially looked like an apology, saying he was “very sorry for my actions as I am guilty by association.” In the next image, he wrote that he was just joking, that “last night was awesome” and that he had “absolutely no sympathy” for anybody who was offended. He claimed to be Jewish. Then he deleted his account...

And to Think, I Was Actually Following This Guy *SHRUGS*

It's Nicholas Fuentes, who I thought I'd give a follow a month or two ago, but then I saw him tweeting vile anti-Israel tropes, and dink! Unfollowed the f***er.

And for some reason, I just came across this editorial, out today, at the Iowa State Daily, "Editorial: Iowa State deserves the right to know about controversial speakers."

I'm not for punching Nazis, but I don't think top conservatives should be mainstreaming racist goons like this guy, and apparently Fuentes was getting some attention from "alt-right" icons at CPAC, including Faith Goldy, who I like (but who is too close to genuine racists).

In any case, we live in interesting times, as they say.

Completely unedited pic.twitter.com/l9psFUvwZg

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) March 3, 2019

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews

At Amazon, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945.

Candace Owens Clarifies Comments on Adolf Hitler

If you don't know much about Adolf Hitler and the fundamental program of the Nazi regime, it's probably not a good idea to reference them. Like at all. And this is interesting to me, really interesting, since I'm the adviser to my campus's chapter of Turning Point USA, which is planning on having Ms. Owens on campus for a talk sometime this spring semester.

In any case, at USA Today, "After backlash, conservative pundit Candace Owens clarifies viral Hitler comment."

Thank you @USATODAY for publishing the FULL quote & context of what I said.

We are all holding to see if @ChelseaClinton will apologize for perpetuating this leftist media hoax.

Similar to #Covington, this hoax has resulted in death threats against me.https://t.co/3VEAkX23nx

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) February 9, 2019

Joachim Fest, Hitler

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Joachim C. Fest, Hitler.

Volker Ullrich, Hitler

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939.

Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right

At the New York Times, "One Legacy of Merkel? Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right":

One Legacy of Merkel? Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right - The New York Times https://t.co/3AWDhXWafo

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 6, 2018

EBERSBACH-NEUGERSDORF, Germany — Frank Dehmel was on the streets of East Germany in 1989. Every Monday, he marched against the Communist regime, demanding freedom and democracy and chanting with the crowds: “We are the people!”

Three decades later, Mr. Dehmel is on the streets again, older and angrier, and chanting the same slogan — this time for the far right.

He won freedom and democracy when the Berlin Wall came down 29 years ago on Nov. 9. But he lost everything else: His job, his status, his country — and his wife. Like so many eastern women, she went west to look for work and never came back.

To understand why the far right is on the march again in Germany, it helps to understand the many grievances of its most loyal supporters: men in the former Communist East.

No doubt the far right has made gains across Germany. The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 13 percent of votes in last year’s elections, enough to make it the leading opposition voice in Parliament. It is now represented in every one of the country’s 16 state legislatures.

But support for the AfD in the East is on average more than double that in the West. Among eastern men, the party is the strongest political force, with 28 percent having cast their ballots for the AfD last year.

Eastern Man, a figure long patronized, pitied or just ignored in the West, is in the process of again reshaping German politics.

No one more embodies the frustrations of eastern men — or has been more the object of their ire — than Ms. Merkel, an eastern woman who rose to the pinnacle of power and provides a daily reminder of their own failure.

Yet Ms. Merkel never became the ambassador for the East that people yearned for: Living standards in the region still lag those in the West, even after what is perceived as a traumatic economic takeover.

Mr. Dehmel calls her a “traitor” and worse.

After reunification, Mr. Dehmel recalled, western men in suits and Mercedes-Benzes arrived in his eastern home state of Saxony, soon running businesses, running universities, running the regional government, “running everything.”

And that was before more than a million asylum seekers, many of them young men, came to Germany in 2015.

“I didn’t risk my skin back then to become a third-class citizen,” said Mr. Dehmel, now 57, counting off the perceived hierarchy on his fingers: “First there are western Germans, then there are asylum seekers, then it’s us.”

One-third of male voters in Saxony, where he lives, cast their ballots for the far right last year — by far more than any other place in the country...

More.

America's Weimar Moment

This is a great piece, from Joel Kotkin, at the O.C. Register, via Instapundit, "Lurching to a new Weimar":

America seems to be heading inexorably toward a Weimar moment, a slide toward political polarization from which it could be increasingly difficult to return. Weimar — that brief, brilliant and tragic German republic of the 1920s — was replaced by Hitler’s murderous regime in 1933.

Like Weimar, our politics are increasingly defined by violence, whether the Pittsburgh massacre, the mass mailing of bomb-laden parcels, dueling mobilizations on the border, the shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise or, less lethally, the antics by unhinged partisans such as Maxine Waters. Respect for the basic folkways of a functional republic is vanishing, damaged by the angry narcissism of both President Trump and his often-hysterical media enemies...

Let’s start by stating that Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, and his increasingly cowed Republican Party no National Socialist clone. But his intemperance has widened gaps that were already gaping. And certainly, his prior, mistaken refusal fully to denounce the alt-right activists at Charlottesville displayed a terrifying ignorance about white nationalists and their agenda.

Yet, less obviously, the road to Weimar is also being paved by his opposition. Trump was elected legally, but from the beginning his opponents — including senior member of the Democratic Party — devalued his election and threatened his impeachment. By claiming to be the “resistance,” as opposed to the loyal opposition, they have set in play a tit-for-tat political war game that is becoming all too real.

In a democracy, norms of transcending partisanship matter. It was the refusal of the various parties in Germany, notes City University of New York historian Eric Weitz, to express faith in free speech and democratic norms that undermined that country’s democracy. In Weimar Germany, he notes, lack of faith in liberal principles infected many, if not most, of the top aristocrats, intellectuals, clergy, bureaucrats and industrialists — most eventually welcomed the authoritarian Nazis. “Democracy,” Weitz notes, “needs democratic convictions and a democratic culture.”

More at the link.

The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred

From Ruth Wisse, at WSJ:

The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred by my former professor at McGill University Ruth Wisse https://t.co/Ud7ogCfXfz

— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) November 1, 2018

The most discouraging feature of the anti-Israel brand of anti-Semitism is its penetration of Western societies, including the U.S. That a single shooter wants to kill the Jews is less dangerous to this country than Louis Farrakhan’s smiling designation of Jews as “termites,” broadcast to a vast audience, or the vicious movement to boycott Israel—an extension of the Arab boycott launched in 1945. The incursion of fanatical anti-Israel politics into the American campus and the Democratic Party is a threat not to the Jews alone but to what they represent in liberal democracy.

Even as we try to comfort the mourners and suggest better security measures, we must stop the scourge before a full-fledged anti-Semitic politics emerges in America under the unifying banner of “intersectionality.” Anti-Semitism is the only ideology that can unite the far left and far right. Its success would signify America’s failure....

RTWT.

Last Known Nazi Death Camp Guard Deported to Germany

Good riddance to the fucker.

And ICE deported him. You'd think leftists would celebrate that, right?

At the Guardian U.K., "U.S. deports Nazi war crimes suspect to Germany."