SOCIALIST GERMANY: THE OLD IS NEW AGAIN

"A multimillion-dollar campaign to boost Germans' low self-confidence has backfired after it emerged that its slogan was coined by the Nazis. The $34 million "Du Bist Deutschland -- You Are Germany" -- campaign was devised to inspire Germans to stop moaning and do something good for their country. Beethoven, Einstein and the sports stars Franz Beckenbauer and Michael Schumacher have been cited in advertisements encouraging Germans to take more pride in their homeland.

But a historian from Ludwigshafen has provoked an uproar with his discovery that the same "Du Bist Deutschland" cry was used at Nazi rallies in the 1930s. Stefan Morz uncovered photographs of a 1935 Nazi convention in which soldiers display a banner reading, in Gothic script, "Denn Du Bist Deutschland (Because You Are Germany)." The slogan was topped with the head of Adolf Hitler. Leading Nazis such as Hermann Goring and Joseph Goebbels attended the event."

(Excerpt from here)

The Nazi connection is not as obscure as the article excerpted above pretends. One of Hitler's favourite slogans was: "Um uns ist Deutschland. In uns marschiert Deutschland. Und hinter uns kommt Deutschland!". Like much of Hitler's rhetoric it cannot be translated in a way that gives much idea of the impact of the original but it literally means: "Around us is Germany, In us Germany marches and behind us comes Germany". So the basic idea behind the modern slogan and Nazi thinking is pretty similar: Identifying the individual with the nation and making Germany a sort of mystical icon. All very Hegelian!

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ELSEWHERE

There is another article here on the stupidity of Abraham Foxman of the ADL. With him a a friend, Jews don't need enemies. The incredible Foxman thinks Christians are the main threat to Judaism. I guess I must have misheard the religion of Osama bin Laden. I linked to a similar demolition of the anachronistic Foxman on 20th.. It's time that the ADL sacked the non-foxy one. Having such a frantically Leftist fool representing them is no favour to Jews.

9/11 and the fraud that is Leftism: "Most remarkable is the initial and continuing indifference both to those who perished and to the country itself as it came under attack. On a political level, the Left could summon no indignation after assaults upon America's capital, defense headquarters, civil aviation, embassies, warships, and chief city, any one of which would be a classic and unambiguous casus belli, while in strange contrast it seemed to regard the mere presence of Americans in Saudi Arabia, the trade in oil, and the Arab world's exposure to American popular culture as unpardonable aggressions. Irrationality on a political level from these quarters has never been a shock. On a personal level, however, the predominant response of the intellectual Left was a mystery. It was as if the thousands of crushed and incinerated men, women, and children-those who threw themselves into a quarter-mile abyss rather than have the flesh seared off their bones as they stood in the wind at glassless walls, the small children who died in terror after watching hysterical fanatics slit the throats of screaming stewardesses, and so on, for there are almost three thousand stories-simply did not exist. How does one explain such an egregious absence of sympathy (much less assertions that "they" deserved it, or that it was a work of art) among endlessly self-proclaiming empathetics whose stock in trade is to milk compassion even from the Rock of Gibraltar?"

Wal-Mart critics reading from an old script: "The success of retail giant Wal-Mart has generated criticism of its business practices from across the political spectrum -- criticism that, according to a new study published today by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has been heard frequently before. Contemporary attacks on Wal-Mart are echoes of the same unjustified charges leveled at retail innovators for over a century. Because of Wal-Mart's uniquely successful history and influential place in the U.S. retail sector, the company has become the focus of many individuals' wider anxieties about shifting economic realities and the future of American prosperity."

That naughty advertising again: "Not content to save us from global warming, catastrophic cooling (said to result from global warming; don't ask), poisonous food, unsafe workplaces, dangerous water sports, and lawn darts, the federal regulatory apparatus in Washington now has a bright, shiny new cause: It wants to save us from product placement. When Peter Parker shot out his webbing and snagged that can of Dr. Pepper a few years ago in Spider-Man, it seems that impressionable movie audiences across the country suffered deleterious consequences -- perhaps in the form of forgetting how much they loved Mr. Pibb. Jonathan Adelstein, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, is particularly outraged at what he sees as product-placement manipulations by TV networks. Because "'he public needs to know when they're being advertised to,' Adelstein told The Wall Street Journal, he wants the FCC to investigate the practice and require a lengthy, large-font disclosure notice during every TV show with paid placements."

European doublethink about Muslims: "I would suggest that the Europeans are engaging in a more extreme version of what many liberals do vis a vis blacks in the U.S. In one part of their mind, liberals idealize blacks as the soulful oppressed victims about whom one must never think a judgmental thought, while, in the other part of their mind, they carefully organize their lives to have as little contact with blacks, certainly lower class blacks and angry activist blacks, as possible. In the same way, the Europeans with one part of their mind tell themselves that the Muslims are just marvelous, while with the other part of their mind they strictly avoid them. And somehow these two tendencies or thoughts never meet, so that the contradiction is never felt".

Incorrect book's 14th week on NYT best seller list: "No publicity in recent weeks. No reviews beyond three that appeared online when the book first came out. Yet my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) continues to attract interest. For the week of December 4, it checks in at #22 on the New York Times Bestseller List (paperback nonfiction). This is its fourteenth week on the list".

Jefferson vs multiculturalism? "Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here. If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements.."

Reliapundit has a review of the debate in France over how to respond to the Islamic and black riots there.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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