In which the pond's Sunday meditation strays into most peculiar turf thanks to the gutter-saluting Murdochians and the angry Sydney Anglicans praying to a building ...

The pond has noted some consternation about Hitler salutes, which just goes to show how much people forget ...

In Tamworth, in the old days, the boys would play the Nazis and the girls would play the victims.

Says all you need to know about Tamworth really ...

Nazi salutes were a matter of great technical concern. Everyone knew the conventional one, but what about the more informal offering?

This was known as the ...

Führergruß:

Eine Variante des Grußes, bei der der Arm nicht ausgestreckt, sondern nach hinten angewinkelt wird, ermöglichte es, auch bei körperlichen Gebrechen, die das Ausstrecken des Armes nicht möglich machen, den Gruß abzuleisten. Diese Form des Grußes wurde auch verwendet, wenn enge Platzverhältnisse ein Ausstrecken des Armes nicht zuließen oder der zu Grüßende dem Grüßenden direkt gegenüberstand. Hitler selbst grüßte meistens auf diese Weise, auch dann, wenn es durch die Umstände nicht geboten war. Dies wurde bemerkenswert von Charlie Chaplin im 1940 erstaufgeführten Kinofilm Der große Diktator persifliert. Seine Figur Adenoid Hynkel hob gelangweilt seine rechte Hand und schien sogar zu vergessen, warum er eigentlich seine Hand oben hatte, und verdeutlichte damit die extrem einseitige Zuneigung zwischen dem „Führer“ und seinem Volk. Im Gegensatz dazu grüßten die Untergebenen teilweise in aller Übertreibung und stark überzeichnet. Im Englischen wurde auch das Verb „to heil“ gebildet, es war die Zeit von Sprach-Konstruktionen wie etwa, „Sieg heiling the Führer“

You could wiki it here if German's your Greg Hunt thing, but given the pond's family stopped speaking German during the great war, please allow Google to offer you a loose translation:

A variant of the salute, when the arm is not stretched out, but bent backwards, made it possible even with physical infirmities that make you stretch the arm is not possible, the greeting abzuleisten. This form of salute was also used when limited space did not allow a stretching of the arm or faced directly to the greeting saluting. Hitler himself greeted mostly in this way, even if it was not necessary in the circumstances. This was remarkable by Charlie Chaplin in 1940 premiered movie The Great Dictator satirizes. His figure Adenoid Hynkel raised bored his right hand and even seemed to forget why he actually had his hand up, and thus highlighted the extremely one-sided affection between the "leader" and his people. In contrast, the subordinates greeted partially in all the hype and heavily oversubscribed. In English, the verb "to salvation" was formed, it was the time of voice constructions like, "victory Heiling the leader".

Well the pond used the word "loose" - aren't the bots always good for an algorithmic laugh - but why should we be straying into this turf for a Sunday meditation, except for a cheeky bit of 'Godwin's Law'-smashing nonsense from yet another Murdochian tabloid?

Yes it's about as grubby as it can get, and we all know why the grubby rag doesn't sell in Liverpool:

Strange how none of the Tamworth lads made it to the front page, but it brings the pond back to that informal salute.

Now as the Greg Hunted noted comedians used to mock it:

But the pond is now prepared to make an astonishing revelation, as deep and as intelligent as any Murdochian rag's world exclusive, by exclusively revealing that Ming the Merciless was himself not above a friendly salutation Adolf-style:

No doubt Murdochians around the world will be envying the pond its fabulous scoop, and be copying the photo in a trice.

But how to pivot from this tremendous scoop to a meditation on the angry Sydney Anglicans?

Well of course Hitler was very big on family:

Or the Anglican church, as you get some of that complimentary women popcorn into you, and read more about women in German in the 1930s here.

Which nicely cues up the pond's latest beef with the Anglican website.

Yesterday in a very flashy animation - only intermittent and probably soon gone now to flash heaven - this jumble of words turned up, with bookish illustrations:

Hang on, hang on, let's tilt that around a bit:

Say what?

Now the Anglicans are dissing Miles Franklin?

Well she might have been barking mad - you can get an ADB bio here - but given her attitude to marriage and  'rabbit work', what's she doing in a colourful Anglican reading list?

But yes, she did colour the pond's world at a tender age ...

As for the notorious Dickens ...

In all his writings, Charles Dickens—a Christian of the broadest kind—is outspoken in his dislike of evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism, but, especially in his fiction, he is very reluctant to make professions of a specific faith beyond the most general sort of Christianity. Nothing more surely aroused his suspicions about a person's religious faith than a public profession of it, and this aversion formed a fundamental feature of his dislike of evangelicals and dissenters. Dickens's parents were Anglican, but evidently entirely uninterested in the dogmas of the Church of England and probably not very regular in their worship. As a small boy in Chatham, Dickens seems to have attended services at a nearby Baptist chapel. 
There is little positive evidence about Dickens's religious thinking throughout the twenties and thirties, but it is in the latter decade, a period of significant reform in England, that he was at his most unrestrained in his religious satires—for example, upon sabbatarianism (in the pseudonymously published Sunday Under Three Heads [1836]) and upon hypocritical dissenting preachers (in the form of Mr. Stiggins in The Pickwick Papers [1837])...  (and the rest here).

As for Robert Hughes, how did he get on the angry Anglican reading list for a bit of colour?

Here's some Hughes' colour, back when he was one of Australia's then living national treasures, and being quoted on attending a Catholic school:

"Every time you wanked, it was a slaughter of future Catholics so small that a hundred of them could dance, or at least wiggle, on the head of a  pin ... The notion that some small part of the cosmic order hung on our teenage willies was a heavy load for us young soldiers it St. Ignatius' army of Christ. In some of us, including Private Hughes, it induced the kind of suffocating guilt that led to scepticism: if God was so busy counting sperm, and so apparently unconcerned with preventing the world's famines, epidemics and slaughters, was He worth worshipping? Was He there at all? No answer from the altar."
"Nobody - except those who believe, on no evidence at all, that an immortal soul really is implanted in the embryo at the moment of conception, thus endowing it with complete humanity - can say at what point an embryo turns into a human being. The innocence of fetuses is not in doubt. But it is irrelevant: lettuces are innocent too."

And so the angry Sydney Anglicans' foolish flash reminded the pond of a quotation it had been itching to use, what with Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature designated toilet reading (you can preview it on Google books here):

        

Now the angry Sydney Anglicans can have a couple of the other books on the reading list - Jane Austen was into piety, and Eric Liddell was so far beyond piety that he was into stupidity and self-harm.

But did the lettuce leafs have the first clue that their silly little flash would lead the pond back to the dangerous, notorious Steven Pinker?

And for what?

What was the purpose of this frivolity?

Pray for Moore College?

Like the building's got a soul in need of redemption? Bricks and mortar having some kind of conceptus ...?

Would someone kindly tell them they're dreaming ... and to stop trading off on their intellectual and artistic superiors with a cheap and flashy bit of silliness ...

And as for the punchline about the bible and it being the only book worth knowing by heart ...

... would someone kindly tell them that by the time you get to knowing all of Chronicles off by heart, the only thing you'll begat is mind-blowing stupidity of a "free complimentary woman with every box of popcorn" kind ...