The pond rarely gets outraged at a scandal, but this one is a doozy, all the more so when you see the likes of Niki Savva turning up on The Insiders to peddle the shameful party line …and no one saying boo to this particular goose or to Porter …
Search for a lizard Oz piece on the scandal, and you'll find the reptiles still doggo …and by a curious coincidence, this morning the pond was reading the NY Review of Books over breakfast, and stumbled across Cass Sunstein's It Can Happen Here (currently outside the paywall).
What a salutary read it was for these Malware, Trumpian times …recording what happened when Milton Mayer talked with some ordinary Germans about their experiences of Nazi rule …
...When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt “that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man,” and that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not “by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.” Many Germans “wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”
Mayer’s most stunning conclusion is that with one partial exception (the teacher), none of his subjects “saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect.” Where most of us understand Nazism as a form of tyranny, Mayer’s subjects “did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now.” Seven years after the war, they looked back on the period from 1933 to 1939 as the best time of their lives. Mayer suggests that even when tyrannical governments do horrific things, outsiders tend to exaggerate their effects on the actual experiences of most citizens, who focus on their own lives and “the sights which meet them in their daily rounds.” Nazism made things better for the people Mayer interviewed, not (as many think) because it restored some lost national pride but because it improved daily life. Germans had jobs and better housing. They were able to vacation in Norway or Spain through the “Strength Through Joy” program. Fewer people were hungry or cold, and the sick were more likely to receive treatment. The blessings of the New Order, as it was called, seemed to be enjoyed by “everybody.”
Even in retrospect Mayer’s subjects liked and admired Hitler. They saw him as someone who had “a feeling for masses of people” and spoke directly in opposition to the Versailles Treaty, to unemployment—to all aspects of the existing order. They applauded Hitler for his rejection of “the whole pack”—“all the parliamentary politicians and all the parliamentary parties”—and for his “cleanup of moral degenerates.” The bank clerk described Hitler as “a spellbinder, a natural orator. I think he was carried away from truth, even from truth, by his passion. Even so, he always believed what he said...”
...The killing of six million Jews? Fake news. Four of Mayer’s subjects insisted that the only Jews taken to concentration camps were traitors to Germany, and that the rest were permitted to leave with their property or its fair market value. The bill collector agreed that the killing of the Jews “was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did.” He added that “some say it happened and some say it didn’t,” and that you “can show me pictures of skulls…but that doesn’t prove it.” In any case, “Hitler had nothing to do with it.” The tailor spoke similarly: “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened.”
With evident fatigue, the baker reported, “One had no time to think. There was so much going on.” His account was similar to that of one of Mayer’s colleagues, a German philologist in the country at the time, who emphasized the devastatingly incremental nature of the descent into tyranny and said that “we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.” The philologist pointed to a regime bent on diverting its people through endless dramas (often involving real or imagined enemies), and “the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise.” In his account, “each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’” that people could no more see it “developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”
And so on … with the corn currently growing over the heads of a lawyer and his whistle blowing client … and the brave, bold reptiles still lurking deep in their craven caves …
But this is a comedy blog, and so it's time for a little light comedy of the best kind.
The pond offered a tricky set of questions earlier in the day, but our Gracie topped that on the weekend …
Indeed, indeed, and they don't come any more utterly puerile than our Gracie … and so to the quiz ...
Now the pond can sense a few readers might be struggling with those wonderfully clever questions, so it decided to get in a few hints and prompts for the next question ...
The data's here, but the trying hard to be helpful pond collected just a few names, and lordy lordy, look who's head of the list ...
Right, now absolutely no excuses, everybody should be able to get the answer to the next question, and understand the urgent need to throw even more money at long-suffering big business ...
Utterly peurile and a complete futtock to boot is our Gracie … but the pond promised comedy, and surely it has fulfilled its duty …and just to round it out, here's a cartoon for our Gracie …
Wau, Our Gracie is a one, isn't she. But I wonder who really made up all that methyl mercaptan that she put her name on - somebody from the Institute for Paid Agitprop, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteMurdoch was given an $882million handout from the taxpayers a few years ago.
ReplyDeleteWhat he did was to loan money from one of his companies to another in one form of currency and repay it as another currency and then claim the currency conversion losses.