Coming from the perspective of a Jewish man, I see your position, you know I do.
Coming from the perspective of an American Indian, I know a bit about genocide...my ancestors began numbering around 8-10 million in the Americas pre-Columbus...now there is fewer than a half million of us left. That number is dwindling.
And the assertion that there are currently no actual Nazis in power positions in this world is naive. I spent 10 years managing a high end audio company for a true red and black Nazi, pic of himself in full Hitler Youth costume on Der Fuhrers' knee in his desk drawer. The real deal. He moved among the power eiite and top mafiosi of Miami, wife was President of all N. American operations for Lufthansa, Santos Trafficante', Henry Gonzales, Frank Sinatra were regulars there..along with several South american drug lords. I was living in a very high tension rarified atmosphere then...dangerous is an inadequate word.
All good Fascists I assure you.
What we have today, run by these mad bankers, financiers, and Corporate greed monsters, may not be a classical Naziism as you recognize it..but it's there, whether you choose to see it or not. Someone in America today will die because a brute in a black uniform beat him to death. Someone will be thrown in prison without charge for pissing off the President. Someone's children will get blown to bits by a missile out of nowhere, launched by a20 yr old in an air conditioned bunker in Nevada. Somewhere, stormtroopers will kick in doors and shoot civilians. They will be wearing Stars and Stripes on their sleeves. Somewhere, a Nation will finally crumble under the uprising the CIA brewed in its' belly...Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria...Ukraine.
We Americans don't have the classical Naziism..no big parades, no death camps yet, no spiffy crisp uniforms and blood red battle flags..we are creating a New Thing. This is why you don't recognize it. Lessons were learned. Now the Iron Fist wears a Velvet Glove. It lets you THINK you're free. You're not.
I'm not living in the middle of Europe because I'm hallucinating.
Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
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Ernest Greene
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- Posts: 22
Re: Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
Just to clarify this a bit, there is a distinction and an important one between fascists and Nazis. Fascists? We've got plenty of those around, doing all the things you say. And they do have a link to the fascists of old, sometimes in the quite literal form of having assumed control of what were once Nazi properties, like all those chemical companies I mentioned. Nor is there any shortage of evil in the world. Never has been. Nazis didn't invent genocide. That dubious honor probably goes to the European conquerers of North and South America, who as you correctly point out were directly responsible for the dates of millions of indigenous peoples. The turks had a pretty good go at it with the Armenians. And what of the Khmer Rouge? They killed off about 4 million of their own people after we casually side-swiped their society in our mad Indochinese adventure. I suppose that's not exactly genocide because the killers and the victims were of the same tribe, but it's certainly a mass crime against humanity.
For that matter, if we're just talking numbers, both Stalin and Mao probably killed more people than the Nazis, and certainly more different kinds of people. It's not about the numbers. It's about motives.
Personal liberty is a unique historical idea that has managed to take hold in a few places but most of the world lives under some kind of heavy authoritarian hand. In my more pessimistic moments I fear that's what most people actually prefer. Making individual choices is hard and the consequences come back "return to sender." Easier by far to let some political demagogue, religious fanatic or corporate schemer tell you what to think, say and do. Human beings are quite lazy for the most part when it comes to dealing with matters outside their own personal lives. They don't see the bigger picture because they don't want to. That makes life good for bad guys and bad for good guys. I don't think any of that's new in the world, though the methods for exploiting political ignorance and indolence have grown more sophisticated.
However, it's not because I'm Jewish that I take such exception to what I see as misuse of the the Nazism identifier. Nazism wasn't exactly a political ideology. It was a bizarre death cult that got control of a modern industrialized nation and turned the whole society into a killing machine. The mass murders of other evil parties were motivated by some kind of perceived self-interest, but Hitler's objective from the start was to create a mechanism for exterminating particular groups he didn't like. Everything else was sacrificed to that goal. At the end of the war, trains needed to bring troops to the front to resist the advancing Allies were instead diverted to moving concentration camp inmates further from the front so they could be killed off before the war ended. Had Hitler been able to hang onto Europe he was already making plans to exterminate the Poles. Extermination wasn't a means to Nazi true believers. It was the whole reason for what they were doing. Indeed, it can be argued that the extermination program cost Germany the war. The diversion of resources to this mad project interfered with every other thing they tried to do.
What do you need to know about the difference between Hitler and other dictators? At the end he blamed the German people for letting him down and ordered the flooding of the Berlin subways, which were full of people hiding from Allied bombers, and killed thousands of his own supporters. That isn't just evil, it's mad.
I don't think you can compare that to anything that's gone on since. The crudest and most brutal self-interest still has a core of warped logic at its center. Somebody benefits from it at whatever cost to others. To the victims, the motives aren't important, but historically they matter a great deal. The ahistorical aspect of Nazism was that it was created for the express purpose of mass murder and everything else was a cover for that agenda.
What we have with modern corporate fascism is the opposite. Mass murder is simply incidental to the accomplishment of "pragmatic" objectives. Mass murder was the objective of Nazism and that's why it makes a bad metaphor for other kinds of despicable ideologies, of which there are many. It's as if some weird version of Charlie Manson had become chancellor of a modern nation. Some nations have leaders not utterly unlike that now. I'd be inclined to put North Korea on that list, as it too seems more attached to mad ideas than to its own survival, but what influence do the North Koreans have outside their own borders? Not much.
To say that modern perpetrators of crimes against humanity employ Nazi-like methods is not unreasonable at all. The U.N. just bestowed that unique honor on the North Koreans as a matter of fact. But to suggest that the world's power is concentrated in the hands of lunatics with grandiose, Wagnerian, pseudo-mystical motives of fulfilling historical destinies even at the cost of their own destruction gives them both too much credit and too little.
They haven't the bizarre imagination to invent anything like Nazism but they do have the smarts to appropriate what the Nazis did effectively toward more self-interested objectives.
That's not a minor distinction. It would be much easier if the enemies of freedom today all goose-stepped around in black suits so we could pick them off, but instead they wear Saville Row suits and work in air-conditioned offices in New York, London, Brussels and Beijing. That's a different more subtle kind of menace that can't be counted on to undue itself with its own craziness. If anyone cares to prevent the crimes these wannabe masters of the universe are committing now and will commit in the future, first they have to be identified correctly for who and what they are and then new political strategies must be devised to combat them.
They say a good general fights the last war and a bad general fights the war before that. We need some generals who can figure out how to fight an unconventional kind of war not previously seen in this world, a war waged by long distance and largely dependent on hired mercenaries. You look at a picture of a group of actual Nazis and you know just what you're seeing You look at a bunch of bankers in Davos and conclusions are nearly as obvious, nor are the effective countermeasures.
I'll step back now. I can never win this debate and I know it because I've had it too many times before. It's important that Holocaust scholarship continue to point out the unique nature of Nazi evil for many reasons, but one of them is probably not in search of working strategies to resist the specific evils of the modern world. That task, if possible at all, will require a perspective that looks forward at where we're going rather than backward at where we've been.
For that matter, if we're just talking numbers, both Stalin and Mao probably killed more people than the Nazis, and certainly more different kinds of people. It's not about the numbers. It's about motives.
Personal liberty is a unique historical idea that has managed to take hold in a few places but most of the world lives under some kind of heavy authoritarian hand. In my more pessimistic moments I fear that's what most people actually prefer. Making individual choices is hard and the consequences come back "return to sender." Easier by far to let some political demagogue, religious fanatic or corporate schemer tell you what to think, say and do. Human beings are quite lazy for the most part when it comes to dealing with matters outside their own personal lives. They don't see the bigger picture because they don't want to. That makes life good for bad guys and bad for good guys. I don't think any of that's new in the world, though the methods for exploiting political ignorance and indolence have grown more sophisticated.
However, it's not because I'm Jewish that I take such exception to what I see as misuse of the the Nazism identifier. Nazism wasn't exactly a political ideology. It was a bizarre death cult that got control of a modern industrialized nation and turned the whole society into a killing machine. The mass murders of other evil parties were motivated by some kind of perceived self-interest, but Hitler's objective from the start was to create a mechanism for exterminating particular groups he didn't like. Everything else was sacrificed to that goal. At the end of the war, trains needed to bring troops to the front to resist the advancing Allies were instead diverted to moving concentration camp inmates further from the front so they could be killed off before the war ended. Had Hitler been able to hang onto Europe he was already making plans to exterminate the Poles. Extermination wasn't a means to Nazi true believers. It was the whole reason for what they were doing. Indeed, it can be argued that the extermination program cost Germany the war. The diversion of resources to this mad project interfered with every other thing they tried to do.
What do you need to know about the difference between Hitler and other dictators? At the end he blamed the German people for letting him down and ordered the flooding of the Berlin subways, which were full of people hiding from Allied bombers, and killed thousands of his own supporters. That isn't just evil, it's mad.
I don't think you can compare that to anything that's gone on since. The crudest and most brutal self-interest still has a core of warped logic at its center. Somebody benefits from it at whatever cost to others. To the victims, the motives aren't important, but historically they matter a great deal. The ahistorical aspect of Nazism was that it was created for the express purpose of mass murder and everything else was a cover for that agenda.
What we have with modern corporate fascism is the opposite. Mass murder is simply incidental to the accomplishment of "pragmatic" objectives. Mass murder was the objective of Nazism and that's why it makes a bad metaphor for other kinds of despicable ideologies, of which there are many. It's as if some weird version of Charlie Manson had become chancellor of a modern nation. Some nations have leaders not utterly unlike that now. I'd be inclined to put North Korea on that list, as it too seems more attached to mad ideas than to its own survival, but what influence do the North Koreans have outside their own borders? Not much.
To say that modern perpetrators of crimes against humanity employ Nazi-like methods is not unreasonable at all. The U.N. just bestowed that unique honor on the North Koreans as a matter of fact. But to suggest that the world's power is concentrated in the hands of lunatics with grandiose, Wagnerian, pseudo-mystical motives of fulfilling historical destinies even at the cost of their own destruction gives them both too much credit and too little.
They haven't the bizarre imagination to invent anything like Nazism but they do have the smarts to appropriate what the Nazis did effectively toward more self-interested objectives.
That's not a minor distinction. It would be much easier if the enemies of freedom today all goose-stepped around in black suits so we could pick them off, but instead they wear Saville Row suits and work in air-conditioned offices in New York, London, Brussels and Beijing. That's a different more subtle kind of menace that can't be counted on to undue itself with its own craziness. If anyone cares to prevent the crimes these wannabe masters of the universe are committing now and will commit in the future, first they have to be identified correctly for who and what they are and then new political strategies must be devised to combat them.
They say a good general fights the last war and a bad general fights the war before that. We need some generals who can figure out how to fight an unconventional kind of war not previously seen in this world, a war waged by long distance and largely dependent on hired mercenaries. You look at a picture of a group of actual Nazis and you know just what you're seeing You look at a bunch of bankers in Davos and conclusions are nearly as obvious, nor are the effective countermeasures.
I'll step back now. I can never win this debate and I know it because I've had it too many times before. It's important that Holocaust scholarship continue to point out the unique nature of Nazi evil for many reasons, but one of them is probably not in search of working strategies to resist the specific evils of the modern world. That task, if possible at all, will require a perspective that looks forward at where we're going rather than backward at where we've been.
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Ferres
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- Posts: 281
- Contact:
Re: Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
In my opinion, Nazi power was already on the decline. With their setbacks in Africa, Britain and Russia. The Soviets would fight them to a stand still and internal forces would do the rest. Many Germans already wanted Hitler dead and without him the Nazis would lose their grip to other German nationalist forces who already control large armies just lack the courage to act. The threat of annihilation may also have contributed to the German's costly fanatical behavior. If they knew they had a chance for a peaceful end they may not have killed off so many of their slave workers. People are more dangerous when they are afraid.Ernest Greene wrote:
And as for the option of staying out of WW2, it never existed. Roosevelt was dead right that we could never coexist with a fascist-ruled Europe and that Hitler and all his works would have to be destroyed at whatever cost to preserve what passes for civilization. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin all did some very bad things themselves but they did rid the world of Nazism and for that we can only be grateful. I wouldn't be here if he'd failed to follow through on that conviction and the notion that any better society could have somehow done business with a descendant government of The Reich is risible.
A bonus to this scenario is that the Soviets would not be able to roll into Eastern Europe and perhaps would never have the cold war at all. Europeans hated the Nazis but they hated the Soviets more. They could unite against this Eastern threat once the Nazi's are removed from power. It will end with a status quo very similar to the present day. Who knows what would happen to the Soviets if they were put in a corner like that. Without a clear victory, how long can Stalin stay in power.
The Japanese side of the equation doesn't have as much alternatives though.
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ROBERTS
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- Posts: 730
Re: Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
Mass Extermination?
Would you consider an idea to reduce the population of the entire globe to around 500 million total a overriding plan for mass extermination? the deaths of over 7 billion humans qualify?
That's exactly what I think these top level mega rich discuss and plan in their island retreats. And I think they're well on their way.
I subscribe to the concept of the "Breakaway Civilization"...that the top top tier of ultra wealthy humanity has so separated itself, lives in such rarified environs, that they have no connection or NEED for humanity. None at all. They've never stood in a grocery store, don't know the smell of a public toilet, and haven't bought anything at a cash register themselves ever.
And those people, like the Pharaohs before them, see the Slaves have multiplied at an alarming rate, and if left unchecked, will overwhelm their little planet and them.
Indeed Ernest...I see an idea equal to the murderous hate of the Nazis in these people. I see it coming fast. There is a danger in your way of thinking, a danger in not recognizing the New Thing. It doesn't wear spiffy black uniforms or hold huge rallies, that would make it far too simple to crush before it grows. It's wearing the best silk and sipping wine not available for public purchase while discussing the issue of overpopulation and how 7 billion will become 10 billion and then 20 billion before their next private stock has aged properly..and they're discussing how the "solution" is coming along.
From your perspective, you say nothing could be worse than the Nazis. I say you're wrong.
Would you consider an idea to reduce the population of the entire globe to around 500 million total a overriding plan for mass extermination? the deaths of over 7 billion humans qualify?
That's exactly what I think these top level mega rich discuss and plan in their island retreats. And I think they're well on their way.
I subscribe to the concept of the "Breakaway Civilization"...that the top top tier of ultra wealthy humanity has so separated itself, lives in such rarified environs, that they have no connection or NEED for humanity. None at all. They've never stood in a grocery store, don't know the smell of a public toilet, and haven't bought anything at a cash register themselves ever.
And those people, like the Pharaohs before them, see the Slaves have multiplied at an alarming rate, and if left unchecked, will overwhelm their little planet and them.
Indeed Ernest...I see an idea equal to the murderous hate of the Nazis in these people. I see it coming fast. There is a danger in your way of thinking, a danger in not recognizing the New Thing. It doesn't wear spiffy black uniforms or hold huge rallies, that would make it far too simple to crush before it grows. It's wearing the best silk and sipping wine not available for public purchase while discussing the issue of overpopulation and how 7 billion will become 10 billion and then 20 billion before their next private stock has aged properly..and they're discussing how the "solution" is coming along.
From your perspective, you say nothing could be worse than the Nazis. I say you're wrong.
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ROBERTS
- Member
- Posts: 730
Re: Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
Ferres: The German war campaign turned south when Barbarossa launched into Russia and N. Africa was essentially lost. I see this as the turning point in all of it. Russia was the most incredibly stupid move. Hearing interviews from German armor crews from the huge battles on that front, and the Russian survivors, it becomes clear very quickly that the Russians simply had 10 times the manpower and a steady flow of cheap tanks..they could not be beaten because they had no regard for losses. Destroy 500 Russian tanks and kill 10,000 Russians, and next day 500 more roll up on you with 10,000 MORE Russians. The German Panzer corps outclassed, outfought, outgunned, outmaneuvered the Red Army in every way but one...mass of numbers.
Then in 1943, the 8th Air Force showed up, and the grave was dug deep.
The final blow was bombing the industrial centers of Germany. Day and Night. That was it, game over. The failure of the Luftwaffe to stop the bombers, Hitlers' insane psychosis to never build a "defensive" weapon (this stopped development on numerous ground to air missiles, air to air guided missiles, jet fighters, which would have changed everything) guaranteed Germany's destruction.
It should be noted that the battle of "Bloody Omaha" on D-Day was almost a route and total defeat for the US..and that stretch of beach was defended by an undermanned underequipped unit of Wehrmacht sent there for R&R and re-equip...the US faced an understrength unit without it's usual heavy weapons support. If not for the Russians destroying Germany's best in the East, and the bombers preventing timely production of adequate replacement weapons and vehicles by destroying German industry, D-Day never would have been planned at all. Had the US faced the unit it faced at full combat strength fully armed, they never would have got close to that beach.
Then in 1943, the 8th Air Force showed up, and the grave was dug deep.
The final blow was bombing the industrial centers of Germany. Day and Night. That was it, game over. The failure of the Luftwaffe to stop the bombers, Hitlers' insane psychosis to never build a "defensive" weapon (this stopped development on numerous ground to air missiles, air to air guided missiles, jet fighters, which would have changed everything) guaranteed Germany's destruction.
It should be noted that the battle of "Bloody Omaha" on D-Day was almost a route and total defeat for the US..and that stretch of beach was defended by an undermanned underequipped unit of Wehrmacht sent there for R&R and re-equip...the US faced an understrength unit without it's usual heavy weapons support. If not for the Russians destroying Germany's best in the East, and the bombers preventing timely production of adequate replacement weapons and vehicles by destroying German industry, D-Day never would have been planned at all. Had the US faced the unit it faced at full combat strength fully armed, they never would have got close to that beach.
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LOLord
- Member
- Posts: 368
Re: Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
Seriously! How the hell can you get your girl in there?? DO you mind share the method with me?
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Ferres
- Member
- Posts: 281
- Contact:
Re: Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
Not a paid gig. It's just to get the name out and see stuff in print.LOLord wrote:Seriously! How the hell can you get your girl in there?? DO you mind share the method with me?
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fernandofan
- Member
- Posts: 230
Re: Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
I have to admit that I have seen your stuff around and found it intriguing, but it is a bit too "gothic" for my tastes. However, I appreciate the artistry and I did just read your bio on your site and I find your methods most fascinating. Just wanted to give you some encouragement to keep up the good work! 
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ROBERTS
- Member
- Posts: 730
Re: Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff
Happy for you Ferres! Nice cover! I knew you'd do something nice...bravo!
LoLord....how do you get on the cover of an international magazine? Hmmmm....create a fabulous beautiful image the Publisher LIKES.
See, Covers sell Magazines...the cover must make the bold statement, "look, really GREAT shit in here!" "More of THIS inside!" Most important..."BUY THIS MAG!" The cover promises and teases..and MUST be great.
It also is required that you be an artist of reputation and large following with a fan base, it gives the Publisher confidence that many people will look at this just because Ferres, or Roberts, or Fernando, delivers what they all know will be great erotic artwork. The people must know your brand, so must the Publisher..
LoLord....how do you get on the cover of an international magazine? Hmmmm....create a fabulous beautiful image the Publisher LIKES.
See, Covers sell Magazines...the cover must make the bold statement, "look, really GREAT shit in here!" "More of THIS inside!" Most important..."BUY THIS MAG!" The cover promises and teases..and MUST be great.
It also is required that you be an artist of reputation and large following with a fan base, it gives the Publisher confidence that many people will look at this just because Ferres, or Roberts, or Fernando, delivers what they all know will be great erotic artwork. The people must know your brand, so must the Publisher..