Pages from Japan’s manga style “Mein Kampf”

Sales of a comic version of Adolf Hitler’s notorious political tract Mein Kampf have become a hit in Japan.

Telegraph | Sep 30, 2009

By Danielle Demetriou in Tokyo

The manga book describes both Hitler’s autobiography and his infamous Nazi manifesto in the unlikely form of easy-to-read comic pictures and captions.

Since it was published in Japan last November, its popularity has soared, with sales of more than 45,000.

The book, which forms part of a series on world classics turned into manga, covers a range of aspects of Hitler’s life, from his childhood to the formation of his political party.

Its success in Japan has reportedly ignited a debate in Germany about whether the ban on the work imposed since 1945 should be overturned.

The current copyright of the book within Germany lies in the hands of the finance ministry of the state of Bavaria which will not reproduce it out of respect to the relatives of those who suffered during Hitler’s regime.

Japanese publishers East Press are no strangers to tapping into the trend of bringing political tracts into the 21st century: the current series also includes a popular manga version of Karl Marx’s seminal anti-capitalist tome Das Kapital.

Manga enjoys a soaring popularity in Japan, with its most high-profile fans including the former prime minister Taro Aso.

Along with Nazism and anti-capitalism, there are few topics that are regarded as sacred from being transformed into manga. Previous issues tackled range from delicate Japanese-Chinese relations to the spread of bird flu.

Described as the AP Super Army the collection of models were in town to promote Agent Provocateur’s New World Order campaign

Agent Provocateur’s new model army marches on Selfridges to launch new lingerie line

Daily Mail | Sep 15, 2009

By Eleanor Glover

Dressed in little more than their underwear a host of models descended on London’s Oxford Street today to launch the new Agent Provocateur bra.

Clad in thigh-high boots, zip-up pants, braces and bra, topped off with aviator sunglasses and caps, the army of lingerie models marched on Selfridges department store, stopping the traffic along the way.

Despite it being the crack of dawn the troop of flag-wielding females caused quite a stir as they paraded along the capital’s main shopping street as bus drivers and black cabbies looked on in surprise.

If it had been any later, who knows what sort of mayhem could have ensued.

Described as the AP Super Army the collection of models were in town to promote Agent Provocateur’s New World Order campaign and Nikita range of underwear including the £75 push-up bra.

The promotion coincides with the release of the underwear label’s new advertising posters which feature 13 different super hero style characters dressed in the company’s trademark raunchy styles.

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Related

Nazi chic in fetish clothing

Nazi chic is a controversial topic in the fetish clothing subculture. The symbolism of fascist, communist, and other regimes remains popular, and a common compromise is to adopt the main design features of Nazi-era clothing – such as peaked caps, jackboots and trenchcoats – but not to include any explicit Nazi symbols. Sometimes substitute symbols are used, with designs that clearly reference the design styles of Nazi symbols without directly copying them.

Max Mosley wins ‘Nazi’ S&M privacy case

Wearing neo-fascist insignia, Gaetano Saya gives a salute at the first meeting of the vigilante Italian National Guard, in July. (Stefano Rellandini/Reuters)

Encouraged by Silvio Berlusconi, groups of far-right vigilantes are patrolling the streets of Italy, awakening fears of a return to fascism

London Times | Sep 13, 2009

Little Hitlers

by Christine Toomey

Gaetano Saya’s staccato voice rises to a near-hysterical pitch as he points skywards, jabbing his finger in the direction of four giant marble eagles with outspread wings that tower above the semicircular porticoes of Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica. “Look! There they are — symbols of the mighty Roman Empire. They are everywhere!”

Saya is almost spitting with rage as he speaks. For most of the time that we sit in the sweltering summer heat, sipping espressos in a bar tucked under the arches of the busy piazza, he maintains his composure. But when it comes to discussing the uproar caused by the insignia chosen for the recently formed patrol units of his revived neo-fascist party — which include the imperial eagle once worn by Musso-lini’s Blackshirts, the camicie nere — he can barely contain his fury. “The eagles on our badges are Roman, not fascist emblems. If you ban them you would have to tear the eagle off every public building in Italy. They are part of our history. Just as Cromwell is part of yours,” he rants, stroking his clipped moustache.

For the first time since the second world war, Rome is now run by a right-wing mayor. Gianni Alemanno is not only right-wing, but a former neo-fascist street protestor, whose supporters flashed fascist salutes at his victory rally. Alemmano was swept into office in spring last year in the wake of national hysteria following the brutal murder in Rome of an Italian naval officer’s wife by a Romanian Roma gypsy. Her attacker stole the few coins in her purse, attempted to assault her sexually, then left her for dead as she was returning home along a deserted street in October 2007. The 47-year-old religious education teacher’s face was beaten to such a pulp that police could only describe her as of “indeterminate age” before she died of her injuries.

Following sensationalist coverage of the “Roma beast” responsible for Giovanna Reggiani’s death, vigilante groups sought revenge. Four Romanians begging in the centre of Rome were beaten and stabbed, while immigrant shacks all over Italy were set on fire. Since then the country has found itself in the grip of a growing wave of xenophobia that politicians on the right are ruthlessly exploiting. Extremists such as Saya, with his reinvigorated Italian Social Movement-National Right (MSI-DN) party, are also feeding off the fear of immigrants.

The ultimate beneficiary has been Silvio Berlusconi, the 72-year-old perma-tanned billionaire prime minister. Using the might of his extensive media empire, he quickly declared that his country was in the grip of a “Roma emergency” of criminal activity. Many reports at the time wildly inflated the extent to which immigrants account for crime in Italy, with one leading outlet even suggesting that “all Romanians harbour criminal intent”.

Overall crime figures in Italy have not risen for over a decade, yet more than a third of prisoners are now foreigners. Last year foreigners were charged with 68% of rapes and 32% of thefts.

Concern about immigrant crime levels helped to sweep Berlusconi back into power in April 2008 on a law-and-order ticket. He immediately announced the introduction of a “national security package” that has seen thousands of uniformed soldiers in camouflage combat suits deployed to stand guard on street corners in Italian cities and towns. The package is billed as an attempt to crack down on both crime and illegal immigration, now often depicted as entirely synonymous in Italy, which Berlusconi says should never be allowed to become a “multi-ethnic society”.

With so much attention focused on the bed-hopping antics of the flamboyant premier, this ugly undercurrent of racism has been allowed to spread quietly and insidiously. Berlusconi’s decision to legalise new vigilante patrols is raising particular alarm.

Waving his hands with a flourish of self-satisfaction, Saya boasts that thousands of Italians are now clamouring to join the extreme right-wing vigilante patrols he has called the Guardia Nazionale Italiana, or Italian National Guard, set up by his party in June. When the National Guard unveiled its uniform — military-style black caps bearing the imperial eagle, black gloves, black ties, khaki shirts and armbands with the symbol of the black sun long associated with Nazism — Italian prosecutors immediately launched a judicial enquiry into the group. Both Nazi and fascist symbols have been banned in Italy since after the second world war. But Saya, 52, who has been investigated in the past for inciting racial hatred, is confident that the enquiry will be quietly dropped.

“We are just ardent patriots. How can anyone object to that? We favour ultra-nationalism. We defend our history and we are on the march,” he says. He blames the “millions of foreigners invading Italy” for the economic, social and moral crisis he believes his country now faces. “Mussolini was a great man inspired by a real love of his nation. He was a legitimate leader, not a dictator.”

Saya waves his hand to beckon a young follower who has been hovering nearby. Riccardo Lanza is an eloquent 33-year-old stockbroker, neatly dressed in a suit and striped shirt. The reason the paramilitary uniform of the National Guard is hanging in his wardrobe, he says, is that “Italians are no longer in charge of their own country”. He blames the Russian and Chinese mafias for the “total chaos” in Italy. “They have infiltrated our economy, just as foreigners have taken over our streets. We need to put a stop to this.”

Unlike in many European countries with long colonial pasts, mass immigration is a relatively recent phenomenon in Italy, which traditionally was more used to the steady emigration of its citizens. Waves of immigration — first from eastern bloc countries such as Albania and the former Yugoslavia in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more recently from north and sub-Saharan Africa — have seen an estimated 3.5m people coming to live in Italy legally, and another 1.5m illegally, over the past 20 years. The country is left grappling with the fact that it is no longer monocultural. Berlusconi recently complained that his birthplace, Milan, “looks like an African city”.

Political expediency lies behind the creation of vigilante groups. Berlusconi was helped back into power with the backing of the far-right Lega Nord (Northern League), originally founded to lobby for the secession of northern Italy from the rest of the country, but more recently defined by its opposition to mass immigration. Ten years ago it was the Northern League that started organising unofficial anti-crime street patrols in towns and cities throughout the north with large numbers of immigrants. When it became clear that Berlusconi’s newly formed People of Freedom Party (a loose coalition between his former Forza Italia movement and the National Alliance, run by the reformed neo-fascist politician Gianfranco Fini) needed the support of the Northern League, promises were made about security, including the introduction of vigilante patrols. The way to tackle illegal immigration, declared Roberto Maroni, a key Northern League politician and subsequent interior minister, was to “get nasty”.

The security package, introduced in stages over the past 12 months, also includes stringent new rules making illegal immigration a criminal offence punishable by a fine of up to €10,000. Children of illegal immigrants are banned from attending school or receiving health care, and those who knowingly harbour illegal immigrants face up to three years in prison. These measures have been compared by leading academics and writers to Mussolini’s infamous race laws banning Jews from work and education. The Vatican has described them as “of great concern” and “a reason for sadness”.

Even Berlusconi soon appears to have realised that he had gone too far in his support of vigilantism. When groups such as Saya’s National Guard started strutting about in fascist-style uniforms, and violent clashes broke out between an extreme right-wing patrol group and left-wing opponents in the Tuscan resort of Massa in late July, Maroni announced that vigilante groups would have to meet strict criteria before being allowed to start patrolling the streets. Patrols should be of no more than three people, members should not wear military-style uniforms, and they should be armed only with walkie-talkies and mobile phones to alert police to trouble.

But the genie of mob rule had already been let out of the bottle. Nowhere is this more apparent than among the followers of the far-right group at the centre of the violence that erupted over the summer in the small city of Massa.

Massa appears to be a typical Italian seaside resort, with its neat rows of sunbeds and striped umbrellas. But it is perched on the edge of the craggy Apuan mountains and has a proud record of resistance. In the second world war these mountains provided hiding places for scores of partisans. Some of the most notorious atrocities committed in Italy by German SS forces were carried out in the area, including the massacre at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, a small village where 560 civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, were rounded up and shot and their bodies burnt.

So when Stefano Benedetti spins me a yarn about how the name for the vigilante patrol group he and other right-wing extremists set up in Massa came to him by chance, it is clearly laughable. The group is called Soccorso Sociale e Sicurezza (Social Help and Security), and its initials, SSS, are seen as highly provocative.

Benedetti, a travelling salesman well known for playing fascist anthems on his car stereo and hanging a portrait of Mussolini at home, is the only right-wing city councillor in a municipality controlled by the left.

“People call me a Nazi and a fascist. But I am just doing my civic duty,” he argues, explaining how his SSS patrols began to operate at night earlier this year, touring areas of the city frequented by immigrants, on the lookout for trouble.

“There are too many foreigners in our community and they are turning to crime, stealing cars, breaking into houses, becoming violent.”

When SSS members congregated outside a bar close to where left-wing union members were staging an annual solidarity march on the night of July 25, fighting between the two factions sent tourists scurrying. Three policemen and two demonstrators were admitted to hospital; left-wing protestors staged a sit-in on the high-speed rail link.

As news of the emergence of the SSS started circulating among the small immigrant and Roma communities in and around Massa, local officials reported that foreign-born parents were starting to pull their children out of summer activity programmes. A visit to one ramshackle Roma camp of makeshift huts and caravans scattered along the railway tracks between Massa and the neighbouring town of Carrara soon reveals why. “The Italians have always hated us. But until now they have left us alone most of the time,” said one 23-year-old father of three boys, who would only be identified by his first name, Ercoles. “These patrols say they will make the streets safer. But now we are afraid to let our children out of our sight. We’re afraid if we let them go to local swimming pools or beaches, they will be attacked.”

“Massa has a reputation as the sixth safest city in Italy,” its mayor, Roberto Pucci, explains wearily. “But the way these right-wing patrols operate is to create a false sense of fear, create a perception that there are more problems than there are, then portray themselves as the only ones interested in and capable of solving them.

“We are a young democracy, and what is happening here should be taken seriously,” Pucci concludes. “It is not a pleasant situation.”

Pucci has now banned the SSS from operating in Massa, and many left-wing municipalities throughout Italy are expected to follow suit. But Benedetti and his followers vow they will resume their patrols. “They have forbidden the SSS from operating. So we will just change our name and reform as a different organisation,” says one supporter. “What we are doing is within the new law. No one can stop us now.”

This defiance is echoed by Gaetano Saya. Although the National Guard has delayed starting its vigilante patrols as a result of the judicial investigation, he says they will circumvent the rules banning uniforms by reclassifying themselves as a “party militia”.

“The guard will become the operational arm of our party, accompanying our politicians wherever they choose to go on the streets. That they can’t stop,” says Saya, who claims to have the backing of a group of rich industrialists who funded a surveillance helicopter the group recently bought.

The prospect of vigilante patrols mutating into political militias, as existed under Mussolini, has many Italians alarmed, especially in the wake of government measures such as the decision to fingerprint the country’s entire population of 150,000 Roma gypsies, some of whose families have been in Italy since the Middle Ages. The fingerprinting programme quickly got under way in some cities, but has since been watered down to exclude children, following human-rights protests. But such programmes have already had a desensitising effect. The bodies of two young Roma sisters, who drowned while swimming off a Naples beach in the summer of 2008, were left draped in towels for hours on the sand as bathers carried on picnicking and playing Frisbee.

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London Times | Sep 10, 2009

by Helen Nugent

President Mitterrand of France warned Margaret Thatcher privately that a reunited Germany might “make even more ground than Hitler had” only a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, newly declassified documents reveal.

In papers due to be published by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office tomorrow, after a year of deliberation by Whitehall officials, the scale of Anglo-French fears on German reunification is laid bare.

At a lunch at the Élysée Palace on January 20, 1990, Charles, now Lord, Powell, the then foreign affairs adviser to Mrs Thatcher reports in a memo that Mr Mitterrand talked about how reunification would cause the re-emergence of the “bad” Germans who dominated Europe.

According to the memo, Mr Mitterrand said at one point that if Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor of West Germany at the time, were to get his way, a unified Germany could win more ground than Hitler ever did and that Europe would have to bear the consequences.

Mr Mitterrand warned Mrs Thatcher that if Germany were to expand territorially, Europe would be back to where it had been one year before the First World War.

The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and Germany was not formally reunited until October 1990. The private meetings between the then Prime Minister and Mr Mitterrand followed Mr Kohl’s ten-point plan for reunification.

Mrs Thatcher’s opposition to reunification, and her disagreement with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office over the issue, is also revealed in the 500 papers. One document refers to her expressing horror on hearing incorrect reports that the members of the Bundestag in Bonn sang Deutschland über alles to celebrate the fall of the Wall.

In another document she is reported as finding the views of Sir Christopher Mallaby, the British Ambassador to Bonn, “alarming”, expressing astonishment that he appeared to welcome the prospect of a united Germany.

The documents show that diplomats from the Foreign Commonwealth Office realised as early as January 1989 that German reunification was a possibility. After the Wall fell they feared that Mrs Thatcher was adopting a stance so shrill that no one was listening to her.

The decision to make the papers public now (Britain normally issues secret official documents only after 30 years) is being viewed as an attempt to show that British diplomats were positive about reunification in the early stages.

An extraordinary etching of a young Adolf Hilter playing chess against Vladimir Lenin has come to light. The art work is by Hilter’s Jewish art teacher Emma Lowenstramm who witnessed the game Photo: BNPS

A picture of a young Adolf Hitler apparently playing chess against Vladimir Lenin 100 years ago has come to light.

Telegraph | Sep 3, 2009

The image is said to have been created in Vienna by Hitler’s art teacher, Emma Lowenstramm, and is signed on the reverse by the two dictators.

Hitler was a jobbing artist in the city in 1909 and Lenin was in exile and the house where they allegedly played the game belonged to a prominent Jewish family.

Winston Churchill returns to the Government In the run-up to the Second World War the Jewish family fled and gave many of their possessions, including the etching and chess set, to their housekeeper.

Now their housekeeper’s great-great grandson is selling the image and the chess set at auction. Both items have a pre-sale estimate of £40,000.

The unnamed vendor is confident the items are genuine after his father spent a lifetime attempting to prove their authenticity.

He compiled a 300-page forensic document that included tests on the paper, the signatures and research on those involved.

Experts, however, have questioned its authenticity especially the identification of Lenin who they say might have been confused with one of his associates.

When the etching was made, Hitler was 20 and Lenin was twice his age and the house was where politicos went to discuss things.

The etching is thought to be one of five and shows Hitler – playing with the white pieces – sitting by a window, with Lenin opposite him in half shadow.

It is titled “A Chess Game: Lenin with Hitler – Vienna 1909″.

It raises tantalising questions about what the two men who helped shape the world in the 20th century might have spoken of.

Lenin was already a highly influential Russian figure who in 1907 went into exile once more after the revolution was crushed by Tsarist authorities.

Richard Westwood-Brookes, who is selling the items, said: “This just sounds too good to be true, but the vendor’s father spent a lifetime proving it.

“He compiled a 300 page document and spent a great deal of money engaging experts to examine the etching.

“The signatures in pencil on the reverse are said to have an 80 per cent chance of being genuine, and there is proof that Emma Lowenstramm did exist.

“The circumstantial evidence is very good on top of the paper having been tested.

“Hitler was a painter in 1909 and his Jewish teacher Emma Lowenstramm was the person who made the etching.

“There is some suggestion that when he came to power Hitler protected her and she died from natural causes in 1941.

“At the time, Vienna was a hotbed of political intrigue and the house where this game took place belonged to a prominent Jewish family.

“Lenin at the time was moving around Europe in exile and writing “Materialism and Empirio-criticism”.

“His movements are hazy and it is known that he did play chess and later he certainly wore wigs as a disguise.

“It is also known that Lenin was a German agent and the house was where people went to exchange political views.

“The chess set is clearly the same chess set as that in the etching. It is a box chess set that folds out and the pieces are identifiable – particularly the kings and bishops.

“To my knowledge there are five etchings of this image, but this has the signatures of both men and the artist.

“The provenance is that it has come through the family of the housekeeper who was given it when the Jewish family fled in the late 1930s.

“The family is based in Hanover and it is the great great grandson of the housekeeper who is selling it.

“On all sorts of levels it is an extremely valuable artefact. Even as just an allegorical picture it shows the men playing chess possibly for the world.”

Historian Helen Rappaport, who has just written a book called “Conspirator: Lenin in Exile”, said the etching was probably a “glorious piece of fantasy”.

She said: “In 1909 Lenin was in France and there is no evidence that he was in Vienna.

“In October he went to Liege in Belgium and in November he went to Brussels. He would have visited Vienna before and after that year.

“He liked the place and went there because he travelled around Europe on trains, but he wouldn’t have been there long enough to meet a young Hitler.

“He was also as bald as a bat by 1894 with just hair on the sides of his head.

“And when in exile he was not known as Lenin and instead used a number of aliases.

“The person believed to be Lenin in the etching may well have been one of his revolutionary or Bolshevik associates who was misidentified.

“It may even have been an Austrian socialist with whom he associated in the Second International.

“The Germans did fund the Bolsheviks and gave them millions of marks for the revolutionary effort, but Lenin was not a German sympathiser.

“Although this is totally spurious it is wonderful to bring these two great megalomaniacs together.

“It makes sense retrospectively and the history of art is full of retrospective meetings between people.”

The items are to be sold at Mullock’s auction house in Ludlow, Shropshire, on October 1.

mensnewsdaily.com | Aug 31, 2009

By Carey Roberts

Shell-shocked liberals have taken to dubbing conservatives as “Ku Klux Klan folks” and “neo-fascists” toting swastikas to town hall meetings. But ironically, turns out it’s liberals who have engaged in a century-long pas de deux with fascistic ideology.

Take Margaret Sanger – public health nurse, rabid feminist, and avowed socialist. Doing her rounds in New York City’s immigrant ghettos, she became enamored of the biological and political possibilities of birth control. A prolific writer, she churned out numerous books and articles. In Women and the New Race, Sanger ominously expounded: “no Socialist republic can operate successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree.”

Margaret Sanger regarded members of both sexes with a decidedly misanthropic disdain. Of men she wrote, “In all of the animal species below the human, motherhood has a clearly discernible superiority over fatherhood….natural law makes the female the expression and the conveyor of racial efficiency.”

Members of the female sex were equally worthy of contempt: “woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.”

In 1921 Sanger established the American Birth Control League, which later assumed the sanitized moniker Planned Parenthood. The League’s co-founder was the anti-Semite Lothrop Stoddard, who would later aver the “Jew problem [is] already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich.”

Two years later Sanger launched her notorious Birth Control Review. The journal would publish propaganda pieces like “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” by Ernst Rudin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. The American counterpart to the Nazi group was the American Eugenics Society, of which Sanger was a prominent member.

In 1939 Sanger created the Negro Project with the avowed purpose of reining in the unchecked growth of the Black population. But her true intentions went beyond mere population control: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she cautioned a friend.

At that time Blacks numbered 12 million persons, representing about one-tenth of the U.S. total.

The acme of Sanger’s career came in 1932 when she unveiled her Plan for Peace. The fascistic manifesto urged the U.S. Congress to “apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of populations whose progeny is tainted” and to “give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.” Sanger’s wide-ranging hit-list included “morons, mental defectives, epileptics,…illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, [and] dope-fiends.”

Sanger admitted these persons constituted an “enormous part of our population,” upwards of 20 million persons. That represented about 15% of the American population.

A mere year after Sanger expounded on her peace plan, Adolf Hitler signed the infamous Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. During the ensuing years, the Nazi regime sterilized an estimated 400,000 persons deemed to be racially, physically, or mentally unfit.

At the Nuremberg Trials, Allied prosecutors recited the horrifying litany of Nazi crimes, including the practice of compulsory sterilization. Without mentioning Sanger by name, the German Socialists defended their harsh population control measures by explaining it was the United States from whom they had taken inspiration.

Over the years, Margaret Sanger used her bully pulpit to call for the segregation or sterilization of 15% of the U.S. population, and the extermination of another tenth of the citizenry. Despite those fascistic designs, Margaret Sanger still occupies a revered position in the pantheon of American liberalism.

Every year Planned Parenthood bequeaths its Margaret Sanger Award to recognize “outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement.” Past recipients include such liberal luminaries as Bella Abzug, Phil Donahue, and Jane Fonda.

Any guesses who carried home the award in 2009? Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

An NPD Party supporter Photo: REUTERS

Germany’s far-right NPD Party is on a collision course with the government over plans to build a museum celebrating the Third Reich’s “Strength Through Joy” movement, which organised leisure activities for the masses.

Telegraph | Jul 27, 2009

By Allan Hall in Berlin

Jürgen Rieger, the vice-president of the party that seeks to ban all immigration and sever all ties with the EU, has submitted plans to authorities in Wolfsburg – home to car giant Volkswagen – for the museum intended to “show the people what this organisation did and what it meant”.

But critics have accused Mr Rieger of using the museum as a way to spread pro-Nazi propaganda.

Sir Brian CorbyStrength Through Joy, at one time the largest tour operator in the world, was created to promote “a National Socialist people’s community and the perfection and refinement of the German people” through its tightly structured recreational programmes.

Battalions of Strength Through Joy workers built the massive holiday complex of Prora on the Baltic Sea intended to be used by 20,000 holidaying Nazi loyalists at one time. the organisation also controlled a fleet of cruise ships that allowed pre-war Germans to travel to far away destinations at rock bottom prices.

And it also financed the production of the “people’s car” by VW, which later became the classic Beetle of the post-war years.

By the time war broke out, it was virtually redundant, but had accomplished its task: binding the people to Hitler and controlling leisure the way every other activity was controlled under the regime.

Mr Rieger’s plans to turn an old furniture warehouse into a museum have met with stiff opposition.

Ralf Schmidt, a spokesman for the city, said: “We will use every legal means at our disposal to stop this from becoming a reality.” Because Mr Rieger has made his application to have the museum as a “commercial enterprise”, the initiative, which critics say “glorifies Naziism”will be more difficult to stop than if it were merely being opened as a political showcase for the NPD viewpoint.

Mr Rieger has already assembled a fleet of Nazi-era cars, propaganda posters, documents, flags and uniforms of the movement ready to go on display.

Local officials fear that the museum will become nothing more than a shrine to the far-right, who continue to indulge in violent racist attacks while attracting more vulnerable young people during the economic downturn.

In June, Mr Rieger founded an association to promote the museum. A barbecue and music evening at the intended site turned bloody when NPD members with shaved heads attacked journalists who turned up to report on the event with clubs and beer bottles.

Later the same night, a black man was beaten up at the main train station.

An art installation by German artist Ottmar Horl featuring hundreds of Nazi-saluting garden gnomes Photo: GETTY

German prosecutors have launched an inquiry into whether a garden gnome with its right arm raised in a Hitler salute in a Nuremberg art gallery breaks the law.

Telegraph | Jul 16, 2009

Salutes and Nazi symbols have been illegal in Germany since the Second World War but investigators may decide the figure is in fact ridiculing the Third Reich.

Wolfgang Traeg, a spokesman for the public prosecutors office, said: “The investigation is ongoing and people are being interviewed.

“It is also a question of art a bit,” he said. “It will also depend on what the artist and the owners of the gallery have to say for themselves about the whole thing.”

The gnome was produced by German-born Ottmar Hoerl, the president of the Academy for Fine Arts in Nuremberg.

After his customary denunciation of parliamentary politics as an anachronism, he let out his frustrations, calling for fascist means to serve liberal ends by way of a liberal elite as “conceited” and as power-hungry as its rivals. “I suggest that you study the reinvigoration of Catholicism by Loyola,” Wells said. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti.” It was also to Communism that “we shall have to turn—we outsiders, that is, the young people with foresight for enlightened Nazis; I am proposing that you consider the formation for a greater Communist Party; a western response to Russia.”

H. G. Wells: novelist, historian, authoritarian, anticapitalist, eugenicist, and advisor to presidents

City Journal | May 22, 2009

By Fred Siegel

A generation of American liberals, including Walter Lippmann, Margaret Sanger, and the editors of The New Republic, regarded Wells as a visionary. The Granger Collection

Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led.

These antidemocratic and elitist assumptions were nowhere better illustrated than in the extraordinary career of a Briton, H. G. Wells. Wells is best remembered today as the author of such late-nineteenth-century socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man. But he was much more than that. His political writing achieved extraordinary influence in America, not just through his defense of liberal freedoms such as free speech but through his hostility to population growth, capitalism, and democracy itself.

Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review. More than any other intellectual of the time, Wells spoke to two enormous nineteenth-century shifts: the growth of giant industries, which undercut the old assumptions about the sovereignty of the individual; and Darwinism’s concussive reassignment of humanity from the spiritual to the natural world, which begged for prophets of a naturalized humanity.

Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

But if these people were leading the world on the path to hell, there were also the redeemers, the “New Republicans,” the “capable men” of vision who might own the future. These scientist-poets and engineers could, Wells thought, redirect the Darwinian struggle away from a descent into savagery and toward a new and higher ground. Building on the social and sexual ideals of nineteenth-century utopian reformers, Wells generated a complete cosmology, a scientific socialism to compete with Marxism, which, he thought, reduced the complexities of life to simpleminded slogans of class war. Outflanking the Marxists on their own ground, he called for a different kind of struggle, a “revolt of the competent” against the confines of conventional middle-class morality.

The conventions of Anglo-American family life, Wells believed, blocked the path toward a more highly evolved future. On one side was a “normal, ordinary world which is on the whole satisfied with itself” and encompasses “the great mass of men”—the bovine “Normal Life” of workers, clerks, and small businessmen. Opposite it stood an “ever advancing better world, pushing through this outworn husk in the minds and wills of creative humanity,” a “Great State” led by the creative class, a richly textured life that might be possible if only the new men of science could displace the vote-buying of electoral politics.

Well before Mussolini, still a revolutionary socialist in the early twentieth century, and at roughly the same time as Lenin, Wells—in the book that he called the “keystone to the main arch of my work”—gave up not only on democracy but on organized labor as a transformative force. All three men rejected what might be described as social democracy, that is, the attempt to use political means to redress the inadequacies of capitalism. Instead, each proposed a new class, a vanguard to carry forward a postcapitalist social order.

In A Modern Utopia, written in 1905, Wells updated John Stuart Mill’s culturally individualist liberalism in light of the horizons opened by Darwin and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Biologically, argues the book’s narrator, the “species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.” That means, he says, that the “people of exceptional quality must be ascendant.” Further, “the better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest freedom of public service.”

What provides the possibility for such freedom is eugenics. Wells has no use for the iron laws of Marxism, but he replaces them with the iron laws of Malthus and Darwin. “From the view of human comfort and happiness, the increase of population that occurs at each advance in human security is the greatest evil of life,” he writes. “The extravagant swarm of new births” that created the masses was “the essential disaster of the 19th century.” Man’s propensity to reproduce will always outstrip his productive capacity, even in an age of machinery. Worse, the “base and servile types,” who are little more than the “leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon,” are the most fecund.

In Anticipations, Wells had already argued horrifyingly that the “nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, or poisons its People of the Abyss” would be ascendant. For the base and servile types, death would mean merely “the end of the bitterness of failure.” It was “their portion to die out and disappear.” The New Republicans would have “little pity and less benevolence” for the untermenschen, “born of unrestrained lusts . . . and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity.”

In A Modern Utopia, Wells, stung by criticism of Anticipations, backed off, but only partway. “Idiots,” “drunkards,” “criminals,” “lunatics,” “congenital invalids,” and the “diseased” would “spoil the world for others,” Wells again argued. But their depredations required “social surgery,” not total extermination. That meant preventing people below a set income and intelligence from reproducing, as well as isolating the “failures” on an island so that better folk could live unfettered by government intrusion. Remove the unfit, and there will be no need for jails or prisons, which are places “of torture by restraint.” Illiberalism enables liberalism.

Wells’s “Samurai,” an updated version of the New Republicans, would keep track of their charges through a centralized thumbprint index of all the earth’s inhabitants. Latter-day Puritans in everything except sex, the Samurai would lead lives of irreproachable rectitude, abjuring tobacco, alcohol, trade, and games, which they could neither join nor watch. These elect, “the clean and straight” men and women capable “of self-devotion, of intentional courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour,” would rule in the name of the new godhead: Progress through Science. As Wells would later put it, science was to be “king of the world.”

Wells saw America, which wasn’t weighted down by ancient traditions, as the best chance for his ideas to come to fruition. A host of British visitors, from Fanny Trollope and Charles Dickens to Robert Louis Stevenson, could barely contain their disdain for their backwoods American cousins. But Wells—an anti–Henry James who saw himself as a self-made man—exulted in the absence of an established church, the embodiment of the irrational past. “Up to the point of its equality of opportunity,” he wrote, “surely no sane Englishman can do anything but admire the American state.” His 1904 nonfiction book Mankind in the Making welcomed a possible reunion of Britain and the United States based, as he saw it, on their common racial stock.

At the same time, Wells showed deep concerns about America. A socialist critic of American capitalism, he was revulsed by the “inhuman energy” of New York’s immigrant masses. In the Days of the Comet (1906) portrayed overproduction by a rapacious “gang of energetic, narrow-minded” American ironmongers as a threat to English social stability. Wells also thought that American democracy provided too much leeway to the poltroons who ran the political machines and the “fools” who supported them. The “immigrants are being given votes,” he argued, but “that does not free them, it only enslaves the country.”

In The Future in America, an account of his first trip to these shores in 1906 that was serialized in American and British magazines, Wells rightly pointed out that America was essentially “the central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head or the subjugated feet.” But that wasn’t a good thing, he claimed. In England, modern men of money “had become part of a responsible ruling class”; in America, the absence of an aristocracy had left the country without that sense of “state responsibility” that was necessary “to give significance to the whole.” The upshot was that “the typical American has no sense of the state. . . . He has no perception that his business activities, his private employments, are constituents in a larger collective process.” Further, Wells argued, America’s can-do commercialism was “crushing and maiming a great multitude of souls.” “The greatest work which the coming century has to do,” he wrote, “is to build up an aristocracy of thought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of mercantilism” and its allies “materialism and Philistinism.”

In the course of his visit to the U.S., Wells was befriended by Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens, who arranged for a visit to the White House. Teddy Roosevelt, an avid reader, was delighted to talk for hours with Wells about the growing class divisions in America, which had been exacerbated by the confluence of rapid industrialization and rapid immigration. Roosevelt had rightly read The Time Machine as an anticipation of deepened class divisions hardened over time into an overworld and an underworld. The president became “gesticulatory,” his voice “straining,” Wells remembered. “Suppose after all,” Roosevelt said slowly, “that should prove to be right, and that it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real”—Roosevelt’s reform effort to curb the power of giant monopolies, that is. “It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it—even then.”

“My hero in the confused drama of human life,” Wells wrote in The Future in America, “is intelligence; intelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god imprisoned in mankind.” Three years before Herbert Croly’s pathbreaking book The Promise of American Life totemized Roosevelt as the incarnation of a new liberal politics that deployed Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends, Wells presented TR as the demigod incarnate, the very symbol of “the creative will in man.” Here was the man of the future—“traditions,” noted Wells, “have no hold on him”—a model of the Samurai. “I know of no other,” said Wells, “a tithe so representative of the creative purpose, the goodwill in men as he.”

Continues

A woman holds a portrait of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during a demonstration in central Moscow on Victory Day, commemorating the end of World War II, on May 9. The Kremlin announced the creation of a special 28-member panel tasked with examining and combating examples of “historical revisionism” that harm Russia’s image. Alexander Natruskin/Reuters

A proposed law could make comparing Soviet rule with that of the Nazis a crime. Intellectuals fear a manipulation of Russia’s past.

Russia plans to battle attempts to ‘falsify history’ with a Kremlin commission that opponents say is part of a drive to silence those who dare to challenge Moscow’s view of the Soviet empire.

Christian Science Monitor | May 21, 2009

Russian history 2.0: Kremlin wants to ‘correct’ the record.

By Fred Weir

Moscow – A bitter joke from the Soviet-era has it that Russia is the world’s only country with an unpredictable past.

The committee, which has no legal power, is chaired by the head of President Dmitry Medvedev’s administration, Sergei Naryshkin, and includes a sprinkling of historians but also lawmakers, Kremlin officials, the armed forces’ chief of staff, and members of the FSB security service.

But a companion law, drafted by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and soon due to be introduced into the State Duma, will stipulate fines and prison sentences of up to five years for anyone found guilty of “denying the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal.”

This is a reaction to a growing body of historiography in former Soviet and Eastern European countries that depicts the long years of Soviet domination as similar in nature to the Nazi occupation, and suggests that for these nations, liberation arrived only when the USSR collapsed. Even more irritating for the Russians are perceived attempts in some places, like Ukraine and Latvia, to “rehabilitate” citizens who wore German uniforms during World War II to fight against the oncoming Red Army.

“It is high time to make a study of what is going on here, and to decide what kind of documents we need to dig up and publish to counter these new interpretations,” says Natalya Narochnitskaya, a historian, former Duma deputy, and member of the new commission. “If a nation is unable to come to a united view in interpreting its own past, it will be unable to formulate its national interests.”

Ms. Narochnitskaya insists that the panel’s brief is to study the problem and make recommendations, not to impose a Sovietesque party line. “All nations have this problem of balance and need to find their own path between humiliation and normal self-criticism,” she says.

Critics are alarmed by what they see as a blatant throwback to Soviet methods of intellectual control.

“You cannot struggle against falsifications of history by creating bureaucratic commissions,” says Sergei Solovyov, editor of Scepsis, a Russian quarterly journal that aims to promote cross-cultural debate. “Either it will be completely useless or it will become a tool for suppressing people with different points of view.”

Former Soviet states have a different view of the facts

The Kremlin has been infuriated by what it sees as attempts to “revise” the results of World War II in some Eastern European and former Soviet countries. The removal of Red Army war memorials in Poland and the Baltic states has drawn particular ire, as have street marches by Latvian SS veterans, a Lithuanian law banning the public display of Soviet symbols, and an Estonian prosecution of a decorated Soviet war veteran, Arnold Meri, on charges of genocide for his alleged role in postwar deportations of Estonians to Siberia. (Mr. Meri died two months ago, before the trial finished.)

Another sore point has been Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s public praise for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought a CIA-backed guerrilla war against the USSR for nearly a decade following the end of World War II, as well as official Ukrainian efforts to get world governments to classify as an act of “genocide” the mass famine caused by farm collectivization in the early 1930s, which killed millions of Soviet peasants and is known in Ukraine as the “Holodomor.”

In his recently launched blog, Mr. Medvedev recently complained that “such attempts [to revise history] are becoming more hostile, more evil, and more aggressive…. We find ourselves in a situation in which we have to defend the historical truth and once again prove facts that not long ago seemed most clear. But it is necessary to do.”

War history a touchy subject

A public opinion survey conducted last month by the state-run VTsIOM agency found that almost two-thirds of Russians agree that attempts to “deny the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War” should be outlawed, referring to the Russian term for World War II. Many older Russian historians appear to agree that the panel, and its brief of fighting revisionism, is a good thing.

“We had to do this long ago,” says General Makhmut Gareyev, a war hero and president of the official Academy of Military Sciences in Moscow. “One cannot tolerate historical falsifications, particularly of World War II. Once the state organs make their decision, some things will possibly be corrected in the near future.”

Roy Medvedev, a dissident historian from the Soviet period, told the independent Ekho Moskvi radio station that the commission is not an objectionable idea in principle – if it sticks to reviewing history and opening up archive access. But he added, “I have strongly protested against any measures for criminal prosecution for falsification because this would be a restoration of Soviet practices…. It will be very bad if publishing various kinds of theories and research ends up being banned.”

In search of a stable past

Russia’s own national identity has been in flux since the collapse of the USSR, along with its ideology and multi-ethnic empire. The early post-Soviet years were marked by excoriating self-criticism and widespread public demoralization. Vladimir Putin came to power nearly a decade ago amid a patriotic backlash, which aimed to banish that pervasive sense of national humiliation by restoring pride in Russia and recognizing the positive achievements of the Soviet years.

Some ultranationalist thinkers, such as Alexander Dugin, who heads the influential International Eurasian Movement, suggest that the creation of a national myth that will unite Russians is a worthy goal.

“We should fix some limits to freedom of speech in order to establish a national consensus and preserve it for future generations,” Mr. Dugin says. “To have a myth that provides a stable point of reference for society is necessary to define our historical path. That’s not false.”

But critics have long complained that the downside of the Putin-era “feel good” approach to Russian history includes a tendency to minimize a multitude of past crimes, including mass murders carried out by Joseph Stalin’s NKVD security service.

“I don’t even think [the commission] is legal. Our Constitution forbids the establishment of a state ideology and mandates ideological pluralism in Russia,” says Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former independent Duma deputy. “You can debate history, but it shouldn’t be imposed by those who happen to be in power. For centuries, our history has been written and rewritten by czars and commissars. So, this new commission can only raise doubt and protest.”