Posts Tagged → Germany
Historic American Art vs. NAZI ISIS People
In the 1930s, the German NAZI party identified “degenerate” art that was supposedly representative of “degenerate” culture, officially unfit for Germans.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery, books, poetry, you name it, if it had any artistic value, the NAZIs scrutinized it carefully. And if that art did not match the NAZI’s new standards, then it was forbiddden, burned, destroyed, or looted and hidden away, to be ransomed and sold off to future buyers outside of the ‘culturally supreme’ Deutchland.
Entire museum collections and privately owned collections throughout NAZI-occupied Europe were looted, damaged, and or destroyed, because the art did not comport with the new standard these Ultra Germans had created. Priceless artifacts were lost forever, at best melted down for their precious metal value.
If you want to see the long-term impacts of this intolerant approach to art, use www.duckduckgo.com to search the phrase “nazi looted art,” and marvel at the sad results. Real Western culture took a huge hit from the neanderthal NAZIs, and the ill effects are still felt today.
Fast forward six decades to ISIS, the puritanical Muslim movement that uses extreme violence and sadistic cruelty to achieve political domination. A lot like the NAZIs, come to think of it.
ISIS has a thing against most art and even historic artifacts, if they do not fit neatly into the Sharia law that ISIS followers believe in.
Ancient Buddhist cliff carvings, imposing and inspiring…detonated into rubble, by ISIS.
Ancient Assyrian cities, buildings, from the beginning of recorded human history….bulldozed and detonated into shards of broken rock, by ISIS.
Important archaeological digs providing useful history, bulldozed by ISIS.
Entire churches looted of anything of immediate value, then burned down, by ISIS.
Entire museum collections either destroyed, or looted and re-sold on the international black market, by ISIS.
Fast forward just a few years to ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, etc., and now we have priceless American artifacts that belong to the public being outright destroyed by mobs from these groups.
Irreplaceable and beautiful bronze statues of long-dead generals and soldiers are being removed and destroyed either by street thugs enabled by big city mayors, or by the big city mayors themselves.
This is a war on history and art no different than the NAZIs or ISIS.
At the very best, this is simply the mistake of applying new understandings to old history.
Oh sure, the neanderthals claim that these statues are memorials to bad ideas, and sad times, and to some extent there may be some vague shred of truth in that. But to keep these cultural artifacts, these works of high art, is no endorsement of what they may have once captured long, long ago.
Rather, these statues are mute testimonials to our nation’s history, its struggles, and its triumphs. The fact that the Confederacy did not win, due to the intervention and huge sacrifice by hundreds of thousands of Caucasian men from the north, is the real story of these old monuments.
Today we have one American political party that is increasingly at open war with every basic value and idea that undergirds America, as it was founded. These public square symbols are caught up in that party’s war.
That political party has more and more officials doing cheap political stunts, like seizing old bronze statues in the public square, and declaring them “Cherem” (unfit, like ISIS does to the churches it burns), and culturally unfit, like the NAZIs did.
Frankly, there is zero difference between these mayors, and Virginia governor Terry McCauliffe, and the other totalitarian movements that preceded them, like the NAZIs, ISIS, and the Soviets (who tore down beautiful old Russian statues and replaced them with boring, utilitarian statues of Lenin and Stalin meant to project an intimidating political message).
Whether these mayors and governors act unilaterally and use publicly owned machines to take them down, or if they allow their allied street thugs from ANTIFA and BLM to tear them down, while the city police are ordered to make no arrests, it makes no difference.
In the end, these mayors and their violent street soldiers are no different than the worst people in history. But if they win, you can bet they will erect statues of themselves, glorifying their total transformation of America to…God knows what.
Now they are talking about destroying the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. No lie.
I say we make a stand like a stone wall to protect this historic American art, and stop this insanity, stop this assault on America, by these modern day NAZIs and ISIS thugs.
Watching Evolution Happen: UN dying like League of Nations & dinosaurs
Before the United Nations there was a League of Nations, spawned by the savage destruction of World War One.
The League of Nations was initially built by the victorious Allies (Britain, France, America) and later began to accept other minor nations, many of whom had been opposed to the Allies. Collective security, and an international court for settling disputes before they turned into warfare, were supposed to prevent wars either through large alliances, or through legal mechanisms.
All that great intention came crashing down in the 1930s, when Japan, Germany, and Italy dispensed with the notion of playing nice, and each pursued their own national interests with the bayonet. The League of Nations was powerless to stop them, powerless to prevent World War Two, and to some degree is to blame for not allowing Western nations to directly threaten military force against rogue nations like Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan before they got up a head of steam.
It was a classic situation where the moral people were constrained by their own laws, while the lawless people ignored those laws and in fact used them to buy the time they needed for territorial acquisition. Kind of like gun control: The good guys were disarmed, the bad guys were not, and the bad guys did what they wanted.
During the incredible destruction of World War Two, the League of Nations ceased to function altogether, and fell into disrepute, but afterwards the new United Nations took its place. Using a lot of the same concepts and mechanisms, the UN was supposed to bring order to international relations and prevent wars.
Anyone watching international relations today realizes that the UN is an utter failure. It is a monstrous and corrupt bureaucracy, wherein rogue nations like Iran are actually able to gain cover and a foothold in diplomacy, instead of being held accountable for their military threats. Anti-Americanism is the dominant theme there.
On the personal level, consider the many continuous media reports of UN diplomats gone wild in America, leaving personal wakes of rapine and property destruction. These diplomats cannot be held accountable because of their “diplomatic immunity,” and so they enjoy wild lifestyles at the expense of American citizens’ safety and wellbeing that they could never get away with in their own countries, and nor could any American, here or there.
Spies, too, get lots of cover in the UN, damaging American interests and blocking the spread of democracy and universal human rights. Judging the UN by its own charter, it is a total failure. Judging its leaders by their ridiculous, empty, and sanctimonious statements, the UN is an object of derision among the most dangerous nations in the world. It is a joke. It does and stands for nothing, at least nothing good.
When evil people use the UN to advance their goals, it has failed in its basic mission.
It is time to do what is so painfully obviously needed, and end the UN, as its predecessor died. This is natural and healthy evolution. The idea that the dinosaurs get to dictate how the modern humans live is crazy.
Sorry to be cliché here, but it is time to get the US out of the UN, and get the UN out of the US. Whatever new relationships the US can and should pursue with like-minded democracies like Britain, France, and Israel, let’s build them. Without all the hokum and artificial blocks of the Useless Nations.
D-Day remembrance & thank you to Vets
Today is the 70th anniversary of “the” D-Day, a combined allied assault on France’s northern shore then in the grip of Hitlerian Germany.
Our family watches the movie Saving Private Ryan every year to help us appreciate what those brave men did that day, clambering through freezing waves into the teeth of bombs and bullets.
For those Americans inclined to disavow and disrespect the military, how do you otherwise explain the heroism that created America in 1776, and which has been a force for good ever since? Without a military to extend our safety, we’d now be speaking German on the east coast and Japanese on the west coast. Apparently empty slogans matter more than practicality in a comfortable society, protected as it is by brave warriors.
Thank you to all our Veterans, for all you have done to keep us free, and for preserving all of our rights. For keeping America, America. God bless you all.
Simple formula about life on Earth escapes many people
After World War I, “the war to end all wars,” antipathy towards anything military related ran so deep in England and France, that both countries practically disarmed to both cut costs and to symbolize their break with “militarization.” America followed suit to some extent.
England’s Neville Chamberlain was famous for his “peace in our time” mis-statement, as he allowed the alligator of German aggression to eat more and more of Europe, in the hopes that eventually the alligator would become full and not go after England, too.
Obviously Chamberlain’s approach of appeasing evil tyrants Hitler and Stalin did nothing to stop them, and barely delayed their ambitions. England suffered terribly from German attacks, and only survived because America awakened from her slumber and engaged. Militarily. As in, sending troops, boats, bombs, bullets, planes, guns, and tanks to England to both defend England and to use England as a launching ground to take the fight back to Germany.
Winston Churchill holding the very American Thompson submachine gun is a famous icon of Western resolve to withstand tyranny.
Fast forward to Ukraine, now being invaded by a reinvigorated Russian empire…like the old evil Soviet empire. You know, the one that fell apart from sustained Western military, economic, and diplomatic pressure.
Now, where is that pressure? Obama is using appeasement and laughingly empty threats against a tyrannical, militaristic, imperialistic would-be emperor, Vlad Putin. It won’t work. All that appeasement does is make the inevitable military clash all the worse, because it gives the bad guys all the time they need to build up their military strength, while the good guys wring their hands, and dither.
Question here is, Do people learn from history, so that they can survive? Answer here is, No, not those people whose ideology or religion (sometimes it is impossible to tell the two apart) inclines them to ignore what is in front of their faces. To wit:
Yesterday I was in the Washington, DC, area for an event, and had plenty of opportunities to talk with long-time liberal politicians and activists gathered there. Yes, I was one of the few conservatives/ traditionalists present. So the liberals felt comfortable speaking from their hearts, and it was a fascinating experience. One man, Hal, presently on a large city council and deeply involved in Congressional oversight, asked me what my number one problem with Obama was, from a functional perspective, not values or ideological view. “A lack of accountability for Obama’s actions and misdeeds,” was my response.
Naturally, Hal asked me what those were, and I could not get past pointing out that ObamaCare has received thousands of politically -based waivers from the White House, not to mention the many delays in implementing it, so that the pain felt by Americans would not be translated into punishing Democrats at the polls. When I pointed out that none of these waivers or delays are permitted by the law, Hal simply and repeatedly said “Yes, but it is his signature effort, his defining law.”
As if that excuses unconstitutional actions by an out-of-control, out-of-bounds executive. But in Hal’s mind, it does excuse Obama. And I am positive Hal is representative of liberals everywhere: The ends justify the means. Because the ends are pure (they think), any means of achieving those ends is acceptable, including violating the Constitution. A young student named Ms. Korn, now being indoctrinated at Harvard, recently wrote an essay in the Harvard Crimson where she declared that the First Amendment rights of conservatives are getting in the way of her (and Obama’s) version of “justice,” and that in the name of achieving that justice, the First Amendment should be vacated. Ms. Korn is probably representative of her generation, having been indoctrinated by people like Hal.
And thus we see the deficiency of liberalism going inter-generational. Pragmatism is something used only if it advances the liberal agenda, not if it defends Americans or democracy. And seeing what is going on in Ukraine (and Syria, and Iran, and and and…), one must wonder what Obama’s agenda is? And do a majority of Americans care, even if the basic rules of successful life on this planet are violated?