JC Penney's 'Hitler Tea Kettle' sold out

Great point - he was threatening.

First picture I saw of him: "who is this scary, creepy guy with a permanent scowl?"

 

2K1toaster shame on you to discount what destruction was put on the Jewish People. I suggest you visit the Holocaust museum in DC and try for the sake of humanity to put yourself in there shoes.

Opinion: Holocaust artifacts bear witness - CNN.com

 

Oh put a sock in it.

And I have been to the Holocaust museum not that it means anything. I am not denying that it happened. I am not denying it was horrible. Eddie Izzard is a comedian. But he has a point, that countries generally don't care when people kill their own people. For instance, Syria right now. It took 2 years for the US to enter WW2, and only after Japan came over and killed people in Hawaii.

Lighten up.

 

Actually Toaster I won't put a sock on it. I think what you said is deplorable to discount the holocaust. Clearly over half of the global Jewish popuation was killed within a few years in death factories. In Germany and Poland over 90% of Jews were killed. There is no talking around it. It is the saddest single event this and last Century in my opinion.

You should be ashamed of yourself. You said the holocaust does not mean anything. Shame on you. Shame on you.

 

I don't know Wth you are smoking but I said no such thing. I said the opposite. And it didn't happen this century...

If you're going to be stupid, do it somewhere else and stop putting words in people's mouths. Maybe I need a ridiculously sized image to prove the point.

 

You need help just understanding what you write. It is extremely disrespectful to the memory of 6 million innocent Jews who died for no reason.

I suggest you make a deep internal review and next time this subject comes up, think of a response from the position of the people who died and there relatives who dearly miss them.


The next time you shoot your mouth off think of these children. I'll remind you none survived. Not one. They were just children.

 

And you could equally be called disrespectful for not mentioning the 2.5million to 8 million people that Stalin murdered. Is he not important? He also killed children.

What about something closer to home, the 2million to 100 million innocent men, women, and children from Native American decent that the colonists murdered in their own homeland?

1-3 million Nigerians killed in their civil war. Not a peep.

Bad crap happens. It did happen. Deniers in this day and age can only be blamed on purposeful misinformation. It was a bad thing. Nobody is putting Hilter, Polpot, Stalin, or any other "mass murdering f-heads" as Izzard calls them on a pedestal.
The world continues, and moves on. Their memories are preserved and the loss serves as a bitter and cruel reminder to the future about what happens during wars.

 

I showed this pic to my 11 year old daughter and her reply was: "How racist are you on a scale of 1 to 10? Nein"

 

Lol

 

As I recall, Hitler killed Jews both inside AND outside of Germany, even diverting resources from the war effort for the genocide.

 

Recently I saw a page of (in)famous signatures.

What made 8off's sig standout and have me laughing was it was about the only one sliding down....analysts say that's a feeling of insecurity. Tragic so many suffered from his sense of unworthiness, which BTW "worthy" appeared frequently in his speeches.

 

Shame on you for ignoring the Gypsies, disabled, gay, and others the Nazi's killed along with the Jews.

 

Troll I covered that in my first post. Yes it was very sad for many.

 

Eh? Lot's of shaming going on here. He's covered it twice now.

 

All this talk about the kettle, and no mention of the Hitler House?

 

And separately...

JMD, I see your point. And I understand the sensitivities. And I don't think the holocaust is something to be joked about. But joking about the holocaust and laughing at Hitler are two very different things.

My view on laughing at Hitler is that it's a valuable thing. He's still seen as a hero by neo-Nazis - in fact, he's gaining in popularity in parts of Europe as the horror of what he did loses resonance and as extremist racism rears its head again. Making him a figure of fun weakens his heroic image, and I think that's extremely important. By showing how absurd he was individually, we also help to demonstrate the absurdity of his views - that, for example, the Aryan race (of which, let's face it, a short, haired Catholic Austrian with terrible dress sense was not the best example) is somehow superior, and that Jews are to blame for all of the world's problems. It's essential to expose this ridiculousness, because it pops up so easily again and again - that Serbs are a superior race and Bosnians and Croats are to blame for all the world's problems; that Christian Americans are superior and Muslims are to blame for all of the world's problems; or that Hutus are a superior race and Tutsis are to blame for all of Rwanda's problems - and ridiculing both the individual and the concept might, in a small way, help reduce the likelihood of its recurrence.

I think 2K1toaster made a good point about Hitler's notoriety not just being a result of the numbers, but being a result of him not just focusing on a minority in his own country. In the list of tyrants in previous posts, Pol Pot didn't even come up. In four years, he managed to kill an estimated 2 million people - a quarter of Cambodia's population - before the Vietnamese invaded and put an end to it. When you compare the technology, communications and personnel that Pol Pot had to what Hitler had, and look at the proportion of the population that he killed and the timeframe in which he did it, Pol Pot's murders took an even greater effort - and thus, arguably, more evil - than Hitler's. But because (a) it all happened within one country's borders and (b) it happened to people who were not white and didn't live in Europe or North America, it's not going to achieve the same notoriety as the holocaust. Also, of course, Cambodia's history forces us to look at our own countries' culpability in bringing Cambodia to the point at which this could happen (and I say this as someone who thinks Paul Kagame's determination to blame the French for what happened in Rwanda is ridiculous: outside forces played a far greater part in bringing Cambodia to the brink than in bringing Rwanda to the brink).

Rwanda is another case. The speed at which things happened there - up to a million people killed in 100 days - was phenomenal, and it was driven by a few individuals, but I, for one, can't even remember the names of the individuals who drove that genocide. Why? I think the answer's pretty obvious, unfortunately. Even though that strife extended into other countries - Burundi and the DRC - it didn't extend to anywhere that much of the rest of the world cares about.

So.... I think it's important to single out Hitler. I think it's useful - and not disrespectful to his victims in any way - to laugh at him as well as to condemn him. And I think it would be nice if we could remember that when it comes to being a complete b----d, he's far from alone: he was just the first to have the infrastructure in place to conduct genocide on an industrial scale. And I think that the more we condemn him and the more we laugh at him, the more we have to remember that he - and Pol Pot, and Stalin, and the Hutu Power leaders, and Milosevic and Tudjman, and whoever else you can think of - didn't do it alone. In every case, millions of people went along with those leaders, and willingly participated in the madness. I knew a few Germans who were old enough to have been involved in the horrors of Nazism, and who did nothing to stop it. I know loads of people who were involved in the stupidity of the Cultural Revolution, and who actively took part None of them can explain why they did what they did, and they seem like a perfectly normal cross-section of any society. But they did it, partly because such things clearly appeal to our animalistic instincts (we're far more closely related to chimpanzees than bonobos, unfortunately), and partly because no-one was exposing the ridiculousness of what they were being told. That's where laughing at Hitler comes in.

 

....(of which, let's face it, a short, haired Catholic Austrian with terrible dress sense was not the best example)...

The post above won't edit, for some reason. I of course meant to say "(of which, let's face it, a short, dark-haired Catholic Austrian with terrible dress sense was not the best example)"

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Perhaps Mel Brooks an American film icon of German Jewish roots did much to relieve the psychological torment with comedy . Laughter is a great healer. However this horrific event is a wound of which nothing can erase. Most people go along not thinking about it than something like a Hitler Tea Pot blasted in the media only reminds people of something they have tried a lifetime to forget. Many understand that torment.