JC Penney's 'Hitler Tea Kettle' sold out

I get that, too. But there are two issues there. The first is that you can't censor everything for fear of offending a few people. I know that the numbers involved and the level of horror are different in this case to many others, but that doesn't detract from the principle. Whatever someone makes fun of, someone else is going to have an adverse reaction to it. Taken to extremes, this could mean that we couldn't have cute kitten memes because someone's hamster was killed by a cat. And I'm not trying to draw any comparison here - I'm saying that there's nowhere that you can arbitrarily draw the line. The one place I do draw the line is when comedy, or anything else, incites people to further hatred, or to violence. That's wrong, but risking raising the dormant memories of some people is, I'm afraid, a risk that has to be taken.

The second issue is that of the greater good. I've explained why I think it's essential that we laugh at and ridicule Hitler and others. And I think those benefits more than outweigh the undeniable damage.

 

I defend your right to say what you want but will attack what offends me. I see nothing good about Hitler. Nothing. Just pure evil. No race is superior of another. There is no talking around it. No grey area. No greater good. No talking around the issue.

 

As you should, as long as that attacking isn't counterproductive. It's up to you to decide whether this is counterproductive.

No, of course not. There are absolutely no grey areas about him or what he did. You will get no argument from me there.

No-one is talking around the issue.

The worst thing we can do is not talk about Hitler. Whether it's sober history or jokes, we have to keep his memory alive. Because if we don't, it's even easier for us to do it again.

 

I'd call this teakettle a Triumph of the Ill.

 

Considering the historic Aryans are today's Iranians, that might make him closer to them.

 

Pre-internet I read there was a poll during WWII the best punishment for Hitler would be to parade him in a cage and laugh at him. That is happening with the Youtube clips of the Downfall movie, of which I am a fan obviously, but it even includes the movie's director. > Downfall Producer And Constantin Film Partner Loves Those Hitler Parodies | TechCrunch

 

Mussolini was hanged in a public square upside down

 

Ah, yes. But racists never let the facts get in the way of their ideology.

 

That would have been a very good idea.

And Pol Pot died a free man. After 20 years of nobody doing anything, he either died naturally or committed suicide before he was handed over to an international tribunal.

 

HKMB where are you coming from? I must say that you are starting to scare me. Do tell us what are your true feelings about this subject.

 

This thread reminds me of what Noam Chomsky was saying about how people in power are able to abuse and misuse their power because society that puts them in power allows them to - and that power does not exist in a vacuum but side by side with the consent of the governed and power cannot be sustained for long without that public approval. I suppose the mere idea of Nazis rising from the ashes to take power is ridiculous and a joke to some (hence the laughter of a evaporating fear). However, minority groups like the Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian community, the Kurds and the Rwandian Tutu will most likely not be laughing about since such groups have been recently subject to industrial strength ethnic cleansing -genocide. The WWII Jewish holocaust stands out as one of the better documented cases of ethnic cleansing and how quickly an industrialize society can wipe out a minority group. However, the really scary part is not some genocidal maniac like Hitler but how somebody like Hitler was able to manufacture consent and approval from an educated industrialize democratic society to support his genocidal agenda. Germany was a democratic republic that inch by inch became a Totalitarian state before the start of WWII It's Thomas Jefferson's worst fear French Revolutionary like Mob kangaroo court based democracy with no human rights.

 

I'm not sure why I'm starting to scare you. Here's a quick summary of where I'm coming from on this.

I'm a British person living in Australia who's spent a lot of time in China. I studied German at school - and spent a fair bit of time in Germany - and studied two Chinese languages at university. I've spent time in Cambodia. And while at university in China, my fellow students included significant contingents of previously-normal Hutu and Tutsi Rwandans who, when the genocide kicked off at home, reenacted what was happening at home in their tiny society in China: the instant a Hutu and a Tutsi saw each other on the streets in Tianjin it would descend into violence.

So I've spoken to a lot of people involved in genocides and collective madness: a lot of my British friends' grandparents escaped the holocaust, and my own grandmother fled the Italian fascists. An awful lot of my British friends are British because they were thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin when they were three or four years old. Loads of my friends were involved in the Cultural Revolution, on all sides (inasmuchas there were sides), and I've met a lot of people who were involved in the catastrophe that was Cambodia. I've never been directly involved in this sort of horror, but I've got a lot of clear second-hand accounts of what happens and why.

The holocaust is particularly horrifying, because of its volume, and because of the absolutely devastating effect it had on Jewish people (yes, and Gypsies and homosexuals and others, but the Jews are the people history focuses on because they suffered the most). You seem to think that I think there's some sort of "grey area" regarding Hitler, the Nazis and the holocaust. There is not, and I honestly don't know where you got this idea from. The only time I've contradicted you was in my saying that I think that laughing at Hitler serves a useful purpose, and that while I understand your position, I disagree with it. I have never said anything to suggest that Hitler was not a bad person, or that the holocaust was not one of the worst episodes of human history.

What I have said that you might have seen as somehow minimising Hitler was my suggestion that he was not solely to blame for the holocaust. When I said this, I was explaining that a very large number of people supported him: he could not have controlled Germany, much less the rest of Europe, without this support, and all of these people are culpable (and most escaped punishment). And I've said that others have led similar genocides, in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent the Former Yugoslavia. (And in many cases, the leaders of these events got away with it.) What I'm saying is that there is a fundamentally evil streak in many of us. We're easily - willingly - led into mass hysteria, and we love to find scapegoats and punish them for problems that have nothing to do with them. Hitler was obviously evil, but we can't just blame him and pretend that holocausts can't happen without him. It is not difficult - or rare - to convince a population to find a scapegoat and start ethnic cleansing, whether through murder, eviction, or a combination of the two. And in every single case, that ethnic cleansing isn't just morally wrong - it's illogical and stupid. Morality is why we shouldn't do it, but logic is why we shouldn't be fooled into it: the Jews weren't to blame for Germany's problems; the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians were getting on fine until some leaders felt they could profit from some ethnic violence; and the Hutu-Tutsi thing involves, as I understand it, two made-up ethnic groups that were defined by the Belgians.

That's why ridiculing Hitler and his ideology are important. But the other side of the coin is that to make him somehow exempt from ridicule is to glorify him: for us to say that he is the one person we cannot joke about elevates him in the eyes of the evil people who admire what he did. Of course what he did was evil. But to ridicule him serves the dual purpose of showing the stupidity of his ideology and of reminding us how easily these things can happen. We have to remain constantly on guard against this sort of collective madness, and in my view, ridiculous as it might sound, laughing at a kettle that looks like a South Park-style cartoon of Hitler's face helps us achieve this.

I hope this clears things up. I don't know how else to put your mind at rest, because I honestly don't understand why I'm worrying you.

 

Yes. That's a lot more concise that what I said.

 

Well said.

 

Hitler....

• Started a war that in the European theater alone, killed at least 45 million people. Stalin and Mao took much longer to kill about that many people.
• Divided Germany and Europe for nearly a half century.
• Nearly destroyed Europe and took her off the center stage. The silver lining is it accelerated the end of colonialism and led to the rebirth of Israel.
• The Cold War was a result of him starting WWII, which almost ended in WWIII at least twice.
• While did not invent genocide, put it on a horrifying scale, added medical experiments, etc.
• A gifted speaker of the dark side, or demagogue. The lesson for us is even in a democracy, to beware of speakers appealing to things like fear and hatred. If there is one reason he is generally considered the most evil person ever, it's his passionate rhetoric for all that is wrong.
• ^ and he is also remembered so well because it's all recorded on film.
• Fortunately, nobody like him will every lead a superpower and start a global war because unfortunately, it would be a nuclear war.

 

Few of the Nazi hierarchy would fit into the blond super race Hitler talked about, including himself. Goering - corpulent, Goebbels - short with a defective foot, Hitler's family had a history of mental issues, including a member he executed > Real History and the Relatives of Adolf Hitler Not to mention his DNA indicates both African and Jewish connections > Hitler 'had Jewish and African roots', DNA tests show - Telegraph

 

I'm glad I put your mind at rest. I hope everything is OK now.

 

Always good to check what your dealing with. You are ok.

I have run into some strange people in my day.

 

This is exactly what I was talking about. Some things can be blamed on Hitler (and his team, and his vast number of supporters); others can't.

It's true that he and his cohorts started WWII. But it's worth noting that you don't need a single genocidal maniac to kick off a war in Europe with millions of casualties, as WWI clearly demonstrates (oddly enough, Franz Ferdinand is on the radio as I type this). We'd have found an excuse for a war eventually.

No, the Cold War was not Hitler's fault.

After defeating Hitler, there was no Hitler-based reason for the Cold War. Hitler didn't make the Americans and Russians hate each other. The Cold War was because the American government and the Russian government hated each other and advocated different political and economic systems, and both wanted to build what were effectively empires. Hitler had nothing to do with it.

Yes, fair enough.

True. Well, almost - the Germans were doing medical experiments in concentration camps in Namibia long before Hitler came to power. But yeah, in general this is a reasonable statement.

Yes, this is true. That's what sets him apart from most of the other evil people.

I think that to argue that no-one like him will lead a superpower again is something of a stretch. You underestimate the stupidity of people, the power of a compliant media, and people's keenness to find someone else to blame (and persecute) for their own failings. Zhirinovsky came close in Russia. Putin, while no Hitler, is pretty evil. If China were democratic, Bo Xilai would have stood a pretty good chance of rising to power: he was enormously popular in Chongqing, and he is a fascist maniac. Even without democracy, he came close, and for those of us who knew what was going on, it was pretty terrifying. Shinzo Abe was elected in Japan on a seriously nationalist ticket, and people even more nationalist than him, bordering on the fascist, have risen to prominence in Japan - people like Shintaro Ishihara and Naoki Inose. I'll avoid discussing the increasingly-popular politicians on the fringes of the Republican Party in the US for fear of this being moved to the politics section. Suffice to say that March and April 2012 were good months for me: at the start of 2012, I was aware of the very real possibility that by the start of 2013 we could be facing a world ruled by Bo Xilai and Rick Santorum (which would have lasted peacefully for about 20 minutes before a war started).

So...

Blaming Hitler for things that were not his fault - such as the Cold War - allows us to deny our own responsibility for our actions. Hitler wasn't the one using agent orange and napalm in Vietnam, or cluster-bombing Cambodia, or slapping down Czechoslovakia and Poland, or funding murderous proxy wars in places like Angola. In addition, erroneously blaming Hitler for the things he didn't do - like the Cold War - brings everything we say about Hitler into question, and we can't afford to do that: it reduces the credibility and the impact of what we say about the terrible things that he did do, such as the holocaust.

And, as I said before, blaming Hitler for everything allows us the luxury of the complacency that you show in your last point, claiming that no-one like him could ever lead another superpower. By absolving ourselves of responsibility and pretending that one person is responsible for most of the atrocities of the 20th Century, and saying that without him, nothing similar can happen again and no-one like him would ever rise to power again, we leave ourselves vulnerable to it happening again.