Archive for the ‘nazis’ tag
The Real Indiana Jones #
Speaking of Hitler… The Telegraph tells the rather interesting story of the German archeologist who inspired Harrison Ford’s character:
Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ’s blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn’s obsession ended up costing him his life.
(via kottke.org)
“Liberal Fascism” Again #
I admit, I’m morbidly fascinated by the life that has been taken on by the psuedo-intellectual name calling of Jonah Goldberg and his latest book Liberal Fascism. The latest one to address it is Slate’s Timothy Noah.
Modern liberalism, he argues, is linked to Nazism because both contain a cult of the organic (Hitler was a vegetarian) and both embrace sexual freedom (Himmler ordered his men “to father as many children as possible without marrying” in order to achieve the Aryan ideal). Eventually, Goldberg backs himself into asserting, in effect, that any government that does more than prevent abortions and provide for the common defense is inherently fascist. Granted, he gives a wide berth to the common defense. In a token criticism of President George W. Bush, Goldberg cites as evidence of fascist influence not the de facto suspension of habeas corpus and refusal to follow the Geneva Conventions, which go unmentioned, but rather Bush’s extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs.
Reconsidering “The Banality of Evil” #
This is slightly more academic than most stuff I post, but it’s also rather interesting. Tony Judt reconsiders the history of the Shoah — that’s the Holocaust to most — on the western psyche and people in general.
Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke —the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality— or “banalization”—that we face today.