Most likely a futile attempt to oblige, just like the failure by Don Durito to get some blogging ethics back into the Pond. For some years now, the Pond has become more of aan echo chamber with purity in thinking. No one has defined what the party platform of this community should be beyond the founder Martin Longman. Just like selection of species, the community evolves throughout the years, the choice is for the good or the bad. There are many moments in life one makes a choice.

Re: The Deep State and Lisa Pease’s Contribution (none / 1)  

Would you care to expand on your suggestion of fascism and naziism in this community?

You have mentioned it a few times, perhaps if its a real problem, we should discuss it seriously.

by bazzz on Wed Jun 27th, 2018 at 08:43:13 AM MEST  

More below the fold …
What I have witnessed in this community is a horrific abuse of the ratings system. This has been more than once diaried until everyone was fed-up, but nothing changed. By abuse of the ratings system, fellow bloggers act like order troops claiming purity of thinking. This is a fascist phenomena and is not about Nazism. The fascist phenomena can be endured from the left, extreme socialist or communism and to the right and far-right the fascist states as the world witnessed in the 20th century leading up to the Second World War.

I was born a few months after the German capitulation and as a boy I was witness to the effects of vast destruction in The Netherlands. I have written many times about the effects of the German occupation, the minefields and bunkers along the North Sea coastline where I grew up. See info the Atlantik Wall. After living in the States as an immigrant for ten years I chose to return to Europe after finishing my study with a BSEE.

More important, I was witness to many first hand accounts of heroism and collaboration experienced during the German occupation of Holland from 4-10-1940 through 5-5-1945. My dad was under arms after a call for duty and was stationed at the Moerdijk Bridges that should have been part of the defense. Dutch traitors worked for the Nazis before the invasion and they managed to sabotage the explosives as the German forces crossed the border from the East and South. The German Blitzkrieg was overwhelming and the Dutch capitulated within two weeks. The German Luftwaffe had destroyed the city center of Rotterdam, a civilian target. A new method of war to subjugate a people and nation.

From my personal experiences and inherited analytics thinking from my parents, I have always been critical of politics and the role played by might in society. I have always been a Social Democrat and as I grew wiser and older, I have been more firm in my beliefs. In the last decade as I see the world and society change after 9/11, I have become more adament to speak my mind. The role of Xenophobia and Islamophobia has been a major focal point in my writings here @BooMan.

Islamophobia has been supported, facilitated and funded my the Jewish State of Israel. I have written about this theme for at least 10 years now and it has come to fruition in the States with the presidency of Donald Trump as a result. A major force which hastened this process is the occupation of the nine judges in the United States Supreme Court. Yesterday’s decision marks for me a watershed moment, a 1933 moment when Hitler got the power in Germany to implement all his ugliness of Mein Kampf.

Sit tied people, it’s going to be a rough ride the coming years …

 

Staging Friendship: Mussolini and Hitler in Germany in 1937*| Cambridge Press |

In September 1937, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met in Germany. Millions of ostensibly enthusiastic Germans welcomed the Duce. Here were the world’s first two fascist dictators, purportedly united in solidarity, representing the ‘115 million’ Germans and Italians against the Western powers and Bolshevism. Most historians have dismissed the 1937 dictators’ encounter as insignificant because no concrete political decisions were made. In contrast, I explore this meeting in terms of the confluence of culture and politics and argue that the meeting was highly significant. Its choreography combined rituals of traditional state visits with a new emphasis on the personality of both leaders and their alleged ‘friendship’, emblematic of the `friendship’ between the Italian and German peoples. Seen through this lens, the meeting pioneered a new style of face-to-face diplomacy, which challenged the culture of liberal internationalism and represented the aim of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to create a New Order in Europe.

“We Are Evidently Aryans” | Slate – 2017 |

Excerpted from Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 by Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Anti-Semitism had little or no place in Italian fascist doctrine before 1938, reflecting the Italian Jewish community’s relatively pacific existence on the peninsula. The tiny size of the country’s Jewish population (about 44,000 out of 44 million), the frequency of intermarriage, the physiognomic and cultural similarities that linked Italians of Catholic and Jewish faiths, and the absence of popular anti-Semitic violence had allowed the Jews to enjoy a relatively harmonious existence in Italy throughout the liberal period.

Though the conquest of Ethiopia would produce a slew of official efforts meant to inculcate a “racial consciousness,” before and after Hitler’s rise to power, Mussolini had publicly rejected credos of biological racism as utopian and ahistorical. In 1933, he authorized a public attack against Nazi racial doctrines.

But we should be cautious in interpreting this as a denunciation of anti-Jewish sentiments. More than any support for Jews, fascist anti-racism of the early ’30s reflected the Duce’s desire to portray Italian fascism as different from and superior to the ideas being propagated by the parvenu Hitler. During 20 years of rule, Mussolini’s attitudes toward the Jews were guided by a similar pragmatism. When he felt that the Jews would help him attain his domestic and foreign policy goals, he was for them; when the Axis alliance led him to perceive the Jews as an obstacle to reaching those goals, he did not hesitate to turn against them.

Just two months after the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, in fact, Mussolini published a series of anonymous pronouncements in his newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, that set the tone for the dictatorship’s new attitude toward Italian Jews. Dismissing centuries of historical and theological debate, the Duce explained that “anti-Semitism is inevitable wherever there is exaggerated Semitic visibility, interference, and arrogance. The excessive Jew gives rise to the anti-Jew [Il troppo ebreo fa nascere l’antiebreo].” Mussolini’s remarks anticipated the different attitudes and aims that separated the Italian and the German racial campaigns. The Italians sought less to eradicate Jews entirely from society than to coerce changes in those Jewish behaviors and customs that had long frustrated Italians and Catholics.

Related articles on topic …

○ I Don’t Love My Country by soj @BooMan on Dec 27th, 2008

Declaring your nation as “exceptional” is the beginning of authoritarianism by a global power, a first step evolving into fascism.

In my new normal I post this upfront, for this occasion I did not. 🙂

[Cross-posted from European Tribune – where dissent is NOT troll rated!]

oaquabonita – the obsessive heckler here, here, here and here.