“Am I sometimes exasperated by the barmier entries, including by those who appear to believe that all terrorism is always false flag? Yes, I am sometimes. But no more than I am exasperated by those who swallow the entire war on terror agenda and the associated wars and attacks on liberty at home.”
I am having an interesting dialogue with angrysoba in comments on his blogpost about one of my blogposts. Some people don’t seem to get the concept of open debate. Angrysoba appears to be angry because he believes it is wrong for anyone to be allowed to express views which he deplores.
http://angrysoba.blogspot.com/2009/12/british-ambassador-and-his-loony.html
“Oh well, perhaps you’ll learn when somebody challenges you to a jewel with battle axes and spikey balls.”
Excuse the spelling. Looking at it now I see it as a Freudian avalanche.
“In what sense is he a neo-Nazi? Please tell us about his political philosophy if you are privy to it.”
Don’t be foolish. He wrote a book called The Hitler We Love and Why explaining his love of the Fuhrer. He’s a white supremacist and ran Samisdat Publishing which primarily printed Nazi promotional material and Holcaust denial material. I fail to see how calling him a neo-Nazi discredits him.
http://www.amazon.com/Hitler-We-Loved-Why/dp/1593640234
And before you ask “Christof Friedrich” are Ernst Zundel’s middle names. It’s a pseudonym of sorts.
The picture of him grinning like an imbecile wearing a concentration camp uniform is available to see in Michael Shermer’s Denying History on page 65 apparently given by Zundel himself so it’s not “black propaganda”.
Oh, and the attempt at equivalance with Prince Harry is silly on a number of levels which I can’t even be bothered to go into.
“Grow a spine and stop whinging.”
What are you talking about? You’re the one bleating about how my words aren’t very nice and I’m being mean to poor old misunderstood Ernst Zundel.
If the language is a bit too saucy then I suggest you find a something a little more wholesome to read than the ventings of my spleen. As for what it does to my character, better out than in I say.
“I’m interpreting the incident because I know you. In all my decades of disagreeing with Bible bashers, none has ever bashed me – and that includes a US marine I had a passionate disagreement with about how to interpret Genesis while on flying from Narita to Anchorage.”
Well, good. But it only shows that you don’t know the incident in question. It happened when I was talking to a young lady. Her husband approached me from behind and slugged me in the face. He was actually quite intoxicated at the time and he himself is a bit confused about why it happened. I assumed it was because of what we were having a conversation about but that might not have been the case. Anyway, his wife didn’t speak to HIM for a week and many of his friends were angered by his behaviour. He later apologized to me in no uncertain terms and I forgave him (an ironically Christian thing to do). No one has ever talked of the incident since then and all of us have put it behind us except you who wasn’t even there to witness it and have brought up this incident more than once now in a bizarre attempt to shame me, it seems.
“And if you’d said that back in the eighties, we’d have had you marked down as a “Holocaust denier”.”
What? When was Raul Hilberg ever referred to as a Holocaust denier (except by the deniers themselves who often try to attempt to make equivalences between their positions and those historians who genuinely revise aspects of the Holocaust as new evidence comes to light)?
“Don’t be foolish. He wrote a book called The Hitler We Love and Why explaining his love of the Fuhrer.”
Don’t be churlish. I’m only askin’. So, what were his reasons for loving the Fuhrer?
“He’s a white supremacist.”
It’s a charge that’s often made, but usually by people who who are supremicists of one kind or another themselves. The number of times I sat in a pub in my early days in Japan, many moons ago, full of white English teachers and suit and tie johns boozing and rantning about how the Jap’s were barely human because they do everything different to the way we do, how the chicks were yellow cabs and the dicks were dickheads. And I’ve battled white supremicist thugs on the London Underground and been beaten up by white supremicists at a Chinese Takeaway in Bethnal Green Road in my time. So I know ’em when I see ’em. What’s Zundel done to qualify? Don’t tell me he’s tried to justify the genocide of the Native Americans in print as our friend Christopher Hitchens has.
“I fail to see how calling him a neo-Nazi discredits him.”
He may be a paleo-Nazi. They really hate the neos.
“Michael Shermer’s Denying History”
Yes he is. That’s the most sensible four words you’ve typed all day. Zundel’s fancy dress party was not the “black propaganda” I was referring to. I was thinking more of the sort of thing the UK gutter press has been doing to Craig Murray. Now if you believe half of what they wrote you have no business being within a million gigabytes of this den of iniquity. But of course, nobody does.
“Oh, and the attempt at equivalance with Prince Harry is silly on a number of levels which I can’t even be bothered to go into.”
Oh, that’s really wounded my pride now. I’m going to have to put my fist through the monitor and chew on my mouse for a bit.
“You’re the one bleating”
No, you’re the sheeple, remember?
“No one has ever talked of the incident since then and all of us have put it behind us except you who wasn’t even there to witness it and have brought up this incident more than once now in a bizarre attempt to shame me, it seems.”
That’s not the way I remember you telling it before. But I’ll defer to your latest eye witness account and retract the suggestion that you in any way provoked the assault. But next time, treat every American as a “live” American, as in “liable to explode suddenly at any time.”
“What?”
Once more with a feeling, people who were skeptical of the lampshade story in the 1980s or before were commonly referred to as “holocaust deniers” by people in Shoah-biz. Of course, not many people were skeptical back then. Most people including myself lapped up every NAZI attrocity story and Holocaust fable that the media fed us with, without bothering to check whether or not it was kosher. I still believe in my heart of hearts every Holocaust horror story I heard from the media as a child, even though many have latter turned out to be fabrications, just as I believe the Bible stories I learned that I now know are not literally true. The difference is nobody gets put in jail or spat on by true believers these days for questioning the factuality of Book of Judges or the Gospel according to Luke.
“He wrote a book called The Hitler We Love and Why explaining his love of the Fuhrer.”
I googled this and found that the title is “The Hitler We Loved and Why” (past tense) and that apparently Zundel didn’t write it. But he supplied the pictures, appears under a pseudnym as a joint author, and was the publisher. The text was by Eric Thompson.
Have you read the book and would you recommend it? The Amazon ratings were split evenly between 5s and 1s.
Wow! You do seem to be taking this personally.
Ernst Zundel couldn’t possibly wear his political colours on his sleeve more explicitly if they were sat next to a swastika.
If you can Google “The Hitler we Loved and Why?” you can see exactly what he thinks about the Fuhrer and race-mixing and the White Race in online extracts. Why you would even have any uncertainty before reading it is completely beyond me. If that isn’t “neo-Nazi” then the term has no meaning at all.
You should probably also avoid bars where people use terms like “Jap” and “yellow cab” (hint: they’re racist eptithets, y’know?)
As for your “treat every American as a “live” American, as in “liable to explode suddenly at any time.”” comment I assume you are talking about the guy who hit me. Only trouble with that is that the guy was Samoan, not American (and not American Samoan, either).
“Wow! You do seem to be taking this personally.”
Not at all. I’m just responding with mild irritation to your own highly emotive and visceral comment style. I fail to see why you should tie your intestines in knots because someone writes that he loved Hitler. Millions of people loved Hitler once, by the way. He was almost as popular as John Lennon. Do you get into the same sort of huff over people who write that they loved Stalin, Mao or Churchill?
“If you can Google “The Hitler we Loved and Why?” you can see exactly what he thinks about the Fuhrer and race-mixing and the White Race in online extracts. Why you would even have any uncertainty before reading it is completely beyond me. If that isn’t “neo-Nazi” then the term has no meaning at all.”
As I indicated earlier, it sounds more paleo-Nazi than neo. You know, the sort of thing that made Adolf Hitler TIME Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938, much to Mussolini’s chagrin.
“You should probably also avoid bars where people use terms like “Jap” and “yellow cab” (hint: they’re racist eptithets, y’know?)”
I bore that advice in mind years ago and never go near them. The most notorious such bar in Japan was The Rising Sun in Tokyo, where rugby-playing British expa financial wonderboys used to hang out. They scared the willies out of me, I can tell you! And almost every man jack of them more of a white supremicist than Mr. Zundel appears to be.
“Only trouble with that is that the guy was Samoan, not American (and not American Samoan, either).”
Oh, well in that case you should have reported it as a racially-motivated attack. When you related the incident to me originally, I only remember you saying you were hit by a Christian fundamentalists. You didn’t mention his nationality or ethnicity. You should be careful around Pacific Islanders in general, by the way. Do you realize how many missionaries went in the pot before they were finally converted to Christianity. And now Richard Dawkins wants to convert away from it. Madness, sheer madness.
If you’re so concerned about people raising objections to race-mixing, Mr. Soba, then you’ll doubtless be aware that one country where such people have power is Israel. Have you any particular feelings or comments on Israeli law and policy concerning intermarriage, or are you going to settle for selective outrage against Ernst Zundel?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1111929.html
For instance, how would you take it if the Japanese PM’s Office and the “Japanese Agency” undertook an aggressive ad campaign to discourage Japanese from marrying foreigners by sticking up notices on walls accross the company likening Japanese with foreign significant others as “missing persons”?
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090907/FOREIGN/709069840/1042
How would you feel if the Japanese government launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging people to inform on Japanese friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Japanese?
You’ve got a good brain. You’ve studied philosophy. You have a good think about why Zundel’s personal views on inrtmarriage are so offensive to you and the Israeli government policy and general social attitudes to it are not, OK?
My points about Zundel were in response to your quizzing me about referring to him as a neo-Nazi. Apart from pointing out a typo of mine and quibbling about paleo-s and neo-s I think I’ve demonstrated perfectly well that my characterisation of him is correct and my points about race-mixing were to justify my comments that I made about him being a white supremacist despite your constant, and really quite tedious, attempts at innuendo and equivalences and demands that I must never pronounce on any issue unless I simultaneously say something about, hmmm…which country today…ah! How ’bout Israel, for a change!
It’s really very, very boring.
My questions statements and conjectures were all in direct response to your questions and statements. You’ve neglected to give straight answers to a fairly long list of my questions, which grew out of your own comments Possibly you did this out of boredom, possibly out of a desire not to go down the paths you saw looming ahead.
If you didn’t want to generate sparks, why bring Eric Hufschmid into the discussion? Why bring up Ernst Zundel out of thin air, to inform us all of your disgust for him? Very few people take seriously the views of Eric and Ernie on any subject. The first apparently doesn’t believe a man walked on the moon; the second is a man whose published views indicate he spends a lot of time there. Both are men of straw in more than one sense.
I would much rather you had remained on Koestler, his speculations and their philosophical, ethnological and political implications, but apparently that was too down to earth for you. Did you just want to zig zag like the Bismark? When you make barbed comments, you should be prepared for others to explore their validity and implications.
Up to now you’ve never mentioned miscegenation as an issue in any discussion I’ve seen you engage in, but you’ve now brought it up as a reason for calling Zundel “a nasty piece of work”. As someone who is in favor of letting consenting adults choose their own sexual and marriage parters without duress, and who doesn’t recognize the concept of “race” per se or see any need to protect racial, national, ethnic or religious purity at the cost of individual liberty, I find the entire idea of being against freedom of choice in marriage in today’s world a ridiculous anachronism when held by an individual but an intolerable outrage when turned into national government policy. And frankly I’d very be surprised if you didn’t share this view.
Anyway, I am done with this conversation. I will leave it those reading this exchange (assuming anyone can be bothered) to make up their own minds about it.
“Look, my final advice, …. Anyway, I am done with this conversation.”
Decent dispatches a few parting shots,
dispenses agony aunt advice,
declares victory,
and departs into the depths of cyberspace.
“I don’t particularly care about Koestler’s Thirteenth Tribe.”
Says Decent about book he trashes with authoritative swagger.
“You pooh-poohed all of this and I provided evidence to show you I was correct…..”
Oh, that was very good! Indignation, acusations, projection and demonstrations of the same zig-zag ink-quirting squid evasion technique you deny ever using, all in one paragraph!
“Look, my final advice, ”
Decent agony aunt makes parting shot.
“Anyway, I am done with this conversation.”
Then declares victory and departs into the depths of the blogosphere.
“Then declares victory and departs into the depths of the blogosphere.”
The victory re: Ernst Zundel is self-evident and a declaration would be superfluous.
I’ve hardly run away. I’ve simply not opted to indulge your diversionary questions.
Arthur Koestler’s book might be important to you and if it is good luck but I’ve given my reasons for not reading it and I don’t particularly care if you’re not satisfied by them. I can’t read every book that’s ever been written and so I have to make judgements about which ones I will.
First off, does it sound interesting?
No.
Oh, well no need to continue even though I did when pressed.
It’s quite clear where you can find me and if you really want I’ll put this little exchange up on my blog in its entirey without any editing even for typos.