[Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

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i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

Some Guy TT posted:

Ronald Reagan's pronouncement, in his first inaugural address in 1981, that �government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem� marked a signal moment in what has become the most successful political counterrevolution in modern American history. Having won a smashing electoral victory, Reagan acted as if he were the latter-day inverse of his long-ago political hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Summoning the American people to �a rendezvous with destiny��a line he had shamelessly filched from FDR in the 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater�s presidential campaign that established him as the Republican right wing�s future leader�and pretending that the stubborn stagflation of the 1970s was a crisis of the same magnitude as the Great Depression, Reagan channeled Roosevelt�s optimistic rhetoric to attack the instrument of Roosevelt�s great reforms: the federal government. He aimed, above all, to revive the laissez-faire economic and social policies that the Depression had discredited, that Roosevelt had supplanted, and that even Richard Nixon had repudiated when he declared himself a Keynesian. But Reagan�s antigovernment politics and policies went much further than rolling back the New Deal.

Reagan�s Republican Party of 1981 was very different from Herbert Hoover�s of 1933: it had become the refuge of millions of formerly Democratic white conservative voters in the Solid South who resisted the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Accordingly, behind his cheerful veneer Reagan made sure that he tapped into the fierce resentments of federal authority, dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, that fueled that resistance. Before they were done, the Reagan Republicans had absorbed into their coalition an array of aggrieved Americans, including quasi-theocratic white Christian nationalists, the gun-manufacturing lobby, antiabortion militants, and antigay crusaders.

The antigovernment fervor that grips the nation today is the long-term product of the right wing that Reagan called to arms (literally, in the case of the National Rifle Association) forty-odd years ago. It was his attorney general Edwin Meese, in tandem with the newly formed Federalist Society, who started packing the federal judiciary with the conservative judges who have gutted federal protections for voting rights, abortion rights, and more, while inventing, with fake history presented as �originalism,� an individual�s Second Amendment right to own and carry military-grade armaments. It was the Reagan administration that eliminated the FCC�s fairness doctrine, which mandated that broadcasters provide balanced coverage of controversial public issues, paving the way for right-wing talk radio inciters like Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and, on cable TV, Rupert Murdoch�s Fox News to amplify antigovernment paranoia.

The Reagan White House also harbored the former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan as its communications director. Buchanan�s politics were rooted in the 1930s America First isolationism of Charles A. Lindbergh and the diatribes of the right-wing �radio priest� Father Charles Coughlin, with their eccentric fixations on imaginary Jewish internationalist cabals. In the waning days of Reagan�s presidency, Buchanan remarked that �the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.� He tried to fill that vacuum himself, nearly defeating President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 New Hampshire primary with his �pitchfork brigades.� His convention speech later that year laid out the culture wars to come. Then he followed up with another bid for the Republican nomination in 1996 and an independent campaign in 2000. All those efforts failed, but their stark themes of isolationism, lost national greatness, immigrant invasion, and racial fear provided a template for Donald Trump�s MAGA campaign a quarter-century later. �American carnage� was the favored far-right image at least two decades before Trump.

Meanwhile, a step away from Buchanan�how distant a step has long been subject to debate�an assortment of antisemitic and white nationalist organizations remained on the political fringes during the Reagan period. The fringiest may have been the neo-Nazi National Alliance, founded in 1974 by William Luther Pierce, the author of the widely read novel The Turner Diaries, a lurid description of�and in some respects a blueprint for�a white supremacist revolution. The conspiracy-mongering Liberty Lobby, founded in 1958 by Willis Carto, claimed in the early 1990s a membership of 20,000, supplemented by 90,000 subscribers to its weekly newspaper, The Spotlight. In 1968 the Liberty Lobby supported the segregationist hero Governor George Wallace for president. Twenty years later the splinter Populist Party, which Carto helped to organize, nominated the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke. In both 1992 and 1996 The Spotlight backed Buchanan.

A major turning point in the Republican Party�s rightward radicalization and its fitful convergence with the evolving conspiratorial and white supremacist netherworld�populated today by groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and QAnon�came during the fall and winter of 1994, culminating in the spring of 1995. Much to the shock of Republicans who assumed that Reagan had created a national coalition that would last for decades, a Democrat, Bill Clinton, won the presidency in 1992. Republican strategists shifted their attention to Congress, and in November 1994, led by the firebrand Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the party captured the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. Rewarded with the speakership, Gingrich dominated the news cycle with slash-and-burn denunciations of �sick,� �corrupt,� �anti-flag� Democrats. Advised by the political consultant Frank Luntz, he adopted his poll-tested vocabulary of demonization, published in a private memo entitled �Language: A Key Mechanism of Control�: �anti-child,� �decay,� �welfare,� �traitors.�

Limbaugh, Liddy, and smaller-fry right-wing radio shock jocks added their own blend of conspiracy mongering and personal abuse. The prolonged and fatal siege in 1993 involving an armed religious sect, the Branch Davidians, and federal law enforcement in Waco, Texas, became a cause c�l�bre on both sides of the increasingly blurry border between the GOP hard right and the paramilitary extremists. �Go for a head shot,� the ex�Watergate plotter Liddy shouted into his radio microphone, instructing listeners on how to kill federal firearms officials. �The second violent American revolution,� Limbaugh declared around the same time, �is just about�I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart�is just about that far away.�

Out of this toxic mix of cultism and grifting came Timothy McVeigh, a young, decorated army veteran, subscriber to The Spotlight, gun show enthusiast, and avid fan of Limbaugh�s. He had developed a burning hatred of Bill and Hillary Clinton and studied The Turner Diaries like a field manual. In April 1995, on the second anniversary of the end of the Waco siege, McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck crammed with barrels of fertilizer explosive, flicked his Bic lighter to fire a five-minute fuse, and blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, 19 of them children.

Nearly everything went according to plan that day for McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, except the most important thing of all: their audacious attack failed to touch off a revolutionary uprising. Yet the fallout from what McVeigh and Nichols conceived as an act of war against the US government did nothing to pause the radicalization of American right-wing politics inside and outside the Republican Party, which continues to this day. As Jeffrey Toobin writes in Homegrown, the story of the Oklahoma City atrocity is �not just a glimpse of the past but also a warning about the future.�

Toobin has established himself over the last thirty years as one of our premier legal journalists. His writings have included authoritative behind-the-scenes reports on John Roberts�s increasingly conservative Supreme Court, notably an enlightening book on the fraught relations between the Court and Barack Obama�s White House. Toobin has a special talent, however�a historian�s talent�for narrating the ins and outs of high-profile trials while placing them in their broader social and political settings.

His books have become especially important as a chronicle of the 1990s; taken together they are among the most revealing and perceptive accounts of that decade yet written. Those on the O.J. Simpson murder case and trial (which overlapped chronologically with the Oklahoma City story), the Clinton impeachment, and the disputed 2000 election in Florida leading to Bush v. Gore offer a panorama of the crosscutting forces of race, class, and partisan politics that lay behind the courtroom dramas. Throughout US history the most important of our national conflicts have always eventually become legal and then constitutional struggles, and Toobin dramatizes that fundamental historical point as few other writers have.

Although Homegrown covers some of the same themes as his earlier books on the 1990s, its story takes Toobin to what are, for him, some unfamiliar American places, including the bleak, hollowed-out upstate New York landscape where McVeigh grew up and the even darker landscapes he came to inhabit as a gun-loving right-wing drifter. Toobin also had access to a mountain of source material. In a move that raised eyebrows, in 1999 McVeigh�s lead attorney, Stephen Jones, donated his entire archive on the case, including all the government�s discovery material, to the University of Texas. In view of attorney-client privilege, this was, as Toobin responsibly discusses, ethically dubious, even though Jones�s client had by then been convicted and executed for his crime. For Toobin, though, the archive provided invaluable insight into the case, including (thanks to the oft-questioned McVeigh�s powerful memory) a nearly microscopic view of the terrorist�s activities, virtually from his childhood to the day he bombed the Murrah Building.

The challenge for Toobin was to shape this overabundance of detail into a true-life crime-and-punishment story in which the chief perpetrator�s guilt is never in doubt and the outcome of his trial is virtually assured. The Simpson case turned on whether Simpson�s crafty attorneys could play upon passions linked to racism, policing, and celebrity, and lead a jury to dismiss clear-cut evidence of guilt. The Clinton impeachment was full of dramatic twists and turns, as well as a repellent cast of characters operating behind the scenes to pull it off; so was the 2000 Florida election debacle.

By contrast, the central figure in Homegrown is no tortured Raskolnikov but a soulless fanatic who, beyond his messianic delusions, evidently had no inner life to speak of, let alone any complicating motives. The supporting cast, for the most part defense attorneys and prosecutors, although not without their quirks, elicit little fascination compared to the flamboyant Johnnie Cochran or the sanctimonious Kenneth Starr. The one character whose appearance might pique special interest is the then-as-now punctilious Merrick Garland, who as a prominent young Department of Justice official briefly oversaw the government�s investigation and prosecution of McVeigh, which gives an idea of the contrast with Toobin�s earlier protagonists.

The only great drama in the book is McVeigh�s preparation and then the bombing itself, described by Toobin in just enough horrifying detail to underscore its barbarity and the suffering it inflicted, without sensationalizing it. He does manage to make the subsequent trial interesting by examining its inner workings, including clashing egos and lawyerly miscalculations. Toobin cannot, however, make it suspenseful, hanging as it did on whether the unrepentant McVeigh could somehow outwit the feds and prove them incompetent as well as oppressive, a narcissistic gambit that, even with the predictable prosecutorial flubs and missteps, had almost no chance of success. A subplot involving defense lawyers taking sumptuous trips all over the world, on the government�s dime, to try to track down supposed additional accomplices and masterminds shows just how far-fetched and self-aggrandizing their efforts became, but it finally amounts to a zany sideshow. As in Toobin�s other books, but even more emphatically, the essence of the story lies not so much in the crime and the trial as in the politics behind them.

In the hours and days immediately after the bombing, suspicions gathered around the probability�even, some said, the certainty�that the bombers were foreign terrorists, most likely Islamic. The supposed terrorism expert Steven Emerson claimed on CBS News that the attack revealed a �Middle Eastern trait.� At the instant McVeigh was arrested wearing an antigovernment T-shirt, that framing began to shift. White House officials led by President Clinton�who from the start, based on his experience in Arkansas, was convinced the bombers were homegrown right-wing zealots�accused conservative demagogues of fomenting hatred of the federal government. In the news media, however, a portrait was painted of McVeigh not as a domestic political terrorist but as a troubled loner�a survivalist, perhaps, but in any case a one-off madman driven by personal demons. Conservative Republicans were particularly vigilant about deflecting anything that might associate them with the mass slaughter of innocent Americans.

Even a year after the bombing, the widely syndicated conservative columnist Cal Thomas was still condemning the slightest suggestion that right-wing Republicans and their radio publicists bore any responsibility for it. According to Thomas, nobody had demonstrated that McVeigh or any other accused �crazies� like the Waco cultists had �ever listened to talk radio or read or heard a single speech by Newt Gingrich.� Yet reckless Democrats and their supporters in the press, Thomas charged, were outrageously blaming Republicans and talk show hosts �for contributing to a climate that produced these violent acts,� as if conservatives generally were �unindicted co-conspirators.�

Toobin�s account shows incontrovertibly that this is precisely how the radicalizing right of the mid-1990s, in and out of the Republican Party, ought to be regarded. To be sure, much of McVeigh�s biography reads like that of a generic disturbed and violent criminal: an anomic childhood in a declining Rust Belt small town; divorced parents; sporadic employment after high school; an inability to form romantic or other emotional bonds; an early obsession with guns, followed by combat service in the Gulf War; and then a seminomadic life on the periphery, split between his childhood home outside Buffalo and the Middle American heartland. At one point he spent much of his time shuttling between gun shows while subsisting on fast food and Pepto Bismol. It took, however, a political self-education to turn a young man living on the edge into the terrorist Timothy McVeigh.

At some point not long after high school, McVeigh obtained�via the National Rifle Association�s magazine, American Hunter�a mail-order copy of The Turner Diaries, which offered him a worldview that he never relinquished. From this book, written at the furthest reaches of antigovernment paranoia, he eventually extracted the basic instructions on how to touch off, with a spectacular act of terror, a white supremacist revolution that would overthrow the federal government. (This in turn, according to the novel, would lead to a nuclear war and then a race war, and finally the systematic extermination of all nonwhites and Jews.)
But it was only after leaving the military that McVeigh began acting on his antigovernment animus. The brother of his army buddy (and later co-conspirator) Terry Nichols, while McVeigh was visiting them in Michigan, introduced him to The Spotlight, which, he would later tell his lawyers, pretty much summed up �my world/my culture�the stuff I identify with�stuff I know and live.� Around the same time, McVeigh began listening to Limbaugh, who was just coming into his own as a best-selling author, television performer, and talk radio megastar. �As they say, �Rush is right,� (double meaning),� McVeigh wrote to a friend, �and many people (opponents) consider his views extreme.� He became an ardent fan.

It was the Nichols brothers, meanwhile, who along with Limbaugh made McVeigh aware of Buchanan, then running his presidential primary campaign against George H.W. Bush. (Limbaugh, like The Spotlight, endorsed Buchanan�s bid.) As Toobin explains, Buchanan rounded out McVeigh�s political thinking, above and beyond�but by no means in contradiction to�the crude racism of The Turner Diaries.

From Buchanan, McVeigh learned of the menacing New World Order (NWO), purportedly a project of shadowy, powerful, internationalist elites to topple the America created by the Founding Fathers and replace it with a single omnipotent world government run exclusively by and for themselves. From Buchanan, he learned that a new revolutionary resistance could defeat the NWO much as the patriots of 1776 had defeated the British. And from Buchanan, perhaps most important of all, he learned that, just as the redcoats had once tried to strip the patriots of their arsenals, so the nefarious globalists and their liberal minions were out to shred the Founders� Second Amendment and seize the guns of a God-fearing citizenry. For Buchanan, Toobin writes, �guns meant freedom.� McVeigh already believed as much, but Buchanan politicized that belief as never before.

Instead of Buchanan, however, voters eventually turned not to Bush, who would have been bad enough, but to Clinton, and McVeigh�s political rage found a new fixation. Judging from Toobin�s account, it is impossible to overestimate McVeigh�s hatred of Clinton, especially after the conflagration in Waco barely three months into his presidency, which to the extreme right was proof that the government�s attack on guns and freedom had begun in earnest. Through 1993 into 1994, right-wing talk radio inciters led by Limbaugh fanned the flames further with malicious conspiracy mongering, including the cruel lie that the Clintons had been responsible for the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, their old friend who had committed suicide after being subjected to a campaign of false accusations of wrongdoing by the conservative editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal.

During a brief visit home, McVeigh startled his father by muttering, whenever Clinton appeared on the TV, �Someone should kill that son of a bitch.� What he hoped someone else would do to the president, McVeigh did symbolically to the First Lady. In the late summer of 1994, while living in a house in rural Kansas and having finally decided to take up arms against the government, McVeigh and Nichols thought they should work on their sharpshooting. McVeigh set up a life-size silhouette for a target to which he then attached a photograph of Hillary Clinton.

Apart from the Waco fiasco and the right-wing media assaults, Clinton�s presidency got off to a rocky start, as an early ginned-up controversy over gays in the military gave way to hard fights over passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a vicious struggle over the administration�s ambitious health care reform plan. By the late summer of 1994, the health care bill was spiraling toward defeat. With the midterm elections looming, Clinton and congressional Democrats were determined to show the voters a major victory. They got it in September when, after heavy lobbying by the White House, the Senate passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban as a crucial part of the administration�s comprehensive Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act�the seriously misunderstood Crime Bill of 1994, now widely maligned as a racist measure to incarcerate blacks.

Prohibiting for ten years the manufacture for civilian use of certain semiautomatic weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines, the measure aimed to curtail a recent alarming rise in the number of mass shootings. It was successful, not only in that regard but in reducing the proportion of overall gun deaths due to mass shootings, until the George W. Bush administration allowed it to lapse in 2004, with horrible if predictable long-term results. At the time, though, the ban was politically risky for the White House and the Democrats in view of Republican opposition to any limitations on gun manufacturing and ownership. The following January, shortly after taking office as Speaker, Newt Gingrich assured the NRA that, with a Republican majority, �no gun control legislation is going to move in committee or on the floor of this House.�

More than historians have allowed, the assault weapons ban was a major contributing factor to the Democrats� historic defeat in the 1994 midterm elections. For McVeigh, however, as he later told his lead attorney, the ban was �the last straw.� Clinton�s signing in 1993 of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, requiring background checks on individuals attempting to purchase certain firearms�named in honor of Reagan�s press secretary James Brady, who was shot and partially paralyzed during John Hinckley Jr.�s assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981�had angered McVeigh. But as the indictment papers against him stated, the plot that led to the bombing began on September 13, 1994, the date that Clinton signed the assault weapons bill.

Although McVeigh may at that moment have wanted more than ever to see the president dead, he took instruction from The Turner Diaries and blew up the Murrah Building. But as Toobin emphasizes, although McVeigh attacked the federal government, hoping to initiate its overthrow, he also had a more specific target in mind: the Clinton administration. To that extent, he was perfectly aligned with his political heroes on the Republican right, who would continue to escalate their war on Clinton long after McVeigh was gone, on into the impeachment and the succeeding volume, chronologically, of Toobin�s multivolume history of the era.

Toobin wants his readers to understand how the politics of the mid-1990s prefigured those of our own times and how the slaughter of April 19, 1995, connects to the rampage of January 6, 2021. The links are vivid enough: in the assurance that sinister �globalist� forces are either about to take control of the country or already have; in what Toobin calls �the belief in the value and power of violence�; in an obsession with gun ownership that reduces the entire Constitution to a twisted version of the Second Amendment; in a crackpot narrative of American history that turns liberalism into tyranny on the supposed authority of Thomas Jefferson. �How dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes!� Clinton declared in 1995, adding that �there is nothing patriotic about�pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.� In 2022 Joe Biden proclaimed that �we can�t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.�

The largest difference between now and then, Toobin says, is frightening. Whereas McVeigh, only superficially a lone terrorist, found a kind of community in right-wing periodicals, talk radio call-ins, and far-flung gun shows, the Internet and social media have at once vastly enlarged that community and tightened its connections, with billions of unfiltered rants and orders and falsehoods flashing through the ether. McVeigh thought it would take a grandiose act of targeted terror to arouse what he only sensed was an immense army of like-minded militant patriots. Today�s extremists not only know with certainty that the army exists; they are in contact with it and are counting on its triumph, whether in the Storm or the boogaloo or some other revolutionary apocalypse. And with the Clinton assault weapons ban a distant memory, they are armed to the teeth.

But while it warns about the present danger, Homegrown also illuminates and bids us to reckon with the larger history of what happened in 1995. Not only do today�s distempers date back well before Trump or the Tea Party; they originated well before the inflamed mid-1990s, taking their modern form during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who encouraged them with his denunciations of the federal government as a malevolent force.

And there is an even longer history behind that. The great revolutions in American history�from the nation�s founding through Emancipation, Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, and the New Deal�have been predicated on the idea, inscribed in the Constitution, that it is the nation, the more perfect Union striven for in 1787, that is best equipped to secure the common good and the general welfare. Counterrevolutionaries in their various forms�nullifiers, Confederates, so-called Redeemers overthrowing Reconstruction, anti�New Deal Liberty Leaguers�have fought that idea, never more successfully than in the long counterrevolution begun under Reagan. Though resisted and even halted from time to time, that reaction, steadily radicalized, has now turned a substantial number of Americans against their own government, and they are ready and willing to use violence for their retribution. In the process, large and influential elements of the party of Abraham Lincoln�a party that fought against one such counterrevolution�have become captive to that subversive rage.

jeffrey tubin'

# ? Oct 30, 2023 23:29

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# ? May 24, 2024 23:40

HootTheOwl: May 13, 2012; Hootin and shootin

Syq

# ? Oct 30, 2023 23:38

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/08/17/american-carnage-homegrown-jeffrey-toobin/

sean wilentz's review of jeffrey tubbin's new book

# ? Oct 30, 2023 23:42

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

The �great wealth transfer� isn�t $72 trillion but $129 trillion, BofA says�and the government gave most of it to baby boomers

quote:

Boomers have quite simply been the biggest beneficiary of a �massive wealth transfer,� wrote the BofA team led by Ohsung Kwon, echoing Dalio�s observation that trillions of wealth flowed from the public to the private sector thanks to government policy since the 1980s, when boomers were in their prime working years. BofA pointed to the ballooning government debt�from 31% of GDP to 120% during that period�and the 10-year Treasury yield shrinking from 12% to 4.6% today (it�s actually 4.9% as of press time).

So how many trillions? Over this period, BofA calculates, U.S. household net worth has skyrocketed from $17 trillion to $150 trillion. Boomers, alongside �traditionalists,� hold two-thirds ($146 trillion) of that total net worth. This means that government policy has resulted in a $129 trillion wealth transfer into the pockets of those boomers and older Americans, BofA said (it didn�t clarify the exact apportionment of wealth between these two groups).

loving infuriating. The worst generation in American history.

# ? Oct 31, 2023 00:05

skooma512: Feb 8, 2012; You couldn't grok my race car, but you dug the roadside blur.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

lol sorry sean i dont care how good the book is, im not reading anything by the guy that beat off on live CNN

He did what?

# ? Oct 31, 2023 00:13

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

skooma512 posted:

He did what?

it was actually an inter-office zoom call but yeah

# ? Oct 31, 2023 00:14

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

its history now and on topic to discuss in this thread at least it must be since it would be pretty weird for everyone to act like jeffrey toobin is a serious person whos learned from his mistakes if this was only like a few years ago

# ? Oct 31, 2023 00:25

Dr. Jerrold Coe: Feb 6, 2021; Is it me?

Chamale posted:

This is one of the most common misconceptions of modern history. Banana candy tastes the way it does because of a chemical called isoamyl acetate - nicknamed banana oil because it smells somewhat like bananas - that was used to water-proof canvas airplane wings. It's made by combining a byproduct of alcohol distillation with vinegar, so it's cheap to produce. When airplanes started to be made of metal, there was a glut of banana oil, so companies used it to produce banana-flavoured candy. It was never intended to be a close match to the scent or flavour of bananas, it's just an extremely cheap chemical that happens to be close enough.

It's also one of the weirdest lines in the overheated, nonstop English dub for Godzilla Raids Again (1959): "Aw, banana oil!"

https://archive.org/details/godzilla-raids-again-1989-video-treasures

# ? Oct 31, 2023 05:13

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

https://twitter.com/aquaimperium8/status/1720184063233806754

# ? Nov 3, 2023 19:13

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

I've been reading Midnight at the Pera Palace and it's super fun. Wish I'd picked it up earlier.

quote:

Since the bar run by the sometime madame Bertha Proctor was just down Graveyard Street from Dr. Chukri�s office�a bar that employed women whose names are recorded in history only as Frying Pan, Square rear end, Mother�s Ruin, Fornicating Fannie, and Skinny Liz�it was possible for men and women to acquire a disease and be relieved of it on the same city block.

# ? Nov 4, 2023 03:07

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

quote:

A detailed survey of first-run films in the summer of 1932 revealed the range of Istanbul�s viewing preferences: 96 percent of films showed characters using alcohol, 74 percent had a plot concerned with wealth or luxury, 70 percent centered on a love affair, 67 percent had actresses clad in suggestive clothing, 52 percent showed passionate romance, and 37 percent featured sexy dancing. Most of the movies�63 percent�were also determined to have an implausible plot.

I wanna be the guy doing the survey

Deciding what is implausible, deciding what dancing is sexy dancing, deciding what plots concern wealth or luxury. gently caress yes. Dream job.

# ? Nov 4, 2023 03:15

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I wanna be the guy doing the survey

Deciding what is implausible, deciding what dancing is sexy dancing, deciding what plots concern wealth or luxury. gently caress yes. Dream job.

was a lot easier when they had intertitles to convey dialogue and plot, as opposed to indistinct mumbling

# ? Nov 4, 2023 07:06

Tankbuster: Oct 1, 2021

Incredible things were happening in Singapore after the city fell to the Japanese.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ? Nov 6, 2023 13:10

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

That reminds me of an argument I had with a bunch of Americans 20 years ago who insisted there are both male and female cows and bulls are a different species.

# ? Nov 6, 2023 13:29

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Orange Devil posted:

That reminds me of an argument I had with a bunch of Americans 20 years ago who insisted there are both male and female cows and bulls are a different species.

They must have gotten confused by people who claim that goats and sheep are different species, rather than male and female.

# ? Nov 6, 2023 14:03

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Uhuh, yeah, ok.

# ? Nov 6, 2023 14:53

Weka: May 5, 2019; That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.

Tankbuster posted:

Incredible things were happening in Singapore after the city fell to the Japanese.

Wasn't there a chronic food shortage?
E: just realized they may have had a religious reason not to slaughter the cattle.

# ? Nov 6, 2023 21:28

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

In WW2, which regular soldiers were the worst off? Worst supplied, suffered the most, everything. I'm not counting people in punishment battalions or irregulars of any kind, no matter how organized.

My answer is the collaborationist soldiers in China or the Romanians

# ? Nov 8, 2023 13:03

Tankbuster: Oct 1, 2021

Weka posted:

Wasn't there a chronic food shortage?
E: just realized they may have had a religious reason not to slaughter the cattle.

well I was reading a book about the INA. The Japanese then were eager to get the newly captured indian troops on their side and were willing to provide them with (male) cows.

# ? Nov 8, 2023 14:04

Weka: May 5, 2019; That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.

Tankbuster posted:

well I was reading a book about the INA. The Japanese then were eager to get the newly captured indian troops on their side and were willing to provide them with (male) cows.

Just seemed weird to me to release 50 edible bulls when there was a food shortage until I realized those fellows may have had a good reason to.

# ? Nov 8, 2023 23:15

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

I didn't know where to post this account of the Belsen trials. I don't know what to make of people like this:

"(Belsen female SS guard) Irma Greese, a simple but fanatical Nazi who had joined the Party to spite her left-wing father, felt victimized by her work in the camps as well:

The conditions in the concentration camps were bad for everyone, including the SS.The only time that I was allowed to go home for five days was after I had finished my training in Ravensbruck. I told my father about the concentration camp and he hit me and told me never to enter the house again."

I mean, good for him, obviously. That was probably a dangerous thing to do in Nazi Germany, but seriously wtf.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 03:45

Slavvy: Dec 11, 2012

Nazis are always the victims in their story, they are driven by resentment and think of themselves as righteously striking back against their oppressors.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 05:53

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

One of the concentration camp guards in Jasenovac had a therapist, who was an inmate, because reality has a sick sense of humor sometimes. Said inmate survived the war, and (for obvious reasons) didn't hold his patient's privacy in high regards.

The guard complained to the therapist that during a prisoner killing contest (recorded and confirmed as a thing to have existed by multiple people), he ran into an old man who lost his entire family, who was still lucid but couldn't be intimidated no matter how much the guard tortured and humiliated him. This made the guard very depressed, so he quit the contest after killing the man, and then kept complaining how he lost the sense of euphoria from the killings and wants the therapist to help him to get it back.

Dude got traumatized from the torture he was inflicting, and wanted to get it out of the way so he could torture some more.
The winner of the above contest successfully fled to USA and was never found, by the way.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 09:58

Tankbuster: Oct 1, 2021

Frosted Flake posted:

I didn't know where to post this account of the Belsen trials. I don't know what to make of people like this:

"(Belsen female SS guard) Irma Greese, a simple but fanatical Nazi who had joined the Party to spite her left-wing father, felt victimized by her work in the camps as well:

The conditions in the concentration camps were bad for everyone, including the SS.The only time that I was allowed to go home for five days was after I had finished my training in Ravensbruck. I told my father about the concentration camp and he hit me and told me never to enter the house again."

I mean, good for him, obviously. That was probably a dangerous thing to do in Nazi Germany, but seriously wtf.

dads rock. Also loling at the german Dasha.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 10:23

genericnick: Dec 26, 2012

Tankbuster posted:

dads rock.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 12:17

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Red Scare worthy thesis Becoming Evil: The Shaping of a Nazi Female Consciousness from Weimar through the Third Reich

Don't stay in grad school too long posted:

...while historians have extensively studied this period (the Holocaust), relatively few have examined the roles that women like Grese played, and still less has been written on how these women came to occupy those roles. This thesis aims to remedy this by taking a broad view of evolving attitudes on women�s public engagement from the Weimar Republic through the Third Reich to determine how a German female consciousness developed that led some of these women to become active participants in the Holocaust.

More specifically, this thesis seeks to answer an as-yet open question regarding what drove German women to commit the acts they perpetrated during the Holocaust. It argues that through the Weimar Era of Germany, a feminine conscience developed that would come to underpin women�s involvement in the Final Solution. By obtaining the right to vote, women became politically active and pursued equal rights in all aspects of life. Women�s newfound assertiveness created a �New Woman,� which would reshape German society. Many German women remained adamantly opposed to the emergence of this �New Woman,� and to gender equality. Crucially, though, those who were open to these social changes were members of the younger generation that would become
complicit in the Nazis� crimes a decade later.

...women like Grese were arguably only able to contribute in the public ways they did thanks to the trailblazing that Weimar-era feminism had done in making the public sphere open to women.

...

Notwithstanding, the work of women like Grese who worked in the concentration camps has not always been recognized by scholars, as these women were not members of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi state charged with implementing the Final Solution, the Schutzstaffell (SS); they were instead civilian employees of the SS. And moreover, because employing these women in positions outside traditionally feminine roles would have gone against Nazi ideology and been contradictory to Hitler�s beliefs, they typically were not engaged in direct persecution of camp prisoners like male camp guards; rather, they served as nurses or secretaries and in some cases were married to SS officers, as in the case of Ilse Koch, spouse of Buchenwald Commandant Karl-Otto Koch. Such gender roles as these were not however uniquely German. German women, like many other women in different parts of the world, still struggled with their place in the political sphere.

...

In Grese�s case, what is surprising is that her father was staunchly against Nazism, a difference of opinion that scholars have in the main faulted for Grese�s departure from her family home and entry into the Nazi bureaucracy at an especially tender age

Sailor National Socialism

Cross-examination of Helene Grese (sister) at the Belsen Trial:

How long before 1943 was it since you had seen your sister?
-- In spring, 1942, when she was working in the dairy.

When she came home in 1943, did your father give her a thrashing?
-- I did not see that, but he was quarrelling with ther because she was in the S.S.

Did he forbid her to come to the house again?
-- I do not know. She never came again.

Was not that because she told you what she did at Ravensbr�ck?
-- I do not know why.

You would be 16 at that time; you never asked your sister what she was doing in the concentration camp, and she never told you?
-- She told us she was supervising the prisoners working inside the compound, and she had to see that they were doing their work well and that they did not escape. We asked her: "What do the prisoners get for food, and why have they been sent to a concentration camp?" and she answered that she was not allowed to talk to the prisoners and did not know what sort of food they got.

Why did your father lose his temper with her?
-- Because he was very much against her being in the S.S. We all wanted to belong to the Bund Deutscher M�dchen, but he never allowed us to do so. I have not seen my father since April, 1945.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 13:48

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Gotta be honest, having your children turn out to be nazis in spite of your vehement opposition must be an all-time nightmare scenario.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 13:57

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Frosted Flake posted:

-- Because he was very much against her being in the S.S. We all wanted to belong to the Bund Deutscher M�dchen, but he never allowed us to do so. I have not seen my father since April, 1945.

oh yeah we didn't want to join the SS, nosiree bob, we just wanted to be in the women's wing of the Hitler Youth

# ? Nov 9, 2023 14:20

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

The "we" might just refer to the children there and not the father. It's ambiguous, and a bit weird if he'd be violently mad about joining the one nazi organization but supportive of joining the other.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 14:32

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Orange Devil posted:

The "we" might just refer to the children there and not the father. It's ambiguous, and a bit weird if he'd be violently mad about joining the one nazi organization but supportive of joining the other.

yeah I mean that's the other child speaking right? so "we" was she and her sister

# ? Nov 9, 2023 14:33

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

gradenko_2000 posted:

yeah I mean that's the other child speaking right? so "we" was she and her sister

Yeah.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 14:36

Fish of hemp: Apr 1, 2011; A friendly little mouse!

Well of course I was never a true believer, I simply wanted to advance my career.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 15:06

Azathoth: Apr 3, 2001

Fish of hemp posted:

Well of course I was never a true believer, I simply wanted to advance my career.

The worst part is, that's probably true. I was reading a book on North Korea and while the author was talking about the loyalty displays, they speculated that in any given system maybe 10% of the people are true believers and the rest are just trying to get through their day to day existence. They also opined that such would hold true for communism in China or capitalism in America.

I don't make any claims about the percentage, but the overall idea feels true. And that's the really hosed up thing. Like, it's easy for the average person to wrap their head around someone getting convinced by a charismatic leader about a new morality system, it's way harder for them to comprehend someone already having that murderousness inside them and being willing to use the state to kill someone so they can have slightly better material conditions. Folks really don't like to sit with the implications of that one so we have this cultural idea that everyone in Nazi Germany was brainwashed and as soon as Hitler was dead everyone looked around and said "well that sure was crazy, so glad we're all sane now". A lot of these assholes tried to use the "just following orders" defense, but that's loving worse.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 15:39

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Frosted Flake posted:

I didn't know where to post this account of the Belsen trials. I don't know what to make of people like this:

"(Belsen female SS guard) Irma Greese, a simple but fanatical Nazi who had joined the Party to spite her left-wing father, felt victimized by her work in the camps as well:

just a simple country Nazi...

# ? Nov 9, 2023 16:44

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

gradenko_2000 posted:

yeah I mean that's the other child speaking right? so "we" was she and her sister

Another context clue is that even a nazi dad probably wouldn't want to join the league of german girls.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 18:30

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Critical support for the dad sticking by the "see a Nazi, beat a Nazi" principle though.

# ? Nov 9, 2023 19:07

uninterrupted: Jun 20, 2011

So I'm reading Black April, and in it there's mention of a Congressional delegation to South Vietnam in 1975. Specifically, it says:

quote:

�Despite Ford�s best intentions, the U.S. congressional visit to South Vietnam from 25 February until 3 March was, for the most part, an abject failure. So much has been written about the disastrous congressional trip that the author will not cover it here. The level of buffoonery exhibited by Representative Bella Abzug surely was a new low in American diplomacy.�

I have found literally no information about this delegation or Bella Abzug behavior during outside of these meeting minutes: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v10/d182

Anyone know what the 'buffoonery' refers to?

# ? Nov 17, 2023 23:51

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

uninterrupted posted:

So I'm reading Black April, and in it there's mention of a Congressional delegation to South Vietnam in 1975. Specifically, it says:

I have found literally no information about this delegation or Bella Abzug behavior during outside of these meeting minutes: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v10/d182

Anyone know what the 'buffoonery' refers to?

I did find this old NYT article talking about a one day stop they made in Cambodia shortly before the Khmer Rouge took over, which has some examples of buffoonery, though not from Abzug herself: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/02/archives/tour-in-cambodia-fails-to-sway-congressmen-us-legislators-visit.html

quote:

The members of Congress did get to hear some battle noises when they visited military bases some distance from the fighting. Troop commanders periodically fired their artillery pieces for show�in an effort to impress the visitors with the drama and immediacy of the war. Each round fired from the 105‐mm. howitzers cost $43.83 and each one fired from a 155‐mm. howitzer cost $102.35.4

Wherever the legislators went today�to military command posts, refugee camps, the presidential palace, the United. States Embassy � they were continuously surrounded by newsmen recording their remarks in notebooks and on film.

Sometimes they asked for privacy, and the press corps withdrew briefly, but mostly they seemed to enjoy the attention. Others in the group also seemed to be enjoying themselves, such as an important civilian official from the Pentagonwho wore his tailored combat camouflage uniform and steel helmet throughout the day �although he did take the helmet off for the high‐level lunch at Government House.

...

For part of the day, the legislators‐who flew back to Saigon in late afternoon �broke up into groups of two. The only solidly hawkish team was Mr. Chappell and Representative John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, a former Marine colonel twice wounded in Vietnam.

Dressed in sports shirts and green army trousers, they drove down to see some troops on Route 1 southeast of Phnom Penh. With the local commanding general standing alongside listening to all the answers, Mr. Murtha, a tall and solidly built man, spoke to a small soldier who had no shoes and whose knees were poking through gaping holes in his uniform. �Do you like it in the army,� he asked. �Yes, sir,� the soldier replied, corning to attention.

�Are you getting enough food?� the Representative continued.

�Yes, sir,� the boy said.

�Do you think you can hold out until the rainy season?�

�Yes, sir,� came the answer again.

�Spoken like a good soldier� Mr. Murtha boomed. �Nice to see you�

# ? Nov 18, 2023 00:17

Azathoth: Apr 3, 2001

given the comment about only one of the pairs of congresscritters being reliably hawkish, it wouldn't surprise me if the buffoonery also includes just generally saying anti-war things beyond the general idiocy outlined there. Abzug was pretty well known for being anti-war and people still loving hate Jane Fonda for that poo poo 50 years later.

# ? Nov 18, 2023 00:54

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# ? May 24, 2024 23:40

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

weird that people hate jane fonda at all since everyone knows that america and especially american artists were extremely antiwar and this was an important plank of the countrys free expression that they could say or do whatever they wanted in regard to that with no consequences

# ? Nov 18, 2023 01:15

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