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ANOTHER VAGUE LINK BETWEEN THE LEFT AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Let’s see how the “Pope was a Nazi!” crowd copes with this:
Germany was rocked by the revelations last night that Günter Grass, its greatest living author and doyen of the Left, was a member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS.
The Nobel laureate, who has been the country’s moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview published today that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.
Germany’s “moral guide”, was he? Tough gig.
UPDATE. Lefty Lindsay Beyerstein stands by her man:
Regardless of whether GG served in the SS, I’m still looking forward to reading The Tin Drum, because Amanda totally sold me on the book on the drive back from the NOW conference in Albany.
UPDATE II. Leftist authors sure do love tyrants. Here’s Gabriel García Márquez—like Grass, a Nobel Prize winner—on Fidel Castro:
His devotion is to the word. His power is of seduction. He goes to seek out problems where they are. The impetus of inspiration is very much part of his style. Books reflect the breadth of his tastes very well. He stopped smoking to have the moral authority to combat tobacco addiction. He likes to prepare food recipes with a kind of scientific fervour. He keeps himself in excellent physical condition with various hours of gymnastics daily and frequent swimming. Invincible patience. Ironclad discipline. The force of his imagination stretches him to the unforeseen.
José Martí is his foremost author and he has had the talent to incorporate Martí‘s thinking into the sanguine torrent of a Marxist revolution. The essence of his own thinking could lie in the certainty that in undertaking mass work it is fundamental to be concerned about individuals.
He’s concerned about individuals, all right. That’s why he keeps jailing and killing them.
(Via Lois B.)
God, and driving back from the NOW conference was so…empowering, and we were women, driving in a car, back from a NOW conference, and discussing how I would really like The Tin Drum, and this was, like, amazing. More than that, it was awesome. And above all, of course, empowering. But I like this man, Gunter Grass. He’s what I look for in a guy: someone too old to be a sexual threat but still young enough to be an SS guy who’s not dead. Were they real bad? But he like apologized and everything, right? Cause that’s OK. President Clinton apologized and I’d blow him right here right now. Did I say we were driving back from a NOW conference yet?
Slow down with the updates already Tim! They are goddam depressing and I can’t drink fast enough to drown out the fawning moonbattery over monsters who kill for a living and instruct the rest of us on the inequity of life in our liberal,capitalist democracies.
Posted by Vanguard of the Commentariat on 2006 08 12 at 01:24 AM • permalinkWhy he was only a member of the Nazi version boy scouts. Yes we believe him.
Posted by stackja1945 on 2006 08 12 at 01:44 AM • permalinkOh, Benedict.
I thought you were referring to Pius XII. Now there was a real Nazi.
Posted by Harry Eagar on 2006 08 12 at 02:43 AM • permalinkWho knew the Waffen SS allowed in such perverted wankers as Grass? He’s always struck me as the kind of German that is into big time cacophagia.
And speaking of Castro, there is a film out now on DVD called “The Lost City”, directed by and starring Andy Garcia, a Cuban-American actor of some reknown and mucho talent.
Garcia’s real life family was forced to flee Cuba and his film depicts the vicious thuggery and manipulation of the revolution by Castro and Che Guevara. No Hollywood whitewash like Robert Redford, Steven Speilberg, and Oliver Stone, so it will win no awards.
I watched it the other night and it’s very well done.
Harry Eager,
You actually raise a very interesting point viz religion and fascism.
Some on the Left are chortling today over President Bush’s use of the term “Islamo-fascism”. Apparently, the moonbats see religion and fascism as mutually exclusive, ignoring Pope Pius in the 1930’s implied endorsements of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and O’Duffy, not to mention the Croat, Hungarian, and Vichy French.
Those were just aspects of CatholicClerical Fascism in one place at one time.
I drank as much or more in college than anyone but at least I went to friggin’ class, attended lectures, and read books, too. Why don’t these morons get it?
As I’ve said many times previously, National Socialism was a leftist, not a rightist manifestation. The fact that they were nationalistic meant little or nothing.
Hell, Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese regime was devoutly nationalistic AND devoutly communist.
Posted by Mike Jericho on 2006 08 12 at 03:41 AM • permalinkOh, and for those who are surprised that the Waffen SS would allow in someone like Grass, try to remember that toward the end of the war, the Germans were desperate for manpower.
The Waffen SS allowed in just about anyone who didn’t have a third eye.
Posted by Mike Jericho on 2006 08 12 at 03:45 AM • permalinkthe worst supporter of the castro regime , in my opinion, has been the vile vile wife (and now widow) of Mitterrand. typical of the French left’s love of that dreadful man, not to mention their love of Pol Pot etc
Posted by arnienelly on 2006 08 12 at 05:27 AM • permalinkwhat a piece of sycophantic crap from Gabriel García Márquez
and note where the article was first published (Granma),now let the Guardian print an article from one of Castro’s political prisoners (for balance of course).Posted by Torontosteve on 2006 08 12 at 07:42 AM • permalinkSangine? A sanguine torrent?!
Y’all know “sanguine” means bloody, right?
Posted by P. Froward on 2006 08 12 at 08:06 AM • permalinkThe Tin Drum? Isn’t that a novel about a perverted dwarf who crawls up a woman’s skirts? But he does it during World War 2 so that’s okay.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 08 12 at 09:16 AM • permalinkLater, hmm hm hm….
The central concept in the novel is that Hitler really was a devil and Nazism essentially the spell he cast, a bewitchment. If that was so, then Germans were the victims of a higher power against which they were defenseless, and they cannot be held accountable. The reasons that Germans became Nazis are open to rational analysis, but The Tin Drum instead encourages the mystification that they couldn’t really help themselves. The opposite of the Solzhenitsyn truth-telling that enables people to understand their choices and their fates, Grass’s approach smoothly converts Germans from active agents of Nazism into passive victims. The cop-out could hardly be more complete.
Source. Well, I hope that young NOW member has fun reading.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 08 12 at 09:41 AM • permalinkDescribing Cuba with “sanguine torrent” sounds appropriate enough to e.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 08 12 at 09:43 AM • permalinkAndrea, your link doesn’t work. Try this one.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 08 12 at 10:02 AM • permalinkMarkL, Wikipedia (grab your salt shaker) says that conscription was used later in WWII, but it’s unclear if conscription was applied to Germans. The only examples cited concern foreign nationals.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 08 12 at 10:10 AM • permalinkGrass has been publishing books for nearly 50 years. I remember reading his “From the Diary of Snail” many years ago. I’ve just been looking, unsuccessfully, for that old copy, but it gave a biography of him. I’m pretty sure it said he served in one of the minor, auxiliary arms of the German Armed forces - an anti-aircrat auxilliary (as Jospeh Ratsinger REALLY was) or something of the kind. It would be worth looking up what those old autobiographical jacket-blurbs actually said.
Posted by Susan Norton on 2006 08 12 at 10:36 AM • permalinkI thought you were referring to Pius XII. Now there was a real Nazi.
Ah, the slander that will not die, repeated endlessly by people whose knowledge of Pius XII has no doubt been gleaned primarily from polemical trash like Hitler’s Pope - whose author, incidentally, has largely recanted - and Hochhuth’s malicious play. As to the church’s implicit support of Franco, permit me to point out that elements of the Republican coalition were slaughtering clergy and laity in the thousands, digging up the remains of dead nuns and exhibiting their remains in defiled churches, and waging war against the very idea of God.
BLECHTROMMLER CLIFF NOTES:
If you get a horse’s head in your bed, hope it’s eel season.
If you go to a nightclub, take an onion
The end.On topic, now we know what the Stasi was holding over his head all these years and why the Left Gueard was so solid in raising him up to be “the moral voice” of Germany.
Smug ,annoying old bore should take a house at the seaside with Kurt Vonnegut.
Unkenrufe indeed.The Nobel laureate, who has been the country’s moral guide for decades
The “pseudo-intellectual wanker” part of the country, anyway.
“Regardless of whether GG served in the SS, I’m still looking forward to reading The Tin Drum ...”
Wow, what a useless statement. Looking forward to? The book was published 47 years ago, unless you’re in 10th grade you’ve had plenty of time to read it.
Anyway, I always found Günter Grass to be vaguely creepy (as well as the literatis’ unending infatuation with him), even before I realized just how far on the left he’s always been. As per Rebecca in #23 I must admit that I am surprised about this specific revelation, but not that something about him has come out. The guy was just too crazy for there not to be some skeletons in his closet.
The Nobel laureate, who has been the country’s moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview published today that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.
snip
Grass, who had volunteered for the submarine forces at the age of 15 to “get away from the family” but had been rejected, was recruited into the SS in the winter of 1944-45.
Odd, this. In his Nobel lecture, he said the following:
...when at fifteen I donned a uniform, at sixteen I learned what fear was, at seventeen I landed in an American POW camp, at eighteen I worked in the black market…
The two don’t seem to jive.
Grass said in the interview that he wanted to dispel the notion that Germans were unwilling victims of Hitler.
The notion that he himself advanced? But, of course they were unwilling victims. Just as the occupied French were all members of le Résistance.
Leftist authors sure do love tyrants.
Indeed. Don’t forget last year’s winner, Harold Pinter, the absurd absurdist, a Castro supporter and member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign UK, advocated freeing Slobodan Milosevic as a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević.
Apparently, the moonbats see religion and fascism as mutually exclusive…
I beg to differ, JBD. They see Christianity, in particular Fundamentalist Christianity, as the very embodiment of fascism.
Germany’s “moral guide”, was he? Tough gig.
Belly laugh, Tim.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 08 12 at 01:37 PM • permalinkThe Tin Draum was a nap-worthy movie, as I dozingly recall.
Like, I totally like Garcia Marquez, ‘cause he like totally tells all about how the old white men of like oil companies and bananas like, totally made the South Americans like, fight and stuff. And there was this totally like, womyn-friendly sex that wasn’t, you know, like that awful Tropic of Cancer that I read that was in my dad’s closet.
“The essence of his own thinking could lie in the certainty that in undertaking mass work it is fundamental to be concerned about individuals.”
Why do keep thinking of the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei?
Posted by G Hamid USA on 2006 08 12 at 02:33 PM • permalinkIn related news, CBS 60 Minutes Fossil Mike Wallace just returned from Iran and assures us Ahmedinajad is not anti-semitic…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 08 12 at 03:24 PM • permalinkRe Pope Pius XII: “Righteous Gentile”.
Cheers
Posted by J.M. Heinrichs on 2006 08 12 at 05:41 PM • permalink#38, Thanks for that link, Heinrichs. I remember my Grandad saying he’d never return to Vienna —“The City that Hates its Jews”—after his last trip in ‘64, but that he would go to Rome because of Pius XII.
He was always spitting chips whenever this “nazi pope” crap ever surfaced. He spent 25 years going through archives in Mittel Europe, Eastern Europe and Israel researching and compiling lists of relative lost and ancestors at risk of being forgotten.
He told me the Vatican had always been of enormous help to him in that task.
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 08 13 at 03:34 AM • permalinkGot an excellent answer from a very knowledgeable gentleman on a forum elsewhere.
It is very long, but basically the SS began as an all-volunteer organisation,but by the end of teh war was conscripting. So he may well be telling the truth when he says he was conscripted.
MarkL
Canberra“If you can get hold of George H. Stein’s “The Waffen-SS”, it gives a history of the convoluted interactions of the SS, the military, and Hitler which determined recruitment for the Waffen-SS at various periods of its existence.”
...
...“So in short, the armed SS was started as a model of “Aryan volunteers” according to the Nazi ideology, but the pressures of war made it less than a completely volunteer force even before it received the title of “Waffen SS”, and the remaining years of the war saw it become a multi-racial force far from Nazi ideals of “racial purity”.
MarkL—what I don’t understand is, if he was conscripted, why didn’t he own up to it? There’s no moral stain from forced actions, so why deny it?
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2006 08 13 at 12:07 PM • permalinkpaco,Mental, Heinrichs, I have one word for you: Croatia
Posted by Harry Eagar on 2006 08 13 at 06:34 PM • permalinkbut the pressures of war made it less than a completely volunteer force even before it received the title of “Waffen SS”, and the remaining years of the war saw it become a multi-racial force far from Nazi ideals of “racial purity”.
This is certainly true of the “foreign legion” divisions of the Waffen SS. I’m pretty sure they never conscripted Germans, though.
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See Kathryn Jean Lopez in NR’s Corner today and VDH on his web page for complete excoriation of this totalitarian enabler (and willing participant apparently). He was an anti-American, Soviet apologist for decades, even though he chose to live in evil, capitalist West Germany rather than heaven on earth egalitarian East Germany. Nobel prize laureate, that’s par for the course!