http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2237414.ece

perhaps the funniest take on adolf hitler since "springtime for hitler." turns out he had jewish and russian musicians in his record collection.

i pretty much laughed till i cried reading this. but, to be fair, i think the real issue here is, did he truly believe in what he was preaching or was he using racial hatred to manipulate and control the masses? i actually think it's a fair question.

***

The famous dictator and Nazi regalia enthusiast Adolf Hitler has been in the news again, which just goes to show that everlasting memories of horrendous genocide are almost as effective as being snapped alighting knickerless from a taxi semi weekly as a way of keeping you in the public eye. This time the excuse for trotting out more pictures of Hitler looking as if his milliner’s measuring tape might be a little off is the “discovery” of his record collection. and within it the works of a number of Russian composers and Jewish musicians. There among the Bayreuth Live! recordings and – I’m only guessing here, you understand – self-help tapes, including Seven Habits of Highly Mistaken Lunatics and Polish for Beginners, were recordings of works by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and others whom he accused of creating “sub-human” music.

First, let’s be fair: we’ve all got embarrassing things in our record collections. In my younger days I had a copy of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody on seven-inch, before it occurred to me that I was a boy in the late stages of adolescence and not a mid-forties divorcée. I’m entirely certain that dinner parties that I’ve hosted in the hope of converting new acquaintances into full-blown friends have ended early when guests’ eyes have alighted on that old cassette of Boney M’s seminal Nightflight to Venus album so beloved of my seven-year-old self. Show me a man with a culturally faultless CD pile and I’ll show you a man with a loft.

But what those who have written up this story seem to want us to learn from it is that Hitler was a hypocrite. I know, I know, and he seemed so nice.

I can’t help wondering what we’re supposed to do with this information. Is it supposed to make us feel less well disposed towards Hitler than we previously were? If so, how? Is it possible that there are people for whom someone being a practitioner of genocide but not a hypocrite is significantly preferable to a practitioner of genocide who is also a proven humbug? Are there perhaps even those for whom this record collection revelation could just act as the final tip of the balance in favour of the Hitler-Was-Not-a-Nice-Man school of thought? Let us assume for the sake of our optimism about the world that there are not such people (and in order to keep that assumption viable, let’s not go on the internet for a while).

Perhaps, these being 24-hour-news-cycle, goldfish-minded times, the ladies and gentlemen of the press are concerned that some of the old things we didn’t like about Hitler have become rather overfamiliar to us and stale, so that we need constant, fresh things to dislike about him: yeah, yeah, he plunged the world into the grisliest conflict in history’s bloody stagger through the 20th century – heard it; sure, sure, he exterminated millions off the back of catastrophic misreadings of Nietzsche and Darwin – tell us something we don’t know. He what? He used to turn his underpants inside out so he could wear them for two days, you say? Ooh, that Hitler.

You have to hope not. In truth, it’s most likely that this story has been reported to satisfy the peculiar appetite most of us have for knowledge of the peccadillos and smaller-scale misdoings of humanity’s blackest sheep. You can sit in school for terms on end exploring the finer points of the Munich beer hall putsch and Kristallnacht, but there is nothing you are more likely to remember in a pub quiz 15 years down the line than the details of Hitler’s alleged unconventional marrying of Saturday night bedtime naughties with the principle function of the human bowel.

You may imagine that we enjoy such items because they give us a key to understanding the inner workings of inconceivably warped minds, but I suspect that what truly lies behind our never ending interest in despot minutiae is, odd as it sounds, that it helps us to feel superior. Clearly, that is insane. As a rule of thumb, unless you have had an irate phone call from the UN confirming otherwise, you can, with absolute certainty, feel that you are better than Hitler.

Still, the story has done it’s job; we’ve all got to feel a bit cross and a bit superior without any of it really impinging on the time we’d set aside for DIY or feeling sorry for Amy Winehouse. And if we’re feeling a bit down again next week, the press can always run that story about Mussolini fiddling his Premium Bonds.

I will finish reading this after I stop laughing at the first sentence "Nazi regalia enthusiast Adolf Hitler".

omg, they mixed up their contractions and their possessives in the last paragraph. ("it's job"???????) what the hell are they smoking at the london times??

That was a howl, and while you are about it click on the bush/god article    ;D

:D

That reminds me of an episode of "Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends" in which Theroux pays a visit to some Afrikaaner white separatists.  The man and his wife were part of a new white-only township.  They were going on about the superiority of the white race and how the blacks wreck everything.  The usual rubbish.  Theroux is in their living room checking stuff out and he goes over to the record collection.  All of a sudden the guy gets really irritated and tells Louis to back off, but Louis is like, "Wait a minute, let's see what we've got here--Lionel Ritchie, Diana Ross, The Temptations..."
"That's enough, my friend!  Turn the camera off!"

:D

It's not exactly news, is it?

I mean, the guy extolled the supremacy of the tall, blond Aryan race while being a short, dark Austrian... that could be described as somewhat selfless, until you realize that he obviously put himself in with the tall, blond lot.

But the article was beautifully tongue-in-cheek with some great one-liners.  Made me think:


To Berlin
A rabid Austrian came
He preached anti-semitic genocide
And Hitler was his name
Kristallnacht
And pogroms began again
And Jews were shipped
Off to Auschwitz
And were never seen again...

But..

Hitler the hypocrite picked a disc
And listened to some Tchaikovsky
(Well, Wagner's just a thumpety-thump
Thump! Thump! Thump!)
Hitler the hypocrite picked a disc
And grooved on down to a Sondheim
(Hell, Beethoven's just Da-da-da-dummm
Dummm!  Dummm!  Dummm!)


A trifle sick, methinks, but has potential... no prizes for guessing the tune.

That reminds me of an episode of "Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends" in which Theroux pays a visit to some Afrikaaner white separatists.  The man and his wife were part of a new white-only township.  They were going on about the superiority of the white race and how the blacks wreck everything.  The usual rubbish.  Theroux is in their living room checking stuff out and he goes over to the record collection.  All of a sudden the guy gets really irritated and tells Louis to back off, but Louis is like, "Wait a minute, let's see what we've got here--Lionel Ritchie, Diana Ross, The Temptations..."
"That's enough, my friend!  Turn the camera off!"


That's not too unusual. In the 1920s and 30s, there were a fair amount of white people in the United States who enjoyed listening to jazz music made by black musicians, but who still believed in racial segregation.

That's not too unusual. In the 1920s and 30s, there were a fair amount of white people in the United States who enjoyed listening to jazz music made by black musicians, but who still believed in racial segregation.

Well, that's exactly my point.  Black jazz musicians made the legendary Cotton Club what it was, but they were allowed only as entertainers, not as patrons, and they had to use the back door. 

In the Jim Crow era, whites had no problem with this.  "Coloreds are very musical people," they would say.  But that didn't mean they were not inferior to whites.  The fact that Eugene Terreblanca had a problem with the world seeing the black artists in his record collection is significant.  Even Afrikaaner white separatists are underconfident about the ideology.

There are even more glaring ways in which Hitler contradicted his own professed beliefs. He was supposed to believe that the white race was superior to all other races, but he was still allies with the Japanese.

There are even more glaring ways in which Hitler contradicted his own professed beliefs. He was supposed to believe that the white race was superior to all other races, but he was still allies with the Japanese.

He did it because he needed them in the Axis strategically.  If he won the war, he would have thrown the Japanese under the bus as soon as he could get away with it!
::)

He did it because he needed them in the Axis strategically.  If he won the war, he would have thrown the Japanese under the bus as soon as he could get away with it!
::)


...or in the ovens.

Imagine if Hitler were alive today, but his face and name were unknown. Germany is no longer a threat to world peace (except for making crappy Volkswagens), thus, he is out of a job. He goes for a job interview...

"So, Mr. Hitler, what can you tell me about yourself?"

~~"Well, I have a few things in my life of which I'm not proud."

"Such as?"

~~"I invaded another country and ruthlessly slaughtered its people in 1939."

"That's bad, but it's ancient history..."

~~"I planned on conquering the world and killed millions of people in the process."

"I guess we can forgive that."

~~"I took a crapload of drugs and thought of committing suicide."

"That's understandable."

~~"I'm certifiably nutso."

"We have treatment programs for that."

~~"I'm also a raging hypocrite."

"What? HOW DARE YOU! OF ALL THE NERVE! A HYPOCRITE?! You... you... go to Hell, Mr. Hitler!"

Ant

I can’t help wondering what we’re supposed to do with this information. Is it supposed to make us feel less well disposed towards Hitler than we previously were? If so, how?


It's supposed to make us listen to Hugh Marsh's Rules Are Made To Be Broken, and I'm probably not giving anything away by pointing out that it's a spoken-word reading of the Nazi regime's regulations on music... with Marsh and band breaking each and every rule, word for word. 

It's a great piece of history, but more importantly, it's a great piece of jazz. 

"If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know."
- Louis Armstrong

I don't say this lightly:  for those who don't listen to jazz, Rules Are Made To Be Broken is the closest anyone's come to (unintentionally) proving Armstrong wrong.  It's the closest thing anyone's ever come to explaining jazz without destroying it in the process.  I'll forgive Armstrong for not forseeing that the Nazis would rise, issue hundreds of pages of orders concerning the sort of music that was fit for the German airwaves, and that 50 years after 50,000,000 people died over it, a jazz musician would pick up a few of those pages, use them as a how-to manual, and by breaking each and every rule, in sequence, write a song based on it.  Even Armstrong's cool had its limits.