Comments

1. hakmao

   Wednesday 30 April 2008 at 23:47

   … and the Jews done it all anyway.

2. Jim Denham

   Thursday 1 May 2008 at 0:47

   OK: Wilby doesn’t quite argue that WW2 was an Allied conspiracy, but he does seem to argue that the jews wouldn’t have been killed if the allies had done a deal with Hitler…or have I misread this former editor of the ‘New Statesman’, Britain’s leading “left wing” magazine?
   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/25/foreignpolicy.iraq

3. Will

   Thursday 1 May 2008 at 1:00

   Although to be fair, the Yanks did take their fucking time about joining in on the whole ‘killing nazis’ thing - despite their “Lend-Lease” program (otherwise known as war-profiteering). Thank fuck for Pearl harbour - they might never have bothered otherwise.

4. Will

   Thursday 1 May 2008 at 1:11

   Sorry — scrub that — not ‘might never have bothered’ - make it ‘would not have bothered’.

5. hakmao

   Thursday 1 May 2008 at 8:44

   Thanks Jim … I think.

   The creatures outside looked from Wilby to Irving, and from Irving to Wilby, and from Wilby to Irving again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

   The thesis completely ignores the importance of ideology in the Nazi state and the centrality of antisemism in that ideology–the Nazis believed they were fighting a war of survival against Jewish bolshevism and international finance, and that if UK/USA/France opposed them, it was only because they were controlled by Jewish ’string-pullers’ behind the scenes or crypto-Jews in positions of power (so-called ‘mimicry). The Nazis used the words Ausrottung (extermination) and Vernichtung (annihilation) to refer to their plans for the Jews. And (obviously) the package holiday gone wrong thesis–we couldn’t send them to Madagascar so we had to send them to a resort in Poland instead–is bollocks.

   Hitler to a party meeting on 6 April, 1920:

   We don’t want to be the emotional anti-Semites who seek to create a mood for pogroms. Rather, we are driven by a pitiless and fierce determination to attack the evil at its roots and to exterminate it root and branch. Every means is justified to reach our goal, even if it means we have to make a pact with the devil.

   In a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 Hitler declared:

   I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly derided. At the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who only greeted with laughter my prophecies that I would someday take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people of Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that this hollow laughter of Jewry in Germany has already stuck in its throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe!

   That’s your trifecta right there–international baking, communism, Jewry.

   Now I will wash my keyboard.

6. SteveF

   Thursday 1 May 2008 at 15:21

   These days he’d probably get some regretful blog posts about who the real war criminals were, why it was in the interests of the allies to make him look bad, and how tragic it was the “truth” had died with him.

   Such sentiments will probably turn up here:

   http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/benjamin_pogrund/2008/05/why_we_are_here.html

7. No Good Boyo

   Thursday 1 May 2008 at 15:31

   Al-Jazeera, 29 April, via BBC Monitoring:

   On the Tariq Aziz story, Al-Jazeera’s coverage was sympathetic to the “leader of diplomacy” during Saddam’s era. The channel quoted his defence lawyers as saying that “the current government is seeking revenge against Aziz for refusing to testify against Saddam Hussein”. It broadcast part of a phone interview with Aziz’s son, Ziyad, who said his “innocent” father was targeted as a figure and not for any alleged crimes.

   Al-Jazeera also interviewed a defence lawyer, Badi’ Arif Izat, who criticized the postponement of the trial to the afternoon. He said the delay was “not a normal delay and has a purpose”. He stressed that the trial’s date was deliberately set today because it is Saddam’s birthday, which indicates that “the court is very politicized”. He added that there are internal struggles within the court because “the Sadrist and Badr trends are involved in addition to some who are influenced by external forces and some professionals”.

8. SteveF

   Thursday 1 May 2008 at 15:56

   Hmmmm, just to follow on from my previous remark, noted CiF racist “berchmans” made the following sinister sounding remark regarding the author of the blog:

   To Benjamin Pogrund with the gentle face

   http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/benjamin_pogrund/2008/05/why_we_are_here.html#comment-1315936