The Old Hack

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/assorted-18a-004

Just keeping the conversation on track.

Given that they wanted to and STILL want to murder me, my wife, my father, my brother, his children and more other people than I can readily count, I do not feel inclined to spare their tender feelings.

It's true as long as you are bigger and heavier than anyone else on the road. You would not believe how safe I feel in my Leopard II. Oh sure, I hear this occasional crunchy noise as I drive but I don't think it is the engine, I check it coming back home and it seems fine.

Yes. That's fear. Is fear a cultural contribution? Am I unfairly representing Nazis when I say of them that people feared and hated them? Should I feel concerned about their feelings? But doing what Shriver recommends and completely ignore those people who may be harmed is no solution either.

http://egscomics.com/comic/tlod-012

Look, I apologised already and I promise I won't let any more von Dänikenites in to look for alien technology in your pyramid. The last batch was a mistake anyway.

Look, let's just end this, please. This is not helping me with my burnout and my stress and it keeps nagging at me. I am willing to concede that I set a high bar for what is a cultural contribution of lasting value that makes its originating group entitled to name themself a culture, but it is in the context of the start of the discussion which deals with cultural appropriation and abuse of culture that provides an identity. All I am asking for is some sort of cultural contribution you can identify with that isn't either eating your fellow human beings or mass murder.

Stay off Twitter and social media of any sort for at least a day. Maybe several. And possibly also less respectable news outlets. I beg you all, in the name of God. I have seen an image I shall never be able to unsee and I may never be able to eat a mushroom again, or even look at one.

Hahahahahahahaha. Have you ever tried to read it? I defy you to read even the first half of it without giving up. I am STILL struggling to read the damned thing and I have beat my brains out against it for more than a year. But seriously, I would like you to try. And then explain precisely what is in it that you see as a cultural contribution.

But I did not do that. I asked you to provide an example of a Nazi cultural contribution with staying power that they hadn't just copied from somewhere else. You still haven't.

You won it anyway. Consider it an award for playing Nazi apologist to a man whose family was almost murdered by the 'cultural contributions' of the Nazis.

I am too tired to continue this so you win. Nazis are a pinnacle of culture and since you admire them so much for all of me you can keep them. Maybe you can have a stay in a concentration camp sometime so you can marvel at Nazism at its peak.

http://egscomics.com/comic/tlod-013

I am sorry. It is too late. You have beheld the Doom of Man and there is no escape now. All we can do is pray that merciful Madness will spread her wings to shelter our faltering minds so we may know some semblance of peace ere the End.

You should be safe in a few days when it has died down. I hope.

Especially stay away from the Mushroom Kingdom. And any reference to Mario Kart. I beg you.

Not really, no. That is a reaction to cannibalism produced by mainstream media. A genuine cultural contribution by a cannibalistic society would involve some sort of cannibal art, science, literary or architectural achievement that originated from them and either survived to our time or found acceptance in other cultures in a form that was clearly traceable to them. Similarly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" cannot really be called a Soviet cultural achievement even though they ran the Gulags and provided the abuse that Solzhenitsyn suffered. Rather, it could be called countercultural in that it provoked him to write it as a response. And I am afraid I must reject Elie Wiesel's "Night" as an example of Nazi culture for the same reason. If for no other reason than I have trouble seeing concentration camps of any sort as a cultural achievement.

I have not really spent that much time looking into it -- do you know what cultural innovations and art and literature the Soviet system managed to generate in the time it had? I'd be curious to know.

An incredibly courageous German diplomat caught wind of what was going on and he and some of his friends risked their lives in getting word out before the operation started. Many Danish Jews quietly prepared for flight. On the night between October 1 and October 2, 1943 the Nazis started their action but only caught 500 Danish Jews, or about 5% of the total. The rest managed to escape to Sweden or simply to stay hidden in the time that followed. I have mentioned that my own family was part of this. My uncle Per was only a few months old, and my grandfather and grandmother did not dare to bring him along for fear that his crying would bring the Nazis down on them. Instead my family's beloved and loyal nanny Gerda took charge of him and went out of town, pretending that he was her own. My grandparents and my eight year old father then went to the coast hoping to find transport across the Sound. They could not find a vessel willing to carry them but managed to buy a leaky rowboat for the exorbitant price of five thousand crowns, or roughly thirty to fifty thousand dollars in today's currency. The rowboat nearly sank and one time they feared they had been turned around, but they finally reached Sweden. Fortunately they were not greeted by a Nazi-sympathising government that separated my father from his parents and sent him to a children's internment camp. I am very thankful for that. Faithful Gerda stayed hidden for three months but rumour got around that she was hiding a Jewish baby and she was forced to flee. She managed to reach Sweden and started to search for my grandparents. Once again, the Swedes did not seize my uncle and send him to a holding facility for refugee babies. And after many weeks of searching she found my grandparents and my father. It was an emotional reunion and Gerda was part of my family for the rest of her life. Of course, this would have been impossible without the cooperation of many Danish politicians, police officers and civilians. Fortunately not all of the fleeing families had to deal with greedy war profiteers to escape. And happily and importantly, when it became possible to return home to Denmark again, the way opened by the Allied soldiers who fought so long and hard to destroy the Nazi abomination, Danish Jews were welcomed home. My own family found their apartment completely untouched if a bit dusty. All that was missing was a bottle of brandy that the janitor had availed himself of, and given how well he had taken care of everything my family hardly begrudged him that. I owe my life and freedom to the German officials who leaked a warning of the upcoming purge, to the Danish politicians who quietly spread the word, to all the people who aided in the flight, to the Swedes who so generously gave shelter to my family and so many others, and of course to the efforts of the American and English soldiers -- and to all the Americans and English who worked so hard and paid so much back in their homes. My wife's grandfather, a Captain in the U. S. Corps of Engineers, fought his way from D-Day to Berlin, missing only the Ardennes offensive because he was on Christmas leave. It was a privilege to have known him. (Lord, but the man hated Nazis. I find it hard to blame him.) This story is very much on my mind these days. I apologise for rambling about it, but I feel better with it out here. Thank you all.

Oooh! Tell me about their cultural influences! What works of art have they produced, and how have they shaped their successors? I'm sure you can come up with examples. The Babylonians were thousands of years ago and as mentioned we got the sexagesimal minute from them, and of course they established the idea of a formal code of laws. The Egyptians left so much great art and established mathematical principles we still use today. (The windmills that deliver the clean energy that powers my apartment were designed based on Egyptian mathematics.) The Romans and Greek, well, I'm sure I don't have to give many examples, especially not to an American. If they don't have influences like these, for all I care they could be yogurt cultures. They are cultures, too, and would serve about as well in WHAT THE WHOLE DISCUSSION IS ABOUT as yours.

I admit that sentencing someone to be thrown to the Senators doesn't carry quite the same gravitas, no.

Wow. Are these cultures as influential as the cultures of Rome and Egypt?

You are still not getting it. That research was made by German researchers from German universities that had grown from centuries of German culture. And all of it had been co-opted by the Nazis. I will give you this challenge: point to even ONE actual cultural achievement produced by Nazi 'culture'. ONE. It can not be done. There is NOTHING in the Nazi movement that was not stolen from elsewhere. It's either that or you are postulating that the Nazi mentality was always there hidden in every single German and that it still is there today. And frankly, while I know some people do believe that, all they are doing is displaying the exact same mentality of hatred. That really depends on how you look at it. The Crusades killed an AWFUL lot of people and sometimes they were butchered in what you might call a ritualised manner. 'Deus Vult' was used to justify a LOT of killing. But yeah, they were pretty damn efficient at it. Not for culture. Pssst. Let me tell you a secret. Wikipedia is not actually the be all end all of all knowledge. It is just a knowledge repository being vigorously and constantly edited by a lot of fallible human beings who sometimes have trouble agreeing on the exact direction from where the Sun will rise the next day. Or in other words, I can live with being in conflict with Wikipedia. When I am, it is not necessarily me who is wrong. For that matter, it is not even certain that Wikipedia is being used correctly. Hm. That is a matter of definition. These are not the large cultures that ended up spanning empires. They were simply small ways of living confined to tribes. 'Agriculture' contains the word 'culture' but all that means is living off food grown from the land and that is pretty wide. The kind of culture I am talking about are the ones involving art forms so broadly accepted that they became styles used across long distances and sometimes for many centuries. If you take three tribes from fifty thousand years ago they might be quite close but have little in common as to how they did things. More modern culture, starting with for example Babylon, Egypt and the Romans, produced art so influential that it was widely admired and adapted for long distances and over many centuries. The sexagesimal system we took our minutes from is a remnant inherited from the Babylonians. That is an example of staying power. But tyrannies and dictatorship tend to be lackluster when it comes to cultural contributions and what they do leave behind is largely a reaction to them, not as a result of them. ('Guernica', for example.) Nazism was not a culture. It was a movement, and a reactionary movement at that. It was based on fear and hatred of the strange, the different and the new. What few icons it created were stolen from elsewhere. The 'art' you linked to above, for example, is directly copied from Greek and Roman statuary. All poor Albert Speer really managed was to add size and bombast to his architecture. And Saddam Hussein, in his absurd admiration of Hitler, pathetically copied that. He essentially made copies of copies and called it art. (Mind you, I would without hesitation call Charlie Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator' a work of art. But again, that is a reaction to Nazis and not actually produced by them.) Fear and hate are destructive in nature. By definition they cannot create. Perhaps the best example is the time Stalin desired a hotel constructed to impress guests from outside of Russia. He ordered some architects to plan one and they went to work, fearful of displeasing him. So they came up with two different schemes: one Renaissance, one Baroque. They took both plans with them and presented them to Stalin. He took one glance at them and said, "Yes, use that." Then he left. None of the architects dared to follow Stalin and explain to him that it was two sets of plans, not one. And they were terrified of appearing to disobey him. In order to cover their behinds, the final structure was half Renaissance, half Baroque. You could safely call the overall effect... shall we say, unusual. But I am not sure I would call it a daring new artistic effort of Stalinist 'culture.'