organization:nazi party

The State of Israel vs. the Jewish people -
Israel has aligned itself with one nationalist, even anti-Semitic, regime after another. Where does that leave world Jewry?
By Eva Illouz Sep 13, 2018
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-state-of-israel-vs-the-jewish-people-1.6470108

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6470107.1536854196!/image/2025029857.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/2025029857.jpg

An earthquake is quietly rocking the Jewish world.

In the 18th century, Jews began playing a decisive role in the promotion of universalism, because universalism promised them redemption from their political subjection. Through universalism, Jews could, in principle, be free and equal to those who had dominated them. This is why, in the centuries that followed, Jews participated in disproportionate numbers in communist and socialist causes. This is also why Jews were model citizens of countries, such as France or the United States, with universalist constitutions.

The history of Jews as promoters of Enlightenment and universalist values, however, is drawing to a close. We are the stunned witnesses of new alliances between Israel, Orthodox factions of Judaism throughout the world, and the new global populism in which ethnocentrism and even racism hold an undeniable place.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu chose to align himself politically with Donald Trump before and after the U.S. presidential election of 2016, some people could still give him the benefit of doubt. Admittedly, Trump was surrounded by people like Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, who reeked of racism and anti-Semitism, but no one was sure of the direction the new presidency would take. Even if Trump refused to condemn the anti-Semitic elements of his electoral base or the Ku Klux Klan, which had enthusiastically backed him, and even if it took him a long time to dissociate himself from David Duke – we were not yet certain of the presence of anti-Semitism in Trump’s discourse and strategies (especially since his daughter Ivanka was a convert to Judaism).

But the events in Charlottesville in August 2017 no longer allowed for doubt. The neo-Nazi demonstrators committed violent acts against peaceful counter-protesters, killing one woman by plowing through a crowd with a car (an act reminiscent in its technique of terrorist attacks in Europe). Trump reacted to the events by condemning both the neo-Nazis and white supremacists and their opponents. The world was shocked by his conflation of the two groups, but Jerusalem did not object. Once again, the indulgent (or cynical) observer could have interpreted this silence as the reluctant obeisance of a vassal toward his overlord (of all the countries in the world, Israel receives the most military aid from the United States). One was entitled to think that Israel had no choice but to collaborate, despite the American leader’s outward signs of anti-Semitism.

This interpretation, however, is no longer tenable. Before and since Charlottesville, Netanyahu has courted other leaders who are either unbothered by anti-Semitism or straightforwardly sympathetic to it, and upon whom Israel is not economically dependent. His concessions go as far as participating in a partial form of Holocaust denial.

Take the case of Hungary. Under the government of Viktor Orban, the country shows troubling signs of legitimizing anti-Semitism. In 2015, for example, the Hungarian government announced its intention to erect a statue to commemorate Balint Homan, a Holocaust-era minister who played a decisive role in the murder or deportation of nearly 600,000 Hungarian Jews. Far from being an isolated incident, just a few months later, in 2016, another statue was erected in tribute to Gyorgy Donáth, one of the architects of anti-Jewish legislation during World War II. It was thus unsurprising to hear Orban employing anti-Semitic tropes during his reelection campaign in 2017, especially against Georges Soros, the Jewish, Hungarian-American billionaire-philanthropist who supports liberal causes, including that of open borders and immigration. Reanimating the anti-Semitic cliché about the power of Jews, Orban accused Soros of harboring intentions to undermine Hungary.

Whom did Netanyahu choose to support? Not the anxious Hungarian Jewish community that protested bitterly against the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Orban’s government; nor did he choose to support the liberal Jew Soros, who defends humanitarian causes. Instead, the prime minister created new fault lines, preferring political allies to members of the tribe. He backed Orban, the same person who resurrects the memory of dark anti-Semites. When the Israeli ambassador in Budapest protested the erection of the infamous statue, he was publicly contradicted by none other than Netanyahu.

To my knowledge, the Israeli government has never officially protested Orban’s anti-Semitic inclinations and affinities. In fact, when the Israeli ambassador in Budapest did try to do so, he was quieted down by Jerusalem. Not long before the Hungarian election, Netanyahu went to the trouble of visiting Hungary, thus giving a “kosher certificate” to Orban and exonerating him of the opprobrium attached to anti-Semitism and to an endorsement of figures active in the Shoah. When Netanyahu visited Budapest, he was given a glacial reception by the Federation of the Jewish Communities, while Orban gave him a warm welcome. To further reinforce their touching friendship, Netanyahu invited Orban to pay a reciprocal visit to Israel this past July, receiving him in a way usually reserved for the most devoted national allies.

The relationship with Poland is just as puzzling. As a reminder, Poland is governed by the nationalist Law and Justice party, which has an uncompromising policy against refugees and appears to want to eliminate the independence of the courts by means of a series of reforms that would allow the government to control the judiciary branch. In 2016 the Law and Justice-led government eliminated the official body whose mission was to deal with problems of racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance, arguing that the organization had become “useless.”

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6470460.1536855272!/image/775907019.JPG_gen/derivatives/size_1406x1055/775907019.JPG

Encouraged by this and other governmental declarations and policies, signs of nationalism multiplied within Polish society. In February 2018, president Andrzej Duda declared that he would sign a law making it illegal to accuse the Polish nation of having collaborated with the Nazis. Accusing Poland of collusion in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities would be from now prosecutable. Israel initially protested the proposed legislation, but then in June, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, signed an agreement exonerating Poland of any and all crimes against the Jews during the time of the German occupation. Israel also acceded to Poland’s move to outlaw the expression “Polish concentration camp.” Moreover, Netanyahu even signed a statement stipulating that anti-Semitism is identical to anti-Polonism, and that only a handful of sad Polish individuals were responsible for persecuting Jews – not the nation as a whole.

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6470106.1536854705!/image/101185962.jpg_gen/derivatives/size_1406x1055/101185962.jpg

Like the American, Hungarian and Polish alt-right, Israel wants to restore national pride unstained by “self-hating” critics. Like the Poles, for two decades now, Israel has been waging a war over the official narrative of the nation, trying to expunge school textbooks of inconvenient facts (such as the fact that Arabs were actively chased out of Israel in 1948). In order to quash criticism, Israel’s Culture Ministry now predicates funding to creative institutions on loyalty to the state. As in Hungary, the Israeli government persecutes NGOs like Breaking the Silence, a group whose only sin has been to give soldiers a forum for reporting their army experiences and to oppose Israeli settlers’ violence against Palestinians or the expropriation of land, in violation of international law. Purging critics from public life (as expressed in barring the entry into the country of BDS supporters, denying funding to theater companies or films critical of Israel, etc.) is an expression of direct state power.

When it comes to refugees, Israel, like Hungary and Poland, refuses to comply with international law. For almost a decade now, Israel has not respected international conventions on the rights of refugees even though it is a signatory of said conventions: The state has detained refugees in camps, and imprisoned and deported them. Like Poland, Israel is trying to do away with the independence of its judiciary. Israel feels comfortable with the anti-democratic extreme right of European states in the same way that one feels comfortable with a family member who belches and gossips, losing any sense of self-control or table manners.

More generally, these countries today share a deep common political core: fear of foreigners at the borders (it must be specified, however, that Israelis’ fears are less imaginary than those of Hungarians or Polish); references to the nation’s pride untainted by a dubious past, casting critics as traitors to the nation; and outlawing human rights organizations and contesting global norms based on moral principles. The Netanyahu-Trump-Putin triumvirate has a definite shared vision and strategy: to create a political bloc that would undermine the current liberal international order and its key players.

In a recent article about Trump for Project Syndicate, legal scholar Mark S. Weiner suggested that Trump’s political vision and practice follow (albeit, unknowingly) the precepts of Carl Schmitt, the German legal scholar who joined the Nazi Party in 1933.

“In place of normativity and universalism, Schmitt offers a theory of political identity based on a principle that Trump doubtless appreciates deeply from his pre-political career: land,” wrote Weiner. “For Schmitt, a political community forms when a group of people recognizes that they share some distinctive cultural trait that they believe is worth defending with their lives. This cultural basis of sovereignty is ultimately rooted in the distinctive geography… that a people inhabit. At stake here are opposing positions about the relation between national identity and law. According to Schmitt, the community’s nomos [the Greek word for “law”] or sense of itself that grows from its geography, is the philosophical precondition for its law. For liberals, by contrast, the nation is defined first and foremost by its legal commitments.”

Netanyahu and his ilk subscribe to this Schmittian vision of the political, making legal commitments subordinate to geography and race. Land and race are the covert and overt motives of Netanyahu’s politics. He and his coalition have, for example, waged a politics of slow annexation in the West Bank, either in the hope of expelling or subjugating the 2.5 million Palestinians living there, or of controlling them.

They have also radicalized the country’s Jewishness with the highly controversial nation-state law. Playing footsie with anti-Semitic leaders may seem to contradict the nation-state law, but it is motivated by the same statist and Schmittian logic whereby the state no longer views itself as committed to representing all of its citizens, but rather aims to expand territory; increase its power by designating enemies; define who belongs and who doesn’t; narrow the definition of citizenship; harden the boundaries of the body collective; and undermine the international liberal order. The line connecting Orban to the nationality law is the sheer and raw expansion of state power.

Courting Orban or Morawiecki means having allies in the European Council and Commission, which would help Israel block unwanted votes, weaken Palestinian international strategies and create a political bloc that could impose a new international order. Netanyahu and his buddies have a strategy and are trying to reshape the international order to meet their own domestic goals. They are counting on the ultimate victory of reactionary forces to have a free hand to do what they please inside the state.

But what is most startling is the fact that in order to promote his illiberal policies, Netanyahu is willing to snub and dismiss the greatest part of the Jewish people, its most accepted rabbis and intellectuals, and the vast number of Jews who have supported, through money or political action, the State of Israel. This suggests a clear and undeniable shift from a politics based on the people to a politics based on the land.

For the majority of Jews outside Israel, human rights and the struggle against anti-Semitism are core values. Netanyahu’s enthusiastic support for authoritarian, anti-Semitic leaders is an expression of a profound shift in the state’s identity as a representative of the Jewish people to a state that aims to advance its own expansion through seizure of land, violation of international law, exclusion and discrimination. This is not fascism per se, but certainly one of its most distinctive features.

This state of affairs is worrisome but it is also likely to have two interesting and even positive developments. The first is that in the same way that Israel has freed itself from its “Jewish complex” – abandoning its role as leader and center of the Jewish people as a whole – many or most Jews will now likely free themselves from their Israel complex, finally understanding that Israel’s values and their own are deeply at odds. World Jewish Congress head Ron Lauder’s August 13, 2018, op-ed in The New York Times, which was close to disowning Israel, is a powerful testimony to this. Lauder was very clear: Israel’s loss of moral status means it won’t be able to demand the unconditional loyalty of world Jewry. What was in the past experienced by many Jews as an inner conflict is now slowly being resolved: Many or most members of Jewish communities will give preference to their commitment to the constitutions of their countries – that is to universalist human rights.

Israel has already stopped being the center of gravity of the Jewish world, and as such, it will be able to count only on the support of a handful of billionaires and the ultra-Orthodox. This means that for the foreseeable future, Israel’s leverage in American politics will be considerably weakened.

Trumpism is a passing phase in American politics. Latinos and left-wing Democrats will become increasingly involved in the country’s politics, and as they do, these politicians will find it increasingly difficult to justify continued American support of Israeli policies that are abhorrent to liberal democracies. Unlike in the past, however, Jews will no longer pressure them to look the other way.

The second interesting development concerns Europe. The European Union no longer knows what its mission was. But the Netanyahus, Trumps, Orbans and Morawieckis will help Europe reinvent its vocation: The social-democrat bloc of the EU will be entrusted with the mission of opposing state-sanctioned anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, and above all defending Europe’s liberal values that we, Jews and non-Jews, Zionists and anti-Zionists, have all fought so hard for. Israel, alas, is no longer among those fighting that fight.

A shorter version of this article has originally appeared in Le Monde.

The Nazi regime sought to tightly control the flow and interpretation of information, ultimately denying the public access to alternative news sources.

THE PRESS IN THE THIRD REICH.
Establishing Control of the Press.
▻https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-in-the-third-reich

The Propaganda Ministry, through its Reich Press Chamber, assumed control over the Reich Association of the German Press, the guild which regulated entry into the profession. Under the new Editors Law of October 4, 1933, the association kept registries of “racially pure” editors and journalists, and excluded Jews and those married to Jews from the profession. Propaganda Ministry officials expected editors and journalists, who had to register with the Reich Press Chamber to work in the field, to follow the mandates and instructions handed down by the ministry. In paragraph 14 of the law, the regime required editors to omit anything “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.”

The Propaganda Ministry aimed further to control the content of news and editorial pages through directives distributed in daily conferences in Berlin and transmitted via the Nazi Party propaganda offices to regional or local papers. Detailed guidelines stated what stories could or could not be reported and how to report the news. Journalists or editors who failed to follow these instructions could be fired or, if believed to be acting with intent to harm Germany, sent to a concentration camp. Rather than suppressing news, the Nazi propaganda apparatus instead sought to tightly control its flow and interpretation and to deny access to alternative sources of news.

Art et Liberté: Egypt’s Surrealists | by Charles Shafaieh | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

▻http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/02/03/art-et-liberte-egypts-surrealists

In March 1938, the Egyptian poet and critic Georges Henein and a small group of friends disrupted a lecture in Cairo given by the Alexandria-born Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, who was an outspoken supporter of Mussolini. Six months later, Henein, along with the Egyptian writer Anwar Kamel, the Italian anarchist painter Angelo de Riz, and thirty-four other artists, writers, journalists, and lawyers, signed the manifesto “Vive l’Art Dégénéré!” (“Long Live Degenerate Art!”) that would inaugurate Art et Liberté, a short-lived but influential artists’ collective based in Egypt that is the focus of an illuminating exhibition currently at the Tate Liverpool, in Britain, covering the years 1938–1948. Printed in Arabic and French, with a facsimile of Guernica on its reverse, the declaration was a direct challenge to the previous year’s Nazi-organized exhibition “Entartete ‘Kunst’” (“Degenerate ‘Art’”), which presented art by Chagall, Kandinsky and other modern artists, largely Jewish, that the Nazi Party deemed decadent, morally reprehensible or otherwise harmful to the German people.

Internationalist in orientation and opposed as much to fascist-endorsed art as to the Egyptian academy’s own nationalist-minded aesthetics that resurrected ancient symbols in the name of “Egyptianness,” the group declared that it was “mere idiocy and folly to reduce modern art… to a fanaticism for any particular religion, race, or nation.” Surrealism—in its rejection of tyranny in any form and by championing uninhibited freedom of expression—was a fitting counterpoint that the group believed could also be harnessed to bring about social change.

Hitler at Home
▻https://placesjournal.org/article/hitler-at-home

https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Stratigakos-Hitler-6.jpg

The Invention of the Private Hitler
The coming out of the Führer’s personal life marked a distinct departure from earlier National Socialist publicity, which had focused on Hitler’s role as agitator of the masses and leader of a militant political movement. In the runoff election, the need to cast a wider net pushed Nazi Party propaganda toward a celebration of their candidate’s personal attributes. Hitler’s youth and dynamism, epitomized by his much-advertised campaign flights across Germany, became a selling point. Against the aura of aristocratic dignity that clung to the remote, eighty-four-year-old Hindenburg, the Nazis offered the modernity and glamour of a candidate who took to the skies to meet face-to-face with the German people. More daringly, Nazi publicists brought Hitler’s private life into the limelight to emphasize his moral and human character and thereby win over the bourgeois voters and women who earlier had overwhelmingly supported Hindenburg.

In those same years, the New York Times Magazine grappled repeatedly with the topic of Hitler’s domesticity, returning time and again to the Obersalzberg. In October 1935 it ran a short but admiring article, “Hitler His Own Architect: He Practices His Art on a Simple Chalet.” Noting Hitler’s early aspirations to become a professional architect, the magazine credited him with the renovations to the house (still minor at that point), which it lauded for its modesty and tastefulness: “Haus Wachenfeld … differs in no way from thousands of other Bavarian chalets except for the enlargements and the fact that it is furnished more simply and in rather better taste than the average home of the Bavarian peasant.” 50

A year and a half later, in May 1937, the magazine featured on its cover a stunning photograph of Berchtesgaden with the tagline: “Where Hitler Dreams and Plans.” Otto Tolischus, the Berlin correspondent who contributed the three-page report, began with a clear-eyed assessment of the significance of Hitler’s mountain residence:

Germany is administered from Berlin, capital of the Third Reich. It is inspired and spurred onward from Munich, capital of the National Socialist movement. But it is ruled from a mountain top — the mountain on which Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler has built himself a lofty country residence where he spends the larger part of his time and to which he always retires to ponder events and to make those fateful decisions that so often startle the world.

Der Berghof, as this residence is now called, is rapidly becoming a place of German destiny.

Trump et les suprémacistes blancs: revue de dessin de presse
Magazines reflect on rise of race hate in America with illustrated covers
▻https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/18/magazines-reflect-rise-race-hate-in-america-with-illustrated-covers-presiden

Major US magazines have dedicated their front covers to recent political events with illustrations that reference Donald Trump, the Nazi Party and the KKK.

https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2017/08/trump-magazine-covers-design-news_dezeen_2364_col_1.jpg

Un article sur l’histoire de la #svastika qui date de 2000 :
▻http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/072900tank-swastika.html

Before the Nazi party adopted the swastika and turned it into the most potent icon of racial hatred, it traveled the world as a good luck symbol. It was known in France, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, China, Japan, India and the United States. Buddha’s footprints were said to be swastikas.

Navajo blankets were woven with swastikas. Synagogues in North Africa, Palestine and Hartford were built with swastika mosaics.

[...]

The swastika gets its name from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning well-being and good fortune.

The earliest known swastikas date from 2500 or 3000 B.C. in India and in Central Asia.

Via ►http://www.slate.fr/story/117385/guerre-racisme-troupes-noires

Édifiant. Quand un nazi devient un tueur du Mossad

The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman
Otto Skorzeny, one of the Mossad’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorites.

▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.711115

On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.

The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.

HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.

We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.
Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.
But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”
Key to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night, telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.

Krug, as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.

During the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.

According to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic missile program for that Arab country.

In the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.

The threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962.

It was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.
On the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources, Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.

Skorzeny, then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.

The colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”

Krug contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain — could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.

The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.

After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.

The troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel, continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.
Israel’s motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.

The Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies: Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career in Brussels in 1990. Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.

To get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is what seemed necessary.

But why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?

He was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless, bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war, and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.

He joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard force.

Skorzeny, in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France. His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS, after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party and its genocidal plan.
His most famous and daring mission was in September 1943: leading commandos who flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.

This was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.

In September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally, was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged, Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that point.

Also in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own lines.

The bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property — plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military strategist.

There was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the American military authorities who held him for a third year after his acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.

Skorzeny’s escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the missile program and employing German experts.
In Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.

Mossad officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.

The Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and perished.

Like many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name, and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force. The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s intelligence chief.

Raanan’s unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare, attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.

The Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan” if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie, playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.

Internal Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty, vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a couples game.

One evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome — though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented finance minister.

They had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just survived a harrowing street robbery.

They spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were, respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his “helper,” Anke.

There were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”

The young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”

“Or maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”

Anke spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”

After a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed information and would pay him handsomely.

Hitler’s favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”

The Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.

The Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”

Skorzeny finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man concealed his disgust.

“I knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said, with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover story.”

The next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler, Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by name as “a war criminal.”

Raanan, as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust survivor.”

Naturally, many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.

The new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis, he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their addresses.

Skorzeny also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.

Raanan continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.

Eitan was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States government.

Surprisingly flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.

“Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.

Ahituv, who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many secrets and often conducted joint projects with the Mossad.

The Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal— declaring that his name had been cleared.

Skorzeny continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists worked.

The campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they were immediately set free.

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.

Harel submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it. The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit, moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.

Amit did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official. Nothing ever came of it.

Skorzeny never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.

He also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful and alive through killing and fear.

It is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry for his actions during World War II.

He may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.

He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.

There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.

The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.

Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” (Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at feedback@forward.com

For more stories, go to www.forward.com. Sign up for the Forward’s daily newsletter at ►http://forward.com/newsletter/signup

The Forward

Haaretz Contributor

#Israel #Mossad #Nazi #Egypte #Histoire #Allemagne #Hitman

Revealed: how Associated Press cooperated with the Nazis | World news | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/30/associated-press-cooperation-nazis-revealed-germany-harriet-scharnberg

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/535ba1bd4f2827b112e3eee5fcf235b00752f2fc/0_0_2560_1535/master/2560.jpg?w=1200&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=b440197e33d29a72796781ff9ace3cbe

The Associated Press news agency entered a formal cooperation with the Hitler regime in the 1930s, supplying American newspapers with material directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry, archive material unearthed by a German historian has revealed.

When the Nazi party seized power in Germany in 1933, one of its first objectives was to bring into line not just the national press, but international media too. The Guardian was banned within a year, and by 1935 even bigger British-American agencies such as Keystone and Wide World Photos were forced to close their bureaus after coming under attack for employing Jewish journalists.

Associated Press, which has described itself as the “marine corps of journalism” (“always the first in and the last out”) was the only western news agency able to stay open in Hitler’s Germany, continuing to operate until the US entered the war in 1941. It thus found itself in the presumably profitable situation of being the prime channel for news reports and pictures out of the totalitarian state.

#presse #agence_de_presse #nazisme

The Nazi’s Philistine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937 | Open Culture

▻http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/nazis-degenerate-art-exhibition-of-1937.html

http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Child-and-Aunt-Paul-Klee-1937.jpg http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/entartetekunst.jpg

Has any political party in Western history had as vexed a relationship with art as the German National Socialists? We’ve long known, of course, that their uses of and opinions on art constituted the least of the Nazi party’s problems. Still, the artistic proclivities of Hitler and company compel us, perhaps because they seem to promise a window into the mindset that resulted in such ultimate inhumanity. We can learn about the Nazis from the art they liked, but we can learn just as much (or more) from the art they disliked — or even that which they suppressed outright.

#art #bauhaus #art_dégénégé #nazis #nazisme

"Experimenter": 2015 film on Stanley Milgram

This is a beautifully shot film by Michael Almereyda, featuring Peter Sarsgaard and Wynona Ryder.
“Experimenter” is based on the true story of controversial experimental social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who at Yale University in 1961-1962 conducted a series of radical behavior experiments that tested ordinary humans obedience. The film not only illustrates well the concept of the Milgram experiment, but also a few other experiments during his career.

►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1VOZhwRvWo

Milgram was interested in finding out why people’s behavior changes when they know they are not responsible for something. When they do something because “they are told to”, they seem to be able to dissociate themselves form the consequences of their actions. (or lack of thereof).

Milgram wanted to find an answer to the question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”. This happened in the same period of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, which also revolved around the concept of following orders and thereby not being able to let own personal morals take the upper hand. The danger of which was discussed by Hannah Arendt in “The Banality of Evil”. (It is also worthwhile to note that earlier this year (2015) the movie “The Eichmann Show” appeared, from director Paul Andrew Williams. It tells what happened form the point of view of the person responsible for directing the televised, live transmission of whole trial which was broadcasted to the whole world. Earlier, in 2012 the same story was told form the point of view of Hannah Arendt, in the film with the eponymous name.)

The Experiment goes as follows:
A test person (T) in one room asks questions to another “test” person (L) in another room. L is punished with an electric shock administered by T if the answer is wrong. They cannot see each other, and communication only happens form T to L via a microphone. L answers to questions by pressing a button, which blinks a light in T’s room so he can evaluate the answer. If the answer is wrong, T is instructed to flip a switch that delivers an electric shock to L. There is a whole row of switches, each one with a higher voltage. T is instructed that after every wrong answer he must use the next switch, thus delivering a higher shock to L. The switches ranged from 15 to 450 volts.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/Milgram_experiment_v2.svg/500px-Milgram_experiment_v2.svg.png

When T refuses to administer a shock then the examiner E gives him a series of orders/statements to ensure that he continues. There were 4 statements and if one was not obeyed then T receives the next statement:

Statement 1: please continue.
Statement 2: the experiment requires you to continue.
Statement 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Statement 4: you have no other choice but to continue.

Aim of the experiment
See how far T is willing to go (up to the last switch), following the instructions/orders.
See if and from what point T will decide to abandon the experiment for refusing to cause more pain to L.

Outcome
It was expected that many would stop when hearing L is in pain, but it turned out that most subjects T carried on when instructed to do so, even if they were manifestly displeased/uncomfortable and would have preferred to stop. At some point most did want to stop but they were just instructed they just had to carry on and follow the instructions of the experiment, that this is all part of the experiment.
65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e. T) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.

Conclusion
People are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of hurting an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in most of us from the way we are brought up.
People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognise their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school and workplace.

Remarks
(0) A newspaper ad asked for volunteers to participate in a scientific research experiment aimed at improving memory. It is form the responses that candidates were selected to be T. Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area.
(1) It is presented to T as if both T and L are randomly selected and participating in the experiment. In reality L is an accomplice/confederate. There are two roles to be taken: the Teacher and the Learner. When T can chose a hand to determine who will be the Teacher and who will be the Learner, it is predetermined that T will have “Teacher” written on the little paper that is in the hand he selects.
(2) The experiment does not revolve around two but three entities: the Teacher person (T) whose obedience is going to be tested, the other, fake participant Learner (L) who is an accomplice, and thirdly the conductor/leader/Examiner (E) of the experiment who sits in the same room as T and pretends to observe and take notes. He wears a lab coat so as to simulate the authority of an uniform. The role of E is crucial, as it fulfills the role of “commanding authority” to which T “must” obey. During the experiment some T asked who was going to take responsibility if something happened to L, and then they seemed to accept carrying on when the answer given by E was “I am taking responsibility”.
(3) Even though L cannot talk directly to T, T does hear the noise L is making, through the wall. As a consequence, T will actually hear L screaming form pain and after a while begging to stop.
(4) L does not really get electrical shocks, and the reactions/comments made by L with the intention to be heard through the wall by T, are actually prerecorded messages on tape.
(5) In order to give T an idea of what these shocks feel like, before the experiment starts, T is administered a small shock of 45 volts. When asked to guess how much they had received, most of them thought it was more (eg. 75).
(6) When both T and L visit the room where L will reside, L cares to mention he has a heart condition. This is done so as to add extra psychological weight on T’s conscience.

A short presentation of the experiment:
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr5cjyokVUs

A 1962 documentary on the experiment:
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXn2SZfwuSc

More on the Milgram and other related experiments:
▻http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

The Agentic State
Milgram defined this state as the one an individual is in when he yields to authority, and in doing so becomes alienated form his own actions. Typical statements we hear from individuals in agentic state are:
– I’m just doing my job / It’s not my job
– I don’t make the rules
– I just follow orders
– This is our store / company policy

Other experiments shown in the film
Milgram received quite some criticism about his experiment, mainly about it being unethical and forcing people to inflict pain and possibly causing psychological damage. In a later debriefing session whose purpose was to refute these claims, it was shown that
– 84% of the subjects were glad to have been in the experiment
– 15% had neutral feelings
– 1.3% said they experienced negative feelings.
74% said they had learned something important about themselves and about the conditions that shape human action.
The debriefing meetings allowed to conclude that no one showed signs of harm or had been traumatised.

The impact of all this was that Milgram had a hard time finishing the book that was supposed to document his experiment. He did finish it, and the book appeared in 1974: “Obedience to authority: an experimental view”. [1]
During that pause between the experiment and the publication of his book he carried out or focused on some other experiments. The film also documents these. Some of them are:

Experiment 1: Solomon Asch’s experiment of the effect of group pressure on conformity
Solomon wanted to analyse the effect of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgments.
There is one test person (T) and 5 fake participants. A question is asked to all, and they give an answer.
The goal is to observe the behaviour/response of T when after a while the other 5 participants start to give wrong answer on purpose. The initial experiment was visual: "which line on the right is of the same length as the line on the left.

http://www.edrants.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/solomonoasch.gif

Initially the fake participants give the right anwer, which is in accordance with what T thinks. But after a while they all give the same wrong answer, and T starts doubting, but it happened more than expected that T chose to give the same wrong answer a well in order to “conform”.

Experiment 2: Another of Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments was conducted as part of a 1962 Elevator Candid Camera TV show.
Normally people who enter an elevator turn around to face the door. Here the test subject enters an elevator, and he notices everyone already in the elevator is facing the back wall. After a while, the test subject starts to face the same direction in order to feel more “conform”.
▻http://vk.com/video_ext.php?oid=91077908&id=169731762&hash=04a77d473c63fa2e&hd=3

Experiment 3: Lost Letter technique
This is another experiment that is documented in the film. It consists of writing hundreds of letters, putting them in stamped envelopes addressed to the same address (part of the experiment), but distributed over 4 different “addressees”. Then the envelopes would be spread throughout the city, and the experiment was to see how many of them would arrive. The contents of the letters was a simple message from Max to Walter, proposing an upcoming meeting. The results for the 4 addressees were:
– “Communist Party” : 25% got delivered
– “Nazi Party” : 25% got delivered
– “Medical research Associates” : 72% got delivered
– “Mr. Walter Carnap” : 71% got delivered.

Experiment 4: The Small World problem
This is the experiment which illustrates that there are less than 6 degrees of separation between you and several million strangers whom you may or may not encounter in your lifetime.

Notes regarding the movie:
Note 1: the film quotes from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographical work “Speak, Memory”:
“The cradle rocks above an abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Note 2: The same theme of “subjects obeying an authority” also is used in Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. There are several films about this:
• 2001 : Das Experiment, by Oliver Hirschbiegel
• 2010 : The Experiment, by Paul Scheuring
• 2015 : The Stanford Prison Experiment, by Kyle Patrick Alvarez.

_
[1] Text version of the book: ▻http://www.shimer.edu/live/files/338-obediencemilgrampdf

#Philip_Zimbardo
#Solomon_Asch
#obedience #authority

Trump tweet features Nazi imagery
▻http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/247886-trump-image-appears-to-use-nazi-soldiers

http://thehill.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_full/public/blogs/trumpnazis07142015.jpg

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to use an image of Nazi reenactors in the place of Americans marching in front of the White House in a tweet on Tuesday.

A soldier in the image seems to be wearing a “dot” camouflage uniform worn by the Waffen SS, an armed wing of Germany’s Nazi Party.

The image was released by Trump’s Twitter account on Tuesday afternoon, and featured the business mogul and surging Republican White House contender silhouetted in an American flag alongside the soldiers, a picture of the White House and $100 bills.

[…]

The picture was later linked to stock photos of modern-day reenactors in the Nazi gear, marching across a grassy field.

“We need real leadership. We need results,” the image declares at the bottom. “Let’s put the U.S. back into business!”

Nazi Germany’s “Perfect Aryan” Baby Was Jewish

In the 1930s, the Nazi party began issuing propaganda featuring the image of a “perfect Aryan” child. If you were looking to build a master race of adorable white people, you could do a lot worse: #Hessy_Taft, the model, had round eyes, a charmingly surprised expression, and a perfectly tousled tuft of dark hair on her head. She was also Jewish.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--uuxUJBiA--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/793818795368304929.jpg

▻http://gawker.com/nazi-germanys-perfect-aryan-baby-was-jewish-1599034466

#propagande #nazisme #modèle_juive #race_ariane

Greece: Gay play production team and cast charged with blasphemy
By Scott Roberts
16 November 2012If found guilty the defendants could face several months in prison

If found guilty the defendants could face several months in prison

Actors and the producer and director of a play in Greece that depicted Jesus Christ as gay have been charged with blasphemy.

Earlier this month, director Laertis Vasiliou was forced to close his production of Corpus Christi in Athens because of political pressure from neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.

RTE reports that charges of “insulting religion” and “malicious blasphemy” have been filed after a bishop lodged a lawsuit against those involved in the play.

The production had been subjected to protests since October, when a Golden Dawn MP was captured shouting homophobic and racist insults at Mr Vasiliou among a violent mob.

If found guilty, Mr Vasiliou and the other defendants could face several months in prison, a trial date has not yet been set.

Mr Vasiliou said he was stunned that prosecutors had chosen to go after him rather than pursue tax evaders and others blamed for driving Greece to near-bankruptcy.

Golden Dawn have increased their power since June’s election and its supporters have been linked to a significant number of attacks on migrant workers, rival political groups and LGBT citizens.

Pas d’amalgames // Ann Coulter - September 12, 2012 - LIBYA COMMEMORATES 9/11
►http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2012-09-12.html

The much-ballyhooed “Arab Spring,” with mobs of men gang-raping American reporters, firing guns in the air and murdering their erstwhile dictators, is more akin to the pointless bloodletting of the French Revolution.

That godless antithesis to the founding of America is the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s Nazi Party, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s slaughter and America’s periodic mob uprisings, from Shays’ Rebellion to today’s union thugs in Madison, Wis., and Occupy Wall Street.

Eye blog » Type Tuesday. Gothic horror: the Nazi party’s obsession with cultural dominance
►http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=6614

Early in the rise to power of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, commonly known as the Nazi party), infighting triggered fierce debates between proponents of Modernism (i.e. those who accepted Expressionism and, to a certain extent, Bauhaus ideas) and Völkism (i.e. those who revered Teutonic folk traditions). Ultimately a rigid, retrograde Nazi style developed that inveigled its way into society through the concept of Gleichschaltung, the integration and consolidation of National Socialist cultural dominance over everything from architecture to typeface design.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6014/5950638728_1aabe55780_z.jpg http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6008/5950650390_43573aee79_z.jpg

#nazi #design #typographie