Newsletter No 358

                                                                               ISSN 1440-9828
                                                                       November 2007
                                                                  No 358

David Brockschmidt : Clarifying Comments on Clive James and Geoffrey Blainey

Clive James:

When you have worked your way through Clive James’ latest 876-page tome, which according to his own estimate, took him 40 years to write, one has to say that the title of this book is spot-on and you have the feeling that Cultural Amnesia is exactly what the author is suffering from.

Although he devotes only 6 pages to Adolf Hitler, the ghost of Adolf Hitler spooks through the whole book, so let’s call in the Ghost Busters here in order to de-tox Clive James’ mind.

Clive James is an Australian entertainer who since the 1960s lives in London. He is a keen and analytic observer of the human condition, has brilliant flashes of insight and a good sense of humour.

In a recent interview given by him to our national broadcaster >our ABC TV< in September 2007 Clive, the lovely old chatter-box, left the interviewer almost speechless. Clive drowned nearly everyone, including the viewers, in a verbal tsunami.

When it was all over, everyone, including Clive, who >got it off his chest again< was breathing with relief but at the same time everyone was asking themselves what the hell was that all about?

Clive’s most important comment in this interview was that he needed the book – but most of us don’t.

Being pregnant with a book for over 40 years, then giving birth to a still-born book, must be a terrible painful experience.

This reminds me of Stanley Kubrik’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, which he wanted to make for 25 years. The film was praised over the moon by so-called film critics and ignored by the public.

In my opinion that film should have been called Brains wide-shut. Kubrik did not survive his last film and he died soon after compleating it. This is a shame because his masterpiece, 2001 A Space Odyssey, proves that he was a great film maker, but the fact remains that his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was a flop.

After reading Clive James’ latest book, Cultural Amnesia, I have the feeling that this book will also be a flop and most likely his last book.

J. M Coetzee, the ex-South African novelist now living in Australia, calls Cliver James’ book >Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization<.

To me this whole exercise of crash courses in civilisation, history, psychology, and indeed any other major subject deemed to be part of our cultural aquisition, always ends up in a crash landing. Clive James’ book reminds me so much of today’s American infotainment writers: They know sooo much but understand sooo little.

How can you do justice to historical figures like G F W Hegel, Adolf Hitler and Tacitus, for example, on five to six pages each? Impossible!! It is OK to write about Karl Kraus, but at the same time ignoring Immanuel Kant is unforgivable.

Clive James drowns us in an ocean of words, throws thousands of names into his monumental work and begins to sound like a grand champion in a cross-word puzzle competition.

Cultural Amnesia is certainly a book for our times, the age of infotainment, where everyone wants to believe and nobody wants to know. The tragedy here is that James tries to be somebody he is not – an historian.

So, for God’s sake Clive, do what you can do best, entertain us and, of course, dance the Macarena with your feisty Mariechen Prabacan.

The best about Clive James’ book is the cover, which indicates that James brings some light into our >cultural darkness<. Unfortunately this is not the case. The design of the book cover was pirated from Peter Behren’s book: Allgemeine Elektrisitaetsgesellschaft – AEG Metallfadenlampe.

With regard to the pirated light bulb design on the front cover of his book I would like to end this brief review with a German phrase: Es ist im Leben nie zu spät, wenn endlich dir ein Licht aufgeht – it’s never too late in life, if you see the light.

Geoffrey Blainey and his historical short cuts

Geoffrey Blainey was always one of my Australian heroes, especially after he got done-in by Australia’s politically correct Bolshie-academics who are still running Australia’s universities and Australia’s various state dis-education departments.

I have read Blainey’s lates book, A Short History of the 20^th Century. Blainey makes the same mistake here as does the entertainer and amateur historian, Clive James in his monumental work, Cultural Amnesia.

Clive James can be forgiven for his short cuts because his field of expertise is entertainment and not history.

With Geoffrey Blainey it is totally different because he is an historian and he has a duty to research, document and report to his readers his findings. Any short-cuts or short versions of history, which are politically correct, like in Blainey’s last book, is not doing justice to history and historical personalities.

When the why question is ignored, which clearly helps to explain the cause-effect in history, historical truth is suppressed for political reasons. I would like to quote here the Director of the Adelaide Institute, Dr Fredrick Toben, who said: >>When truth is suppressed, the lie must flourish<<.

After Australia’s left-wing Academia tried unsuccessfully to character assassinate and professionally destroy Blainey, as they did with Dame Leoni Kramer, Blainey should have given up on these half-educated, unelected, self-appointed >education commissars< whose aim is to turn Australia into a democratic, socialistic people’s republic. Frank Hardy’s ghost is alive and kicking at the universities and the various state education departments, but there is >no power and no glory< for them. Blainey should have retired and gone fishing. Unfortunately he did not do that, and it looks like Blainey has not learnt his lesson from the Keith Windschuttle affair. Blainey chose another avenue now, which is – if you can’t beat them, join them.

Big mistake, Geoffrey. If you join the ruling establishment, your reputation as an honest professional historian will go down the gurgler. Remember, Geoffrey, if you are not in the bad books with the Bolshie-academics and the predatory capitalists who run this country into the ground, you are worth nothing.

In order to make our reader to understand what I am talking about here, let me give you an example. Blainey reviews Ian Kershaw’s latest historical work, Fateful Choices: Ten decisions that changed the word 1940-1941, published in the Review section of Weekend Australian, 18-19 August 2007.

Blainey begins his review with: >>World War II could have been a very different train running on a different track<<. Here Blainey fails to explain that the rail tracks which lead to war are always laid by the parasitic and criminal tribes of Wall Street, the City of London, and their miscarriages, which this money cabal has planted around the world.

Blainey fails to explain that:

1. The dictators, dictatorships and the fertile ground for both of them is always created by this criminal and insane usury system. The 800-tonne gorilla is in the hall, but everyone ignores him. This speculation King Kong will bring war to our doorsteps again, i.e. if we don’t neutralise him. Blainey fails to explain that Japan would have never attacked Pearl Harbour had Roosevelt not enforced an economic blockage around Japan, which starved Japan of raw materials and food.

2. Adolf Hitler let the British and French forces escape at the beaches of Dunkirk, hoping thereby that Churchill would make peace with Germany in order to fight and to defeat the Bolshevic Soviet Union.

3. Hitler’s attack on Stalinist Russia on 1 June 1941 was a pre-emptive strike against Stalin’s plans to steam-roll all of Europe, just 15 days later on 6 July 1941.

Blainey tells his readers the old fairy tale of the totally unprepared and peace-loving Soviet Union, which was viciously attacked by Nazi Germany.

Everyone except Blainey knows that Stalin’s date to attack and steamroll all of Europe, which aimed to turn the whole of Europe into a Soviet GuLag, was 6 July 1941. At that time Stalin’s war machine was the biggest the world had ever seen.

Blainey’s assumption that it was not sure that Roosevelt would have secured a professional mandate for war against Germany, is of course, nonsense.

After the Japanese attack on pearl Harbour, which Roosevelt provoked and let happen, sacrificing nearly 3000 of his own soldiers, with many more maimed, to get his entry ticket from the US Congress for World War II in order to defeat the Axis powers.

Poor old Admiral Kimmel, the commander of the US Navy at Pearl Harbour is to this day still blamed for not being prepared for this >vicious Jap survrise attack<, which was not a surprise for the war mongers in the White House at all.

Blainey fails

1. to tell his readers that Roosevelt and Churchill wanted war. Between 1939-44 Hitler made more than 40 peace offers to the Allies, all of them were rejected.

2. to explain that history is repeating itself here with the Bush administration lies about Iraq’s WMD, which was Bush’s new Pearl Harbour in order to attac Iraq and Afghanistan.

3. to tell his readers, regarding the extermination of Jews by Hitler, that between 150 to 300, 000 Jews and half-Jews were fighting in Hitler’s army, airforce, navy and other military organisations.

4. to inform his readers of the Nazi-Zionist co-operation and collaboration from 1933 to 1943.

At the end of Blainey’s review of Kershaw’s book, Blainey tells his readers: >>Even the leaders who have to make grave decisions are partly in the dark, for most wars are full of the unexpected<<. Certainly yesterday’s and of course today’s political leaders are not enlightened at all and walk in the valley of darkness, and so do most politically correct historians.

Last but not least, Blainey >enlightens< us by saying: >>We the public are even more in the dark<<.

Big mistake again, Geoffrey, the public does not depend on politically correct historians anymore. Our weapon of mass destruction against political and historical lies and half truths is the mighty Internet, the weapon of mass instruction.

Game is over, old cock – start writing cook books.

Here is a list of books I suggest Geoffrey Blainey should read if he is interested in truth in history:

1. Martin Allen: The Hitler-Hess Deception

2. David L Hoggan: The Forced War

3. Bryan M Rigg: Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers

4. Lenni Brenner: Zionism in the Age of Dictators

5. Lenni Brenner: 51 Documents – Zionist Collaboration and Cooperation with the Nazis

6. Edwin Black: Ha’avera Transfer Agreement

7. John Weitz: Hitler’s Banker

8. Allen Abrams: Special Treatment

9. Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin’s War of Extermination

10. Gerd Schultze Klanhof: The War Which Had Many Fathers

11. Antony G Sutton: Wall Street and the Bolshevic Revolution

12. Antony G Sutton: Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler

13. G & S Pool: Who Financed Hitler?

14. David L Hoggan: The Myth of New History

15. A J P Taylor: The Causes of World War Two

16. Mark Curtis: Web of Deceit. Britain’s Real Role in the World

17. Kevin Macdonald: The Culture of Critique

18. Victor Suvorov: Ice Breaker

19. Victor Suvorov: The Day ‘M’

20. Werner Maser: Der Wortbruch

A German archbishop has sparked controversy by calling some modern art "degenerate" - a term used by the Nazi regime in its persecution of artists.

"I thought all this was history, and then it is a high-ranking member of the Catholic clergy who uses it"

Michael Vesper, former minister

Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne, was speaking as the church inaugurated its Kolumba art museum. Meisner opposed an abstract window for Cologne Cathedral.

Cardinal Meisner warned that when art became estranged from worship, culture became degenerate. The cardinal had not intended to pay tribute to "old ideologies", a spokesman said.

Taboo

The BBC's Marianne Landzettel says this was no off-the-cuff remark by the cardinal, delivered in a sermon in Cologne Cathedral, but was precisely scripted.

She says the phrase degenerate art - "entartete Kunst" - in German has only one connotation: that of Nazi Germany and the persecution of artists, the banning of paintings and the burning of books. "Entartete Kunst" was the name of an exhibition of works organised by the Nazis in 1937 in Munich as a warning to the German people.

In a newspaper interview, the North Rhine-Westphalia culture secretary, Hans-Dietrich Grosse-Brockhoff, said it was appalling that Cardinal Meisner had used such a word. Former minister Michael Vesper also said he was shocked. "I thought all this was history, and then it is a high-ranking member of the Catholic clergy who uses it," he said.

After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazi government started to bring art under its control. All modern art, and Expressionism in particular, was labelled degenerate and was not to be shown in public. More than 15,000 paintings were removed from German museums.

Recently Cardinal Meisner expressed opposition to a new stained-glass window in Cologne Cathedral. The abstract work by renowned artist Gerhard Richter contains thousands of squares. The archbishop's supporters say he is not opposed to modern art as such but wanted the window to be a more figurative representation, including of those who suffered under Nazi persecution. Correspondents say any sign of agreement with the Nazis is taboo in Germany.

COMMENT: Under the circumstances of today as we know them, it could not be otherwise, could it. Last week, a top TV presenter was sacked for praising the Nazis' respect for families and motherhood.

COMMENT: If, in reviling the Nazis, one must not forget to revile “the Nazis' respect for families and motherhood.” How pitiful are today’s Germans!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/6996251.stm

Meisner opposed an abstract window for Cologne Cathedral

*******

September 18, 2007, 10:55 Lithuanian-Israeli row brewing over WW2 killings

Yitzhak Arad, former Director of the Yad Vashem museum

Israel has refused a request from Lithuania’s chief prosecutor to question Yitzhak Arad, former Director of the Israeli Holocaust Museum. The prosecutor alleges that Arad was involved in the killing of Lithuanian civilians as a partisan fighter during World War Two. The dispute started with a small article in a local Lithuanian magazine, but grew to involve the governments of Israel and Lithuania, who are now deadlocked over what steps to take next.

Until now they’ve not found even one Jew who would have killed defenceless Lithuanians. There were no Jews like this. And in all the archives you will find the names of 23,000 Lithuanians who killed Jewish people - Joseph Melamed, President, Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel

Based on quotes from his autobiography, and testimonies Yitzhak Arad gave at the trials of Nazi war criminals, Lithuania’s chief prosecutor wants to question him for alleged crimes against Nazi collaborators. Mr Arad believes he was targeted as part of a general Lithuanian policy against pro-Soviet World War Two troops: “What, as I understand, they are investigating now, is actually the whole Soviet partisan movement,” he says.

Unlike ordinary Lithuanian civilians, his choice, as a Jewish teenager in a territory occupied by the Nazis, was for survival, Mr Arad says: “I saw as my obligation to fight those who were murderers of my people, those who were murderers of millions of other people. I saw it as my duty. I was proud of it. And of course, I saw it also as a matter of survival.”

The Israeli government says the request to question Yitzhak Arad is nothing short of outrageous. The issue in general first arose when Lithuania established a committee to examine the role of partisans in the killings of Lithuanian civilians. Leading historians in Israel charge that the committee was not established to discover the truth, but rather to ease Lithuania’s acceptance into the European Union.

http://www.russiatoday.ru/news/news/14317