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High school apologizes over “think like a Nazi” essay assignment

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:21:00 +0000

As part of a lesson in persuasive writing, students at a New York state high school were asked to write an essay arguing that "Jews are evil" using "solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich."

According to the Times Union:

Students were asked to watch and read Nazi propaganda, then pretend their teacher was a Nazi government official who needed to be convinced of their loyalty. In five paragraphs, they were required to prove that Jews were the source of Germany's problems.

The assignment upset a number of students and families, prompting an apology from Albany High School Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, who chalked the controversy up to a misunderstanding about academic intent.

"I would apologize to our families," she told the Times Union. "I don't believe there was malice or intent to cause any insensitivities to our families of Jewish faith."

Holocaust researchers: More Nazi camps than we knew

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:08:00 +0000

Holocaust researchers recently revealed that the scope of Hitler's program of camps and ghettos has been significantly underestimated. Researchers at he United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have, for over a decade, been documenting every Nazi concentration camp, ghetto and forced labor site set up around Europe from 1933 to 1945. The number counted shocked even Holocaust researchers, according to the New York Times. Some 42,500 sites have been cataloged. began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

Via The New York Times:

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Kentucky neo-Nazis charged in gruesome murder, dismemberment

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0000

The 25-point manifesto of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) makes several hyperbolic “demands,” such as “all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force.’’

But it appears that two Kentucky members of the neo-Nazi group and an accomplice took at least one of the over-the-top mission statements deadly serious.

Point 17 says, “We demand the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug dealers, usurers, profiteers, race traitors, etc. must be severely punished, whatever creed or race.”

On Jan. 9, according to the authorities, the men lured a white, 19-year-old alleged small-time drug dealer into the back seat of their car, choked him, beat him with fists and a metal pipe, dragged him out of the car, slit his throat, stabbed him in the chest, rolled his body down a hill and left him dead in the bushes, covered in brambles, in a field in Boone County, Ky., essentially a suburb of nearby Cincinnati.

Quentin Tarantino talks to himself

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

The eccentric Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin, writing on literature and semiotics from around 1919 until his death in 1975, had this crazy idea: Stories talk to one another. Bakhtin theorized that authors cobble narratives together from various “languages,” combining and juxtaposing familiar motifs, images and tropes from other stories as well as cultural associations, history and even clichés to tell a new tale. An active “listener-reader,” to use Bakhtin's term, simultaneously senses many levels to each story – the characters talking to one another within the story, the narrator telling us the story and the author speaking through the story. These levels engage in dialogue with one another, and the listener-reader constructs meaning by eavesdropping on their conversation. The different levels also address the artworks and narratives from which they have been created. They talk back.

In many stories, the author, like a magician, tries to hide his or her hand. But Bakhtin's ideas prove especially helpful in talking about stories where the author's presence comes through strong – like the movies of Quentin Tarantino.

Austrian court finds 3 guilty of glorifying Nazism

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:33:00 +0000

VIENNA (AP) — An Austrian court has convicted a leading neo-Nazi and two accomplices of glorifying Nazism through a website and sentenced them to prison terms of up to nine years.

Gottfried Kuessel was given a nine-year prison sentence Friday for being the founder of the "Alpen-Donau" website. He already spent time in prison in the 1990s on conviction of trying to form a successor to the Nazi party.

The two others — Felix Binder and Wilhelm Anderle — were sentenced to seven and 4 ½ years respectively.

The website is no longer active, but defied years of Austrian efforts to shut it down because it was housed on a U.S. server.

Austrian officials said that left their hands tried because of U.S. free speech laws. Austria bans glorification of the Nazi era.

New Jersey neo-Nazis arrested in assaults on Middle Easterners

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:33:00 +0000

Federal authorities in New Jersey are ending 2012 with the arrests of two accused white supremacists who allegedly went on a hate-filled assault spree last New Year’s Eve.

Christopher Ising, 31, a reported member of the Atlantic City Skins from Waretown, N.J., was arrested today by FBI agents on an indictment charging him with conspiracy and commission of a hate crime assault. Those laws are contained in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed by Congress in 2009.

Michal Gunar, 27, of East Windsor, N.J., also faces the same federal charges. He is an alleged member of another New Jersey-based white supremacist group known as the Aryan Terror Brigade, the FBI said in announcing the arrests.

The arrests grew out of a New Year’s Eve party last year in East Brunswick, N.J., where Ising hosted a “meet and greet” gathering for white supremacists, FBI officials said.

Anne Frank visits FX

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:05:00 +0000

Of all the people I trust to assemble a fiction about the possibility that Anne Frank survived the Holocaust, Ryan Murphy is not high up on the list. Philip Roth? Fine. The guy who has made multiple episodes of musical television all but canonizing Britney Spears? I don’t know. But in last night’s “American Horror Story,” in which a woman who may or may not be Anne Frank got herself locked up in an insane asylum and — no half measures here — wrote to Kitty about it, that’s just what Ryan Murphy did. The results were wild, ludicrous, unconcerned with taste and propriety and, against all odds, fantastic. The Holocaust fits snugly into "American Horror Story's" purview.

How fiction fooled Hitler

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Before there was James Bond, there was Gregory Sallust. Unlike Bond, who is just sexy fun, Sallust was out to trick the Nazis, defeat Hitler and save the world. The debonair anti-Nazi crusader was the most popular fictional hero in England, and Dennis Wheatley, his creator, was the war’s best-selling author, along with Agatha Christie.

Wheatley’s Sallust slips in and out of Germany on spying missions, often at crucial junctures. He tries to overthrow Hitler and bring down Vichy France. It’s all fantasy, of course, except that Wheatley writes around real events in what counted, in the radio era, as real time: His wartime novels appeared only a few months after the events their plots relied on.

And then it got even more real. The British military took notice of Wheatley’s work and thought he might have a thing or two to teach officers and bureaucrats about the Nazi mind. So convincing is Wheatley’s war fiction that Wheatley was taken up as the great imaginary mind of the war, in an effort the Brits dubbed “deception.”

AFA’s horribly misguided spokesman

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association (AFA) spokesman whose ultraconservative worldview is so extreme that he makes Pat Buchanan look like Rachel Maddow, seems never to have met a fact that he couldn’t improve upon.

He has declared that gays were responsible for the Holocaust and opined that American Indians lost their land to European settlers because they (the natives) weren’t Christian. He has claimed that states have the right to impose religious tests on elected officials and said that HIV is not linked to AIDS – a dangerous and utterly false theory that has led to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in South Africa and elsewhere.

‘Most-wanted Nazi’ found

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:41:00 +0000

A former Hungarian police officer accused of responsibility for the deaths of nearly 16,000 Jews in World War II has been found living in Budapest.

Britain's Sun newspaper reportedly found a man believed to be Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, now 97, living in the Hungarian capital.

Sun reporters confronted Csatary at his apartment in an upscale suburb of Budapest about Canada revoking his citizenship in 1997.

Answering the door in a long-sleeve shirt and underwear, Csatary told the newspaper, “I don’t want to discuss it.”

He lived in Canada after the war, but disappeared after being stripped of his citizenship.

Csatary was also questioned about his role helping to organize the 1944 deportation of some 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz during World War II.

“No I didn’t do it, go away from here,” Csatary reportedly said in English before slamming the door.

Weimar America

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 20:30:00 +0000

What happens when a nation that was once an economic powerhouse turns its back on democracy and on its middle class, as wealthy right-wingers wage austerity campaigns and enable extremist politics?

It may sound like America in 2012. But it was also Germany in 1932.

Most Americans have never heard of the Weimar Republic, Germany's democratic interlude between World War I and World War II. Those who have usually see it as a prologue to the horrors of Nazi Germany, an unstable transition between imperialism and fascism. In this view, Hitler's rise to power is treated as an inevitable outcome of the Great Depression, rather than the result of a decision by right-wing politicians to make him chancellor in early 1933.

Historians reject teleological approaches to studying the past. No outcome is inevitable, even if some are more likely than others. Rather than looking for predictable outcomes, we ought to be looking to the past to understand how systems operate, especially liberal capitalist democracies. In that sense, Weimar Germany holds many useful lessons for contemporary Americans. In particular, there are four major points of similarity between Weimar Germany and Weimar America worth examining.