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ow, wow.

I've seen pictures of mahatma ghandi and george bush standing on 2 feet, surrounded by a group of folks.

Is that just mere coincidence?

Come on, this hitler/israel thing is a little tired by now. The 2 experiences come out of very different histories. Jews came to Israel to escape prosecution, not to ethnically clense an entire region.

Yeah, I know that certain zionist elements now are promoting the removal of palestinians from Israel, this is unexcusable. But come on, your stupid arguement is hyperbole of the worst kind.

(or maybe its not coincidence that I've seen photos of both my mother and abraham lincoln standing on a stump talking to people. gee whiz)

You're right, it does seem like more than coincidence.

For balance, can we have old some soviet art?
I mean since were on this autocratic/butcher
theme... Look, this isn’t about certain people
in power. This is about the power that put them there.
How did we let this happen? Damn weasels, look what
they've done to the henhouse after they moved in.

your right about it being about power.
But here hitler is an individual and is compared to unknown people with flags. So you might be interpreting the "artist" as talking about power, but he seems to me to be equating hitler to an entire race.
So on one hand its a person (hitler) and on the other hand its an unknown mess of assumedly jewish people.

Perhaps the appropriate comparison would be socialist realism from the 30's on to today that is fronted by individual cults of personality.

This stuff becomes clearly bullshit, hitler is equal to an entire nation of differentiated individuals? get off of it.

You're focussing on a small aspect, the one dissimilar thing. I should hope anyone older than oh, say, 8 or 9 could manage that. Any idiot can see the differences.
A reasoning individual ought to note that behind Hitler is a large mass of individuals. Take Hitler out of the picture for a moment. What do you see? Great flags of ethnic nationalism waving ... crowds ... big beams of sunlight from the sky .... the similarity is frightening to me.

"take hitler out of the picture" you say. Isn't that the theme of this fucking "artwork" by lattuff?

Yeah, I agree with you that if you take hitler out of the picture you get a lot of people waving flags in the sun following a stupid ideology. I am not a fan of zionism.

No, the Hitler thing is exactly what pisses me off. Hitler is used by both the left and the right to personify evil while neglecting the mundane issues that are really the crux of the matter.

The historical moment that hitler represents, a historically priveledged people beating up on other people is very different then the case of Israel, where a nation was founded by victims of a genocide where a large population ends up in their own ignorance attacking thier neighbors. There are Israelis who hate the occupation and are fighting against it.

This "art" equates the more concrete evil of one man to the more abstrace evils of a nation.
If we take hitler out of the picture", we are looking at a very different picture.

"No, the Hitler thing is exactly what pisses me off. Hitler is used by both the left and the right to personify evil while neglecting the mundane issues that are really the crux of the matter."

Very much in agreement here. Hitler's importance is so overstressed in most histories of the war, that you can be forgiven for forgetting he was a kind of anti-christ; that is, he bears all the sins of the people who elected him. It's much more simple to understand the whole thing by putting it down to a single evil character, than to try to work out the complexities of how a nation turned to Nazism.

"The historical moment that hitler represents, a historically priveledged people beating up on other people is very different then the case of Israel, where a nation was founded by victims of a genocide where a large population ends up in their own ignorance attacking thier neighbors. There are Israelis who hate the occupation and are fighting against it."

A historically priveleged people? The Germans? Are you joking? The Germans were kept divided into hundreds of kingdoms throughout the middle ages, and when they finally managed to unite as a nation, they got war war and more war from the established powers. The Nazis played on these feelings of inferiority, citing their history, the unfair terms of Versailles, the treatment of Germans abroad, etc etc - many of which were legitimate complaints, and lent weight to the Nazi appeal. Historical privelege might be said to be relative, and the Germans, who had never fully participated in the colonial era and bore the brunt of French and British imperialism in Europe, did not look so priveleged compared to their neighbours.

Granted, there certainly are broad differences. The Germans had never been victims of true genocide, and yet sought to inflict it. The Israelis have been victims, and I don't think they mean (as a whole) to inflict all-out extermination. Casualties in the Levant conflict are comparable with levels in the Northern Ireland conflict (a bit higher, but in the same 'bracket' if you will), whereas casualties in WW2 were several thousand times greater. The Israelis have outside support from a great power, the Germans did not, which may have contributed to their feelings of isolation. The Israelis did not even so much choose their conflict; the British could have pushed for an Israeli state in any of a number of other locations but chose the Levant out of expediency, a foolish plan which cost both the Israelis and Palestinians.
But there are still dangerous currents of ethnic nationalism in Israel, and lessons of the war being ignored. I think it is a case of collective national stockholm syndrome.

......
I agree with what you say.
And thanks for the further insight into the German situation.


I am not disagreeing with your contentions about the German situation, but its interesting that the historic lack of a unified German Nationhood until Bismark (?) is seen as a sign of its relative oppression. Today, I think one of the most dynamic things about Germany is its continued de-centralized government and the level of autonomy that each state has.
I never have looked into the reasons why the German States remained seperate for so long.

It was a matter of status quo; the other nations feared new competitors.
As to the unity being a sign of oppression, I don't think it alone would have created the feeling. It's part of a whole history, that continued right up until and after unification. I'll quote Hitler here to show why the whole thing had relevance:
"Even Alsace and Lorraine, taken by themselves, would not account for the energy with which the French conducted the War, if Alsace-Lorraine were not already considered as a part of the really vast programme which French foreign policy had envisaged for the future. The aim of that programme was: Disintegration of Germany into a collection of small states. It was for this that Chauvinist France waged war"
He's speaking about ww1 of course. Whether real or not, these fears were foremost in the German mind, and difficult for anyone to dispel easily.
Then there is the Polish situation. Poland and Germany had been in conflict for centuries, each of course believing the other was out to destroy it. After WW2, parts of Germany - notably Silesia - were turned over to Poland after plebiscites were held to determine borders. I've never been able to confirm whether this is true or not before the war, but there are reams of German propaganda regarding supposed atrocities against the German minority there. There could be something to it, then again perhaps not: but the point is the man in the street believed there was.
This feeling of being victimized and isolated was almost certainly the key factor in the Nazi rise to power.