It Never Was.

Looking around Deviantart tonight I stumbled across an anti-immigrant cartoon. (I won't link to it to avoid giving the artist hits)  It claimed that immigration only occurs to "white countries."  I checked the profile of the artist, and he lives in the United States, which I was entirely unsurprised at.  He, and anyone else with similar beliefs, needs to get a clue.  The United States was never a "white country."  Before colonists showed up those lands were the home of various indigenous peoples.  That remained the case after large scale colonisation began.  As the United States expanded it also took in territories where significant numbers of people of Spanish descent lived, many of whom also had indigenous ancestry.  Then there were all the African slaves brought in before the US Civil War finally ended that crime.  Chinese workers were brought in to build the railways, Hawaiians began to move to the mainland after the US annexed it, as did Puerto Ricans after their island met the same fate.  And on it went.  Of course the past equivalents of today's believers in this nonsense didn't always want white people immigrating either, if they came from places like Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, or were European Jews.  That should come as no surprise, given that racism isn't in any way rational.

How Not To Win Friends.

Talk about stupid.  The League of the South, a bunch of fanboys of the Confederate States of America, intend to honour John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.  I'm sure that will rally a lot of people to their cause.  Oh wait, it won't.  Anyone likely to be attracted to the League by such behaviour is likely already a member.

The Pile.

At the moment I have rather a large pile of books on my bedside table, all of which I'm in the process of reading.  Some I've just started, others, I've been going at for a while now.  They are:

-The End:  The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945, by Ian Kershaw.

-The Strat In The Attic:  Thrilling Stories of Guitar Archeology, by Deke Dekerson.

-Who I Am, by Pete Townshend.

-Rommel's Lieutenants:  The Men Who Served the Desert Fox, France, 1940, by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

-This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band, by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis.

-On Some Faraway Beach:  The Life and Times of Brian Eno, by David Sheppard

-Rolling Thunder Against the Rising Sun:  The Combat History of U.S. Army Tank Battalions in the Pacific in World War II, by Gene Eric Salecker.

You can cay they're all history books.  They're all books that are my personal property, not library books.  And there's at least another history book I should really go buy, assuming a copy is still in the cheapy section at McNally-Robinson in a few days.  Not that I'll tell you what that book is, you might go buy them all out if I do.

Angering The Neighbours?

Next year is the bicentennial of the War of 1812.  The government intends to spend a bunch of money commemorating the event.  In a way I'm surprised.  Stephen Harper and much of the current strain of Canadian conservattism tends to treat anything American as wonderful, and will frequently denounce even the mildest of criticisms of the US by Canadians as anti-Americanism. Yet the current Conservative government intends to celebrate an event where the Americans, from a Canadian perspective, were the bad guys.  Apparently they aren't worried about bringing up bad memories in the US, as the War of 1812 included the occupation of Washington, DC and the burning of the White House and Capitol Building in 1814.  This was retaliation for the US attack on York, the future Toronto, so apparently the government isn't worried about stoking Canadian resentment towards the US either.  Most interesting.

Making Assumptions.

I was watching a program on History Television Tuesday night about Cleopatra.  The comment was made that based on a modern reconstruction of what Cleopatra may have looked like Julius Caesar wouldn't have fallen for her because of her looks, because she wasn't hugely beautiful.  But how would anyone know that?  There's no way of knowing what Caesar thought was attractive in a woman.  It's not like he left an autobiography telling us what he found hot.

Short Memory.

I'm no fan of the Olympics.  I think it's a waste of money given the way it's currently conducted.  But I had to roll my eyes at the foreign press reports claiming the Vancouver Games are the worst ever.  Apparently these supposed journalists have no knowledge of the subject they're supposed to be writing about.  If you're one of them all I have to say is do some research about the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.  That is the worst Olympics ever, for obvious reasons.

Happy Holidays!

Well, it's not an actual recognised holiday in Canada, but that doesn't mean we can't celebrate it anyways. Today is Fuhrertodestag. On this day in 1945 Adolf Hitler killed himself. Too bad he didn't do it, oh say 15 years earlier. Thanks to Orac for reminding us of this important occasion.

Too Bad The Inside Didn't Match The Outside.

Today I received more spam from those wastes of oxygen calling themselves The New Order. The subject line was "We Fought on the Wrong Side!" Of course this wasn't an indication that they finally shed their ignorance and realised the vileness of Nazism. Of course the article enclosed was the usual nonsense about the wonders of Hitler and the horrors of the EVIIIIIIIL JOOOOOS, who started WW2 to defeat "the great man." Of course as with many issues these fools demonstrate their ignorance of history with such talk. After all it was Hitler who attacked Poland in 1939 despite warnings from the French and British not to, that doing so would cause them to declare war on Germany. It was Hitler who attacked Norway, France and the Low Countries in 1940, turning what had been a low level conflict that might very well have petered out, to Germany's benefit, into an all out conflict. It was Hitler who attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, ignoring the historical example of Napoleon's failed invasion of Imperial Russia more than a century before. And it was Hitler who declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. Only in the fantasies of the utterly ignorant or the crazed was Hitler some innocent bystander beset by evil forces. Rather it was the greed of Hitler and his cronies that brought Germany into conflict with other states, and the arrogance and racism of the Nazis that convinced them they could fight wars against several major powers at once.

Rosa Parks has died at age 92. Its from small actions like her's in 1954 that revolutions are made.

Sunday saw a commemeration of the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden in WW2. However a group of hard rightists protested before the ceremonies, denouncing the bombing as a war crime. Hearing that the word hypocrite came to mind. After all it was the equivalent of such people in the 1930s and '40s that lead Germany into the war that resulted in the bombing.

With this week being the 60th anniversary of the Soviets seizing the Auschwitz concentration camp not surprisingly stories about the Holocaust have been appearing on network newscasts and so forth. And not surprisingly the Holocaust deniers and other Nazi nitwits have been whining about the coverage. Sometimes you have to wonder about these losers, as they are ironically one of biggest forces in keeping discussion of the Holocaust so common as they keep bringing it up. You'd think they'd realise that if they shut up about it people wouldn't be exposed to what their spiritual counterparts did 60 years ago, and hence wouldn't look on them as such losers and scum.

One thing that is interesting to read in accounts by those victims and potential victims who survived the Nazi genocide efforts was how many people who were actually at threat just couldn't believe the stories they were hearing. The idea that the Germans were engaging in deliberate mass murder just didn't seem compatible with their views of the Germans as a civilised and rational people. Unfortunately the Nazis managed to create a climate where the darkest part of human nature could come forth, and millions of murders were a result.

I just remembered a bit ago that this is the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Oddly enough I've seen nor heard nothing in the media about this, when in past years I'm sure I have. Perhaps its just a case of WW2 becoming more and more like earlier wars, namely a true historical event instead of something that sort of hangs over everything. This process is of course inevitable for any historical event as it becomes more distant from the present and more and more people it directly affected pass away. Thirty years from now 911 will be the same way.