What’s so political about Germany in 1936?
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You mean the organization thrown together in the wake of 9/11 to battle the monsters under the bed needs a second look? I think it needs to be split up and some of its parts sent back where they belong.
The Coast Guard should go back to the Pentagon or at least DOI and take the Customs service with it. The folks who enforce border crossings and immigration papers should not be the same people, as those are different goals. ATF and a few of the other acronyms probably DO belong in a sub-department of the DOI called Homeland Security, working with other cabinet agencies to achieve its goals.
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You know, just out of curiosity, I did a nationwide telephone book search of the name and found 9 different people living today with the name “Ernst Ries”. Thus I don’t find it all that hard to take the letter at face value and posit that Ernst Ries from Cologne was a regular Joe Schmoe regurgitating the sort of stuff that was being blared from all media at the time. The Nazis did control the radio and most newspapers, having tossed all other editors into Dachau and other concentration camps.
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That’s not what he is saying, but proposing a new variant of the law and the probability of a certain person or group being mentioned. Only this time, it’s the inevitability of Trump being mentioned, not Nazis.
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Sure, who could forsee such a thing drawing political comparisons? /s
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But that’s not Godwin’s law! Godwin’s law is about the increasing probability of [X] being mentioned. It is only about the probability of an Internet forum thread bringing [X] up.
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Boing Boing is not a newspaper. It’s a cultural and social blog. Not journalism.
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An old (German descent) friend of mine, his father turned his father, the grandfather, over to the SS for “saying Hitler was mad” and was rewarded with promotion to Commander of tank. The Grandfather was a National Socialist, last seen heading toward Dachau.
Later in life, my friend, his father tried to explain to his son why he did such a thing. He thought it was right, during the time period. My friend, his father deeply regrets, he thought he would see HIS Father again, be in prison and let out at some time shortly. Eventually, in his elder years, my friend, his father eventually committed suicide.
Social conditioning.
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Joined 17 hours ago
Welcome. You were saying?
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we’re talking past each other, but using the same venn diagrams. Ha! No worries.
One need not be a BBS member to read BB.
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But there one is, being welcomed and invited to say more. And here you are… I don’t get it.
Forgive me, I read your comment as terse and dismissive. I guess I was wrong.
to each their own!
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Of course not.
Anyone who interprets “paranoid” to mean “unwarranted fear” perhaps doesn’t read Boing Boing often.
Anyone who suggests our articles maintain a high level of journalism obviously doesn’t read Boing Boing often.
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If he isn’t a native English speaker, I could see the confusion based on the definition.
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The original text seems to link the mistrust to the ancestry and money rather than anything else.
Herr Ries starts by saying that he has to give the government very specific details of his ancestors and where the ‘fortune’ could be ‘at the moment’.
There’s then all the stuff about asking various people for information but getting nothing.
Specifically - Kugler knowing nothing either. That sentence in the original runs on with a comma into the “people are indulging themselves in speculations” bit and “the one regards the other with suspicion” rather than ending in a full stop with the speculation and suspicion stuff being a new sentence.
German sentences do tend to go on and on. And on.
Together with the bit at the end about how he could really use the inheritance, it sounds to me as though there was some pot of money which Ries thought he might have a claim on - provided he could satisfy the authorities that he was sufficiently related to somebody or other.
That wouldn’t surprise me given the amount of assets being seized and redistributed by the Nazis. Something similar happened after the Wall came down (and of course -quite rightly - after the war by the descendants of those who had their stuff taken by the Nazis).
That and/or it’s to do with the law requiring people to notify the state of any assets belonging to them outside Germany:
Given he says he lost 500,000 Reichsmark, he must been quite rich at some point. Assuming I’ve worked this chart out correctly, that equates to around EUR 2,050,000 or about 2.4 million US dollars.
The letter reads to me very much as though it’s the money he’s actually writing about. The stuff about the Jews and how wonderful life is now the Fuehrer is in charge strikes me like the equivalent of “little Mary got her GSCE results and old Mr. Frottelhelm broke his hip” tacked on out of concern for social niceties. All the more revealing for that of course.
The spelling also seems to get worse during the rant about Jews. I get the picture of him hammering away at the typewriter, spittle-flying as he gets worked up about the poor German girls being degraded by those nasty Jews… 
@beschizza - Do we/ does Prof. Shaughnessy know anymore about Mr Ries?
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If so, I’m sure he’ll jump in!
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Interesting bit about the Jews fleeing to Palestine, for those of you who don’t support a 2-state solution. Despite efforts of post-war Allied govts to literally wipe it off the map, it shows that it was common knowledge that the state of Palestine did at one time exist.
^^
I’m sure of your intentions.
I fully understand the words and their meanings,
It’s just an odd combination that makes me listen up.
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