his shocking praise for Adolf Hitler.
He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two coats!
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It’s a tribute to the power of propaganda that nonsense like this and “At least Mussolini made the trains run on time” live on despite nearly a century of contrary evidence. Deliver the lie, get buy-in from lazy media and elite opinion shapers, then repeat, repeat, repeat.
Bloomberg has an interesting overview of Mussolini’s railroad project. It was basically performative. He built fancy stations and markedly improved service on the routes most used by tourists and the wealthy while letting everything else continue going to hell. Foreign journalists and businesspeople saw the shiny new stuff (while imbibing Fascist propaganda) and went home with glowing descriptions of the Mussolini miracle.
It’s amazing how well this worked. As a fan of humorist/social commentator Will Rogers I was embarrassed to read his comments about his 1926 visit with Mussolini. Rogers was dazzled by what he perceived as a clever, tough “regular guy” using unconventional methods to solve the big problems ordinary politicians couldn’t. He loved the “common sense” castor oil treatment for political enemies and speculated it could be used back home to limit Senate filibusters. Rogers ended by musing that while Mussolini is indeed a dictator, “[The] Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government there is, if you have the right Dictator.”
The Bloomberg article is here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/stop-saying-mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time
And here is an American History article on how Rogers was bamboozled by Il Duce:
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Funny. That’s precisely how MAGA fanatics feel about Trump.
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Of ketchup?
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He keeps it so that if he sees a quote from it he likes on the internet, he can look it up, read that line, and convince himself that the book agrees with HIM. Kinda how most people “read” the Bible.
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Yeah, I suspect his ownership of the book was mostly talismanic, but I could also believe he read a few choice (short) quotes out of the book, back in the days when he was less cognitively impaired, to make himself feel educated. That was probably the limits of his reading ability, even when he was younger.
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In private?? He glorified Dictators right out in the open!! This isn’t even a revelation. Dude is a straight up jackass trying to sugar coat dictatorship so he can get some of his own.
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I recommend to anyone the always entertaining The Rest is History podcast, which just a couple months ago did a multi-part series on Germany under the Nazis, before the war. They went so heavily on arming themselves, at the expense of all else, households had a hard time feeding themselves (note the date; it wasn’t a secret):
But they put on a good parade!
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Biff’s mentor Roy Cohn took on Gotti as a client, and of course Biff built his reputation as a developer by cutting deals with the Mob to get concrete to build his early projects. So definitely.
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Trump Tower has a concrete tube structure instead of a steel frame. Allegedly concrete was used to generate business for mafia-controlled concrete suppliers.
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Obviously a fake. If it were a real photo Trump would be holding the book upside down. /s
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Mein Kampf, in any case, is – in addition to its odious content – very tediously written and unlikely to be Trump’s choice if he were to pick up any book at all (The Very Hungry Caterpillar would probably be more up his street). Hitler may have been a “meh” painter but for sure he was never in danger of winning international literary awards for his sparkly and entertaining prose. (Mein Kampf did make him a considerable pile of money even so, because while the Nazis were in power, every bridal couple in Germany would, by law, be issued a copy of the book as part of their civil wedding proceedings, with royalties going directly to the Führer.)
They say that reading the Bible is one of the faster ways to become an atheist. Perhaps neo-Nazis should be forced to actually read Mein Kampf from cover to cover, in order to turn them off Nazism.
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Like I’ve said for a while: if you want to make sure a book is despised and unread, don’t ban it; make it compulsory in year 10 English.
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I think the book he allegedly kept at his bedside was a book of Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. So maaaybe he read through at least some of it, though I wouldn’t bet on more than a couple of paragraphs here and there.
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Every accusation is a confession
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Designed by Ron Hamberder?
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These people are sharp, tough, and generally vicious,
He sees vicious as a virtue. It is the amoral world view of bullies. Evil people tell you that there is no “good” or “evil,” only winners and losers. It is shocking how many people embrace this, especially in so-called “Christian” communities.
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Too many people fetishize tough love. Recently, I was reading about “originalism”, and the idea that following the text to the ends of the earth was seen as some sort of virtue-- a constraint upon ones free will.
Too much of this sort of nonsense, and people begin to believe that the sensible, the intelligent, and the good are somehow Satan’s toolbox.
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Murke’s Collected Silences comes to mind.
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