Poland: Still a bit pissed about the war Saturday saw the kick-off of the European Football Championships in Basel. The tournament for Europe’s top 16 football (you call it 'soccer') nations is being co-hosted this year by Switzerland and Austria, neither of which is a noted hotbed of footballing passion, but feelings have nonetheless been running high for the past few days. That has little to do with the placid Alpine fans, and more to do with Sunday’s match between old rivals Germany and Poland.

In the run-up to the game, the Polish tabloid Super Express devoted its back page to a gruesome depiction of the Polish coach holding the severed heads of Joachim Löw and Michael Ballack, the German trainer and captain respectively, beside the headline “Leo, give us their heads!” A minor diplomatic incident ensued, with the situation defused only by an in-person apology from the Polish coach to the two decapitated Germans. “This is shit,” exclaimed Leo Beenhakker angrily. “Here one sees what sick people there are in this world.” Though the match itself was unremarkable, rival fans clashed afterwards, with some 150 detained; it is reported today that some of the German fans were heard singing Nazi and anti-Semitic chants.

Polish antagonism towards their neighbors has shown little sign of abating with the passage of time; last year, the then Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, caused outrage when he suggested that Poland’s voting rights in European Union institutions, weighted according to population, be rebalanced to take account of the millions killed by the Germans during the war. But in a continent which has largely banished conflict as a means of settling grievances, football is often the continuation of war by other means. Local rivalries exist in all sports everywhere, but Europeans are particularly good at using them as an excuse to dredge up old grudges.

Holland Brought It: to germany in 1988 Perhaps the most famous of these is the rivalry between Holland and, yes, Germany. When the Germans hosted these championships 20 years ago, the Dutch convoys came across the border singing "In 1940 they came, in 1988 we came" (it's catchier in Dutch, apparently). Two years ago, the fans traveled back across to Germany for the World Cup clad in WWII-style orange plastic helmets. The atmosphere is reasonably light-hearted these days, but there is no mistaking the undercurrents running beneath the surface.

Other match-ups are more hostile. Games between Greece and Turkey, or Serbia and Croatia, have in recent years seen major clashes between supporters. Armenia and Azerbaijan took it one stage further; their two qualifying matches for this competition were simply canceled amidst childish wrangling over venues. As for Israel, they clock up the air miles competing in the European football set-up, rather than against their Arab neighbors.

But, just as football fans can use the sport to express hostility, it can also serve as a vehicle for more positive nationalist sentiments. In the Gorbachev era, for example, with Soviet republics beginning to scent independence, fans used local club sides as proxies for the national teams that were still some years off. And so supporters of Ararat Yerevan, say, would look forward to games against "Georgia" or "Lithuania," not Dinamo Tbilisi or Žalgiris Vilnius, and chant the name of their opponents’ home republic in solidarity.

In some parts of Europe, club teams remain a focus for regional or national pride. Barcelona is still sentimentally seen as a substitute for a Catalan national side (despite being stuffed with foreign players), AEK Athens historically draw their support from the descendants of the displaced Greeks of Asia Minor, Glasgow Celtic "represent" Scotland’s Irish Catholic community. As for my own country, it has been seriously argued that devolution of government from Westminster to Edinburgh was delayed by two decades due to the timing of a referendum on the issue just months after Scotland's shattering failure at the 1978 World Cup.

Arc de Triomphe: after france's world cup win in 1998 But we who follow the sport with maniacal devotion (I'm typing this with one eye on the France-Romania match in the corner of my screen) do have a tendency to exaggerate its powers. The most remarked example of football as vehicle for social cohesion from recent years is probably France’s World Cup-winning team of 1998, whose members comprised a veritable rainbow of races and immigrant backgrounds; Armenian, Basque, Senegalese and Caribbean. The crowds celebrated in the Champs-Élysées under a giant picture of the great Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, illuminated in red, white and blue under the slogan "Zidane Président." The chattering classes in France loved it.

Only Jean Marie Le Pen and his National Front chose to strike a sour note: "France cannot recognize itself in the national side," he griped. "Maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of color, and should have been a bit more careful." Le Pen's casual racism seemed out of step with the time, but four years later he was in a runoff for the Presidency against Jacque Chirac, and few would say that Zidane's iconic image has done much for relations between "native" French and the country's large Muslim population. Perhaps sport serves as a focus for national pride when other outlets aren't available; maybe it's a safety valve that allows us to mock our enemies without (usually, at least) fighting them in the streets; maybe it can hold up a mirror to our society and help up see ourselves as others see us. Maybe it can even change that society for the better. But hang on; in the corner of my screen, it looks as if the French team of 2008 may finally be stuttering into life, so let's wrap this up.

The actual football game between Germany and Poland? It passed off without incident. The Germans won, as the Germans usually do. Appropriately, both goals were scored by striker Lukas Podolski, who was born in Poland and left when he was a child. He did not celebrate.

Q: What did one Jew say to the other on the train to Buchenwald?

A: "Hey, at least we're not on the train to Auschwitz!"

It's funny because it's true, right? Just ask Rand Simberg, who in a little japeGallows At Buchenwald-Ohrdruf: Not a casualty from "stress" or "disease" promulgated by University of Tennessee Law Professor and "blogfather" of the right Glenn Reynolds, wrote this:

Buchenwald...while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war.

Let's see: Was Buchenwald a slave labor camp ordinary in the history of war? There were some 238,380 people incarcerated there between 1937 and 1945, of whom SS materials record 33,462 dead. Additionally, according to a former prisoner's calculations, there were 8,483 executions by shooting, 1,100 executions by hanging, and 13,500 deaths on evacuation transports beyond the SS numbers, for a grand total of 56,545 deaths. What could possibly be more historically normal for a time of war than that?

But wait, it gets better. Simberg adds:

The people who died there did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet. Which, of course, says much more about human nature and history than it does about the Nazis.

Did the victims of Buchenwald die of stress and disease rather than "a deliberateBodies At Buchenwald-Ohrdruf Labor Camp: "not historically abnormal in a time of war" attempt to wipe them off the planet"? John Cole points us to the Jewish Virtual Library's entry on Buchenwald, which includes not historically abnormal details such as the secret experiments with poison, chemical burns and incendiary bombs, spotted fever virus, yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, paratyphus A and B, cholera, and diphtheria conducted on prisoners. And what about the prisoners who died under "the stress of work"? Here is how Reinhard Heydrich described the purpose of labor camps, as recorded in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference by Adolf Eichmann:

Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.

In other words, inducing "the stress of work and disease" was a deliberate attempt toCorpses Treated With Lime: not victims of "a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet" exterminate the Jews. Simberg is claiming that the Nazi concentration camp system, with the exception of Auschwitz, was not the mechanism of a premeditated plan to murder the Jewish people, and that whatever deaths occurred there were not historical outliers. Those are the fundamental premises of Holocaust denial, endorsed by a popular right-wing blogger and passed along to anyone who might be interested by a tenured law professor at the University of Tennessee.

What on earth could possess anyone who is not eager to be shunned by decent society to say (or in Reynolds' case, disseminate) such things? Why, naturally, it helps to discredit Barack Obama, who recently mentioned in passing that his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz. In fact, Obama's great-uncle helped liberate Buchenwald. The first error generated a gleeful apoplexy on the right because no one ever has or would describe a great-uncle as an "uncle." The second is nefarious because Auschwitz was so awful, and Buchenwald so blah by comparison, that Occam's razor itself, Simberg aptly observes, dictates that Obama substituted "Auschwitz" for "Buchenwald" in a calculated attempt to boost his Jewish vote. Which makes sense only if (a) you buy into Holocaust denialism or (b) you're a deranged hack.

Incidentally, the second Allied officer at Buchenwald was William B. Ravenel III,More Wartime Normality At Buchenwald: So Obama's uncle and McCain's mentor helped stop this; so what, right? who later was hired as an English teacher and football coach at Episcopal High School, and eventually became a mentor and surrogate father to John McCain. In Faith of My Fathers, McCain wrote that "when I came home from Vietnam, Mr. Ravenel was the only person outside of my family whom I wanted to see. I felt he was someone to whom I could explain what had happened to me, and who would understand. That is high tribute to Mr. Ravenel. For I have never met a prisoner of war who felt he could explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it." I spoke recently with Katharine Ravenel, William Ravenel's daughter, who told me that what enabled her father to connect to McCain's experiences as a POW was not any lesson in the classroom or on the football field, but Ravenel's experience liberating Buchenwald and forcing the local townsfolk to see with their own eyes what had happened there (one of the mayors Ravenel led through the camp shot himself).

In other words, Simberg and Reynolds are denigrating the heroism of one of the most important influences on John McCain's life, in addition to their graver indecencies. They were out to score points against Barack Obama, but the gutter they dove into is too polluted with filth to allow for any partisan outflow.

What can we learn from this painting?: The marriage portrait of Charlotte von RothschildThe Israel Museum, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a fantastic collection of art, has a well-deserved reputation for hosting world-renowned art exhibits. Particularly in the realm of Jewish art -- that is, art created by members of the Jewish community -- the Israel Museum most often provides a vibrant, honest experience. However, its two most recent exhibits, "Looking for Owners: Custody, Research, and Restitution of Art Stolen in France during World War II" and "Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust," leave much to be desired.

"Looking for Owners" features pieces that the Nazis looted specifically from French Jewish communities during the Holocaust, while "Orphaned Art" features works of art looted from other European Jewish communities that were discovered in various hiding places by the Allies after the war. The art in both exhibits was collected by various organizations, professors, and graduate students who did years upon years of research in order to determine the owners of each piece and their countries of origin. An effort to return the uncovered pieces to families with legitimate ownership claims would have been an important endeavor, but instead, the entire project served as means of creating various exhibits to simply display the artwork.

Both exhibits consist of largely unrelated pieces of work that were simply owned (not created) by well-to-do Jews before the war. This alone does not establish a cultural contribution to the world of art by the Jewish community, nor do the works themselves tell us much about the lives of this portion of the Jewish community (upper-class European Jews). Instead, they merely serve as a rather mundane display of the wealth of their owners. The majority of the paintings displayed were either portraits of well-known families, such as the Rothschilds, or mediocre oil paintings of all things gold, shiny, and generally superfluous.

There are still many significant cultural contributions from pre-war Jewish communities that have yet to be salvaged from the remnants of the Holocaust. A people that, since WWII, has established a state and arguably redefined communal resilience, warrants the exhibition of more than a mere display of what was taken from them.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day we tend to focus on the six million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. We read from Night, sing that song by Hannah Szenes, and light six Memorial candles for the nearly two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population who were systematically wiped out by the Nazis. It’s important to remember that Jews bore the brunt of the Nazis wrath, but also that they were far from the only group singled out.
Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi: the retired managing editor of Ebony magazine was born in Germany and narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp with his mother
Homosexuals, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani Gypsies, blacks, and all kinds of political dissidents were also sent to concentration camps and murdered in large numbers. In total, an estimated 5 million non-Jews were killed by the Nazis. Civilian deaths in Europe add many more millions to that number.

A lot of Jewish discourse about the Holocaust rightly focuses on the great Jewish suffering and loss. The other groups who were persecuted, put in camps and executed are generally glossed over, an after-thought to our own grief. It’s natural that we should focus on the community that is closest to us, and that we would fixate on our own families and the stories of those we are familiar with. But the five million others who died deserve more than lip service, more than a footnote.

Related: Third Generation Descendants of Holocaust Survivors and the Future of Remembering

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and if you’re like most of us, you’ve already seen Schindler’s List, Escape From Sobibor, and Life is Beautiful. You read Number the Stars and Anne Frank’s diary in middle school, and you know the basics from the Nuremberg laws and the Warsaw ghetto to Bergen-Belsen and Terezin. Here are some books and movies with distinctively different ways of looking at the events of World War II, and the way they still affect us today.

	The Reader by Bernhard Schlink: A German teenager has an affair with an older woman and later realizes she was involved in some of the worst Nazi cruelty. Beautifully and simply written (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) it stays away from the detailed descriptions of Jewish suffering, and instead wonders about the complicity of average Germans, and how to make amends.
	The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman: A fictionalized account of the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinisky, who hid more than 300 Jews and Polish resisters in the Warsaw Zoo that they ran. I’m only half way through, but the writing is fantastic, and the subtext and commentary about how people, animals, and the way we treat each other is subtle and fascinating.
	The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman: Spiegelman produced what the Wall Street Journal called “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust.” He tells the story of his rocky relationship with his father, Vladek Spiegelman, and intersperses the story of his father’s survival in WW II Europe. Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.
	The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn: Part Memoir part history, the book is the story of Mendelsohn’s journey to find out as much as he could about the six members of his family who died in the Holocaust. Instead of focusing on big numbers and statistics he uses a microscope to look closely at just a few people, and the results are tender and moving. Listen to a Nextbook podcast interview with David Mendelsohn here.
	Somewhere in Germany by Stefanie Zweig: Zweig’s family escaped the Nazis by moving to Kenya, but they return to Germany once the war is over, and the novel, translated by Marlies Comjean, looks at postwar Germany, the anti-Semitism that remains, the difficulties of returning home, and the pain of exile. Otto Frank has a memorable cameo appearance. A gorgeous sequel to Nowhere in Africa (see below).
	The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen: 12-Year-old Hannah travels back in time from a Passover Seder in 1988 to Poland in World War II. As Chaya she is sent to a concentration camp where she learns about growing up and survival in a harrowing and poignant young adult novel. They made a movie with Kirsten Dunst, but the book is much better, and accessible to middle schoolers and adults alike.
	Bent Directed by Sean Mathias: Max, a gay man in Germany at the start of WW II is sent to Dachau, where he pretends to be Jewish, instead of gay, and then falls in love with an openly gay prisoner. An effective look at the way the Holocaust effected other minorities.
	The Counterfeiters Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzsky: The story of a German man, Sally Sorowitsch, in a concentration camp where he’s forced to help the Nazis produce fake foreign currency in order to weaken the Allies’ economy. When a friend and fellow counterfeiter refuses to help the Nazis Sorowitsch is faced with a dilemma that could mean life or death. Winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign film.
	Nowhere in Africa Directed by Caroline Link: Based on the book by Stefanie Zweig, the movie tells the story of Zweig’s family’s departure from Germany on the eve of the Holocaust, and their strange and difficult lives in Kenya, where they enjoy relative safety from the Nazis, but must wonder constantly about the rest of their families. Winner of the Oscar for best foreign film in 2003.
	Forgiving Dr. Mengele Directed by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh: A documentary about Eva Mozes Kor, who, along with her twin sister Miriam, was used as a guinea pig by Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. In the 80s, Kor persuaded former Nazi doctor, Hans Mnuch, to return to Auschwitz with her to declare that the Holocaust happened. During a press conference at that event Kor said she forgave Munch, and when she was asked if she could forgive Dr. Megele, she said said yes. The movie looks at the ways we forgive, the meaning of forgiveness, and how we look back on a painful history.
	The Rape of Europa Directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham: A documentary narrated by Joan Allen, this film looks at the devastating effects of Nazi art theft during World War II, and the heroic efforts of American military personnel, and American art historians who try to recover and return as much of the lost art as they can.
	Walk on Water Directed by Eytan Fox: An Israeli film about a contemporary Israeli secret service agent tasked with following around the grandchildren of a Nazi war criminals. A beautiful and provocative movie, it looks at everything from what it means to be an Israeli man, to sexuality, to forgiveness.

Raised By Wolves: she wasn't actually, but she sure acts like itIt's easy to decry a Holocaust memoir that turns out to be more fantasy than fact.  What’s more difficult is trying to figure out why a woman who’s not even Jewish would pen this story. What drove Misha Defonseca (real name: Monique De Wael) to write a book falsely claiming that she was trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, was subsequently raised by wolves, and later killed a German soldier in self-defense?

Defonesca likely did have a horribly painful childhood. She now claims that her parents were Belgian resistance fighters killed by the Nazis, and that she was raised by her grandfather and uncle who treated her poorly and called her the daughter of traitors because of her parents' role in the resistance. She says this led her to "feel Jewish." I’m not suggesting that Defonesca’s fraud is anything less than atrocious, but it’s not hard to see why she thought writing a Holocaust memoir would be a good way to attract reliable support and sympathy. After all, Bernard Holstein (real name: Bernard Brougham) pulled the same stunt back in 2004--wolves and all. It’s as if Auschwitz is the gold standard for suffering.

The Jewish community should take care to shun “Shoah-business,” and avoid fetishizing the suffering that occurred in the camps. Survivors, Holocaust scholars, and community leaders need to stop going into conniptions whenever the words ‘Holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ are used to describe anything other than the events of World War II. Jews do not have a monopoly on anguish, but when we seem to dominate the field, we can’t be surprised to find those who want to play company to our misery.

Related: Eat Pray Backlash

Thanks, Will.

 

The New York Sun's Adam Kirsch reviews Norman Davies' No Simple Victory, an Apollonian nose-thumbing to the conventional Homeric takes on World War II. No longer, concludes Davies and Hirsch, can the struggle between Fascism and Stalinism be seen as "good" but only "decent." For one thing, the largely self-inflicted military* death toll on the Soviet side was 11 million. Four years of fighting, 11 million dead. Stalin took more than twenty years to murder 20 million through purges, assassinations and de facto death sentences to Siberia. Here's Kirsch:

After Stalin's own incompetence prevented the Red Army from anticipating the German invasion, the Soviet Union could only compensate for huge initial losses by treating its soldiers as cannon fodder, overwhelming the Germans with sheer numbers. Soviet commanders wasted lives in a way that no American general would even have considered. It was necessary to deploy "blocking regiments" behind the front lines, expressly tasked with shooting any comrade who tried to retreat.

Worse, because totally irrational, the Soviet state continued to destroy its own people even when the war was at its height. During the first year of the invasion, the Red Army issued 800,000 death sentences to its own soldiers. Every unit had its commissar, who had to countersign all military orders, and who could condemn anyone to death for an impolitic word. No wonder that, as Mr. Davies writes, "the front-line zone of maximum physical danger" became for the Red Army troops "a zone of psychological liberation, even of gay abandon, which no doubt contributed to the willingness of the ‘Ivans' to rush to their deaths with a hurrah on their lips."

The recent spate of revisionist histories of World War II, and of Stalin himself, attempt to show that the man who inveigled Churchill and Roosevelt was obviously less than a buffoon, was very nearly an intellectual, and was most certainly a great statesman. A few problematic facts obtrude in this thesis:

1. Stalin's so-called "Third Period" of international Communism ordered German party leaders not to ally with the Social Democrats in blocking Nazi electoral gains in the Reichstag in 1932. According to Stalin, National Socialism was the last gasp of capitalism and must be allowed to run its course. One German Communist, Remmelle, was given to remark, “Let Hitler take office – he will soon go bankrupt and then it will be our day.” Trotsky, to this day Stalin's most astute political critic, labeled this non-Marxist policy "sham ultra-radicalism," which failed to "make any distinction between fascism and bourgeois democracy." Indeed, Stalin's tactic of more or less allowing Hitler's rise to power was to assail the Social Democrats as "social fascists." In Trotsky's description of this nonsense designation, "All cats then were equally brown: Hitler was a fascist, but so were the leaders of the traditional bourgeois parties, right and center; so in particular was Bruning, who already ruled by decree; and so even were the Social Democrats who formed the ‘left wing of fascism.’"

2. Stalin was repeatedly warned about Operation Barbarossa by his own spies in Berlin, whom he suspected of being double agents and crypto-fascists. (His paranoia knew no bounds). In fact, one spy even provided the Kremlin with the exact date of the Wehrmacht invasion, though Stalin refused to mobilize the Red Army to prepare for it. The catastrophic loss of Russian lives -- both military and civilian -- could thus be blamed on the incompetence of generalissimus. All the while, Stalin believed that his old ally Hitler would be slower to betrayal; Stalin thought he'd be the one to end the "friendship" pact first.

3. Stalin murdered his best military commanders like Tukachevsky and Yegorov. The British Sovietologist Robert Conquest once asked his friend Tibor Szamuely, the great Hungarian-Russian dissident, why Stalin had killed Yegorov. Tukachevsky's murder was explicable: he had been appointed by Trotsky in the Civil War. But why Yegorov? Szamuely's response was: "Why not?" It was such totalitarian caprice that vitiated the Red Army, requiring the sacrifice of so many more soldiers' lives than should have been necessary.

* Thank to commenter below for spotting the need for clarification.

If you've read or seen Alan Bennett's play "The History Boys" -- turned into a fair movie last year with the same West End/Broadway cast -- you'll know how the subject of historical revisionism is treated. The younger instructor Irwin is called in to sex up a group of public schoolboys' curriculum in preparation for their A-levels, the test that will determine whether they get a fine Oxbridge education or merely a "red brick" university one. The boys' hard-earned pearls of poetic wisdom -- "gobbets," as Irwin terms the boys' wordperfect recitations of Auden, Hardy and Larkin -- are to be used to bedizen unconventional takes on major narratives. Here's how Irwin puts it:

"If you want to learn about Stalin, study Henry VIII. If you want to learn about Mrs Thatcher, study Henry VIII. If you want to know about Hollywood, study Henry VIII.... History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It's a performance. It's entertainment. And if it isn't, make it so."

Another word for "entertainment" in Bennett's play is "journalism," and another way of describing the foregoing approach to history is to argue that Churchill was a war criminal and "Stalin was a sweetie." The nice thing about satire is that it alters your interpretation of real world evidence which supports satire's rather extreme point of view. Here is Andrew Bacevich reviewing Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, a new book by Geoffrey Roberts:

In brief, the story that Roberts tells goes like this: Josef Stalin, uncontested leader of the Soviet Union from 1927 until his death in 1953, deserves to be remembered as a great statesman—indeed, as the greatest of the age. Although Stalin made his share of mistakes, especially in the early phases of World War II, he learned from those mistakes and thereby grew in wisdom and stature. Among allied chieftains, he alone was irreplaceable. He, not Churchill and not Roosevelt, was the true architect of victory, "the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy."

And here's the best line you'll read all day:

Whether intentionally or not, Roberts suggests that Stalin’s penchant for ordering people shot qualifies as a sort of personal quirk, akin perhaps to FDR’s infidelities or Churchill’s fondness for drink.

Pearl HarborWhen I'm not doing comedy, I make my living as an SAT tutor. A damned good one, if I may say so. Every time I hear about some dumb gimmick for studying the SAT (study on your cellphone, "yo momma" jokes, the SAT shower curtain), I think "Well, that'll work for vocabulary." (It's not, however, likely to teach you to deal with fractional exponents, or any serious comparison of long reading passages).

When Flocabulary came out with a hip-hop vocabulary book and CD, I shrugged. That could work. But when the same people came out with Flocabulary: The Hip-Hop Approach to U.S. History, I bought the book and CD. So I could laugh. Blog and laugh.

I loaded the tracks on my iPod ... and proceeded to have a religious experience. Pedagogically religious, anyway. The music didn't suck. In fact, the first song, about the founding of America, began like this:

Black Male Voice Portraying a European, and Rapping in the Most Drippingly Sarcastic Rapper Voice I Have Ever Heard: Wow, I just discovered America!

Black Male Voice Portraying an Angry Native American Speaking as Though to a Small, Racist Child: You didn't discover it. We were already here.

The song goes on to talk about migration over the Bering Strait, the five "civilized" tribes, and the fact that some Native Americans had slaves ("Indians weren't living on some heaven on earth tip"), and to comment, "Isn't that cheap? They call my Jeep a Jeep Cherokee -- what if they called my Jeep a Jeep Jew?"

In the course of this album, Harriet Tubman gets a Lil Kim-like solo ("Reward for my capture? 40 G's"), Frederick Douglass gets to sound like the incredible badass he was, Carnegie (in "Big Ballin' in the Gilded Age") raps about Social Darwinism while Rockefeller points out that Jay-Z named his company "after me," and Sacajawea guides Lewis and Clark through the Rockies "like Mapquest." Lincoln (whose Emancipation Proclamation, of course, failed to free any actual slaves) is portrayed with a dorky, squeaky white guy voice -- but FDR gets a booming, dignified white guy voice. Perhaps my favorite line is when Sally Hemings first attracts Thomas Jefferson:

She's dressed in yellow. She says "Hello,

You probably noticed me in the fields of Monticello."

Below is a sound clip (a couple verses, so as to say within fair use) from a song called "Would You Drop It?", which presents, I think, a not-bad-at-all explanation of World War II up to Truman's decision to drop the bomb. I challenge anyone to better explain fascism and its appeal to Germans, isolationism, the Great Depression, and Europe's falling to the Germans until Pearl Harbor galvanized us "like 9/11" -- in one minute, in rhyme.

All these tracks are on iTunes (search "Flocabulary"). If I could buy them for every teenager in America, I would.

"Would You Drop It"? (clip)

The following is a modified excerpt from Is it Good for the Jews: The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby, published by Random House, Inc. It has been adapted for Jewcy by author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz. He was seventeen, sensitive, with brooding eyes, and wept easily; little more than five feet tall, slender and dark, but handsome. He felt alone, angry, and confused, and outrage overwhelmed him. He was a Jew. And he had a gun. Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was born in Hannover, Germany, but held Polish nationality. By 1938, he had lived through three years of chaos. The Nazis were in power, and he was not allowed to become an apprentice nor otherwise gain employment. He wanted to go to Palestine but found no way to get there. Finally, he went to Belgium, then crossed the border to France without authorization. He was a refugee, an illegal immigrant, non-Christian, ...

I've always maintained a warm spot for the films of Paul Verhoeven. RoboCop is one of the smartest, most acid satires on corporate capitalism, not to mention eminently more watchable than any reeled species of manufactured dissent by Michael Moore or Tim Robbins. (The frequent news interludes that peppered this gory and bleak cyborg dystopia were worth the price of admission: the weather satellite that precipitates natural disasters and kills vacationing ex-presidents; the Battleship-like board game centered on nuclear annihilation; the gargantuan 6000 SUX sports car advertised as bigger than Godzilla, “An American Tradition.")

 Part of Verhoeven's appeal stems from his love of kitsch and a willingness to transform B-movie subjects (and B-movie dialogue) into blockbuster entertainment. Basic Instinct without his direction would been the most lucrative screenplay Joe Eszterhaus ever sold to Cinemax AfterHours. The underrated Starship Troopers, which, as a smart Robert Heinlein novel, provided him with an ideal blend of sci-fi pulp (giant bugs, intergalactic warfare) and political cynicism (citizenship was purchased through military enlistment, and jingoism topped the list of deadly virtues).

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that, as a Dutchman, Verhoeven treats vulgarity – physical or emotional – with a kind of vaudevillian exuberance that seems more attuned to the seedy cosmopolitan stages of Weimar than to the soft-lit lens of Hollywood. This is another of saying it was only a matter of time before he tackled fascism. Verhoeven's latest film is entitled Black Book, and Manohla Dargis thinks it’s great, sick, brilliant fun:

The thrashing rarely lets up in “Black Book,” a film in which a Jewish woman’s body is saved from the off-camera death camps, gas chambers and ovens to become a site of negotiation, a means of survival and an erotic spectacle. Abused and misused, stripped and stripped again, Rachel — named, it’s worth noting, for the mother of Israel — survives by masking that body with a putatively Aryan disguise. She also falls for a Nazi.

Not any old Nazi, but the head of the Gestapo in The Hague, where Rachel has landed after fleeing an ambush that claims her brother and parents. Now working for the resistance, Rachel signs up for the ultimate Mata Hari assignment and agrees to bed Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) so she can uncover Gestapo secrets. She does that and more. After dyeing her hair a brassy blond, Rachel insinuates herself into the superdashing Nazi’s confidences and, soon enough, his bedroom. It takes just one glance at the top of her head with its creeping dark roots for Müntze to guess the truth. Grasping her naked breasts in her hands, Rachel pleads her case with Shakespearean gravitas, “Hath not a Jew, er, eyes?”

Leni on the Slopes: Riefenstahl the Aryan pin-upIn Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay (dig the new website!) on the life and legacy of Leni Riefenstahl, we come across the following factoid, which has the virtue of being pathetic enough to be true:

In the course of a dark century, Riefenstahl seems to have suffered at least one spasm of something like doubt, and the moment was captured in a photograph. When Hitler invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, she mustered some of her most seasoned technicians into a combat-film unit. They left for the front about a week later, reporting for duty “on Hitler’s orders” to the small, predominantly Jewish town of Końskie. Waking under fire the next morning, September 12th—the day the Reich’s news bureau promised a solution to “the Jewish problem in Poland”—Riefenstahl was on hand to witness an improvised beginning to the exterminations. Claiming that Polish partisans had killed a German officer and four soldiers, the occupying troops herded a Jewish burial detail to the main square. When the soldiers guarding the gravediggers began to kick and club them into the pit, Riefenstahl tried to intervene, she said, but they turned on her with cries of “Get rid of the bitch.” Bach writes, “An amateur photographer captured her distraught expression.”

The subsequent massacre at Kon´skie left a toll of thirty victims. An eyewitness testified that Riefenstahl had a “sobbing fit” when she saw the Wehrmacht open fire on civilians, and she later claimed to have been “so upset” by this experience that she asked for permission to abandon her assignment and return to Berlin. In reality, however, she hitched a ride on a military plane to Danzig, where she lunched with Hitler (he expressed “shock and anger” at the story, she said) and accepted his invitation to hear the victory speech in which he blamed England for the war.

So the best propagandist for the Third Reich evidently didn't think what she was selling would ever be purchased by men with guns. One admires Hitler's feigned reaction upon hearing of a massacre that must have had him salivating at the prospect of more.

In the original version of his beautiful memorial to W.B. Yeat, Auden wrote:

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet. 

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Riefenstahl had some talent as a documentarian, but can it really be said that she should be pardoned by the moral judgment of posterity as she was by the tribunal of Nuremberg, whose punitive scope was much narrower?

Not That Fun For Anyone, ReallyNew Year’s Eve blew even more tourist butt than usual this year. There was the requisite good-time-pressure implosion and resultant tears, of course. And the face-sucking of acquaintances, natch. Deflated expectations, girl-fighting, and the oldest anti-climax in the book, check.

It got worse, however.

We got invited to tag along to a party, the theme of which was, I shit you not at all, Paris in the ‘30s. (Note: not to be confused with dressing up like a projected Paris In Her Thirties.) At first glance, that might not seem so strange. Paris = debauchery and style and fun! Josephine Baker! The Lost Generation! Avant-Garde! Anais Nin! Henry Miller! Anal sex! Absinthe! Whatever! Wheeee!

But, uh, all that revelry turned out to be something of a harbinger for -- how you say -- not the best of times for a… lot of people.

From Jay Freedman’s review of The Twilight Years, William Wiser’s seminal account of the period:

“Tragically, while Dali and Picasso painted, while existentialists debated in Left Bank cafes, while proponents of haute couture thrived, the social and political rot gnawing at the innards of the Third Republic accelerated.”

Long story short, Paris in the thirties was “…a city whose brightest lights seemed oblivious to impending doom.” A regular "ship of fools". A terrible choice for a party ushering in 2007, one would hope like hell.

Why not just go all the freaking way and make it Berlin in the thirties? It was a fucked up time everywhere. There was the Depression, the rise of Fascism, the Nuremberg Laws. Oh, and don’t forget Stalin's first round of purges! Chug-a-lug!

Izzy felt that, since we were both wearing our pants tucked into our boots (neither Paris in the ‘30s nor Paris In Her Thirties), we should storm the party like resistance fighters. The jazz trio and champagne tower had too hypnotic an effect, however, and we found ourselves stuck in stunned, ambivalent silence. (Kind of like the French as the thirties drew to a close.)

Admittedly, it’d be hard to find a historical party theme that doesn’t carry with it a bitter, bitter historical aftertaste for someone, somewhere. And our hosts seemed like fine, fine folk. Next time, though, maybe a good old fashioned Come-As-You-Are?

Obviously I should’ve addressed all of this on the first of the year. But I was way, way too hung-over, self-indulgent, depressed, and apathetic to bother with much grappling.

Kind of like France as the thirties drew to a close.

Whatevs. Peel me a grape.

David IrvingWhat you won't find mentioned in the mainstream press coverage of David Irving's release is that this dark and univiting figure has tussled with actual Holocaust deniers. I say "actual" because, if you absorb some of the argot of the paranoid subfield of what I suppose should be called Shoah epistemology, you find that people of Irving's type fall into two categories: "Deniers" and "revisionists." Deniers believe that Hitler never endeavored to create a Judenrein (Jew-free) Europe, let alone came quite close to actually achieving it. Revisionists counter that, well, the Nazis have been given a raw deal this past half century but did indeed engage in some summary executions of Jews. No gas chambers were used, though, and most of the deaths were caused by camp epidemics, condemning the Third Reich to, at worst, the crime of malignant neglect (the initial crime of corralling an entire ethnic population into fenced-off areas is typically elided in these discussions).

Irving is a revisionist. He's a liar and a slippery customer on a number of questions, mostly pertaining to his own rhetoric about his continuing legal troubles (which began with Deborah Lipstadt). But he has provided evidence against his own pro-Nazi "side." For instance, his scholarship has revealed that Joseph Goebbels suborned the homegrown Fascist movement in Great Britain led by Oswald Mosley, putting paid to a small but significant lie propagated for decades by the British right that Mosley's cheques were not signed in Berlin. Irving also comes right out and grants that the SS killed thousands of Eastern European Jews in an "experimental" gas chamber in the Polish town of Chelmo, demonstrating that the intention of genocide was never far from the Fuhrer's mind. (In a contradictory vein, Irving's argued that Hitler personally never knew about Kristallnacht.)

However, in perhaps the most interesting twist of this weird tale, Irving's visibly tusseled with full-blown Holocaust deniers like the Frenchman Robert Faurisson, lately of the Ahmadinejad-sponsored meeting of the minds in Tehran. That Iranian Jew-haters have taken up Irving's free speech martyrdom is only slightly deserving, then, of being termed ironic.

For what it's worth, I think it's a scandal that Irving's books have been unavailable in this country for mass purchase except through recondite and inconvenient channels. You can easily walk into any Barnes & Noble and pull Mein Kampf off the shelf. And Manhattan boasts a handful of "radical" bookshops that sell everything from the farcically doctored Soviet encyclopedias (from whose successive editions more and more Old Bolsheviks were wiped clean from history) to Stalin's writings on nationality. There's more legitimacy in what Irving has printed on the German military campaigns of World War II than in much of the more morally comforting scholarship on the same subject.

It's revealing just how unsure our culture is of its own rush to censorship. The editor of St. Martin's Press, which was set to distribute Irving's 1996 biography of Goebbels, once described to Christopher Hitchens the firm's zero-hour cancellation of the project as "Profiles in Prudence." (Irving eventually self-published the book, a decision that has had him strapped for cash and probably in no better shape for that unenviable defense counsel's bill from Austria.)

Locking people up for nasty opinions has a way of becoming a form of self-punishment. Irving's release coincides with a news cycle in which David Duke and a gaggle of pea-brained anti-Semites have been given too much ink on their second thoughts about not-so-recent tragic events. Perfect. They'll think their cause has had an effect on international capitulation to Jewish sensitivity.

What kind of "message" would have been sent had Irving been allowed to continue his eccentric and marginal work unmolested?