All posts tagged: Hitler

Clarence Thomas blames progressivism for Hitler. Historians aren’t having it

Clarence Thomas blames progressivism for Hitler. Historians aren’t having it

Published by Sam Flores

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing backlash after remarks linking progressive political ideas to the rise of Adolf Hitler, a comparison critics say misrepresents history while escalating partisan rhetoric. During a recent speech, Thomas criticized early 20th-century progressivism — including ideas associated with President Woodrow Wilson — arguing that such movements contributed to conditions that enabled authoritarian regimes in Europe. The comments, which circulated widely online, drew sharp responses from historians and legal scholars who rejected the comparison as inaccurate and misleading. Experts note that the rise of Nazi Germany is broadly understood to have stemmed from a complex set of factors, including economic collapse, political instability and the aftermath of World War I, not American progressive reforms. Critics argue that invoking Hitler in modern ideological debates risks distorting that history while inflaming political divisions. Supporters of Thomas defended the remarks as part of a broader critique of government overreach, suggesting he was drawing philosophical parallels rather than asserting a direct causal relationship. Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for …

Turkey brands Netanyahu ‘Hitler’ as Erdogan threatens Israel invasion | World | News

Turkey brands Netanyahu ‘Hitler’ as Erdogan threatens Israel invasion | World | News

Published by Sam Flores

Turkey’s president has launched a scathing attack on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declaring he is “blinded by blood and hate,” while one of his ministers branded him a “Hitler of our time”. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also issued threats to invade Israel over its assault on Lebanon. In a speech delivered after indictments were issued against 35 senior Israeli officials, Mr Erdoğan said: “Had Pakistan not been mediating in the war between the US and Iran, we would have shown Israel its place. Just as we entered Libya and Karabakh, we can enter Israel. “There is no reason not to do it.” The officials, including Netanyahu, face charges of crimes against humanity, prompting the Israeli prime minister to hit back in a social media post, accusing Mr Erdoğan of having “massacred his own Kurdish citizens”. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz, who was also named in the Turkish indictments, branded the Turkish premier a “Muslim Brotherhood man”. The latest friction between the nations emerges as Mr Erdoğan cautioned Donald Trump about potential “provocations and sabotage” in …

From Hitler to ‘Pinocchio’: Germany’s speech laws collide with satire

From Hitler to ‘Pinocchio’: Germany’s speech laws collide with satire

Published by Sam Flores

When German historian Rainer Zitelmann reposted a photo of Adolf Hitler to warn against appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin, he didn’t expect it to trigger a police probe. According to police, the problem was the image itself: Hitler was shown wearing a swastika armband — a banned symbol under Germany’s criminal code, which prohibits the public display of Nazi and other extremist insignia. Zitelmann was informed in February that authorities were examining the case. Zitelmann’s is just one of several recent investigations into online speech, which have raised questions about how far German authorities are going in enforcing strict speech laws — and whether efforts to curb extremism are colliding with satire and political criticism. Zitelmann said he posted the image as a warning, not an endorsement. Like Hitler, Putin cannot be trusted when he says he has no further territorial ambitions. “I’m usually against Hitler analogies,” he said. “They’re often inaccurate and used to discredit political opponents.”  But, he added, ”the parallels practically impose themselves.” A week earlier, a journalist found himself in a …

Women of the Rosenstrasse protest challenged the Nazi regime for their detained Jewish husbands’ freedom – and won

Women of the Rosenstrasse protest challenged the Nazi regime for their detained Jewish husbands’ freedom – and won

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — On the cold evening of Feb. 27, 1943, Charlotte Israel gathered with a small crowd of women on the Rosenstrasse, a narrow street in central Berlin. They were not Jewish, but their husbands were, and the men had just been arrested in a sweeping roundup of more than 9,000 Berlin Jews. Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and an architect of the Holocaust’s murder of 6 million Jews, called this arrest a “de-judaization of the Reich.” Nearly 2,000 of those arrested had non-Jewish wives and were crammed together in a building on the Rosenstrasse. Israel and the other women who had gathered outside resolved to return the next day. Early the next morning, as she approached Rosenstrasse in search of her husband, Annie Radlauer heard a chorus of voices growing louder as she drew nearer: “Give us our husbands back!” The vigil, which sometimes grew into collective protests, continued off and on until March 6. This protest still raises questions about how Hitler ruled and about attempts to rescue German Jews. Families …

Hitler in Greenland – The Atlantic

Hitler in Greenland – The Atlantic

Published by José Betancourt

Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s. According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone “interested him more in his youth” than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the first team to cross Greenland’s interior. A surviving volume from Hitler’s private book collection contains firsthand accounts of the geologic and Arctic explorer Alfred Wegener’s Grönland Expedition, which left Wegener dead in 1930 and inspired the 1933 adventure film S.O.S. Eisberg, starring the actor and eventual filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler’s personal copy of History of the Expedition, the narrative of the tragic Wegener venture, can be perused in the rare-book collection at the Library of Congress among the 1,200 or so remnant volumes from Hitler’s private library. The 198-page monograph bears his personal bookplate—ex libris, eagle, swastika—like many of the others, but is notable because unlike most, it does not include a handwritten inscription by an author, a close associate, or a distant admirer. This suggests that the volume was …

A Watercolor by Adolf Hitler Guest Stars in HBO’s ‘Industry’

A Watercolor by Adolf Hitler Guest Stars in HBO’s ‘Industry’

Published by Jenni Sidey

Adolf Hitler’s artistic ambitions may have died in a Vienna admissions office, but his watercolors remain surprisingly alive on the auction circuit—and, now, on prestige television. This week’s episode of HBO’s Industry features a quiet reveal that would have felt implausible if it weren’t so well documented: a tasteful watercolor of Neuschwanstein Castle turns out to be signed “A. Hitler.” The moment lands as satire, but it also reflects an awkward reality of the art market. These paintings exist, and they sell for real money. Related Articles In 2015, a group of Hitler watercolors fetched roughly €400,000 at auction in Nuremberg, with one version of Neuschwanstein Castle selling for €100,000 to an anonymous buyer from China. Other works, including still lifes and architectural views, have continued to circulate, provided they omit Nazi symbols and pass basic legal thresholds in Germany. As a specialist at one auction house put it in 2019: the works have no artistic value, yet could sell for thousands of euros. This is where Industry gets it right. The painting is a kind of shorthand for inherited wealth, moral rot, and the …

Danes risked all to save Jews from Hitler. We must do nothing less to protect Denmark now.

Danes risked all to save Jews from Hitler. We must do nothing less to protect Denmark now.

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Speaking to Jake Tapper of CNN about the proposed takeover of Greenland from Denmark — which could effectively end NATO and throw our civilization to the wolves — Trump aide Stephen Miller said, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” No wonder Miller’s childhood rabbi has criticized him as a purveyor of “negativity, violence, malice and brutality” who learned nothing from his Jewish spiritual education. This Hobbesian ethic is precisely the opposite of what the Talmudic rabbis meant when they said the world stands on, among other things, acts of kindness, truth and peace (Avot 1:2,18).  They also stated: “Be careful in your dealings with the ruling authorities, for they do not befriend a person except for their own needs. They seem like friends when it is to their own interest, but they do not …

Hitler’s “Children”: The Führer Never Had Kids, but These Wild Conspiracies Insist Otherwise

Hitler’s “Children”: The Führer Never Had Kids, but These Wild Conspiracies Insist Otherwise

Published by Sam Flores

By all legitimate accounts, Adolf Hitler died on April 30, 1945, in his Berlin bunker after swallowing a cyanide pill and shooting himself in his right temple. At the chancellor’s side was Eva Braun, his young wife of one day, and their beloved German shepherd Blondi—both dead by cyanide. Their bodies were doused with gas and burned while Allied forces closed in on Germany’s capital from both sides. The war was over, and the führer was dead. But what if he really wasn’t? Conspiracists have long speculated about if and how Hitler might live on: using a pseudonym in Argentina, huddling in a bunker under the Antarctic ice, or secretly siring offspring. Throughout his rise to power and reign, actually, rumors constantly swirled about Hitler’s romantic partners and possible progeny. More than 80 years later, writers, creators, and fabulists in dark corners of the internet are still imagining ways and worlds where Hitler’s genes somehow survived. (See, as one example, Netflix’s upcoming remake of The Boys From Brazil, starring Jeremy Strong as a Nazi hunter …

European Magazine Depicts Trump As Hitler With Oil Moustache

European Magazine Depicts Trump As Hitler With Oil Moustache

Published by Sam Flores

Slovenian newspaper Dnevnik’s supplement magazine Objektiv took a bold artistic approach in its latest cover Friday, depicting President Donald Trump wearing a Venezuela flag pin and bleeding oil from his nose in an image that makes him appear similar to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The cover, illustrated by artist Tomato Košir, features a subhead reading “American Attack on Venezuela” and comes in reaction to the Trump administration’s recent military strike on the Latin American country, which resulted in the capture of its president, Nicolas Maduro, by US forces in the middle of the night. In the aftermath of the military operation, Trump announced that the US will “run” Venezuela, later suggesting that the US oil industry would take over the country’s oil production. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent, and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue,” Trump told NBC News. Comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis are nothing new for the president and his administration, which has drawn heightened criticism during …

The Evil Genius of Fascist Design: How Mussolini and Hitler Used Art & Architecture to Project Power

The Evil Genius of Fascist Design: How Mussolini and Hitler Used Art & Architecture to Project Power

Published by José Betancourt

When the Nazis came to pow­er in 1933, they declared the begin­ning of a “Thou­sand-Year Reich” that ulti­mate­ly came up about 988 years short. Fas­cism in Italy man­aged to hold on to pow­er for a cou­ple of decades, which was pre­sum­ably still much less time than Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni imag­ined he’d get on the throne. His­to­ry shows us that regimes of this kind suf­fered a fair­ly severe sta­bil­i­ty prob­lem, which is per­haps why they need­ed to put forth such a sol­id, for­mi­da­ble image. The IMPERIAL video above explores “the evil genius of fas­cist design,” focus­ing on how Hitler and Mus­soli­ni ren­dered their ide­olo­gies in art and the built envi­ron­ment, but many of its obser­va­tions can be gen­er­al­ized to any polit­i­cal move­ment that seeks total con­trol of a soci­ety, espe­cial­ly if that soci­ety has a suf­fi­cient­ly glo­ri­ous-seem­ing past. Fas­cis­m’s visu­al lan­guage has many inspi­ra­tions, two of the most impor­tant cit­ed in the video being  Roman­ti­cism and Futur­ism. The for­mer offered “a long­ing for the past, an obses­sion with nature, and a focus on the sub­lime”; the lat­ter “wor­shiped speed, …