There's a new exhibit at the US Holocaust Museum, which they've put up on-line. It's a collection of 116 photographs from Auschwitz, showing SS officers in their spare time, on-duty, and so on. The first 12 are the ones I find the most interesting and simultaneously unsettling; it's just photos of people having fun. Lots of them look like really nice people; the sorts of faces you would expect to see amongst your friends. Except that the men are wearing the uniforms of SS officers, the women of SS auxiliaries, even while they're playing accordions and laughing in the rain.
(There was lots of rain there. I've heard that the amount of smoke produced tended to seed clouds.)
Several of the later photos are interesting, too. #57 shows the commandant (Richard Baer), the previous commandant (Rudolf Hoess), and Josef Mengele just hanging out; this picture has a lot less of the "oh, what nice guys" aspect and a lot more of the "wow. So this is what villains look like in their spare time" aspect.
The usual sentiments about "the banality of evil" apply. The NY Times has an article and op-ed piece about the exhibit, which have some interesting bits about the provenance and significance of the photos.
Can you do a general outline blog entry on the whole Iran thing we are going through right now? I have had the feeling, throughout the entire bush administration, that we are being fed a bunch of bullshit by said administration and our media. Everything I have read and heard from Ahmadinejad sounds more legit and honest than what I hear coming out of the mouth of our administration.
I understand that's it's our prerogative to take out these middle eastern countries in the pursuit of fossil fuel control and protecting Israel, and that the media and Bush admin generally will support propaganda towards this end. But I see no logical argument towards military action against Iran.
Perhaps they are developing nukes. I am personally not convinced of that. Regardless - we all have them, so who are we to say they cannot develop them.
The senate or whoever decided to decide that part of the Iranian military/goverment was a "terrorist organization". Um. What the hell is that supposed to mean? They give no rationale for that decision based on what I can find.
It seems taken as an axiom in american media stories that Ahmadinejad claimed the holocaust was a myth. Every fact that I can find, however, points to him simply claiming that we are displacing/harassing palestinians in support of a ethnic group that happened to suffer persecution at the hands of a regime completely removed from anything Islamics had anything to do with.
It would be cool if you could call out some of the shit our media and administration is feeding us, based on your political knowledge/experience in studying this stuff. Hopefully the fact that you are Jewish (????111two) doesn't bias you too much.
September 30 2007, 11:06:39 UTC 8 years ago
Can you do a general outline blog entry on the whole Iran thing we are going through right now? I have had the feeling, throughout the entire bush administration, that we are being fed a bunch of bullshit by said administration and our media. Everything I have read and heard from Ahmadinejad sounds more legit and honest than what I hear coming out of the mouth of our administration.
I understand that's it's our prerogative to take out these middle eastern countries in the pursuit of fossil fuel control and protecting Israel, and that the media and Bush admin generally will support propaganda towards this end. But I see no logical argument towards military action against Iran.
Perhaps they are developing nukes. I am personally not convinced of that. Regardless - we all have them, so who are we to say they cannot develop them.
The senate or whoever decided to decide that part of the Iranian military/goverment was a "terrorist organization". Um. What the hell is that supposed to mean? They give no rationale for that decision based on what I can find.
It seems taken as an axiom in american media stories that Ahmadinejad claimed the holocaust was a myth. Every fact that I can find, however, points to him simply claiming that we are displacing/harassing palestinians in support of a ethnic group that happened to suffer persecution at the hands of a regime completely removed from anything Islamics had anything to do with.
It would be cool if you could call out some of the shit our media and administration is feeding us, based on your political knowledge/experience in studying this stuff. Hopefully the fact that you are Jewish (????111two) doesn't bias you too much.