Something was making me queasy as I walked past the newsstand, and I had to go back to find out what it was. This is what my lateral vision had caught:
I think it’s a really shitty way to sell magazines.
Selling Swastikas
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Clarissa's Blog 
I agree. Awful, gross, and insensitive.
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“Something was making me queasy as I walked past the newsstand”
I agree completely! In this day and age? To use the smiley face on the cover of a magazine is an assault on all that is good and decent. Disgusting!
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“I think it’s a really shitty way to sell magazines”
There is no space for spirituality (beyond individual consumer choices) in fluidity and so nothing is sacred and so nothing is profane.
For most people a magazine with a swastika on the cover gives them a chance to present themselves as virtuous (because they’re against the nazis because they’re like racist and stuff).
For others, it’s a sign of ironic distance and pseudo-transgression.
For a very few it’s a totally non-ironic brand.
The Nazi Swastika is just another consumer product now to be used for a variety of purposes by those creating their market brand.
Any moral twinges about its undoubted robust commercial power is nation-state thinking.
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The cover story is on the “Last Nazi Hunter.” Although by this time they are looking for very old people who were very young and very insignificantly connected to the Nazi movment. So the cover is connected to a story inside the magazine. It is interesting that in the case of no other horrible regime do we talk about people hunting down its representatives decades later. In almost all other cases perpetrators of other crimes against humanity get amnesties and immunity from prosecution.
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Soviet leaders got no punishment at all.
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Especially when you see how much the process was rigged for the winners at Nuremberg.
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Victors always dispense their brand of justice after major wars — nothing unique about that.
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That’s because no other “horrible regime” ever started the most destructive war in the history of the world, and then proceeded to lose it.
The “Nazi hunter”‘s lifelong quest is over, but the old men who’ve dedicated most of their lives to the search can’t let it go. All of the significant Nazis from World War II are long dead — and most of them died living openly and freely in West Germany without ever being charged under then-existing German laws.
Charging an accountant with war crimes because of who his bosses were isn’t justice — it’s German guilt on steroids.
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This simply isn’t true. For one thing there is Japan. Although the crucial part here appears to be the losing part. The USSR was allied with Nazi Germany from 1939-1941 in the invasion of Poland. But, really if international law means something why were 90 year old Germans guilty of minor crimes under the Nazis in the Netherlands being while Dutch officers guilt of murdering hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were never tried? It is a horrible double standard and one that can not be morally justified as you have tried to do. Belgium for instance murdered more Congolese than Hitler killed Jews.
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So what is your point? That the Japs and the Dutch got off scot-free after the Second World War, while the Germans have been held guilty unto the tenth generation, like the Old-Testament Hebrews in the Bible?
The Japanese got off easy for exactly one reason: General MacArthur took pity on their humble little emperor. No occupied nation in Europe cooperated more in slaughtering the Jews than the Nederlands, and after the war they cried “victim.”
Belgium and the Congo? How in the world are they connected to World War II?
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The subject wasn’t WWII. It was horrible regime. Your racist dismissal of the Belgian atrocities in Congo which involved the murder of twice as many Black people as Hitler killed Jews is well noted.
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“Belgian atrocities in Congo ”
Yeah, Belgium was absolutely the worst colonial power in Africa, not even close.
Were the Germans in Africa the best of a bad lot? They weren’t there long and IINM helped strengthen Swahili as a lingua franca rather than just try to cram their own language down everyone’s throat (there may be lots of stuff I’m unaware of….).
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Cliff, German colonialism in Africa varied according to colony. In Namibia there was the genocide against the Herero and Namqua in 1904-1907. In Tanzania there was considerable violence in suppressing the Maji Maji rebellion in 1905. In Togoland and Kamerun it was considerably less violent. Generally the opinion on Togoland is that the Germans were more efficient and no more brutal than the French that replaced them. But, the total numbers killed by the Germans in Africa were puny compared to the Belgians, French, Portuguese, or even the British. Many of the atrocities like the French murder of over a million Algerians or the British massive use of concentration camps in Kenya against the Mau Mau insurgency took place long after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
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Sorry, but that’s the sole focus of this discussion.
No one doubts the magnitude of the slaughters that have occurred in Africa before, during, and since the end of World War II, continuing well into the modern times.
But that’s another subject entirely.
In the 1990’s, the Western World (NATO) self-righteously went to war against Kosovo, which was no threat to any NATO nation, because NATO was upset about the rapes of several thousand white European women, while it turned a blind-eye to millions of African men, women, and children who were being mutilated by machetes a mere continent away.
Was that racism? Or simply wisely staying within your sphere of influence, recognizing that your forces don’t have the power to save the whole world?
Whatever you choose to label the West’s inaction in Africa, it’s a topic for another discussion, totally unrelated to the specific horrors that were going in our European backyard during the Second War World and in the years afterward.
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No the subject was clearly “horrible regimes” and not WWII. You don’t have very good reading skills. Read my first comment again. I even mention the post WWII atrocities of the Dutch against Indonesians which you wrongly because you are an idiot moral and otherwise read as Dutch collaboration with the Nazis.
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@J. Otto Pohl
My, my, aren’t you getting a bit upset, just because someone dares to have a different opinion than you?
Our posts were talking past each other. Reading skills? When you say “no other horrible regime,” you’re clearly comparing those regimes’ treatment to that of the Nazis after WWII. So I specifically addressed treatment of the Germans and the Japanese.
The Indonesians and the Belgians are an entirely different subject that you brought up out of the blue — not part of the original discussion.
So that makes me an “idiot moral WHAT?” — there’s a noun missing in your insult. Do you want to clam down, and try rephrasing your tantrum in correct English?
Or perhaps just calm down. 🙂
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” The USSR was allied with Nazi Germany from 1939-1941 in the invasion of Poland. ”
It might be interesting to some (including Matt) that the general semi-official position of Russia is that Polish aggression was the real cause of WWII.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/5445161/Russia-accuses-Poland-of-starting-Second-World-War.html
The point here is that Russia is still mired in Great Powers thinking, Nazi Germany was a great power and so Russia (in its USSR guise) could and should deal with it.
Russians (in the majority) are fine with the idea of superpowers deciding the fate of lesser nations (as long as Russia has a seat at the superpower table).
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Hey, if magazine covers in a newsstand don’t catch customers’ eyes, the magazine doesn’t sell.
If the magazine’s lead story was about the Russian revolution, you’d probably see a picture of the Soviet flag or Lenin’s face on the cover.
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I agree. Especially in this case, we talk about nazi hunters. This is very anti-nazi.
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Google “Haredi protesters Holocaust imagery children” and you will understand why this newsstand failed to make any impression on me.
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