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Samizdata quote of the day

Don’t forget, of the two miasmic horrors of the 20th century only one is unfashionable currently. A recommendation to invade Poland and turn people into soap will get you jailed these days. A recommendation to invade Poland and eliminate the bourgeoisie as a class gets you a book contract.

Tim Worstall

11 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • lucklucky

    Social Supremacists had and have many supporters in journalist “class” and teacher “class”. They are the priests that tell us in the churches of XX and XXI century, that means newspapers and TV news what is a sin and what is not.

  • Paul Marks

    Eliminating the Slavs is still an allowed point of view Mr Worstall – as long as the methods used are mass abortion for the local population and mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East.

    As for the National Socialists – they wanted to wipe out Jews (such as my kinsmen in Holland), but the enslavement of Slavs was to be more than enslavement in Poland. All of Poland was going to given to Germans – and the Polish people were not going to be sent to the Moon (they were going to be eliminated – one way or another).

    In some ways Frankfurt School Marxism is a form of Nazi ideas – it is obsessed with race (not so
    much class), but instead of white people being worshipped, they are demonised. It is fairly clear that the modern left wants “white” (actually pinkish grey) people exterminated. In the United States the Federal bureaucracy (and that of many States) hold that the Covid vaccines should not be given to old people first – because old people are “too white” (white people being inherently evil).

    How do the health bureaucrats and media square their anti white racism with their Marxism? Easily – as “Critical Theory” teaches them that “race” like “gender” is a “Social Construct”. Being “white” is not about have pinkish grey skin – it is about such things as hard work, keeping things clean, and believing in objective truth (they really do teach this – including to the UNITED STATES MILITARY).

    So a person who has black skin can actually be “white” (and therefore evil) and someone with white skin can really be “black” (and therefore good).

    It all makes perfect sense – if you went to an expensive school and university and actually believed the crack brained ravings they teach.

    And not just in the humanities – remember the articles in such things as the “New England Journal of Medicine” are often dominated by Frankfurt School Marxist assumptions.

  • lucklucky

    In 1942 more than a book contract would even get handed over people to make the soap:

    Évadé de l’Oflag II-D en Poméranie, le 1er février 1941, il gagne l’URSS où il est interné jusqu’au moment de l’attaque allemande à l’été 1941. Il devient alors représentant de la France libre à Moscou. Avec d’autres Français, il est échangé contre des réfugiés russes de Londres et s’embarque à Arkhangelsk sur un bateau qui lui permet de gagner le Royaume-Uni.
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Billotte

  • Lee Moore

    Tim W is being a little unfair to Miasmic Horror 2, making it appear that they were uninterested in production.
    In fact while Miasmic Horror 1 was happy to kill people to make soap, Miasmic Horror 2 was more interested in killing people to make infrastructure projects like the White Sea Canal. Miasmic Horror 2 was not really into consumer products.

  • Stonyground

    “…such things as hard work, keeping things clean, and believing in objective truth…”

    It isn’t hard to fathom why, on average, such people tend to be more successful and have nicer places to live.

  • Tim Worstall

    “Miasmic Horror 2 was more interested in killing people to make infrastructure projects like the White Sea Canal.”

    Well, yes. I first read Gulag Archipelago while holed up in a flat in Moscow during a pro-communist coup attempt. Determinedly not leaving the flat because someone had damn near killed me on the first evening of that coup attempt. The flat being right next to 38 Petrovka, where Yeltsin’s laddies were revving up their tanks.

    There was a certain wonder that people out there were willing to try to take over the country to reimpose that system again.

  • Paul Marks

    Tim Worstall – I believe that there really was a chance for such things as Trial by Jury, an end to Conscription, and the private ownership of natural resources, in Russia.

    However, as you know, Credit Bubble banking was created (under advice from the Clinton Administration) and Russia collapsed into inflationary chaos – paving the way for the tragedy of the Putin regime.

    Where the money is corrupt – everything else eventually becomes corrupt.

    And the money (the basic medium of exchange and store of value) is corrupt EVERYWHERE in the World today.

  • Niall pedant Kilmartin will now inform you of a little history whose relevance to the OP point is a very tangential.

    The Nazis ripped the gold out of Jewish teeth and stored it in the reichsbank. They made felt from Jewish hair. They gave their bombed-out city dwellers Jewish clothes, sometimes with darned bullet holes and sometimes with that left as an exercise to the receiver. And etc., and etc. – they did a lot of vile side things over, under and around their mass murders.

    There is however one thing that it appears they did not do: make Jews into soap and wash themselves with it. It was widely believed at the time – inside Germany as well as outside – that they did, but it seems the idea of aryans washing themselves in rendered-Jew disturbed Hitler, Himmler and others, and so they refrained from that one particular horror, and even took steps to see it did not happen.

    The idea of making soap from humans appears in the first world war, when a German factory for making various fat-based products out of pigs cadavers was praised inside Germany for its contribution to overcoming the blockade. Westerners noted that such a factory would also work with human corpses and the idea that maybe it was being so used floated around, inspiring a Kipling joke poem:

    Charlotte, when she saw what Hermann
    Rendered after he was dead,
    Like a well-conducted German
    Spread him lightly on her bread.

    However, it appears German WWI dead were not converted into blockade-busting German margarine, so this was one WWI rumour which was described and resented by the Germans in their post-war pretence that all allied propaganda about their misdeeds was fiction.

    In WWII, the factory operated again, and as knowledge of the final solution spread widely, various wartime jokes showed that the assumptions the allies made in WWI were now being made not just by the Allies but also by the Germans. In November 1942, Himmler ordered Mueller (head of the Gestapo) to ensure that this was not being done after he read an Allied report claiming it was, but already his own internal intelligence service was noting the jokes being made inside Germany, such as:

    “Who are the three greatest chemists in history? Jesus, because he turned water into wine, Goering because he turned butter into cannons, and Himmler because he turned Jews into soap.”

    In school showers, 15-year-olds were heard joking that the initials stamped on their soap bars were not RIF (Reichsstelle fur Industrielle Fette – Reich Office for Industrial Fats) but RJF (Rein Judisches Fett – Pure Jewish Fat).

    I predict with confidence that this summary will not cause anyone to think the Nazis were misunderstood victims of libel. As a mere point of pedantic accuracy however, I note there is some reason to think that this one detail of the whole Nazi horror has been misstated.

    If anyone can correct me and show that, despite Himmler’s orders and a few other indications, it did in fact happen, by all means do so.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Who are the three greatest chemists in history?

    This is hilarious.

    At the risk of being labeled a fellow traveler (and i don’t mind being Niall’s fellow traveler) I’ll go on to say that Nazi propaganda was more reliable than the American media, and particularly the New York Times, when it comes to Soviet mass murder.

  • This is hilarious. (Snorri Godhi, December 22, 2020 at 4:08 pm)

    Intellectually, one ‘sees’ the joke, though it’s always been too dark for me to smile at it. I remember some jokes because they are funny. This one I remember because it is history: just one more item to add to the mound of evidence of how phoney the post-war German “Ve had no idea” narrative was.

    At times, through no intention to be honest, Nazi anti-soviet propaganda outperformed Walter Duranty and his imitators, a low bar. But at other times, Nazi policy forced many Slavs who loathed the Soviet regime to support it as the lesser (though still very great) evil. Stalin wanted to “deport” (i.e. exterminate) the Ukrainians “but there were too many of them”. Hitler did not allow that consideration to stand in his way. The extermination of 170 million Slavs was the planned long-term Nazi goal, whereas Stalin was always checked by the fact that he’d have few people left to rule over if he went that far.

    Up north in the Baltic states, things could be reversed; the Nazis could appear to be the lesser (but still very great) evil (if you were not Jewish).

    Dr Johnson’s remark about not disputing the point of precedence between a louse and a flea comes to mind, to check me from wanting to discuss further – especially as this is increasingly off-topic.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Niall: I agree that the chemists joke is very dark humor. I might have been sickened by it when i was younger, but now i am more cynical.

    Up north in the Baltic states, things could be reversed; the Nazis could appear to be the lesser (but still very great) evil (if you were not Jewish).

    For the Finns, too, the Nazis were by far the lesser evil; mostly because they could not invade unless & until they conquered Russia.

    It must be said that Baltic Germans had long been Estophiles. Keep in mind that the Estonian national epic was written by a fellow named Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald.

    (Added in proof: having seen the movie version of the Great Estonian Novel, i can understand the affinity that Germans must feel for the Estonians. Although the latter do not necessarily reciprocate.)