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The Power of Recall


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Knock yourself out, John:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Loret

A few details: Loret joined the Resistance. He had nine children. His attorney weighed the option of claiming royalties on the sale of Mein Kampf.

An excerpt:

During World War II Loret worked as chargé de mission with the French police in Saint-Quentin, Aisne. He claimed he got the job by Hitler's order, though there is nothing concrete to support this. Charges that he had collaborated with Gestapounits in France are also unproven. There were no charges of collaboration against him after the war, which makes it appear most unlikely. Loret has said that Hitler ordered all material on Loret to be destroyed. However, Loret was considered only an average individual and not overly diligent. It would have been unusual for him to have gained such a high post on his own merit when still in his early twenties.

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New book:

Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators by Jay Nordlinger 

20151002_ss.jpg
 

That's Svetlana Alliluyeva in the middle, an accomplished memoirist in her own right..

Excerpt from a review:

In Jay Nordlinger’s new book, Children of Monsters, we meet Jean-Marie Loret, a Frenchman who believed his mother and Hitler had a brief, yet productive, affair during World War I. Loret had an unhappy life. He was tormented by the burden of what he believed to be his ancestry. Oddly, the torment did not prevent him from growing a Hitler-style mustache.

Lol.

Edited by Childress
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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 months later...

snip

Now to that list of most influential people, he has it all wrong

 

#1 The person who first harnessed fire.

#2 The person who first learned to plant crops

#3 The  person who first domesticated animals.

#4 The person who first thought up writing- okay that is likely a bunch of people so we'll call 4 a group win.

#5 The person who first realized shell fish are damn good eating - okay that probably doesn't belong there, but this is my list.

 

For Kohlenklau

#1 The genetic forbears of Kate Upton.

#1 is the guy who worked out that if threw a rock you hurt the other guy without hurting yourself, and you were far enough away to run if you missed. #2 is the guy who saw it happen and asked the question "How did you figure that out?"

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Steven Wilthsire draws a panorama of Istanbul.... from memory. The city comes alive on paper as Stephen makes his first visit to the historic city. Live drawing and an exhibition at the Palladium Tower between the 24th and 28th of September 2014.

Edited by Childress
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Compared to Hitler though Stalin was something of a hermit king. He was notorious for practically hiding inside the Kremlin or his various summer dachas around Russia. Sending representatives to the reaches of his Kingdom with his explicit instructions. Hitler was more of an actor, who made every attempt to be seen in public to much fanfare. He traveled frequently, and was known for his trips to various HQs which his notorious reputation for micromanaging the military probably came out of. (Made more difficult by his habit of giving vague instructions orally.) The Wolfsshanze is almost as well known as the Eagle's Nest after all. 

Look at their mannerisms during various PR events. Hitler stands up on the podium and performs his characteristically chauvinistic speech accompanied by violent arm thrusts and gestures implying a primordial rage aimed at Germany's enemies. 

Meanwhile at Red Square, you can just barely see Stalin's face poking out through his heavy overcoat. He waves a little every now and then but mostly concerns himself with the various members of his team in small talk. It's clear he holds all the strings, and he doesn't seem to think he needs to impress anyone. Least of all anyone in the public.

If we're talking about two sides of the same coin, then I imagine each side of that coin would still be substantially different. With Stalin's side featuring an unflattering, crudely etched image of his face like a Roman Denarius maybe featuring a single line along the lines of "Our Great Leader" or some such. Hitler's side is ornate, featuring all manner of eagles, and scenery with a precisely machined reproduction of the Furher's face and its (exaggerated) features. 

Ultimately I do not envy whoever had to carry this currency around. 

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Hitler's side is ornate, featuring all manner of eagles, and scenery with a precisely machined reproduction of the Furher's face and its (exaggerated) features.

There was a statue—it may still exist—of Hitler made after he came to power. It shows him in a suit of medieval armor but without the helmet. Having his head with its monumentally ugly face poking out of an oversized suit of armor is cosmically absurd. I wonder that anyone could have ever seen it as anything but a cruelly accurate parody.

Michael

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A statue that perfectly fits Hitler's conjured image of himself as the Great Crusader defending Germany from the Judeo-Bolshevik hordes. That sort of thing is ridiculous to us today but was perfectly reasonable 60 years ago when contemporary historians still seriously believed Rome had been "conquered" by invading hordes of foreigners. 

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Meanwhile at Red Square, you can just barely see Stalin's face poking out through his heavy overcoat. He waves a little every now and then but mostly concerns himself with the various members of his team in small talk. It's clear he holds all the strings, and he doesn't seem to think he needs to impress anyone. Least of all anyone in the public.


Stalin was the proto-typical apparatchik and the ultimate insider. Trotsky recalled Stalin in the years before he grasped power as a 'grey blur'. Hitler seduced the masses, Stalin rose from within the bureaucracy. He lacked Hitler's theatrical skills but that was not essential given that the Bolshevik seizure of the state was largely a top down operation.

Edited by Childress
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 Germans on the other hand required some degree of consent to Nazi rule. The acting and energies toward it were a necessary ruse. Germans were a relatively wealthy and correspondingly well educated people in an unhealthy love affair with their military industries. Hitler combined that with the anxiety Germans had toward existential threats, enabling the establishment of his regime under a guise of legitimacy. (His attempts to launch the Nazi Party into power through coup had failed, disastrously.) Regardless of what all those liars said at and after Nuremburg, fear wasn't the only resource the Nazis had at their disposal. Collaboration, was also an underpinning of the Nazi regime. 

Stalin needed no such theatrics, but I notice that he did need information. Stalin was a real spy master and had located himself within several, complex and intertwining rings of informants. Conspiracies would come from within the party and had to be defeated by maneuver and intrigue.

Hitler struck me, at first, as relatively trusting of his subordinates. He lopped power and praise upon other personalities of the Nazi Party, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler etc. Goebbels had actually conspired against him in partnership with Gustav Stresemenn in the early days and yet somehow did not end up like Ernst Rohm. 

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Hitler believed in proliferating and overlapping bureaucracies. He gave only verbal orders and let his ministers compete for resources. The Holocaust? Convicting him in a Nuremburg setting may have proved problematical for that very reason. There was not much of a paper trail.

Both he and Stalin removed the intellectuals and theorists from the visible center of power perhaps under the theory that such a regime would alienate the people. Goebbels, a gifted orator, was an exception. Rosenberg became a non-entity over time.

Hitler struck me, at first, as relatively trusting of his subordinates. He lopped power and praise upon other personalities of the Nazi Party, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler etc.

One notices that the last names of many prominent Nazis show a curious alphabetical grouping. Napoleon's regime offered a similar phenomenon (Massena, Marmont, Murat, Ney and others). Was this deliberate? An insight into mass psychology? An odd theory, I know.

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Martin Bormann, Hjalmar Schact, Albert Speer, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinz Guderian, Gerd Von Rundstedt, Ernst Rohm, Gustav Stresemann, Anton Drexler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Erwin Rommel. 

These are just a short grab bag list of names on top. One might notice a rather disproportionate tendency for the letters H and G to appear in Nazi circles. With the letters R and S represented slightly less often. 

Vyacheslav Molotov, Lev Kamanev, Kliment Voroshilov, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenty Beria, Georgy Zhukov. I'm seeing something of a preference for the letters K, V, and M in Stalin's circle. One wonders if this was really a conscious move on the part of either dictator or more just the result of culture and background. For instance in Germany isn't a name like Heinz essentially the "John" of German names? 

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The leadership elite in Nazidom, the marquee surnames listed above in my post, undeniably show an alphabetical clustering. The phenomenon was even starker under Napoleon, who was known on the continent as "Napoleon' not 'Bonaparte' after anointing himself emperor. Stalin didn't appear to implement such a public relations strategy- if indeed it was a strategy. And I'm not familiar with the alphabetic progression in Cyrillic.

Who knows?  Perhaps it was a ploy to make the leadership appear more cohesive, more unified. Hitler was a walking encyclopedia of historical details and certainly crafty and insightful enough to dream up such a thing.

This is all pure speculation.

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Martin Bormann, Hjalmar Schact, Albert Speer, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinz Guderian, Gerd Von Rundstedt, Ernst Rohm, Gustav Stresemann, Anton Drexler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Erwin Rommel. 

These are just a short grab bag list of names on top. One might notice a rather disproportionate tendency for the letters H and G to appear in Nazi circles. With the letters R and S represented slightly less often. 

Vyacheslav Molotov, Lev Kamanev, Kliment Voroshilov, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenty Beria, Georgy Zhukov. I'm seeing something of a preference for the letters K, V, and M in Stalin's circle. One wonders if this was really a conscious move on the part of either dictator or more just the result of culture and background. For instance in Germany isn't a name like Heinz essentially the "John" of German names? 

You are way, way, way overthinking this stuff.

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ITT LukeFF plays the buzzkill. 

Well hey, don't post crazy conspiracy theory stuff, and I won't be in your base buzzkillin' your replies. :D 

I have three Ls in my full name. One wonders if this was really a conscious move on the part of either of my parents or more just the result of culture and background. :ph34r:

Edited by LukeFF
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 Well hey, don't post crazy conspiracy theory stuff, and I won't be in your base buzzkillin' your replies. 

Yeah! Cut it out, Capt, you're creeping us out. Stay in your cave and play with your Ouija board. ;)

 

Cool emoticon, LukeFF.

Decision of the day: the Windows 10 upgrade is sitting on the laptop screen. Do I press Install?

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I pressed install. Windows 10 downloaded- over a 7 installation- without a hitch. It has some quirks but on the whole I loved it. The upgraded PC ran beautifully for several days then crashed. A bit of google-fu beforehand would have revealed that this was inadvisable if not rash, as my tech guy commented ex post facto. Factory installed10 is perfectly stable.

Beware.

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  • 1 month later...

'There was a statue—it may still exist—of Hitler made after he came to power. It shows him in a suit of medieval armor but without the helmet.'

It was a painting:

0527042d6b8a898e587db2bb4696a9be.jpg

Stalin favored, like Hitler, portraits  and photos that showed him as an avuncular dedushka- grandpa. Both renditions were equally mendacious.

roses-for-stalin.jpg

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