I'll just leave this here

Neville Chamberlain pic.twitter.com/xnYDcXQicB

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019

Mike Pence pic.twitter.com/OhZDhZdmUU

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019

Epic!

Charles Laughton as Emperor Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross (1932), via Peplum, a website entirely devoted to the sword-and-sandal film genre.

Commenter Ohsopolite had a useful thought after everybody was identifying Emperor Trump with Caligula this morning:

Maybe he'll go the Nero route and take up the violin.

Of course Nero did not actually have access to a fiddle, or a lute either—that only happened for Italy a thousand years later, when all the hipster crusaders picked up rababs and ouds in the Middle Eastern bazaars as souvenirs to bring home and took to writing troubadour poetry, and it was another 500-odd years before the violin itself was invented, but that's another story.

Nero's performance art wasn't so much the instrumental music as the declamation of Greek and Latin poetry, accompanying himself on the tortoiseshell lyre, and focusing on his own big Latin epic, apparently (per Juvenal) one of the worst poems of all times, the Troica—what he would have been out there chanting during the great fire of 64 C.E., if he was (there's no real evidence) would have been his own description of the burning of Troy, illuminated by the flames of Rome, what an incredible dramatic effect! He might have had the fire set himself, just to find out how cool it was (no, there's no evidence he did that either).

And you know what other famous dictator of history fancied himself an especially gifted artist? (It's OK, Mike Godwin himself says we can start doing this if we want, as long as we make an effort to know what we're talking about.) Not those watercolors, either, I'm talking about movies. I got this idea from one of the greatest movies I've ever seen, as a matter of fact, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Unser Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (1977), which I saw twice, believe it or not (it's 442 minutes long), in which a major thesis or thesis-like theme is that Hitler increasingly saw himself as a filmmaker, in particularly from the war onwards, what we'd later call an auteur, literally having the war filmed, as we know, and watching the takes in his redoubt like a studio director going over the rushes. A Wagnerian film, obviously, with a Götterdämmerung at the end. Like the emperor Nero, Hitler felt the destruction of the world around him was interesting and deep, and a credit to his deep artistic sensitivity. Hitler was the Dramaturg of the end of the world.

And then, you know, there's Trump, who does "reality" shows, of which our experience in the last couple of years is certainly an example, and who is, as we know, similarly psychotic. I will doubtlessly be coming back to this thought, but I want to let it sink in a little. 

In which we go Godwin

You know who else used to talk nonstop about freedom? Via TodoPorMéxico.

Via Mother Jones:

At a campaign event in New Hampshire, Carson noted that many people believe a situation like what took place in Germany in the 1930's and 1940's could never happen in America. "I beg to differ," Carson said. "If you go back and look at the history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts, it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech."

At a press conference after the speech, reporters asked Carson who he thinks is like Adolf Hitler in the U.S. "I'm not going to go into that that. I think that example is pretty clear," he responded, without elaborating.

Running away, as you see, from his poison remarks. Carson loves to complain about "political correctness" preventing him from talking about slavery and Nazism, though as has been noted, he talks about them unhesitatingly all the time, but what's really wrong with what he does is the cowardly way he does it, throwing those scary words out into the discourse and then just leaving them there, refusing responsibility.

Cheap shots and fashion tips

With Oscar Peterson leading and Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Louie Bellson.

Via Crooks & Liars:

Fox News media analyst Lauren Ashburn on Sunday suggested that former prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl could be a Taliban sympathizer because he was released after five years of captivity wearing a Muslim "smock."

Go Godwin yourself

Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. From The Telegraph.

From the Telegraph (H/T Glenn Greenwald):

Palestinian activists routinely claim to be suffering a "shoah" at the hands of Israel, but the Jewish state normally denies any moral equivalence between the suffering of Palestinians today and European jewry under the Nazis.  

Matan Vilnai, deputy defence minister, broke that taboo when he used the term "shoah" during interview on Army Radio. 

"The more qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," he said.

Hmm. Does everybody remember Godwin's Law, according to which every online discussion, if not cut off, will eventually lead to a comparison of something with Adolf Hitler and the German National Socialist Party? And the corollary that

once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.

How does that apply in this case? Can we just say the Israelis have now lost their war and it is now over? Or have they, by the unusual expedient of Godwining themselves, broken the entire system, so that we are now all licensed to compare the Israeli political establishment to the Nazis whenever we want? Personally I would have been satisfied with being allowed to compare them to Apartheid South Africa. But they condemn themselves out of their own mouths, like Haman in the book of Esther.

“The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences,” wrote [Gilad] Sharon in the extremist publication The Jerusalem Post. Sharon elaborated:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. 

There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire. 

Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared. 

Sharon added that “There is no middle path here – either the Gazans and their infrastructure are made to pay the price, or we reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip.” (Quoted from Ali Abuminah in The Electronic Intifada)

Yes, that's Gilad son of Arik, Arik King of Israel as his followers called him, who started the fashion of campaigning for the premiership by starting a war when he took his famous trip up the Holy Mount and launched the Second Intifada. Hatred for democracy? Check. (They "are not innocent", they voted for the wrong party.) Collective punishment? Check. Race hatred? Check. And now we have a call for holocaust from that ex-general Vilnai, an Israeli cabinet minister, a member of Ehud Barak's "Independence" party!

The images from Europe were unpleasant too. Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names.

(And would you like to tell me that the Hamas warriors would do the same to Jewish Israelis? Maybe they would, who can tell? But one thing for sure is that they won't, because they are too weak. Of course if you carefully cultivate the hatred, over another generation or two, as the population continues to grow... But maybe there's another way; why do you suppose Israel hasn't nuked Germany yet?)

Update:
Actually that issue of the Telegraph (the Vilnai quote, not the picture) was from February 2008, just before the last time the IDF invaded Gaza on the ground (nowadays, he has just left the cabinet and Knesset and is off to be ambassador to Beijing), and the government explained at the time that "holocaust" doesn't always mean "holocaust", so the whole thing is a bit less meaningful than it was meant to be (I'm blaming you, Glenn). Alas, so little has changed otherwise that he might as well have said it today, so I'm sticking by the post.