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Friday 9 November 2018

The Christmas market goes up on Adolf-Hitler-Platz

A pane of window glass is an odd thing. Just 4mm thick, and so fragile that a child's ball may shatter it, in our minds it is as much of a bulwark against the elements, against the chaos of the street, against the bad outside as nine inches of brick and mortar. Anyone who has had a broken front window pane will know the sudden vulnerability, the sense of unprotectedness, the anxiety and the naked exposure of that void. Until mended, we can't sleep. We imagine dark forms, of burglars, deviants and suchlike attracted like moths to the boarded gape - blind to the reason that the piece of plywood covering the hole is many times stronger than the thin, weak pane it replaces. 

Eighty years ago today tens of thousands of our German cousins had their windows deliberately smashed, windows of not only their homes but their businesses. Synagogues were smashed and burned. Kristallnacht marked the change from social, economic and political discrimination to physical attack. Kristallnacht marked the start of the Holocaust. 

The boundary, the constraint, the separation between discriminatory treatment, between scowls and insults flung in the street and on the trams to physical battery, to rape and murder, to violence and robbery and to organised genocide was just as thin and fragile as a sheet of glass. Eighty years ago it was smashed and the first thirty thousand of Germany's Jews were rounded up for the concentration camps, to be killed in an ad-hoc, haphazard fashion, from starvation, lack of care, overwork and shooting. It was to be another thirty-eight months before the Germans agreed the designer death factories at Wannsee - Vorsprung durch Technik - but already the fate of Europe's Jews was effectively decided. 

NEVER AGAIN

I was in Villach yesterday, enjoying a beer on the broad, elongated space that stretches up the hill from the Drau to the church, paved in the same red catshead cobbles as a century ago, and called Adolf-Hitler-Platz until the British occupation force changed its name in 1946. The Christmas tree was already up, the size of the tree in Trafalgar Square, and carpenters were building the Christmas village, sturdy huts and braziers soon to be filled with the scent of burning pine, Glühwein and hot Leberkäse. As I write I can't actually remember what the space is called today - after having seen all the photos from March 1938, such as that below, it is forever Adolf-Hitler-Platz in my mind. Among this crowd, I wonder, were the Jews of Villach watching the procession? Still at that time with faith in the strength of their windows to protect them from rape, brutality and death?

27 comments:

Stephen J said...

Yes Raedwald.... Genuine racism is so rare and unusual that the perpetrators stand out in the collective memory for longer than most people actually live.

I can think of Adolf Hitler and his gang, Ali Jinna the founder of Pakistan, who unleashed terrible violence in the name of his creed, and Idi Amin who expelled or killed people of Indian descent, just because of their background. The Afrikaners and the remains of Confederate America were slightly different but leaned in that direction, more protectionist than racist. There have been many examples of African and European genocide too, again, not racist, always to do with territory.

The rest of the scum that we have to put up with are simple socialists, and far more dangerous.

It is why, I and others were/are so aggrieved at your vitriolic abuse of people who are merely ordinary folk pissed off at the antics of socialists.

And neither are right-wing, the socialists control the language and describe socialists that they find distasteful as "far right". They are still socialists though... They all eventually resort to the same tactics, which is to squeeze the middle 80% of a given population on the pretext that they are helping the bottom 10-15%.

The populists are the 80% that are looked down on by the socialists and the racists, and all they want is a minimal government that does not impede their short lives for no good reason.

Cuffleyburgers said...

Radders - I think that is a beautifully written piece.

Anonymous said...

I agree, Cuffley. Particularly the last paragraph which I have read several times.

Mr Ecks said...



The Jews were just living their lives. There were no Jewish rape gangs. The Jews had very low levels of crime and violence and millions of them were not being imported. Nor did they have a whole list of barbarous capers attached to their culture--daft myths aside.

Matters are somewhat different today. So let us all hope Radders that your latest aberration is not to try and suggest that those who are against mass migration are IN ANY WAY akin to the Germans of the 1930s.


It is not "racism" to resist your nation being turned into a third world shithole or to fight against your people being turned into a despised minority in what used to be their land.

And as for "racism"--well our dear guests have barely arrived and they clearly think that our women and girls are there to be raped. So if you want real racism just wait until socialist scum assemble enough imports to takeover the country.

THEN you will see real racism on the job. Just take a look at the hate lessons they teach their kids.

And even worse--you move to some very nice little enclave of whiteness and civilisation and then try to equate resistance to the Marxist-controlled destruction of our society with the German SOCIALISTS of the 1930s. All most likely filtered through your mind damaging encounter with the regime of Spanish SOCIALIST Franco a lifetime ago.

You need to sit down with some Ayn Rand-type introspection and examine the muddled flow of your thoughts Radders. That way you might arrive at a coherent set of beliefs and not find yourself so much at odds with reality.


Anonymous said...

Mr Ecks said @ 10:56

'You need to sit down with some Ayn Rand-type introspection and examine the muddled flow of your thoughts Radders. That way you might arrive at a coherent set of beliefs and not find yourself so much at odds with reality.'

Appeals like that will get you nought mate - you'll have noticed our host deleted a blog this week because he didn't like the feedback. He's comfortable with ethnocide these days: as a component of the bloodless genocide of white Europeans he'll be long dead when the curtain comes down on our civilization.

Steve

jack ketch said...


I was in Villach yesterday, enjoying a beer on the broad, elongated space


Yep, know that feeling, that moment of reflection , that ponderance of the ghost of Xmas past. It hits home hard when you realise, as I did, that the firm you work for was originally Jewish, the house where you live was built on land that belonged to Jews, your local was Jewish owned and run (strangely enough the only Jew of the village to survive the Shoah was the young publican's daughter) , the kiosk where I bought my coffee and fags likewise. The bus stop where i caught the bus to work each winter morning at silly o'clock was formerly the parking space for the very first car in the entire village...yep, you've guessed it, belonging to the Jewish shopkeeper.

Oh and the brand of cigarettes I smoked, bought at that formerly Jewish kiosk, were originally about as teutonic as a Bar Mitzah.

Anonymous said...

Not that long before the start of the genocide of Jews, Muslim Turks started, and completed the genocide of Greek Christians, in what us now known as Turkey. Hitler noted the response of the West.

The Greek genocide, including the Pontic genocide, was the systematic genocide of the Christian Ottoman Greek population carried out in its historic homeland in Anatolia during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922).[1] It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish national movement against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary execution, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments.[2] According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.[3] Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece (adding over a quarter to the prior population of Greece).[4] Some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide

Greeks were the native peoples of Asia Minor, along with Armenians. Their presence went back to the Bronze age. And yet they are gone from that region, by the genocidal policies of Islam. With Islam its convert, pay the Jizya or death.

It seems Christians in Europe face the same prospect with Europe, led by its assinine EU and British politicians, rush like Gadarene swine to the abyss of the caliphate.

DP111

Anonymous said...

Raedwald: Anyone who has had a broken front window pane will know the sudden vulnerability, the sense of unprotectedness, the anxiety and the naked exposure of that void.

Beautiful and evocative. The glass is a mere sliver, yet protects us from uncertainty.

But then I think of the great stained glass windows of the cathedrals of Europe. They symbolise the shelter and protection of our civilisation from demonic forces without. But our ignorant politicians have unleashed demonic winds within the cathedral itself-an eventuality never ever remotely considered.

The winds that these politicians have unleashed are going to destroy Europe and Western civilisation, along with the great stained glass windows, which symbolise and protect it. Its hard to conceive of the rapine and loot to come. Even the Nazis had never contemplated the destruction of Western civilisation itself.

Thank you Raedwald for a very thoughtful and inspiring essay.

DP111

Anonymous said...

Mr Ecks wrote: And even worse--you move to some very nice little enclave of whiteness and civilisation and then try to equate resistance to the Marxist-controlled destruction of our society with the German SOCIALISTS of the 1930s. All most likely filtered through your mind damaging encounter with the regime of Spanish SOCIALIST Franco a lifetime ago.

And here it is what you predict


Local Labour Accused of Trying to ‘Dilute’ Scrutiny of Grooming Gang Inquiry

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2018/11/09/local-labour-govt-accused-trying-dilute-scrutiny-huddersfield-grooming-gang-inquiry/

DP111


Cuffleyburgers said...

Ecks and Steve

Splendid fellows both and frequent posters at blogs I like.

I fail to understand your apparent hostility toward our esteemd
Ed on this occasion.

Kristallnacht was a truly horrible thing and as Radders says was in some ways the start of the holocaust, one of the most disgusting episodes in history.

I dont think he was making any comparison with or reference to quite justified concerns about mass immigration nowadyas.

What I would say is that when Radders does coment on mass immigration his opinions are, in my opinion, nuanced and thoughtful.

Dave_G said...


Retrospective memories of Jewish persecution shouldn't distract from modern day similarities but it seems to work - for about a week or so....

Raedwald said...

Folks, this is my blog - not a platform for you to post links to race-hate material.

Comments with such links will be deleted.

Anonymous said...

Thank you Radders for this blog, and the gentle reminder. Just for info, do you regard Islam a race, or a religion, political ideology, or both of the last two.

DP111

Raedwald said...

DP111 - I'm sure you can find an on-topic site where such things are decided.

This post is about the anniversary of Kristallnacht. It is a reminder, in Primo Levi's words, that "Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions."

Dave_G said...


More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions."

I'd amend that to state "the functionaries ready to [ignore the wishes of their electorate] and to act without asking [permission] questions".

The common man only react to the situations they are placed in - I've never seen 'common man' go to war on their own incentive.

Budgie said...

Is lslam equivalent to the Jews? Or equivalent to the Nazis? Equivalence does not exist merely because someone says it does. Either way.

In my opinion having a suspicion of the foreigner is healthy. It is not the equivalent of Nazism. It is a protection of our nation, our culture, and our people. My own grandfather (an immigrant) was imprisoned at the start of WW1 for being a foreigner. Although I never met him, there was no sense in our family that his internment was anything other than understandable.

The British establishment has over-compensated for a sense of guilt about the Empire. They admire "tolerance"; wrongly understood as approval. The EU and mass immigration are part of their atonement; strictly their atonement imposed on us. Any protest by the thick, nekulturny, non-establishment, therefore, must be xenophobic, racist or white-supremacist.

When Corbyn is asked to condemn anti-Semitism in Labour and he falls back on general platitudes about "all racism" being bad, we rightly ridicule him for hypocrisy. It is difficult to have enough empathy for all the evil in the world. But we must condemn Muslim racist rape gangs just as we condemn the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazi empire.

Anonymous said...

Raedwald said on 10 November 2018 @ 07:05

'Folks, this is my blog - not a platform for you to post links to race-hate material.'

For the record the link I provided - the one you subsequently deleted - was to a report on a study by 'The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), set up at the University of Washington by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.'

Also for the record the only people I 'hate' are politicians

Steve

Sean O'Hare said...

Today it is called Hauptplatz (Main Square).

Anonymous said...

'Also for the record the only people I 'hate' are politicians'

Steve,you have followers!

John Vasc said...

And yet large numbers of the descendants of those who managed to flee to Britain are now applying for German passports - as the German government has rather boastfully announced.

jack ketch said...

Britain are now applying for German passports -Vasc

And who can blame them when even the leading mouthpiece for BrexSShite has made damn sure his own kids have their German passports. Although I expect, it is the more likely, that those descendants of the few German Jews the yUK very reluctantly agreed to take in (and then promptly imprisoned if they were 16+ males) have learnt from the mistakes of their grandparents and can read the signs and know what might be coming. For anyone whose family suffered in the holocaust, the idea that the mob has decided to have them declared 'non-citizens' is particularly worrying (and it matters not a jot that that 'citzenship' is not actually, legally, a citizenship).Add in the fact that Her majesty's Opposition could give Mosley a run for his money in the antisemitism sweepstakes and you can understand why anyone of Jewish descent might just want the 'fall back' of another passport.


Budgie said...

Jack Ketch, Fake equivalence. Insinuating that those who want their nation to be independent of the EU are akin to the SS is an insult to those that really suffered, as well as palpably false. Of truth and rationality you have none: you merely enjoy nihilism. Brexit is a recognition of self determination, and that the nation state is the biggest bloc in which freedom under the rule of law, free enterprise, and democracy can flourish. That requires builders to understand, not destroyers. If you think the that the EU is safer and more civilised, you go there and enjoy it. Please. There is no inclination here to save Europe from itself a third time.

John Vasc said...

@Jack Ketch: It may have escaped your attention that Nigel Farages' second wife is German, therefore his children by her (who speak their German mother-tongue) are already German citizens, according to German 'jus sanguinis' law. So they have every right to apply for German passports, and do not need either parent to make 'damn sure' they get them - whatever you mean by that.


any of those who have recently applied for German passports (not - according to my Jewish friends - because they feel any more 'threatened' than are the rest of us, but because they understandably think it will be a convenient extra passport to have), have had no other connection with Germany than a parent who was forced to leave Germany in the 1930s, had a lifelong horror of the Germans, and who would be horrified at their children's decision. The latter rarely speak a word of German, and so are unaware of the German restrictions on dual nationality: once we have left the EU, they will be forced to choose between German and British nationality, but may not keep both - contrary to their assumption.

Personally I find this restriction of dual nationality (as in the US) an excellent principle - one we should perhaps institute ourselves, to avoid the bizarre conflicts of interest we see arising in Parliament and elsewhere in public life.


John Vasc said...

Para 2 should begun with 'Many' - not 'any'.

Dave_G said...


@Budgie (in response to Ketch)

Bravo. Well spoken. Truthful.

APL said...

Budgie: "If you think the that the EU is safer and more civilised, you go there and enjoy it."

And please, Ketch, renounce, if you haven't already, your British citizenship. Because there may be hardship ahead of us, and we don't need losers sniping and sneering behind the scenes.

Bring your manifold talents in that regard, to your adopted country, they'll surely appreciate them more.

APL said...

John Vasac: "not - according to my Jewish friends - because they feel any more 'threatened' than are the rest of us, but because they understandably think it will be a convenient extra passport to have"

Which betrays a fundamental disloyalty to your kith, kin and country. Dual citizenship should be abolished.

Many of the Moslem Rapists in Rochdale had dual citizenship. Dual Citizenship is the signature of disloyalty.