What Color Is Your Shirt?
Posted: Sunday, January 03, 2010
by Gregory Lewis
PopGnosis
In a phone conversation over the holidays, a friend told me, "We choose to live in a place that matches our shirt." And what do you know? He was right! The tightly wrapped colorful Hawaiian shirts I stuffed into my backpack when I moved to Miami Beach proved it, as did my t-shirts with the psychedelic fish and a Taoist Winnie the Pooh flying a kite with the words, "Drifting and Dreaming." These shirts didn't match the oppressive khaki and flannel New England hill town where I grew up. The obvious solution was to move to Florida. This same friend has a thing for Ingmar Bergman films. He's fanatic about Bergman, the distinguished Swedish filmmaker whose name people often confuse with the actress Ingrid Bergman. I told my friend that I could take Bergman, or leave him, and I'm sorry I didn't share his fascination. Anyway, he knew I did like David Carradine, and recommended that I try The Serpent's Egg.
The actor Heinz Bennant reads from one such article, and this is the one that so caught my attention as to compel me to write this piece. Its substance is chillingly reminiscent of a disturbing trend in my country, the United States, which I hear echoed today:
"Terrible times are at hand when circumcised anti-Christian Asiatics on all sides are lifting their gory hands to strangle us. The massacre of Christians by the Jew Isaskar Zederblum, alias Mr. Lenin, was enough to make a Genghis Khan blush. A Jewish terrorist pack, trained to murder and assault, is prowling through the country, butchering honest citizens and farmers on portable gallows. Will you wait until you see thousands of people hanging from lampposts in your town?"
And so it continues. It doesn't take above average intelligence to substitute the word "Jew" with the word "Muslim" and fast forward a virtually unknown Adolf Hitler's pogrom in 1923 with the rhetoric of the past decade. Its essence is identical. The exterior warning label reads, "Muslims threaten the Christian world." The concealed warning is the more troubling, "Fascism has returned with a new scapegoat."
In Serpent's Egg, a drunken Carradine walks the streets to his apartment late at night. On the way he sees a group of thugs-Brown Shirts, bullying some Jewish men into scrubbing the gutters. One tries to run away, when a Brown Shirt catches him, and beats him. Police stand by, but take no action. Brown Shirts later raid a cabaret, whose actors are a diverse group of Germans, Jews, homosexuals and a dwarf. The Brown Shirt thugs smash everything, and brutally beat the owner.
A new BBC report spotlights a pre-War British fascist movement called the "Black Shirts." Presently, surviving children of women members of the Black Shirts struggle with the shame of their mothers' infamy. Photos of these women show them attired in militant looking black shirts and black berets. These women supported Hitler during the war. One woman, now 88 remorsefully remembers scrawling "Perish the Jews" on walls. "It is something I will never get over," laments Diane Bailey, as reported in the January 3, 2010 BBC article, Children of Blackshirt women live with shame. Mother Was a Blackshirt will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, January 4 at 11:00 GMT.
Dire warnings that ours and other European countries are changing, their cultures being consumed by Muslims and other foreigners who reject assimilation mirror the anti-foreigner pogroms of 1920s Germany. People who proudly announce their disgust with political correctness as dangerous, saying it blinds us to a vague impending threat are nothing more than tepid confessions of fascism. The truth is many people secretly and not so secretly admire Hitler. I'm not talking about high profile groups like Aryan Nation and the KKK, but every day people in your own community. Most would probably not come right out and say so, but like Mel Gibson, get them drunk and it comes spilling out. The serpent's egg: the outline of the creature within is clearly visible beneath the thin shell.
At the end of Serpent's Egg a fatherly police inspector gloats to Abel Rosenberg (Carradine) that "Herr Hitler failed with his Munich putsch. The whole thing was a colossal fiasco. Herr Hitler and his gang underrated the strength of the German democracy."
We know the worst was yet to come.
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Top-level comments on this article: (6 total)You have lived and learned more in your 50 years than most people could or would if they were given 200. Another astounding article.- Faithfully Yours- EllaPlease log in to respond to this comment.Thanks for that Ella. Faithfully your, GregoryPlease log in to respond to this comment.
Excellent article, sir. I agree with you about many people admiring (or at least passively condoning) Hitler, just as there are many who condone racism and bigotry to a certain extent. You would think people would learn by now.Very well done.Please log in to respond to this comment.Thanks for commenting Michael. Some stuff going on right now in Hungary with the Roma. History repeats.Please log in to respond to this comment.
The Jews were never the threat to Germany and Europe that the Muslims now pose to the free world and to America.Fundamentalist Jewish culture in Europe sought its own private enclaves and maybe, just maybe some assimilation and was excoriated and destroyed; the Fundamentalist Muslim culture seeks domination.But your heart IS in the right place.( FLORIDA!)Thanks for a cautionary advisory, nonetheless.Please log in to respond to this comment.Sorry Paul, but it's just too easy to lump all Muslims in with "Fundamentalist" Muslims. Only when we stop looking a labels and deal ONLY with specific behavior will we have any possible chance at peace.Please log in to respond to this comment.I did indeed say 'fundamentalist, though.However, all Jews of any ilk were all lumped into the category; 'slated for murder'.Not all Muslims are that easily lumped into being called "fundamentalist Muslims", Muslims who are committed to jihad and terrorism; there is much worldwide relief and worldwide recognition that most Muslims are non violent.Please log in to respond to this comment.We know there is a violent arm of Islam. But I'm trying to get people to err on the side of acceptance, not wholesale rejection of an entire group of people. I highlighted some of the propaganda of 1920s Germany that ultimately paved the way for the National Socialist takeover. When you compare the rhetoric, it is often identical to what we read today, that Christian peoples are under pressure and under fire from radical Islam, that our traditional American values are threatened to be overrun by a burgeoning Muslim population. We can explore this phenomenon from different angles. What about American born Muslims? Do we intern them the way we interned Japanese Americans? If you're Mexican American, should you be required to "show your papers" to some Homeland Security Black Shirt when you were born and lived here for 40 years?
When I have pressed the question, I have found some people right here on SearchWarp that categorize all Muslims as a threat to our homogeneity. Some others who reviled Muslims as terrorists didn't go that far, but said as long as Muslims integrate and assimilate, they would accept them. I carry doubt as to their sincerity (based on the content of their articles), but openly I will have to take them at their word.There was nothing intrinsically bad or different about Germans in the 1920s-30s. They were just like us.Please log in to respond to this comment.
Great article, Gregory. SOOO true. I often lament that the Human Race seems incapable of learning from history.Please log in to respond to this comment.Thank you for reading and reflecting, Joyce. I lament too, and in another time past (or to come!) I could be shot for speaking against the status quo.Please log in to respond to this comment.
So home is where your shirt is, Gregory.You cannot really blame the Muslim fundamentalists for they get such a good deal if they believe. Could you resist the offer of 72 black eyed virgins waiting for you in heaven? Could be worth a bomb for. maybe that is why the latest one placed it in his underpants.Please log in to respond to this comment.You raise an excellent point Carol. I do not blame the young suicide bombers. I blame the old liars everywhere who distort religion to serve their self-interests. Those lying old Muslim recruiters are no worse than the lying Christian leaders who convince our young Americans and British that they are serving the Lord's Army. Lies, lies, all lies in the name of self-interest, not religion.Please log in to respond to this comment.
Well- written as always Gregory. Another one of your viewpoints that I agree with.BlessingsPlease log in to respond to this comment.
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