oh god GMKU, come on. you can do so much better than falling back on the old 'we saved your asses in wwII' line. I'd expect that from a lesser American but not you. you're slipping. you really are.

It may be lame but it's true. You'd all be speaking German and drinking pilsners and eating jaegersnitzel if it were not for dog-faced American GIs like me.

since we're talking about lame truths, it's just a shame that so many people had to die before you decided to put an end to things.

twice. not so smart now are we?

It took a while to figger out the way to mass destruct, but once we did, it was a doozy, ya gotta admit.

As I said, lame truths aren't generally my thing but, as you insist, America had the resources to nip nazism in the bud bit it chose not to. Every country had its reasons not to get involved but not all of them chose to use those reasons as an excuse not to. When Britain asked America for help it received what amounted to little more than a bank loan. Nice one.

I see. And you had what for collateral? Some meat pies? Let's be real, OK? We went in to save the wealthy Jews, not you silly ass broke as shit Brits. You just reaped the benefits.

you're right. we were broke and we needed the money largely to go on fighting a war we couldn't afford to fight. so yeah, the money was welcome but an end to the war would've been preferable. just as well Stalin was there really. hard to imagine what would've happened had the red army also decided to stay out of harms way.

That's the problem with you Brits. You don't like a good, long, protracted, senseless fight. Wimps.

I'm only casually aware of Jeremy Clarkson's cuntness but I can see potential of him being a bigger cunt.

Could he take over the world with his big cunt-ness?

Not at all. He's too insufferable to manage a private army.

So American G.I.'s wouldn't need to come over and kick his Brit ass?

aahh, my blood pressure can't take this conversation any longer. I surrender.

He really can't.

It's one of those things someone like him says just to say anything at all.

God, we should have let you Brits go to the Nazis. What did you ever give us back except the Beatles and the Stones. Sheesh.

Yeah, giving us the Stones was an entirely unwarranted curse.

nazism always had that romantic suicidal wagnerian drive so i don't think it would have lasted had america stayed out of the war. fuck how much better was the american victory over a potential nazi victory anyway? hitler had his gas chambers and concentration camps but is the violence america has reaped since ww2 somehow comparitively lesser? to me, and this may be niaeve, nazism is almost a preferable evil to capitalism because it seems so much more volatile and from defeatable in an obvious fuck the facists let's kill the fuhrer kind of way. and then you have the space opened up for a potential leftist revolution. plus they have cooler uniforms, when you see the swastika and the skulls its like- there's the bad guy let's shoot him. Point and click basically.

plus with nazis you can convince them you've got the holy grail of the turin shroud or a time machine and they'll lap that shit right up and come to negotiate and then bam- trapdoor in your secret liar and they all fall into the sarlac pit.

In a way I strangely agree. I wonder if we'd stayed out of the war if things would have simply imploded. That is, did our involvement just bolster Nazi resolve and prolong things? Would the German people have realized sooner the error of the Nazi way and ended things themselves? It's possible. And yes, things like Vietnam, racism in America, killing students... we can hardly say we have been much better.

But yes, basically, Nazism in Germany was so extreme that it could not have sustained itself. Imagine, though, how it must have looked to the rest of the world at the time, when communication was so slow and so primitive by present standards.

peter sellers.

there were quite a lot of people in positions of power sympathetic to the nazi cause, joe kennedy for example, but hitler alienated them. the argument i've used about their self destructive urge is taken right out of ian svenonius' the psychic soviet which i'm reading at the moment. he also talks about how soviet realism was in a way feted to win over nazism, highlighting how hitler made the 'suicidal' decision to invade russia despite the historical warnings of napolean and charles xii. it was this move that ultimately was the nazis undoing, as they were defeated and pushed back by the russians all the way to hitlers munich bunker. interestingly svenonius cites eisenstein's film nevsky as prophetic, it being shot in 1938, funded by the soviets and showed the defeat of the german teutonic knights by russian prince nevsky in the middle ages. The invading germans are lured onto an ice lake and drown, similar to how the invading nazi germans heavy machinery broke down in the russian winter, leading to their defeat. when the film was commisioned russia's showdown the the nazis was seen as inevitable, so the idea that soviet realism triumphed over the nazi romantic wagnerian urge for self immolation seems quite plausible. i think nazism's very nature provokes such an easy nationalist reaction to having to bow down to the german fuhrer that it mobilises strong feelings of pride and solidarity against it in people, so resistance is strong and the target is easy to recognise. whereas capitalism creeps in stealthily, it doesn't care about flags, it buys out people and then funds already existing sympathetic elements in the country who can give the appearance to their own people of being nationalist and strong all the while shaking hands with the investors behind closed doors. Also in wars capitalism doesn't require a full military defeat of the country it is invaded, it's troops are ultimately expendable, all it needs is to open up the markets and create conditions favourable enough for business to be done. the anti facist spirit isn't too hard to invoke in people. there is a figurehead that represents a massive weakness because assasinating him does massive psychological and structural damage, and it's always easy to turn such a symbol into a figure of hate. and also yes, what so frightened and awed other countries about nazism was the films it made of its rallies and the seemingly astounding discipline and coordination of masses of people on such a large scale. Apparently tho, the real scene was quite chaotic and less organised than it appeared, but for your only knowledge of another nation to be photos in newspapers of hitler addressing the crowds and perhaps radio clips of their chanting heil in unison... disturbing. what was going on across the world back then must have seemed potentially so alien.

Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky was prophetic but only because, in this case, history was likely to repeat itself. I don't think it demonstrated any kind of superiority within Soviet Socialist Realism which was just as bound up with ideas of 'self immolation' as the Nazi's Wagnerian romanticism. Socialist Realism was a genre which promoted 'reality' only insofar as it corresponded with and ultimately promoted official Soviet policy and, as such, was just as likely to pervert a reality to suit the demands of the party as Nazi art was designed to portray a 'reality' laid out by the Nazis. Both were ultimately conservative reactions against earlier avant-garde tendencies within their respective countries (Expressionism in Germany and Constructivism in the SU). Although both genres now enjoy a certain kitsch status, neither produced any really credible art and are generally seen as betrayals of the once vital and progressive art being produced within Germany and the SU. Eisenstein was basically forced to make Alexander Nevsky after Stalin made him officially apologise for the 'mistakes' of his earlier films like Battleship Potemkin, October and Strike.

I'd be really interested to read Svenonius' account of Soviet Socialist Realism, especially if he's trying to give it some credit.

Comic genius.

no.. They all seem fun and ridiculous. I like that in a person.