h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Tell you what, I know a lot of young Germans who are totally baffled by the British (dare I say English) attitude to history? They have asked me, straight faced, why football fans find it necessary to sing 'Stand up if you hate Germans' what all the 'two world wars and one world cup' is about.

They have been paying reparations for years, they put up with a lot of carp with (mostly) good humour and understanding.

The fact that I find something tasteless doesn't need patronising quote marks from anyone. As I said: I've done my bit and I don't need to apologise to anyone.

I also said that I understand why people want to commemorate such events and the passing of time means that there are fewer and fewer people to remember first hand. I just wonder, a lot of the time, if we wouldn't better serve those who died and suffered horribly during the war in making the current world a much better place to live?

As I mentioned before: we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I prefer to learn and move on. All that stuff about repeating it and so on.

In the meantime, this is something that concerns me a whole lot more because we're apparently totally inadequate to the task of stopping it:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-crimewave-that-shames-the-world-2072201.html

Robert Fisk: The crimewave that shames the world

It's one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of 'honour'. Nor is the problem confined to the Middle East: the contagion is spreading rapidly

Hmmm, must have stale cookies on this PC, or something... something broadly similar happened to me before on hootoo (screen view failed to refresh) and it was put down to badly-baked cookies in the oven... delete cache, try again!

On the issue of hatred... given all the nations that lined up on the German side in WW2, many of their own free willwith no coercion applied, it's interesting that the only hate (and its stablemate, fear) that lingers on now is for the Germans. Nazism was born in Austria and still arguably persists there: but we have no animosity towards Austria, where logic dictates it should be directed. (Look at Kurt Waldheim, for instance, an ujnrepentent Nazi who nearly made it as head of state...)

Even though Mussolini declared war in 1940 as an opportunist thing, to wait vulture-like till the Germans had done the hard work of beating Britain and then to grab our African colonies for Italy. Even though he sent the Italian Air Force to join the Luftwaffe in bombing Britain in 1940 (a little-known aspect of the Battle of Britain - it wasn't just German aircraft we were fighting) and promised Italian ships and troops for an invasion of Britain. We don't hate Italians, even though their part in WW2 dictates we should. OK, the story persists, seventy years on,that the Italian armed forces aren't really all that warlike or particularly good at it, but I'm afraid they're stuck with that. It could be worse.

None of the smaller European nations that fought for Hitler are vilified as the Germans are, and if you told the average Brit at a footie match exactly how many countries fought on the German side he'd be perplexed - that's assuming he could find them on an atlas. Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, the Baltic states... but no animosity towards any of them.

I'ved had to recognise and work on a different sort of WW2 related hatred all my life.

Relatives who were close enough for me to have known - had they lived - died in Japanese death camps in the war years, victims of cruelty, sadism, neglect and brutality. The feeling in my extended family is a very real and palpable anti-Japanese one, expressed by my grandmother as a regret that only two nukes were dropped on "them", and there was no subsequent invasion to thin their numbers out a bit. This feeling goes right down the generations and in some parts of the family is possibly as bitter now as it was in 1945. I'm sure other relatives of soldiers asnd civilians murdered by the Japanese , and there are a lot of us, feel the same way.

but... where do you stop? I can grasp intellectually that it is pointless and wrong and stupid to blame Japanese of my age for the evils committed by their grandparents and great-grandparents. On the Net I occassionally speak to - and greatly appreciate - the work of a Japanese-American cartoonist called Jen Babcock. She's as far removed from Changhi and the Burma Railway as you could get. I hope and think that my former loathing of Japan is progressively being replaced by an interest in the country's history and traditions. but when the family preserves the memories of uncles I never knew, or whose lives were cut short by the Far East, and dumps the blame on the Japanese and on incompetent generals... it's a long slog....

>I know a lot of young Germans who are totally baffled by the British (dare I say English) attitude to history?

Do they not detest Nazis in the same way then? I have no problem with commemorating people giving their lives to fight Nazis.

I don't think its very helpful to lump everything together. Surely young Germans aren't so stupid as to not see a difference between football yobs acting like prats and the tabloids acting like prats, and people wanting to commemorate those dying during an awful time in our history, when there was very real threat of invasion from Nazi Germany.

I don't live in Germany so I have no idea if young Germans are unable to tell the difference or indeed if any Germans are. It does seem likely though that the mayor of Dresden can't.

Off to a different subject:

'. . . by utilizing psychoanalytic and biological constructs, traditional gender roles are strengthened through the pharmaceutical industry, as women who deviate from them are medicalized. Of course, pharmaceutical ads targeting women can have many positive effects, such as encouraging women to speak to a doctor about what’s troubling them and combating the stigma of certain conditions. Many women’s lives are significantly improved when they learn about medication that can be beneficial for them. But isn’t it time we were a little more critical, looked behind the ads, and started making informed decisions about our own health?'

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/09/07/no-commentvintage-editionyou-cant-set-her-free/

I've always liked Ms. Magazine.

Effers, if you're going to deliberately misunderstand there's no point. The young(er) Germans I know are baffled by the ENGLISH attitude to the past.

Not all Germans were Nazis. Not all Germans helped or spoke against them that much is clear. If you can get past that and listen to what people say it might be easier.

As for me, I see no need to bang my head against a brick wall. There are more interesting things to do.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11234058

Drug-related violence in Mexico increasingly has the hallmarks of an insurgency, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said.

EU parliament tells France to stop Roma expulsions 'immediately'

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/343501,stop-roma-expulsions-immediately.html

Yesterday, Earth passed thru the debris of a shattered planet.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/meteorite/

"The Sudan meteorites are from a rare class of asteroids known as ureilites, which contain a lot of carbon, much of it in the form of graphite, as well as diamonds produced by shock. The Sudan specimens show evidence of volcanic activity, which means they came from a parent body that was almost big enough to call a planet."

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/meteorite/#ixzz0z2Jn5Erz

Looks like stuff that fell off the back of the Vogon's trucks.

Not so much news as a 'factoid':
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/09/biases_confirmed.php

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11218791

in one London church homosexuals are attending a "gay Mass" with the blessing of senior clergy.

I'm not really sure what I think about this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11242275

A rare copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America, billed as the world's most expensive book, is to go on sale at Sotheby's. A separate edition of the wildlife book sold for a record-breaking price of $8.8m (£5.7m) a decade ago.

What I think about a gay mass is that it is of no concern and irrelevant to the vast majority of people.

So long as the gay people attending the mass don't exclude straight people and perpetuate the discrimination that they experience within the Catholic Church (and elsewhere), they should:-

a. Get on with it.
b. Be allowed to get on with it without hinderence.

PP

*pedant alert*


Oh dear Mr PP, I do not know if your spelling of hindrance was
deliberate or not, but it sent me to my dictionary and a hearty
guffaw concerning female deer and the rear quarters of a horse.



~jwf~

Speaking of wildlife:

'A black bear in Whistler, B.C., was so intent on getting at a few tomatoes growing in a window box that he climbed a three-storey condominium building to get them.'

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/09/09/bc-bear-three-storeys-tomatoes.html#ixzz0z8PaEO1J

film at 11:

http://www.cbc.ca/video/player.html?category=News&zone=canada&site=cbc.news.ca&clipid=1588122212

JWF,

It is simply the case that my speling is not gud.

Now it is ME that has to go have a look at a dictionary so I can share the joke.

PP

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11265311

MELOTA!!!!MELOTA!!!!!

It's a swizz Those aren't Klingons, they're humans in costume.

and your point

the bullfighters in carmen are actors in costume

the egyptians in aida are also actors in costume

its opera

they are not real cats in cats and don't get me started on starlight express