Nazism

I was just fourteen years old when I first heard about Anne Frank’s chestnut tree - around the same age as the world’s most famous diarist, when she mentioned the tree in the poignant jottings that chronicled her experiences in hiding during World War II.

That tree, which Anne Frank viewed as a symbol of the freedom she would never recapture (she died at 15 in the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp) has now fallen outside the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam.

Back in 2007, I wrote a blog post after I received a couple of emails telling me the 150-year-old tree had been declared a safety hazard and was about to be cut down. But events progressed very quickly and a court injunction prevented authorities from bringing the tree down.

Continue reading "The tree that symbolised hope, fortitude and tolerance" »

At the risk of sounding like a language Nazi—to use the daft and offensive term which almost should be banned—it’s time for a voluntary worldwide moratorium on using Nazism as an analogy for anything other than Nazism itself.

A couple of bizarre examples follow from the past week. In the Vatican, a senior member of the clergy has tastelessly likened the (valid) scrutiny of the Catholic Church over child sexual abuse to the persecution of the Jews.

Given the vexed history between Judaism and Catholicism - not to mention the totally non-historical nature of the comparison - the Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa should really spend less time nosing through the Bible and more time glancing at the history books.

Continue reading "Nazi way to make a point" »

Near Sydney’s Circular Quay sits the Hitler Bar. The door sign has Hitler’s name in Germanic script on a swastika background. Similar nazi era iconography decorates the menus.

Alright, not surprisingly, there is no Hitler Bar. Instead what overlooks Sydney Harbour is the Lenin Bar, replete with the nostalgic/ironic hip communist hammer, sickle and Soviet star kitsch.

This is strange because in overall scope, communism presents as a greater man-made humanitarian catastrophe than nazism, or almost certainly any other ism.

Continue reading "Communism isn’t cool, and never has been" »