Italian Hitler Wine Bottles 'Offensive'

Wine bottles featuring Adolf Hitler on the label have been called "offensive" after complaints from US tourists in the Italian city of Garda.

Michael Hirsch, a lawyer from Philadelphia, complained to local media after he found a supermarket near his hotel was stocking wine bottles with Hitler in various poses and another bottle featuring an image of Pope John Paul II.

"It is very shocking and startling to us," Mr Hirsch told The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday. "We would think of it as neo-Nazism It makes you wonder about the sympathies of the local people."

One bottle features Hitler with his arm raised in the Nazi, another is labelled 'Mein Kampf" and another was labelled "Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer" (one people, one empire, one Fuhrer), Mr Hirsch said.

Local prosecutors said they have opened an inquiry into the sale of the wine bottles.

"I want to reassure our American friends who visit our country that our Constitution and our culture rejects racism, anti-Semitism and Nazi fascism," said Andrea Riccardi, the Italian integration minister. "This offends the memory of millions of people and risks compromising the image of Italy abroad."

Isn’t it interesting that one can find pictures of any number of examples of people killed, murdered, on the internet. Code pink can send pictures of their vaginas to the Republican National Convention. Gays feels themselves entitled to display their “lifestyle”, in every detail, publicly. But, but, if someone displays a picture of Adolph Hitler in any context that allows the viewer to put his or her own interpretation on it, that is to be withheld from public view.

That is interesting. Whose censorship is being exercised? For the sake of which values?

If history were taught unvarnished and unedited, people would know that a) corpses of murdered victims ordinarily shouldn’t be shown, except when such showing demonstrates the depravity of the perpetrators or the seriousness of the situation the general society finds itself in; and b) generally speaking, people shouldn’t be sending or receiving pictures of genitalia for public viewing, since it is indicative of either the sender’s or receiver’s moral turpitude; and c) people shouldn’t be making the private practices of their bedroom - whose privacy they decry when pried into - public. If history were taught for what it is, people would also know that the treatment of publicly repudiated and moral reprehensible figures, such as Adolph Hitler, can be reliably left to the public to judge. We live in an age of indulgence, ignorance, and foolishness, both of those in authority and those under authority.

These wines are being marketed by the Lunardelli winery in Veneto. Aside from the Hitler and Mussolini labels, they also feature Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Napoleon, and Francisco Franco. I must admit I was somewhat taken aback by the Heinrich Himmler label but the Rommel didn’t bother me in the slightest. If it weren’t for darkness, there’d be no need to name light.

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