Harlan Crow collects memorabilia from the Nazis and the communists. The mainstream media only criticized him for one, and gave him a pass on the other.

Wordpress ^ | April 11, 2023 | Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)

[grundle]

When I heard about recent news reports that Harlan Crow (a friend of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) collected Nazi memorabilia, I thought, “Maybe there’s a context to this collecting that isn’t being accurately reported – or maybe not.”

Well, as it turns out, the context is that the media has a double standard when it comes to Nazism and communism. They criticized Crow for collecting memorabilia for one, while giving him a pass on the other.

Wikipedia states:

“Crow’s backyard garden is home to at least 20 statues of authoritarian leaders and Communist icons, including Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Hosni Mubarak, Josip Broz Tito, Nicolae Ceausescu, Walter Ulbricht, Gavrilo Princip, Bela Kun, and Che Guevara. Crow acquired these former public monuments after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. According to Crow, he collects such memorabilia because he ‘hates communism and fascism.’ Crow also owns original paintings by Adolf Hitler, Claude Monet, Rembrandt Peale, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Winston Churchill, and Dwight Eisenhower.”

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Crow

I hate the media’s double standard for Nazism vs communism.

On the other hand, I love the fact that Crow “hates communism and fascism.” As a libertarian, I view the two as being very similar to each other. I never understood how anyone could hate only one but not the other. If I go to a restaurant and the menu has a bowl of feces and a bowl of pus, I would walk out. And I would never understand any person who was only disgusted by one but not by the other.

[BenLurkin]

They're communists, Jim.

2014: Press Secretary Jay Carney Decorates His Kitchen in Soviet Propaganda

[Rockingham]

I know of a now deceased former OSS officer, Mr. P., who was an assistant to Bill Casey in London during WW II. After the war, he went on to a highly lucrative and successful corporate legal career, and then, in retirement, he became mayor of a wealthy small city in Florida. In short, Mr. P. had a good life by all external measures.

Mr. P. also had an astonishing collection of Nazi artifacts that he had assembled personally at the end of WW II. As he got older, Mr. P. treasured his Nazi artifacts more and more, eventually taking them from a locked private office at the back of his large beach side home to being on display on the walls of his condominium in assisted living. Worse, Mr. P. was ever more inclined to make comments that suggested admiration for Hitler and the Nazis.

Why such an odd attitude by someone who surely knew better? As best as I can tell, Mr. P. was a bright and ambitious but fundamentally hollow man, with the Nazis and Hitler being the greatest thing he had encountered in his life. In old age, that is what fascinated him the most, the greatness of the Nazis and Hitler, even though they were deeply and profoundly evil.

For other people, the debilities of old age are not needed to express an attraction to the Nazis as great and powerful, doing what they wanted. Indeed, that is the code such people live by, checked by little more than avoiding trouble by going too far. Call it the attraction of mostly well-behaved sociopaths for full on, unrestrained psychopaths in the person of Hitler and the Nazis.

[Fai Mao]

The Nazis intervened on the proper side 0f Spanish Civil war given the incredible trail of death the Communist have left everywhere they took power. Beyond that, there is not a lot to admire.

[Pontiac]

Typical American Socialist propaganda

A trendy home with fit White Happy Preppy family (sans Dad) with an obscene amount of food on display that the citizens of a Communist country could not even dream of in their wildest fantasy.

One thing that the Communist and Nazis recognized the value of and perfected earlier than their opponents was the value of propaganda in bringing the common man in to line.

One thing that COVID Lock Downs brought in to focus is that controlling the dominant media outlets is key to controlling the masses.

[Does so]

“Beyond that, there is not a lot to admire”.

Snappy uniforms?

[Chad C. Mulligan]

And some great marching music.

[Fai Mao]

I saw a presentation of milifary uniforms several decades ago. The professor making it remarked that the side that lost in war generally had better looking uniforms.

[laconic]

The wonderful people of the Fremont section of Seattle have a statue of the mass murderer Lenin in a public place. It came from the Czech Republic, where with the fall of communism, the people pulled it down. How appropriate for it to be given a place of honor in the People’s Republic of Seattle.

[Rockingham]

Quite so. People tend to forget the Spanish Civil War and the death and chaos of the Bolshevik assaults throughout Europe were so often worse than the Nazis. Unfortunately, as to Mr. P., that was not his point. He liked the way the Nazis kept things and people in line.

And since one of Mr. P.'s political adversaries on the city council was Jewish, a nasty, crude antisemitism was revealed to be part of Mr. P's makeup. By chance, I knew the city councilman (Harry R.) and his wife well. Liberal Democrats from New York City, we disagreed as to national politics, but they were delightful company and fine, honest people. Harry's criticisms of the defects of the city administration were later proved true, years after his death.

[LouAvul]

I started attending gun shows back around 1972..ish. There were always large tables of vendors with Nazi memorabilia. Back then, we still had a large number of WW2 vets alive, and many of them collected artifacts of the monsters they beat in the war. Trophies, if you will.

[carcraft]

The NAZI’s aren’t even close to the death toll of communism. Estimates center around 100 million people killed by communist in 100 years. Stalin is estimated to have killed 20 million, Mao was the score board leader with 60 million kills. 20 million more scattered among smaller communist countries like Cambodia, Czechoslovakia etc. NAZI killed 12 million.Today China is involved in genocide.

[carcraft]

There was a story in a Montana paper about a group of soldiers whose job was to secure Hitler’s alpine lair. The elevators had been destroyed. When they got into the building it was deserted. One guy grabbed a wooden container with crystal glasses and a decanter, all etched with the NAZI Eagle holding the swastika. Every year they gathered together, as many as could and toasted there fallen comrades

[AppyPappy]

The Soviets killed 80% of the German soldiers they captured.
OTOH the Nazis may have killed 50% of the Soviets they captured.
It’s hard to find anything good in either one.

[Rockingham]

The Nazis were a special menace in that their movement arose in a leading country and drew on ideas popular at the time: industrial socialism in the sense of rule by a worker's party; strong nationalism and cultural identity; atheism and the rejection of bourgeois morality; theatrical leadership by a supposed great man; and race, genetics, science, and technology as central to human progress.

In contrast, the greatest toll of communism was in countries at the periphery of or outside of European civilization that were historically prone to brutality and social convulsions with a heavy death toll. And communism had a longer run that naturally made for more cumulative death and destruction.

That said, there is much to the view that Nazism and communism were dual totalitarian assault on traditional Western civilization after it became deeply demoralized and vulnerable after WW I. Indeed, Hitler and Stalin were allies for a time and expressed admiration for each other.