with lots of well deserved praise for your work. Many thanks for doing this and sharing it.

Very best wishes,

Max.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I remember reading this almost a decade ago and being oddly fascinated, thinking: “Hey, i’ll never get to know the full story behind this…”

1.

Main Entry: 1mon·ster
Pronunciation: \ˈmän(t)-stər\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English monstre, from Anglo-French, from Latin monstrum omen, monster, from monēre to warn — more at mind
Date: 14th century

1 a : an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure b : one who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character
2 : a threatening force
3 a : an animal of strange or terrifying shape b : one unusually large for its kind
4 : something monstrous; especially : a person of unnatural or extreme ugliness, deformity, wickedness, or cruelty
5 : one that is highly successful
I think Hitler and many other petty evil tyrants (Idi Amin Dada, for example) would fit into several categories of this definition.

Also, I just used the webarchive.org to look up my old IAM page. Brought back some serious memories!

But back to the tattoo – you say “Of course effort is being taken to be clear that this is a sci-fi tattoo, not a neo-nazi tattoo!”. In what way will you be making that clear?

To be perfectly frank, if I saw those images on someone, I would deem them quite inappropriate. You can’t possibly explain your reasoning to everyone that would see them and be offended.

They’re fascinating images without the swastikas in my opinion.

I don’t think you can say “maybe” some groundbreaking work being done. There definitely was. And while I’ll give you that in the madness of the camps there was definitely some pseudo-science going on, the research was deemed extremely valuable by the Allied and Soviet forces who scooped it up as spoils of war — along with many of the German scientists — and used it to leapfrog their own nations into the future.

I agree with almost everything else you’re saying, other than the last bit — I think that whether you or Hitler have a lot in common should be answered on a factual level, not an emotive level… Because as I think you’re pointing out in the second last paragraph, he was a relatively normal person who was a product of his time, and I think that tells us something that we should never forget — that it doesn’t take some anti-christ to bring these things about.

That said, I think a lot of this conversation has moved past the scope of the tattoo, which really is just sci-fi, and that’s pretty much the beginning and end of it.

You’re right in stating that the Nazi era had its own aesthetic (a neutral term), but I seem to get the feeling, from what you wrote, that you are quite fascinated by that, which I find a bit disturbing. Even more so is your argument about the Nazi’s “achievements”, which I’d usually only hear from old people who lived through the war and didn’t learn anything afterwards (“Ach, it wasn’t all bad back then”), or from neo-Nazis. So what exactly are the achievements you’re referring to? Maybe there was some groundbreaking scientific work done, but even more horrible, pointless, pseudo-scientific experiments were conducted during that time, mostly on Jews, gypsies, and POWs. You cannot praise them without relativizing their atrocities.

“Nazis had more significant achievements culturally…” Are you serious? What were those achievements? Militarization of a whole nation, leadership cult, racism, revisionism, hate and fear-mongering, euthanasia, banning of ‘Degenerate Art’, propaganda films and music, public burnings of books, building of grandiloquent, intimidating concrete palaces, reducing women to birth machines, censorship, keeping the ‘Aryan’ blood pure…? Nazis didn’t contribute anything at all to German culture, as in its essence, it was an un-German movement.

And please, people, stop saying Hitler is evil or a monster. It’s a childish and primitive statement. He was a frustrated, failed Austrian artist who became a politician in Bavaria. He was a product of his time, and couldn’t have got to power without the petty vengefulness of the Treaty of Versailles that humiliated and crippled the country, and couldn’t have upheld his power without the fatal Appeasement Policy, which made him increasingly popular in Germany, and helped casting doubts about him aside. The incredible arrogance of the Allieds, who didn’t take him seriously and thought they could keep him in his place with concessions, backfired when he started WWII and they finally realized that he’s out for world domination.

Shannon, you seem to be a reasonable and intelligent fellow, and I do realize you’re not a Nazi supporter or a fascist, but I think you’re out of line with some of your statements on this issue. It’s like me saying that Hitler and me have a lot in common because he was vegetarian and animal-friendly. It may be true, but would I want to make such a statement in earnest? Of course not!

So I don’t agree that Hitler was special from an atrocity point of view.

Not only that, but I think we do ourselves a disservice by thinking that Hitler was in some special category, because it fools us into thinking that his “evil” was unique. Sadly, it’s not. And even more sadly, similar things are still going on, and I expect will continue to go on for a very long time. Believing Hitler was an evil we’ll never see again is one of the things that lets these evils keep on repeating…

It gets even more morally difficult when you start considering that the American and Russian space programs were made possible not just by German rocket scientists, but also by the horrific research done at concentration camps run by both the Germans and the Japanese.

Also, it’s important to get that there was plenty of evil to go around in that war — and in all wars I think. Even Canada committed a rather endless string of attrocities, both domestically and in the war proper.

Finally, it’s also important to understand that the winning side is not the one in the right, and the losing side is not the one in the wrong. As a general rule, war is wrong from top to bottom, and benefits only the ultra-rich on each side, and has more to do with classism than with international conflict… But that gets us into a whole different debate.

The Nazis are no better and no worse than the Americans, the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, or any other major force in that war. There’s plenty of evil to go around.

Health and happiness to you and yours.

I think it’s reasonable to say that the Nazi’s “good” work was pretty much invalidated in people’s minds by the serious genocidal errors they made — that said, I also think it’s reasonable to say that Europe of the time was no friend of the Jews, and that Hitler’s mistreatment of the Jews was what kept America out of the war as long as it did (see: Charles Lindbergh et al).

I think the world is too complex to write off anything (even North Korea) as “shit” across the board… Very few powerful movements that turn out to be seen as “evil” in the eyes of history don’t have a significant set of remarkable traits as well as the ones we hold against them.