Book Review - To Die For Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon by Jay W. Baird

A book with a split personality.

This book is well written and is an easy and good read. It seems to actually be two books in one though. The first part of the book is indeed about Nazi "heros" who were killed early on in the Nazi Movement in Germany such as Horst Wessel the Ur-Skinhead (I think he is who Elton John's song about Saturday night is alright for fighting is written about) and the sixteen "immortals" who were gunned down during the abortive attempt to overthrow the Government of Bravaria in 1923.

Each chapter contains an account of a different subject, however, after a few chapters, the book suddenly changes content and tone. The middle and final chapters are no longer about Nazi's who died but goes over to talking about Nazi aesthetics, poetry, and propaganda. Indeed, there are pages and pages of Nazi poetry about death and mother's loss until you start getting weepy-eyed for the fallen German SS soldiers. It snaps me back to reality though when I realize these SS soldiers that Baird's presentation of poetry are getting me weepy about would have gladly and happily killed me as an untermench had they come across me in their conquests.

All in all a very good book. Baird's emotional portrayal of the Nazi cult's embracement of death in all their arts (with pages and pages of tear-jerking Nazi poetry) will make you reconsider and think. And that's the best thing a book like this can do, break you down, make you consider once again: Was this period of history really that bad? Were we right in resisting the "noble" and "mother loving" Nazis? Did they have a point sending their einsatzgreuppen against the Jews and Slavs and everyone else they didn't like? Some say its dangerous to think those thoughts. I personally do not because I always come down on the side that the Nazis were pure evil if for no other reason that I personally would have been the first they shot or threw in their ovens had they come across me.

Atlantis calling! Atlantis calling!

Just sit right back and hear a tale...

I totally forgot to say something about Giorgio Tsoukalos's first episode of "In Search of Aliens."  It was called "The Hunt for Atlantis."  There's probably a good reason for this.  As much as I love to watch Giorgio, I was probably trying hard to stay awake.

I've been reading about Atlantis for very nearly forty years, either in books or articles in books.  I've also watched countless documentaries and television programs about it.   For me, Atlantis is a very old, very dead, and very well beaten horse.  I guess that's my problem for being an ancient! :-)

Still, when I saw the title of the first ever program starring Giorgio, I rolled my eyes.  Atlantis?!?  Really?!?  But that's just because, for me, its a topic more overplayed than a Phil Collins song. 

Still, the episode itself is very good.  Giorgio has a lot of energy and seems to really believe in what he's doing.  Hey, if I could be paid to travel the world and babble about aliens and 'ancient mysteries', I'd probably be pretty happy too!  Giorgio's take on Atlantis is that it was in the southwestern Iberian peninsula.  A variant on the 'Tartessos' theory that Atlantis was one of the ancient kingdoms in the region that would later be Spain and Portugal.   

Well, Giorgio ends up thinking that Atlantis itself may have been some sort of alien base on Earth.   It wasn't destroyed so much as left (cue MIB scene "No, Elvis is not dead, he just went home!)  

I enjoyed the program although I probably know as much, if not more, of the various how/who/where/when/what theories of Atlantis than even Tsoukalos himself.   I think that, if Atlantis did exist, it was an ice-age or post-ice age civilization contemporaneous with the builders of Gobeckli Tepe.  If it was anything more than a pure invention of Plato, it could be a distant memory of a prior civilization, probably totally built up by Plato in the telling.  

Ancient Aliens: The Tesla Experiment

Last week's Ancient Aliens program focused totally on the life and character of Nikola Tesla, the famous inventor of the late 19th and early 20th century.  

It was rather a good show.  They did not stray too far into the realms of fantasy and really did not even say that Tesla was given his information by aliens; although he could have been influenced by them in some way.  They didn't even mention the usual theory that Tesla could have been an 'avatar' or 'plant' put upon the world by the aliens to advance human knowledge.  Well, maybe one guy mentioned that, but this week, Ancient Aliens pretty much stuck to the book.

I suppose too much is known about Nikola Tesla and too much of what did happen is wild enough (truth stranger than fiction) without the necessity for grey aliens doing morally shaky and ethically unsound things with Tesla or his mother (before his birth). 

The Tesla Experiment didn't even mention the theory that Tesla could have inadvertently caused the Tunguska Explosion (something he's been accused of).  Supposedly he did get his transmission of power through the air working though, although the way that AA made it sound, it was more transmission through the ground to light bulbs put into the earth along a path.  Other bizarre and strange Tesla stories that I have heard were absent; AA kept to the books and mainly just talked about his actual achievements. 

Tesla's later years were only lightly touched on when, like Howard Hughes, Tesla spend his final years a virtual recluse and seemingly mad as a hatter.

All in all, a very interesting outing for Ancient Aliens.  A good episode to watch if you are new to Nikola Tesla.  Its practically a documentary of his life with only a few 'out there' frills thrown in at the edges.

Book Review: Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult by Peter Levenda

More like "The Occult's Involvement with the Nazis"

This is an interesting book but it must be said that the cover and the title are a little misleading. Levenda does talk quite a bit about the Nazis and their occult movement. However, great swaths of the book recount general occult societies' history through the 20th century. Levenda lavishes chapters on Aleister Crowley (who Lavenda seems to think influenced almost every event in the first part of the century).

One further thing must be said about this book. Levenda approaches his subject from a number of assumptions. Assumptions that many people would call conspiracy theories. For instance, to Levenda, Martin Boremann's survival and escape to South America is not a theory but a fact. Levenda reminds the reader on several occasions that Boremann escaped to South America in the guise of a Catholic priest and with the help of the Catholic church. The fact that DNA testing in the early 1990s has pretty much overwhelmingly proved that Boremann died in Berlin in 1945 never comes into play.

The Catholic church does not come off well with Lavenda and he adds the fact that they were allied to the Nazis from the start (another "fact" Levanda accepts as gospel) to the many recent charges against them. Another "fact" is that Crowley was a British MI5 agent from WW1 and through WW2, actively working with the British government. These and other "facts", some just not well documented to others which are pretty much the territory of Conspiracy Theorists, really increase the "grain of salt" factor of the book.

Levenda, not a historian but some manner of journalist who spend most of his life investigating the occult, really knows his stuff though. Much of the text are obscure and phantasmagorical occult references to societies and personalities long forgotten and dead. Charles Manson gets a good airing as does LeVay, founder of Satanism. He does try to tie it all back to Nazi Germany in the first part of the book. Helena Blavatsky is fingered as one of the founding influences for Naziism, which she probably was.

Even for all the wild VonDaniken-esque ramblings and heapings of "facts", this book is a really good read. Lavenda's story of how he tried to penetrate a secret "Nazi" compound in Chile (which indeed is there and in which the Chilean dictatorship of the time did carry out very gruesome acts) is very gripping. Whether or not Martin Boreman and every other unaccounted for Nazi was hiding there at the time is really up for debate though. Its also good if you are up on your occult knowledge to know some of what Levenda is talking about. I recommend this book but go into it as a book written by an occultist with an axe to grind, not as a history written by an academic.

The Lathe of Harry Potter

I saw an article lately about Ursula Le Guin called "Ursula K. Le Guin pressured to make books 'more like Harry Potter' "

I really can't think of a good analogy to this.  Its like asking Michelangelo to paint pictures of McDonald's characters for advertisements.  I have to admit that I haven't read as much Le Guin as most science fiction readers but I know enough that she is one of the giants of real science fiction, up there with Heinlein and Frank Herbert in my book.  Her book, The Lathe of Heaven, has haunted my mind for forty years since I first read it.  The 70s movie was okay, although it changed stuff a lot.

In fact, I wonder if Ms. Le Guin thought of her 1971 book when her publishers made this ludicrous suggestion, demand even.  The Lathe of Heaven is about all sorts of things; power corrupting absolutely, the abuse of power, the possibility that our problems will get solved in ways that we didn't intend and that are very bad.   Like the characters in the book, magic users in Harry Potter are able to remake their world, delete and edit memories, call things into existence that weren't there before.  But in Harry's world, this is all cool (and having almost no negative long range consequences).  

I just find this whole idea amusing.  I enjoyed the first couple of Potter books until author-bloat set in and JK Rowling showed her true stripes and lack of talent by doing the opposite of what usually happens with new successful writers: Her books became more bloated, less focused, less carefully plotted as she threw in more and more stuff, more and more wizbang and less thoughtfulness.  The final books, in which she portrays magical battles as mere gun battles with wands instead of attack rifles, was just disappointing.  These people are supposed to have strange magical powers but there was none of the idea of high magic and warfare in a whole different plane.

In the end, wanting a great science fiction writer to write JK Rowling stories is just silly anyway, its a whole other genre.  I suppose its understandable, the desire to admixture something you love with something else you love is a common theme I see in everyday life.  Gamers who want a computer game which combines two other games they love, but would suck if it was actually done.  You can't mix Harry Potter and the Earthsea Chronicles.  No matter how much you might love both of them, if you mixed them, you can almost be guaranteed a bad result. 

Stealing from myself!

I've been feeling sort of depressed and down the last couple of days so I haven't had much to say, or to post to a blog.  I'm a sort of person who clams up when they get "blue" and don't say much.  However, I still want to post content on my blog here.  They say that trying to keep blogging and stuff like this is good for depression.  

So, all these book reviews that I've been posting are actually mine, I just wrote them previously.  They are actually book reviews that I wrote for Amazon.com, but I thought I would repost them here.  

I'm sure that if I was a famous blogger or online personality, I'd have someone email me telling me that someone was stealing my stuff from Amazon.com (or visa versa).  That gives me a good giggle, because its just me, stealing from myself.  Oh well, I'll sort it out with myself later!

Book Review: Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics by Frederic Spotts

I bought this book in a batch with several others and didn't read it right away. From the title I was expecting something very dry, very boring, very thick.

Boy, was I wrong!

First off, in the introduction, Spotts starts off strong, talking about how his book has been required reading in universities AND neo-nazi forums and websites. He talks about how he has been accused of being a Nazi apologist, or maybe even more... His work has been misunderstood and even used to show people how aesthetic opinions and value can change once the provenience of a work is known (he mentions someone shown a Hitler painting saying that its okay and a good quaint try by a beginner recoiling in horror when told who drew it!). But most of all, Spotts writes with incredible humor, tongue and cheek, spearing Hitler, the Nazis, and even art critics with barbs and jabs through the text which frequently made me laugh out loud! And that's just the introduction...

The book is very long, I warn you. It is "thickly" written... Spotts is an academic and will expect you to digest difficult ideas with sometimes convoluted sentences. He writes from the assumption that you already have a nodding familiarity with aesthetics, art history, art criticism, and WW2. Oh, he does explain things and gives some background but he does not spend much time on it. This is something I personally like because it bores me to death when a historian feels the need to digress for ten pages to explain something s/he just introduced until I have forgotten what the original point is!

Pictures! There are pictures on almost every page! This is something I totally love about this book. Even in the paperback copy, there was practically a picture on every page about something being talked about in the text. For this alone, I highly recommend this book.

Everything is covered in this book. Architecture, paintings, movies, even how Hitler got involved with the creation of the Volkswagen. The looting of valuable art by the Nazis is given in such detail that I had to skip through lengthy lists of artworks stolen by the Nazis (the overwhelming amount of data probably included by Spotts just to give an idea of the enormity of the deed).

And through it all Spotts will remind you of who's side he's on as he wryly snipes at the Nazis with entertaining quips and comments. Other armchair generals and historians have launched offensives against the Nazis in the areas of Nazi military stupidity, propaganda and their horrible war of extermination against the Jews and everyone else they didn't like. Many historians and documentaries try to make a meal of Hitler's initial failings in Vienna trying to get into the art school with many a wispy "what if..." Spotts will have none of that. I don't have the direct quote at hand but you'll know it when you read it because it made me guffaw... words to the effect that Hitler just sucked! This book truly is an art historian's offensive against the Nazis in support.

In all, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in art history, World War 2, and the Nazis. It took me a long time to get through it, its lengthy and densely written at times, but its entertaining and even uplifting. Spotts holds back no punches in showing you not only in what the world lost but also the horror of what almost came to pass... and that's when its uplifting because you close the covers of the book and realize, even just in the art world alone, how lucky we all are that the Nazis failed.