tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448657.post6957736529111810328..comments2023-09-30T08:07:26.165-04:00Comments on Mystical Politics: New York Times on the establishment of Dachau, March, 1933.Rebeccahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17626228106192215280noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448657.post-17055312785452761842010-04-06T15:51:47.792-04:002010-04-06T15:51:47.792-04:00Hi Rebecca,
You make a good point. By the way, we...Hi Rebecca,<br /><br />You make a good point. By the way, were these articles front page stories? Or, like so much else about the Nazi regime, was it all buried inside?<br /><br />I mentioned, in connection with another of your excellent posts, William Hitchcock's excellent book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Road-Freedom-Allied-Victory/dp/1439123306/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270582371&sr=1-1" rel="nofollow">The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe</a>. A good chunk of the book is devoted to the liberation of the camps and the actual conditions discovered (and what occurred before such people were able, to the extent such things later became possible, to move on with lives). Everything was infinitely worse, on his telling - which I believe to be a straight telling -, than what appeared in the papers (or in most other reports). The survivors were so reduced at the time that any notion of retained dignity, even humanity, was destroyed. They were walking flesh, even willing to defecate in public. The Times presented a sanitized version of reality. The Times deserves rather little credit for its coverage although, as you note, there is some detail.<br /><br />Today - and, I mention this because we all should learn from past errors -, the Times (among a number of other papers), is sugarcoating what is going on in the Muslim - and most especially Arab - regions. Such papers are rationalizing a truly vicious reality and movement out of deference to who knows what. I like to think that, like with the use of euphemistic terms such as "militant," such papers know some semblance of the reality they have chosen to obscure. However, I rather suspect that they often believe (or have come to believe) their sanitized version of reality.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448657.post-81439280842406558972010-04-06T10:43:12.780-04:002010-04-06T10:43:12.780-04:00It is interesting to see what the Times actually c...It is interesting to see what the Times actually covered about the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, however. This article that I first quoted seems to me to give an overly rosy picture of Dachau, but then it was at the very beginning of its existence, and the article about its liberation gives lots of nasty details not present in the first one.Rebeccahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17626228106192215280noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448657.post-80903423683311026682010-04-06T00:37:59.798-04:002010-04-06T00:37:59.798-04:00You have posted some interesting material. As alwa...You have posted some interesting material. As always, thank you.<br /><br />It is worth underlining the fact that <i>The New York Times</i> was not great at shedding light on the threat that came from the Nazis. By contrast, it is my understanding that the paper's coverage of the Armenian genocide was typically front page news. At least that is what appears in <a href="http://www.peterbalakian.com/" rel="nofollow">Peter Balakian</a>'s excellent book, <i>The Burning Tigris</i>. So, had <i>The New York Times</i> wanted to cover what was happening to Europe's Jews - and not just after the fact -, the paper could have made it front and center.<br /><br />Likewise, today, <i>The New York Times</i> downplays the virus running within the great Muslim regions. As a result, one is forced to dig deep - and often onto websites with nasty agendas to find links to news reports - to learn about how Christians in the Muslim regions are under assault and, in fact, exiting the Muslim regions in a great Exodux. Yet, without this bit of context, our understanding of the Muslim regions is skewed dishonestly. As with its burial of stories about the nasty nature of the Nazi regime towards Europe's Jews, the burial of stories today makes us all poorer.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com