Posts by Tom Semmens
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For whatever it's worth, WW2 Wehrmacht veterans have been accorded associate membership status of the Australian Returned Services League since at least the 1960s
I didn't know this. Disgraceful that it happened. I suppose one has to give the RSL the benefit of the doubt and assume that because of the cold war the widespread participation and complicity of the Wehrmacht in genocide and crimes against humanity in the East, the Balkans and Italy was not known.
After the fall of France demonstrated the genius of Hitler and validated his beliefs the brutalism of Nazi philosophy entered deeply into the German soul. German civilians - and the military even more so - knew and/or broadly approved of Nazi crimes untl the rain of Allied bombs and defeat in the East caused them to start to fear the consequences of those beliefs. For that reason alone no one who fought for the German armed forces in WW2 should be in anyway rehabilitated as combatants. Ever.
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I'd take it back to the Congress of Vienna myself.
The birth of the modern world is widely set at 1789 aand the French Revolution. That is where I would date the historical chain of events that led to the great coalition wars of the first half of the 20th century, and we are still living in that era today. Hence the famous quote attributed to Mao when he was asked he thought of the French Revolution: "To soon to tell".
It should be remembered that if you take the Balkan wars as the first skirmishes of the Great War and Russo-Polish & Greco-Turkish wars as the last gasps of the Great War then that first cycle of fighting lasted for over a decade. If you date the second round of fighting from the Spanish civil war in 1936 to the communist victory in China in 1949, the second cycle lasted thirteen years.
I mention this because this is the context that de-Nazification has to be set. Most of the hardline true believers - the "militia movement" types - were dead in 1945. Killed being heroic warriors in the Waffen SS or just shot out of hand as prisoners by the Allies (the Soviets killed most of their prisoners anyway, and it was a lucky SS prisoner who made it out of the battle zone in the west, and and good riddance to bad rubbish I say). The Nazi survivors knew it was over, and the rubble of their shattered cities and Marshall plan stripped them of any political credibilty. The rest of the Germans - and the western allies - just wanted war and killing to be over, even if that meant some went unpunished.
The fate of the "useful" Nazis who were rehabilitated to fight the Cold war was not typical of the fate of most Nazi's after 1945. Most Nazi's were collectively punished until around the cold war really kicked in from circa 1952 onwards, a period of seven plus years where many were denied any work except as labourers. While Germany was being rebuilt, this more than anything meant that when they did re-emerge as citizens, the ex-Nazi's were largely shut out of the new bureaucracy and political institutions. They may or may not have been unrepentant, but they were also totally impotent.
Perhaps the most telling commentary on the near total marginalisation of serious Nazi's post WWII is the battle of Dien Bien Phu is sometimes called the "last stand of the Waffen SS", because so many of them wound up in the French Foreign Legion. Killed by an Asiatic in the service of the country that forced the Versailles Treaty on Germany. Who said history doesn't have a sense of Karma?
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Danyl in his first post basically sums up what I think on this matter.
BUT
1) The Germans had the absolute coolest uniforms, weapons, tanks, planes, etc of that era.
They didn't have such uniforms just because they thought combat required you to be snappily dressed. The Nazi's were besotted with the power of their symbols, plastering swatikas on any and everything. The western public lampooned them for this even at the time - there is a well-known 1939 cartoon from a Belgian newspaper showing Hermann Goring admiring himself in the uniform of a tram conductor that apparently infuriated the Reichsmarshall. And when the Nazi's were defeated, the Soviets symbolically desecrated the symbols of Hitlerism.
Ridiculing, debasing, and making powerless objects of humour of Nazi regalia is the surest sign I can think of that their defeat was total.
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Our various "mainstream" cultural exports have mostly come out of performances in licensed premises, frequently at hours that, according to the draft policy, shouldn't exist.
There is also a massive intangible benefit of helping retain your twenty something urbanistas. I must know two dozen or more high achieving, beautiful, and well qualified New Zealanders who live in Sydney or Melbourne or London and whose primary motivation to move was because "Auckland's nightlife sux", and have now built happy BYT lives in those places and will probably not return.
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As for the cops, Tom, they'd rather stop all drinking (as opposed to going back to the "swill") because they spend so much time cleaning up the mess. Same with ER doctors.
It was more in the "a curse on all their houses" mode.
After reading Simon Grigg's post it got me thinking about something which should stand out like dogs balls to all of us yet is either completed overlooked or ignored. I read some travel writer somewhere saying we don't do cities well in New Zealand, that the "real" New Zealand is out there in the provinces, as if real New Zealanders spend their lives doing bunging jumping hakas onto jetboats that are zooming across the surface of active volcanoes.
Yet Auckland occupies a pivotal and critical role in our nation’s cultural life. Auckland is our only proper city, and therefore is unique in being the only truly urban New Zealand experience in the entire universe. The obvious importance of this is completely missed in the policy making mix. The cultural and economic value of the bright lights of a large urban area in retaining and attracting desirable BYTs and fostering our cultural identity as something other than as a bunch of Ed Hillary mini-me’s is scorned or ignored, and to me this stunts our growth as a cultural nation. I am not saying that public drunkenness at 4am is part of our growth as a national identity, but I do think that the fostering of a vibrant and thriving nightlife in our only city is every bit as important to our sense of identity and national pride as any sterile art gallery or dreary museum, and should be identified as a desirable outcome of any holistic review of liquor and night time entertainment policy.
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The thing is though there IS a liquor problem in Auckland. But it seems to me that in the "debate" about what to do about it the voice of anyone who actually uses the bars and clubs of Auckland is conspicuously absent. The most prominent players certainly seem to have completely missed the cultural changes wrought by neo-liberalism on social behaviour over the last fifteen years.
Bhatnagar and the rest of his C&R cronies have presided over the (non) planning disaster that led to the crazy situation where shoddy, non-sound proofed apartments are built next to historic and/or existing live music venues and established suburban pubs. That same ideological belief in the sanctity of property rights now turns Bhatnagar and co into enthusiastic supporters of the bully state, because a property owners right to reasonable enjoyment of their property (via a quiet night) in their mindset comes ahead of any other community consideration. Circular reasoning and historical amnesia of this type is unfortunately all too typical of fools like Bhatnagar.
The joyless, aging wowsers of City Vision (Let’s face it, Northey is a drip) best summed up by Brian Rudman in his Herald column today seem to me to be not much better. Their vision of Auckland’s nightlife is the same as ACToid killjoys like Aaron Bhatnagar, only with more trees and a bus lane.
The police don't want a late night culture, for obvious reasons. If the cops had their way, we would go back to a few booze barns with 6pm closing, leaving them plenty of time to eat their donuts back at the station.
When such a toxic alliance of people with their own, anti-entertainment agenda tries to make policy is it any surprise that we end up with a complete dogs breakfast which is then easily dealt with by the spin-meisters of big booze, who have a vested interest in turning us all into 24x7 alcoholics.
Auckland DOES need a new liquor policy - but here is an idea, how about you take a holistic view of the matter - for example, look at things like at least ameliorating the worst of bad planning by offering to subsidise the retro-fitting of double or triple glazing and air conditioning in inner city apartments? How about surveying the attitudes of the actual consumers of late night entertainment rather than just listen to those who have vested interests and assorted lobbyists? Talking to clubbers and the like often reveals surprisingly reasonable and informed views on these matters.
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Bhatnagar's plans are pretty par for the course when you get a bunch of born-to-rule, property rights worshipping, right wing fundies running a city. C&R have tried to wreck Auckland's nightlife consistantly for as long as I've lived here, and i can't see any change anytime soon.
We have a late night culture now, I love it and I think it is good fun and it is hardly unique - try going out in Madrid or even Santiago before midnight. Try having a nap before you go out, get hard or just go home, but FFS stop moaning about it like a bunch of old Nana's.
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A lot of the new proposed regulations seem to me to be aimed squarely at shutting down the plethora of seedy "Sports Bars" that have sprung up in recent years, and the attitude seems to be bad luck if you are collatoral damage.
Some of the proposals make sense. Forcing off-licences, including supermarkets, to close at 10pm is a wildly good idea.
But most of it is rubbish - shonky regulations to protect shoddy apartments from noise - apartments approved or built by the property developers who run Auckland city.
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Tut tut tutting that student mob behaviour is awful, no fun and totally negative is about as accurate and helpful as claiming drugs are never fun. To remember what it was like to be nineteen, to accept that when you were nineteen and full of testosterone and energy it WAS fun to run away from the police, might restore a bit of perspective and compassion to how we assess these things.
I am not really defending these students. The ones that got caught probably deserved a face full of pepper spray for their troubles and a thick lip as a reward for their ability to articulate in an educated way their views to the arresting police officer, but it should also be "here endeth your lesson".
Philosophically I can't square the circle of defending on one hand the right of fundamentally bad gangsters to parade about in gang colours and then demand that the full weight of institutional violence be used to crush the lives of fundamentally good kids who drunkenly threw a bottle at a policeman one night. It just seems to me that a lot of people have internalised the whole proscriptive, purse lipped P.C. mindset they laugh off as non-existant all the time.
I find it difficult to understand how a supposedly intelligent web community that ridicules Judith Collins at every opportunity fails to grasp the reasons why you should be institutionally lenient towards the actions of drunk young men and women very unlikely to ever offend again. Surely the state's institutions also needs to protect our youth from themselves, not just aid and abet in making sure they fall at the first hurdle in such a way as to guarantee they'll never get a decent run?
No wonder we have the second highest prison muster per capita in the Western World.
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I was talking to a friend of mine last night and we both agreed - nothing is quite so thrilling and fun when you are young as running away from the police.