The magazine that plasters up Hitler and Stalin on the front page to try an put them in a good light, till it is all too clear they are main perpetrators in an evil in carnage.
To be a blood thirsty barbarian give a person a leg up on the rest of the population, then most of us must be working to the wrong ends
http://money.cnn.com/2001/12/04/news/column_wastler /
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Who's your choice for Man of the Year?"It's no wonder so many people detest the news media," Jack said in our Eye Opener newsletter, which we write during the CNN Money Morning show. " ... Unless they run a picture of bin Laden's head on a stick, I'm not interested. This man is revered by thousands of people in the Middle East who don't know any better and putting him on the cover of a prestigious publication like Time magazine only adds to his cachet as a larger-than-life figure."
Actually, and much to Jack's chagrin, I can understand Time's reasoning.
Who has changed the course of world events this year more than Osama bin Laden? His acts of terror and cowardice have pushed the world's super-power into a war and a mission it would have never contemplated a year ago. Thousands of lives ended because of him. Thousands more are changed, because of this one man.
It wouldn't be the first time the magazine has singled out a villain as the Man of the Year. Adolf Hitler was the honoree in 1938. Joseph Stalin, who arguably killed more people than Hitler, got the nod in 1939 and 1942. More recently, the Ayatollah Khomeini, no friend of the United States, was named in 1979.
There have been unsavory choices before at Time.
It should be clear from these past choices and current considerations that Time's Man of the Year designation isn't so much about honor as it is about influence. That's why Time would be better off calling its exercise "Newsmaker of the Year."
But it doesn't, which is unfortunate for those of us with corporate ties to the magazine (CNN/Money and Time are owned by the same company, AOL Time Warner). The magazine, while pursuing a journalistically sound goal, runs the risk of alienating some of its primary audience. Some folks won't get the philosophical intent. They will just see Time giving what looks like an honor to America's deadliest foe.
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http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/festjc/c... 1. The Incubation Period
"I believe that it was the will of God to send a boy from here into the Reich, to make him great, to raise him up to be the Fuhrer of the nation."—Adolf Hitler, 1938, in Linz
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His feeling of superiority, which was necessary to him after he had failed in every personal challenge he had met, was founded not only on an arrogant contempt for mankind but also on the racial-biological twist, which, clearly following in the footsteps of Lanz von Liebenfels, he gave to his vulgarized Darwinian ideas. On the coincidence of belonging to one particular race, the failure could build up the self-importance his inflated ego demanded ever more urgently because of the abysmal depths of his own being. The Aryan - this was soon to become the firm core of his anti-Semitism - was 'the highest image and likeness of the Lord', and just as he had been the source of all the great achievements of culture and civilization in the past, so under the creative plan of providence he was destined in the future too for the loftiest position, for mastery. Meanwhile the Jew, as the principle of destruction and evil, with the hate and vengefulness characteristic of the inferior, increasingly opposed the Aryan in order to subjugate the world by the means peculiar to him: planned corruption, deliberate pollution of the pure Aryan blood, and the systematic poisoning of public life. 'Was there any shady undertaking,' Hitler demanded later, 'any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like the maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.' (23) The press, art, prostitution, land speculation, syphilis, capitalism as well as Marxism, but also pacifism, the idea of world citizenship and liberalism, were the camouflages adopted at different times to conceal a world conspiracy, and behind all of them stood the figure of the Eternal Jew. The last obstacle to the Jew's plans was the German nation with its high proportion of Aryan blood; if that champion was vanquished in the mighty conflict, the victory of mongrel man, the end of civilization and the disruption of the plan of creation were at hand; a stop must be put to this threat. 'In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.' (24)
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http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/festjc/c... Martin Bormann - The Brown Eminence
Admittedly it is not honesty which in real life overcomes dishonesty. In the harsh struggle for existence the stronger, the harder capacity for self-assertion daily gains the victory and yet it is bitter if this capacity is based upon intrigue and a burning ambition as in the case before us. — Martin Bormann
But you know, don't you, that in my dictionary DUTY is written in capitals.
— Martin Bormann
From too great a distance, as from too close, a totalitarian system of government looks like a single tightly knit block whose massive structure towers over society, as vast as it is impenetrable. However, this impression, based upon the determination and the merciless energy with which such governments achieve their purposes, is an illusion. What the observer sees as a block is often enough merely the reflection of his own anxiety, which has clothed this arbitrary and unrestricted power in a compact mental image. In contrast, the National Socialist regime had a curious and at first sight astounding lack of structure, which was not the result only of the laziness about establishing an orderly system which continually betrayed the leading National Socialists' urban bohemian origins. This structural untidiness is the expression of one of the basic principles of totalitarian government: the maxim of the unreliability of all authority, which, paradoxically, is the leadership's most reliable instrument for the establishment of an intimidating, continuously threatening super-authority. The effect of this is that power itself recedes into the background and becomes curiously intangible.
By keeping the jurisdiction of the various authorities intentionally vague and their hierarchical positions inextricably involved, it was possible to play a double game, leaving the individual in a state of utter helplessness like that experienced by Kafka's heroes and producing the same psychological reactions. The individual in the National Socialist state gradually-lost an human certainty and dignity in the crushing encounters with a power that could not be located and yet was everywhere.
The duplication and finally the 'multiplication' (1) of authorities, which gave this feeling of insecurity a basis in institutional organization, began with the separation of party and state. Every state function was balanced against a party office of equal status, and the result was a chaos of rival institutions, all of which considered themselves competent in such matters as foreign policy, intelligence, administration or law. This dichotomy was largely a reflection of the principle that lay behind the rise of National Socialism, as of every totalitarian movement. Such movements do not see themselves as a party in the literal sense, that is to say as the representative of a part within the framework of an accepted order, but as the spearhead of a bid for total domination which 'is developed and realized in express and open hostility to the state'.(2) It is true that after the law of 1st December 1933 official pronouncements repeatedly stressed the unity of party and state; in fact, however, the dividing line was sharp. The state soon degenerated into a mere 'technical apparatus' with purely executive functions. It still had the task, as representative of the civil principle, of inspiring trust and appearing to preserve bourgeois standards, but the party gained wide scope for the expression of its emotional drives and the achievement of its aims. The top leadership, in its single-minded and opportunist pursuit of power, could waver from side to side, play off one against another, and if necessary betray all. The preponderance of power, and above all the role of formulating and realizing its own totalitarian aims, always lay with the movement, just as in his own eyes Hitler was always the 'Fuhrer' rather than Reich Chancellor. Beyond its purely technical functions the state, visibly deprived of its sovereignty, had no importance except as a facade. Its task was to represent a power which it did not actually possess, a power that stood behind it and appropriated to itself, for its own legitimation, a deep-rooted popular attachment to the state which drew on common national experience, tradition and respect. Hidden and secret, the real centre of power, by its very aura of anonymity, appeared to its opponents, as well as to the merely refractory, all the less vulnerable, all the more terrifying, all the more omnipotent - an earthly deus absconditus.(3)
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