Prince Philip has broken a 60-year public silence about his family's links with the Nazis. In a frank interview, he said they found Hitler's attempts to restore Germany's power and prestige 'attractive' and admitted they had 'inhibitions about the Jews'. The revelations come in a book about German royalty kowtowing to the Nazis, which features photographs never published in the UK. They include one of Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms. One row back in the cortege in Darmstadt, western Germany, was his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, wearing a Royal Navy bicorn hat.
Another picture shows his youngest sister, Sophia, sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Goering. Explaining the attraction of the Nazis, 84-year-old Prince Philip told an American academic: "There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building. There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic. "I can understand people latching on to something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was." The revelations are in the book Royals and the Reich
He added that there was 'a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti-Communist and who knew what was going to happen to the regime?' Philip stressed that he was never 'conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views'. But he went on to say there were 'inhibitions about the Jews' and 'jealousy of their success'.
Philip was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on Corfu in 1921, the youngest of five children and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. All four of his sisters married German princes and three - Sophie, Cecile and Margarita - became members of the Nazi party. Sophia's husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became chief of Goering's secret intelligence service and they were frequent guests at Nazi functions.
Philip went on to fight with distinction for the Allies in the Second World War before marrying the young Princess Elizabeth in 1947, five years before she became Queen. He served with the Royal Navy where, by 1945, he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant on a destroyer and was mentioned in despatches. All of his sisters and brothers-inlaw are now dead but he keeps in contact with his German relatives. His comments on the family's Nazi connections appear in Royals and the Reich, by Jonathan Petropoulos, to be published in Britain in May.
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Steven Pinker on Eugenics: "Contrary to the belief spread by the radical scientists, eugenics for much of the twentieth century was a favorite cause of the left, not the right. It was championed by many progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger, and the Marxist biologists J. B. S. Haldane and Hermann Muller. It's not hard to see why the sides lined up this way. Conservative Catholics and Bible Belt Protestants hated eugenics because it was an attempt by intellectual and scientific elites to play God. Progressives loved eugenics because it was on the side of reform rather than the status quo, activism rather than laissez-faire, and social responsibility rather than selfishness. Moreover, they were comfortable expanding state intervention in order to bring about a social goal. Most abandoned eugenics only when they saw how it led to forced sterilizations in the United States and Western Europe and, later, to the policies of Nazi Germany".
Truth under attack again: "Students and lecturers are calling for a Leeds University don to be sacked after he said he supported a theory that black people were inferior to whites. In a row that has reignited the debate on the limits of freedom of speech, Frank Ellis, a lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies, sparked anger after stating, in an interview with the university's student newspaper, that he was an 'unrepentant Powellite' who thought that the BNP was 'a bit too socialist' for his liking. Ellis said he supported right-wing ideas such as the Bell Curve theory, which held that white people were more intelligent than black people. '[It] has demonstrated to me beyond any reasonable doubt there is a persistent gap in average black and white average intelligence.' Repatriation would get his support, he added, if it was done 'humanely'. Now students are preparing to picket his lectures, protest on campus and bombard the vice-chancellor with emails calling for Ellis to be removed from his post."
Wisdom from Berkeley: "David Brooks quotes Peter Beinart of The New Republic as saying that Harvard students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd expect from a good high school student," and that required courses can be "a hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes." But Harvard students are in most cases outstanding high school students, so they arrive with at least the core knowledge expected of a good high school student". [A false but amusing assumption. America's High Schools are now so bad that even Harvard has to give 20% of its freshman intake remedial courses in the "3rs". See here]
Catastrophic drop in births in Japan: "More than half of the women born during Japan's second postwar baby boom from 1971 to 1974 had not had any children by age 30, according to statistics released Friday by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. Coupled with an earlier prediction that the number of women of childbearing age-15 to 49-will continue to decline over the coming decade or more, the ministry is concerned that the fall in the birthrate will accelerate. "(Because) numerous women in the second baby boom generation have few children, (this) could mean the birthrate will fall at a faster rate, and the population will further decline," a ministry official said. According to a special report published by the ministry focusing on births, the share of women who had not given birth by age 30 was 18 percent among those born in 1953, and rose every year thereafter. The figure topped 30 percent among those born in 1961 and 40 percent for those born in 1967; among the cohort of women born in 1973, a year that saw more than 2 million births in total, 51 percent had not had a child by age 30."
I put up a post on Socialized Medicine yesterday that noted how low the British National Health Service has sunk. They now fund "alternative" treatments while refusing to fund some real therapies.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).
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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)
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