January 17, 2013

"I think there's a very fascistic thing under The Little Prince, you know.... I think there's a kind of SS totalitarian sentimentality in there somewhere."

"You know, there's something, you know, that... masculine love of a certain kind of oily muscle, you know what I mean? I mean, I can't quite put my finger on it, but I can just imagine some beautiful SS man loving The Little Prince. You know, I don't know why, but there's something wrong with it. It stinks!"

A quote from "My Dinner With Andre" that ties together this morning's 3 posts:
Andrew Cuomo's "muscular brand of politics"  

Politicians, including Hitler, using children 

Hitler's resemblance to Chaplin
Is there a Chaplin/Little Prince connection?



Talk about the sentimentality of fascists.

49 comments:

Dust Bunny Queen said...

So.... are we suddenly noticing, waking up, to the Fascist tendencies of Obama and the Fascist and Socialist yearning of the progressive left? Hmmmmm?

Some of us are not surprised and notices and tried to warn y'all much earlier. Unfortunately I think it is already too late.

MOLON LABE

Lawyer Mom said...

Well, they're not too sentimental about their Whole Foods. Mackey compared Obamacare to fascism and quickly backed down after Obama's fans threatened a boycott.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/whole-foods-fascism_n_2496603.html

Jason said...

Every woman adores a fascist.

Over to you, Inga! :-)

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

From Lawyer mom's link:

"Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey says he regrets comparing Obamacare to "fascism," but remains critical of the president's health care reform law.

Mackey compared Obamacare to "fascism" in a recent interview with NPR, saying that the government controls "the means of production" in health care. The comments sparked an outcry among Whole Foods shoppers, many of whom emailed The Huffington Post to say they plan to boycott the supermarket chain.

"I regret using that word now because it's got so much baggage attached to it," Mackey told HuffPost Live on Thursday. "Of course, I was just using the standard dictionary definition."


We can't throw dictionary definitions at the left. They always end up running around screaming with their arms flailing in the air.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Idiots who support ObamaCare have no idea how bad it is.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Scott said...

Jeez, Connections.

Anonymous said...

All the Irish priests and nuns that taught me in the 60's quallify for this one. And, they were sentimental in a way that only the Irish can be. Good people one and all, but to a 60's hippie they were all "fascist pigs". It's the way we talked back then. In retrospect it was probably just the blond Lebanese hashish bubbling up through the water pipe while we listened to Blonde on Blonde and rapped about how the "Man" was keeping us down

Baron Zemo said...

Hey here is Cedarfords favorite song "Little Tiny Moustache!

Anonymous said...

Jesuits - God's own SS.

jungatheart said...

Beware the baobabs, my son,
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

YoungHegelian said...

Will you guys please just pipe down while I go clean out my volcanoes for the greater glory of the Reich?

Thx!

Chip Ahoy said...

< shill >

Little Prince Deluxe Pop-Up book rated very highly with 624 customer reviews ATTAAP for $23.00

Amazon video.

H. Gutierrez says:

I just received this book as a Christmas present, and I must say that even in my mid-30s, this book still tugs at my heartstrings. Though fundamentally a children's book, "The Little Prince" is deeply philosophical in nature. I've been collecting this book in different languages over the past decade or so, and I must to say that this is now my favorite version.

< /shill >

edutcher said...

Actually, the SA was into the oily muscle stuff, Ernst Rohm being notoriously homosexual and encouraging a "Greek military existence" segregated from women.

Himmler OTOH hated anything that kept men away from women (and probably vice versa IYKWIM), so the sentimentality in the SS went another way.

traditionalguy said...

Its the Aaron Rodgers stache. The Green Bay QB finally came out as a Little Prince wannabe. And then the SF Forty-niners pass rush got extra mean

The SS guys are never considered cute. Chaplin was a great character actor.

But Chaplin's skills must have intrigued Adolph from Munich who was a great actor himself.

Tibore said...

I'm at a loss as how "masculine love of a certain kind of oily muscle" is somehow fascist, but whatever. I guess it's that Alice in Wonderland Humpty Dumpty thing:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master that's all."

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot!

Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

Scott M said...

Talk about the sentimentality of fascists.

Hey, don't knock 'em too hard. They do make the trains run on time.

gerry said...

Talk about the sentimentality of fascists.

Is that an order?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Its repulsive and insidious.

traditionalguy said...

Nazi SS emotions are summed up in Wagner's music. The Ring Cycle has a fight to the death in which the warrior hero dies, very bravely in battle, and his wife rides into his funeral pyre.

Remember they played a Wagner overture in the Airborne Assault Helicopters attack scene using attached loudspeakers in Apocalypse Now.

Anonymous said...

Those were the days and those will be the days.

Anonymous said...

That line jumped out at me too from My Dinner With Andre. I've thought about it since and concluded it's just bad reasoning:

My enemy likes X.
Therfore there is something wrong with X.
I don't like X.


Then the flipside:

My friend likes Y.
Therefore there is something right with Y.
I like Y.

Both are fallacious. X and Y stand or fall on their merits or lack thereof, not on who likes or dislikes them.

There is nothing wrong with The Little Prince because a fascist likes it. Note that it's worse than this -- Gregory condemns The Little Prince because he can imagine a fascist liking it.

Fascists might get sentimental about lots of things -- children playing, homecooked meals, their mothers, the song "Lili Marleen," etc. None of those things stink because of their sentimentality.

My guess is that Gregory turned against The Little Prince for some unconscious reason and justified it by blaming fascists.

For the record, Antoine de St. Exupery, the author of The Little Prince and adult books as well, was a staunch anti-Nazi, who flew for France against the Nazis and went to America after France fell to convince the US to enter the war. He returned to Europe and died flying with the Free French Air Force agains the Axis.

I love My Dinner with Andre but shame on Gregory for linking The Little Prince with fascism so glibly.

garage mahal said...

o.... are we suddenly noticing, waking up, to the Fascist tendencies of Obama and the Fascist and Socialist yearning of the progressive left? Hmmmmm?

You know how I know you're a fascist?
Cause you're a fascist? And you can tell who other fascists are?

wildswan said...

The author of the Little Prince died fighting the Nazis. And anyhow where is admiration of oily SS muscles - where is that in the book? I remember a rose and a child and a crashed airman. It was about as far from SS sensibilities as you can get. The SS were insensitive - taught to be that way so they could be successfully mean to Jews and others. The first thing the SS would have done is pulled up the rose as a toughing exercise. And come to think, I think Andre was pulling up the rose also in a spiritual sense. Fascist

campy said...

The Ring Cycle has a fight to the death in which the warrior hero dies, very bravely in battle,

Actually he's stabbed in the back while having drinks after a boar hunt by a supposed friend.

ricpic said...

Why tar Wagner with his fans? He was a great composer.

Philip Glass' music expresses liberalism uber alles, but I don't hold that against him, it's just his music stinks.

Saroyan said that almost everyone is helpless against the pull of sentimentality, not just fascists.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I was trying to make a connection between "the children" and "the oily muscular" and the only thing that popped up was my love of wrestling as a child.

I'm not versed on the wrestling/fascist connection though.

Revenant said...

This is one of the reasons why "My Dinner with Andre" left me cold.

I've nothing against watching people have a conversation. Jon Favreau's "Dinner for Five" was a favorite show of mine (and by far the best 'inside Hollywood' show out there). It is just that Andre himself really doesn't have anything interesting to say.

It is like listening to a character in a Woody Allen film for 90 minutes, without the jokes.

AllenS said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
traditionalguy said...

Wagner's operas are populated with Norse deities making them popular with Teutonic pagan magicians, not that there is anything wrong with that.

We were watching Amadeus again last night. Emperor Franz Joseph (of the too many notes fame) commissions Wolfgang Mozart, a German from Salzberg, to write an opera in German against the wishes of the Italians who are old timers at Court.

Mozart's genius has everyone jealous.

A very well done movie, and one of the last ones done before computer animation and and sci-fi plots took over everything.

Seeing Red said...

Totally sexist post here about Whole Foods.

Don't more women shop there?

They don't like being called fascists?

LOLOLOL

Rabel said...

Dear Abby RIP

Astro said...

Beware the baobabs, my son,
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Jabberwock. Baobabs are trees. Or were you making an allusion I missed?

----------------------

Anyway, just a point of terminology:
Weren't the Fascists the Italians?
The Germans were Nazis (National Socialists).

Seeing Red said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ken in tx said...

The Italian Fascists took their name from the symbol of the Roman Senate, a bunch of rods strapped around an axehead. The same symbol was on the back of a US Mercury-head dime. Two of those symbols are on the wall of the US Senate chambers. It means strength in numbers.

William said...

Too late now, but instead of Chaplin playing The Great Dictator, it would have been better for the great dictator to have remade some of Chaplin's movies. I think a lot of Chaplin's films were sentimental and lacked a sense of danger. Take City Lights where the Chaplin character helps the blind girl. How much more interesting and significant the movie would have been with Hitler in the Chaplin part. Hitler wouldn't go for the easy laughs, and there would be a sense of suspense in all his interactions with the defective blind girl.

Basta! said...

As I recall, only those Roman officials who had the authority to pronounce the death sentence had the right to have the fasces (rods and axe) carried before them when they went out on public business. An honor, but also a public warning --- don't mess with this guy.

Anonymous said...

Actually the fasces were just the bundle of rods - the symbol of Roman authority. But you are correct, the insertion of the axes into the bundle indicated the authority included the power to impose a death sentence.

Anonymous said...

And yes, the Italian national socialist were the ones who coined the name fascist. Not coincidentally Mussolini was also the person who gave us the term 'totalitarian.' In his own words it meant 'everything within the state, nothing without.'

comatus said...

And the damned trains did not run on time.

comatus said...

And the damned trains did not run on time.

TMLutas said...

"And the damned trains did not run on time."

It is tragedy that so many people are so ignorant about fascist/nazi economic incompetence. That sort of ignorance makes people susceptible to fascist arguments, especially in certain kinds of economic crises.

Rusty said...

And you can tell who other fascists are?

Their behavior gives them away.

Rusty said...

ThomasD said...
And yes, the Italian national socialist were the ones who coined the name fascist. Not coincidentally Mussolini was also the person who gave us the term 'totalitarian.' In his own words it meant 'everything within the state, nothing without.'

As a young man Mussolini was an ardent communist. later he became a socialist. For him the masses weren't accepting the socialist ideal quickly enough to suit him so he invent his version of the new socialism, fascism. His thought being that fascism would be more acceptable to the middle class and the business class. Fascism was just Mussolini's brand of.socialism.

Unknown said...

My conscience is clear. I've never voted for him.

Tina Trent said...

Jesus, Saint-Exupéry was an anti-fascist who used his influence with the isolationist -- though often wrongly labelled pro-Nazi -- Lindberghs, particularly Anne Morrow, to press the need for America to enter the war against fascism.

Her relationship with him is fascinating.

Don't facts matter to anyone? Anywhere? Good God, has sexual innuendo really melted everyone's brains?



Jose_K said...

Fully agree with creeley23. That Exupery died fighting the nazis was my first thought

mariner said...

Scott M.,
Hey, don't knock 'em too hard. They do make the trains run on time.

Yes, and look at what those trains carry ...

mariner said...

garage,
You know how I know you're a fascist?
Cause you're a fascist? And you can tell who other fascists are?

You don't know a fascist when you see one in the mirror.