Monday, October 2, 2017

Arlene Corwin writes



Nazis On The Streets Of Sweden



We have illusions, all.
But most of us don’t want to kill.
I looked it up.
I asked some simple questions.
Google told me:
Nazi symbols are allowed in Israel!
Also in the USA!
Prohibited in Germany,
Allowed in Finland.
Austria is definite. No! no! no!, no! and no!
Some countries have no laws at all –
Apparently no views
Or views so lax
They seem to non-chalate* the facts.



Neo-Nazis plan to march
The streets of Sweden,
Thirtieth September, twenty seventeen.
They call themselves a neo –
Their philosophy is old as Hitler,
Old as Wagner, long before.
False ideals, inner lies but outer dealings,
Hates delusional, baiting plentiful.



March occurring on Yom Kippur,
Near a synagogue, to boot.
Their aim: to root out, root out, root…
Annihilate, decimate, eradicate,
Means inhumane,
And most important,
Based on lies! 
Statistical, imaginary, fantasized.    



Nazis on the streets of Sweden
We do not believe in you!


*non-chalate: I’ve made a verb out of the word nonchalant because such was needed and could not be found in the dictionary.


 Police defend decision to let neo-Nazis march through Gothenburg

 https://www.thelocal.se/userdata/images/article/se/37606.jpg

 Related image

3 comments:

  1. Nazism in Sweden has been fragmented and unable to form a mass movement since its beginning in the early 1920s, though several hundred parties, groups, and associations have existed. The high point was in the municipal elections of 1934 when they won over 100 electoral contests. Veterinarian Birger Furugård and his brothers Gunnar and Sigurd founded the Svenska Nationalsocialistiska Frihetsförbundet (Swedish National Socialist Freedom League), the country’s first Nazi party, in 1924, which renamed itself the Svenska Nationalsocialistiska Bonde- och Arbetarpartiet ( Swedish National Socialist Peasants and Workers Party) in 1925. Meanwhile, Sven-Olov Knutsson Lindholm and Konrad Hallgren, former German officers, formed the Sveriges Fascistiska Kamporganisation (Swedish Fascist Cause Organization), abandoned the ideals of Italian fascism in favor of German national Socialism in 1929, and formed the Sveriges Nationalsocialistiska Folkparti (National Socialist People's Party of Sweden). After Hallgren’s ouster the two groups merged in 1930 as the Nysvenska folkförbundet (New Swedish People's League) with Furugård as the party’s riksledare; then the group again changed its name to the Svenska nationalsocialistiska partiet (Swedish National Socialist Party). They held their first public meeting in 1932 in Stockholm, with 6,000 people in attendance. In 1933 Lindholm, the second-in-command, formed the Sven-Olov Lindholm formed the Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarpartiet (National Socialist Workers Party), which adopted the swastika symbol, and Lindholm rapidly superseded Furugård as the nation’s most prominent Nazi leader. In 1934 the rightwing Allmänna valmansförbundet (General Electoral League) expelled its youth organization, the Sveriges nationella ungdomsförbund (National Youth League of Sweden) due to its pro-Nazi stance; it reformed as the National League of Sweden (Sveriges Nationella Ungdomsförbundet och Förbund); Per Engdahl split the group in 1941, forming first the Svensk Opposition group, which then became the Nysvenska Rörelsen (New Swedish Movement). Furugård disbanded his party in 1936 after a poor showing in the national elections earlier that year, and Lindholm again reorganized his party as the Svensk Socialistisk Samling (Swedish Socialist Union) in 1938. The government officially banned the Nazi parties in 1950, though Engdahl organized the European Social Movement, an international neo-nazi alliance, in Malmö in 195M; its more radical members formed the rival New European Order the same year; by 1957 both groups had become mainly moribund, though their members formed the National Party of Europe in the 1960s. In Sweden, Lindholm’s former wife Vera Oredsson and her new husband Göran Assar Oredsson formed the Nordiska rikspartiet (Nordic Reich Party) in 1956, which survived until 2009. Klas Lund founded the Vitt Ariskt Motstånd (White Aryan Resistance) in 1991, modeled after the former American white supremacist group The Order; after it dissolved in 1993 Lund formed the Svenska motståndsrörelsen (Swedish Resistance Movement)in 1997, which expanded throughout Scandinavia in 2016 as the Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen (Nordic Resistance Movement). In the 1990s new groups, including the Riksfronten and the Nationalsocialistisk front, emerged; the NSF (founded in 1994) declared itself a political party on Adolf Hitler’s 110th birthday, 20 April 1999, and became the largest Neo-Nazi Party in Sweden until its dissolution in 2008, but its leaders formed the Folkfronten (People’s Front) at the same time, which then became the Svenskarnas parti (Party of the Swedes) in 2009. It became, in 2010, the first Nazi party to win a seat in the Swedish assembly since the end of World War II, but soon lost it due to the ineligibilty of its holder. In 2014 it only got 4,189 votes (0.07%) and disbanded seven months later.

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  2. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is Judaism holiest day, marking the date on which Moses received the second set of Ten Commandments, following the completion of the second 40 days of instructions from God; at that time the Jews were granted atonement for the sin of worshipping a golden calf, an idol Moses’ brother Aaron made while Moses was on Mt. Sinai for those 40 days. God told Moses that he was going to destroy them and start a new race sired by Moses, but Moses dissuaded him from doing so; God "repented of the evil which He said He would do unto His people (Exodus 32: 14). It completes the Yamim Nora'im ("Days of Awe"), the period known as the High Holy Days which begin 10 days earlier on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Rosh Hashanah is held on the traditional anniversary of the creation of the first people, Adam and Eve. On that day God inscribes everyone’s fate in the “Sefer HaChaim” (the Book of Life) and then seals the verdict on Yom Kippur, giving them an opportunity to seek forgiveness for any wrongs done against God or other humans. During Yom Kippur’s five prayer services (ordinary days have only three) public and private petitions and confessions of guilt are made. Five prohibitions are observed: No eating and drinking, no wearing of leather shoes, no bathing or washing, no anointing oneself with perfumes or lotions, and no marital relations. Until the year 70, when the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, on Yom Kippur the kohen gadol (high priest) entered the Qoḏes HaQodasim, the Holy of Holies in the inner sanctuary where God dwelt and which contained the Ark which held the Ten Commandments, the only day of the year that anyone went inside; there, he performed a complex set of special services and sacrifices to obtain atonement for all the Jews and the world itself.

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  3. The famous Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein once claimed, “I hate Wagner, but I hate him on my knees.’ Even though the composer died a half-century before the rise of the fueher, Adolf Hitler was a life-long admirer of Richard Wagner's music and thought his operas embodied his own vision of the German nation; in a 1922 speech he claimed that Wagner's works glorified "the heroic Teutonic nature .... Greatness lies in the heroic." From 1923 onwards he visited the Bayreuther Festspiele, a music festival held annually in Bayreuth to showcase the composer’s music in a specially designed theater, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the design and construction of which Wagner personally supervised in order to accommodate the huge orchestras for which Wagner wrote as well as his views about the staging of his works. After Wagner’s death the event was directed by his widow Cosima, his son Siegfried, the latter's widow Winifred Wagner (who became a close friend of Hitler and a member the chief Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, which actively suppressed modernist music and works by "degenerate" artists.), their two sons Wieland and Wolfgang, and the composer's great-granddaughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner. One of the intellectual lynchpins of National Socialism was “Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts” (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) written by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Wagner's son-in-law). In 1850, as a young, failed composer Wagner wrote “Das Judentum in der Musik” (Judaism in Music), in which he blamed Jews for much of what he thought was going wrong with art and society; a particular target was composer Felix Mendelssohn, who demonstrated that “a Jew can have the richest abundance of talents and be a man of the broadest culture, but still be incapable of supplying the profound, heart-seizing, soul-searching experience we expect from art;" he also decried the "harmful influence of Jewry on the morality of the nation." He even coined the Nazi terms “"Jewish problem" and "final solution." His antisemitism was not a passing, youthful passion; as late as 1881 he informed his patron, Ludwig II of Bavaria: “I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it.” Seven years later, in “Nietzsche contra Wagner,” Friedrich Nietzsche, a former friend and admirer of Wagner who in 1872 effusively praised his work in his first published book, “Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik” (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”) denounced Wagner’s art as diseased, narcotic, morbid, hysterical, and brutal, and accused him of being a master of hypnotic trickery, a neurotic tyrant with an actor’s genius, and an incomparable histrionic personality. Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried insisted that "As a listener, I consider ‘Tristan und Isolde’ a masterpiece of 19th century music, but I am at the same time repelled by Wagner's Weltanschauung. I cannot just sit and enjoy his music. I never put on Wagner's music in my home... Richard Wagner's antisemitic writings will always overshadow my life… I cannot separate the operas from his theoretical work. His writings and his music form a unified whole.... He always considered himself a philosopher first, and a composer only second."

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