大象传媒

But this picture is suitable, I think, to discuss a delicate subject.
It's early summer 1964, on the day of my Sacrament of the First Holy Communion. Important Roman Catholic time honoured custom. I'm holding my presents ; a German-fabricated locomotive and 'The shooting Star' by Herg茅. You heard his name before in my entries. On the cover of this album you can see Tintin and Snowy looking at a gigantic fast-growing mushroom that is going to explode.
This cartoon was made during the war and published in a Belgian newspaper between the end of October 1941 and the end of May 1942.
Are you familiar with Stevensons book :
'A man called Intrepid '?
In this book you'll find the story of the British
ww2 masterspy called Intrepid.
14 April 1941 Intrepid warned the American and British authorities that Standard Oil was trying to make the war profitable from both sides tankers steaming between the Gulf of Mexico and Tenerife to supplying the Spanish refineries with oil apparently but in fact supplying the enemy ships at sea.
Herg茅 used this news in his creation but the company has a different name : "Golden Oil'.
[Also his version of the story is a bit different. The Golden Oil Company is not willing to deliver fuel for Tintin's ship. they say 'We are out of oil!' But strange enough another vessel is bunkering. The Captain 'Chester' of this ship happens to be a former comrade of Captain Haddock, Tintin's sailor-friend . Chester helps the Captain and Tintin's party to get fuel by siphoning over the bunkered oil into the tanks of the 'Aurora'!]
Inteprid also had a book printed in Camp X ,Canada BSC(British Secret Service-bureau) smuggling the book into the U.S. that 'disclosed'the secret cooperation between I.G. Farben (a German Company that was into chemistry and nuclear power) and Standard Oil.
The Tintin-story in fact shows us a competition between a European favoured party and an American party to conquer a meteorite that crashed upon earth in the Northern-icesea. Of course the Europeans win by making use of an shipbased Arado-seaplane.
The meteorite however is sinking and huge mushrooms grow and explode into the air. You don't need very much imagination to think this cartoon may be has to do with the competition on the development of the nuclear-weapon.

There is one other aspect of the war that I didn't discuss yet. It is an important but very delicate subject to discuss and also difficult for me to understand. I will try to keep the discussion in its proper dimensions. I think that it is hardly possible to have a man like Adolf Hitler, chosen in a democracy: the Republic of Weimar, come into power if there is not wide-spread anti-Semitism in the Western world.(please let me finish my plea !) Even a man like Max Heindel, founder of the Rosicrucian Fellowship discusses radical solutions in his 'Cosmology'(Dutch edition ; chapter 13, published 1924 ) to solve 'The Jewish Problem'.
In his 1935 essay about Hitler, Churchill had been eloquent on the question."The Jews, supposed to have contributed, by a disloyal and pacifist influence, to the collapse of Germany at the end of the Great War, were also deemed to be the main prop of communism and the authors of defeatist doctrines in every form," (Franklin&Winston,Jon Meacham)
Hitlers words in the Reichstag , 30 January -Roosevelt's birthday- 1939,are for many historians proof that Hitler predicted what he was about to do in a few years time and kept his word : exterminate the Jewish Race in Europe. In my opinion it is a bit easy-going to think like this. Hitler thought of himself as a prophet, a man with a vision or perhaps a messiah. In our opinion he had very strange evil and agressive idea's but apparently people failed to see the true danger in this man. Men like Rudolf Steiner,or the Theosofists e.g. predicted earlier in the 20th century that 'Christ' would become visible in the ethereal-world. 'The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century, An Imagination' , Jesajah Ben Aharon, 1993).
"Roosevelt was often seen as pro-Jewish ( The 'Jew-Deal' was among the slurs his anti-Semitic foes used against him) in an era in which many Americans considered Jews suspect. Immigration quotas and anti-Semitism were political realities in both nations before and during the war, and although Roosevelt and Churchill were the most courageous of politicians, they were still politicians......It is clear that Roosevelt and Churchill could have paid more attention to the question during the war and tried to take more action to move Jews out of harm's way, both by attempting to open their nations'doors wider to fleeing Jews and by more agressive encouraging neutral countries to do the same. There were such efforts before 1944, but not many...Retribution, not rescue was a central feature in Churchill's and Roosevelt's remarks on the Final Solution... 'They both wanted to concentrate on winning the war as quickly as possible. The threat of postwar retribution was the only diversion they would consider.'"(Franklin&Winston, Jon Meacham)
The fact that my uncle thought that he was safe in the hands of the German occupier may have had to do with the fact that he didn't know that there was a decree published : Death-penalty on robbery of rationing-coupons and ID's( I mentioned this already), maybe also because because he was from a family with military roots.
When you read Herman Giskes' ABWEHR III F, German counter-intelligence in the Netherlands, (1949),the first few pages, you will understand that before and during the war there was a heavy competition between the military (intelligence) and the 'Nazi-Party'(Reichs-Sicherheits-Hauptamt; RSHA)RSHA winns in the end, and I think inside this political instrument competition was even worse. E.g. Kammler and Veesenmayer become visibly into executive power in the military and economics during the war.
Admiral Canaris and Georg Elser to be shot 9th april 1945. (The Secret front, inside story of nazi political espionage, Wilhelm Hoettl). Georg Elser had been accused of planning the Buergerbraukeller attack on Hitler in Munich early November 1939. He was kept in prison in the same block in Oranienburg as the British captain S. Payne Best and accused of planning the attack on Hitler on British Secret Service instructions and he was to be trialed by the Nazi's after they won the war.
My uncle probably unaware of all this, had learned from childhood on to trust solid military structures.
The picture:
The cartoon has a little secret in it. 'The Shooting Star' was first published in 1943, but with a few strips left out of the album-version. (all Tintin-albums last 62 pages)One of the 'left-outs'
can be localised in the beginning of the album : the prophet 'Philippulus' crying out that the end of the world is near at hand and two very ugly-looking people say to each other in a kind of 'slang-French-language' that they are lucky that they won't have to pay back the borrowed money when the end is so close (the slip is in a book called 'Essay RG' ,H. van Opstal) It is anti-Semitism , I agree, and it was in the 'Soir' when in Belgium Jewish people could be called up to be send to Germany to work in the war-industry. Six days after the story was finished the '' Yellow-star'was introduced in Belgium. You will probably better understand the violent European antisemitism of Hitler and his partei when you read (a few pages will do) of the work of the very antisemitical author Theodor Fritsch, he died in 1933. There is a French pre-war author who describes the life of the young people of the pre-war period ; how they lived, their idea's, e.g. He was shot after the war for his very bad political behavior. He romantises fascism in his book and his name was Robert Brasillach; 'Notre avant-guerre'is the title of his book. You read Brasillach and you will understand more of Herg茅's world and the world of my uncle. But I don't really think that both of them romantised fascism. Herg茅 used to defend himself after the war by saying that it was 'in fashion' to mock at the Jew.
I remember that I read , although I can't remember exactly where , that someone asked Luther what he would do if the end of the world was near. He answered that he would plant a fruit-tree.
I imagine; Luther putting so much trust in God that he aready planted the tree for the new Garden of Eden to come. A second chance for Adam and Eve in a new world !
Maybe Adolf Hitler and his Partei thought of their New-Order to be perfect christian and a 'Valhalla' that would last more than a thousand years if they succeeded in simply exterminating 'the snake' out of it. And of course the 'International Jewish conspiracy' was the snake that they were looking for. But also on the 1st. of September 1939 they start secretly experimenting in Poland on solving the 'problem' of the mentally retarded people who need nursing and cost money and this is very non-competitive and inefficient when you are getting involved in a total war. The second world war is the first 'total war' in history . It means that no longer only soldiers are fighting the war but that the whole nation is participating in the war. The end of the First World War (1914-1918)when the German Zeppelins were dropping bombs on civilian targets this new kind of war came into picture. Long before the large scale bombings of the Second World War had been developed, in India the British used this method on a very small scale to help them get 'unfriendly tribes' under control. The theories of the Italian Douhet(Ill Dominio dell'Aria), British Trenchard and the American Mitchell(global air-supremacy) were based on the idea : 'The bomber will always get through'.And will deter.
(in the pre-ballistic missile period that probably ended when A4/V2 was launched in combat-conditions in September 1944)I'm not a historian. But I do sell dairy-products at the market-place!

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