How My Grandfather Came to Meet Adolf Hitler in 1942

People get carried away with the great “evil-doers”, don’t they? Assuming they were madness factories, scheming and plotting their way into maximising the misery of the general public. They never think of the time when Stalin was swinging on his chair, acting the typical boy that - deep down, he really was - when he fell over amid the stifled laughs of nearby communists. Or the time Sadam Hussein’s barber accidentally left him with a handlebar mustache, and Sadam, in a fit of rage, chased him around the palace with a scissors. There was a vulnerability to these people - they weren’t all about genocide and striking facial hair you know. And say what you like about the holocaust - but that Hitler fella, I won’t hear a bad word said about him.

I was told a story by my grandfather once, about when he fought in the succession of tragedies now known as the second world war. He was in the Navy, patrolling the English channel. Submarines were stealth sharks, and kept the younger men awake at night with anticipation of a roaring-tear in their vessel’s hull that would let all the dark blue and seaweed and so on into their beds. My grandfather was out on deck with some rope that night. He walked around, his life jacket correcting his crooked posture, whistling an old Glen Miller tune as the strong wind provided a demented accompaniment. He also held a lantern for atmospheric purposes, the fagstain-yellow glow of which illuminated the pools of water on the ship’s deck. Unfortunately a wave suddenly knocked him overboard. He lost his rope.

The ship sailed off without him, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew that there was a “man overboard!” My grandfather didn’t mind so much though, he was tired of the war and all the noise. It was 1942 already. “It was so loud”, my grandfather told me. Anyway, he just floated and bobbed about in the dark blue sea like a cork in a bath. 

He fell asleep for a while, as the cold water and the passing of time made him feel tired. “It was boring, just floating about, nothing to do, you know”, my grandfather told me. He started to name the stars and do all the other romantic things people imagine soldiers might have done as they laid awake under the nightsky, stifling their dread. But it was all too dull, so he went asleep. After some time, he awoke to a wild red sunrise, and the sound of seagulls bickering over a lettuce led astray by the sea’s current. “I must be near France, I thought”, he told me. A couple of hours later he walked out of the sea onto the beautiful sandy beach with beautiful french wartime women splashing nude in the shallow waters, then he was captured by some Nazis. 

My grandfather wasn’t frightened at all, he told me. He was just happy to have something to look at. And boy, were these Nazis something to look at! “I’d never seen men built like them before! They looked like they were made out of scrapyard cubes, with lips like broken fenders, eyes like smashed ovens, and lots of rusty pipes all over them!” The Nazis treated him reasonably, and they told him that the Fuhrer wanted to have a word with him. “Beats the idleness of the sea”, said my grandfather.

After a long time of traveling in a black car with a swastika on it, my grandfather finally arrived at his destination. A nondescript place, so I won’t try.

Hitler took him inside to a mahogany room with a big fire and asked him if he’d like anything to drink. There were loads of other Nazis there, sitting around in their uniforms. But Hitler wore his pajamas. He said he had the best English supermarket blends of tea, he was quite a fan of the English breakfast if he could be so bold to admit. My grandfather was very taken with the Fuhrer, he spoke English very well, like an Earl or a Gentleman. He made a few funny gags too, and an impression of Winston Churchill that brought the house down. He gave my grandfather his dictating hat, and my grandfather did a cartoon-goosestep march, and Hitler laughed, and so did all the other Nazis in the room. Then my grandfather gave Hitler the life jacket he was still wearing from being overboard, and Hitler got in his big bath and lay there with his eyes closed, floating. He stayed like that for what seemed like a very long time, and everybody waited patiently. When he opened them again, there was a tear rolling down his cheek. 

Eventually the tea arrived and everybody sipped and chuckled and talked in groups. As my grandfather was the guest of honor, everybody wanted a word with him, asking him about the Earl of Sandwich, and English women, and the rules of cricket. My grandfather had a great time. 

When all the tea was gone, Hitler ordered some fine beer, and the joking and revelry went long into the night. Hitler played a lot of Wagner, and when my grandfather mocked the great composer for being overly dramatic Hitler raised his voice, but then remembered that other people are entitled to their opinions too, and apologised. 

The next day, Hitler presented my grandfather with a new life jacket as a gift: “Take this. I sent for a brand new English navy life jacket last night when you were asleep. It was very difficult to get at such short notice, so I hope you appreciate the gesture”. My grandfather thanked him gratefully. Hitler said that a car would deliver my grandfather to a french resistance stronghold in Normandy, France, and that they could organise him to be brought back to Great Britain. Hitler shook his hand and said: “I always wanted to meet a live Englishman in the flesh, and the experience did not disappoint.” My grandfather bowed as he got into the black car with the swastika on it, and Hitler chuckled to himself. 

“A nice man - but for all his laughter, I thought deep down he was terribly sad”, my grandfather told me.

The Hammer and Sickle Theory

Sometimes flags and symbols are ironic. However, none is more ironic than a Soviet Flag. Look at it. A tiny hammer and sickle on a vast scarlet field. What thoughts come into your mind?

After hearing about Stalin’s purges and Gulag's, all you can think of now is a huge pool of blood from millions of poor peasants, with their hammers and sickles dropping from their hands and floating around in this pool of blood. However, when the Soviets were designing this flag, they were thinking of quite the opposite. This is the story of how their lack of foresight has brought the Soviet Union down, through their flag alone.

Kasimir Malevich, the well known minimalist, was on the committee panel of the Soviet Flag design team. He is well known for works that portray things in the most faceless way and shun any will to be unique, such as the painting below:

No wonder he was so well accepted by the rulers of a nation that promoted facelessness and suppressed any individualism. He is also well known for his work, “The Black Square”. It’s just a black square on a white background. The French and German art critics went crazy about that work in their quest to find the most brutally outrageous work of art. They wanted something more outrageous than a “sculpture” of a urinal, and what could be more shocking than a black square?

So what was the committee thinking? They were trying to create a flag that captures the spirit of the Soviet Union, and in the most brutally minimal way. By using the successful philosophy of the Black Square for the flag, they thought they could create a flag that could boast to the world how forward-looking, efficient, hard working and modern the Soviet Union was, while pleasing radical European art critics at the same time. They got the efficiency and the hard work bit correct, but that was about  it. While being so idealistically excited about the great Soviet Nation, they forgot about the practical reality of the future. They didn’t know that in 1980’s, in the age of computers, waving a flag that showed such stone-age tools as hammer and sickle would make your nation look a bit backward.

Since the Soviet symbol was the Hammer and Sickle, the soviet union really was all about the hammer and sickle. It was all about the process of using the tools, but not the end result of their use. The flag clearly showed this. Stalin started to force millions of his people to work in distant lands with hammers and sickles, this carried on for years. Each new leader forced the new generation to obey his latest order, to the tune of the same Soviet anthem and the crimson colour of the Soviet flag.

 

 If the USSR had any aim, their flag wouldn’t look like this. For example, take the NASA flag. 

Sure, billions of dollars were blown on failed projects, and two shuttle disasters have happened. But the flag still showed that the aim of NASA was to explore space and beyond. And they did. Bear in mind that no single tool was shown anywhere on the NASA logo.

On the other hand, what could one say about the aim of Soviet Union, by looking at this flag? 

Nothing, because if you see the tools and nobody gives you the point for their use, you either look for something to make or you wait what the tool owner tells you to do with them. In the case of Soviet Union, you had to wait for whatever your leader wanted you to do. The Soviet Union was a dictator/control freak’s paradise. In the army, for example, there was a widespread practice of digging  trenches that would serve no purpose at all. These trenches are still scattered randomly over the former Soviet Union. They are scattered so aimlessly that they don’t even spell out a swear word, when you look at them from space. This is what these trenches failed to deliver:

It just shows you how the Soviet institutions were about control and the process of doing anything to obey the leader’s duties. There’s no aim to these trenches, but there were a lot of hammers, shovels and picks used.

A classic example of how aimless and control-craving the Soviet Flag became is shown through a legend of the Worker and the Farm Woman.

When times were hard, and the evil imperialist rulers completely ignored the ordinary people, the Worker and the Farm woman looked into the distance. They united their tools of hammer and sickle, hoping that anything or anyone from the sky above would notice their trouble and either save them or rule them. However, by performing such a dramatic gesture, they clearly weren’t thinking about the long-term business plan of their farming duties and the potential profitability of using a hammer for making stuff. When you’re enterprising, you don’t play out dramatic gestures to attract help or investment. You attract an  investor by using previous reports and books. Just by looking at this worker and peasant woman, you could tell that they looked a bit blank and lacked some entrepreneurial bravery. It’s a well known fact that any prospective entrepreneur would look at things with a scowl like this, and wouldn't engage in symbolic dramatics:

The level of blankness in the couple’s look and the eagerness to wait for orders from the higher power come close to that of a well known intergalactic army:

These are the ideal Soviet citizens, but Soviet artists weren’t excited enough about the facelessness of Soviet regime to think of something like this. So, the result was an only slightly blank gaze of the worker and the peasant woman. They were clearly waiting for someone, someone that could lead them.

In the end, their dreams came true. A bunch of short and bearded men, fresh from European prisons after raising hell over there with their control-freak ideologies, told this poor couple that their hammers and sickles could also help to save thousands of other people like them. 

How could the couple say no to that, when the previous regime had neglected them completely? The bearded men didn’t mention  such terms and conditions as how seriously should they take their orders, but that didn’t matter. Those men were criminals who have honed the fine art of idea selling, so terms and conditions and other ethical stuff wasn’t on their list of priorities.

Fast forward to 1990, when technology and ideas changed, and the USSR’s old  enemy, the USA, had a more timeless flag:

If those old communists were to pitch the idea of the USSR to an investor by using the Soviet flag, they couldn’t  say much. In the age of computers and space shuttles, the hammer and sickle as a nation-building tool was well out of date.  Even such a great leader as Michael Gorbachev had given up continuing the great Soviet nation, after he realised this. As an experiment, try to act as if you’re going to be starting a new country and convince any modern age politician with this sales pitch: "here's my plan for a successful nation,  and here's my logo, which contains a hammer and sickle on a red background, to show how hard working and land-loving my nation is.  This hard work will be done to my orders every five years, when I will finalise my five year plans. Now give me a  couple of billion dollars so I can force people to use those tools!” Of course, the politician would ask, why should the people work hard with hammers and sickles, when there are robots to build stuff and combine harvesters to plough the vast fields of wheat? Even as early as 1990, you had robots to make stuff. So the hammer and sickle as nation building tools were well out of date even 21 years ago. The Soviet Union’s flag needed an idealistic upgrade, but Malevich and the gang couldn’t think about this back in the 1918.   No wonder the Western world found the concept of the USSR out of date back in the 1990!

And for this reason, no wonder the USSR collapsed, when the hammer and sickle became a symbol of backwardness.

Wheelchair Boy Witnesses the Tyranny of the 21st Century

A young man can be seen in this footage paying to be thrown out of his wheelchair and beaten. If these men were not paid to do this, they would be in prison by now. Who pays them, we do! They get paid from our taxes. What do we get...? The archetypal bully who threatens you for your pocket money, claiming they will save you from blows and bruises and then once the money is handed over they will beat you to a pulp. Then if you talk back about your rights, they in fact threaten you further for even daring to accuse the bullies and their tyrannical authority.

So the message is kids, once you put on the blue uniform can you do what the fuck you want? You don’t have to have any cognitive skills or ethical training to be a Cop, no no, none of that, just the art of thuggery. Being a policeman has the same appeal to child molesters and malevolent men as it was to be a priest back in the heyday of Catholic oppressed Ireland; raping young boys, good wage, authority beyond question...? Ring any bells?

What was this young man in a wheel chair doing? Fighting for his rights in education and equality.  So this raises the question, are our supposedly progressive European regimes and democracies any different that Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia? A scientist from the depths of a laboratory in the alps bordering Switzerland has done experiments using computer date extracted from biographies, interviews and profiles of such political leaders as  David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Pope Benedict XVI. In his research he found these leaders to be worse than either Hitler or Stalin, ‘if they have any more power, god help us all’, concluded the report. The only leader who came out with any credibility was Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was compared with that of the personality of a well fed bear from Hamleys toy store with plenty of young girls to cuddle him.

I proclaim we reanimate Che Guevara from the passive sewn seams of t-shirt merchandise and symbolically behead these leaders in a tribute to the French Revolution. We use this anachronistic act to show history can be used to empower and not just oppress people. It can be done, if everyone fights the tyranny, if everyone uses history not to make the same mistakes as NAZI Germany and go along with the oppressive government (whom nobody wanted there in the first place) and not to hide their support for students (i.e. your children, sisters, brothers and friends) like those who turned a blind eye to the massacre and genocide of Jews, you are just as bad as them, massacring their education, changing their lives by depriving them of the education that would give them agency, instead you pay the police to systematically beat up a young man in wheelchair, nice, go you! NO not go you! Now stop the tyranny before Auschwitz 2: Return of Ignorance arrives!