In case you missed it the other day, Reason maggie on the latest assault on Internet free speech, titled with  brilliant irony, “First They Came For Hitler …” in which YouTube caves in to pressure from a German film company to take down the many scathing “Hitler Bunker” parodies.

If you’re unfamiliar with these parodies, first, welcome back from the Russian front. Der Untergang (known to Americans — and in fact widely known to Americans, solely thanks to the parodies — as Downfall), features a scene in which a bunker-trapped Hitler harangues his inner circle (in German) as the Russians close in on Berlin. A few years ago, some inspired genius put on new subtitles in which the Führer ranted about getting banned from Xbox Live rather than about the 11th-hour desertion of his generals. Because Hitler has been bringing the laughs at least since the Beer Hall Putsch, the result was pretty funny, and it spawned a vast genre in which, simply through subtitle changes, Hitler rants about Jay’s replacing Conan, Hitler can’t get Miley Cyrus tickets, Hitler’s pissed off about getting bad seats for a Bruce Springsteen concert, etc.

This situation appears to be moving faster than the Red Army. Softpedia with updates here and here. 

TVWeek, meanwhile, has instructions on how you can fight a rearguard action in defense of the Hitler parodies.

At last check ”Hitler rants about the Hitler parodies” and a lot of others are still up: 

In this one, Hitler phones an Indian call center with a PC problem:

Someone stole the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign off the gate at Auschwitz. Guardian. A weird and disturbing crime, as the defacement of a historical site that also serves as a memorial to the murder of millions of people.

Norm Geras discusses the view that this is an act of Holocaust deniers seeking to remove the evidence. If that’s the case, it makes it a fascinating historical event in its own right. But if so, as Geras notes, it is a pathetic act, as the sign, or even Auschwitz itself or the ongoing living testimony of survivors are no more necessary to prove the Holocaust happened than history requires artifacts and survivors to document the Black Plague. What is more disturbing than the actual act of defacement if that’s the case is the existence of people who not only deny history but think they can rewrite it through acts of vandalism. Geras also notes the danger of buying into the view that destruction of artifacts equals destruction of history.

But I’m not convinced that is necessarily what happened here. Could be deniers. Conversely, it could be neo-nazi enthusiasts who want it for their clubhouse. Could be someone who wants to sell it to a World War II memorabilia collector. Or, it could be scrap metal mongers. Turns out the thing is made of bronze. In the past couple of weeks, someone pried off a 100-year-old commemorative plaque at Lexington’s Battle Green, as well as a couple of plaques with the names of World War II and Vietnam war dead in Attleboro, Mass. Scrap metal thieves suspected. If it can be melted down, they don’t really care what it is.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I have some familiarity with the alleged misappropriation of artifacts associated with murderous regimes, having made headlines and having been widely denounced as a looter and international art thief in 2003 after I was stopped by U.S. Customs in possession of a painting of Saddam Hussein, liberated from what later became the Green Zone in the immediate aftermath of combat operations. U.S. Customs seized it, had it assessed at $800, and determined that it therefore exceeded the $400 value I was legally allowed to steal from Saddam Hussein. Hey, I don’t write these laws. I’m just subject to them. U.S. Customs reportedly intended to return said painting to the grateful Iraqi people. Unclear whether that ever happened, but I’d love to hear about it if anyone witnessed that profound and deeply meaningful event, as all this occured at a time when the Iraqi people were happily tap dancing on Saddam’s face, American soldiers were routinely pulling down his statue with armored vehicles and peppering his image with high-explosive rounds, and the remaining Saddam fans were actively trying to kill American soldiers. U.S. Customs did allow me to retain a hefty brass profile of Saddam, about the size of the head on a men’s room door, liberated from the wreckage of a palace that had been turned inside out by a cruise missile. Saddam’s head now rests on a shelf in a decorative Arab enamel box full of spent bullets, which could be scooped up by the handful at the intersection of Haifa and Jaffa Streets by the Jumhuriya Bridge after one particularly warm spring morning there.)

But the Norwegian Nobel Committee theoretically should be aware that peace and freedom do not grow on trees.

President Obama celebrates the 70th anniversary of the fruition of the famous non-aggression pact … the Sept. 17, 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland* … with a big present for Stalin wannabe Vladimir Putin. He scraps Euro missile shield! Reuters: 

PRAGUE/WARSAW (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama has told east European states he is backing away from plans for an anti-missile shield there, in a move that may ease Russian-U.S. ties but fuel fears of resurgent Kremlin influence.

Russia said it would welcome abandonment of the plans, which have been a major source of Russian-U.S. tensions.

Tensions gone!

The shield, involving interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar complex in the Czech republic, was promoted by Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush to defend against any missile launches from “rogue” states such as Iran and North Korea.

…

The Wall Street Journal newspaper said Washington had decided Iran was not as advanced in developing long range missiles as it had previously thought.

The Obama administration seeks to “reset” battered ties with Russia so that the two former Cold War foes can cooperate on Iran, on fighting Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and on reducing their vast arsenals of nuclear weapons.

Russia is allowing the United States to move trains carrying supplies for U.S. forces across the country via Central Asia to Afghanistan, avoiding routes through Pakistan that had come under frequent attack from the Taliban.

Washington also wants Russian support in economic sanctions against Tehran, which it accuses of developing nuclear weapons.

Diplomats in Moscow say Russian hardliners could read the shield backdown as a sign of U.S. weakness. Far from doing the bidding of the United States, they may instead press for further gains to shore up Russian power in the former Soviet bloc.

No kidding. Hey, remember what a belly laugh the Russkies got out of leaking Neville’s … I mean Barack’s double secret letter proposing the appeasement for cooperation vs evil swap?

“This would be very bad,” said Witold Waszczykowski, deputy head of Poland’s National Security Bureau which advises President Lech Kaczynski. “Without the shield we would de facto be losing a strategic alliance with Washington.”

Ignoring U.S. assurances that the system was not targeted at Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev threatened last year to station missiles in a Russian enclave near Poland if the United States implemented the plan.

For Poland, the timing of the announcement is particularly sensitive. Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland following a pact between Moscow and Nazi Germany, an event seen by Poles as “a stab in the back.”

“I hope this is just a coincidence,” said Waszczykowski.

Actually, it probably is. The Obama administration doesn’t study history. It reimagines it. If there is any purposefulness to this date, then its because the Ivans proposed it: “Hey there, my yankee imperialist capitalist lackey fellow traveling tovarich. OK, we’ll make this deal. One thing, could you announce it on Sept. 17? Works better for us. (Muffled giggle).”

Have to say, I like the part about Eastern European leaders getting their phone calls after midnight. Kind of mean phone pranky way of telling your pals it’s over. “Hi, Czech Republic? Poland? You awake? You might want to check something. Is your refrigerator running? Ha ha ha!”

But more likely the O crowd hoped they could just leave a message.

Memorandum‘s got your big news and commentary roundup. With a nod on links and art on this matter to Closing Velocity, including this from WSJ: 

Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he expected the Obama administration to drop the missile-defense plans. He said that Moscow wouldn’t view the move as a concession but rather a reversal of a mistaken Bush-era policy.

Well, of course. Giving them everything they want, in exchange for nothing, is just the beginning.

Congratulations, Ivan! Happy Molotov-Ribbentrop Day. (And a big posthumous congrats to Ted Kennedy, Surber adds. Malkin, reassuringly, don’t worry, be happy. HotAir, even more reassuringly, with Biden: Iran not a threat.)

This is a much better deal for the neo-Stalinists than the Molo-’Trop was. Cutting deals with Hitler was a predictably dodgy game, destined to end badly … as any fool could see given what Hitler was doing with the Munich Agreement. So the Obama-Putin Iranian Nuclear Disarmament/Eastern European Betrayal Pact is more like if Stalin had cut a deal with Chamberlain on, say, Sept. 2, 1939, to help contain Hitler. Or maybe like Hitler cutting a deal with Chamberlain to keep Mussolini in line. 

* The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed Aug. 24 and ironically titled the “Treaty of Non-Aggression” … Nazi-Soviet humor … divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. Hitler’s forces invaded Poland Sept. 1, 1939. Stalin’s forces invaded Sept. 17. This turned out to be a stupid move on both parts, as the Germans followed on with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, before Stalin had a chance to invade them. Tens of millions of Russians, Germans and other Eastern Europeans were dead, including almost all the Jews, and vast swathes of both countries … plus everything that lay in between … were laid waste before it was all over six years later.

Anyone reading this with any White House contacts, please tell Obama to google it. “World War II.” It was a really big deal. Here’s some quick reading, if your guy needs to bone up on the subject:

POLAND BETRAYED: The Nazi-Soviet Invasions of 1939 David Williamson

Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe Robert Gellately

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany William Shirer

Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War Chris Bellamy

Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899-1940 Robert Citino

Story of a Secret State Jan Karski

The Second World War Winston Churchill

The Second World War John Keegan

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Yeah, well, it sounds bad when you put it that way.

I’m sure Garlasco had an appropriately awed sense of horror, as he suggests himself, along with the fascination for military history. Nothing wrong with collecting evil regime stuff. Like a lot of press types who find themselves wandering around war zones, I’ve got a couple of shelves full of it. Milosevic’s Serbs and Saddam’s Baathists, mainly. Picked up in the course of business, the cost of which is only that one might get one’s legs or head blown off in the process. No online handle or swap-meet attendance required. I don’t have any Nazi stuff, but then again, I never got to wander around the wreckage of the Nazi regime. Too bad. A flattened, cowed Germany frantically ridding itself of Nazi paraphernalia and trying to pretend like it was all someone else’s idea would have been a sight to behold. 

(You could say that the remade Germany, including the post-war pacifism of Garlasco’s Luftwaffe grandad who inspired the Nazibilia collecting, is the greatest military history artifact of them all. It demonstrates what a dramatic effect carpet-bombing and the onslaught of several million Russians, Americans, Brits, etc., can have on one of the world’s worst repeat offenders. Especially the Russian onslaught part. Talk about fighting fire with fire. That really gave the Germans religion, helped them figure out who the good guys are. They haven’t misbehaved since. If anything, they’ve become useless. Memo to Germany: The war’s over. A little more heavy lifting, please. No one’s going to hold it against you. Except maybe Human Rights Watch.) 

As for Garlasco, he explains in a bit of a Huff that he is not a Nazi, if regretfully inspired to exuberance by his hobby. Though by Human Rights Watch standards, as a reformed Pentagon intelligence analyst involved in targeting Saddam Hussein for the hated Bush-Cheneyites, he might as well be. In fact, you could say Garlasco is a military artifact of a hated regime himself.

(Not to overanalyze this, but Flak88′s grandad would have been firing his 88 at Flak88′s great-uncle up in the B-17, prior to being provided with religion compliments of said B-17. Now Flak88′s aimed his own guns at the people he used to gun for, while getting gushy about the fashion sense of the crowd who so sorely abused grandad and great-uncle. The levels of self-loathing complexity start to hit critical max.)  

Garlasco’s problem isn’t so much the WWII fascination. It’s that he and his organization are major Israel and America bashers, with a long history of having a hard time figuring out who the good guys are, complicated by some difficulties getting the facts straight. The greater Judeosphere, which has long had issues with Human Rights Watch’s view of IDF operations, is not pleased with Garlasco’s hobby. And they are taking issue with the accusation that Garlasco’s Nazibilia pantsing is an insidious Israeli plot. Memo to Garlasco’s pals: Blaming an international Jewish conspiracy for your problems never really works in the long run. Sheesh, every student of military history knows that. Just ask the Germans.

Surber gives props to the lefty UK Guardian for having principles, and includes the HRW associate director’s letter with the latter-day blood libel.

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Tarantino and Pitt, both great, weird talents, in what sounds like a truly weird World War II flick. Title mispelling apparently is an artistic statement. I’ll watch anything with Brad Pitt in it, and anything made by Tarantino. I’m also partial to movies in which Nazis get splattered. And with Tarantino, you know they’re really going to get splattered, and Pitt’s going to have a good time doing it. So I guess I’ll watch this:  

CANNES, France (Reuters) – U.S. director Quentin Tarantino rolls a Western, gangster flick and wartime caper into one in “Inglourious Basterds,” a new film starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a ruthless gang of Nazi-slayers. So fearsome is the band of Jewish-American “bastards” that Adolf Hitler himself comes to hear of them, and the violent and action-packed narrative weaves real life figures into a riotous and fanciful plot that re-writes history.

…

Early reviews have been mixed. 

Hollywood publication Variety’s Todd McCarthy said the movie improved halfway through, “after which it’s off to the races,” but Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called it a “catastrophe” and like “some colossal armor-plated turkey from hell.”

…

The narrative opens in the first year of the German occupation of France, where character Shosanna Dreyfus witnesses the execution of her family at the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, flamboyantly played by Christoph Waltz.

Elsewhere in Europe, Pitt’s character Aldo Raine forms a group of soldiers charged with scalping their Nazi victims.

Diane Kruger plays a famous German actress who is also an undercover agent on a mission to take down the leaders of the Third Reich. The strands converge on a small Parisian cinema where history is turned on its head in an explosive climax.

Much of the humor in Inglourious Basterds stems from language. Americans’ reputations for speaking nothing other than English is a recurring theme, with Pitt’s limited Italian comically exposed by the polyglot Landa.

Reuters leaves out a lot of critical detail, though there’s some fun chatter about Tarantino and Pitt sounding each other out in an extended drinkfest.

 ”I got up the next morning and I saw five empty bottles of wine laying on the floor … and something that resembled a smoking apparatus, I don’t know what that was about,” Pitt said.

“And apparently I agreed to do the movie because six weeks later I was in uniform and I was Lieutenant Aldo Raine.” 

OK, here’s some critical detail from the Times of London, whose reviewer appears to have a greater appreciation for the genre Tarantino just made up:

Tarantino’s film, which jumps like a needle on a scratchy vinyl record between three languages, bears scant resemblance to Castellari’s Italian original. Here, a small group of bloodthirsty Jewish mercenaries from America, led by Brad Pitt’s redneck, half-Apache Indian leader, land in France with the mission to put the fear of God into the Nazis. The director deploys his unrivalled army of B-movie tricks to light the way

The film starts like a spaghetti western and then accelerates into an old-fashioned wartime thriller, complete with a sumptuous plot to blow a local cinema in Paris to smithereens — and with it most of Germany’s top military brass. Bullets and blood are never far from the screen.

The Basterds, as Pitt’s gang refer to themselves, are introduced like vintage bad-ass cowboys despite the alarmingly incongruous Jewish looks. They ambush German patrols in forests, and proceed to scalp them in lurid close-up. Pitt’s leader revels in this comic and macabre campaign, toying with captives before carving swastikas into their foreheads. While German captives gabble for their lives, Pitt’s calm, Southern drawl is almost comically ruthless.

The fairytale tone of Tarantino’s picture is strikingly obvious from the opening line: “Once upon a time . . . in Nazi-occupied France”.

…

On one, thrilling level Tarantino paints a surreal revenge fantasy where some of the most toxic villains in history get their grisly dues. The brief glimpse of Hitler with his bullet-ridden face almost perforated beyond recognition made the Cannes audience gasp. But by measuring his film against that of Goebbels, the director asks whether pulp is any better than propaganda. In this sense it is Tarantino’s most sophisticated film since part one of Kill Bill.

Colossal armor-plated turkey from hell? I dunno, sounds like a romp. Bloody, explosive slash romp. How big a bomb could it possibly be? If it is one sounds like it will be colossal. Bloody colossal.

In tough economic times, some of the cheese-gobbling yodelers see the spike-topped sausage-eaters as competition and wouldn’t mind seeing the Auslanders the heck aus of Switzerland. AP here. SwissInfo here. Caricatures of the loutish, uncouth “ugly German” are circulated on the Internet. Hurtful Swiss newspaper headlines include: “The Germans are coming” and “How many Germans can Switzerland stomach?”

Good question, but I dunno. They took a powder with that neutrality figleaf back in the day, and spent decades getting rich banking for some of the world’s worst dictators while being all high and mighty about how moral they were. 

With a cross-border tussle over tax havens underway, one Swiss lawmaker compared Germany’s Finance Minister to the “generation of Germans who marched through the streets in leather coats, boots and armbands.” Swiss daily Blick gleefully to print the headline “Nazi!” over the Kraut dignitary’s photo. 

And deposited large amounts of Jewish cash in Zurich. If anyone ever deserved a horde of Siegfrieds and Brunhildes …

She’s hot … and stupid! Just the way guys like ‘em. Jessica Alba gets props for going all history on O’Reilly. From those other ignoramuses, MSNBC (UPDATED with important revelation plus more hotness below): 

Jessica Alba is setting the record straight: Sweden was neutral during World War II.

Alba and Fox TV show host Bill O’Reilly traded punches last week after the presidential inauguration. After Alba told a Fox reporter that O’Reilly was “kind of an a-hole;” he retaliated by calling her a “pinhead” for telling a reporter to “be Sweden about it,” assuming she meant Switzerland.

“I want to clear some things up that have been bothering me lately,” Alba blogged on MySpace Celebrity. “Last week, Mr. Bill O’Reilly and some really classy sites (i.e.TMZ) insinuated I was dumb by claiming Sweden was a neutral country. I appreciate the fact that he is a news anchor and that gossip sites are inundated with intelligent reporting, but seriously people… it’s so sad to me that you think the only neutral country during WWII was Switzerland.”

Although Switzerland is more frequently cited as an example of neutrality, Sweden did indeed follow a policy of neutrality during World War II. History point to Alba.

Sure, Sweden was neutral. And Iran, victim of American war crimes, wants nukes for peace. The Taliban, which brought law and order to war-torn Afghanistan, was obliged under the internationally recognized principles of Pashtunwali to harbor Osama bin Laden. Hamas is a government. The Zionists are Nazis, Bush was a lying, chimp-like Hitler knockoff, Iraq was a happy kite-flying nation and Barack Obama, experienced unifier, is ready to govern.

Might want to ask the Norwegians what they think about Swedish neutrality. But let’s have some Swedes tell us about the neutrality they carefully maintained in difficult times as a result of policy decisions to seek a positive trade balance with another northern European nation, rather than engage in non-lucrative, potentially hazardous resistance operations.

The main question for Sweden was how to stay neutral. When Denmark and Norway were occupied by the Germans, many thought that Sweden had no possibility to stay out of the war. A coalition government with all parties represented in the parliament, except for the Communists, was formed.

Sweden was never attacked by Germany. This was probably due to the fact that Germany did not have to. Germany was dependent upon Swedish metal ore from the mines in northern Sweden. Throughout the entire war, the Germans had no trouble in getting this metal ore. Sweden also exported ball bearings to the Germans, vital for their production of tanks and aeroplanes. German troops were transported to Norway and Finland on the Swedish railroad system during the war. After the German set-back at Stalingrad the Swedish policy towards Germany changed. The troop transports, for instance, were stopped. After the war this compliance to the Germans has been discussed and criticised. At the time, however, it was considered necessary in order to avoid confrontation with Germany.

A luxury Norway, Denmark, France, Poland, Belgium, Holland and Czechoslovakia were not afforded. Great Britain, Australia and Canada chose to fight for others, at great cost. So did the United States, after several years of openly providing Britain with vital support in its life-and-death struggle against a vile, murderous dictatorship. (That other vile, murderous dictatorship, Stalin’s Soviet Union, sought to collaborate, signing a secret deal that split Poland and gave the Soviets the Baltics. The deal also provided Nazi Germany with trainloads of Soviet wheat and oil … which the Germans used to fuel Operation Barbarossa. Who says Germans don’t have a sense of humor? Important history lesson there, by the way: When you make a deal with the devil, you might get away with just losing your soul. A deal between two devils? Just ask 30 million-odd dead Germans and Russians what that costs.)

You know, I think Saudi Arabia might fairly be characterized as a stronger ally of Israel than Sweden can be called neutral in World War II.

But what Hollywood needs to know … could make for one of those great, nuanced, dark, conventional wisdom-challenging black & white ethical epics … there is no such thing as neutrality when the fundamental sovereignty of peoples and civilization itself is at stake. Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, doesn’t matter. When the world is on fire, neutrality is the skirt under which selfish, cowardly nations hide.

Wow. Here’s a guy who is theoretically smart enough to know better. It says a lot when esteemed, learned scholars of international relations think a nation that collaborates with one of the most vile war machines of history, supplying vital resources and allowing the passage of troops enroute to murdering Norwegians, can call itself “neutral” and it is so. No wonder so many potentially great nations keep getting away with rank cravenness.

Dan Drezner might be interested to know that until Germany’s fortunes began failing with the reversal in Stalingrad, “Sweden’s hostility towards the acceptance of refugees prevented many Jews from finding safety there.“ It’s not like the United States is exactly blameless on that front. Anyway, no one ever said neutrality is moral. OK, maybe some Swedes and Swiss did, but who cares what those amoral Nazi collaborators think?

The thing about neutrality and other crimes against humanity is, it’s never too late to make good. Sweden is actually trying to do something useful in the world, and has troops that have seen combat in Afghanistan. More, please. Switzerland, though it has made significant strides in trying to avoid being the financial enabler of despots and terrorists everywhere, prefers to let others keep the world safe for business.

OK, all that said, the girl is hot.

Even if she calls a guy an “a-hole” one week and makes snide remarks about who’s “classy” the next. No one expects her to be consistent, or even smart. They just expect her to be hot. 

Wicked hot. Girl should stick to doing what she does best.

Looking hot.

Hold everything … I just realized … Alba could be a satirical genius. By admonishing a reporter to “be Sweden about it,”  the hot actress may be cleverly mocking the poor scribbler, subtlely pointing out that “You know, and I know, and you know that I know, that you’re gonna be about as neutral as … Sweden.” Hot and smart like that … what a package. Anyway, maybe “stupid” is a little harsh, as noted in comments. Maybe “clueless” is better … much like a lot of the incoming. Speaking of which:

Welcome Lawyers, Guns, Money, Crooks, Liars and assorted lefties. Always so good to see you. Now that you’ve mastered your Swedish history lesson, it’s time for climatology. Sorry, my mistake, it’s time alarmist panic mongering and rare Arctic birdwatching.