I guess controversy sells more tickets than talent.
During a concert in Cardiff, Madonna flashed images of Adolf Hitler and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe followed by (John) McCain.
In contrast Democrat candidate Barack Obama was in a sequence with John Lennon, Al Gore and Mahatma Gandhi.
Source: Yahoo! News
I am by no means John McCain’s number one fan, but please, this vile woman needs to take a lesson in Genocide History 101. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that she comes up with inane rot like this, or the fact flocks of mindless zombies at her concerts lap it up.
The disturbing reality here is that Madonna is not stupid, far from it. She is a shrewd businesswoman which makes her use of the aforementioned comparisons even more disturbing, not to mention especially nauseating considering she professes to be an adherent of Kabbalah, a spiritual discipline (or sect, depending on how you look at/practice it) derived from Judaism. I would certainly have an ethical problem myself in using symbols of genocide for personal financial gain, but I’m not Madonna and therefore I wouldn’t know what it’s like having a carbon guzzling ego to support.
I have posted a translation below completed some months ago regarding the post-war prosecution of a medical doctor in Germany who committed unspeakable crimes under Hitler’s Reich (n.b. don’t start me on on any of that ex post facto twaddle either, they were and remain crimes). It should be noted the original document from which my translation is drawn is an article in Der Spiegel accompanied by various photographs, including one of four skeletal gypsy children who were innocent pawns in Hitler’s genocidal game. I don’t care how much one doesn’t like McCain, and trust me, the guy really irks me (Obama, on the other hand, is no more than an emperor with a nice, shiny suit), the following translation alone should make it abundantly clear there is no connection whatsoever between the policies of McCain and Hitler, and Mugabe as well for that matter.
But in the end it is not Madonna who should be hanging her head in shame, it is the people who take her seriously in turn lining her pockets with money and further bloating her insufferable and narcissistic sense of self.
Oh, and one more thing, this is a woman who sincerely believes magic water can neutralise nuclear waste.
Human Experiments
Der Spiegel (Nr. 46, 1983)
Unbridled malice
A retired medical officer who tested remedies against poison gas on concentration camp prisoners has just been charged with aiding and abetting murder.
Prisoner number 6545 writhed in coughing fits. He spat mucus, then blood. As his strength dwindled, shreds of his lungs surged from his distorted mouth. The death struggle lasted four hours.
On the 18th of June 1944 at midday Adalbert Eckstein died in agony at the age of 20 in the Alsatian concentration camp Natzweiler-Struthof of a severe oedema of the respiratory organs.
What befell the vagrant Eckstein and three of his friends at that time is now, almost four decades later, the subject of legal proceedings in Bonn. The Office of the Public Prosecutor has laid four charges of aiding and abetting murder against Dr. med Helmut Rühl, 65.
These scientifically embellished experiments conducted on thousands of concentration camp prisoners – on Jews, Gypsies, prisoners of war and “asocials” – during the Second World War are to be atoned for. The killing of the experimental subjects was at the least put up with, at worst, intentional.
The doctors protested the ostensible scientific need for the tasks but what really happened in the concentration camps, as described by Frankfurt psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, were “crimes of unbridled, and at the same time bureaucratically and businesslike organised, coldness, malice and lust to kill.
It was tested, for example, how long an artificially chilled person can survive, and measured at what body temperature death occurs. A freefall from the height of 20,000 metres was simulated in a vacuum chamber in order to study the effects of oxygen deficiency. The prisoners got injected with vaccines, possibly against typhus, and some remained unvaccinated, although infected with typhus.
The tests were, as determined by an American Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Doctor’s Trial in 1946/47, marked by “cruelty, agony, mutilating injuries and deaths.”
22 men and one woman, the former Ravensbrück Camp doctor Hertha Oberheuser, were made to face charges of conducting deadly experiments before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. After 139 days in court seven of those charged were sentenced to death, seven were acquitted and the rest received prison sentences of between ten years and life.
However, during the Nazi Reich there had been far more doctors who obeyed Hitler rather than Hippocrates. “Of approximately 30,000 doctors practising in Germany at the time,” noted Mitscherlich, who as head of a Committee of German Doctors monitored the Nuremberg trial, “committed approximately 350 medical offences “. One of whom, the Office of the Public Prosecutor thinks it can prove, was Rühl.
What happened then in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp was already on record in Nuremberg. And also the name Rühl – though in the English manner of writing Ruhl – had already emerged there: as signatory to reports regarding human experiments.
Rühl’s doctoral thesis supervisor at the University of Strasbourg, Medical Professor Otto Bickenbach, developed a protective agent against the poisonous gas phosgene in 1939: Hexamethylenentetramin, also known as Urotropin, taken orally or intravenously injected, proved successful on tests with cats and apes.
The Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler, officially sanctioned – as described in Nazi jargon – “the provision of Concentration Camp prisoners” for medical experiments but nevertheless showed little interest at first in Bickenbach’s research results. Only when German secret agents announced in 1943 that the Allies would soon use poisonous gases like mustard gas and phosgene on the battle field did Himmler give instructions to carry out experiments on humans.
Bickenbach, who was later put on trial in Metz and sentenced to a lengthy term of hard labour, gave an account of the nature of the phosgene experiments during his first questioning – the court protocol found its way into Nuremberg Doctor’s Trial as “Document Number 3848″. He had, reported Bickenbach, at first “conducted an experiment on myself” and then on approximately 54 prisoners, at which he “no longer remembered the exact numbers”; at any rate, “only a single person had become sick… as a result of the experiment”.
Yet Himmler demanded a further series of experiments, “wherein”, determined the Public Prosecutor, “both protected and unprotected persons should be exposed to the gas.”
Rühl’s task was to measure, “with the help of an apparatus provided by him”, (as stated by the Public Prosecutor) the respective gas concentrations upon their gradual increase in a specially built 20 cubic meter chamber. The so-called control persons without protective treatment were affected. As can be proved, people died in one of such chambers in June and August, 1944, Adalbert Eckstein was the youngest. In the protocol of one of such deadly experiments (“On the protective effects of hexamethylentramin on phosgene poisoning”) it was said
The intravenously protected remained healthy and showed not the slightest discomfort or symptoms, the orally protected contracted a slight oedema of the lung, some later pneumonia and pleurisy which they overcame. One control person survived a lung oedema, the second died after a few hours, the autopsy resulted in typical findings of a quite severe lung oedema
One Doctor, Rühl, became a city physician in Bochum after the end of the war and later, at the beginning of the Sixties, medical officer for the Rhein-Sieg region. He occasionally appeared as an expert in court. A death sentence imposed on him in absentia by the French “due to provision of poison” and preliminary proceedings later suspended by the Office of the Public Prosecutor in Bochum did not hinder his professional career path.
After a criminal complaint inquiries were resumed against Rühl in January 1980, who had since been promoted to Chief Medical Director. Investigators then came across incriminating documents in the French archives.
Rühl, retired since January 1983, who in the meantime has become unfit to stand trial according to his defence counsel, admitted during preliminary proceedings to having taken part in the human experiments. He claims only to have discovered first after the event that unprotected prisoners were sent into the gas chambers.
Rühl’s former boss Bickenbach had already earlier decided on an explanation for his actions in the Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp. He had said in 1947, according to “Document Number 3848″, acted “with respect to Himmler’s orders”.
The victims of his experiments with poison gas were for Bickenbach merely “human material.”
August 25th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Yeah what a slut bag.
August 25th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Huh? We agreed on something?!!
August 25th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
What a selfish twat. All the good politicians are in her party, all the other guys are fascists.
Then again, maybe McCain is up to something after all. Has anyone really given his campaign bus’s ovens a thorough inspection?
August 26th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Madonna knows Kabbalah like I know quantum physics.
I’ve got a magic Jewish fluid to clear up Madonna’s complexion.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:16 am
And imrove her hair, eh Abbadon?
Vis a vis (hehehe) other related topics, the “human material” note reminds me of the Chinese term for their use of prisoners from time to time: they were called “logs”.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I think we agree on most things, Rachel, including most politics, economics, comedy, music, and most importantly, what’s fun to do when you’re drunk. You seem often surpised by it, though. I wonder if I tend to express disagreement more thoughtfully and loudly than I do agreement.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
That’s true actually, I never thought of it that way. I guess in your mind agreeing is much more boring than debating. But as for comedy, have the DVDs arrived yet? PS You are by far one of the best drinking buddies I’ve ever had. I was never so proud as when you called me a juggernaut on the way to the lake when I made a vodka cocktail in the teapot.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Never have taken Madd’s seriously.
Impossible task.
I just want to screech at her: “PUT IT AWAY YOU SCRAWNY ARSED OLD SCRAG!”
(All the same, still like some of her early songs, just a handful, but nothing from the last 15 years or so.
“Vogue” still makes me want to smash household electrical items, just to make the song go away.)
August 27th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Jugernaut… I *like* that. Hasn’t changed since then, from what little I can see.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Er… gg-ernaut, not g-ernaut.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Jugsernaut…under the cones.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Hey Ab, mate, what’s with the bazooka fixation?
Got caught in the headlights one night, perhaps?
Or maybe… just too many milkshakes???
Lol!
August 27th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Kathy, meet Abbadon… he likes boobs!
August 27th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I just got a notice this morning from the post office that a package arrived for me from Australia. If it’s not from you it’ll be the first thing I ever received from down under not from you…but in this uncivilized country they don’t deliver packages, you have to pick them up yourself.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
You never know, with the Lithuanian postal system it could be from someone you met in Australia when you were here for Kongresas all those years ago?! Otherwise, if it is indeed the DVDs I really hope you enjoy them, the one you wanted is definitely in there, but the other two are uniquely Australian humour so I hope the humour converts well…
August 28th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Hey, Kathy –
It’s a male thing. You know?
August 29th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Speaking of having to go pick things up, I was on a business trip to Isreal to do some technical work awhile ago, and needed some hardware sent to me. It came FedEx; well at least as far as the airport. They required me to come down from Haifa to get it. I hired a taxi, and when the driver heard what I was going to try to do, his eyes got really wide and he insisted on staying with me during the whole process. Which was a very good thing. Yeow! What a mess. Anyway, what was sent was a small circuit board (maybe 4″ by 6″) in a small box. When my turn came, they motioned me into the room where I had been watching them poke at it for awhile. I was to stand next to it while they opened it. No problem there. But standing there for the next 10 minutes while they had a nice young lady *hand-draw* a picture of it was, well, surreal. Then of course having them pack it back up, kick me out of the room, and put it on a conveyor belt to another room, where I could submit more paper in order to dimly see it in the distance… well, it was just the highlight of my trip, I have to say. They asked me how much it was worth, and I guessed $1,000. Then they said “well, you owe us $400 duty”. I guess to make sure I wouldn’t sell it while I was there. The nice thing is that when I brought it back to the airport on my way out and showed them, they tore up the credit slip. There were many other adventures on that trip, but this post is too long as it is.
August 29th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Madonna…hmmm…let’s see…old, washed-up pop star being controversial in an attempt to stay relevant. Yep, I think that sums it up.
August 29th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I’d say you pretty much nailed it in that one sentence Joe.