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For John, BLUF:  Intolerance of the opinions of other is as common.  In the past politeness and custom and the First Amendment has protected us from the Zealots.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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“But she knows me !”

This Samizdata item from 18 June, was posted by Mr Niall Kilmartin (Stirling).

I forward this because:

1. Leni Riefenstahl was a talented filmmaker when she teamed up with the National Socialists.  Her movie Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) captures the 1934 National Socialist Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 supporters.  She lost her perspective.
2. The Samizdata post is about how the Social Justice Warriors of our day are acting like Maoist acolytes during the Cultural Revolution, or National Socialists in 1930s Germany (before the death camps) in going after Author Sarah Hoyt.

Here is part of the blog post, the part that deals with Ms Leni Riefenstahl:

Late one night near the start of the 1930s in Germany, Leni Riefenstahl dropped in on friends whose house she chanced to pass as she returned from the very first Nazi rally she attended.  For ten minutes, she raved about the the glorious future awaiting National Socialism, the insight of Hitler – until the expressions on the faces of her stunned-into-silence hosts finally penetrated the haze she was in and she recalled that this married couple (that she’d been friends with for years) were two of her several Jewish friends.  She murmured something about how she was sure that aspect of National Socialism would not amount to anything that need concern them.  Then she finished her coffee and left. She never came back. Her circle of friends changed to contain fewer Jews, then fewer still.

(Leni’s next chance to meet Jews in numbers came in the early 1940s, when she borrowed concentration camp inmates to be extras in crowd scenes in her films, returning them to the camps after their scenes were shot. The couple who gave her coffee were not among them.  Before that night, they were typical intellectuals, sure that National Socialists were all very stupid self-defeating people.  That a girl like Leni – clever, strong-willed, career-minded, inventive, unorthodox – could become one was incomprehensible to them, so incomprehensible that it shattered their intellectuals’ conviction that they were the ones who understood things.  Therefore they fled Germany early and so they lived – long enough to tell the story of that night on a television programme I watched long ago.)

This kind of thing is abroad in the land.  I am sure the Progressives will think this post is about President Donald Trump and Les Deplorables.  Just as strongly I think this post is about the Progressives and their Social Justice Warriors.

The thing is, next they will be coming for you.

Hat tip to the Samizdata.

Regards  —  Cliff