Most of the research that I do passionately is discovering new things about Adolf Hitler that we did not already know from before or has not disseminated to be taught in education systems. Actually, a lot of that is archived and surfaces when someone has the drive to do so.
Recently, I’ve noticed that Hitler comes up in the news regularly. Once in a while his name will grace the headlines of a major newspaper which is usually the result of an Historical event or commemorating, militaria type agenda. It won’t involve anything violent and is mostly due to public interest (ie, museum exhibit, memorial).
The other most common topics or reasons of why he still being talked about is either someone comparing themselves to him, someone comparing other individuals to the man, people who COMPLETELY mis-interpret things (like seeing the face Jesus encrusted on a slice of toast), people who adore him, people who hate him.
Recently and still now actually, there are headlines of people comparing Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. IF you have actually studied Adolf Hitler, you would know that while there may be SOME similarities to tactics used or words said, however, those are surface similarities. There is nothing else. The comparisons are so weak, it’s like walking down the street and pointing to a person with the same hair colour and saying “Hey, are we related?”
Normally, I would put links up to show some examples of these comparison articles, but it’s not needed in this case because there are so many and I am sure, through one of the social media outlets, you have already been privy to such news. It would be great to hear what others have to say.
On May 9th (really just a few days before this post), It was discovered that Proctor & Gamble created a new cover for one of their products called Ariel (clothes detergent). The image displayed a big 88 and a smaller 18 on its liquid gel cleaner. The 88 was actually supposed to represent the amount of loads that could be washed; 88 and 18, respectively. What wasn’t realized was that is also represented — > “Heil Hitler” (88) and is used even today by far right extremists to spread their word in “code”. H is the 8th letter in the alphabet (HH). The 18 represents “AH” for Adolf Hitler.
Here are some links to different new outlets (pretty much all says the same thing):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2624936/Aryan-automatic-Detergent-giant-caught-Nazi-row-Ariel-boxes-feature-secret-far-right-code-Germany.html
Daily Mail – Huffington – ABCNews/AP
The question is; are we infatuated with this man? Why do we always draw the most far fetched conclusions and try to connect the dots when there aren’t any to connect? This was obviously a mistake in that P&G dd not even think to calculate this into their R&D about cultural sensitivity. The fact that we are still doing this (seeing conclusions that don’t exist) is most likely because of the fact that we have not culturally or historically moved on.
If you are reading this, please leave your comments/opinions and feedback in the comment section below. Please discuss this blog as it should represent what everyone is thinking, not just myself. For me, there is a certain time and place for everything, but when trying to dig things up that aren’t there. It has more to do with who you are as a person. It’s difficult to tell if someone was “actually” insulted by this or they knew it was an ad, but the ad was too tempting not to use it to become a minor celebrity with it online. I find motivation for bringing these silly things to light aren’t what you think they would be.