If the makers of Ganesh v. Hitler, a play set to debut in Melbourne, Australia on September 29, would like to add that line to their playbill, all we ask is that they credit Popehat (but please don't mention that to the Roman Catholics).

According to the playwright, Hitler stole the swastika from the Hindu religion.  And, much as U2's Bono recovered the song "Helter Skelter" from Charles Manson on behalf of the Beatles and Indiana Jones recovered the Ark of the Covenant on behalf of Uncle Sam, Ganesh just wants to steal the swastika back. 

The publicity blurb for Ganesh versus the Third Reich, from Geelong-based company Back to Back Theatre, depicts the elephant-headed Hindu god of prophecy seeking to go one-on-one with Hitler over the swastika.

Rajan Zed, a Hindu statesman from the United States, said Hindus were concerned about the play, which will premiere at the Melbourne Festival.

"The Lord Ganesh was meant to be worshipped in temples and home shrines and not to be made a laughing stock on theatre stages," Mr Zed said in a statement.

"Lord Ganesh was divine and theatre/film/art were welcome to create projects about/around him showing his true depiction as mentioned in the scriptures," said the president of the Universal Society of Hinduism.

"Creating irrelevant imaginary imagery, like reportedly depicting him being tortured and interrogated by Nazi SS, hurt the devotees."

While Rajan Zed, the Hindu statesman from the United States, isn't explicitly calling for censorship, the thought of Lord Ganesh suffering at the hands of Nazis has gotten some Australians, specifically Dr. Yadu Singh of the Council of Indian Australians, calling for censorship:

Depiction of Lord Ganesha in this manner is going to become an Issue in India and among Indians, and is likely to create a controversy between India and Australia, which is unnecessary.

Further more, agencies which receive public funding in Australia, can’t be associating with any action, commentary, documentary or play, which lampoons the beliefs, deities or feelings of people from any religion.

What seems to be lost in the controversy and threats of international incidents is that this is a play about a giant elephant-headed man clobbering Hitler, which is not to trivialize the giant elephant-headed man, nor his divinity.  While the enormity of his crimes can't be diminished, Hitler himself has become so trivialized and diminished that politicians feel no shame in invoking Hitler to describe the Chamber of Commerce.  Hitler is now a comic book character, and a bad one at that.  Despite the playwright's description of the play as:

a “wildly inventive ride through history, where sacred icons and rituals become weapons” and “brimming with humour”.

it probably sucks, just like a bad comic book.

Surely Lord Ganesh is divine enough to withstand such a trifling indignity, even if some of his followers aren't.

HITLER.

And he failed, too. Find out how — and how a British Lieutenant-General succeeded, if only for a month — in this fascinating and entertaining post at Finem Respice.

As longtime readers know, we dabble in alternate history. Well, I do.  Ken's a political science major who thinks history began in 1968. But it's all wanking, as much as the long title of this post.

Still, for those who delight in this sort of wanking as much as I, here's a nifty, if deeply flawed, "counterfactual" of the Second World War with an utterly implausible (yet plausible to Hitler) thesis:

Then, too, what if Poland had agreed in 1939 to join Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union, as Hitler wanted? If Poland had allied with Germany rather than resisting, Britain and France would not have issued territorial guarantees to Poland, and would not have had their casus belli in September 1939. It is hard to imagine that Britain and France would have declared war on Germany and Poland in order to save the Soviet Union. If Poland’s armies had joined with Germany’s, the starting line for the invasion would have been farther east than it was in June 1941, and Japan might have joined in, which would have forced some of the Red Army divisions that defended Moscow to remain in the Far East. Moscow might have been attained. In this scenario, there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and thus no alienation of Japan from Germany. In that case, no Pearl Harbor, and no American involvement. What World War II becomes is a German-Polish-Japanese victory over the Soviet Union. That, by the way, was precisely the scenario that Stalin feared.

Implausible for three reasons: First, it assumes that the Poles would, or could, have caved in to the Nazis, becoming a giant Finland as Hitler wished.  For those who appreciate such things, here's an old Polish joke that isn't derogatory to the noble people of Poland:

Q: A Polish soldier is confronted by a German soldier approaching from the west, and a Russian soldier approaching from the east. Which does he shoot first?

A: The German. Duty before pleasure.

Second, the larger work, which speaks of ways Hitler could have won the war, is flawed because it ignores its central character: Hitler. Hitler was no more capable of doing the "right" thing in war than he was of doing the "right" thing in politics.  A Hitler who could have sat back and let the Prussian General Staff dictate the course of the war to him would never have propelled the National Socialists to power in the first place, nor held power for six years before war, nor have scared the Russians so badly they'd made a deal to give Hitler a free hand, and cheap oil and minerals, while he dealt with France.

Third, the larger work ignores the singular character of Churchill, in his way as odd a man, and every bit as exceptional, as Hitler:

If we agree with Roberts, as we should, that Churchill personally helped lengthen the war by keeping Britain from seeking peace terms after the fall of France, then we are also implicitly saying that, absent Churchill, peace might have been made. The war-winning alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union was sealed only in December 1941, and could not have been achieved had Britain left the war.

"Absent Churchill" is a tall order, in that the man was on the scene.  Removing Churchill takes us from the realm of alternate history into "what if Stonewall Jackson had survived Chancellorsville?" territory: not alternate history, but The Man In The High Castle, or Doctor Who prevents the creation of the Daleks level science fiction.

Still, for those who care, this is some fantastic semi-science fictional wanking.

Via Angus, who in an alternate reality co-blogs with the Governor of North Carolina.

(Hey, I voted for his co-blogger, even if no one else did.)

NEWS FROM 150 YEARS AGO: "Yankees are in desperate need of leadership."

PERPETUAL DOOMSDAY PROPHET PAUL EHRLICH (most famous as the loser of a sucker's bet) whines that the world's worst problem is that there are too many rich people in it. Funny, I always thought the world's biggest problem is that there aren't enough rich people in it.

SIR LATTIMORE BROWN, "THE MOST UNFORTUNATE ARTIST IN THE ANNALS OF SOUL MUSIC," has found peace at last.  After reading his obituary, I'm pretty sure Brown would have been the most unfortunate artist in the annals of blues music.

THE MORGANZA SPILLWAY was last opened in 1973.  This is what it looked like at the time:

Whether or not Louisiana dodges a bullet this time, you could do worse than to donate to the affected area's greater Habitat for Humanity.

There were many ways this old man could have handled his grandson's query about prejudice, a word his grandson was too young to understand. Or even to pronounce.

He could have explained, without being judgmental, why it's best to think of our friends as individuals rather than classifying them as part of an arbitrary group.

He could have given his grandson a short, sanitized history of anti-semitism, explaining why Jimmy legitimately felt ostracized by being classed as "The Other," while, in his grandfatherly fashion, getting his grandson to agree that, as good people, the grandfather and the grandson are above this sort of name-calling and labeling. He could have started his grandson down the right path, to a future in which the boy judged individuals on their merits, rather than by race, religion, or class. He could have made the boy part of the team.

But did the grandfather do that?  No.

Grandpa lowered the boom. He told his four year old grandson, so young that he still lisped, that the boy was an incurable bigot. Beyond redemption. A thought criminal with no hope of reform.

There is a reason the camera fades away in the last seconds of this public service commercial: so as to avoid showing this boy's face as his own grandfather deals a traumatic blow, an emotional punch in the stomach, that will follow the boy to his shame for the rest of his days. There is no way the child will ever think of himself as a decent person after this. Every time this child looks in the mirror, he will hate the face that looks back at him. Whenever he sees his friend Jimmy, he'll be filled with self-loathing.

Kinder that the grandfather had removed one of those hooks from his hat and gouged out the boy's eye.

Today that kid is probably a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, bouncing between parole and prison in a meth-fueled haze, praying to Wotan, in his lucid moments, that the government never connects him to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Thanks a lot, grandpa. And thanks a lot, Jimmy Carter, for traumatizing kids with this sort of shit during their After School Specials.

One hundred fifty years ago today, Confederate batteries under the command of Brigadier General Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard (a Louisiana Frenchman whose name always brings to mind the phrase "laissez les bon temps rouler!") opened fire on the Union works at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The opening shot was offered to Roger Atkinson Pryor, a Virginian congressman who so favored the southern cause that he ventured to South Carolina to urge the attack, though his state had not yet seceded. Pryor refused, overcome perhaps by the significance of the moment, or by grief that things had come to this pass, or by fear. So the honor fell to Captain George Sholter James, formerly of the United States Army artillery.

Captain George Sholter James, in happier times

The firing on Fort Sumter fascinates, like many great episodes in history, because it is one of those moments at which things stand on the edge of a knife.  All things were possible at 4am on April 12, 1861, in a way that they weren't on, for instance, November 6, 1987.

The war that began that day fascinates because, no matter how one feels about the causes for which men fought, the causes matter today, unlike squalid affairs like the Mexican War or the umpteenth middle eastern intervention we'll engage in next week.  We can discern nobility and character in men on both sides even if we believe some of them were wrong in a way that we can't say of, for instance George Erwin Rommel, whose noblest deed was a confession that the war he'd fought so well was fought on behalf of a genocidal monster.

Unless we're black.

With that said, from today and every day for the next 1,458 days, you can read about the history of the war, stories of individuals who fought in it, and artifacts of their deeds, at the University of North Carolina's Civil War Day By Day blog, which will tell the story of the war, each day, with a primary source document or other item from the Wilson Library's southern historical collection, one of the best archives in the country for those who, like me, find this war such an intriguing flash of history.

Today's entry, from which this post is titled, concerns General Beauregard's orders to the batteries at Fort Sumter.

On August 1, 1864, the British Empire, by far the world's greatest military power, had taken a stance of neutrality in the American Civil War.

The empire was led by Lord Palmerston, a statesman known for his caution in placing British interests ahead of his ideals. Despite Palmerston's feelings that Union forces were the aggressors, that the Americans fomented terrorism in Ireland, and that the American President Lincoln was a tyrant, the most Palmerston had been willing to concede to the Confederate States of America was recognition as a belligerent which might one day become a nation. Despite urging to enter the American war from the French emperor, Napoleon III, who hungered for glory and sought to distract his people from domestic scandal and, like Palmerston, sympathized with the Confederates, the most Palmerston had done was to send British troops to Canada when faced by an act of American piracy.

On August 1, 1864, Lincoln's forces, led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose name was shortly to become a byword for cruelty in war, all but surrounded the city of Atlanta. In one month Sherman would burn the city to the ground. Now, suppose Palmerston had reliable intelligence on Sherman's plans for Atlanta? In Palmerston's eyes, the Confederates had the just cause, and were fighting for freedom against an enemy of the British empire. With orders carried aboard a swift ship, the British could have intervened in the American war, attacking from Canada, preventing an atrocity and dealing a mortal blow to an enemy nation with which Britain had fought two wars.

In the end, Palmerston did nothing. The city of Atlanta was burned to ashes and the Confederates were ground under the heels of tyrants.

Should Palmerston have acted? And if he had, what would the consequences have been for the British empire and the world?

NPR has a story on the life and death of Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. It's a harrowing tale of bravery, sacrifice, friendship, and the maddeningly indifferent and inexorable brutality of totalitarian government. Check it out.

Blogging is probably going to be light today, so I'll pose a hypothetical question that may never be answered.

First, we know that the late William Rehnquist, the former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, did suffer from severe back pain for much of his career.  Suppose that during the month of December 2000, Rehnquist's back pain became so severe that, due to surgery or narcotics, he was temporarily unable to fulfill his duties as Chief Justice.

On December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount of all ballots cast in the Presidential election held the month before.  The Florida recount, according to some, might have taken months to complete and certify.  President Bill Clinton was scheduled to leave office on January 20, 2001.

On December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court ordered a halt to the recount, handing an effective victory along with Florida's electoral votes to George W. Bush in the still controversial case of Bush v. Gore.  The case was decided by a vote of 5 to 4, with Rehnquist in the majority.

Now, if any Justice in the majority, let's say Rehnquist, had been unable to decide the case for any reason, the vote would be 4 to 4, leaving the lower (Florida Supreme) Court's decision standing.  The recount would go on.  Let's say until March.

Which leads to another question: Who would be President on January 21, 2001?

You are armed with a copy of the United States Constitution, the most authoritative document which purports to answer this question.  And I'll submit that its answer is not at all clear.  You may use any school of legal reasoning to decide this question.  You will receive extra credit for explaining your answer in detail, whether by reference to text, history, statute, or case law (assuming that, unlike me, you can find an applicable statute or case).

Can you believe that CNN would write this?

Jewish groups and many scholars argue that starting in 1939, Germans committed genocide, when more than a million Polish Jews were massacred in the waning days of the Third Reich.

Modern-day National Socialists officially deny that a genocide took place, arguing instead that hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews and Christian Germans died in intercommunal violence around the bloody battlefields of World War II.

I can't believe it either.

Tariq Aziz has been sentenced to hang.

Not to minimize the crimes of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq, but Aziz seemed a  powerless figurehead, a guy Saddam trotted out for television because he looked like a strange, avuncular owl who spoke perfect English.  Aziz was at most a cover for the really grisly characters who sprayed chemical weapons on Kurds.

To the extent most westerners will even remember Aziz, it's as a character who used to appear on early 90s  television interview programs, much like George Plimpton.  You could tell the regime was in trouble when, for the sequel war, they replaced Aziz with Baghdad Bob.