Old SM Nazi Leica

[Paul T.]

Reading such dumb things should be funny if the Shoah hadn't been the indescriptible horror it has been. Comparing is often (if not always) pointless. And there are some "things" you just cannot compare.

It's probably because "the Holocaust" was at task in the francoist Spain that many European and American businessmen invested in it...

So because Americans invested in Spain it couldn't be extremist? Uh, right.

Preston (thanks for the correction) of course isn't saying this was as horrendous as the Holocaust, and implying this is such was facile. But 200,000-400,000 deaths from the White Terror make Franco a quintessential dictator who was more bloodthirsty than Mussolini - even if Americans traded with him or went on holiday to Spain.

In fact Franco was more right wing than Mussolini, and horrified even Goebbels with his delight in murdering workers. yes, he relaxed in his later years, because he'd killed all his enemies - and was notoriously lazy.

Ultimately we are of course talking semantics, as to whether a right wing extremist, who gets help from Mussolini and Hitler, and sends troops to fight with them, can be termed a Fascist. There's an argument against it, for sure, but it's got nothing to do with whether Americans invested in anything! IBM invested plenty in the Holocaust, remember... their information technology helped power the death camps.

 

[raytoei@gmail.com]

wow.. i was genuinely looking for information on the white sm...

 

[Highway 61]

Ultimately we are of course talking semantics, as to whether a right wing extremist, who gets help from Mussolini and Hitler, and sends troops to fight with them, can be termed a Fascist. There's an argument against it, for sure, but it's got nothing to do with whether Americans invested in anything! IBM invested plenty in the Holocaust, remember... their information technology helped power the death camps.

I do agree with you there. Yet behind the semantics there are the facts. The semantics and the facts are undissociable from each other. It's when wrong or borderline semantics are used to describe some given facts that revisionism begins. Calling every dictator a fascist or a nazi makes fascism and nazism something casual. You can call your jewish maths teacher a fascist or a nazi because you've got a D- instead of the A+ you were expecting (like in "A serious man").

The "Holocaust" term cannot be used to spell anything else than the Shoah.

Nobody went spending their honeymoon holidays driving their newly acquired second hand car in Germany, Czechoslovaquia and Poland during the Holocaust. Speaking of "Holocaust" regarding Franco's regime is some historical revisionism.

 

[efinglada]

To me it is naive to say that Franco was not a fascist; surely he was a ruthless blood thirsty criminal, who kept on signing death penalty sentences in court martial prosecutions from the civil war, well into the fifties (the war ended in '39)

He was definitely supported by US, but that does nor mean that he was not a fascist (the US have supported most of the world dictatorships, Somoza "he is a son of a bitch but he is aour son of a bitch" the US said , Pinochet, Batista.......)

Many books have been been written about the Spanish Civil War times, (Hugh Thomas, Paul Preston, Ian Gibson,,,,) and all historians describe Franquism as a form odf Fascism

Franco helped the Germans for a time sending a division to fight in the east front formed with falangistas and war prisoners, but he sent also signs to the allies, for example he dumped the wolfram that he was suposed to sell the Germans

If Franco had entered WW2 to help his allies Hitler and Mussolini, there would habe been a bad side to it, but the good side would have been that we would have not supported his dictatorship until 1975, and the Spanish society, democracy, economy, etc. would have matured much earlier

BTW, so Leica is a fake!

 

[Highway 61]

People who think that calling Franco a "fascist" is a mistake don't think that he was better.

And yes the US supported him nolens volens after the war but this was in the Cold War context, which nobody could have predicted before the second world war. Don't forget that until 1956 the risk of seeing the French Communist Party (very stalinian at that time) coming legally to power in France was quite high. Ike and Mamie wouldn't have liked that. The "containment" policy was at work.

Trying to figure out what would have happened in Spain if Franco had involved the country in the second world war is quite hazardous. And a bit pointless.

On the other hand, the multiple reasons why the Spanish republicans lost the civil war in 1939 eventually, including Stalin's policy, are quite well documented.

 

[greyelm]

Back to the opening post, it's obvious that the white camera is a crude soviet fake and if any serious collector buys this as a true Leica they must have more money than sense. As soon as I get my dremel engraving attachment I'll have a Fed that has Stalin's personal monogram on it. 🙂