Bill O’Reilly’s new book has been out for several weeks, but I have delayed ordering it because I thought I would probably not like it.
This morning I read a bad review of the book here. In reading this bad review, I learned that the book is rich in detail and “meanders” off the track a lot. That’s what I like when I read books.
I want to know that the tablecloth at the Potsdam Conference was red. I already know about Hitler’s diet, but I might learn more details about his diet from O’Reilly’s book. Call me crazy, but I want to know the details. Readers of my blog and my website know that I dote on the details.
General Patton pees into the river as he crosses the Rhine into Germany in March 1943
This quote is from Patton’s book:
“I drove to the Rhine River and went across on the pontoon bridge. I stopped in the middle to take a piss and then picked up some dirt on the far side in emulation of William the Conqueror.” General George S. Patton, March 1945
I wrote about Patton on my website section on Buchenwald at
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation8.html
Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. This quote is from the review of “Killing Patton”:
Soon, though, Patton would become the commanding officer in Southern Germany and, with the end of the war, be responsible for the so-called Displaced Persons camps in Bavaria and elsewhere. Many of these displaced persons were Holocaust survivors. Patton had contempt for them. He called them “animals” and, in letters to his wife and in diary entries, made his anti-Semitism as plain as could be. Here, in reference to a critical report on the condition of the DPs by an official named Earl G. Harrison, is a sample diary entry: “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to Jews who are lower than animals.”
[…]
But how is it possible to write over 300 pages on Patton and not once mention his rancid Jew-hatred? How is it possible to mention the flower beds at the Potsdam Conference and not pause to cite Patton’s mistreatment of people who, just a short time before, had been in Auschwitz? How is it possible not to mention that Patton ran his camps in such a manner that President Harry Truman, in a letter to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, said, “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” Golly, gee, Bill, isn’t that colorful enough for you?
O’Reilly, like Patton, forgets why World War II was fought in the first place – to combat the evils of Nazism. Foremost among the evils was anti-Semitism, which provided the rationale for the Holocaust. O’Reilly could easily have mentioned Patton’s repellent anti-Semitism, but it clearly was not all that important to him. He didn’t have a tight narrative. He has a narrow mind.
As soon as I receive my copy of O’Reilly’s book in the mail, I will search for any mention of the famous slapping incident when Patton slapped a Jewish soldier. In my humble opinion, this incident angered the Jews to the point that his death was inevitable.
This quote from this source is about the slapping incident:
Patton also created controversy when he visited the 15th Evacuation Hospital on 3rd August 1943. In the hospital he encountered Private Charles H. Kuhl, who had been admitted suffering from shellshock. When Patton asked him why he had been admitted, Kuhl told him “I guess I can’t take it.” According to one eyewitness Patton “slapped his face with a glove, raised him to his feet by the collar of his shirt and pushed him out of the tent with a kick in the rear.” Kuhl was later to claim that he thought Patton, as well as himself, was suffering from combat fatigue.
As for Bill O’Reilly’s failure to call General Patton an anti-Semite, this is excusable because everyone, who is not Jewish, is now an anti-Semite. The word has lost all meaning. Originally, it meant a person who wanted the Jews to have their own country, rather than living in ghettos in every country in Europe, where the Jews had everything that a person would normally have in a separate country.
This quote, regarding anti-Semitism, is from Wikipedia:
In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, German propaganda minister Goebbels announced: “The German people is anti-Semitic. It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the Jewish race.”[31]
After the 1945 victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany, and particularly after the extent of the Nazi genocide of Jews became known, the term “anti-Semitism” acquired pejorative connotations. This marked a full circle shift in usage, from an era just decades earlier when “Jew” was used as a pejorative term.[32][33] Yehuda Bauer wrote in 1984: “There are no anti-Semites in the world… Nobody says, ‘I am anti-Semitic.'” You cannot, after Hitler. The word has gone out of fashion.”[34]
Scrapbookpages Blog 