His comment must lose something in the translation. I’m not getting the humor, or the insight, or the snark, or anything.
READ ON...
While Jewish men, women and children were being killed in Auschwitz, some were forced into slave labor at IG Farben or wherever else the Nazis wanted labor. That’s the smidgen of truth in Beppe’s barrel of lies.
“IG Farben: ‘’but they weren’t killed by the Nazis, they were killed by Jews, so Jews killed their Jews ..., it is so strange that there were killed 6 million of Jews, more than their whole population, maybe they were only 600.000, I mean that those 6 million Jews are today in America...”
It is important to understand Beppe’s paranoid thinking here.
Around six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, with the help of other European regimes.
There are more than six million Jews in the United States today, so with typical paranoid logic, Beppe jumps from six million murder victims in 1945 to six million living American Jews in 2013.
Six million Jews murdered in places like Auschwitz “equals” six million living American Jews today.
Get it? I don’t either.
It’s paranoid thinking.
Paranoid thinking is important to understand. We see a fair amount of it in America today, and it’s an old, old European specialty.
Beppe’s Italian audiences lap it up.
Curiously enough, Beppe Grillo is married to a lady born in Iran, where children soak up Death to Israel! Death to America! slogans ... every single day of the week. So do all the soldiers, bureaucrats, Revolutionary Guards, and the Basiji — the regimes imported thugs from the countryside.
Beppe tells the world that “Everything I know about the Middle East I learned from my father-in-law!”
After marrying his Iranian wife, by some miracle, Beppe suddenly got a lot richer. His public career took off, and from being a comedian he became a politician. Or maybe just an idealistic truth-teller to a corrupt Italian state.
Humor rarely translates well between languages and cultures.