Pope Pius XII playing Cards With Hitler
Oil on canvas by Oscar Bernal 60 x 48 inches 2005
If you know your history, then no explanation is necessary. ___M.M.E.
Hitler always fascinated me. Before he got into politics he had been a second-rate painter who got by by hanging wallpaper. His father was a bastard. Until his father was thirty-nine, his father's legal name was Schicklgruber, a somewhat comic-sounding name even to Germans. Then his father changed it to Hitler, his biological father's name, in order to qualify for a small inheritance. If that hadn't happened, the Nazis would have had to answer their telephones with "Heil Schicklgruber."
The Pope favored Hitler. Actually the Pope didn't much care for him but he favored Fascism over Communism. Communism, if it gained universal power, would stomp out religion entirely. Which of course, included Catholicism. So what was the Pope to do?
What a beast this Hitler was. Murdered over six million gypsies, Jews and others who didn't fit into his definition of "Aryan Purity." Murdered! He didn't just let them die. He actively killed them! I guess when it comes to numbers, Joseph Stalin was even worse since he murdered more than twenty million people. Cut off food supplies to the Ukraine and let millions of his own people die of starvation. What a way to squelch a brewing revolution.
Hitler made a big speech where he let the Germans know that he was Catholic. Then he said that since he was a Catholic, the Nazis shouldn't worry because being a Catholic, he knew how to handle the Pope. I guess he was right. Poor old Pius the Twelfth was just trying to choose between 'the lesser of the two evils.' Interesting moral decision, no? He also probably thought that Hitler was going to win and it's always nice to be on the winning side.
I've seen Hitler on T.V. so often that I feel I know him. Not intimately of course, but rather like the way a child might know a stiff and pompous Uncle.
People say that horrible world-wide tragedies don't come from individual leaders, that the leaders are just expressing the "spirit of the times." I used to believe that. It's a nice theory but, now that I've taken a closer look, I think it's a lot of hooey. Generalissimo Franco was a good example of how untrue that is.
And so was Adolf Hitler.
It was only through a German general's insubordination that Paris wasn't left burning like the way Saddam Hussein left the Kuwaiti oil fields.
I'm surprised that the French haven't built a monument to the German General who disobeyed Hitler's order to "Leave Paris in smoldering embers." Perhaps they think it would be a monument to their own vulnerability, but I disagree. It would reek of Brotherhood and Universality. I can just see it now. A thirty-foot statue of good old General Speidel sanctimoniously holding a fire-hose. The huge fire-hat he would be wearing would provide a nice shelter on a rainy day and it would fit right in with the French romantic tradition, since 'Fireman's hat' is slang for a piece of intimate anatomy in almost every language.
If the City Fathers wanted to be reminded of the darker side of that ghastly piece of history, they could build a mechanism inside the statue where every hour on the hour a modest little puff of poison gas would spew forth from the tip of the nozzle, a sort of French version of London's Big Ben done up like one of those sophisticated watches without numbers on the dial. It'd probably be a big tourist attraction and at the same time help to solve some of the Paris pigeon problem. It'd be in such poor taste that the kitsch-sculptor, Jeff Koons would probably build it for free.
The ancient Romans 'erected' giant statues along their fabulous highways in honor of Priappus, The God of the Phallus (though the eroticism in their monuments was a little more literal than what I had in mind). Why don't the modern French do the same with at least one single, giant, marble statue of General Speidel?
It'd kill two birds with one stone. ___From "Elder's Arena" by Muldoon Elder