HESS TODAY, GONE TOMORROW – AT 8:38 A.M. ET:  The events in Norway have focused attention on right-wing extremist politics in Europe.  By that we emphatically do not mean conservative politics, although attempts are already underway by the usual suspects, led by The New York Times, to link the two, a particularly vulgar tactic.  And we sometimes forget that Europe has an ugly history on the fringe right.  We were reminded by a strange story out of Germany.  From the Weekly Standard:

Earlier this week, as reported first in Süddeutsche Zeitung, the remains of Rudolf Hess were disinterred from a Protestant cemetery in Wunsiedel, Bavaria. (Der Spiegel has also reported on this in English.) Ever since the suicide of Hitler's deputy in 1987 at age 93 (he was the sole inmate at Spandau), his gravesite had become a problem, attracting neo-Nazis who turned the quiet town into a pilgrimage site. But the town had finally had enough. In agreement with Hess's family, the headstone was removed and the body scheduled for cremation and burial at sea—a similar fate that Adolf Eichmann met after his execution in Israel in 1962.

COMMENT:  That's pretty much the bin Laden solution.  Get rid of the body and avoid a shrine.  The Israelis did the same when they executed Adolph Eichmann, the organizer of the Holocaust.  The Weekly Standard points out that those sentenced to death at Nuremberg were all cremated, and their ashes dumped in an undisclosed ditch.

And so Hess, once one of the most powerful figures of the Nazi regime, will finally disappear from this Earth.  And I'm willing to bet that his burial at sea will also be used by a blinded press to condemn "right-wing" politics and attempt to make fascism and "conservatism" appear the same.  Fight back.

July 24, 2011