In a spectacular own-goal the right-wing magazine The Spectator published an article online headlined ‘In praise of the Wehrmacht.’ Despite the copy being quickly changed, the original was screen-grabbed and shared on Twitter.
The piece, attributed to ‘Taki’, had it's headline subsequently changed to ‘The truth about D-Day.’ Taki’s opening gambit was also changed from: “The real story of D-Day is the heroism of German soldiers who were vastly outnumbered but fought nobly and to the death,” was subsequently changed to the more palatable “Don’t believe the Hollywood version. The fact is the Wehrmacht were sitting ducks.”
Rather than reading like an expose on the Steven Spielberg-esque narrative of the Second World War as the “Hollywood bullshit,” he claims it is, the piece does in fact read, as one Twitter user put it, like “praise for the Wehrmacht,” which some editor thought would make a great title.
Instead of addressing legitimate claims against Hollywood’s portrayal of D-Day, say like the under-representation of African Americans onscreen, Taki asks us to remember the horribly outnumbered Germans who hid behind a “mythical sea wall.”
We should also feel sorry for the 76,000 Germans, reserve troops who had “not trained in combat,” but never-the-less fought bravely and nobly against the, apparently unfair, 150,000 British, American and Canadian troops.
German bravery in the face of unfair Allied numbers who used too many trained troops for a sea invasion against a continent strangled by Nazism and suffering the horrors of the holocaust.
But hey, what do you expect from a guy whose previous weekly witticisms include “In Praise of Mussolini,” and once referred to Jewish publishers at the New York Times as "The Big Bagel Times."
Maybe it's time for the Spectator to have a Taxit?
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