Tag Archives: Genocide

Why We Think it is Fitting to Compare BIDs to Nazis

An essential book for understanding what it felt like to be a Nazi before everyone hated the Nazis.  Click on image for detailed information.
An essential book for understanding what it felt like to be a Nazi before everyone hated the Nazis. Click on image for detailed information.
This blog has two essential purposes: first, to publish public records obtained from the three Hollywood area BIDs we cover and their collaborators and second, to needle employees and supporters of those BIDs. Neither educating nor convincing anyone of anything are huge priorities of ours, and even the public revelation of our two purposes cuts against the grain somewhat. However, it’s recently come to our attention that some of our readers who, so to speak, come upon our work innocently, not involved with the BIDs but just having a general interest in the political life of Los Angeles, may consider our constant comparisons of BIDs with Nazis to be glib, puerile, shallow, offensive, trivializing, and/or so on. Some of the objections expressed have come to seem, after much consideration, to have merit and to deserve a serious response.
The Olympic Games were held in Berlin in 1936, three years after the Nazis came to power.  Adolf Hitler, still seen by the world as a plausible member of the international community, led the opening ceremony.
The Olympic Games were held in Berlin in 1936, three years after the Nazis came to power (and, coincidentally, four years after they were held in Los Angeles for the first time). Adolf Hitler, still seen by the world as a plausible member of the international community, led the opening ceremony.
To understand our position, it’s essential to imagine what it felt like to inhabit the Third Reich as a non-Jew in the early 1930s, before Nazism was a universal symbol of pure and essential evil. Germany wasn’t yet an international outcast, and non-Jewish Germans, for the most part, didn’t feel like a nation of demons. In many ways they were not. Concentration camps, now considered primarily sites of genocide, were opened by the Nazis in March 1933 immediately after their accession to power. At first they were used for holding political prisoners and criminals and people were actually released from them on occasion. There’s also no particular reason to think that the Nazi government had any concrete plans to exterminate Jews from the earth when they took power in 1933.
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HPOA Chooses Not to Arrest Law-Flouting Liquor Dealers, Proving its Selective Enforcement Intended to Eliminate Homeless Rather than Cut Hollywood Crime

A "habitual or common drun kard" on the streets of Hollywood.  It is illegal in California to sell alcohol to this guy but the BID Patrol chooses or is directed by the HPOA not to enforce this law, preferring to arrest the guy himself.  We gotta wonder why that is!
A “habitual or common drunkard” on the streets of Hollywood. It is a misdemeanor in California to sell alcohol to this guy but the BID Patrol chooses or is directed by the HPOA not to enforce this law against liquor dealers, preferring to arrest the guy himself. We gotta wonder why that is!
We have previously noted that the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance arrests an awful goddamned lot of people for drinking in public. Furthermore, they maintain an utterly schizophrenic attitude about public drinking, arresting the homeless while not arresting the non-homeless for this most natural of human activities. We have suggested that the BID could solve this problem by merely ceasing to enforce this ridiculous law, but our finely crafted arguments have thus far been ignored, making us feel much as the habitually bad-rapped King Canute must have done when dealing with that whole wave thing.
King Canute, habitually bad-rapped by a bunch of ignorant internetties, gracing an illuminated page with his illustrious visage.
King Canute, habitually bad-rapped by a bunch of ignorant internetties, gracing an illuminated page with his illustrious visage.
But we’re not discouraged! We live to serve! We have more unsolicited advice for the HPOA. Even though we think their focus on Hollywood’s putative public drinking problem borders on either the delusional or the deliberate employment of the good old Große Lüge for the usual unsavory and genocidal purposes, we do understand that their livelihoods depend on keeping the arrest rates high. We figure that it’s at least plausible that they don’t want to stop arresting people because they’ll be out of a job if they do. As Albert Einstein1 used to say, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

First we need a little background on how the HPOA sees the purpose of the BID Patrol. According to executive directrix Kerry Morrison (in an email to our tireless correspondent which was almost certainly written, given its exquisitely lawyeresque quasi-literate lack of concrete content, by Minneapolitan Jeffrey Charles Briggs, the HPOA’s attorney for such matters) “they make citizen arrests with respect to conduct LAPD is empowered to cite but lacks resources or the command decision to do so.” The semantics is clear though the syntax is muddy. The BID Patrol arrests people that the LAPD could arrest but just doesn’t for some reason. The point, of course, is that the BID Patrol gets to be selective about who they arrest, wielding California’s overflowing cornucopia of stupid misdemeanors like a bloody scythe in the fields of Hollywood and thereby, they seem to think, discouraging homeless people from hanging out in the BID. This sentiment was stated even more clearly than Jeff Briggs (or Kerry Morrison, whoever it was) could bring themself to do by an anonymous BID Officer, who once chortled in both his joy2 and in range of a video camera that “You don’t challenge the BID officers. The BID officers have the authority to arrest you. What we do is blessed by the staff at Hollywood Division. We’re helping them out.

The HPOA tries to stop the flow of cheap alcohol into Hollywood by asking people nicely not to sell it anymore.  Let it flow, say we!
The HPOA tries to stop the flow of cheap alcohol into Hollywood by asking people nicely not to sell it anymore. Let it flow, say we!
Now, we’re almost to the suggestion, which is based on the at-least-plausible theory that when trying to solve drug consumption problems it’s more effective to attack the supply side rather than the demand side. The BIDs have made some minor moves in this direction, evinced e.g. by an article in their Spring 2014 newsletter in which Kerry Morrison claims that “two owners of area liquor stores … are working with us to minimize sales to our homeless neighbors who suffer from alcohol addiction.” But, vide Canute again, this is never gonna happen. You can’t stop suppliers from fulfilling a demand by asking them nicely. That money’s not going to be left on the table. The BID knows this when it comes to the homeless. They could ask them nicely to leave, but they, reasonably given their goals, don’t bother. Instead they just fucking arrest them. It turns out, and now we’re at the point finally, that they could be doing the same thing to the liquor store owners and employees although, for whatever reasons, they choose not to. Read on for details!
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Somebody at HPOA Is at Least as Good at Public Relations as Heinrich Himmler

Odilo Globocnik, a guy who was very proud of his work and prone to boast about it in public although not, so far as we know, in poetry.  Globus, as his SS buddies called him, had to be told by his boss Heinrich Himmler to shush up because his antics were interfering with the mission.
Odilo Globocnik, “the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known,”1 master architect of mass murder and a guy who was very proud of his work, enough so to boast about it in public although not, so far as we know, in poetry. Globus, as his SS buddies called him, had to be told by his boss Heinrich Himmler to shush up because his antics were interfering with the mission.
Odilo Globocnik first came to the attention of SS bossman Heinrich Himmler because of his relentless antisemitism and his willingness to murder the Jews of Vienna on a freelance basis even before such practices were sanctioned by German law. Consequently, in 1939 Himmler promoted Globocnik and moved him to occupied Poland. In 1941 Himmler directed Globocnik to oversee one of the most enormous instances of genocide in the history of the world: Aktion Reinhardt.

This was a big step up for Globus, as Odilo was affectionately known to his buddies in the Schutzstaffel, “the vilest organization ever known.”1 In localized modern terms, it’s like being moved from the suburban backwater of Inglewood to the big-time bright-lights-big-city cosmopolis of Hollywood! Globus took to his new surroundings like Samson to the Philistines, and, by late 1943 when he wound up operations, more than 2,000,000 Jews were dead. The organizational aspects of this accomplishment were overwhelmingly intricate, so Globus felt understandably proud of his masterful work and wanted to crow about it.

STOP digging any more mass graves and clear up the old ones.  Any form of publicity will be harmful.  AND STOP WRITING POETRY, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!!!
STOP digging any more mass graves and clear up the old ones. Any form of publicity will be harmful. AND STOP WRITING POETRY, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!!
However, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and Globocnik’s boss, had begun to notice that the rest of the world, and even a significant number of German citizens, weren’t too happy about the systematic deportation and gassing of human beings on this scale. As historian Bettina Stangneth has it:

The Nazis might have kept telling themselves that the extermination of the Jews was the only means for their survival, but they lacked sufficient faith in this view to share it with the rest of the world. The Nazi police state was born of the fear that not even its own population would understand its campaign of murder. Himmler guessed early on that this “glorious chapter of our history” could never be written, and he prevented Odilo Globocnik from sinking a memorial plaque into the earth for the heroes of Operation Reinhard…In summer 1942 [Himmler] ordered his commanders to find a way to avoid digging any more mass graves and to clear up the old ones. Any form of publicity would be harmful.2

Meanwhile, back on the home front, on December 11, 2014, the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID held its monthly meeting.
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