Half-Right, I'd say

From The Telegraph:

Mr Starkey made the comments during an interview with The Sunday Times, saying: “What are the points of comparison?

“Well, we have a political movement that has a single historic explanation for why your country is facing such terrible oppression; it's either Versailles or the Treaty of the Union.

“You have a particular group of people who are responsible for this; it is either the English or the Jews.”

He went on: “You have as a symbol the twisted cross: the saltire or the swastika. You have a passionate belief in economic self-sufficiency: known by the Nazis as autarky and the Scots as oil.

“And also you have the propensity of your elderly and middle-aged male supporters to expose their knees,' he said, passing comment on the traditional dress of Scotland and Germany.”

He's right about the treaty and the people. The cross thing is nonsense. The SNP are not into autarky. Nazi autarky was about full self-sufficiency - producing things in Germany rather than buying them from abroad. The oil thing is, perhaps worrying in terms of Scotland viewing their country as a magic money tree rather than as an industrial nation.

The thing of wearing kilts isn't about showing off knees, it's about romantic nationalism. The idea of things being better in the past in your country. The Nazis had the Volkisch, a  folklore movement that looked back to the glorious pre-industrial past of the middle ages, and the ring cycle of Wagner which was a criticism of industrialisation. The kilts are the same thing. A time when Scotsmen were free. Never mind that it was created 400 years after Mel Gibson was fighting the English, and about 100 years after the act of the union.

"Devon farmer forced to kill 'Nazi' cows because they are too aggressive"

Spotted in The Telegraph and emailed in by View From The Solent, who adds "It's a while since you had one of these".

Indeed it is.

My favourite bit from the article:

The farmer added: "Some were perfectly calm and quiet and they are the ones we have kept.

"The others you could not go near. We made sure no one went near them so there were never any incidents.

"To get them into the trailer to get them off the farm we used a young and very athletic young man to stand on the ramp and they charged at him before he quickly jumped out the way. They were so aggressive that was the only way."

Is this really worth it?

From the BBC

Three men aged 88, 92 and 94 have been detained by German authorities on suspicion of being guards at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

The homes of a number of men were raided in three German states, months after prosecutors investigating Nazi-era war crimes announced they were recommending charges against 30 people.

The three men taken into custody have been sent to a prison hospital.

More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz.

I know there's a thing of justice prevailing and all of that, but one or two of them will be dead before they come to trial, where they'll be facing identification from people with fading eyesight and bad memories (the youngest person is likely to be 75). Then at worst they'll end up in something like an old people's home.

And what's their crime? Being prison guards, which makes them (apparantly) accessories to murder. So, what about all the soldiers of the German army that defended Poland from invasion of the Red Army that allowed Auschwitz to remain open? Are they not accessories? Train drivers that carried Jews to the death camps? The men who made the ovens? You can argue that anyone who in any way assisted the Nazis in any way is an accessory to the murders at Auschwitz by that reasoning, and therefore a very large percentage of the elderly German population should be on trial.

Which is why we don't generally do this sort of thing with bad regimes today. You accept that there is a systemic element and you round up the leaders of the system, shoot them and let the footsoldiers go.