RUSH: I mentioned this early on in the program, and I just now getting time to get around to it. A friend of mine sent me something today that I had not seen before, and I looked and said, ‘Ah, I’m not even sure this is genuine.’ Things can be Photoshopped and so forth, and later on I got the documentation to it. What I have here, we’re going to put this on the website. It is a page from a book, chapter 6, page 174 of a book called Auf der Wacht from 1941. It is a picture of a jackbooted thug, a foot kicking out of a room, a cigar, a cigarette and a pipe, a Nazi foot, a Nazi soldier foot. In fact, the cigar band has a racist caricature of a black person.
Here’s the caption of the picture as it appears in the book. ‘The Nazi party barred smoking in many public places, including party offices and waiting rooms. Note the negroid head on the cigar,’ says the caption. ‘Nazi anti-tobacco activists try to characterize smoking as the vice of degenerate Africans and they tried to stamp it out in 1941’. They could smoke themselves because you’ve all seen it in World War II movies, holding their cigarettes. But Hitler was a teetotaler, he was a vegetarian, he didn’t smoke, and they were the original anti-smoking Nazis. And so the backup to this comes from Dr. Michael Sanera. He earned his PhD in political science in 1979 from the University of Colorado at Boulder and served as a U.S. Army military intelligence officer in Berlin in the early 1970s. He wrote, ‘I got the following from a Schau ins Land, a magazine that teaches advanced German language skills. Note that it validates our notion that those pushing smoking bans can legitimately be called ‘lifestyle Nazis.’ Hitler and ‘the Nazis campaigned against smoking and promoted pioneering research into its dangers.”
There’s a long paragraph. We’re going to put this up there. It’s not that big a deal in the great scheme of things other than it’s something that I didn’t know. Well, that’s the thing, even when I make jokes they turn out to be true, they turn out to be right. Anti-smoking Nazis and so forth. Now, I don’t expect this to reverse the anti-smoking hysteria in this country. People are not going to think they have anything in common with the German Nazis. I’m not doing it for that reason. I’m just passing it on because I found it to be a fascinating bit of information. And exactly for what H.R. said. When I say it, when I even make a joke about these people, I’m right. Sometimes even when I think I’m wrong, I turn out to be right. That’s what’s stunning.