How A Pop Band Tricked 9 Million Americans Into Being Nazis. Maybe someone like .. Rupert Murdoch? You know, the guy who owns almost as much of the media as one man can own without coming off as a complete and total movie villain? His newspapers spread anti- immigration hatred all over Europe and Australia, and his cable television network, Fox News, does the same here. So it should come as no surprise that the record label responsible for bringing Happy Nation to the United States from Sweden, Festival Records, was owned by Rupert Murdoch. Yes, that album was released by Arista Records here, but that's because Festival Records set up an overseas distribution deal with Arista way back in the '7. What's most interesting is that this isn't just an example of a pop band slipping obvious Nazi references and symbolism past the music- buying public. It's a case study in exactly how a movement like that takes hold in the first place. As I mentioned last week, when you bring up the parallels between Trump's plans and Nazi Germany, people are quick to reassure you that things aren't bad enough in this country for people to be desperate enough to vote for deporting Mexican immigrants to fix the economy. But those people aren't thinking in terms of inner- city communities that have been hit particularly hard by poverty and gun violence. Along those same lines, the United States as a whole wasn't down and depressed enough to consider a vote for the Nazis at the polls back when Ace of Base stormed the airwaves, but the state of radio itself was pretty fucking sad. Where's the party at?!?!?! To be clear, I don't mean there was a ton of bad music on the radio at the time. It's quite the opposite, really. It wasn't that the radio was overrun with bad music - - it was just overrun with "grunge" music. A lot of quality songs came out of that era. What it didn't produce was a lot of reasons to smile or be happy. It wasn't music you could dance to. You wouldn't put it on first thing Monday morning to whip yourself into a good enough mood to face the work day. That shit was depressing. Eventually, people got so sad that they were willing to latch onto the first thing that came along and promised to give them a reason to feel good. Ace of Base was one of the first groups to offer that, and people went for it in a huge way with no questions asked. It might seem like a minor thing, but it says a lot about our capacity to overlook very obviously hateful messages if it means we finally get something that we've been deprived of for a long time. Apparently, that's especially true if those messages arrive under the guise of something seemingly silly and unimportant. You know, the kind of thing you don't have to worry about. Darren Mc. Collester/Getty Images News/Getty Images"I'm harmless!"After all, it's not like this is secret information. That one of the founding members of the band was also in a Nazi band was information that could've been found. That there might have been something ugly at work in the meaning behind their songs doesn't take much effort to uncover. It's all pretty blatant imagery, but because it comes in the form of radio- friendly dance music, no one even considered examining it any further, not even after the news of the band's past Nazi ties became public knowledge. In this case, the only real consequence was that nine million Americans unknowingly paid money for an album full of Nazi dance tracks. It's hard to tell how much worse it could be if we let something like that happen again. I do have some idea, though, and it has as much to do with Rupert Murdoch as it does Donald Trump. In the interest of keeping this particular column under the 6,0. I'll stop here for now. Come back next week, though, and I'll tell you all about. Adam wants to talk to all of you on Twitter.
Fifteen minutes beneath 41-degree Fahrenheit water is a crippling experience, and possibly death sentence for a two-year-old. These are just not conditions that. Go be his friend there @adamtodbrown. Nazism in America isn't the most palatable thought. However, there are some compelling cases to be made for why it could happen in 5 Reasons You're Picturing Nazis Wrong. And if doesn't happen in America, then don't count out Hitler- crazed Asia, as evidenced in 4 Baffling Ways The Continent Of Asia Loves Hitler. Subscribe to our You. Tube channel to see why all this Nazi stuff happened in the first place in How Not To Go Back In Time To Kill Hitler, and watch other videos you won't see on the site! Also, follow us on Facebook, because Nazis hate Cracked, and we can't let the Nazis win.
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