Fire This Asshole

Drive Time, Wokism

Last Sunday was the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, whereby car enthusiasts converge on the famed golf course and drool over the various examples of automotive gorgeousity strewn around like a rich man’s carelessly-scattered diamonds on green velvet.

Here are a couple other examples:

Iso Rivolta:

Ferrari Pininfarina:

And all was well in the land, until this little Wokist twerp got in on the act:

Let’s get two things cleared up before we continue. The first is that while the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is certainly far from the most momentous cultural event of the year, it is the most prestigious car show anywhere in the world. For a few days in late summer, the 18th fairway at the Pebble Beach golf course is the very highest point for any rich person who covets vintage cars, and the highest honor for any person working in the business of restoring classics.
The second is that Mercedes was not just a car company that was busy at work doing normal car stuff during the time in which Nazis were in power in Germany. Mercedes was an early and direct supporter of Adolf Hitler long before he took power, helping him out while he was still an outsider figure in Bavarian politics. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he got picked up in a Mercedes-Benz.

Ergo, says this girlyman, we should not have the 540K as the winner because it was driven by Nazis.  Here’s the car in question:

And then this:

This is exactly how this car is seen in this world of the mega-rich: an encapsulation of “the optimistic mood” of Germany in 1934. Let us ask: for whom was this an optimistic time, and who is the kind of person who looks back on that time now, remembering its icons for their … optimism? Rich people, that’s who.

Wow… wealth envy and oh-so laudable “anti-Nazi” sentiment all wrapped up in a neat little bundle.  Read the whole thing to get the RCOB that Longtime Reader Ken S. warned me I’d get, when he sent it to me yesterday.  And I did.

Even better is that the writer suffers from the usual hypocrisy of his ilk, in that he owns a… Volkswagen Beetle, surely the most Hitlerish of all German cars of the 1930s.

So just for the hell of it, feast your eyes on a couple other examples of this eeeevil car:

And to hell with this wokist revisionism.  Let’s just enjoy the automotive excellence.

Pity, though:  I used to enjoy reading Jalopnik.

16 comments

  1. So 97 years ago, whomever was running Mercedes-Benz allegedly supported Hitler. Oh and who alive today is “remembering” (author’s word, not mine) Germany in 1934?

  2. …. and that example is not even the best 540K. Here’s a link to the Count Trossi SSK.

    https://tcct.com/news/2020/11/the-mystery-of-the-mercedes-benz-ssk-count-trossi/

    Trossi was an SS Officer. Just because some cars were once owned by some EEEEvil Dictator does not make them bad cars. There are lots of examples of people with bottomless bank accounts that support or supported exotic car builders. Drug dealers who supported IMSA racing in the 70’s. Middle eastern princes who currently support Supercar Builders. Who else car afford them? I don’t care who originally owned them or supplies the $ , I’m glad they exist.

    2. So, the cars are evil because they were owned by evil people.
      I suppose so long as we blame firearms for the misdeeds of the owner/users, it is not that strange to do the same with cars. Do we do the same with horses? Did the horses the James Gang, the Younger Gang, and the Dalton Gang used to rob banks get tracked down later and turned into dog food?

  3. Every once in a while, I think the US would be better off if it were run by real, 1930’s/1940’s Nazis. I’m pretty convinced Sharia law would be an improvement.

    1. That might be a tad extreme, Sykes. I’d lean more towards a King Edward I-type…

    3. National Socialists are still Socialists, with all the lack of economic acumen that that implies.

      They were massively anti-capitalist, anti-Christian (not “atheist”, anti-), and were perfectly willing to groups of people they disliked into mass graves.

      Their nationalism was based on blood and soil–which is to say race.

      They had no redeeming features.

      So no.

  4. The shopworn quote comes to mind, “They were against bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”

    1. H.L. Mencken —
      ‘Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’

  5. One group sees the vehicle as a beautiful example of engineering and design, mixed with a bit of awareness of history (“That is a beautiful car” or “That 1911 is just a classic”).
    The other group will see it as the personification of the not-good and assign it the moral equivalence of the undesired political/social group (“A Nazi drove it, so it must be destroyed” or “The gun is evil, ignore the person holding it”). Based on this, I await the breathless declaration that all of the WWII aircraft and other historical artifacts should all be destroyed so as to prevent fascism from ever intrude on their group consciousness again… or at least until the next morning and they find something else to focus on.
    I stopped reading Jalopnik and switched to thedrive.com.

  6. Identification help:
    .
    In the second PBCdE photograph, what is the roadster at the right, ‘447’ on the door and ‘290’ on the fender?

    1. I believe it is an early Ferrari MM and could be the car that Kirk Douglas drove in “The Racers”.

  7. Big fucking yawn. Everything’s racist & everyone’s a nazi. If douchey McDoucheface wants to look at a genuine automotive Hitler fan, he should start with Henry Ford. Don’t know if Ford ever publicly stroked Hitler, but he was celebrated by Adolf & Co, who eagerly translated his “the joooos!!!!” diatribes for domestic consumption.

  8. It’s interesting that the article author, and most of the commenters, associate the Nazis with the rich. Nope. They were, let’s say, downmarket; far more so than the middle-class led Russian Bolsheviks. Led by a former corporal, there was only one Doctor (Goebbels) among the leadership in a nation full of doctorates. The initial thing they had against the Jews was that the big international bankers who, essentially, foreclosed on Germany when it became apparent they were going to lose WW1 … were Jewish.

    Yes, they got the German industrial leadership onside but that had a lot more to do with big business picking up Nazi ideas than the other way around.

    Some of this (granted, not all) may sound familiar …

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