memes

I'm pretty sure Elon musk looks up to Von Braun for all the wrong reasons.

At least Von Braun actually did his own sciencing instead of, I dunno, purchasing a "founder" title after the fact. Still a nazi tho.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

[Edit: Also, I want to say, For All Mankind is a great show to watch, its an alt-history on what if the USSR won the race to the moon, and the space race never ended. In the show, Von Braun was director of NASA, and it's from this tv series that I learn of Von Braun (and of Tom Lehrer).]

For those interested in learning about Operation Paperclip:

Although he officially sanctioned the operation, President Harry Truman forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members or active Nazi supporters. Nevertheless, officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner to the CIA—bypassed this directive by eliminating or whitewashing incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.

Although defenders of the clandestine operation argue that the balance of power could have easily shifted to the Soviet Union during the Cold War if these Nazi scientists were not brought to the United States, opponents point to the ethical cost of ignoring their abhorrent war crimes without punishment or accountability.^[[1] https://www.history.com/news/what-was-operation-paperclip]

I just posted a video of Annie Jacobsen talking about Nuclear War, she also wrote a book about Operation Paperclip.^[[2] https://lemmy.world/post/24646542]

In the days and weeks after Germany’s surrender, American troops combed the European countryside in search of hidden caches of weaponry to collect. They came across facets of the Nazi war machine that the top brass were shocked to see, writer Annie Jacobsen told NPR’s All Things Considered in 2014. Jacobson wrote about both the mission and the scientists in her book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America.

“One example was they had no idea that Hitler had created this whole arsenal of nerve agents,” Jacobsen says. “They had no idea that Hitler was working on a bubonic plague weapon. That is really where Paperclip began, which was suddenly the Pentagon realizing, ‘Wait a minute, we need these weapons for ourselves.’"^[[3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-us-government-brought-nazi-scientists-america-after-world-war-ii-180961110/]

Wernher von Brown-noser

Every single time this gets mentioned, I feel a need to mention the great Tom Lehrer.

We all burn together when we burn