Led by Glenn Beck -- who was once condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for saying Al Gore used "the same tactic" as Adolf Hitler -- Fox News personalities have frequently invoked Nazi Germany in their political commentary, often comparing progressives to Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the Nazi "brownshirts."...

Beck: Obama advisers show "the kind of thinking that ... eventually led to the Holocaust." On his October 5 radio show, Beck said that statements by Obama advisers John Holdren, Ezekiel Emanuel and Cass Sunstein indicate "the kind of thinking that led to ... the extermination program that eventually led to the Holocaust."

Beck likened reporting about him to "what Goebbels did." Complaining on the August 27 edition of his radio show that ABC reported a statement by Beck that blacks don't own Martin Luther King without also noting that he also said whites don't own Abraham Lincoln, Beck said: "You know what? I'm gonna get a lot of heat for this, but stand in line. That's what [Nazi propagandist Joseph] Goebbels did. That's what Goebbels did. The truth didn't matter."

Beck equates children singing about Obama with "Hitler Youth." On the June 17 edition of his radio show, Beck said that children singing about Obama was "the playbook of the progressives from ... the former regime in Germany, the Third Reich." Beck added, "This is Hitler Youth."...

[Steven Aftergood is a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.]

It is to be expected that national intelligence services will sometimes fail to identify and discover a threat to the nation in a timely fashion. But when intelligence warns of a threat that isn’t really there, and then nations go to war to meet the phantom threat — that is a serious, confounding and deeply disturbing problem.

But in a nutshell, that is the story of the war in Iraq, in which the U.S. and its allies attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq because of the supposedly imminent threat posed by Saddam’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction — a threat that proved illusory.

A new book published in the United Kingdom called “Failing Intelligence” provides a remarkable account of the British experience of how intelligence on the Iraqi WMD program was shaped and packaged to support the decision to go to war in Iraq. The book’s author, Brian Jones, was the chief specialist in weapons of mass destruction on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff. He was also a skeptic of the stronger claims made about the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. The book documents his mostly unsuccessful attempts to register that skepticism, to moderate the extreme claims made by government officials, and later to hold those officials accountable for their actions.

He provides a detailed first-hand account of how his efforts were consistently deflected in the rush to war, and how intelligence declined into propaganda. It’s a grim but instructive case study in the overlapping failure of intelligence gathering, intelligence production, and intelligence oversight.

The National Security Archive has recently published three richly informative collections of declassified U.S. and British government documents on the lead-up to the Iraq war (including several key documents cited or relied upon by Brian Jones).

“The more deeply the processes of creating the government reports on the alleged Iraqi threat are reconstructed — on both sides of the Atlantic — the more their products are revealed as explicitly aimed at building a basis for war,” wrote John Prados of the National Security Archive and journalist Christopher Ames in an analysis of the documents.

“In the light of a decision process in which no serious consideration was given to any course other than war, the question of whether American and British leaders set out to wage aggressive war has to be squarely faced,” they wrote.

By the end of World War II, nearly 4,000 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses had been built, most of them to rain bombs on targets across the Pacific Theater. Today, there's only one B-29 still flying, and she's nicknamed "Fifi."

At a time when most vintage warplanes have retired to a quiet life on display in drafty museums, 65-year-old Fifi is embarking on a new mission: giving rides to paying enthusiasts and once again making the air-show rounds, which occasionally feature a simulated atomic-bomb attack.

Fifi's current assignment follows a long journey back from near obsolescence. To make her return to the skies, she required a four-year, multimillion dollar engine overhaul, and her owners had to navigate through a protracted spat with the Federal Aviation Administration for renewed clearance to fly.

In its prime, the B-29 was the most sophisticated heavy bomber ever developed. Boasting a pressurized cabin and automated gun systems, the four-engine propeller plane could traverse long distances at high altitudes—evading enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire—to drop thousands of pounds of high explosives on Japan. The war's most famous B-29, the "Enola Gay," dropped the atomic bomb above Hiroshima.

From the start, the bombers were unreliable and difficult to maintain. They had powerful-but-finicky engines that were prone to spontaneous combustion. When the war was over, variants of the B-29 remained in service until the 1960s, but the Air Force largely discarded the noisy gas guzzlers.

Fifi didn't see combat. Built just weeks before Tokyo's surrender in August 1945, she served stateside with the Air Force until 1954, when she was lent to the Navy, transferred to a facility in California's Mojave Desert, and promptly forgotten....

The Avtomat Kalashnikova, C.J. Chivers writes in The Gun, is "the world's most widely recognized weapon, one of the world's most recognizable objects." The AK-47 and its descendants have defined and exacerbated half a century of guerrilla conflict, terrorism, and crime; it is the most abundant firearm in the world, with as many as 100 million Kalashnikovs in circulation, 10 times more than any other rifle.

Chivers, a Marine Corps veteran and senior writer at the New York Times, has spent nearly a decade mapping the spread of the Kalashnikov and untangling its history, from the dusty government archives of the former Soviet Union to the battlefields of Afghanistan. The Gun, his history of the weapon, was published this week. He spoke via email with FP's Charles Homans about the AK-47's uncertain origins, how it has transformed modern warfare, and why the age of the Kalashnikov won't end anytime soon.

Foreign Policy: The Soviet Union's atomic bomb and the Kalashnikov both date from the same year, and you suggest that the United States made a critical error in obsessing over the former while ignoring the latter. But is there anything the United States could have done to limit the spread and influence of the AK-47?

C.J. Chivers: The United States is not responsible for the Kalashnikov's mass production or stockpiling, and during the Cold War it could have done nothing to stop these things from occurring. Later, while it certainly would have been helpful, in the security sense, if it had done more to contain the spread of weapons and ammunition that have rushed out of post-Cold War stockpiles, it might be useful to ask this question of China and Russia -- the two main Kalashnikov producers, who have shown little interest in undoing the effects of their exported rifles. That said, there are many ways to contain the ongoing proliferation, and rather than pursue them with any real determination, the United States has instead become the largest known purchaser of Kalashnikovs, which it has reissued in Iraq and Afghanistan with scant accountability. One thing about the AK-47 story is that almost no one looks good in it....

Fighter planes flown by the nation's first African-American military aviators are hard to find.
That's why officials at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum jumped at the chance to buy one.

The museum spent a year raising the funds to pay for a World War II T-6 training plane — known as the "pilot maker" — once used by the celebrated all-black aviation unit.

The $200,000 deal was finalized in late September.
One other such plane exists that was flown by the Tuskegee Airmen, said Brian Smith, the museum's president. "It's a national treasure."

The T-6 will be housed at Detroit City Airport and used for youth training and air show demonstrations.
The vintage aircraft was produced at North American Aviation's Dallas factory, delivered in 1943 to Tuskegee Army Airfield in Alabama and used until 1945.
The same Dallas factory also made the P-51, a fighter plane flown by the African-American war pilots to escort bombers.

Though it's unclear what happened to the T-6 from 1946 to 1950, it was returned to the factory in 1951 to be reconditioned.

The seller is the daughter of a former Air Force colonel who purchased the plane in the early 1990s.
Lucinda Novotny said her father, Rayvon Burleson, was unaware of the plane's historical value....

A famous 1914 photo showing a young Adolf Hitler in the thick of the crowd at a First World War rally – which the Nazis later used as a propaganda picture – was probably faked, German media said Thursday.

Düsseldorf historian Gerd Krumeich has studied the picture and its history and concluded that Hitler was superimposed to lend credibility to the image of the Nazi leader as a patriot and a man of the people, daily Die Welt reported Thursday.

The photo was taken by Munich photographer Heinrich Hoffmann at a rally in support of war against the allies in Munich’s Odeonplatz on August 2, 1914.

But it was not until March 12, 1932 that it was published in the Nazi party newspaper the Illustrierte Beobachter, or "Illustrated Observer," the day before the presidential election, after Hitler’s opponents had attacked Hitler over his flight from military service in Austria-Hungary and questioned his patriotism.

The caption on the picture read: “Adolf Hitler, the German patriot … in the middle of the crowd stands with blazing eyes – Adolf Hitler.”

The photo went on to become a favourite Nazi propaganda picture, appearing with captions such as “Adolf Hitler: a man of the people.”...

If one is interested in experiencing how people lived in Anglo-Saxon England, a trip to Lincolnshire might offer some unique insights. In the village of East Firsby a reconstruction of the 7th-century home has been built by Steven and Jude Jones. Based on archaeological evidence and built with traditional tools, Saxonhouse is an attempt to show how ordinary people lived and worked during the Early Middle Ages.

Saxonhouse is open to visitors, where Steven and Jude, both teachers, talk about daily medieval life as well as the history of England during the Middle Ages. They appear in costume and have a wide assortment of equipment and goods replicated from the Anglo-Saxon and Viking periods....

Adolf Hitler seems to be back in town, with an extremely nervous Germany now preparing to stage the first exhibition dedicated to the Nazi leader this week at Berlin's German Historical Museum with the intention to break taboos that have been in practice since the Fuhrer killed himself in his Berlin bunker in 1945.

According to News.com.au, since WWII, a number of museums have displayed works on Nazi crimes, the Holocaust, slave labour, the murdering doctors, cruel judges and massacring soldiers, all of which faced protests....

Pornography is often portrayed as one of the ills of today's society, evidence of modern moral decay brought to you by video cameras and broadband access.

As it turns out, modern times have got nothing on the past. Pornography existed long before video or even photography, and many researchers think evolution predisposed humans for visual arousal (It's a lot easier to pass on your genes if the sight of other naked humans turns you on, after all)....

By that standard, the first known erotic representations of humans might not be porn, in the traditional sense, at all. As early as 30,000 years ago, Paleolithic people were carving large-breasted, thick-thighed figurines of pregnant women out of stone and wood. Archaeologists doubt these "Venus figurines" were intended for sexual arousal. More likely, the figurines were religious icons or fertility symbols.

Fast-forwarding through history, the ancient Greeks and Romans created public sculptures and frescos depicting homosexuality, threesomes, fellatio and cunnilingus. In India during the second century, the Kama Sutra was half sex-manual, half relationship-handbook. The Moche people of ancient Peru painted sexual scenes on ceramic pottery, while the aristocracy in 16th century Japan was fond of erotic woodblock prints....