London Riots - OR - What's your favourite thing about Hitler?

[Ali]

what I am trying to do is have historical perspective and neutrality on the subject, instead of jumping on the global "oh the poor Jews" -bandwagon.

Bandwagon? There's no bandwagon.

There were many, many trains. Overcrowded, unheated trains without food, water or sanitation.

Trains carrying millions of adults and children to labour camps where they were enslaved and murdered.

We can be objective and look at the victims of Allied attacks, such as Dresden or Hiroshima. But those comparisons diminish neither the intensity of human suffering, nor the compassion we must feel towards the victims.

However, since the war went the way it did, the event we have labelled "the Holocaust" is seen in a purely negative light.

Can you, in all sincerity, see the Holocaust in anything other than a negative light?

Bearing in mind that from a neutral perspective, killing Jews made no tactical sense because the German war effort was built on Jewish slave labour?

[NsMn]

There were other people murdered in the camps, you see. Nobody seems to care about them.

Also, nobody seems to care about this going way, waayyyy off topic.

[Ali]

Did you read my post?

those comparisons diminish neither the intensity of human suffering, nor the compassion we must feel towards the victims.

And I'll edit the topic name...

[NsMn]

Nice name. Didn't know you guys booked morality and the ability to reject Nazism.

[InCreator]

So, politics & region thread this summer it more fun than earlier ones. With less religion.

As for camps, I've been reading up on Gulags alot lately... Seems that camps were just global fashion at this era and "everybody" did it.
Just with less rooms connected to diesel engines and more slave labor. I personally am not really sure what's more humanly: Making prisoners lay thousands of kilometres of railroads and shipping canals with minimum food, tools and clothing, gassing and cremating them, or just burning their shadows into pavement with nuclear bomb... at least first two sound like there's a slight chance of escape or resistance...

Seems that nobody was really a good guy in WWII, nazi or not. One is sure, all superpowers did major research in "how to eliminate masses of people" and got really good results.
I just hope we don't need fruits of this science, ever, although it has evolved into weapons of white phosporous, thermobaric munition and napalm and still going worse.

Maybe so-called "superpowers" should be dismantled like Germany was after war, because all of them continously do crazy inhumane shit, like cropdusting fields of Vietnam with Agent Orange or using gas shells in Grozny or poisoning drinking water in Afghanistan (USSR 1980's). Big countries = evil, no matter what's the leading ideology. To get back on topic #2, I'm trying to say that ultranationalist Germany wasn't much worse than capitalist America or socialist USSR actually, so I don't think ideology is what's to blame.

[Ali]

I certainly agree with most of that.

For me, allied atrocities do not exonerate the Nazis, they just make the Allies guilty as well. And I think it's right to be suspicious of the inclination to play down the Nazi's crimes.

But it is very wrong to imagine that a Nazi victory would have looked the same as an Allied victory. If fascism had triumphed over western democracy (with all its failings) then Europe would be unrecognisably different.

Nice name. Didn't know you guys booked morality and the ability to reject Nazism.

I don't know what your words mean.

[ddq]

In the immortal words of Edwin Starr:
WAR! Huh, good god ya'll, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? Absolutely nothin', say it again.

[WHAM]

"What this place needs is a good WAR!"
(can't remember who said that, I think it was an actor in some play or movie, but heck, it's accurate!)

EDIT:

Also "The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
- Me and some other guy from the past

[Ali]

Also "The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."

Proof, if proof were needed, that Hitler was a loser.

[RickJ]

We can be objective and look at the victims of Allied attacks, such as Dresden or Hiroshima.

So what your saying is that even though someone is try to kill you, you should not be allowed to fight back in unfair ways?   Bah, foolish and naive notion;  aggressors got what they deserve IMHO.

Maybe so-called "superpowers" should be dismantled like Germany was after war, because all of them continously do crazy inhumane shit, like cropdusting fields of Vietnam with Agent Orange or using gas shells in Grozny or poisoning drinking water in Afghanistan (USSR 1980's). Big countries = evil, no matter what's the leading ideology.

Except that the US and USSR kept those evil Europeans in line for the past 60 years.  I think that's the longest they went without causing wars.   

Btw,  Agent orange was dumped on jungle areas to make the leaves fall off trees so that they could see where the enemy was hiding.

[Ali]

So you'd call the children who died in the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo "aggressors"?

I think that is foolish. Bah!

[RickJ]

Yes they were; the country of Japan and the country off Germany were aggressor nations.  The women and children of those countries were participants and would have been the benefactors of victory.    They were  important to the Japanese and German soldiers and knowing that they were putting their families and homeland at risk would necessarily have a negative impact their enthusiasm for war.

Yes, I do think it's foolish and naive to believe that any country would not do anything it could to survive.  You may wish it wasn't so but that won't change reality. 

[Ali]

You're telling me an German infant in a cot was an active and morally culpable participant in the war effort?

The wishful thinking is yours.

[Snarky]

As for camps, I've been reading up on Gulags alot lately... Seems that camps were just global fashion at this era and "everybody" did it.

You're throwing a lot of very different things together under the word "camps", there. Nazi death camps, gulags where millions died of slave labor, and prison camps ranging from murderous to relatively humane (including the internment camps for Japanese Americans). "Everyone" did not have camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka. They simply didn't.

Just with less rooms connected to diesel engines and more slave labor. I personally am not really sure what's more humanly: Making prisoners lay thousands of kilometres of railroads and shipping canals with minimum food, tools and clothing, gassing and cremating them, or just burning their shadows into pavement with nuclear bomb... at least first two sound like there's a slight chance of escape or resistance...

It's certainly possible to condemn certain US/UK actions in the war, like the nuclear bombs, the firebombing of Tokyo, the bombing of Dresden, occasional killings of POWs, etc. But the scale of these (arguable) war crimes are nowhere near German, Japanese and Soviet atrocities, and they had a military rationale beyond just killing for the sake of killing. In terms of WWII atrocities, they belong more with the London Blitz and Katyn massacre than with the Holocaust.

Seems that nobody was really a good guy in WWII, nazi or not.  ... I'm trying to say that ultranationalist Germany wasn't much worse than capitalist America or socialist USSR actually, so I don't think ideology is what's to blame.

If the US was no better than Nazi Germany, why were all the Nazi-occupied countries in Europe so thrilled to be liberated by the Allies? And if it was no better than the Soviet Union, why were German soldiers so desperate to capitulate to American and British forces rather than to Russians?

The truth of the matter is simply that in the 1930s and 40s, the regimes of Nazi Germany & Imperialist Japan (as well as some of their smaller allies) and Stalinist Russia were much crueler than any other significant world powers, and guilty of many more horrific atrocities.

Not at all incidentally, all of these were totalitarian states with fanatical ideologies of devotion to the state and leader, and nationalist/imperialist in actual policy. Ideology is very much to blame.

[RickJ]

You're telling me an German infant in a cot was an active and morally culpable participant in the war effort?

Yes, because his daddy was enthusiastically off to war knowing that wife and baby were safe and secure at home.   

[Snarky]

Yes they were; the country of Japan and the country off Germany were aggressor nations.  The women and children of those countries were participants and would have been the benefactors of victory.    They were  important to the Japanese and German soldiers and knowing that they were putting their families and homeland at risk would necessarily have a negative impact their enthusiasm for war.

Yes, I do think it's foolish and naive to believe that any country would not do anything it could to survive.  You may wish it wasn't so but that won't change reality. 

So what your saying is that even though someone is try to kill you, you should not be allowed to fight back in unfair ways?   Bah, foolish and naive notion;  aggressors got what they deserve IMHO.

Looking at the calendar, it's hard not to notice that this is exactly the kind of thinking that justifies terrorist attacks on the US in the minds of Al Qaeda. (And their conviction that Americans are "aggressors" against Islam and Muslim nations is not completely groundless.)

[NsMn]

You're telling me an German infant in a cot was an active and morally culpable participant in the war effort?

Yes, because his daddy was enthusiastically off to war knowing that wife and baby were safe and secure at home.   

This is an interesting thought. Too bad it doesn't have anything to do with the goals of the bombings of Germany and Japan. Their declared goal was not "fighting back"; It was nothing but "revenge" against a declared "people of murderers". Quite a racist theory if you ask me.

[Calin Leafshade]

Youre going to have to provide a source for that "people of murderers" quote.

The only reference I can find is one made by a German nazi (Julius Streicher) speaking about the jews. which is kind of the opposite of what youre saying.

[Tuomas]

You're telling me an German infant in a cot was an active and morally culpable participant in the war effort?

Yes, because his daddy was enthusiastically off to war knowing that wife and baby were safe and secure at home.   

So in the very sense all of the children in the US were also responsible of dropping the bomb and all the people in Germany who hated the Nazis (yes, believe me, there were some), were all responsible of the genosides? That's just stupid. Active and culpable doesn't mean someone who takes a vacation in Hawaii while Al Qaida flies planes into WTC towers. But according to you logics, these people are the ones, that are part of a nation that gives the opponent a reason to act as they do. If it were so, we'd all be responsible of everything everywhere.

[NsMn]

Youre going to have to provide a source for that "people of murderers" quote.

The only reference I can find is one made by a German nazi (Julius Streicher) speaking about the jews. which is kind of the opposite of what youre saying.

Well, I did not want to reference Streicher, but I did not draw that connection for nothing.