DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: fatman on June 24, 2008, 06:58:45 PM
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An interesting article, not sure if I buy into it but definitely interesting.
Opinion
Pat Buchanan
Was the Holocaust Inevitable?Fri Jun 20, 3:00 AM ET
"What Would Winston Do?"
So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all.
Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power.
That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks."
Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The Brits kicked away their empire. Through colossal blunders, Britain twice declared war on a Germany that had not attacked her and did not want war with her, fought for 10 bloody years and lost it all.
Unable to face the truth, Hitchens seeks solace in old myths.
We had to stop Prussian militarism in 1914, says Hitchens. "The Kaiser's policy shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe."
Nonsense. If the Kaiser were looking for a war he would have found it. But in 1914, he had been in power for 25 years, was deep into middle age but had never fought a war nor seen a battle.
From Waterloo to World War I, Prussia fought three wars, all in one seven-year period, 1864 to 1871. Out of these wars, she acquired two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, and two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. By 1914, Germany had not fought a war in two generations.
Does that sound like a nation out to conquer the world?
As for the Kaiser's bellicose support for the Boers, his igniting the Agadir crisis in 1905, his building of a great fleet, his seeking of colonies in Africa, he was only aping the British, whose approbation and friendship he desperately sought all his life and was ever denied.
In every crisis the Kaiser blundered into, including his foolish "blank cheque" to Austria after Serb assassins murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, the Kaiser backed down or was trying to back away when war erupted.
Even Churchill, who before 1914 was charging the Kaiser with seeking "the dominion of the world," conceded, "History should ... acquit William II of having plotted and planned the World War."
What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust.
Yet consider. Before Britain declared war on him, Hitler never demanded return of any lands lost at Versailles to the West. Northern Schleswig had gone to Denmark in 1919, Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine to France.
Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain ? a war he never wanted.
If Hitler were out to conquer the world, why did he not build a great fleet? Why did he not demand the French fleet when France surrendered? Germany had to give up its High Seas Fleet in 1918.
Why did he build his own Maginot Line, the Western Wall, in the Rhineland, if he meant all along to invade France?
If he wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?
That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.
Hitchens mocks this view, invoking the Hitler-madman theory.
"Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime ... ?"
Christopher, Hitler invaded Russia on June 22.
The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.
Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe.
The British Empire fought, bled and died, and made Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. No wonder Winston Churchill was so melancholy in old age. No wonder Christopher rails against the book. As T.S. Eliot observed, "Mankind cannot bear much reality."
Link (http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20080620/cm_uc_crpbux/op_336442;_ylt=AkE4GDF6e6Xx4AeHj7NoLl39wxIF)
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If Hitler were out to conquer the world, why did he not build a great fleet? Why did he not demand the French fleet when France surrendered? Germany had to give up its High Seas Fleet in 1918.
Because The British sank it with air raids.
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Hitler did threaten: "if the international financial Jewry within and outside Europe should succeed once more in dragging the nations into a war, the result will be, not the Bolshevization of the world and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
I think war gave Hitler the cover he needed to carry out the Holocaust, and I believe it's at least possible that Buchanan is right, "No war, no Holocaust." Britain and France did not go to war to prevent the Holocaust or save the Jews or destroy fascism. They had their own reasons, largely connected with their desire to protect their own Empires, and I'm very grateful to Professor R. Overy's book "The Origins of the Second World War," for explaining all this to me. For most of my life, I had wondered why DID France and Britain go to war, and Prof. Overy answers this very competently and convincingly.
Still and all there is no way to under-estimate the evil of Adolf Hitler. This guy was a moral monster, to Aryan Germans who opposed him no less than to Jews, Gipsies and other so-called "untermenschen." Even without a war and a Holocaust, Hitler was capable of immeasurable evil, and who is to say that another way would not have been found for him to commit deeds as evil as the Holocaust but in some other venue, had Britain and France not decided to challenge him on the invasion of Poland.
I also don't agree with Buchanan that the Holocaust only began after the Wannsee Conference. Wikipedia has an excellent article on the Holocaust, from which it is perfectly clear that the Holocaust was well underway by the end of 1941 before the Wannsee Conference began, only the Germans were limited by their killing methods (mass shootings and Vernichtung durch Arbeit or Anihilation Through Work) in which Jewish slave labour was killed by a combination of endless back-breaking labour, starvation, exposure to the elements, torture, beatings and deprivation. Both the mass shootings and the Vernichtung durch Arbeit claimed hundreds of thousands of victims - - the only solid accomplishment of the Wannsee Conference was that it ended a dispute between those who wanted the Jews kept alive as a source of slave labour and those who wanted to kill them off as fast as possible. The debate was resolved in favour of the latter position and soon thereafter the use of Zyklon B gas in new, massive gas chambers replaced the older and less efficient killing methods.
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Is it no wonder certain contingents of the left moronically keep trying to imply some twisted thought process that Bush = Hitler (or a moronic version of such)
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The similarities between Bush and Hitler are all too obvious. The "equals" sign is misleading, because even after allowing for Bush's obvious inferiority to Hitler in terms of battlefield courage, verbal and oratorical skills, writing skills, artistic skills, organizational skills, resourcefulness etc., I don't say that there is a precise correspondence between the two, only that Bush is a lot LIKE Hitler, not that he is the same as Hitler, as the "equals" sign would seem to imply.
The similarities are:
- readiness to engage in wars of unprovoked aggression based on pretexts that are pure fiction
- readiness to use torture to extract information from enemies, or just as punishment
- demonization of entire groups of human beings with assigned motivations that are patently absurd and ridiculous (the "evil" Jews plotting to take over the world, the "evil" "militant" Muslims plotting to destroy "the West" because "they hate us for our freedoms")
- unrestrained war on civilian populations to achieve stated geopolitical objectives
- creation or exploitation of random terroristic attacks to justify a program of ever-increasing erosion of basic civil and human rights (the Reichstag Fire, the Sept. 11 attacks)
- elevation of the executive branch over the other two branches (the "Fuhrer principle," the "Imperial Presidency")
- unrestrained militarism, glorification of war and violence as the highest calling in the nation.
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Thanks for validating my point regarding the twisted thought process, Tee
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My pleasure, sirs. Sorry I forgot to make my usual concession that Bush would likely be more fun to hang out with. Never meant to imply that he was inferior to Hitler in EVERY respect.
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Hitler was an actual leader. People followed him and his ideas, not his party.
Juniorbush is a second-rate flunky the oligarchy hired to do their bidding because to a man, they are all too utterly despicable to get anyone to follow them. Observe how no one likes Cheney, and after all, Wyoming elected him to the House several times, so he is about as agreeable a clown as they have.
Juniorbush has never had a single original idea.
That said, we are lucky that Juniorbush is NOT another Hitler.
Some poisons kill, others just give you the trots. Hitler was more like the former, Juniorbush the latter.
WWI was entirely avoidable, and we'd all have been better off if everyone had just let the Austrians clobber the Serbs and forgotten about it. The US had no business entering WWI, either.
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That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
As I recall, the trains didn't have to roll... the Jews (and others) were confined to ghettoes (such as in Warsaw). There they could be robbed of all their valuables, used for forced labor, starved and killed off in other ways. Seems the Germans had a good start before the trains started rolling.
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Morality ? Trotskyite vs. Christian
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Did Hitler's crimes justify the Allies' terror-bombing of Germany?
Indeed they did, answers Christopher Hitchens in his Newsweek response to my new book, "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War": "The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities."
Atheist, Trotskyite and newborn neocon, Hitchens embraces the morality of lex talionis: an eye for an eye. If Germans murdered women and children, the British were morally justified in killing German women and children.
According to British historians, however, Churchill ordered the initial bombing of German cities on his first day in office, the very first day of the Battle of France, on May 10, 1940.
After the fall of France, Churchill wrote Lord Beaverbrook, minister of air production: "When I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path ... an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland."
"Exterminating attack," said Churchill. By late 1940, writes historian Paul Johnson, "British bombers were being used on a great and increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian population in their homes."
"The adoption of terror bombing was a measure of Britain's desperation," writes Johnson. "So far as air strategy was concerned," adds British historian A.J.P. Taylor, "the British outdid German frightfulness first in theory, later in practice, and a nation which claimed to be fighting for a moral cause gloried in the extent of its immoral acts."
The chronology is crucial to Hitchens' case.
Late 1940 was a full year before the mass deportations from the Polish ghettos to Treblinka and Sobibor began. Churchill had ordered the indiscriminate bombing of German cities and civilians before the Nazis had begun to execute the Final Solution.
By Hitchens' morality and logic, Germans at Nuremberg might have asserted a right to kill women and children because that is what the British were doing to their women and children.
After the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945, Churchill memoed his air chiefs: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed."
Churchill concedes here what the British had been about in Dresden.
Under Christian and just-war theory, the deliberate killing of civilians in wartime is forbidden. Nazis were hanged for such war crimes.
Did the Allies commit acts of war for which we hanged Germans?
When we recall that Josef Stalin's judges sat beside American and British judges at Nuremberg, and one of the prosecutors there was Andrei Vishinsky, chief prosecutor in Stalin's show trails, the answer has to be yes.
While Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were surely guilty of waging aggressive war in September 1939, Stalin and his comrades had joined the Nazis in the rape of Poland, and had raped Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well. Scores of thousands of civilians in the three Baltic countries were murdered.
Yet, at Nuremberg, Soviets sat in judgment of their Nazi accomplices, and had the temerity to accuse the Nazis of the Katyn Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps that the Soviets themselves had committed.
Americans fought alongside British soldiers in a just and moral war from 1941 to 1945. But we had as allies a Bolshevik monster whose hands dripped with the blood of millions of innocents murdered in peacetime. And to have Stalin's judges sit beside Americans at Nuremberg gave those trials an aspect of hypocrisy that can never be erased.
At Nuremberg, Adm. Erich Raeder was sentenced to prison for life for the invasion of neutral Norway. Yet Raeder's ships arrived 24 hours before British ships and marines of an operation championed by Winston Churchill.
The British had planned to violate Norwegian neutrality first and seize Norwegian ports to deny Germany access to the Swedish iron ore being transshipped through them. For succeeding where Churchill failed, Raeder was condemned as a war criminal and sent to prison.
The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal decided that at Nuremberg only the crimes of Axis powers would be prosecuted and that among those crimes would be a newly invented "crimes against humanity." This decree was issued Aug. 8, 1945, 48 hours after we dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and 24 hours before we dropped the second on Nagasaki.
We and the British judiciously decided not to prosecute the Nazis for the bombing of London and Coventry.
It was an understandable decision, and one that surely Gen. Curtis LeMay concurred in, as LeMay had boasted at war's end, "We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9?10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
After the war, a lone Senate voice arose to decry what was taking place at Nuremberg as "victor's justice." Ten years later, a young colleague would declare the late Robert A. Taft "A Profile in Courage" for having spoken up against ex post facto justice. The young senator was John F. Kennedy.
June 25, 2008
via LewRockwell.com
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Is it no wonder certain contingents of the left moronically keep trying to imply some twisted thought process that Bush = Hitler (or a moronic version of such)
I didn't notice anyone mention el Shrubbo in this thread until you did.
Guilty conscience?
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<<Seems the Germans had a good start before the trains started rolling.>>
Well, that was the whole point of the Wannsee Conference. What looked like a good start to some people was, in German eyes, clumsy and inefficient. The whole process had to be speeded up and, in effect, turned into an industry.
Bush's similarity to Hitler is not in his objectives, for Bush has no real ideology. He's smart enough to read Mein Kampf and even to "get" it, but he wouldn't bother, because he has no interest in ideas.
Bush like Hitler places no value on human lives, certainly not on foreign lives anyway, and will do or say anything, to get where he wants to go. The most notable similarity was in the almost eerie parallel between the use that Hitler made of the Reichstag Fire and the use that Bush made of 9-11. Other major similarities are the pre-fabricated "attack" made by "Poland" on Germany (the Germans dressed German convicts in Polish uniforms, shot them full of holes and dumped the bodies at the German frontier post that the "Poles" were said to have "attacked") and the totally phony "WMD" story concocted by the Bush administration to justify its own long-planned attack on Iraq.
I've wanted to get Buchanan's book ever since I read about it coming out. I wonder if he is going to explore the links between British, American and French capital and the Nazi Party during the late 1920s up to the late 1930s. In some ways I see the whole Nazi movement as analogous to the Taliban - - Western capital builds up a new movement that is going to be the nemesis of their nemesis, the Soviet Union, only the new nemesis develops its own ideas and agenda, which are not what its creators had in mind for it.
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Is it no wonder certain contingents of the left moronically keep trying to imply some twisted thought process that Bush = Hitler (or a moronic version of such)
I didn't notice anyone mention el Shrubbo in this thread until you did. Guilty conscience?
Naaaa, just llike to remind the audience of the Left's perpetual idiocy, in this matter
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Pat Buchanan is an Irishman, overdosed on Catholicism of the sort it would be hard to come by in the Aude Sod today. He hates the English and therefore likes the Germans in the way that a good Sinn Fein man would.
This is not to say that the Brits were not manipulative dorks. I fact, they were the inventors of manipulative dorkery, which is how they used every tool at their disposal, including priests, to infiltrate and thwart every Irish independence movement from Wolfe Tone on down.
But the fact that the Brits were acquisitive monopolists does not make Hitler a good guy. Hitler being an evil genius does not mean that there were a few international bankers who did not also profit from the instability of Germany after WWI, either, and some of them were even Jewish.
WWI was a useless war. Everyone would have been better off had they just let Austria wale on Serbia for a couple of months. How does the poem go,?
The Siege of Belgrade
AN Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade.
Cossack commanders cannonading come,
Dealing destruction's devastating doom.
Every endeavor engineers essay,
For fame, for fortune fighting - furious fray!
Generals 'gainst generals grapple - gracious God!
How honors Heaven heroic hardihood!
Infuriate, indiscrminate in ill,
Kindred kill kinsmen, kinsmen kindred kill.
Labor low levels longest, lofiest lines;
Men march 'mid mounds, 'mid moles, ' mid murderous mines;
Now noxious, noisey numbers nothing, naught
Of outward obstacles, opposing ought;
Poor patriots, partly purchased, partly pressed,
Quite quaking, quickly "Quarter! Quarter!" quest.
Reason returns, religious right redounds,
Suwarrow stops such sanguinary sounds.
Truce to thee, Turkey! Triumph to thy train,
Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine!
Vanish vain victory! vanish, victory vain!
Why wish we warfare? Wherefore welcome were
Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xavier? (ooh look! he mentions me!!!!)
Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell!
Zeus', Zarpater's, Zoroaster's zeal,
Attracting all, arms against acts appeal!
Alaric Alexander Watts
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<<Naaaa, just llike to remind the audience of the Left's perpetual idiocy, in this matter>>
Well, unfortunately, all you succeeded in doing was reminding us how blind the right wing is to the most obvious facts.
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"obvious facts" of course in this case being your perseverative OPINIONATED conclusions of Bush, MINUS any "actual facts". Loved the "unrestrained war on the civilian population" deductive garbage. Pricess is again validating the mutated thought process when it comes to Bush. BDS squared
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<<"obvious facts" of course in this case being your perseverative OPINIONATED conclusions of Bush, MINUS any "actual facts". >>
Well, the obvious facts are summed up here - - you may claim that some are mere conclusions, but those conclusions were exhaustively argued in this newsgroup and for each conclusion, ample facts (some admittedly circumstantial) were produced, in short, there's nothing in this list of Bush-Hitler similarities that is fanciful, imaginary or invented. There are very real and easily seen similarities which you may not wish (for obvious reasons) to recognize but which are nonetheless very real.
The similarities are:
- readiness to engage in wars of unprovoked aggression based on pretexts that are pure fiction
- readiness to use torture to extract information from enemies, or just as punishment
- demonization of entire groups of human beings with assigned motivations that are patently absurd and ridiculous (the "evil" Jews plotting to take over the world, the "evil" "militant" Muslims plotting to destroy "the West" because "they hate us for our freedoms")
- unrestrained war on civilian populations to achieve stated geopolitical objectives
- creation or exploitation of random terroristic attacks to justify a program of ever-increasing erosion of basic civil and human rights (the Reichstag Fire, the Sept. 11 attacks)
- elevation of the executive branch over the other two branches (the "Fuhrer principle," the "Imperial Presidency")
- unrestrained militarism, glorification of war and violence as the highest calling in the nation.
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<<"obvious facts" of course in this case being your perseverative OPINIONATED conclusions of Bush, MINUS any "actual facts". >>
Well, the obvious facts are summed up here - - you may claim that some are mere conclusions, but those conclusions were exhaustively argued in this newsgroup and for each conclusion, ample facts (some admittedly circumstantial) were produced, in short, there's nothing in this list of Bush-Hitler similarities that is fanciful, imaginary or invented.
The similarities (based on mass amount of BDS OPINION) are:
- readiness to engage in wars of unprovoked aggression based on pretexts that are pure fiction
"unprovoked aggression" and "fictional pretexts" would be the disqualifiers in that one
- readiness to use torture to extract information from enemies, or just as punishment
The implication of torture as supposedly equally applied by the SS of the past, and AlQeada of the present would be the mutation of that "conclusion"
- demonization of entire groups of human beings with assigned motivations that are patently absurd and ridiculous (the "evil" Jews plotting to take over the world, the "evil" "militant" Muslims plotting to destroy "the West" because "they hate us for our freedoms")
Use of "entire group" when we're only speaking of Islamofascists & militant Islam, which is a mere fraction of the "entire group" of Muslims, would be the disqualifier, in that one
- unrestrained war on civilian populations to achieve stated geopolitical objectives
Now you're just letting the BDS take full root. You do realize we have artillery shells? You do realize we have multiple MLRS? You do realize we have our own WMD's? Of course, but despite that none of them are emplyed, and the painstaking efforts we go to minimize civilian casualties, there you are, making moronoc statements as above as your supposed "conclusions"
- creation or exploitation of random terroristic attacks to justify a program of ever-increasing erosion of basic civil and human rights (the Reichstag Fire, the Sept. 11 attacks)
When you actually have some judicial decisions that back up that position, then you may have a leg to stand on
- elevation of the executive branch over the other two branches (the "Fuhrer principle," the "Imperial Presidency")
See, more of that twisted, mutated thought process. We still have 3 branches, that check each other. Your "imperial" opinion is pure AMBE
- unrestrained militarism, glorification of war and violence as the highest calling in the nation.
I hope you're really enjoying that stuff you must be smoking. "Unrestrained militarism"...."Glorification of war"....Good gravy, sounds like I'm at some Jane Fonda pot party. So much for the asanine notion that Bush is like Hitler
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Naaaa, just llike to remind the audience of the Left's perpetual idiocy, in this matter
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Ah, yes, the legendary Sirs snark.
Can't see why anyone would nominate you for moderator.
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Naaaa, just llike to remind the audience of the Left's perpetual idiocy, in this matter
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Ah, yes, the legendary Sirs snark.
So, in H's world, posing a truthful observation, as I see it, by members of the far left, is a "snark". Interesting
Can't see why anyone would nominate you for moderator.
Thanks for the pleasantries. You try and have a good day, H
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<<"unprovoked aggression" and "fictional pretexts" would be the disqualifiers in that one>>
Well, still waiting to hear what the "provocation" was. (Hint: fear that a country someday, somehow, might acquire weapons that could harm you does NOT constitute provocation.)
<<The implication of torture as supposedly equally applied by the SS of the past, and AlQeada of the present would be the mutation of that "conclusion">>
I didn't say that Bush was the only leader in world history to use torture. He's just the first American to do so. His use of the tactic is one of the many things that make him similar to Hitler.
<<Use of "entire group" when we're only speaking of Islamofascists & militant Islam, which is a mere fraction of the "entire group" of Muslims, would be the disqualifier, in that one>>
Hilarious. So he's narrowed it down to "militant Islamists" instead of all Muslims. The principle still works - - single out a large group of "others," give them a sinister bunch of motives and demonize. Anyone who's militant and Islamic - - say anyone violently opposed to the Jewish occupation of the West Bank - - is demonized and given motives ("Caliphate" "destroy the West" "hatred of our freedoms") that fit nicely into Hitler's motives ascribed to the Jews ("world domination" "pollution of the Aryan bloodstream" "gold")
<<You do realize we have artillery shells? You do realize we have multiple MLRS? You do realize we have our own WMD's? Of course, but despite that none of them are emplyed, and the painstaking efforts we go to minimize civilian casualties, there you are, making moronoc statements as above as your supposed "conclusions">>
Even more hilarious. Your "painstaking efforts" have so far resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the toll is rising daily. If those are "painstaking efforts" to avoid civilian casualties, I'd hate to be around when you decide to shoot at random.
<<When you actually have some judicial decisions that back up that position [that the Bush administration took advantage of the 9-11 attacks the same way that Hitler took advantage of the Reichstag Fire], then you may have a leg to stand on>>
Yeah, I'll wait till someone uses the courts to decide whether or not Bush was like Hitler. Then we'll have a judicial decision one way or the other. Till then nobody is allowed to find historical parallels for the actions of the Bush administration. Except anyone who wants to compare Bush not to Hitler but to Winston Churchill. For THAT comparison, you don't need any judicial decision.
-<<[elevation of the executive branch over the other two branches (the "Fuhrer principle," the "Imperial Presidency" is just more of that twisted, mutated thought process. We still have 3 branches, that check each other. Your "imperial" opinion is pure AMBE>>
Actually "Imperial Presidency" is just shorthand for Congressional abdication of Constitutional responsibility, and Presidential assumption thereof, as for example, Congress declining to use the war-making powers given to it by the Constitution and delegating instead to the President. Attaching "signing statements" to duly and properly enacted laws, in effect proclaiming that the President might legitimately decide not to enforce them. And deciding for himself what is or is not torture, thus bypassing the courts and the legislature. All well-documented AND all paralleled by Hitler's prior but similar actions.
<<unrestrained militarism, glorification of war and violence as the highest calling in the nation.>>
As in delivering his "Mission Accomplished" speech while prancing around in a flight suit on the deck of a carrier. As in delivering most of his speeches in front of friendly military audiences rather than unfriendly citizens.
<<I hope you're really enjoying that stuff you must be smoking. "Unrestrained militarism"...."Glorification of war"....Good gravy, sounds like I'm at some Jane Fonda pot party. >>
It must be some challenge, sirs, every time you hear some truth that you can't bear to listen to, to find some new way of denigrating it without taking on the impossible task of proving it wrong.
<< So much for the asanine notion that Bush is like Hitler>>
The only asinine notion I've seen around here is the absurd denial of the obvious truth that the two have much in common.
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Late 1940 was a full year before the mass deportations from the Polish ghettos to Treblinka and Sobibor began. Churchill had ordered the indiscriminate bombing of German cities and civilians before the Nazis had begun to execute the Final Solution.
Did Bombs fall first on Berlin or on London?
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<<Did Bombs fall first on Berlin or on London?>>
Guernica. Far as I'm aware, the first Nazi terror-bombing of civilian targets occurred in the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
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<<Did Bombs fall first on Berlin or on London?>>
Guernica. Far as I'm aware, the first Nazi terror-bombing of civilian targets occurred in the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
I think you are right , but Chirchill probly was not involved in that decision.
I beleive that Berlin was deliberately bombed the next day after London was.
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There was also the earlier Nazi terror-bombing of Rotterdam that killed about 900 Dutch civilians. By the time the British got around to bombing Berlin, the Nazis had committed enough atrocities to justify the RAF turning the whole fucking country into a parking lot, and throwing in some good firestorms for a bonus.
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There was also the earlier Nazi terror-bombing of Rotterdam that killed about 900 Dutch civilians. By the time the British got around to bombing Berlin, the Nazis had committed enough atrocities to justify the RAF turning the whole fucking country into a parking lot, and throwing in some good firestorms for a bonus.
Why would Nazi atrocities justify bombing German citizens?
By 1940 the British Empire had committed plenty of their own atrocities, but I don't think it would justify mass killing of British citizens anymore than Saddam's atrocities justify mass killing of Iraqis.
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Nothing really justifies atrocities.
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So, in H's world, posing a truthful observation, as I see it, by members of the far left, is a "snark". Interesting
When it has no relation to anything in the thread and is done simply to provoke others, yes.
And I had a lovely day. Yourself?
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There was also the earlier Nazi terror-bombing of Rotterdam that killed about 900 Dutch civilians. By the time the British got around to bombing Berlin, the Nazis had committed enough atrocities to justify the RAF turning the whole fucking country into a parking lot, and throwing in some good firestorms for a bonus.
For a little while there was a tacit mutual restraint, and Germany and England bombed each others military targets , then the bombing of Berlin followed the bombing of London by a day.
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<<Why would Nazi atrocities justify bombing German citizens?>>
Because lots of them were also Nazis. Even the kids. And because the crimes of the Nazis are primarily crimes against women and children, so you get back at the perpetrators by killing their women and children. Let the bastards feel something of what it's like to be on the receiving end, to have their own women and children suffer what they were so happy to inflict on others. Otherwise the killing of the truly innocent women and children goes unavenged. THAT can't be. Rough justice is better than no justice at all.
<<By 1940 the British Empire had committed plenty of their own atrocities, . . .>>
They acted badly on very rare occasions. They never intended to exterminate an entire race of people.
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<<Nothing really justifies atrocities.>>
Killing Nazis is hardly an atrocity.
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They acted badly on very rare occasions. They never intended to exterminate an entire race of people.
I think the aboriginal Americans and aboriginal Australians would disagree. As would a number of other peoples.
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<Nothing really justifies atrocities.>>
Killing Nazis is hardly an atrocity.
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Killing someone who has a weapon pointed at you is self-defense. Bombing cities is not.
Carpetbombing entire cities is always an atrocity. There were all manner of atrocities in WWII. The greatest seem to have occurred in Nanking, Leipzig, and Hiroshima. It is possible that there would have been many more, had the weapons been available.
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<<I think the aboriginal Americans and aboriginal Australians would disagree [that the English never intended to exterminate an entire race of people.]>>
Sure as hell didn't get very far with their plans, then. Where'd they put those gas chambers, again? Or did they favour shooting them in pits? Or medical experiments?
<<As would a number of other people>>
Yeah those big bad English. Who else they try to exterminate?
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The English were certainly a tad harsh on the Irish. If they didn't gas them, it was likely because they lacked the technology.
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Sure as hell didn't get very far with their plans, then. Where'd they put those gas chambers, again? Or did they favour shooting them in pits? Or medical experiments?
There is evidence that nearly 90% of the aboriginal Americans were killed off. What was the % of Jews killed?
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<<There is evidence that nearly 90% of the aboriginal Americans were killed off. >>
Nice try. The evidence is that nearly 90% died off, mostly due to European diseases to which they had no resistance.
<< What was the % of Jews killed?>>
What's the difference? You're comparing apples and oranges, Jews deliberately killed by shooting, gassing, forced labour and medical experimentation versus Indians dying from exposure to germs to which they had no resistance.
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Sure as hell didn't get very far with their plans, then. Where'd they put those gas chambers, again? Or did they favour shooting them in pits? Or medical experiments?
I understand they tried to kill off one tribe in New England by giving them smallpox-infected blankets.
Wasn't shooting them in pits done in India under British rule?
They were your typical empire-building thugs who wanted to take what they could get and keep it as long as possible. That they are now kinder and gentler (and that you are one of them) does not change history.
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Nice try. The evidence is that nearly 90% died off, mostly due to European diseases to which they had no resistance.
Never heard of the disease laden blankets that were given to 'em?
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I would say that the Nazis were more technically advanced than the guys who passed out the smallpox-infested blankets.
There was a small degree bravery involved for some of the soldiers who passed out the blankets. I am sure that there were few if any German soldiers who died accidentally from Vikon-D.
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<<Never heard of the disease laden blankets that were given to 'em?>>
Yes I did. That happened in one area of New England and was the work of the colonists, not the English governors. I also heard of one tribe in California that was hunted for sport, hunted to extinction over decades. The last guy died in the 1920s. Again, I blame the colonists, not the English. And both were fairly isolated episodes. Mass murder was not the policy of the colonial government the way that mass murder was the policy of the German government.
It wouldn't surprise me if that [shooting in pits] was the punishment applied to mutineers in the Sepoy Rebellion. Some of them were fired from the mouths of cannon. I would draw a line between harsh or even savage punishment of mutineers in the middle of the 19th Century and the deliberate genocide aimed at an entire race of people and sparing none, which was the distinguishing feature of the Nazi German regime.
<<They were your typical empire-building thugs who wanted to take what they could get and keep it as long as possible. >>
They left a better world in their wake wherever they built their empire. Railroads, courts, laws, police stations, postal services, mining commissions, resource management commissions, schools and universities, administration and government. Wherever they went, they left their mark and almost always it was for the better. "Empire-building," sure, thugs my ass. They were the greatest civilizing influence the world has ever seen.
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They were your typical empire-building thugs who wanted to take what they could get and keep it as long as possible. >>
They left a better world in their wake wherever they built their empire. Railroads, courts, laws, police stations, postal services, mining commissions, resource management commissions, schools and universities, administration and government. Wherever they went, they left their mark and almost always it was for the better. "Empire-building," sure, thugs my ass. They were the greatest civilizing influence the world has ever seen.
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I think both views are correct. The British started out being thugs, but the religious element among them really did believe in the "White Man's Burden", and they did generally leave things better off after they left. But the best colonizers seem to be the Danes. Greenland costs them a ton of money, and they won't allow self-government (not that the locals want it much) until the Inuits are ready for it.
They seem to have left a good impression in the Virgin Islanders, too.
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Scholars make finds in Nazi archive
By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer
BAD AROLSEN, Germany - From prison brothels to slave labor camps, 15 scholars concluded a two-week probe Thursday of an untapped repository of millions of Nazi records, and hailed it as a rich vein of raw material that will deepen the study of the Holocaust.
It was the first concentrated academic sweep of the long-private archive administered by the International Tracing Service since it opened its doors last November to Holocaust survivors, victims relatives and historical researchers.
German historian Christel Trouve said the nameless millions of forced laborers began to take shape as individual people as she studied small labor camps ? which existed in astonishing numbers.
Among the striking revelations was the identification of the man who rescued an 8-year-old boy in Buchenwald, Israel Meir Lau, who later became Israel's chief rabbi.
Lau had said his rescuer was a person called Fyodor from Rostow. Kenneth Waltzer of Michigan State University found it was Fyodor Michajlitschenko, 18, arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, who gave the small boy ear warmers and treated him like a father in Block 8 until the camp's liberation.
"A lot of us found the collections here, approached in the appropriate way, really opened up new significant scholarly lines of inquiry," said Waltzer, who is director of his university's Jewish Studies department.
Jessica Anderson Hughes of Rutgers University discovered that prostitutes servicing other prisoners in concentration camp brothels often came from ordinary backgrounds ? exploding the myth that most had been prostitutes before their arrest.
Hughes said the lists in Bad Arolsen allowed her to attach names to the prisoner-prostitutes at Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps which had one of eight known brothels for prisoners.
With the names she could look up incarceration records ? and she found some women were married, some single, some were mothers. The records said many were arrested for petty theft or other minor crime.
"We always portrayed them as volunteers, but I wanted to know why they volunteered," she said. She believed the prostitutes faced "a choiceless choice."
The opening of the files to scholars followed pressure from survivors and from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The importance of the archive was highlighted in a series of stories by The Associated Press, which was the first news organization to be granted extensive access to the long-restricted papers.
The research project was organized jointly by the tracing service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which brought scholars from six countries to begin assessing the significance of the archive, the largest collection of Nazi documents.
The 50 million pages stored in this central German spa town since the mid-1950s previously had been used by Red Cross staff to respond to inquiries about missing persons or the fate of family members, and later to document compensation claims.
With the population of survivors quickly shrinking, the 11 countries that govern the archive agreed in 2006 to widen access to the files. It took another 18 months for all 11 to ratify the required treaty amendments before the archive could open.
Reto Meister, the archive's director, said he still gets 1,000 inquires a month asking for personal information. Now, the archive is also getting dozens of academic inquiries or visitors every month, he said.
The gray metal shelves and cabinets contain 16 miles (25 kilometers) of transport lists, camp registries, medical records, forced labor files and death certificates of some 17.5 million people subjected to Nazi persecutions.
Taken together with written and oral testimonies and the transcripts of war crimes trials, the dry data at Bad Arolsen add texture to the known picture of the Holocaust, from the first concentration camps created within weeks of Hitler's rise to power in January 1933 to the defeat of Nazism in May 1945.
"It was much more than I expected," said Trouve.
"I've been working on concentration camps for 15 years. We know there was forced laborers in Germany ? millions of them," she said. "But then you go through these lists. You see the farmer employing so many people. You see the factory employing hundreds of people. Everything was blurred, but suddenly you have a clear image."
Jean-Marc Dreyfus, of Manchester University in Britain, said the archive "won't utterly change our view of the Holocaust, but it will be very precious for researchers to complement and pursue new research."
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Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this article from Bad Arolsen
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The colonists were English at that time.
Better world? Depends on your point of view.
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<<The colonists were English at that time.>>
They were and they weren't. Much of the first generation was English-born or born to planters in the BWI, but many, even of the English-born, weren't raised in England. They were raised in a frontier culture which wouldn't have been familiar to any Englishman of the time. With each generation that passed, the colonists were less and less English and more and more American.
<<Better world? Depends on your point of view.>>
Long after the former British colonies gained their independence, they voluntarily retained many of the colonial forms and structures left to them by the British, such as the judicial system, the laws, the postal service, the railroads, the Port Authorities, the various Registries, etc. If the British didn't leave them a better world, why did they cling to these British forms when they didn't have to??
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Long after the former British colonies gained their independence, they voluntarily retained many of the colonial forms and structures left to them by the British, such as the judicial system, the laws, the postal service, the railroads, the Port Authorities, the various Registries, etc. If the British didn't leave them a better world, why did they cling to these British forms when they didn't have to??
Probably for the same reason most of the Native American tribes haven't tried to go back to the way things were before the Europeans arrived - after hundreds of years of subjugation and having their culture, religion and customs taken from them and replaced by the occupying powers, it is almost impossible to return things to the way they were.
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Yes I did. That happened in one area of New England and was the work of the colonists, not the English governors.
Actually, that's the only one we have documentation for. And it was done by order of Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of British forces in North America. He was foolish enough to put his order down in writing - "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present." The response from the subordinate on scene (Colonel Henry Bouquet) was a terse "I received yesterday your Excellency's letters of 16th with their Inclosures. The signal for Indian Messengers, and all your directions will be observed."
If the military was cocky enough to put these orders in writing, how many more orders such as these were not put in writing but only implemented on a verbal basis?
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<< . . . as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. >>
Wow. I'm really shocked. Never saw that before. Certainly doesn't seem very British to me. I can't imagine any English man or woman who wouldn't be horrified. But that was back in the 18th Century. Hanging, drawing and quartering was the penalty for treason then. Savage times. If that's where the English were at, I'd hate to have to think of where the Germans were at. Nietzsche once drew up a list of mediaeval German punishments, and they were even more horrific than hanging drawing and quartering.
I still like to make comparisons of apples to apples, oranges to oranges. Seems like you're kind of stacking the deck when you compare British practices of colonial times with the practices of Germany and its people during my own lifetime.
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<< . . . as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. >>
Wow. I'm really shocked. Never saw that before. Certainly doesn't seem very British to me. I can't imagine any English man or woman who wouldn't be horrified. But that was back in the 18th Century. Hanging, drawing and quartering was the penalty for treason then. Savage times. If that's where the English were at, I'd hate to have to think of where the Germans were at. Nietzsche once drew up a list of mediaeval German punishments, and they were even more horrific than hanging drawing and quartering.
I still like to make comparisons of apples to apples, oranges to oranges. Seems like you're kind of stacking the deck when you compare British practices of colonial times with the practices of Germany and its people during my own lifetime.
Is the time the diffrence?
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<<Is the time the diffrence?>>
Probably. When was the last time you saw anyone hanged, drawn and quartered for treason in England? There IS such a thing as the slow march towards civilization, plane, although it's a lot slower than we like to think. And sometimes a wretched pathetic excuse for a human being like your current "President" can set the clock back a hundred years in that process, but still and all, over the centuries, the human race does progress to an increasingly more humane and less savage state. Seen anyone fed to the lions for public amusement lately?
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And sometimes a wretched pathetic excuse for a human being like your current "President" can set the clock back a hundred years in that process, but still and all, over the centuries, the human race does progress to an increasingly more humane and less savage state. Seen anyone fed to the lions for public amusement lately?
After 9-11, all you had to do was turn on any radio talkshow to hear all the grotesque things people wanted to do to punish any Ay-rabs, camel jockeys or towel heads they might run across. There are always a few people who can rise to ghastly barbarism in a crisis, and every once in a while, as in Bosnia, they do.
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Marine basic training still repeats a routine where the entire company shouts Kill!! Kill! kill! rather a large number of times.
So some are born barbarous, others become barbarous, and yet others must have it thrust upon them.
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After 9-11, all you had to do was turn on any radio talkshow to hear all the grotesque things people wanted to do to punish any Ay-rabs, camel jockeys or towel heads they might run across.
I didn't even have to do that, I heard it at work. And since I had travelled pretty extensively in the Middle East and had (and still have) some very good friends there, I complained about it, first to my manager, who did nothing, then to HR. HR issued a memo to put a stop to it, and the company owner brought it up at a company meeting shortly after 9-11 and announced it would be treated like any other type of discrimination or racism. The comments stopped - at least, I never heard any more of them - but my relations with some of my coworkers suffered. In April '02, the owner sold the company, and a few months after that I left and started driving a truck. I was fed up with working in electronics, sure, but I was also tired of having to watch my back. Driving a truck, I was on my own, and the company I drove for cared only that I got my loads in on time and put in more miles than average.
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Sure wish someone would reference those particular radio shows, so I can avoid them. I listen to a fair amout of talk radio to and from work, and didn't get any whiff of such irrational broadbrushing outrage, from any of the hosts. Some of the callers were bigoted idiots
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Sure wish someone would reference those particular radio shows, so I can avoid them. I listen to a fair amout of talk radio to and from work, and didn't get any whiff of such irrational broadbrushing outrage, from any of the hosts. Some of the callers were bigoted idiots
I did not say the hosts of talk radio shows wanted to murder Ay-rabs, camel jockeys and towelheads. I said that these things were said in profusion on talk radio. The ones I heard were the callers, many of whom, as you say, were and no doubts still are, bigoted idiots.