New Poll

[The_Professor]

Plane has indeed here demonstrated excellent discernment. Now, what are the answers?

[Plane]

Plane has indeed here demonstrated excellent discernment. Now, what are the answers?

Proactive encouragement of good behavior.

[Amianthus]

You never proved any of my points were incorrect, I think once you corrected me when I said the RAF never conducted daylight raids, but the exceptions were (1) at the very start of the war, for a short period of time, when the bombers' range probably wouldn't have included Austria anyway and (2) towards the end of the war.  I further produced the web-site of all RAF bomber ops and couldn't find any daylight raids on Austria.  Other than that one minor and inconsequential error, I don't believe you proved any of my points incorrect.

Actually, I proved that your point about the Austrians being "overwhelmingly" pro-Nazi was incorrect (with the documentation on voting patterns for the Anschluss vote), and I also pointed out that your documentation about RAF raids only listed the primary targets for bombing missions. Even you should know that all bombing missions also had secondary targets along the flight path (and the RAF's flight paths were almost all over Austria) which were to be hit in several situations - a) if the bombing mission did not expend all of it's ordinance over the primary, it would hit secondary targets on the way back, and b) if a bomber was damaged so that it could not complete it's mission, it was to hit the closest secondary target and turn back. Since your documentation did not show secondary targets, it does not prove that the RAF did not target sites in Austria.

[Michael Tee]

Austrian voting patterns on the Anschluss would prove very little, since the pre-Anschluss Austrian government was also fascist and anti-Semitic.  A vote against Anschluss was more a vote for Austrian as opposed to German  nationalism , and didn't necessarily reflect any deep philosophical disagreement with the basic tenets of the Nazi party.  When the Anschluss was a fait accompli, there was little if any Austrian opposition to the Nazi program, as evidenced by the 34-page list of prominent Austrian Nazis and war criminals which I posted.  A "voting pattern" which you neglected to quote was the 3% rise in Kurt Waldheim's popularity,  polled after the revelations of his buried S.S. past were brought to the surface.  Remarkable, isn't it, that revelations of a carefully hidden Nazi past would cause a man's popularity to rise in a supposedly anti-Nazi country?

[BT]

The International Committee of historians

Because of the ongoing international controversy, the Austrian government decided to appoint an international committee of historians to examine Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945. Their report cited evidence of Waldheim's knowledge about preparation for war crimes but denied any personal involvement in those crimes. According to the controversial Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up by Eli Rosenbaum, the Austrian government and a number of media outlets vigorously opposed the allegations both before and after the release of the report.[24] During the controversy, Waldheim was defended by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal,[25] who stated in a letter to The Forward, published October 15, 1993:

    The people from the World Jewish Congress, who were so committed to the Waldheim case, find it difficult to accept the results of the international commission of historians. This commission, which was formed at my instigation in Vienna, had come to the conclusion that Mr. Waldheim knew about the wartime crimes in the Balkans but that he was not personally involved in these. A similar judgment was pronounced by a committee that examined the documents about Mr. Waldheim on Thames Television in London. The committee included some of the most respected jurists; the former director of the Office of Special Investigations, Alan Ryan, functioned as prosecutor. This group, too, concluded that there is no 'case' against Mr. Waldheim.

As Simon Wiesenthal publicly stated, there was no evidence found by the committee that Waldheim took part in any war crimes. Rather Waldheim's offence has been to lie about his military record. [26] The International Committee in February 1988 concluded, with regard to Waldheim's ability to do something about the crimes he knew that were going on in Yugoslavia and Greece:

    In favour of Waldheim is, that he only had very minor possibilities to act against the injustices happening. Actions against these, depending on which level the resistance occurred, were of very different importance. For a young member of the staff, who did not have any military authority on the army group level, the practical possibilities for resistance were very limited and with a high probability would not have led to any actual results. Resistance would have been limited to a formal protest or on the refusal to serve any longer in the army, which would have seemed to be a courageous act, however would have not led to any practical achievement. [27]

[edit] Ostrovsky claims

In 1994 the supposed former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky claimed in his book The Other Side of Deception that Mossad doctored the file of the then UN Secretary General to implicate him in Nazi crimes. These false documents were subsequently "discovered" by Benjamin Netanyahu in the UN file, and triggered the "Waldheim Affair". Ostrovsky says the reason was Waldheim's criticism of Israeli action in Lebanon. [28] Debate surrounds Ostrovsky and his writings but they have not as yet been shown to be false, nor have they been shown to be true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Waldheim

[Michael Tee]

<<Plane has indeed here demonstrated excellent discernment. Now, what are the answers?>>

No holds barred except when a post is purely personal attack, speaks to no other point in issue and reaches a level of hurtfulness and vileness that I'm content to let the moderators be the judge of.  (Like pornography, I know it when I see it and so would any half-way intelligent moderator.)

I'd like to leave it to the moderator.  If he or she is good enough to moderate the group, he or she is good enough to know when a line's been crossed.  Why is "left-wing commie traitor" or "killer of American troops" OK and "ugly bag of puss" not OK?  Obviously, because one refers to a political stance which can be picked up or abandoned at will, to a choice which one has made and ought to be prepared to stand behind regardless of verbal abuse; the other is purely an attack on the persona and being of another poster, not in the remotest way issue-connected.

Polls may be helpful in gauging the degree of public acceptance of various levels of personal abuse, and if a moderator chooses to be influenced by them, he or she should be free to exercise his or her discretion any way that he or she chooses.  If the chosen style of exercising discretion is to take polls, so be it.

I agree with plane that these are low stakes, but I also believe in mutual respect (at some basic bottom-line level) and the Golden Rule - - I wouldn't like to be a part of something that shows significantly less respect to another member (terra in this case) than I would like to receive myself, and my demands in terms of respect are pretty minimal.  If a poster can't reach that minimal level, fuck him, let him find some other place to spew his bile.*  My two cents' worth.

P.S.  I meant, after giving him or her 24 hours to apologize.

[Michael Tee]

My point was that Waldheim's popularity in Austrian polls ROSE by 3% after his buried Nazi past was revealed.  The issue was Austrian attitudes towards the Nazis.  My point was proven by the rise in popularity triggered by revelations of a Nazi past - - it does not depend on the truthfulness or falsity of the revelations - - when the guy was seen to be a Nazi, rightfully or wrongfully, more people liked him than when he wasn't seen to be a Nazi.

That "famed Nazi hunter" Eli Wiesenthal is a sell-out was proven in the Balkan wars when he denounced Serbian "war crimes" and defended Croatia.  The Croats were Hitler's allies in WWII - - the Croatian fascist movement, the Ustashe, massacred 60,000 Jews and 600,000 Serbs in some of the most barbaric and sadistic killings of the entire war.  Even the Germans condemned some of their actions.  The Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte gave a terrific account of their atrocities, some of which he had witnessed first-hand.  He was present in the Croatian leader Ante Pavelic's office when Pavelic's aide brought in a wicker basket full of human eyeballs.  The Serbs, who with the Montenegrans, formed the bulk of Marshall Tito's anti-fascist guerrilla forces, were our Allies throughout the war, but when they defended Serbs against Croats during the break-up of Yugoslavia and tried to get a little payback for the wartime crimes of the Croatians, suddenly, to Wiesenthal of all people, they became the "bad guys."  Wiesenthal had whored himself out to U.S. foreign policy interests because the U.S. was now backing the Israeli apartheid state.  Nothing else mattered to him.  Now the Croatians, with their neo-Nazi skinhead volunteers from Germany, were on the side of the angels.  OF COURSE the guy would join in the whitewash of Kurt Waldheim.  Fooling nobody who knows him.

[BT]

If your grandfather wronged me, i have the right, no the duty, to wrong you?

Is that what you are saying?

[gipper]

Rich grossly crossed the line because he engaged in a naked personal attack entirely divorced from rational argument or its logical extension. Trading on the closely personal, Terra's Wiccanism, he seized a vile stereotype of witches and proclaimed her a "bag of pus" and decried her "crack" in pejorative terms. This went beyond argument and competition into the purposefully hurtful, and it did not accord Terra the baseline of what I demand from this club: a core of respect that transcends disagreement. Perhaps hard to live up to at times in the heat of argument, the line is nonetheless definite, and Rich clearly crossed it. I have voted for the one-month suspension.

[gipper]

I will note in addition, and emphasize this point, that Rich's behavior is directly antithetical to the Catholicism he brandishes on his chest like a badge of honor. Rather than being Christlike and charitable (loving), Rich has perverted his religion into the bludgeon of the majority, the barbaric segment of the majority, in a most despicable combination of "righteousness" and hate that the true villains of history could be "proud" of.

[Cynthia]

Perhaps it's time for RichPo to find redemption, then. God works in mysterious ways.

[Brassmask]

Rich is prone to attack.  This is well known.  His "methods" are well known.

As are his buttons.

If one knows that a snake will bite when poked with a snake, or even knows there is even a snake in the bushes, why go near it, let alone poke it?

Not to blame the victim but I generally ignore Rich as much as possible because I just don't want to give him the opportunity to be an ass unless I just want to get into it with him.

I voted for him to be on probation for a month rather than outright banned.  As it turned out, he may have imposed his own sentence; however, as we all know, he will be back for if he were intent on not returning he would not have thumbed his nose as he headed towards the door.

Those intent on actually leaving simply leave and don't return.  Terra has left and returned numerous times always in the same manner.  At Dailykos, they call it "GBCW".  Good Bye Cruel World.  A diarist writes a post detailing the cruelty and harshness of the environment and decrying the perceived enemies of all justice then ceases posting only to return after some period (long or short) of lurking/absence.

[Amianthus]

My point was that Waldheim's popularity in Austrian polls ROSE by 3% after his buried Nazi past was revealed.

First, I discount polls completely. Nevertheless, polls rising in this case is adequately explained by Austrian citizens being pissed about outsiders involving themselves in Austrian politics. It's a very common attitude among Austrians - if an outsider tries to influence them, they do the opposite just to be ornery.

[Christians4LessGvt]

It would not be my style to use terms he did, however a better question might be:

"If Rich was a liberal, would we even be asking this question?"

[Michael Tee]

<<If your grandfather wronged me, i have the right, no the duty, to wrong you?

<<Is that what you are saying?>>

Wait till you stand in the shoes of someone like a Serbian militiaman whose entire family was tortured and murdered by Nazis in atrocities that you don't even know about before you roll out the Socratic questions about grandfathers and grandsons.  It looks a lot different through the eyes of the victims than it does through the eyes of the bystanders who don't even know what happened the day before yesterday.

When you truly understand who the grandfather was, you won't lose any sleep over the fate of the grandson.  From rotten trees you get rotten fruit.  Nineteen times out of twenty.  The twentieth was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In answer to your question, my grandfather wasn't a fucking war criminal.  If he had been, I'd be a totally different person.

And a further reality check for you:  some of the grandfathers are still around even today.  Some of the payback was direct to the source.  As for the others, the presence of neo-Nazi German skinhead volunteers in the Croatian army should indicate even to the semiconscious the nature of their cause and what they still stand for.  Only that egregious little prick Wiesenthal would support them, and that's because "the West" and in particular the U.S.A. have chosen to back them in opposition to the pro-Russian Serbs.  It's a trade-off - - he and the Likud support the Nazis and in return (he hopes) the U.S.A. supports the Israeli apartheid state.  Unprincipled little schmuck.