Modern nazis? Yes. They can all go fuck themselves.
Historical nazis? Like the ones from the 1920s-1945? Maybe. I’m unclear how many of them knew what being nazis actually meant. Like, the average nazi soldier in some 1942 battle. Does he know about jews dying? Does he know the things the nazis stand for? I’m not saying yes or no, because I legit don’t know. I find it hard to believe that millions of soldiers all knew, and still went along with it.
Now the SS? Oh, those assholes KNEW! They were far enough up the ladder that they knew exactly what was going on. They were the ones enforcing it.
Same as the nazis who ran the camps.
I read about this one guy who was basically the warden of one of those camps. Directly responsible for literally millions of dead jews in 4 years. They put him on trial at the Nuremburg trials, and he says he did nothing wrong. So they asked him if they threw him in that same oven, would that be wrong? He said no. Sooooo…that’s what they did. One of the last things he said was that it was ironic that the one who was to throw the switch on his death was Jewish.
Bro, if a person can’t step back and objectively determine for themselves that what the nazis were doing was wrong, then they’re not innocent. They’re stupid, but they’re also not innocent.
What I’m saying is, if you study history, in the 1920s Germany was one of the most progressive, left leaning, all inclusive cultures. To go from that to…nazi Germany in about 10 years should tell you that the general public didn’t know at all what they were doing with the jews.
In the early days, before the war, they were just deporting them. Well what they kept finding happening was, they’d deport the jews. Then they’d take over new land. On that new land they’d find not only jews, but they were figuring out these were the SAME jews they just deported a year earlier from their land. So they’d deport them from this NEW land. Only to later take over more new land, and the cycle repeats.
So for people living in Germany before the nazis, they probably knew and liked their jewish neighbors. Everybody knows the story of Anne Frank, but think of what that entails. It means the homeowner saw the jews being deported, and allowed this entire family to live in the attic. Which shows that people were living in nazi germany, but not in favor of it. And that’s one story that became famous because of a diary, but it was happening all over Germany.
So to think about how many young kids were in the bulk of the soldiers, mandatory drafted, I cannot believe that they all supported something that was intentionally kept a secret from the general public…and these soldiers would have been the general public before being enlisted.
I believe the people who believed in the nazi idiology were definately in the top 5 most evil “governments” we’ve ever seen. Arguably the most evil.
I just don’t believe you can assume a group of 19 year olds are in the know about a government conspiracy to construct a series of death camps with the intention of killing all jews.
Just the same I don’t believe all USA soldiers who fought in Vietnam knew about Agent Orange being sprayed and causing health issues.
Even right now, in russia, you have an entire country that thinks they were invaded by Ukraine. That’s not what happened, but thats what they think.
Government propaganda is real, and it is powerful. So yeah, I absolutely think there were tons of young German soldiers that only found out the truth after the war was over. And if you look at German citizen reaction, it’s pretty clear they didn’t know. They did an abrupt 180, and instantly had empathy for what they had done. If they knew and supported it, they would have kept doing it after Hitler died.
Historical nazis? Like the ones from the 1920s-1945? Maybe. I’m unclear how many of them knew what being nazis actually meant. Like, the average nazi soldier in some 1942 battle. Does he know about jews dying? Does he know the things the nazis stand for? I’m not saying yes or no, because I legit don’t know. I find it hard to believe that millions of soldiers all knew, and still went along with it.
Fuck off with that nazi apologist bullshit. The whole nazi party ideology was based on hating minorities and blaming them for Germany’s economic and social ills. Who fucking cares about the details, the whole party was hate filled rage bait just like modern Republicans.
I don’t want to say ‘Itodaso’ but the guy went from “Not all men” to Nazi apologist in ONE post. These guys are all over Lemmy and it’s super depressing.
If you say something you think is normal, but get downvoted to hell with a bunch of angry replies, then seriously consider their perspective instead of arguing with each one.
Seek out places where you think they’ve been making good points.
If you want to educate the person above, don’t start with “fuck off”. Just explain to them why they are wrong and corroborate with historical bits as you please. The fuck off is completely unnecessary and counter-productive
If you want to educate the person above, don’t start with “fuck off”. Just explain to them why they are wrong and corroborate with historical bits as you please.
Like the ‘innocent German farmer soldiers’ who had no idea what was happening? This is how that starts, dude, seriously, this isn’t even a clever attempt at a wedge issue. It’s as in-your-face as it could be.
Does it feel good getting off to demonizing people who don’t know better
What is he, a goddamn four year old? Who the fuck doesn’t know Nazi’s are bad are you fucking kidding me here? Nobody is ‘getting off’ on anything, this person called out a Nazi apologist. There’s no clean wehrmacht, it was a Nazi lie by higher ups to save their own fucking skin.
From 16 Days in Berlin: (I can’t be assed to find the original attribution, go do it yourself if you care to.)
“We have to win this war… if the others win the war, and they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won’t be a single German left in a few weeks.”
There now I’ve done the thing where the lefty finds the answers for you.
Fuck fascism, fuck Nazi’s, fight them everywhere you see them, give them no ground, no quarter. Defend each other because even the centrists will side with them, just like last time.
18 year old draftees into the Vietnam war sprayed everything with agent orange and caused generations of suffering for innocent people. Many of them also suffered from the after effects and American companies refused to ackniwledge their part in it. Arguably the average American company is far worse than the Nazis were. If you work at Facebook for example, you assisted in multiple genocides. If you know a facebook user, they obviously don’t care.
Ok, well I guess you support the complete facist takeover of the U.S. government which was funded by American corporations. You support climate change, the millions of immigrants being rounded up and placed in for profit detainment camps. The millions who will die in Ukraine, the likelyhood of a second American Civil war, and the likelyhood of WWIII With the United States assisting in the Invasion of Europe.
Oh wait, more than one thing can be bad at the same time, fuck off.
Why are you saying all this to me? This should’ve been in your response to the other guy. Hell even just linking the myth of the clean Wehrmacht article would’ve been a lot more productive than calling them a Nazi apologist right out the gate.
Because I’m going to make goddamn sure you understand what you’re doing so the next time you think we should talk nice to the people defending a group that designed and implemented genocide of more than one people group as a fucking core ideology you’ll pause and maybe reflect on if this is the best time to be super cordial with some guy about to launch into ‘I’m just saying maybe the numbers are exaggerated.’
My grandmother wasn’t thrown in a camp by fucking elite waffen SS guards it was random fucking Wehrmacht child rapists who were taught that Deutschland über alles.
Sigh can you calm down there for a second? I realize that they were parroting clean Wehrmacht propaganda that is, in fact, completely false. However, nothing in their reply made it seem like they have any Nazi sympathies, and instead simply believed propaganda they’d come across or made a not illogical assumption that simply turned out to be false. If you consider that to be an unforgivable sin rather than a misconception that can be corrected then enjoy your ideologically pure trip to fascistland I guess. Otherwise maybe try educating them so they at least don’t spread the same propaganda elsewhere where someone might actually believe it. If then they turn out to be a bad faith actors or dig their heels you can comdemn their Nazi apologia all you want.
The citizens in nazi Germany was very much aware of the anti-semitism and the violent nature of the nazi party.
If you want to claim that they didn’t know of the systemical murder of e.g. Jewish. Based on my understanding, you are wrong. But even if you want to ignore that, they knew of the violence against Jewish and enabled it.
Now, you might be able to make the case that early Nazi party members, before the rise of power, weren’t 100% antisemitic, they absolutely knew they were getting into bed with antisemites.
After the rise in power started, Jewish sympathisers were purged from the party. Anyone in or supporting Nazis (which was a large portion of the population) knew what they were supporting.
I’d just caution painting too broadly. That wasn’t all German citizens that supported the Nazi movement. It was also a brutal regime that stomped out detractors. German media of the era was highly controlled. It’d paint a false picture of the amount of support. True dissent was a dangerous position to publicly take.
I am sorry but it seems you misunderstood my take.
If the German public knew, Nazis knew.
You can choose what you want to call a Nazi. Idc for the sake of my argument. But you can’t claim that you can’t judge Nazis for their support for Nazi shit because they didn’t know. They knew.
I don’t want to bother if you are the person I previously responded to. If you aren’t, then I am not saying, you claimed anything. If you are, read above.
I’m a different person. It appeared to me that you were lumping in all German citizens with Nazis which is why I made the post.
I’m not defending Nazi supporters, even in the earliest stages. They j knowingly joined with the antisemites to try and push their own agendas. History tells us how that worked out.
But that article doesn’t seem to claim that individual soldiers have the same guaranteed culpability.
I mean they must have that culpability since they were cooperating with Nazi genocidal policy by, among other things, invading countries to where the Holocaust would be exported in the first place. I mean it was by definition individual soldiers enforcing the state of affairs where Jews and other targets of Nazi ire were getting exterminated. It was those individual soldiers suppressing resistance, taking POWs to be executed, etc. I mean you’re pretty guilty the moment you’re fighting a war of extermination on the side of extermination.
If we’re trying to find a single good nazi in all of history, then I think technically Schindler counts.
That’s fair, but I think most modern people wouldn’t consider him a Nazi. He was registered as a Nazi by necessity, but ideologically I don’t think he believed in the extermination of Jews while bribing Nazi officials to keep his workers out of death camps. If you do consider him a Nazi then yeah there was dissent within the Nazi party; I don’t think that’s much of a surprise.
Let me tell you that it has been socially unacceptable to make apologies for anyone who flew the Nazi flag ever since 1945.
Yes, I understand you’re trying to take a nuanced approach to the Nazis who had been drafted since being kids, etc, but just don’t.
History already happened, and the last of the original Nazis are slowly dieing out (youngest Nazis tended to be 16 years old, so 1945-16 = born in 1929, so they’d be about 96 years old). They don’t need a random stranger to try to defend them.
Nazism is a failed ideology that abused large parts of the world. It doesn’t need defending.
He was a Semiens branch manager in China in Nanking during the Rape of Nanking.
It’s full of him doing everything he can to minimize the casualties and harm and then he’ll be like “China is great because there aren’t any Jews here, I know Herr Hitler wouldn’t accept such wanton murder and rape from his allies if he knew about it. He’s a good socialist and a friend of the workers, after all!”
And then Rabe, the “Good Nazi,” fresh from saving countless lives from the IJA, returns to Germany and says he approves of the Party 100% in 1938, and to anyone’s knowledge never breathed a word of criticism about the Holocaust.
So it’s a-ok as long as you (pretend that you) don’t know what you are fighting for? So it’s better to be a murderous yes-man than to question or face that you (directly or indirectly), through killing/enslaving/torturing innocent people, are a piece of shit with no spine or balls? That’s… better? That’s okay? That’s, uh, let’s say an interesting take. An awful, braindead take… But it sure is interesting, I suppose. If I were to start killing people that you are close to, would that be fine if I was like ‘oops my bad lmao I didn’t know what I was doing’?
Signed,
a gay guy who would have been experimented on and murdered
I’d like to quote my awsome history teacher here: “People went to the camp on a sunday stroll, looking at the victims as if it were a zoo”
Another great example: A Wehrmacht troop is tasked with pillaging a village. The officers clearly state that this will include killing women and children. They explain that every soldier has the right to refuse to take part in this and will not face any consequences.
Out of a hundred less then ten men refuse.
Also, the people from concentration camps were used as forced laborours. They were led through towns like callte in the morning when their shift started, and led back the same route after their shift ended.
People knew what the regime was doing. To varying degrees, surely, but with all the xenophobic propaganda, the burning of books, “entartete Kunst”, the deportation of millions of people I find it hard to believe that people were that clueless. Because after all, the NSDAP didn’t try to hide it. They wrote it on their banners all proud.
Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?
Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.
While it seems like the common stance in American culture (to which I belong) is that the Nazi Evil and the Holocaust positively were uniquely evil and should be distinguished against other crimes against humanity.
However, I am willing to take the position that this might be American propaganda that focuses the American populace on the Nazis, blinding them to the other atrocities that have occurred in the modern age. Some of this might be because many US History classes end their curriculums at the end of WWII, and so modern history after that isn’t really taught. That lasting impression could explain cultural permanence.
I do tend to agree with you though. I think the Nazis were evil and did evil shit, but after reflecting on it, it is possible to think of today’s Zionists and “modern Nazis”, as one might towards other authoritarian, totalitarian regimes.
If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.
Modern nazis? Yes. They can all go fuck themselves.
Historical nazis? Like the ones from the 1920s-1945? Maybe. I’m unclear how many of them knew what being nazis actually meant. Like, the average nazi soldier in some 1942 battle. Does he know about jews dying? Does he know the things the nazis stand for? I’m not saying yes or no, because I legit don’t know. I find it hard to believe that millions of soldiers all knew, and still went along with it.
Now the SS? Oh, those assholes KNEW! They were far enough up the ladder that they knew exactly what was going on. They were the ones enforcing it.
Same as the nazis who ran the camps.
I read about this one guy who was basically the warden of one of those camps. Directly responsible for literally millions of dead jews in 4 years. They put him on trial at the Nuremburg trials, and he says he did nothing wrong. So they asked him if they threw him in that same oven, would that be wrong? He said no. Sooooo…that’s what they did. One of the last things he said was that it was ironic that the one who was to throw the switch on his death was Jewish.
That’s not irony. That’s payback.
Bro, if a person can’t step back and objectively determine for themselves that what the nazis were doing was wrong, then they’re not innocent. They’re stupid, but they’re also not innocent.
Evil prevails when good ppl fail to act
What I’m saying is, if you study history, in the 1920s Germany was one of the most progressive, left leaning, all inclusive cultures. To go from that to…nazi Germany in about 10 years should tell you that the general public didn’t know at all what they were doing with the jews.
In the early days, before the war, they were just deporting them. Well what they kept finding happening was, they’d deport the jews. Then they’d take over new land. On that new land they’d find not only jews, but they were figuring out these were the SAME jews they just deported a year earlier from their land. So they’d deport them from this NEW land. Only to later take over more new land, and the cycle repeats.
So for people living in Germany before the nazis, they probably knew and liked their jewish neighbors. Everybody knows the story of Anne Frank, but think of what that entails. It means the homeowner saw the jews being deported, and allowed this entire family to live in the attic. Which shows that people were living in nazi germany, but not in favor of it. And that’s one story that became famous because of a diary, but it was happening all over Germany.
So to think about how many young kids were in the bulk of the soldiers, mandatory drafted, I cannot believe that they all supported something that was intentionally kept a secret from the general public…and these soldiers would have been the general public before being enlisted.
I believe the people who believed in the nazi idiology were definately in the top 5 most evil “governments” we’ve ever seen. Arguably the most evil.
I just don’t believe you can assume a group of 19 year olds are in the know about a government conspiracy to construct a series of death camps with the intention of killing all jews.
Just the same I don’t believe all USA soldiers who fought in Vietnam knew about Agent Orange being sprayed and causing health issues.
Even right now, in russia, you have an entire country that thinks they were invaded by Ukraine. That’s not what happened, but thats what they think.
Government propaganda is real, and it is powerful. So yeah, I absolutely think there were tons of young German soldiers that only found out the truth after the war was over. And if you look at German citizen reaction, it’s pretty clear they didn’t know. They did an abrupt 180, and instantly had empathy for what they had done. If they knew and supported it, they would have kept doing it after Hitler died.
Fuck off with that nazi apologist bullshit. The whole nazi party ideology was based on hating minorities and blaming them for Germany’s economic and social ills. Who fucking cares about the details, the whole party was hate filled rage bait just like modern Republicans.
I don’t want to say ‘Itodaso’ but the guy went from “Not all men” to Nazi apologist in ONE post. These guys are all over Lemmy and it’s super depressing.
I am not OP, but I might have been subconsciously being an apologist somewhere. How can I improve myself in this regard?
If you say something you think is normal, but get downvoted to hell with a bunch of angry replies, then seriously consider their perspective instead of arguing with each one.
Seek out places where you think they’ve been making good points.
If you want to educate the person above, don’t start with “fuck off”. Just explain to them why they are wrong and corroborate with historical bits as you please. The fuck off is completely unnecessary and counter-productive
No. Fuck Nazi apologists.
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Like the ‘innocent German farmer soldiers’ who had no idea what was happening? This is how that starts, dude, seriously, this isn’t even a clever attempt at a wedge issue. It’s as in-your-face as it could be.
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Fuck off ;)
😂 💋
I’d assumed you actually were ‘done’ but no, I see you still getting bodied in this very thread by other people.
Keep up the good work :)
What does bodied mean ?
Does it feel good getting off to demonizing people who don’t know better while accomplishing absolutely nothing of value?
What is he, a goddamn four year old? Who the fuck doesn’t know Nazi’s are bad are you fucking kidding me here? Nobody is ‘getting off’ on anything, this person called out a Nazi apologist. There’s no clean wehrmacht, it was a Nazi lie by higher ups to save their own fucking skin.
From 16 Days in Berlin: (I can’t be assed to find the original attribution, go do it yourself if you care to.)
Here’s a list of the companies that used slave labour from concentration camps.
There now I’ve done the thing where the lefty finds the answers for you.
Fuck fascism, fuck Nazi’s, fight them everywhere you see them, give them no ground, no quarter. Defend each other because even the centrists will side with them, just like last time.
18 year old draftees into the Vietnam war sprayed everything with agent orange and caused generations of suffering for innocent people. Many of them also suffered from the after effects and American companies refused to ackniwledge their part in it. Arguably the average American company is far worse than the Nazis were. If you work at Facebook for example, you assisted in multiple genocides. If you know a facebook user, they obviously don’t care.
I just want to leave this here so you can never edit it, nor remove it.
Why am I mentioned here?
Ok, well I guess you support the complete facist takeover of the U.S. government which was funded by American corporations. You support climate change, the millions of immigrants being rounded up and placed in for profit detainment camps. The millions who will die in Ukraine, the likelyhood of a second American Civil war, and the likelyhood of WWIII With the United States assisting in the Invasion of Europe.
Oh wait, more than one thing can be bad at the same time, fuck off.
Why are you saying all this to me? This should’ve been in your response to the other guy. Hell even just linking the myth of the clean Wehrmacht article would’ve been a lot more productive than calling them a Nazi apologist right out the gate.
Because I’m going to make goddamn sure you understand what you’re doing so the next time you think we should talk nice to the people defending a group that designed and implemented genocide of more than one people group as a fucking core ideology you’ll pause and maybe reflect on if this is the best time to be super cordial with some guy about to launch into ‘I’m just saying maybe the numbers are exaggerated.’
My grandmother wasn’t thrown in a camp by fucking elite waffen SS guards it was random fucking Wehrmacht child rapists who were taught that Deutschland über alles.
Sigh can you calm down there for a second? I realize that they were parroting clean Wehrmacht propaganda that is, in fact, completely false. However, nothing in their reply made it seem like they have any Nazi sympathies, and instead simply believed propaganda they’d come across or made a not illogical assumption that simply turned out to be false. If you consider that to be an unforgivable sin rather than a misconception that can be corrected then enjoy your ideologically pure trip to fascistland I guess. Otherwise maybe try educating them so they at least don’t spread the same propaganda elsewhere where someone might actually believe it. If then they turn out to be a bad faith actors or dig their heels you can comdemn their Nazi apologia all you want.
That guy isn’t doing anything. You realize he’s not the one that was trying to defend nazis right?
Not that I even thing the original guy necessarily was either, but whatever. He was still wrong imho.
Exactly
You don’t get to say shit.
Posters have limited energy for polite niceties to people they disagree with. Not one joule of that energy goes to kindness towards Nazi apologists.
Stop being an apologist for nazi apologists.
I told them why they are wrong and if anger keeps them from learning then they weren’t going to learn anyway.
Fuck off
Fuck off
Fuck off
Fuck off
Fuck off.
And fuck the mod or automod who is crying about me being a big ol meanie to Nazi apologists.
😂 one more time for the people in the back ?
Fuck off
oh and the people in the front ?! almost forgot
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The citizens in nazi Germany was very much aware of the anti-semitism and the violent nature of the nazi party.
If you want to claim that they didn’t know of the systemical murder of e.g. Jewish. Based on my understanding, you are wrong. But even if you want to ignore that, they knew of the violence against Jewish and enabled it.
This shit was public
Jews were citizens of Nazi Germany.
Now, you might be able to make the case that early Nazi party members, before the rise of power, weren’t 100% antisemitic, they absolutely knew they were getting into bed with antisemites.
After the rise in power started, Jewish sympathisers were purged from the party. Anyone in or supporting Nazis (which was a large portion of the population) knew what they were supporting.
I’d just caution painting too broadly. That wasn’t all German citizens that supported the Nazi movement. It was also a brutal regime that stomped out detractors. German media of the era was highly controlled. It’d paint a false picture of the amount of support. True dissent was a dangerous position to publicly take.
I am sorry but it seems you misunderstood my take.
If the German public knew, Nazis knew.
You can choose what you want to call a Nazi. Idc for the sake of my argument. But you can’t claim that you can’t judge Nazis for their support for Nazi shit because they didn’t know. They knew.
I don’t want to bother if you are the person I previously responded to. If you aren’t, then I am not saying, you claimed anything. If you are, read above.
I’m a different person. It appeared to me that you were lumping in all German citizens with Nazis which is why I made the post.
I’m not defending Nazi supporters, even in the earliest stages. They j knowingly joined with the antisemites to try and push their own agendas. History tells us how that worked out.
So just to make it clear everything you said in your first paragraph is completely false. It’s something known as the clean Wehrmacht myth.
The Wehrmacht was not “clean”, certainly.
But that article doesn’t seem to claim that individual soldiers have the same guaranteed culpability.
That’s not to say that even low grade nazis were ever innocent and pure, but I think there’s a little grey.
If we’re trying to find a single good nazi in all of history, then I think technically Schindler counts.
I mean they must have that culpability since they were cooperating with Nazi genocidal policy by, among other things, invading countries to where the Holocaust would be exported in the first place. I mean it was by definition individual soldiers enforcing the state of affairs where Jews and other targets of Nazi ire were getting exterminated. It was those individual soldiers suppressing resistance, taking POWs to be executed, etc. I mean you’re pretty guilty the moment you’re fighting a war of extermination on the side of extermination.
That’s fair, but I think most modern people wouldn’t consider him a Nazi. He was registered as a Nazi by necessity, but ideologically I don’t think he believed in the extermination of Jews while bribing Nazi officials to keep his workers out of death camps. If you do consider him a Nazi then yeah there was dissent within the Nazi party; I don’t think that’s much of a surprise.
Agreed, he was only technically a nazi.
Let me tell you that it has been socially unacceptable to make apologies for anyone who flew the Nazi flag ever since 1945.
Yes, I understand you’re trying to take a nuanced approach to the Nazis who had been drafted since being kids, etc, but just don’t.
History already happened, and the last of the original Nazis are slowly dieing out (youngest Nazis tended to be 16 years old, so 1945-16 = born in 1929, so they’d be about 96 years old). They don’t need a random stranger to try to defend them.
Nazism is a failed ideology that abused large parts of the world. It doesn’t need defending.
Oh yes, they knew, all of them. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
John Rabe’s journal is a wild ride.
He was a Semiens branch manager in China in Nanking during the Rape of Nanking.
It’s full of him doing everything he can to minimize the casualties and harm and then he’ll be like “China is great because there aren’t any Jews here, I know Herr Hitler wouldn’t accept such wanton murder and rape from his allies if he knew about it. He’s a good socialist and a friend of the workers, after all!”
And then Rabe, the “Good Nazi,” fresh from saving countless lives from the IJA, returns to Germany and says he approves of the Party 100% in 1938, and to anyone’s knowledge never breathed a word of criticism about the Holocaust.
Yeah, nope. Get out of here with Nazi whitewashing. Germans knew what Nazis stood for. Nazis didn’t even try to hide what they wanted to do.
So it’s a-ok as long as you (pretend that you) don’t know what you are fighting for? So it’s better to be a murderous yes-man than to question or face that you (directly or indirectly), through killing/enslaving/torturing innocent people, are a piece of shit with no spine or balls? That’s… better? That’s okay? That’s, uh, let’s say an interesting take. An awful, braindead take… But it sure is interesting, I suppose. If I were to start killing people that you are close to, would that be fine if I was like ‘oops my bad lmao I didn’t know what I was doing’?
Signed,
I’d like to quote my awsome history teacher here: “People went to the camp on a sunday stroll, looking at the victims as if it were a zoo”
Another great example: A Wehrmacht troop is tasked with pillaging a village. The officers clearly state that this will include killing women and children. They explain that every soldier has the right to refuse to take part in this and will not face any consequences. Out of a hundred less then ten men refuse.
Also, the people from concentration camps were used as forced laborours. They were led through towns like callte in the morning when their shift started, and led back the same route after their shift ended.
People knew what the regime was doing. To varying degrees, surely, but with all the xenophobic propaganda, the burning of books, “entartete Kunst”, the deportation of millions of people I find it hard to believe that people were that clueless. Because after all, the NSDAP didn’t try to hide it. They wrote it on their banners all proud.
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No, all Nazis are horrible. Full stop, no addendums, no caveats.
To be a Nazi is to have an ideology that is abhorrent and to be shunned. It is a choice, unlike all the other examples in you initial comment.
Nazi=bad.
what the fuck?
Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?
No. All Nazis can be grouped together and judged the same, not as individuals. They lost that right as soon as they started being intolerant.
Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.
https://utopiaordystopia.com/2015/12/31/was-nazi-evil-unique/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1cd9yqf/do_you_believe_that_the_nazis_were_uniquely_evil/
While it seems like the common stance in American culture (to which I belong) is that the Nazi Evil and the Holocaust positively were uniquely evil and should be distinguished against other crimes against humanity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_uniqueness_debate
However, I am willing to take the position that this might be American propaganda that focuses the American populace on the Nazis, blinding them to the other atrocities that have occurred in the modern age. Some of this might be because many US History classes end their curriculums at the end of WWII, and so modern history after that isn’t really taught. That lasting impression could explain cultural permanence.
I do tend to agree with you though. I think the Nazis were evil and did evil shit, but after reflecting on it, it is possible to think of today’s Zionists and “modern Nazis”, as one might towards other authoritarian, totalitarian regimes.
So yeah. You’re right
If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.
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