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> there are among even the most terrifying of targeted massacres such as during the regime of pol pot or the misery of rwanda nothing comparable to the holocaust. Jewish children were being hanged from windows in the neighborhoods of germans whose neighbors knew the families. the german people eagerly and happily enjoyed herr hitler and his band of sick psychopaths and perverts and lest we forget to mention it, drug addicts. those who stood against these crimes were murdered along with the Jews. beyond everything, it was the automation and the mechanization of killing innocent Jewish german citizens and gassing and hanging 1.5 million little Jewish children with great purposefulness that gives the german inquisition its special ignoble bloodstamp on history. we have the evidence of the smiling laughing hitler saluting audiences crammed together because there were hardly spaces large enough to hold them all. don't use the word comparable. just don't.
Why do jews always think they're such special flowers? There's virtually no difference in the brutality of atrocities compared to Darfur, Armenia or what the IS is doing. The only difference was sheer magnitude and ruthless execution - with uncompromising German efficiency.
Sympathy for their genocide over other genocides has numerous causes. Mainly, it's because of American relation to it. We saved them, so we like hearing about it. It also bolsters Christian bias in American politics. Still, it was very bad. We would probably have more perspective as a human phenomenon rather than a European one on it if additional genocides were explicated.
Western Germany recovered well from WWII, with western help of course, but then they recovered from the recession that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and now they are again the first in EU by GDP. Even with the help received, you have to admit that they are the kind of people that have the resources to recover from disaster.
And Hitler, along with a second industrial war, was inevitable. I'll even go as far as saying that we were lucky that Hitler happened, because one can argue that he made a lot of tactical mistakes and in other circumstances the Axis might have won.
And I hope we learned something from it, though judging by 2016 I have my doubts.
"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. . . .
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
The actual history, though, is very interesting. Here's the Wikipedia article on the agreement between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat
They would back out of the agreement later, and the pope also denounced the Nazi and Italian regimes that surround and protected the Vatican. Saying that the Vatican compromised is ridiculous, given that they were willing, with thousands of guns aimed at them, to denounce the actions of the people holding those guns, and even take direct legal and illegal actions to sabotage them, such as providing "fake/real" visas (real in the sense that a state issued them, but with false names, false details, "proof" they weren't Jewish, etc), physically hiding Jews, falsify medical documents (Nazis executed cripples and metal patients first), falsify school records, threaten to shut down Rome in protest, the Vatican escape network, all on an enormous scale. The Vatican was, for years, the only organised resistance against the Nazis. And yes, those guns didn't fire as a result of their actions, or at least, not at the Vatican itself (they did shoot plenty of members of the lower ranks of the Catholic church. They got "the honor" of having their own section inside Auschwitz, with "special attention" of the guards. The rumour is that imprisoned priests physically shivered any time any rumour of actions of the Church made it to the inmates, for that special attention of the guards was sure to follow. Most of the people in there had committed crimes to save people from those camps, knowing the consequences, and less than 20% survived those consequences). Would you be willing to violate the law to save a few people you don't like knowing there's an 80 percent chance it'll cost you your life ? But yes, they're a European state and they will negotiate and talk to whatever government comes to power anywhere in Europe. They even hosted Hitler's ambassador (and used him to protect Italian Jews).
As a leader of an organisation, would you be willing to organize crimes against the government if it did things you believe unjust ? Would you be willing and able to have an organisation continue those crimes when it's people were being executed ?
I don't think any of us can imagine what running organisations like the Catholic church, or any other resistance on the mainland, must have been like.
It is very easy to sit in 2016 and say that everyone saw it coming and anyone who didn't respond, did so out of cowardice or outright malice. This isn't true. Self-preservation was by far the main driver of most people's actions.
Why did "so few resist Hitler". Here's a video from yesterday : http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/videozone/programmas/journ... (seems to be censored on youtube, or at least, I can't seem to find videos with the massive crowds cheering his "I killed those dumb criminals" statements. The -many- videos showing Duterte's people arriving on motorcycles to people's homes dragging men and women out of their homes, sometimes leaving behind crying children, are disappearing fast. Here's a video with some -shocking- imagery about what's happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atuqx5Ubr5o watch it, because all these videos become "not available" within a few days)
The socialist international celebrated the membership of the Nazis to their organisation in 1938 and were unwilling to kick them out until 1940.
Or should we point out that members of American academia were publishing articles in New York in support of the Nazis in ......
"You are trying to push an absolutist moral view upon a situation where people needed to compromise with adversaries with an army that were willing to commit mass-murder to push their point."
Wait, what? All I did was point out that the quote was fake, and link to some relevant history. I'm not trying to push anything.
Exactly but GP comment demonstrates how easy it is to get lead into wrong direction. Most of us will not research deep enough is systems seems to come from authoritative source.
An ignorant person will always choose to commit an act of violence towards another to protect against uncertainty. To resist this urge and live with uncertainty is a form of wisdom.
It's easy to succumb to the nihilism in the face of fascism because it is an ideology that is unencumbered by truth or meaning. People like to think that if they could just have a conversation with a fascist and reason with them that they could convince them otherwise. When all the reason in the world does not stem the tide of fascism, one becomes disillusioned with the ideals of the enlightenment. Fascism is the antithesis of the enlightenment: fascism is the full embrace of the stupidity of violence and domination. It is rooted in that fundamental basis of social order which few examine critically. We all would like to believe that our civilization has gone far beyond the point where it is brute violence that decides social truth, and when fascism rises it lifts with it the veil that allows us to entertain such fantasies. When all of the things we were taught are the basis of society seem to be completely worthless in the face of fascism's brutality, how could we but not feel helpless and passive?
Here's an excerpt from Sartre's Anti-semite and Jew [1]. I think it's illuminating:
The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at
the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons.
How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and
frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to
him. He has placed himself on other ground from the
beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to
defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give
himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty
onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some
remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews
because they make servants insubordinate, because a
Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti‐
Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their
replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open
to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is
their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly,
since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right
to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving
ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their
interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they
seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate
and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will
abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that
the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid
of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or
to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning
over some third person to their side.
In order to resist fascism one has to have the conviction to fight for something that fascism seeks to destroy.
"The naïve faith of the proletarian is the faith of the man of action. Rationality belongs to the cool observers. There is of course an element of illusion in the faith of the proletarian, as there is in all faith. But it is a necessary illusion, without which some truth is obscured. The inertia of society is so stubborn that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than is actually the case." -- Reinhold Niebuhr
One thing I found surprising after researching Hitler's rise to power was that he in fact did not achieve a large majority of seats in the Reichstag before seizing power or was overwhelmingly popular. In the 1932 German Federal election, the last free and fair before Hitler took power, the Nazi party only achieved 33% of seats in the Reichstag [0]. Hitler and the Nazi party also gained power within the framework of the Weimar Republic (ie not a direct military coup). My understanding is that this was possible because the communists did not view the Nazi's as the primary threat, but rather the moderate socialist parties, and also some very poor judgement by the Nationalist-Conservative party to form a coalition with the Nazis. With that coalition, the Enabling Act was passed giving Hitler dictatorial powers, and things snow-balled from there.
I know this is kind off-topic, given that the article is about this guys new book, but I've been diving more into modern history after studying mostly ancient and world history. Perhaps some other knowledgeable people can point to good resources on WW2 history? On WW1, I found "The Fall of the Ottomans", "The Sleepwalkers", and "The Guns of August" very insightful, but there are just so many resources for WW2.
latin heretics were doing genocide for 10 centuries
it is same to them as telling kind words
once they rounded up free masons across europe
they just did like they always did
now there is more mass media so it is different
why do people don't resist Obama or Merkel or British now
34 comments
[ 137 ms ] story [ 915 ms ] threadps: experimental printfriendly.com pdf sharing http://pdf.printfriendly.com/pdfs/1482008632_de749b/download
pps: reminds me of that article shared on HN not long ago http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/09/23/the-milo-criterion/
limits of system evolution
Sites will display the article when coming directly from google if you don't have certain cookies from prior visits. Private/incognito ensures the cookies "dont exist".
> there are among even the most terrifying of targeted massacres such as during the regime of pol pot or the misery of rwanda nothing comparable to the holocaust. Jewish children were being hanged from windows in the neighborhoods of germans whose neighbors knew the families. the german people eagerly and happily enjoyed herr hitler and his band of sick psychopaths and perverts and lest we forget to mention it, drug addicts. those who stood against these crimes were murdered along with the Jews. beyond everything, it was the automation and the mechanization of killing innocent Jewish german citizens and gassing and hanging 1.5 million little Jewish children with great purposefulness that gives the german inquisition its special ignoble bloodstamp on history. we have the evidence of the smiling laughing hitler saluting audiences crammed together because there were hardly spaces large enough to hold them all. don't use the word comparable. just don't.
The only occurrence of the string 'compar' in the article:
"Mr. Fritzsche [the author of the book described] does not labor this point by comparing the situation with those that came after..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl...
And Hitler, along with a second industrial war, was inevitable. I'll even go as far as saying that we were lucky that Hitler happened, because one can argue that he made a lot of tactical mistakes and in other circumstances the Axis might have won.
And I hope we learned something from it, though judging by 2016 I have my doubts.
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
Albert Einstein
The actual history, though, is very interesting. Here's the Wikipedia article on the agreement between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat
As a leader of an organisation, would you be willing to organize crimes against the government if it did things you believe unjust ? Would you be willing and able to have an organisation continue those crimes when it's people were being executed ?
I don't think any of us can imagine what running organisations like the Catholic church, or any other resistance on the mainland, must have been like.
Here's a more complete summary: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pi...
It is very easy to sit in 2016 and say that everyone saw it coming and anyone who didn't respond, did so out of cowardice or outright malice. This isn't true. Self-preservation was by far the main driver of most people's actions.
Why did "so few resist Hitler". Here's a video from yesterday : http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/videozone/programmas/journ... (seems to be censored on youtube, or at least, I can't seem to find videos with the massive crowds cheering his "I killed those dumb criminals" statements. The -many- videos showing Duterte's people arriving on motorcycles to people's homes dragging men and women out of their homes, sometimes leaving behind crying children, are disappearing fast. Here's a video with some -shocking- imagery about what's happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atuqx5Ubr5o watch it, because all these videos become "not available" within a few days)
The socialist international celebrated the membership of the Nazis to their organisation in 1938 and were unwilling to kick them out until 1940.
Or should we point out that members of American academia were publishing articles in New York in support of the Nazis in ......
Wait, what? All I did was point out that the quote was fake, and link to some relevant history. I'm not trying to push anything.
"The Catholic Church", on the other hand, attempted to compromise with Hitler.
Here's an excerpt from Sartre's Anti-semite and Jew [1]. I think it's illuminating:
In order to resist fascism one has to have the conviction to fight for something that fascism seeks to destroy.[1] https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Semite-Jew-Exploration-Etiology-...
This is likely why you find so much of business embracing fascism, as they to appeal to those same instincts to drive the consumer economy.
I know this is kind off-topic, given that the article is about this guys new book, but I've been diving more into modern history after studying mostly ancient and world history. Perhaps some other knowledgeable people can point to good resources on WW2 history? On WW1, I found "The Fall of the Ottomans", "The Sleepwalkers", and "The Guns of August" very insightful, but there are just so many resources for WW2.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_Novem...