I really dislike the cartoon-ification of Nazi's, as well as the overloading of that word. It's really impossible for most people nowadays to understand the scale of industrialized hatred that occurred.
Also quote from the wikipedia article about "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" which is shown in many UK schools as part of Holocaust education:
"Research by Holocaust educator Michael Gray found that more than three-quarters of British schoolchildren (ages 13–14) in his sample had engaged with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, significantly more than The Diary of Anne Frank. The film was having a significant effect on many of the children's knowledge and beliefs about the Holocaust. The children believed that the story contained a lot of useful information about the Holocaust and conveyed an accurate impression of many real-life events. The majority believed that it was based on a true story. He also found that many students drew false inferences from the film, such as assuming that Germans would not have known anything about the Holocaust because Bruno's family did not, or that the Holocaust had stopped because a Nazi child had accidentally been gassed. Other students believed that Jews had volunteered to go to the camps because they had been fooled by Nazi propaganda, rather than being violently rounded up and deported."
Not to mention that the movie has the absolute weirdest perspective of getting the audience to empathize with a German boy from a family of Nazis, not the actual victims of the Holocaust, as well as trivializing the hatred perpetuated by the Nazis. Its work like that which seems harmless to most people but it is massively damaging.
The holocaust is not necessarily unique as an instance of ethnic cleansing or genocide. But it was unique in that it was the first instance of industrialized genocide, and was carried out with a degree of bureaucratic process and precision not often observed. Thus it generated a volume of documentation that gives unique insight into how humans might be capable of these sort of atrocities against their neighbors.
Something similar exists for slavery (and Jim Crow) in the US, but we as a nation do not have the fortitude to confront our past in a way the Germans have.
>Something similar exists for slavery (and Jim Crow) in the US, but we as a nation do not have the fortitude to confront our past in a way the Germans have.
Germans have no such fortitude. It was imposed on them through a victory that cost tens of millions of lives. Even then for many Germans its a surface level confrontation for the sake of political correctness.
It was the biggest genocide committed against white people in recent memory. people in general dont' care about what happens to black people (beligan congo, rwanada), cambodians (kumir ruge), or palestinians (witheld to avoid being downvotes to oblivion).
closest thing we can get to a genocide/culturcide of a people currently that anyone in teh west cares about is the uighurs and thats mostly just a half hearted straw grasp to justify anti china sentiments.
What do you think countries did differently in the 1930s-1940s to help Nazi victims that they’re not doing for these other cases of genocide? I doubt the Allied countries would have done anymore to stop it then we do today, if they hadn’t been forced into war by the Axis. Race has much less to do about the lack of action then the enormous cost of action. I think where race does play in is not just the ethnicity of the victims but also the ethnicity and perceived civility of the perpetrators, prior to the war. Germany was a liberal democracy that turned to unimaginable darkness. You don’t see the same reaction to the Soviet Gulags, which killed more people, because the Soviets were already viewed as brutal.
This isn’t correct. Your statement regarding gulag numbers being higher comes from Maier’s report and is generally refuted. The death rates in the gulags were much lower than Maier reported. The gulags did contain many more prisoners than the holocaust camps. [1]
The holocaust is the world’s go-to genocide because it has by far the largest rate of death and has the highest total death count. It was also carried out by a relatively small country. Auschwitz’s last year saw more than 1M deaths.
Sorry for the JSTOR paywall if you don’t have access to an institution. Perhaps you can find it elsewhere. The first two tables compare the total deaths (and also deaths over time) between the holocaust camps and the gulags.
I see the Holocaust, aside form the terrible crime that it was in itself, as a sign that democracy can sometimes fail. Hitler came to power via a democratic process. He won an election fair and square. His message was one of hate, but it resonated with the majority of his countrymen at the time. And then, at all times until it was too late, he was supported by a majority of them again.
What America has is not democracy, it's a system of checks and balances. It's a system with lots of safeguards so that hate does not get legalized, but it was not always like that. It got like that after a half million men lost their life in the struggle to tell right from wrong in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Other countries fought equally bloody battles to figure out their own system of checks and balances. Britain went through its own horrendous civil wars, France went from revolution to revolution from 1789 to pretty much de Gaulle's coup in 1958.
Most countries in the world did not go through such a process though. In all these countries, if democracy exists, it is either a charade, or an immature democracy like the one that allowed the rise of Hitler. No wonder that people like Putin can get in power through the process of democratic elections.
> Hitler came to power via a democratic process. He won an election fair and square.
Debatable. In Weimar Germany’s last free and fair election, the NSDAP won the most seats, but failed to win a majority. von Papen, who was leader of the Centre Party (a centre-right Catholic party), convinced President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor. Neither von Papen nor von Hindenburg were Nazis; they thought they could control Hitler, they found out too late that rather than controlling Hitler, Hitler was controlling them. President von Hindenburg died in office of old age, at which point Hitler decided Germany didn’t need a President any more to keep the Chancellor in check. After the Nazis banned his own Centre Party, von Papen accepted the inevitable, joined the Nazi Party and spent the war as German ambassador to Turkey. At no point did the majority of Germans vote for Hitler in a free and fair election.
> What America has is not democracy, it's a system of checks and balances.
Weimar Germany had checks and balances too, it is just they didn't work. There is no guarantee that America's will forever continue to work either.
And America is a democracy. Some people want to define "democracy" in a very narrow sense to exclude any checks and balances, but that's not usual contemporary English usage. It is the same as these people who pedantically insist that "America is a republic not a democracy", ignoring that in saying that they are using the word "democracy" in a narrower sense than normal. In the normal sense of "democracy", it includes systems which aren't pure democracies, that moderate democracy with checks and balances such as judicial review, representative rather direct democracy, etc – which are very common worldwide, far from being unique to the US
> Hitler came to power via a democratic process. He won an election fair and square.
Sort of but this misses some crucial detail. He lost his run at the presidency to Paul vin Hindenberg. Under Germany’s system, the leader of the largest party became
chancellor, which he eventually did.
I think the democratic aspect can be overemphasised. The Weimar Republic lasted only 15 years and lurched from crisis to crisis. It was rife with political violence, several attempted uprisings, military with questionable loyalty to this new government, economy in taters, so politically unstable that rule by decree had effectively become the norm.
Democracy didn't prevent his rise, but democracy was barely existent.
15 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 45.6 ms ] threadAlso quote from the wikipedia article about "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" which is shown in many UK schools as part of Holocaust education:
"Research by Holocaust educator Michael Gray found that more than three-quarters of British schoolchildren (ages 13–14) in his sample had engaged with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, significantly more than The Diary of Anne Frank. The film was having a significant effect on many of the children's knowledge and beliefs about the Holocaust. The children believed that the story contained a lot of useful information about the Holocaust and conveyed an accurate impression of many real-life events. The majority believed that it was based on a true story. He also found that many students drew false inferences from the film, such as assuming that Germans would not have known anything about the Holocaust because Bruno's family did not, or that the Holocaust had stopped because a Nazi child had accidentally been gassed. Other students believed that Jews had volunteered to go to the camps because they had been fooled by Nazi propaganda, rather than being violently rounded up and deported."
Not to mention that the movie has the absolute weirdest perspective of getting the audience to empathize with a German boy from a family of Nazis, not the actual victims of the Holocaust, as well as trivializing the hatred perpetuated by the Nazis. Its work like that which seems harmless to most people but it is massively damaging.
Something similar exists for slavery (and Jim Crow) in the US, but we as a nation do not have the fortitude to confront our past in a way the Germans have.
Germans have no such fortitude. It was imposed on them through a victory that cost tens of millions of lives. Even then for many Germans its a surface level confrontation for the sake of political correctness.
closest thing we can get to a genocide/culturcide of a people currently that anyone in teh west cares about is the uighurs and thats mostly just a half hearted straw grasp to justify anti china sentiments.
The holocaust is the world’s go-to genocide because it has by far the largest rate of death and has the highest total death count. It was also carried out by a relatively small country. Auschwitz’s last year saw more than 1M deaths.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/152781
Sorry for the JSTOR paywall if you don’t have access to an institution. Perhaps you can find it elsewhere. The first two tables compare the total deaths (and also deaths over time) between the holocaust camps and the gulags.
What America has is not democracy, it's a system of checks and balances. It's a system with lots of safeguards so that hate does not get legalized, but it was not always like that. It got like that after a half million men lost their life in the struggle to tell right from wrong in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Other countries fought equally bloody battles to figure out their own system of checks and balances. Britain went through its own horrendous civil wars, France went from revolution to revolution from 1789 to pretty much de Gaulle's coup in 1958.
Most countries in the world did not go through such a process though. In all these countries, if democracy exists, it is either a charade, or an immature democracy like the one that allowed the rise of Hitler. No wonder that people like Putin can get in power through the process of democratic elections.
Debatable. In Weimar Germany’s last free and fair election, the NSDAP won the most seats, but failed to win a majority. von Papen, who was leader of the Centre Party (a centre-right Catholic party), convinced President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor. Neither von Papen nor von Hindenburg were Nazis; they thought they could control Hitler, they found out too late that rather than controlling Hitler, Hitler was controlling them. President von Hindenburg died in office of old age, at which point Hitler decided Germany didn’t need a President any more to keep the Chancellor in check. After the Nazis banned his own Centre Party, von Papen accepted the inevitable, joined the Nazi Party and spent the war as German ambassador to Turkey. At no point did the majority of Germans vote for Hitler in a free and fair election.
> What America has is not democracy, it's a system of checks and balances.
Weimar Germany had checks and balances too, it is just they didn't work. There is no guarantee that America's will forever continue to work either.
And America is a democracy. Some people want to define "democracy" in a very narrow sense to exclude any checks and balances, but that's not usual contemporary English usage. It is the same as these people who pedantically insist that "America is a republic not a democracy", ignoring that in saying that they are using the word "democracy" in a narrower sense than normal. In the normal sense of "democracy", it includes systems which aren't pure democracies, that moderate democracy with checks and balances such as judicial review, representative rather direct democracy, etc – which are very common worldwide, far from being unique to the US
Sort of but this misses some crucial detail. He lost his run at the presidency to Paul vin Hindenberg. Under Germany’s system, the leader of the largest party became chancellor, which he eventually did.
He didn’t secure a majority of votes though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_pow...
Edit: Skissane beat me to it and makes the point better.
Democracy didn't prevent his rise, but democracy was barely existent.