Remember....the Victors write the history books...

Hoosierdaddy71
The nazis tried to exterminate a race. That not evil enough for you? No nations perfect but that one was particularly nasty.

It would seem that my request of you to think was a bit much?

All you've done is parrot what the text books have been written for us to understand of the situation.

All I tried to point out is that the pearly white version we've been given is whitewash.

reply to post by zeroBelief


I have to agree with the whole "think" argument. Citing Sources and Spilling facts and Statistics is not your opinion. You are doing the exact opposite of what this thread asked to have done. They want to know what YOU think; Opinions, not facts.

IMO all wars are biased towards the winner, I mean, isn't that obvious? If somebody wins control, they get to choose what people say about them by threatening anyone who says otherwise.

Same thing happens between teenagers worldwide, 2 kids fight, winner is telling the truth (as far as the other kids are concerned)
If you were to try to take away from their victory they would become aggressive and confront you. Duh!?!?

There is always good and bad on both sides of any war. Always, Even if you do not share the point of view of the side you disagree with, some of their ideals may have been not so bad. If more people were open minded and accepting, I think we would be less violent as a species.

Take Civil War in America for example.
This is how my grandfather explained it to me and is MY OPINION
Obviously the whole south could not have been evil or they would not have had African American soldiers that not only fought, but fought proudly for the south. Not all slave owners beat their slaves and starved and raped them. Some treated them as family, gave them wages, and allowed them to live in their own homes on the property.
The North was most certainly not all innocent and heroic either. They claim the war was about slavery because they won, but it started long before that was an issue. The north was not fertile land and when the south pulled out of the union they were left with machines and factories but no product to use them on. The slavery argument was basically them deciding, well if they are gonna screw us we should get them first. What can we say that will get us the most soldiers? I Know! Lets use the worst of them and say all of them are like that! (All wars do just that BTW)

Once a group of people in power decides they want war, they get it, as long as the people allow. It is nothing but arrogance in most cases and IDC if you disagree with me. THAT'S KINDA THE POINT. It is opinions.

The good and bad on both sides is portrayed by the winner usually emphasizing the negative on the losing side and the positive on the winning.
Who wouldn't talk trash about someone they hated enough to slaughter?
Not going to lie, I would.

ADDED: To win, you must be a killer. I know of no killers with sparkly white pure motives. Even churches admit to being wrong in those situations.

zeroBelief

Hoosierdaddy71
The nazis tried to exterminate a race. That not evil enough for you? No nations perfect but that one was particularly nasty.

It would seem that my request of you to think was a bit much?

All you've done is parrot what the text books have been written for us to understand of the situation.

All I tried to point out is that the pearly white version we've been given is whitewash.

This is what you said..

I think that after reading this, if you still believe how absolutely "evil" the Nazi Regime was.... Well, I wonder how closed minded you might be.

And this little gem..


I have a job, and a family. And that job is not to be an independent researcher of such things.

If you need a few dozen more of anything, I'd suggest you use Google.


You say directly that the nazis were not that "evil". I say they were and gave you links to prove my point. I also agreed that they were not the only evil in the world. Yet they were still nasty.
The only thing you have to back up your theory is something you "read" that someone else wrote and published in 1990.
Then when xuenchen asked you for more proof to back your theory you tell him to look it up yourself! We get one paper written by a disgruntled soldier as evidence and your done looking. All that you have proven is that you are to lazy to even research the facts before you post a thread. Maybe you should (think) about that awhile.

Hoosierdaddy71
The nazis tried to exterminate a race. That not evil enough for you? No nations perfect but that one was particularly nasty.

Genghis Khan slaughtered 40 million on his way westwards, no one has yet calculated how many the Romans killed, or the followers of the religion that start with the 13th letter of the alphabet, then there is pol pot, thought to have murdered a million, Stalin, 20 million Kulaks,
North American Indians? The Armenians, under the turks, aprox. one and a half million, Black Africans? those under the British empire?
Alexander the great must have killed more than a few on his way eastwards, Lastly the Jews, just how many did they slaughter when they advanced through the land of Canaan?

reply to post by pikestaff


Yep, Jews are evil to. They are human therefor capable of bad things.

Hoosierdaddy71
The nazis tried to exterminate a race. That not evil enough for you? No nations perfect but that one was particularly nasty.

Exactly.

Come on the NAZI took evil to comic book levels. They were a example of what happens when you vote the violently mental ill into power

FyreByrd


What the USA did to Dresden was horrific,

HEY! And the British! Dont forgot our big role in that war crime!


Dam Americans trying to claim all the credit

Hoosierdaddy71
reply to post by pikestaff

 

Yep, Jews are evil to. They are human therefor capable of bad things.

I think a lot of people have done bad things but the more we as a humanity continue to associate specific labels such as Jews and evil right down to a point where we try to express a general value for the whole, we will not see the whole picture.
But you are right everyone is capable of bad things. We can only hope our children grow up to understand the only real evil is death and that is an inevitable part of change, so it cant really be defined as one thing.

We should turn Evil around....LIVE or just make it both at times we chose which one.

I have little doubt I will be flamed for making an observation. I have been many times before, but it proves my point.

When I was in the 10th grade my teacher told the class that 6.2 million Jews were killed in WWII.

I asked how many Americans? How many French? How many English? How many Russian?

I was kicked out of the class and punished for my remarks (the remarks posted above).

Yes indeed, the winners do write the history..............

200Plus
I have little doubt I will be flamed for making an observation. I have been many times before, but it proves my point.

When I was in the 10th grade my teacher told the class that 6.2 million Jews were killed in WWII.

I asked how many Americans? How many French? How many English? How many Russian?

I was kicked out of the class and punished for my remarks (the remarks posted above).

Yes indeed, the winners do write the history..............

Japanese history books skip over the war years and the things that japan did to china. So the losers write their history books to. I know when I was in high school my history book had one chapter on ww2. Ten pages was not much more than a sum up.

en.wikipedia.org...

Hoosierdaddy71
reply to post by FyreByrd

 

When you say what the us did to japan, do you mean the nukes? Because those nukes saved a million plus lives.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one thing and we can debate forever on whether it was necessary or not, however what wasn't necessary was this:

Japanese-American Internment

During World War II, the federal government ordered 120,000 Japanese-Americans who lived on the West coast to leave their homes and live in 10 large relocation camps (see Internment Map) in remote, desolate areas, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Two-thirds were native-born American citizens.

Emphasis added. Also for the article, this:

It would not be until 1988 that the U.S. government formally apologized, provided compensation to those who were interned, and created an education fund to preserve the history and to teach the lessons of this shameful episode. (see Redress for Japanese Internees

It took over to FORTY years for the American government to admit it did anything wrong. History is written by the winners indeed.

reply to post by Krazysh0t




Those actions were no secret, everybody knew about it. What does that have to do with glossed over history?
The Japanese in those camps were not starved, beaten or experimented on. They also walked out of the camps after the war. Although the actions by the US government were unethical they don't constitute war crimes. Maybe racism, the blacks were segregated at that time to.


Here is a link to newspaper articles referring to the Japanese internment.

www.digitalhistory.uh.edu...

Most countries don't advertise their bad laundry.

reply to post by zeroBelief


Great subject. After the Civil War there was only one person tried and hung for his involvement in the losing side, Major Henry Wirz who was the commander of Andersonville, a Confederate P.O.W. camp. History books will tell you of the cruel and inhumane conditions at Andersonville but most will have nary a word about such hellish places as Camp Douglas near Chicago which was dubbed Eighty Acres Of Hell. Fact is, Wirz did the best he could with a nearly non-existent infrastructure to begin with that eroded during the war, making it almost impossible to get supplies there and most of the testimony that got him killed was false. He didn't deserve his fate but the winners write the story and someone, somehow had to be the scapegoat and he was it.

The Wikipage is quite good and has this quote concerning the conditions at Camp Douglas:

"Sir, the amount of standing water, unpoliced grounds, of foul sinks, of unventilated and crowded barracks, of general disorder, of soil reeking miasmatic accretions, of rotten bones and emptying of camp kettles, is enough to drive a sanitarian to despair. I hope that no thought will be entertained of mending matters. The absolute abandonment of the spot seems to be the only judicious course. I do not believe that any amount of drainage would purge that soil loaded with accumulated filth or those barracks fetid with two stories of vermin and animal exhalations. Nothing but fire can cleanse them.

There is also this:

In the aftermath of the war, Camp Douglas eventually came to be described as the North's "Andersonville" for its poor conditions and death rate of between seventeen and twenty-three per cent.[229] The death rate was lower than at Andersonville and its conditions were better

The Union camps were as bad as any in the south. Anyone who has done even a cursory study of P.O.W. camps in ANY war knows that they are bad everywhere, not just on the losers side, as your post shows.

Whether on the winners side or the losers, it's always bad in P.O.W. camps.

reply to post by Hoosierdaddy71


Well that's all fine and good, America acknowledged that they were being openly racist and dehumanizing American citizens, so it is ok in the end. I'm glad I got your stance on the this. Having to uproot and go to these places cost them their livelihoods, friends, trust from their non-Asian friends, and more things I cannot even begin to know. Also I don't care how nice they were treated, being forced into a camp surrounded by armed guards is imprisonment. It isn't a a weekend at some summer camp.

www.factmonster.com...

Conditions in the U.S. Camps

The U.S. internment camps were overcrowded and provided poor living conditions. According to a 1943 report published by the War Relocation Authority (the administering agency), Japanese Americans were housed in "tarpaper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind." Coal was hard to come by, and internees slept under as many blankets as they were alloted. Food was rationed out at an expense of 48 cents per internee, and served by fellow internees in a mess hall of 250-300 people.

Leadership positions within the camps were only offered to the Nisei, or American-born, Japanese. The older generation, or the Issei, were forced to watch as the government promoted their children and ignored them.

Eventually the government allowed internees to leave the concentration camps if they enlisted in the U.S. Army. This offer was not well received. Only 1,200 internees chose to do so.

Lol well treated indeed...

In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed legislation which awarded formal payments of $20,000 each to the surviving internees—60,000 in all. This same year, formal apologies were also issued by the government of Canada to Japanese Canadian survivors, who were each repaid the sum of $21,000 Canadian dollars.

Wow $20,000... And only to the 60,000 survivors (half of the Japanese interned), I guess the families of the people who didn't survive don't deserve to be compensated for being made destitute by their government. Not to mention this was 1988 and $20,000 is no were the same as it was in 1946. It's a good thing those 60,000 were able to put their lives back together and live for an extra 40 years after this hardship was over all so the American government can give a half-assed apology and sweep this embarrassment under the rug.

reply to post by Hoosierdaddy71

Yeah right, hitler loved the Jews. As long as they left his country. If not,off to the camp you went. He also has a fine list of other atrocities to his name.

Hitler hated everyone. Even though he professed "loving Germany", in the end he allowed it to be destroyed along with him rather than give in to save its people.

What love for a country and its people.

This line of thinking is exactly what this thread is about. It regurgitates the official line written by the victors.

Hoosierdaddy71
The nazis tried to exterminate a race. That not evil enough for you? No nations perfect but that one was particularly nasty.

This is precisely what those individual soldiers were thinking in order to justify their actions. It is sick thinking. This is the very rot at the core of the human condition that allowed the Nazis to perpetuate their evil. It all comes down to a demonization of The Other.

Using the atrocities committed by members of a nation/people/race/whatever as an excuse to visit those same atrocities upon them in turn is wrong. Turning that brutality upon those members that are innocent, and had nothing to do with the original cruelty is the worst kind of hypocrisy.

We aspire to higher purpose, but war never fails to illustrate that we are aggressive animals. In the right circumstances, we use the flimsiest of excuses to exercise that primal aggression, and then excuse away those actions with the same circular, and school yard logic.

You stand on the edge of this nasty tendency even in times of peace, and there are so many just like you. I wouldn't want to be any where near you or anyone like you in a war. Not as your enemy certainly, but even more not as a non-combatant that might cross your path, or even standing next to you with the same uniform with the same goal.

People that think as you do are exactly why the Nazis came to power at all.

reply to post by Krazysh0t



Where did I defend the actions of the govt? I said it was wrong. I was only pointing out how the camps in the two countries were different. In the one camp you tended to die, not in the other.

redhorse

Hoosierdaddy71
The nazis tried to exterminate a race. That not evil enough for you? No nations perfect but that one was particularly nasty.

This is precisely what those individual soldiers were thinking in order to justify their actions. It is sick thinking. This is the very rot at the core of the human condition that allowed the Nazis to perpetuate their evil. It all comes down to a demonization of The Other.

Using the atrocities committed by members of a nation/people/race/whatever as an excuse to visit those same atrocities upon them in turn is wrong. Turning that brutality upon those members that are innocent, and had nothing to do with the original cruelty is the worst kind of hypocrisy.

We aspire to higher purpose, but war never fails to illustrate that we are aggressive animals. In the right circumstances, we use the flimsiest of excuses to exercise that primal aggression, and then excuse away those actions with the same circular, and school yard logic.

You stand on the edge of this nasty tendency even in times of peace, and there are so many just like you. I wouldn't want to be any where near you or anyone like you in a war. Not as your enemy certainly, but even more not as a non-combatant that might cross your path, or even standing next to you with the same uniform with the same goal.

People that think as you do are exactly why the Nazis came to power at all.

I said the nazis did bad things. They did. I didn't say they should in turn be removed from existence. All you know about me is what you have interpreted from a few paragraphs. Don't assume you know me.
The author of this thread was attempting to point out how history is painted to be something it really wasn't. I accept that theory. I don't like how he only pointed out how the nazis were not all that bad. He singled out one point in history and then nothing. Yes every culture has done terrible things. That doesn't give the nazis a pass for their terrible deeds.

Hoosierdaddy71
reply to post by Krazysh0t

 

Where did I defend the actions of the govt? I said it was wrong. I was only pointing out how the camps in the two countries were different. In the one camp you tended to die, not in the other.

Throwing stones, glass houses and all that.

TheSpanishArcher
reply to post by zeroBelief

 

Great subject. After the Civil War there was only one person tried and hung for his involvement in the losing side, Major Henry Wirz who was the commander of Andersonville, a Confederate P.O.W. camp. History books will tell you of the cruel and inhumane conditions at Andersonville but most will have nary a word about such hellish places as Camp Douglas near Chicago which was dubbed Eighty Acres Of Hell. Fact is, Wirz did the best he could with a nearly non-existent infrastructure to begin with that eroded during the war, making it almost impossible to get supplies there and most of the testimony that got him killed was false. He didn't deserve his fate but the winners write the story and someone, somehow had to be the scapegoat and he was it.

The Wikipage is quite good and has this quote concerning the conditions at Camp Douglas:

"Sir, the amount of standing water, unpoliced grounds, of foul sinks, of unventilated and crowded barracks, of general disorder, of soil reeking miasmatic accretions, of rotten bones and emptying of camp kettles, is enough to drive a sanitarian to despair. I hope that no thought will be entertained of mending matters. The absolute abandonment of the spot seems to be the only judicious course. I do not believe that any amount of drainage would purge that soil loaded with accumulated filth or those barracks fetid with two stories of vermin and animal exhalations. Nothing but fire can cleanse them.

There is also this:

In the aftermath of the war, Camp Douglas eventually came to be described as the North's "Andersonville" for its poor conditions and death rate of between seventeen and twenty-three per cent.[229] The death rate was lower than at Andersonville and its conditions were better

The Union camps were as bad as any in the south. Anyone who has done even a cursory study of P.O.W. camps in ANY war knows that they are bad everywhere, not just on the losers side, as your post shows.

Whether on the winners side or the losers, it's always bad in P.O.W. camps.

Thank you for eloquently underscoring precisely the intent of my post.

In war, there is no gallantry. No civilized approach.

Boy, we love to paint a pretty picture.

But just look at all the people coming home with PTSD. And ask yourselves...is it truly 100% because of the violence perpetrated upon them by "the enemy" ?