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posted by
cmn32480
on Thursday May 12 2016, @03:37AM
from the history-is-in-the-culture-of-the-teller dept.
from the history-is-in-the-culture-of-the-teller dept.
An interesting phone interview with Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University.
"The Japanese ignore everything before Hiroshima and the Americans ignore everything after Nagasaki."
On Tuesday, President Obama announced his decision to visit Hiroshima, Japan, the site where the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb in August 1945. Obama will specifically visit Memorial Park, which commemorates the event; he will be the first sitting American president to do so, although he does not plan to offer any sort of apology. The bombing of Hiroshima killed around 100,000 people; three days later, tens of thousands more were killed after the United States bombed Nagasaki.
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How Japan and the U.S. Remember World War II
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The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
-- John Milton
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 12 2016, @12:40PM
Ah, good morning, Soylent's resident Nazi true believer!
I agree that our respective national perceptions of WWII are heavily skewed by propaganda. It's dangerous to reduce Hitler and the Nazis to cartoon cutouts the way Hollywood and other forces have, because it blinds people to how easy it is to slide from policies based on reasons to abject evil. They think, well, there's no way we could ever turn out like the Nazis because they were the personification of Satan, whereas we are reasonable people who are responding rationally to real issues. When it comes down to it, the step from rational policies to atrocity can be ever so slight, almost imperceptible. Look how easily the United States has utterly abandoned its fealty to its own Constitution and the rule of law, setting up places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and total police state surveillance through the NSA, CIA, and FBI. American citizens are disappeared in numbers into black sites in Chicago [theguardian.com], where they are tortured and held without access to counsel.
It's also hard to argue the pernicious, persistent evil that is the international banking system. Those people are utterly amoral and corrupt and must be rooted out. The Unaoil scandal, the Panama Papers, LIBOR-rate fixing, drug cartel money laundering, subprime mortgage crisis, and many, many other scandals (and none of those are older than 10 years, BTW), prove that.
But the way you interleave apologia for Hitler in all that is sinister. It's not that we should condemn him and the Nazis less, as you wish, but that we ought to condemn parties like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton more. It's not to displace all moral culpability onto international bankers or some other party, as you wish, but to recognize that we all bear responsibility to cleave to honor and moral rectitude rather than succumb to mindless terror. Even if all we can individually do is to speak up, we all must. The answer to moral depravity is not to call, "Everybody does it, so it's OK," the way you're doing here and the way, say, the NSA's defenders have, but to denounce and oppose it vehemently everywhere. Excusing it makes you an accessory to the crime.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 12 2016, @02:34PM
"Everybody does it, so it's OK," the way you're doing here and the way, say, the NSA's defenders have, but to denounce and oppose it vehemently everywhere. Excusing it makes you an accessory to the crime.
Hear, hear.
Or the common refrain "hey, your country is doing it, too; you can't criticize us for doing it." To which I often say, "I wish my country wasn't doing it either."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday May 12 2016, @09:46PM
Or even worse. "You are committing war crimes too."
No, I am not committing any war crimes. And I have been voting against the establishment in my country that has been for the past 2 administrations.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday May 12 2016, @02:50PM
And indeed, painting Hitler and the Nazis as cartoonishly inhuman monsters is a good way to fail to notice when other people try to do what they did.
By all appearances:
- Hitler was a very bitter paranoid drug addict, angry about the loss in WW I and his completely failed career as an artist, who was on a mission to Make Germany Great Again.
- Goebbels was a flat-out sociopath, out for what was best for Goebbels, not for anyone else, and hitched himself to Hitler because that seemed to be profitable. But he also seems to have had a homicidal-suicidal streak along the same lines as Reverend Jim Jones of the People's Temple.
- The early Nazis (the S.A. in particular) were bullies who wanted a chance to beat people up without consequences. Those kinds of people are never hard to find, anywhere.
- The professional officers in the German military (Rommel, Paulus, etc) were mostly following their orders, but do not seem to have been fans of Hitler. The feeling was mutual. But of course, they followed Hitler's orders, in part to try to save their own necks.
- The early part of the war was fought by the established German army, and that again was mostly professional soldiers following orders.
- The later part of the war was fought mostly by conscripts. Those guys mostly just wanted to somehow get through alive.
- The real fanatics were the S.S., who did in fact want to kill as many Jews as they could get their hands on. Some of them, of course, were just the sort of bullies that had joined the S.A. earlier.
They weren't nuts (at least, at first). They were evil bastards who made it legal to be an evil bastard and illegal to not be an evil bastard. There's a difference.
As to what to do about Nazis and Nazi-like people, at the very least, you refuse to cooperate [businessinsider.com] (that guy was killed, in part because he refused to salute Hitler).
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 12 2016, @04:09PM
As to what to do about Nazis and Nazi-like people, at the very least, you refuse to cooperate (that guy was killed, in part because he refused to salute Hitler).
Do you have a link to an actual page about that guy?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday May 12 2016, @04:34PM
Read all about August Landmesser [csmonitor.com], the man in that photograph.
I actually had it somewhat wrong: He wasn't killed for it. However, the Jewish woman who he was trying to marry died in a concentration camp, and he was drafted and MIA.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 12 2016, @04:24PM
The list you laid out is important, because it reconnects the roots of Nazism to its banal, reasonable origins. But I would reiterate that sociopathy was not unique to the German High Command, and in fact obtains in American government to an alarming degree today. Nothing structural remains between the everyday of American society now, and the pathological path that was Nazi Germany then.
There are no massive protests against the NSA on the streets of America today. Nobody is decrying the massive gap between exit polls and reported vote tallies in the 2016 Presidential primary races.
I wish Soylentils and everyone else would read and process what you're writing, because it's important. We're skittering about on the surface of a perception bubble that's about to burst.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday May 12 2016, @04:43PM
Not entirely true. There are two differences that matter quite a bit:
1. Americans for the most part have enough to eat. The Germans during the rise of the Nazis didn't. That made the Germans more susceptible to the more despicable aspects of Hitler's rhetoric, because hungry people can't think straight (I know, I've gone hungry for financial reasons before).
2. The opposition is much more organized and unified. Hitler only got about 35% of the vote when elected into power, and only ended up in charge because the remaining 65% was fractured among 5 other parties. By contrast, there's typically only 1 opposition party in the US government, so they're much more able to act as a unified force to stop someone with that much of a fringe idea.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12 2016, @11:40PM
Hitler only got about 35% of the vote
Yup. 37.27 percent.
Note also that over a quarter million voted None Of The Above or had their ballots rejected.
Hitler [...] ended up in charge because the remaining 65% was fractured among 5 other parties
Actually, the number of parties in the German election in July 1932 was **61**. [wikipedia.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]