Not really “powertripping”. Just pathetic. Consider this a notice to avoid feddit.org… I’ve unsubbed and blocked the instance.
We can’t dehumanize fascists for their choice to dehumanize everyone for things outside their control though, because that would be mean, and hurt their sociopath feefees!
Europe stool idly by throughout the 1930’s “tolerating” fascism, and the Nazi’s killed over 100 million people. Don’t make the same mistake as the radical centrists of history. Fascists will not afford you the same tolerance or courtesy.
One of the best things that happened in the 20th century was the firm reaffirmation, after the war was over, that Nazi lives do have value.
The allies would have been within every reasonable right to just string up the Nazi leadership like Mussolini, make a new treaty of Versailles, and mime tiny violins any time one of the citizens of Germany raised the alarm that their kids were starving. And, a lot of the people on the ground basically did exactly that. But the word from the top is: They are humans. They have rights.
The ones we think are guilty get lawyers and trials, no matter what we’re pretty sure they did. That’s what humans have to do for each other, in a just world. It doesn’t mean you don’t set things right, but you still give them human value and rights, even the worst, before you put them to death if that’s justice.
The whole roots of the war lay in misery and hate. What are we going to be reaping in 20 years if we just replant it all because it’s “what they deserve?” Let’s put an end to it.
It doesn’t mean we didn’t do terrible things in the war, or kill in self defense. Even kill whole cities in an instant, if you need to. But the killing isn’t the point. It’s just a protection, and it needs to end as soon as you can see a way to end it.
And then, back to human life and value. That is, in fact, what separates us from the Nazis, is that we’re not looking to throw it away.
Thank you for saying this. It needs to be said over and over. It’s the only way forward.
This is absolute bullshit. What the west did wasn’t to generously allow Nazis to reinsert themselves in society after education, but to do a few show trials and allow Nazis to maintain their previous positions. Ex-Nazi party members composed the majority of embassies of Western Germany, operation paperclip brought thousands of Nazis to US soil with immense benefits to produce weapons, a normalization of relations with fascism such as with Fascist Spain ensued, and the US directly sponsored fascist coups such as that of Pinochet in Chile.
“The West” is a massive mob of people with a lot of variation within them, both in motivation and action.
Some parts of it did full-throated support for fascism of all varieties, before, during and after the war. Some parts of it were against the Nazis (because, more or less, they were competition), but fully in favor of other fascism like Pinochet. Some parts of it were breaking their backs to try to save as many innocent people from the Nazis as they could, simply because of concern for human rights. Some parts of it continued that same opposition to fascism, even the flavor of it that the State Department likes, in the decades that followed, even including hearings to try to stop the fascism our people were doing in Central America, and trying very hard to send some high-ranking people in the US to prison for their embrace of fascism in Nicaragua. It didn’t work (except in the case of Thomas Clines, which I don’t consider much of a success), but it wasn’t for lack trying. By some people.
We don’t need to have a big argument over which of those is the “real” face of the US. They’re all real. The second grouping is probably the dominant grouping as far as representation inside the State Department and actual control of the US’s foreign policy, yes, which is a god damned shame. We can agree on that. The vast majority of Nazi war criminals were never punished, just kind of went on about their business.
For the most part, the people who set up Nuremberg were best buds with the people who helped Pinochet later on, but the sins of the second doesn’t completely cancel out the virtues of the first.
When I say “the west” I was talking about western governments, of course I applaud everyone in the west who opposed all of this (shoutout to communists like Michael Parenti).
My point with the comment wasn’t a blanket condemnation of the people in the west, but rather a rebuttal to the fake historical view that Nazis actually generally paid for their crimes through the legal system and Nazism was removed from power.
My point is, the people who put Thomas Clines in prison were also in the government.
You’re not wrong, really, about the sum output of the system in aggregate, viewed from the outside, though.
I really wanted you to be wrong, but you’re not, and that quote is the crux of the matter. I would just add we need to get really aggressive with re-education. I know you mentioned it elsewhere, but we need to be like dogs with t-bones, with it.
Can you give an example for implementing “aggressive reeducation”?
Regular, daily deprogramming with people trained. Aggressive daily therapy at not acting on hateful impulse. Actual critical thinking, critical reading, and logic classes, to start.
What happens if people don’t show up for classes?
Then they are segregated from society and will attend classes like people currently do.
Gulags are a terrible idea.
I agree we need to overhaul our current prisons, and get rid of the clause
showingallowing forspaceyslavery in our 14th amendment.Leftist authoritarians like you are the embodiment of the horseshoe.
I’m so glad we gave the Germans a pat on the back instead of being mean to them. Who knows, maybe the new Nazi government highly likely to be elected this week will use a less painful gas to kill minorities.
The Nuremburg Trials still falls within the determination that Nazi lives did not matter. The executions were definitely the point.
The key example for this was Julius Streicher. He didn’t plan the Holocaust, implement it, or get involved in any military action of World War 2. He just spread antisemitic and genocidial vitriol through the press.
Nazis and the ideologies they spread are a Crime against Humanity for Incitement of Genocide.
Not all Nazis at Nuremberg were condemned to death. The most prominent examples are Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer.
Yep. The point though is the case of Julius Streicher, which demonstrated that someone uninvolved with military operations of world war 2 and the holocaust could still get executed.
Most defenses of Nazis attempt to separate the ideology from perpetration of the Holocaust and World War 2, (Clean Wehrmacht myth for example) which I try to refute with this example.
All this means is to show there was a point when being enough of a Nazi in and of itself meant the death penalty. That is to say: the Nazism itself, not just the acts of genocides and crimes against humanity it carried out, deserved capital punishment.
Maybe it’s just a question of semantics. But to get at the point I was trying to make, you can try a thought experiment:
Imagine someone brings in a big leaking bag of garbage off the street. They haul it into the courtroom, get a lawyer for it, spend months making sure it’s resupplied with water when it stops leaking and gets good housing, repeatedly had experts come in and examine it and look up the records of what type of garbage it had inside it. And then, everything having been satisfied to everyone’s satisfaction, they take it out and toss it in the dump.
Or, someone puts leaking garbage on a truck, drives it to a place where it’s stored until they can get themselves organized to get rid of it, and then they burn it. It’s given an asset tag, but mostly just so they can make use of a system to count the garbage and make sure there’s nothing of value in any of the bags.
You get my point, I think. My point is not that you need to be tolerant or soft about people who are going to try to kill you. My point is that they are (depressingly enough) very much human beings, the whole time they’re doing that, and the allies did good by vigorously rejecting the “anyone who wrongs me stops being a person” model.
That is two scenarios where garbage is disposed of. At no point is the garbage status questioned: because it is established it is garbage.
I don’t think that thought experiment refuted anything.
Nazis are humans. Humans who perpetuate crimes against humanity. The crime against humanity that is Nazism carries the death penalty–as it should. It’s a ideology predicated on lives not mattering.
There is a reason one of the most prominent acts of Nazi leadership is suicide.
This speaks to a difference of mindset about talking about stuff on the internet.
I wasn’t trying to “refute” anything. I was just trying to say what I was trying to say. You can believe it, or not, or partially with caveats, or have some kind of rebuttal, it’s all fine. In no way was I trying to refute anything you were saying. It’s not necessary for one of us to “win.” Sometimes, I’ll be trying to prove someone wrong when I send comments to them, but this absolutely was not that.
It seemed like maybe you were hearing something different than what I was saying, and so I tried a different way of explaining it that hopefully would make it more clear. Then, after reading it and understanding it, there’s a whole different step where maybe if you decide to you can agree with it. Or not. Honestly, that part’s not completely my business. I’m just trying to explain what I meant. Along with acknowledging (if this wasn’t clear) that, yes, in another sense, any Nazis are human garbage, and who really cares what happens to them at the end of the day.
If your model is that we have to “refute” until one of us wins, I think I will not take part. I made multiple efforts to say what I was trying to say. If you want to take it on, or not, is entirely up to you, and I think I will cease with any continued effort to put it across.
Oof, let me rephrase:
I don’t think the thought experiment reinforced or helped explain the refutation of “Nazi lives don’t matter” with the claim “Nazi lives do have value.”
That should’ve been clear, and I think it is for any reading audience? So, uh, yeah.
If it helps, you can think of it not as a statement about the value we give to the Nazis, but the value we hold ourselves to.
A buddy of mine had a relative who was in Germany for the occupation. He was one of the guys I was talking about, miming tiny violins. He fucked a lot of German girls who were half starving. He had money and food and all the armaments of the occupation behind him, so they didn’t really have a choice. He would go into people’s houses and just take stuff, if it looked like something cool he wanted. My friend said he thought that having that experience, having this guy over there in his formative years having all his darkest instincts catered to and amplified, basically ruined him as a person. His whole life he wasn’t able to really be right because of it. But at the time, I guess he thought something along the lines of, “What’s the difference?”
After all, they’re Nazis. Or basically Nazis. Anyway, their lives have no value.
Like I say, I do get what you’re saying. But also… what do you do, when you have a whole population, millions of people, who have all given approval in some way large or small for some kind of monstrous crime?
Some of them deserve to die. Some of them are redeemable. In general, for most of them, I think that kind of question is mostly just not anyone else’s business to get involved in. Whatever they did or didn’t do is going to have to be something that they live with, maybe square up with their maker after if you think of it that way, and nothing you can do can tip the scales of it in any direction. But what about their kids? What about the society they’re now trying to build in the aftermath? It’s so easy and satisfying to say they all have no value, not look at them as human people with all the potential and all the evils and failings that entails, not examine the factors that tipped all so many of them over into taking part in what they did. Not try to make sure you really understand it, try to work it out, so you can see how to work so it doesn’t happen again.
There is an easy answer to all of these questions, of course: “They’re Nazis. Fuck 'em.” In combat, that’s the answer. But out of combat, what future are you building when you write off a whole population because they all took part in a culture that started excusing or committing terrible crimes? Maybe they were confused by propaganda. Maybe they were scared, or just went with the herd. Maybe they had that darkness inside them. Maybe they were creative instigators. How are you going to look into every one of them, and decide what the answer is? Choosing one universal answer is easy, but that doesn’t make it right. And like I say, you are going to lose something of yourself when you start looking at other human beings that way. That’s part of why a lot of people who’ve been in combat come back with bad bad problems.
This whole set of questions about how to relate to that whole population of evil is about to become (or has become) a pretty fuckin’ relevant question in America.
For the record my initial statement regarded the Nuremburg Trials and the outcome that led to a propagandist being executed. I really honestly did not expect referencing the Nuremburg Trials to be so criticized.
Telling me I’d be losing my humanity by finding the outcome of Nuremburg Trials to be just is some wild shit.
Not sure how you got from:
… to concluding I was criticizing the outcome of the Nuremberg trials. Obviously they were a good thing, and the outcome was a good thing. Anyone actually reading my messages would observe me repeatedly using the example of the process and the good outcome of the Nuremberg trials as a perfect example of what we should be emulating.
I suspect you’re still trying to “win,” and desperately rearranging things I’m saying into things I am not, so you can do so. I welcome you to try again if you’d like to.
I still don’t think we should use the death penalty, even here. It’s all too easy to pick an innocent person, accuse them of being a Nazi, and send them to a short drop and a quick stop. Put them in prison until they can be rehabilitated if possible, and until they’re no longer a danger to society if not (usually due to regular death).
Yeah, this is more the sentiment for expressly virulent, unrepentant Nazis. The kind that went to Nuremburg. Someone who is actually capable of changing and renouncing the ideology isn’t a Nazi.
You know there were some acquittals at Nuremberg, right? Papen, Schacht and Fritzsche all went free.
The second phase, after the first phase had tried the Nazi high command, arrested almost 100,000 people, identified 2,500 who were not just Nazis but actual war criminals, tried 177, and convicted 142. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death.
I’m not saying right or wrong here, since we’re already talking about that and having enough difficulty in it already. But the exact step you are skipping over in creating a class “that went to Nuremberg” whose lives have no value, was a critical, critical part of how the allies ran the trial. It might explain why in the other conversation you are confused about why the allies did it that way, if you are confused about what it was they actually did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials#Verdict
This also irritated me. Who makes this determination, on which life and death are being staked? You? We just bring everyone who’s carrying a Nazi sign in front of you, and you decide whether they are actually capable of changing and renouncing the ideology? Or if not you, who does it?
Look, I didn’t make the statement that Nazis have value.
The basis of all of this was to point out the reason Julius Streicher was executed even though he wasn’t involved with military operations or the Holocaust.
This has gotten you very accusatory with how much you’re reading into that. It really does seem like you’re taking personal issue with it, which is wild. You keep saying this conversation shouldn’t continue, so please.
Sorry if I annoyed you with my thoughts about human life and due process. I really am not trying to get personal about it, you may be right, but it’s important to me.
But no one is going to invade America and put American authoritarians on trial. What choices are left?