Nazi Evil

Obviously, from a moral point of view, a murder is a murder. However, what is shocking is that the Nazis introduced a brutal efficiency into killing, making it an almost an industrial organization. This is something, which never before has happened in history. Not blaming it is IMO amoral.

As for what happened to the native Americans, I don't think that the current official view is that it was a good thing, as you claim. To my knowledge the US Government is paying compensations to the remaining tribes and materials about their tragedy are widely available.

As for what happened to the native Americans, I don't think that the current official view is that it was a good thing, as you claim. To my knowledge the US Government is paying compensations to the remaining tribes and materials about their tragedy are widely available.

Sure, nowadays it is very fashionable to appologise for things nodoby will ask back. But what do you think would happen if the remains of the native americans demand california or whatever back?

i am pretty sure people in washington will be less willing to be "polite".

Why should Victor have to tell me anything??

If you carefully read all my previous posts on this thread you will not find anywhere that I have associated the words Suparatu with Nazi.


He (superatu) has managed to inform us of his views all by himself

Kevin in Deva

P.S. By the way Sid. Nice one

I have deleted other insults from New Connaught Ranger. Being called a Nazi may be an insult to some, but not to all. It is not the same as "moron". I have no way of knowing what is on your mind. After all you were the one who said that Nazis weren't EVIL, just bad. If you feel you have been insulted, you can draw his attention on this fact and ask him not to do it again.

Frankly I am getting tired of you two and my limit of tolerance is lower these days. If you don't like the way the forum is run, than just go somewhere else. Nobody is forcing you to stay here.

That is beside the point. The issue discussed here was the way how those events are currently viewed in the "West". And the bottom line is that they are being adressed and guilt is generally being recognized.

If it's the case that the Nazis were bad purely because they fought the West, why don't people consider Imperial Germany and Austria Hungary (also fought the West), Fascist Italy etc. as evil?

Some of the greatest proponents of the George Bush type view of the world were the Nazis themselves, so, if you are against that sort of simplification I don't know why you end up favouring some of the most notable exponents of it.

I think that a main reason for the Nazis being evil is not just genocide, but what they called (if I remember) 'crimes against peace' at Nuremburg.

Even compared to lots of the Empire building engaged in by the European powers in the 19th Century, the Nazi rationale for war was a backward throwback to medieval times, but, in the context of 20th Century Europe much worse.

Hitler's designs in waging war were to take over other nations, take the land belonging to the people of those nations and give it to Germans. The people who were not exterminated would serve as a slave class to the Germans.

Other nations that were not directly taken over would be totally subordinate to Germany.

It seems to have been with this type of idea in his mind that Hitler embarked on World War Two and cost the lives of millions of people, and the destruction of a continent (or two).

To acheive that kind of war aim was it worth allowing even one person to die?

This is one very good reason why you can call the Nazis evil. Even the colonialists in Africa could, and had to at least pretend, that they were introducing a better government to the areas they took over. The Nazis did not even pretend as much as far as USSR and Poland went.

This is one important reason why Nazism is objectively evil. Few other regimes were insane or morally perverted enough to consider such aims as feasible.

It would be good to discuss concrete points of Nazi policy and motivation to stop this topic being closed for drifting into a purely 'opinion' topic.

this is what you have said about me. clearly in contradiction with your post that states you have never called me a nazi.

which makes you a liar.

you have been picking on me because it is the only way you think you can impose yourself. having failed to do that, you started using useless rethoric. that did not work either.

i wonder what you will try next...

yawn...

so this automatically makes me a nazi? that is a very black and white patter of thinking, don't you think? Victor, i appreciate your work a lot on this forum, i like readin your posts about the romanian involvement here and on axishistory but i think it is unfair for you to take sides.

from the beginning i have been targeted by these individuals simply because i had the courage to imply something different than their own opinions.

no matter how much foam at the mouth they will produce i will not change my opinions and it is amazing to me how people who i bet like to think of themselves as open minded truly have a mental blockage regarding this subject. once you metion the word nazi, they immediately think EVIL/

looks like brainwashing to me, since the western opinions in this respect are dangerously similar.

New Connaught Ranger, i ask you not to call me a nazi again because i find it offensive. If you chose to continue to call me a nazi i expect the moderators of this forum to act accordingly, since you have insulted a member of the forum.

Thank you.

But, the only reason you have for saying the Nazis were not evil seems to be that it is a received opinion that in many Western European countries they were. So whatever the Nazis actually did or said, they are not evil simply because lots of British or American people think that they were?

It would be great if you could debate some of the specific points I keep making, because that is the grounds which I am using to judge that the Nazis were evil, not just because other people have said they were.

Given the unusual enormity of the Nazi crimes, it is not strange to make a connection between Nazism and evil. Nor, because of the same crimes, that many people have violent emotional reactions about the subject.

But, again, it would be good to argue the point with relation to historical examples.

It is possible that there is a split between people who have actually read something about Nazism, and those who only have vague ideas. Generally, the more you read about Hitler and his regime in the run up to the war, and during the war itself, the more you start to think they were evil.

But perhaps I am wrong?

And, even if everyone had an absolute right to sing the Horst Wessel song, why would anyone actually want to?

But, the only reason you have for saying the Nazis were not evil seems to be that it is a received opinion that in many Western European countries they were. So whatever the Nazis actually did or said, they are not evil simply because lots of British or American people think that they were?

It would be great if you could debate some of the specific points I keep making, because that is the grounds which I am using to judge that the Nazis were evil, not just because other people have said they were.

Given the unusual enormity of the Nazi crimes, it is not strange to make a connection between Nazism and evil. Nor, because of the same crimes, that many people have violent emotional reactions about the subject.

But, again, it would be good to argue the point with relation to historical examples.

It is possible that there is a split between people who have actually read something about Nazism, and those who only have vague ideas. Generally, the more you read about Hitler and his regime in the run up to the war, and during the war itself, the more you start to think they were evil.

But perhaps I am wrong?

And, even if everyone had an absolute right to sing the Horst Wessel song, why would anyone actually want to?

saudadesdefrancesinhas,

it is not uncommon in world history for a side that has lost the battle to be turned into evil. even if there is no winner, both sides are supposedlu thought by the other as evil.

just think of the christian - muslim conflicts across history. Both sides had their religious rulers make them believe it was ok to slaughter the other side, " because it was evil" and god will love you for it.
and i have no doubt that in heir mind that was the truth.

As i believe your opinion about the nazis is correct. What i am not so sure about is how much of it it is truly yours, and how much is placed there through education. Because you can hardly find two people to agree on what shoul they eat at the restaurant, let alone about a complicated thing like historical facts. SO far, from the west all i hear is one voice, saying one thing. NAZIS WERE EVIL. and it looks weird.

i have NEVER said that what have the nazis done is ok. they have butchered million of people and through their actions influenced the lives of most of the people on this continent BUT what i find too much to accept is the idea that their actions were worse than anything ever done on this planet. I agree, like Victor said, that what is unique about them is the method used, the mechanized killing machine, the way it was implemented.

But just think of how does this differ from Stalin's Great terror campaign? same thing, millions of people died just because something passed through the leader/s mind.

Yat i see today no "evilification" of Stalin, people can say COMRADE to each other, sing communist songs on the street...

In romania, i think we had more to suffer from the soviet side than from the german one. I even think we were respected more by the german side. of course i cannot prove it, it is only an assumption.

So this is what it boils down for for me - this double standard. WHy one is penally reglemented and another, a even more crimina regime, it is not?

This post has been edited by Suparatu on October 22, 2006 04:34 am

Hi Suparatu,

You clearly didn't read my post if you think I am opposed to freedom of speech!

Try reading it again.

What I am opposed to is special pleading on behalf of a particular political persuasion under the disguise of an appeal to freedom of speech.

Horst Wessel was a street thug representing a political philosophy opposed to freedom of speech who made it his business to make sure others couldn't speak freely. He is no pin up boy for feedom of speech, just for Nazism!

Besides, freedom of speech is not an unconditional right anywhere. Libel, slander and privacy laws exist everywhere for good reason and, perhaps even more importantly, simple good taste, politeness and basic human decency should also constrain us from shooting our mouth off. Would you cross the street to tell someone who is deformed that they are deformed? Freedom of speech is not just a conditional right, it is a privilige and responsibility not to be abused.

Your analogy between the deaths of North American Indians and the so-called Holocaust is entirely spurious.

The great majority of North American Indians (perhaps up to 90%) died of Old World diseases, to which they had little immunity. These had inadvertently been introduced by the Spanish further south before Anglo-American colonists even came into contact with them. For example, the Pilgrim Fathers found disease already rampant and populations plummeting amongst local Amerindians when they landed. Also look up the mound cities like Cahokia. When the Anglo-Americans first arrived at them they had already been abandoned for a century or more and they were mistaken for natural hillocks! By contrast, the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews was a conscious and deliberate policy.

Anglo-American treatment of North American Indians was often very malicious and destructive of them, but it was not of the same order of magnitude, intensity or intent as the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Such a contention displays ignorance of the facts or a willful disregard of them.

Cheers,

Sid.

ok then.

what about the soviet regime? was it more evil that the nazi one?

since it killed more people. Just read the book "the great terror " as refference.

if yes, why is it not treated the same as the nazi regime?
ig no, what is the argument for calling the nazi regime evil? Number of people killed - the soviet regime was responsible for far more..ideology - the soviets too had ideology
killing of the jews? hmm.. we may be getting somewhere...
the mechaniyed way of doing it? no difference from what happened in a gulag. in the end people got killed no matter if it was through starvation, cold or zyklon b.

well?

what argument do you use to call the nazi regime evil that one could not fit to the stalin regime for example?

This post has been edited by Suparatu on October 22, 2006 09:26 am

Two posts were deleted. Like I already said, avoid getting personal and discuss the ideas, not the men behind them.

Hello Superatu,

It's true that in conflicts both sides portray the other as to some extent 'evil' in their propaganda etc.

But, in many of those cases you can see that both sides were exaggerating, because often both sides did evil or destructive things.

What I think is different as far as the Nazis go is that it is as if they made a conscious choice to behave in that way, when it was not necessary or justified by the circumstances. I think they also went further in actually encouraging their soldiers and German people etc. to commit evil acts.

The parallel with the Muslim and Christian struggles is probably useful, because that kind of thing used to happen in those wars, but I don't think it really went as far as the Nazis managed. Massacring and cruelty was encouraged to some extent, but also surpressed and contested- whereas as far as Jews and Slavs were concerned it was as if the German government was encouraging people to utterly destroy and wipe out those peoples. This is, I think, evil of one degee more than is usually encountered.

I think there is also the idea that the Germans, as a civilised country in the 20th Century, should have known to behave a bit better than the Christian and Muslim warriors of medieval times.

With the Nazis, while many of the Germans in the lower ranks may have believed that the Jews and Russians were really evil and a menace to Germany, there is some evidence that Hitler etc. knew that this was false.

If it seemed that the Nazis had been convinced that Europe was in danger from a real and imminent evil threat, perhaps their actions would not be considered so evil. But, there is much evidence that men like Hitler were concerned to establish dominance over other countries and peoples, not just to protect their own. And also that they deliberately ignored and exaggerated reality to suit their own view of the world, acting through anger and hate, and not even attempting to challenge their own views or think about the consequences.

It's true that there are other examples of this in history; they would also be evil for similar reasons. The Nazi one is just really big (possibly the biggest?) and recent, so serves as an example of them all, something that happened in modern europe.

My opinion about the Nazis being evil is based on the books I have read about them; I think generally in the UK we assume they were evil, and this is partly just based on the war and so on, and learning about the holocaust.

But, I would say that, the more you learn about the context, the more this judgement tends to be confirmed, even if you have a more clear idea of exactly where the evil is coming from, and why it is evil.

As far as Stalin goes, in the UK at least, he is increasingly seen as evil. And Ceaucescu is actually a byword for evil here, in the same way as Hitler.

I think the Nazis are always going to be more relevant and closer to the forefront of people's minds in Western Europe, because the danger from dictatorships of that kind is stronger than the danger from the left.

These days in the UK, there is also a lot of discussion about racism, and the Nazis come up again as a relevant example. People are too wealthy now to think much about the dangers of the class struggle and revolution, so I think Stalin is forgotten for this reason as well.

The situation in the USSR was also more complex than the Nazi one, and the USSR never had the chance to start a big war, Communism was residually more positive and less exclusive an ideology than Nazism, another reason.

In absolute terms the evils of Communism aught to be well known, and if you know about WW2 they will be clear, but it is unlikely they will ever carry the weight they aught to in Western Europe.

Man, you sure write long answers...

i agree with that. And it has only gotten worse with the insertion of industrialized propaganda - television, newspapers, pundits, etc...

True, but rethoric regarding complete anihilation of one side is not a new fact.
Ilya Ehrenburg wrote this about the germans, as a message for the soviet soldiers:

"Now we understand the Germans are not human. Now the word 'German' has become the most terrible curse. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill a German, a German will kill you. If you have killed one German, kill another."

This is from his "KILL" writing. how is this any different from the nazi slogans? you will say it was a sign of normal outrage, but this is hardly an excuse for incitment to genocide.

Right. An idea made up by the western world that had no problem at the time regarding it's many collonies in Africa or the indian subcontinent. Not to mention that 60 years after WW2 people still kill each other like this - Rwanda, Chechnya, Lebanon, Palestine....fill in the blanks. This is a rather shaky argument, since it has no real foundation on reality. "People thought" is quite different from what people actaully did.

This is great. Let's try a mental exercise. Let's substitute in your paragraph the word "Nazis" with "American government" and "Europe" with America". Then instead of Hitler, write George Bush and see if the paragraph still makes sense, let's if it would be a paragraph written by someone 40 years from now.

What do you think? striking similarities, right?

This is only a little humour, all ye about to start yelling, heel.

I imagine that though time the immensity of the crimes of Stalin will be known. But here in romania, he was closer to us than hitler was and his shadow even more menacing and i think that more romanians dies because of communism than of nazism. Considering this howcome he have a law against the nazis and none against the communists?

I imagine this law had to be implemented here BEFORE Romania could make steps forward. i.e. gain acceptance in the NATO and later EU because..well...i will not speculate.

Exactly my point. People are too bored and lazy to actually THINK. thay have this model "THEM NAZIS WUZ EVUUL" and they ride that flag regardless. Forget about Bosnia and such...

And this is picked up by the WORST of people, the kind that would hit you in the had with a bat if you dare to mention the fact that there might be examples in their own contry's history that is not that poetic and them would go home to his buddies bragging that he has defeated EVIL, he has beaten up a nazi...

Basically this is what i am against, this numbness of the brain, these stereotypes, this silly black'or'white, us - against - them type of personalities which so often populate the environment.

Its surprising how you try to justify your argument for the Nazi's just by simply changing the word Nazi for American, your argument is just a pathetic attempt to try and shift the blame.

Guantanamo Bay Holding facility cannot be compared to the Nazi well planned Concentration and Extermination systems of Nazi Germany.

The Americans and their Allies are not following a progresive system of extermination of the moslem population.

America and their Allies are not in a postion to place their troops indefinately in any of the countries they are engaged in combat situations.

America follows a defence policy of trying to defeat a perceived threat against them, after all 9/11 did happen.

The Americans and their Allies are fighting a war against terrorism (against an enemy, who follows none of the conventianal rules of warfare, and dosen't recognise the Geneva convention.) so one must ask the question are they (the terrorists) entitled to the same treatment as they serve out, or must we allow them full coverage of the Geneva Convention.

The start of the thread was about Nazi morality, you try and justify it by making comparisons with present day America, (or attacks on the native American Indian population, the Prussians in there small colonies, were quite adapt at killing off african natives, just as well as the British treated the African, Australian and New zealand native populations. The Turkish atrocities in 1913 against the Armenians (which they refuse to admit to this day) Stalins purges against the Russian peoples, the farmers, and Ukarainian etc. etc., are well documented.

But why stop there, why not go back to Genghis Kahn or the Ottoman Turkish Empire or the Moorish conquest of Europe. The Roman occupation, The Huns, The Normans conquest of Great Britain, the Viking invasions, The Spanish conquest of central and South America and so on and so forth.

Most of these were committed while Europe and the world was in its infancy

You obviously hold a grudge against the Americans, well a lot of people do, and a lot of people hold a very low opinion on what the Germans did in Ww1 & Ww2.

Thats the way the world turns, do you really think we as the human race are capable of living as one big happy family on the planet and if so whose model do you suggest we follow?

Moslem Fundamentalism, Communist, Fachist, Capatalist, Jewish, Buddist, Protestant , Christian or Anachist or one of the many others??

What political model would you envision us following ??

How would the laws rules and regulations of this "paradise" be worked out??

Who would be in control??

We are essentialy a tribal race of people, and we all maintain that our tribe is better than the one down the road or over the river, over the border (for a model of the mentality I am talking about I would use Football Supporters, no joke).

We carry old grudges, memories, dreams of past glories or defeats, we temper or memories with our influences from Politics & Religions and family traditions.

We as a race are supposed to be moving forward, and the problem is we are to varid to agree, we will never be one happy family speaking one tounge, worshiping one religion, living one way it is not in out nature.

Like it or not, there is no going back to the Roman Empire, the iii reich, the British Commonwealth, etc., etc., our world will be shaped by the countries with the biggest economies, for now the USA, which will probably be overtaken by the Chinese economey, or the Asians, and who knows a Fundamentalist world, which will bear no resemblence to the days of the Moors.

Nucular weapons will also play key roles in the way countries are ranked, those without them will always be forming partnerships with those who have them, (here I must point out with regards the use of these weapons, it must not be forgotton that Germany and Japan were actively persuing their own nucular programmes and who knows what would have happened if Germany or Japan perfected the bomb first, would they have hesitated to use them? I dont think so.

We can post and counter-post here until the cows come home and it will go nowhere, we are to tribal to come to a common agreement, like our species in general.

Kevin in Deva.