OT: Guilt of Nazi children.

[cptroyce 0]

Without going to deep into a very complex subject..the "heart of darkness" that lurks in the human spirt and Nazism were not and are not quite the same thing, IMHO.

 

 

Whatever prejudices I may have..I would not bring myself to shoot old men, women and children in the back of the head and roll them into a trench one after the other, minute after minute, all day long; to use just one example Or process them like farm animals and jam them into an enclosure and have cyanide crystals drop into that enclosure.

 

However, by omission, to stand by and let it happen or not to want to know what has taken place to ones neighbors or a segment of the population..that is another matter. There I think, no one can say what they would do, until they have to make that choice.

 

Germany, perhaps the most erudite and sophisticated country in Europe, industrialized racial mass murder. The German people breathed life into "the monster", then blithely followed it down the road to hell; in the end to their own and many others destruction.

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

I must admit.... I can't fathom why so many people followed that path!...they musta been really pi$$ed about their lives!

[Olham 164]

I must admit.... I can't fathom why so many people followed that path!...they musta been really pi$ed about their lives!

From today's point of view it is hard to understand at all.

You can only catch a glimpse of what the situation was like, from reading, or from good films.

In our world of wealth today, we know only very little (if anything) of the hardship of life in Germany before WW1; and then of the 20s.

Has anyone of us lived in despair for a longer time, without any "light at the end of a tunnel"?

I guess the most of us have not.

 

I am not a big reader of books about this time, but I recommend the really good film "The White Ribbon".

It gives you a glimpse of how hard the time and the people were back then.

Germany was only just rising from poverty back then - no comparison to the Germany of today.

And still - there are always so-and-so-many stupid, fashist, cruel blockheads around - even in this wealth.

 

However - reading or watching good films are only faint attempts to understand, how this could have been possible.

All that I have read or watched, could still not explain to me, how people could have done these things.

I only learned:

Fear is a terrible leader. Despair is an untruthful judicial power. Cruelty is a horrible executive branch.

Democracy may be the best of all bad solutions. But the best one.

May we all never become so desperate again, that we give it up, to follow blind.

Edited July 13, 2012 by Olham

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

From today's point of view it is hard to understand at all.

You can only catch a glimpse of what the situation was like, from reading, or from good films.

In our world of wealth today, we know only very little (if anything) of the hardship of life in Germany before WW1; and then of the 20s.

Has anyone of us lived in despair for a longer time, without any "light at the end of a tunnel"?

I guess the most of us have not.

 

I am not a big reader of books about this time, but I recommend the really good film "The White Ribbon".

It gives you a glimpse of how hard the time and the people were back then.

Germany was only just rising from poverty back then - no comparison to the Germany of today.

And still - there are always so-and-so-many stupid, fashist, cruel blockheads around - even in this wealth.

 

However - reading or watching good films are only faint attempts to understand, how this could have been possible.

All that I have read or watched, could still not explain to me, how people could have done these things.

I only learned:

Fear is a terrible leader. Despair is an untruthful judicial power. Cruelty is a horrible executive branch.

Democracy may be the best of all bad solutions. But the best one.

May we all never become so desperate again, that we give it up, to follow blind.

 

Amen to that

[Von Paulus 8]

Whatever prejudices I may have..I would not bring myself to shoot old men, women and children in the back of the head and roll them into a trench one after the other, minute after minute, all day long; to use just one example Or process them like farm animals and jam them into an enclosure and have cyanide crystals drop into that enclosure.

Me neither.

However I believe, that under the right circumstances all "our" civilized cap can fall and accept the abominable.

And in the case of what happened with Germany, Soviet Union, Chile, etc, etc that was only a part of the equation, I agree.

In the case Yugoslavia, Rwanda or any past, present and future civil war, I believe it's even more easier to follow that heart.

 

May we all never become so desperate again, that we give it up, to follow blind.

We will.

Edited July 13, 2012 by Von Paulus

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

I need only look back at my own country’s recent history to the McCarthy era of the late 1940’s and most of the 1950’s to know how close we were to going down the same path as Nazi Germany. If we had been in poorer economic times, and if Joseph McCarthy had become as powerful a voice as Hitler had become, the United States might have done the same thing to Communists that Nazi Germany did to the Jewish people. I remember being told often in grade school that the only good Commie was a dead Commie. “Better dead than Red!” Sentiments about rounding them all up and shipping them back to Mother Russia were common, as were such statements as “We should nuke ‘em all back to the Stone Age”, and “The world would be a better place without any of ‘em”. The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings that hauled in countless people and ruined their lives because an official government agency publicly accused them of being Communists with no more proof than “your neighbor told us you are” still cause me to shiver with the thought of where it could have gone had not clearer minds of the day ultimately prevailed. Honestly, apart from the sentence of death, the McCarthy Hearings were no different than the Nazi Government’s hearings concerning Jewish sympathizers in Germany during WWII.

 

As food for thought, here is an image of a comic book that was circulated shortly after WWII in the United States, and is only one of many examples of a mindset that was all too common in my country back then.

 

 

 

 

I look at Nazi Germany and sometimes think, “There but for the grace of God…”

 

.

[Von Paulus 8]

"And whose fault is that? Not really his, he didn't create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, the fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

 

 

Edward R. Murrow was a great Man.

Edited July 13, 2012 by Von Paulus

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

 

 

So true, VP. So true.

 

 

 

.

[Olham 164]

Berthold Brecht said: "Man is a wolf to mankind."

Maybe it is because we have no other enemy, that we act like this - splitting some humans off of our community,

to have someone to fight, to trample down, or at least to look down onto.

[Creaghorn 10]

 

In the case Yugoslavia, Rwanda or any past, present and future civil war, I believe it's even more easier to follow that heart.

 

 

hi paulo,

 

won't sound too nitpicking, but yugoslavia was not a civil war (as often wrongly referred), but an independence war. a civil war is among same people with different sides or fighting for or against certain systems etc. an independence war is when some country with other people rules another country and its people, and the ruled ones try to get independent and souvereign and free.

[Von Paulus 8]

hi paulo,

 

won't sound too nitpicking, but yugoslavia was not a civil war (as often wrongly referred), but an independence war. a civil war is among same people with different sides or fighting for or against certain systems etc. an independence war is when some country with other people rules another country and its people, and the ruled ones try to get independent and souvereign and free.

I was not referring to Yugoslavia as a civil war, but rather as the kind of conflict, like civil wars, usually brings to the surface the worst parts of mankind. Like Rwanda was not probably a civil war but rather an ethnic war.

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Edited July 13, 2012 by UK_Widowmaker

[Hauksbee 103]

...and then I read that Herman Goerings great neice and her brother both had themselves sterilised so there wouldn't be any more Goerings.

There seems to be a persistant, deep-seated feeling that the sins of the father can bubble to the surface in succeeding generations...that it's somehow "in the blood". Which it isn't.

[Creaghorn 10]

I was not referring to Yugoslavia as a civil war, but rather as the kind of conflict, like civil wars, usually brings to the surface the worst parts of mankind. Like Rwanda was not probably a civil war but rather an ethnic war.

 

that's true.