[VolandoVengoVolandoVoy]

I think one of the reasons the Holocaust resonates and inspires such horror is that it is a disturbing example of savagery mixed with technological sophistication.
A bunch of Africans slaughtering each other with machetes in Rwanda or some Chinese getting starved in the Cultural Revolution, even though the body counts were just as high or higher, doesn't feel threatening to civilization.
The fact that arguably the most scientifically and industrially and politically(in the sense of being orderly/efficient) advanced nation the world had yet known, would then in turn use those tools that it took mankind millennia to develop to engage in savagery....is profoundly disturbing.
It is threatening to the notion of orderly progress and advancement and leaving the dark ages of humanity behind.
It could happen again. It probably will happen again.

[Lemmo]

(01-29-2015 02:51 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:  

I think one of the reasons the Holocaust resonates and inspires such horror is that it is a disturbing example of savagery mixed with technological sophistication.
A bunch of Africans slaughtering each other with machetes in Rwanda or some Chinese getting starved in the Cultural Revolution, even though the body counts were just as high or higher, doesn't feel threatening to civilization.
The fact that arguably the most scientifically and industrially and politically(in the sense of being orderly/efficient) advanced nation the world had yet known, would then in turn use those tools that it took mankind millennia to develop to engage in savagery....is profoundly disturbing.
It is threatening to the notion of orderly progress and advancement and leaving the dark ages of humanity behind.
It could happen again. It probably will happen again.

If that is the case, why is there far less mention of the allied bombing raids where tens of thousands of civilians would be incinerated in single evenings? This is far more high tech than poison gas, dysentery and starvation. Even the atomic bomb is largely discussed in abstract terms about the evil of the weapon rather than in the context of the allied tactic of burning large numbers of civilians to death.

[Samseau]

There are no good guys in War. Get those illusions out of your head. The only reason America and Russia beat the Nazi's was because they learned to be worse than their enemies. That's how war works. No one wins, because the victors come out way worse than before the war starts.

Consider America before and after WW2: from sleepy Christian Republic to full blown Democratic Industrial-Military Empire. America got rich also, and the women went from honorable housewives into narcissistic feminist skanks. WW2 destroyed the old America completely. A pyrrhic victory.

War is something to be feared and avoided at all costs.

[samsamsam]

In before someone is called a Nazis or Hitler.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

[speakeasy]

(01-29-2015 04:25 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

Consider America before and after WW2: from sleepy Christian Republic to full blown Democratic Industrial-Military Empire. America got rich also, and the women went from honorable housewives into narcissistic feminist skanks. WW2 destroyed the old America completely. A pyrrhic victory.

Didn't realize women in the 50s were narcissistic, feminist skanks. I learn something new every day.

[TheWastelander]

(01-29-2015 04:25 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

There are no good guys in War. Get those illusions out of your head. The only reason America and Russia beat the Nazi's was because they learned to be worse than their enemies. That's how war works. No one wins, because the victors come out way worse than before the war starts.

Consider America before and after WW2: from sleepy Christian Republic to full blown Democratic Industrial-Military Empire. America got rich also, and the women went from honorable housewives into narcissistic feminist skanks. WW2 destroyed the old America completely. A pyrrhic victory.

War is something that be feared and avoided at all costs.

I gotta disagree here, because we didn't learn how to be worse than our enemies. We simply crushed them on the battlefield by exploiting their strategic blunders and letting the Soviets bleed them dry on the Eastern Front.

We won the Cold War that followed, but then succumbed to a combination of out and out greed and a variation of their poisonous ideology they infected us with. It's funny because modern Russia is run by a former KGB-man who knows that poison when he sees it because the Soviets and the East Germans were masters at promoting it in democratic nations. He won't allow it in his nation.

I like to think of it like this: we were hunting each other. The Soviets hit us with a poison dart from a blowgun and we shot them in the legs. They didn't have great baseline foundational leg strength (because leg day is exploitative kapitalist propaganda) so they couldn't hold themselves up any longer, collapsed, and bled out. America is being taken out slowly by their poison long after they're gone.

[britchard]

The reason why the Holocaust is so much more infamous and disturbing than other genocides is because of how systematic and 'neat' it was.

The Armenian genocide, and other atrocities like it, were basically just government backed rampages against a group, it would often include civilians as well as soldiers.

However, in the Holocaust, there were record books, logs of killings, and experimentation on conscious, living children (twins). I don't even know why people are complaining that in several European countries it's illegal to deny the Holocaust happened, how can anyone deny it?

And to the poster who said that the Plains Indians simply died from diseases and weren't attacked relentlessly by the Army, take a history lesson.

One last thing, it's little known that although Hitler knew that there were camps holding Jews, he wasn't very involved in that area. It was mainly Himmler.

[TheWastelander]

(01-29-2015 05:00 PM)britchard Wrote:  

And to the poster who said that the Plains Indians simply died from diseases and weren't attacked relentlessly by the Army, take a history lesson.

[rover]

(01-29-2015 12:21 PM)JWLZG Wrote:  

70 years ago this week, on 27 January 1945, troops of the 1st Ukrainian Army arrived at the gates of a death camp located outside Oświęcim, Poland.

that was Soviet Red Army that freed the camp. The "Ukrainian Army" was mostly fighting on the Nazi side.

[Samseau]

(01-29-2015 12:31 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:  

(01-29-2015 12:26 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

Quote:

I have known many Germans, and explored the country as a student; they are among the most level-headed people I have met, and proud of their country's standing. For such evil to have been committed in the name of their nation not a century ago is astounding.

It's important to remember that most Germans had no idea the Holocaust was even happening. The Nazi's had extremely tight control of information. This illustrates the importance of not having a government keep secrets from the people, and the importance of free speech in general.

Sorry, but that's bullshit revisionism.
It was done on a massive scale, and most Germans knew and approved.
Of course, after they lost...the evil bad Nazis were always someone else's Grandfather...not me, no, of course not.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard

I'm posting bullshit revisionism? Actually it says right in the article you posted that my view is the commonly accepted view by most historians. I'm just repeating what is said by the vast majority of WW2 scholars. Right from the same article you posted:

Quote:

Landmark

Its results, Professor Gellately says, destroy the claim - generally made by Germans after Berlin fell in 1945 and accepted by most historians - that they did not know about camp atrocities.

What you're posting is revisionism, not that it's a bad thing. But the fact you're trying to dismiss me as bullshit revisionism is completely false, so you are acting purely on emotions. The article you quoted is talking about a book that hasn't even been released yet, and you're already treating it as historical fact.

Disturbing a RVF member would think this way, I can only imagine how brainwashed the average man is becoming.

I've done a huge amount of reading on Mao, Stalin, Hiter, and all other historical dictators, and one of the most common features of all tyrants is the banning of free speech. Control speech, and you control thoughts. Hitler controlled every aspect of the state media and while I am sure there were plenty of anti-semites in Nazi Germany, I believe that by the time the war was over most of them were dead. As for the average German, they had no idea what was going besides what their state run newspapers told them.

It's no different than how it was in Mao, Stalin, or even today. Consider how 30k+ girls are groomed and raped in Rotherham, and yet anyone who dares demand justice is called a racist and thrown in jail. And this is in the age of the internet where all info is available. Should we judge the average British guy as responsible for not defending the women of Rotherham? We can't, because the average British man is powerless to stop his current government, just as the average German was powerless to stop Hitler once he staged the Reichstag fire to take complete control of Germany's government. Not to mention the average German had no internet or free press to report on anything the Nazi government was doing.

People forget that Hitler was elected next to 2 other high ranking officials to share the government, but within a month a "mysterious" fire occurred in the German parliment, and the Nazi's blamed the communists and scared the then Chancellor of Germany to give total control to Hitler in order to fight the communists. So all the democratic protections German citizens thought they had were removed by fraud. Hitler was not elected by popular vote, he was brought in to share the government with 2 other parties. He had less than 1/3 of the vote.

Combine this with the fact that there was no internet or news outside of State media, and how can anyone reasonably come to the conclusion that the average German had any clue what was going on? It was a fucking nightmare, can't people see that?

But hey, you're free to believe in childish stories of how the Germans were so evil and the root of all problems just lies with those big bad evil Germans. Obviously what happened to the Germans could never happen to anyone else, after all we are so morally superior it's only the Germans who are evil in this world.

[TigerMandingo]

Heads up: half-Jewish poster here.

First off, the OP's post is like something straight out of Yahoo News - emotional, dramatic, click-bait type shit. Get a grip, dude.

Second, and this is going to sound controversial, but I am of the opinion that Jews as a group need to move on from the Holocaust. Enough with the memorials, the remembrances, the cheesy Eli Wiesel novels etc. The world is now fully aware of what happened and there's no need to constantly remind others and yourselves of the tragedy. I agree with Finkelstein that it is being used now for political ends and that shit needs to stop. Like Doug Stanhope said, if it wasn't for Hitler the History Channel would be out of business.

Now, a lot of people get their panties in a twist when I mention this because to Jews this issue is so off-limits and so sacred that it completely clouds their judgment. The Holocaust is basically a huge part of the Jewish identity now and that is a negative development. It is forever etched into the Jewish psyche, for better or worse (for worse IMO). The problem with Holocaust remembrance is simple: it whips jews into a frenzy and makes them prone to paranoia. Organizations like the ADL, SPLC are constantly coming up with ludicrous stats of how "Anti-Semitism is on the rise". And by that, they mean some 17-year olds who paint swastikas on Jewish graves. Oh yea, real scary shit. The paranoia in turn causes Israel to lash out against the Palestinians, further alienating world opinion and dwindling sympathy for the Jews down to zero. It's sort of a vicious cycle. The creation of Israel was a big mistake if you ask me , but that's another topic. Jews have it way better in the US.

This topic is obviously going to divide a lot of people but hopefully I've made some sense here.

P.S.: I'd love to have a conversation with the average Jewish, Russia-hating neo-con and remind him that it was the Soviet Union that liberated Auschwitz.

[Samseau]

(01-29-2015 04:28 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

(01-29-2015 04:25 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

Consider America before and after WW2: from sleepy Christian Republic to full blown Democratic Industrial-Military Empire. America got rich also, and the women went from honorable housewives into narcissistic feminist skanks. WW2 destroyed the old America completely. A pyrrhic victory.

Didn't realize women in the 50s were narcissistic, feminist skanks. I learn something new every day.

And what daughters came out of the 50's? The richest generation of daughters in all of American history. The boomers. The sexual revolution. Second wave feminism "Oh I hate having a husband take care of me, I want a job too!"

[RawGod]

I propose that we base our society on commemoration of genocidal events. The basic holiday will be known as the "Holo-day": four million dead (sorry, not six) scores one day a year in remembrance. Armenians and Rwandans also earn a Holo-day, while Chinese and Russians both get a full two weeks due to their tragic losses under Communism. Let's make December a full month of non-stop remembrance, and consumption of vodka!

[Sombro]

   

Quote:

It may be fair to point out that Britain and the Allies were fighting to liberate Europe from the Nazis who perpetrated the holocaust. But Zygielbojm is surely correct in saying that the plight of the Jews was largely overlooked at the time. The British public averted its gaze, and the Telegraph does well to remind us of that fact.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greensl...unheralded

[Teedub]

(01-29-2015 05:00 PM)britchard Wrote:  

The reason why the Holocaust is so much more infamous and disturbing than other genocides is because of how systematic and 'neat' it was.

The Armenian genocide, and other atrocities like it, were basically just government backed rampages against a group, it would often include civilians as well as soldiers.

However, in the Holocaust, there were record books, logs of killings, and experimentation on conscious, living children (twins). I don't even know why people are complaining that in several European countries it's illegal to deny the Holocaust happened, how can anyone deny it?

And to the poster who said that the Plains Indians simply died from diseases and weren't attacked relentlessly by the Army, take a history lesson.

One last thing, it's little known that although Hitler knew that there were camps holding Jews, he wasn't very involved in that area. It was mainly Himmler.

I did my final year dissertation on this very issue (Himmler being the primary architect so to speak - not an actual architect, that would be Speer, of course) and he's the main reason why it was so 'neat'.

One of the oddest and most terrifying people I've ever researched. Utterly fascinating nonetheless, because his background was one of remarkable weakness and 'inferiority'. Just completely rule-bound and methodical. One of the reasons the fascination with the Nazis doesn't go away is because of the macabre oddness of it all - particularly some if its main players, as it were. Like Himmler, Eichmann and Mengele.

[Aer]

Ustaše were way more brutal than the Nazis.

A Gestapo report to Himmler was quoted as:

Increased activity of the bands [of rebels] is chiefly due to atrocities carried out by Ustaše units in Croatia against the Orthodox population. The Ustaše committed their deeds in a bestial manner not only against males of conscript age, but especially against helpless old people, women and children. The number of the Orthodox that the Croats have massacred and sadistically tortured to death is about three hundred thousand

Yet you never hear of them, nor do the Serbs play the victim card. They just want revenge, not sympathy. Guess it's just a cultural thing (Balkan vengeance culture).

These acts in World War II were one of the main motivating factors in the Balkan Wars of the early 1990's, which is good to note also.

[scorpion]

There's a reason why Jews' claims of outrageous persecution and suffering at the hands of the Nazis were not taken seriously at the time: because they'd been making hysterical claims of persecution, forced starvation, mass slaughter and the death of "six million" for decades prior. Why? To garner public sympathy that would translate into monetary donations and political support for the establishment of a Jewish state. This was the goal of the Zionist movement, which emerged in the late 19th century and was spearheaded by a coterie of influential, wealthy Jews who agreed to work together on a long-term plan to establish a Jewish state. The result was decades'-worth of propaganda in the early 20th century (aimed at both anti-Zionist Jews and Gentiles) that portrayed the Jews as victims of organized persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia, which necessitated the creation of a Jewish state where they could seek refuge. This propaganda was combined with constant political meddling (i.e. the Balfour Declaration) and gradually the Zionist faction gained preeminence among world Jewry as a whole. Following WWII and the persecution the Jews experienced at the hands of the Nazis, the Zionists were finally able to persuade the world powers to grant them their Jewish state.

With this background in mind, it becomes easy to understand why Zionist Jews had every incentive to exaggerate the persecution they experienced during WWII and why they continue to pump out Holocaust propaganda to this day. It all comes down to the fact that without the Holocaust, Israel has no reason to exist, and no legitimacy as a state. Holocaust denial laws are present to discourage investigation into the Holocaust narrative, because anyone who researches the topic quickly recognizes that many of the claims made at the time were fabricated and/or grossly exaggerated (i.e. shrunken heads, lampshades made of human skin, mass electrocutions via electrified floors, etc...). Naturally, this leads one to question other aspects of the narrative as well, especially given things like the constant, quiet downgrading of death tolls over the years (Auschwitz having gone from 4 million post-war to around 1 million today, for example) If skeptical treatment of the Holocaust as a historical event became widespread, there would be a severe public relations backlash against not only Jews in general, but particularly against Israel as the Jewish state. This is the reason why Jews have erected such a powerful taboo around critically discussing the Holocaust - because the Holocaust narrative as told was not only essential in allowing for the creation of Israel as the Jewish state, but has since become a core component of modern Jewish identity. Given the fact that so many Jews today are secular atheists, the Holocaust functions as a pseudo-religion which binds Jews together. If the Holocaust narrative were to fall apart, it becomes much more difficult to bind the Jewish people together, since so many have abandoned their traditional faith and cultural values.

[Flint]

scorpion, I respect your knowledge on game but your political views, your obsession with Jews (as shown in many other threads) as well as your constant holocaust denialism are an intellectual disgrace to say the least.

It's telling that you consistently express strong views against Muslim but shed a lot of tears for them when they get oppressed by Israel.

[WalterBlack]

Brand new documentary about the Holocaust (Night Will Fall). It includes some never before seen footage that was hidden for 70 years.

Quote:

The story goes that the British Ministry of Information organized a project in which Alfred Hitchcock put together and edited footage shot by soldiers during WWII.

The completed film, given the appropriately unglamorous title of German Concentration Camps Factual Study, has become the subject of an HBO documentary, Night Will Fall, which takes its name from a line from the original documentary: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.”

I don’t know how anybody can deny the Holocaust. They may dispute the numbers, but it definitely happened...

[RawGod]

(01-29-2015 07:15 PM)WalterBlack Wrote:  

I don’t know how anybody can deny the Holocaust. They may dispute the numbers, but it definitely happened...

The problem is that it's completely out of the bounds of inquiry and in many countries illegal to question or investigate. This creates a scab itching to be picked.
For example, David Irving ("notorious" denier) fully admits that the Nazies murdered large numbers of Jews, but believes A) the number was far less than six million (which is actually unarguable when you begin to look at it) and B) gas chambers were not used in a systematic way.

Both of these ideas are surely reasonable to keep an open mind about and INVESTIGATE as POSSIBILITIES for individual citizens and especially for professional historians. But the fact that such investigation will see you lose your job, become a pariah and possibly be jailed raises huge red flags. Then if you look further you will see how the shaping of opinion has happened (i.e. massive amounts of money through foundations, lobbying, etc.) and a picture begins to emerge.

Jews may have had good reasons to try to inoculate Western society against further pogroms. Self-preservation is understandable. But there needs to be perspective, limits and free enquiry.

[Krusyos]

Be merciful, Tuthmosis and indulge me a holocaust post...

To be blunt, the 6 million is a gross exaggeration, bordering on a lie. A fourth grade student could perform the math necessary to disprove the claim that 6 million were directly murdered by a cartoonish villain. If, indeed Auschwitz was constructed as a death camp, A spastic retard must have designed it, it's so inefficient,

[scorpion]

(01-29-2015 07:09 PM)Flint Wrote:  

scorpion, I respect your knowledge on game but your political views, your obsession with Jews (as shown in many other threads) as well as your constant holocaust denialism are an intellectual disgrace to say the least.

It's telling that you consistently express strong views against Muslim but shed a lot of tears for them when they get oppressed by Israel.

I have no idea who you are but you obviously spend a lot of time thinking about my posts. It's also quite dishonest to characterize me as having an "obsession with Jews" and to say that I engage in "constant holocaust denialism". If these were the only topics I posted about, I surely would have been banned long ago. The reality is I simply am not afraid to express my views on controversial topics when they do pop up (if you search you will notice I very rarely start threads myself, and have never started a single thread about these topics you accuse me of being obsessed with).

I would recommend you spend more time researching and less time getting offended by my posts, because pouting and calling someone an "intellectual disgrace" does nothing to prove them wrong.

[MidWest]

(01-29-2015 07:35 PM)Krusyos Wrote:  

Be merciful, Tuthmosis and indulge me a holocaust post...

To be blunt, the 6 million is a gross exaggeration, bordering on a lie. A fourth grade student could perform the math necessary to disprove the claim that 6 million were directly murdered by a cartoonish villain. If, indeed Auschwitz was constructed as a death camp, A spastic retard must have designed it, it's so inefficient,

Prove it then! What is the "real" number?

You said a fourth grader can perform the math. Prove it!

[RexImperator]

In B4 lock...

[JWLZG]

I'm happy to be informed, if not outright corrected, in the almost hyperbolic tone of my OP. Trolling most certainly wasn't my intention and I really didn't mean for it to smack of Jezebel-style emotives. I don't have a drop of Jewish blood, and have no axe to grind.

My juxtaposition of Russia against the Holocaust wasn't intended as such, but I wanted to observe that Putin's mention in the news over Auschwitz's anniversary pretty much reflects his Godwin-esque depiction in the Western media over the past couple of years - such sound-bites as Russia's Anschluss, Europe's "Peace in our time" and "Obama's Munich" proliferate throughout the Western establishment. Is Godwin's Law that effective a mechanism for ensuring history doesn't repeat itself?

(01-29-2015 05:06 PM)rover Wrote:  

that was Soviet Red Army that freed the camp. The "Ukrainian Army" was mostly fighting on the Nazi side.

(01-29-2015 02:24 PM)Seboist Wrote:  

That's because there was no "1st Ukrainian army", it was the 1st Ukrainian Front (previously known as the Voronezh Front) and much like all other red army formations, it consisted of every swinging dick from the SSRs from Russians,Ukrainians,Kazakhs,Georgians,etc(Russians were the largest chunk though). All three of it's main commanders(Konev,Zhukov and Vatutin) were Russians.

The notion that it was a "Ukrainian army" is a recent troll job on the part of the government of Poland and what's more amusing is that the Germans recruited western ukrainians as personnel for these camps.

I stand corrected. 1st Ukrainian Front was what I should've wrote.

(01-29-2015 02:10 PM)Libertas Wrote:  

No one's ever heard of Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide, etc. etc. Niall Ferguson makes a point of all of these that the 20th century was the century of the progress of prosperity while also at the same time the bloodiest and most brutal in all of human history. How these two contradictory happenstances occurred side by side is explored in his book War of the World which I want to read this year.

I've definitely heard of the Armenian Genocide and the Holodomor. The former, in particular, is intertwined with our history despite the relatively small Armenian community in Australia.

The argument I've heard brought up is that unlike those above massacres, the Holocaust stands out as a deliberate, state-sanctioned attempt to eradicate European Jewry. Rather than spontaneous acts of violence resulted from forced population control - or, in the case of the Holodomor, planned economic failure on a nation-wide scale, the Holocaust was a culmination of targeted, racially specified extermination, from Hitler's earliest postulations in Mein Kampf up to the systematic organisation that resulted from the Wannsee Conference.

In the same light, Japan killed far more Chinese in WW2 (predating 1939) than Nazism killed Jews. Far more Chinese went on to die under Mao. This doesn't translate into a recognition of genocide because Japan didn't have it as its agenda to exterminate the Chinese race. While lacking in the Holocaust's industrialised efficiency, Japan outstripped the SS in sheer barbarity - the Nanking Massacre saw cruelty that matched the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front.

Why then, do the Jews deserve such enshrined exclusivity among mankind's record of genocides? We on RVF oppose the idea of inherent equality - this is pertaining to a highly successful group of people that, wherever they have scattered throughout the earth, have in equal parts formed the backbone of that society's infrastructure yet been victims of systematic persecution over 5000 years of existence. Think of the Zuckerbergs, Einsteins, Kafkas, Newtons, Asimovs and Baron Cohens that have been gifted to society, and how many more could have lived had their forebears not perished either in the Holocaust, or the Tsarist pogroms that came before.

I would never propose that one massacred Jew was worth more than a dead Armenian or Ukrainian. All genocides are as repugnant. That Jews have a track record for victimisation in proportion to their population is worth considering.

(01-29-2015 02:10 PM)Libertas Wrote:  

And also the Jews weren't even the only groups targeted in this very atrocity, yet it's only the Jews you ever hear about. Can't remember the Gypsies getting their own state as a result of all of this.

I actually asked this question when we had a delegation from the nearby Jewish school visit us in Year 10 (16 y/o) to speak about the legacy of the Holocaust. I'm surprised I had the gumption to bring that up. Anyway, their response was, and I paraphrase, 'well it's because the Holocaust was a specifically Jewish disaster, and that Jews took the lions' share of the toll. If the other groups that fell victim to it (i.e. Slavs, homosexuals, Roma, Communists etc.) wish to commemorate that, then they can do so separately'.
I think their implication, while not deliberately so, was that the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust were basically collateral. Mind you these kids were the same age as us.

The Holocaust remembrance movement is pretty strong here in Australia, for a country that wasn't directly affected by it - thousands of Holocaust survivors emigrated here after WW2. Personally, we went over it pretty thoroughly in high school History over 2 years (2nd year wasn't compulsory though), and again while covering Judaism as part of Religious Education in Year 10. This was on a greater level than state schools though, I think mine (private, White-Anglo dominant) was the sort that bred White-guilt, paradoxically enough.

Still, that hasn't been deemed enough - we have since pushed for compulsory Holocaust education nationwide.