David Dushman, last surviving Auschwitz liberator, dies aged 98
bbc.com
bbc.com
Also, someone in this discussion said that as more and more people pass away there is less and less truth about WW2 and less and less respect to its lessons. There is also another interesting observation: the more related to WW2 people die the more Cold War #2 we see. Cold War hasn't become "hot" because during these times almost everyone except kids knew what is war and how it looks and that it causes. War heroes were not imaginary movie personalities, they were everywhere. And kids could hear real stories from someone who has seen it all with own eyes. And so, everyone knew that war is hell and that nuclear weapon can make war even worse, so that WW2 will look like a picnic.
But what do we have now? Movies about WW2 with expensive SFX and cheap plot, Call of Duty, etc. War isn't scary anymore. People are eager to fight something. This mad mad mad mad mad world.
Avoiding buying Chinese goods seems almost impossible, we have outsourced also much manufacturing now.
First of all, I am not going to defend soviet concentration camps, USSR has had it's own share of sins. But comparison of Third Reich and USSR is an anti-communist propaganda cliché. For obvious reasons: no jew could become a member of national-socialist party, but anyone could become a communist. So, no matter how disgusting the stalinism was, it cannot be compared to nazism.
As for popularity of communism, well, Red Army was victorious, USSR was one of those who survived and won, so it's ideology was gaining supporters. There were many true believers in ideas of communism. E.g in socialist Czechoslovakia there was an attempt to build "socialism with a human face." In USSR there was a generation called "sixtiers" who were true believers in communism but saw stalinism as something horrible that should never happen again. But, for better or for worse, it looks like believers was the last thing the communist party needed.
By the way, the book "Monday begins on Saturday" by Strugatsky brothers is exactly about a RnD institute (almost) full of people sincerely trying to make world a better place. Strugatsky brothers were believers themselves. To the end of USSR they have become bitter haters.
PS. I am not stating that communism is good or better than capitalism.
He knew the line was bugged, likely by both PET and the KGB. His cries were heard, and after a "chance" meeting at a squash game he became a double agent, years later stationed in London where he nearly became the rezident (~CEO) at the Embassy. He was betrayed by Aldrich Ames at some point around 1985, and went on to become the only (as far as I'm aware) person to be exfiltrated from the Soviet Union directly under the nose of the KGB. Not a bad life story.
Wait, your whole argument for why Stalinism can not be compared to Naziism was that jews could become members of the communist party?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Uni...
Stalinism/communism provided you a moral/ideological choice: to be part of it or to oppose it. Although sometimes people who were taking the side of stalinism and were active in whistleblowing and finger pointing in the name of ideological purity were later repressed themselves.
Nazism, on the other hand, gives you no choice if you are a jew. It is already decided for you.
But again, stalinism was awful. I am not going to defend it. I too have some far relatives who died because of it. My grandmother survived thanks to luck. But to compare communism or even stalinism to nazism is wrong.
> Stalinism/communism provided you a moral/ideological choice: to be part of it or to oppose it. Although sometimes people who were taking the side of stalinism and were active in whistleblowing and finger pointing in the name of ideological purity were later repressed themselves.
The point is there them being repressed themselves. Stalin, & Co. were rather indifferent to who was pointing fingers at whom with regards to who goes to GULAG first.
Very often both the "stukach," and his victim were sharing the same train to Magadan.
The main reason Jews could become communist in the USSR is that Stalin died before he could commit his own explusion/genocide. Had he lived, he would have likely used the Doctor's Plot to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia. Read Stalin's Last Crime:
https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Last-Crime-Against-1948-1953-...
Hitler's no.2 was Jewish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Maurice
It's not a defense of Soviet crimes to say that the Nazis were unequivocally worse.
To place their "evilness" on the same order of magnitude means you're not considering generalplan ost's fulfilment as worse than our current timeline.
I might be misinterpreting, but many in Gen Z seem to consider WWII and Nazi history as a kind of meme to joke about. (9/11 too, for that matter.)
I'm worried we might be destined to forget the lessons we learned. The rise of domestic terror, hate, and partisanship doesn't help.
For example, in Seinfeld, they had a character called the "soup Nazi", a character that was extremely asshole-ey about who he gave soup to. This was not a controversial episode or anything, and became one of the most quoted episodes of the series. Nowadays I'm not sure if that would be considered "ok."
I feel like the rise of domestic terror, white nationalism, and fascism is scary, but seems to a) by mostly composed of millenials my age and older, and b) a lot more complicated than some edgelord humor.
That said, despite the fact that I love edgey subversive humor, I agree that trivializing things as "just jokes" isn't a good thing; if it means fewer memes, I can live with that.
I mean I don't know if I would go that far; things like Hipster Hitler got a fair amount of traction, at least for a bit [0]. Hardly indicative of the entirety of human culture, and obviously it's not a major network sitcom like Hogan's Heroes (or Seinfeld).
Also, a staple of the Call of Duty franchise is a tongue-and-cheek mode of running around killing zombie Nazis, isn't it? (I admittedly haven't played it), and it's not like "Iron Sky"[1] was meant to be taken super seriously.
I think it's unnecessarily reductive to say "one generation is ok with subject X and another generation isn't." I don't think humans really form big, homogeneous groups completely based around the year they were born.
[0] http://www.hipsterhitler.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky
No need to tell us this, tbh. Your easy reference to "the rise of domestic terror, white nationalism, and fascism" to rationalize shutting down humor already marked you as a millennial, my dude, your claims to enjoy edgy humor notwithstanding.
Humor has unsettled fragile, self-righteous authoritarians throughout history, including but sadly by no means limited to, fascists. Attempts to shut it down are always concerning. They will never say "we want to stamp our boot on the face of humanity" as the reason for shutting down humor. It will always be a plausible reason: "we are at war" or "some things are too serious to joke about" or "vulnerable people need our protection"
Embrace your love of edgy humor. It's how people deal healthily with their anxieties and concerns.
I realize I didn't make it as clear as I'd like (and that's my fault), but I wasn't suggesting "shutting down" humor. What I was trying to say (unsuccessfully) was that we should potentially be less tolerant of certain humor en masse via social pressures. I'm really not in favor of having a government entity disallowing humor.
For example, throughout the 90's and early 2000's, it used to be somewhat tolerated to use gay stereotypes to make fun of gay people. Eventually we realized (for the most part) that these stereotypes might be harmful, and for the most part have stopped making these kinds of gay jokes. It wasn't like the government stepped in and said "it's illegal to make fun of gay people", we just socially moved on from that.
This is true. Today, being gay is generally accepted.
Before the 1970s, homosexuality was so unacceptable even joking about it was unacceptable. Homosexuality was invisible. At best, if you were enlightened, you would consider it a mental illness. Most just considered it a moral abomination.
I would argue that jokes from Eddie Murphy, Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Kinnison were simultaneously an expression of society's anxiety about social change, and part of the start of a national, or even global conversation that led to "Enh, being gay is no big deal. As long as it's consensual, let people do what they want."
Today those jokes aren't funny, but I wonder if homosexuality would be as accepted as it is without them. The conversation became increasingly about whether the jokes were fair or not; funny or not. Which at the time was miles better than one mustn't joke about homosexuality
Jokes can be mean-spirited bullying moving society towards being more oppressive and less tolerant, but not always. Not inevitably. Humor pushes taboos and boundaries, sometimes towards good.
Why would making nazis the but of a joke not fly today?
https://www.cinecity.nl/sites/default/files/images/movies/35...
https://www.queerty.com/sharon-needles-banned-from-performin...
https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/samantha-bee-apologizes-to-c...
https://www.thewrap.com/last-man-standing-canceled-tim-allen...
https://forward.com/fast-forward/424615/comedian-isaac-butte...
It seems like you can make fun of the Nazis directly, but cannot joke about the situation surrounding the time/place/events regarding the Nazis.
I’m pretty sure Hitler will have a similar public image to Napoleon in a few hundred years. We do similar things with Roman emperors and praise their accomplishments forgetting the massive amounts of suffering they caused.
I personally find Napoleon and Julius Caesar as completely uninspiring figures. Their accomplishments are worthless but for some reason praised from the perspective of history.
A big reason for this is that history finds explanations after things happened. They attribute to these "leaders" way too much.
Reveal these hidden facts! To which facts do you refer, exactly?
Russians have monuments that praise the rulers that were ruthless and brutally destructive towards the human spirit and it's been less than 100 years ago since these events happened.
Just because current rule in Europe/Germany finds him horrible it does not mean that in 200 years these events will be looked at with the same eyes.
If I had asked "The facts to which you refer are related to what?" then that would be an excellent answer to the question!
I asked "To which facts do you refer?": What are these facts?
I mean, does Russia have memorials of their leaders? Germany also has a bunch of memorials even going back to Prussian days. Yet many of these individuals caused massive suffering.
Attila the Hun is to this day considered a ruthless barbarian and killer. Practically no one could tell you who he was or what he did, but everyone knows he was a bad dude.
Hitler will be remembered for the ovens, long after everyone has forgotten Archbishop Ferdinand.
Apologies to my Magyar friends! But what I said is certainly true in the English-speaking world.
We can only hope that Hitler doesn't become a culture hero on the same fashion.
English poets today don't write how war is great for the spirit or whatever...
Sure, there's still plenty who don't quite get how bad armed conflict actually is.. but it's less romanticized today.
Reading wikipedia it seems when the book came out it was critically received by some for "it's pacifists agenda".
Sure, we still glorify warfare, but our culture and tolerance for casualties have changed dramatically.
Believe me, kids nowadays don't want to fight. They'll be sitting in the tanks, on the battlefield on tiktok or something. Worse, (better?) is the ideas they pick up from the movies. Superbly advanced civilizations, with an almost [Edit: actually] unbelievable array of weapons, still hang their fate on individual superheroes. Their principal weapons are (get this) modern day swords and spears and body armour! also, the weapons are quickly abandoned in favour of punching the opponent in the face, with no apparent effect, and they don't even do that properly. If anything, violent superhero movies should be encouraged.
This zeitgeist is not ubiquitous. There are plenty of newly minted adults who jump into the military. Not all of them are lifers, but the government incentives are very good for the poor facing minimum wage at a McDonald's.
I also doubt it would be popular with helicopter parents :)
But my impression was that it was more tolerated.. with an attitude like: "this is my war", as if every generation has a war to fight.
— George Santayana
"I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive."
— Kurt Vonnegut
Makes more sense to me.
Just to keep the quote chain going. Seems relevant to me at least...
My grandfather was on a train to Auschwitz, but managed to avoid it and survive. A childhood friend of his survived in the camp until liberation. They always paid tribute to the liberators along with those who died in the attempt, at a ceremony commemorating their community.
One of the survivors I knew was executed twice. He said "it didn't catch".
Many/most of the Lubaks (local SS) were from the area, and he'd gone to school with some of them. That's part of the story, but I don't know exactly how it fits in.
I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were.
The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost.
Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day.
Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.
Yet they themselves were eventually murdered by the germans..
The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good.
One go kills random innocent people — he is bad.
Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do.
Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything.
The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
Read the biography of Stanislaw Lem for instance, who grew up in Lwów(current Ukraine, back then Poland) - Nazis frequently recruited local population to both kill and then bury anyone they wanted to get rid of, under a) promise of reward b) threat of being killed themselves. But you don't need to trust the biography of one man and his experiences - we also know this because Nazis kept extensive video and photo evidence of those executions, which they would show back in the 3rd Reich as "evidence" of the barbarism of the local people in places they were occupying ("look at those stupid Poles/Ukrainians/Jews, killing each other for a scrap of food!").
"Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them."
Again, because some of them were given a choice of either joining the ghetto kommando unit, or being shot there and then, along with their families. It didn't matter at all in the end of course, because they all got executed in the end anyway. Can you say with with 100% confidence that you wouldn't make the same choice in the same situation? And I do mean 100% confidence?
Polish nobelist, Wiesława Szymborska, said something about these choices people faced in WW2 that I will always remember - "we only know ourselves as much as we have been tested - and I pray that my moment of trial never comes".
I think she's absolutely right - it's easy to judge what people have done from the comfort of our homes in 2021. But I do hope that I am never put in front of the same choice. I hope I will never be tested in the same way those people were.
And I will clarify here - of course there were willing collaborators too. 100%. But your comment reads as if that wasn't the case and the "myth" of unwilling collaborators was purely made up. I see no reason to believe such a thing.
10000% confidence
Like I said above - I hope my moment of trial never comes.
I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.
There is no point getting depressed from one's ancestors past - if one looks in the past far enough, there will be probably something utterly horrible that given nation/tribe/group did to somebody innocent. Basically all western european democracies fall into this category, and many, many other nations too.
Don't forget about it by any means, tech your kids as I will do, but don't put emotions into this just because your nation was the culprit. There were similar things happening to innocent civilians en masse in the past elsewhere. Genocides are not an invention of Germany or 20th century, life was often pretty horrible and violent in the past.
Time and entropy (empires dissolving or population groups migrating) definitely diffuse the responsibility for a horrific act. Of which there are many in history. But this specific thing happened in living memory, was performed by an organization that still exists (a German speaking nation state, with almost the same borders as before), and by people the OP knows personally. In fact, it's a very wealthy nation that OP has gained a lot of advantage from living in. It's subjective and graduated, but I don't think it's been nearly "long" enough that the Holocaust just background noise next to all other events that have happened in human history.
Modern Germany is awesome btw. Really respect how they've reckoned with this awful time in their history.
I have a lot of respect for Germany's honest portrayal and study of its past. It is a rarity, perhaps singular.
You might want to check out the new podcast Day X. It's about resurgence of far right extremism in Germany going on right now. Sadly, the same thing seems to be happening in my country (US).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/podcasts/far-right-german...
He was then placed with the family of Kazimierz Gołba, a Polish poet(who was himself hiding first from Nazis then from the secret police after the war) - and lived with them using a fake name for a while, only going to back to his original name and surname some years after the war.
Him and my grandma spent years and years of their lives trying to find any trace of what happend to his parents or any of his other family, but without any luck.
Unfortunately, he passed away last year, almost certainly due to covid(I say almost certainly - he passed away due to respiratory problems, and grandma got diagnosed with covid a day later, he was never tested).
Him and grandma and myself and the rest of our family have always lived literally 10 minutes away from the former Auschwitz camp as well - in a little town nearby.
My Grandmother (wife of the man I spoke about) was from your area, Wadowice. She was 16 on the eve of invasion, and her family survived by fleeing east.. gambling on Stalin over Hitler. Her father almost turned them back, having fought Russians in WW1. They were refugees for 7 years, most of the time in central asia. They returned for a while, but a couple of murders over property disputes convinced most survivors (very few survived from Wadowice) to leave. I have some family members who married out and converted. We're not in touch, unfortunately. The live in Krakov, last I heard.
She always maintained ties to her old community, even their most famous member. This is her elbowing past a Prime Minister to say hi and try to get him to do some renovation on an old synagogue. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeM...
We might be related.
From what I gather, he managed to get quite a few people out of there on medical grounds - but not himself.
She never spoke of him. I only found out from the posthumous memoir of her surviving brother, who was a conscientious objector who got sent to Stalingrad. Not an easy read, but one that made me acutely aware of just how quickly things can go incredibly bad.
If I may ask, how did this influence you and/or your relationship with your grandmother?
I think I would have forgiven her, however - I have, now, at any rate.
She was born in 1928 - she grew up in Vienna, immersed in an increasingly fascist culture, and joined the Hitler youth because it was simply what everyone did. In the last days of the war, she, in terror for her life, married a German officer who promised to get her out of Vienna before the Russians arrived - which he did, dumping her, pregnant with his child, in Kano Nigeria.
At the same time, many of her cousins were also fleeing Europe to escape war crime prosecution, and many remained in subsaharan Africa.
She met my grandfather there, a British war and famine profiteer, through a lonely hearts advert. They had many miserable years together.
All in all, I feared her as a younger child, pitied her as a young man - she was a cruel and angry woman, who was scornful to me as a child, and bitter to her (fourth) husband. Her brother, Sigrid, who by the time I was around lived with her, his wife long dead, always looked out for her, told us to be kind, that we didn’t and couldn’t understand why she was as she was.
And then his death, her death, his memoir, and I understood. I wish now that I had known while she was alive, but then, I was a younger man, and I may not have understood. Now, I see her as a victim as much as any of them - her entire life was a pyre of guilt and shame and self-loathing, always running, and never escaping her past, her actions.
As to me, I learned several things I felt were of critical importance:
- That cruel people are usually the product of cruelty - that they are cruel because they are ashamed, and wish to hate themselves.
- That righteous people, working with what they know to be right and good can carry out acts of atrocious evil.
- That you should be aware that your actions, if sufficiently bad, will haunt you til the end of your days.
It's always jarring to me, with my modern/simplistic/naive perspective of these major historical events, to consider that the people who lived during and/or participated in these events didn't understand full extent of what they were seeing or what was happening. It totally makes sense, academically...fog of war, slow/spotty spread of information, determining what's propaganda and what's not.
But still, there's something mind-blowing to me about a soldier mowing down the fence at Auschwitz with a tank, but not knowing what the place was.
I have never been interested in “breaking news” because it is usually pretty impossible to give it context. Reading the news from a few days or even weeks past helps make clear what matters amd what does not.
No internet. Television was in its infancy (meaning few even had a television). There were no "24-hour news channels" anywhere. News arrived via newspaper, film short before a movie in a movie theater, or a brief "news update" on a radio station. Information flowed (worldwide) at a snails pace as compared to how quickly we learn of some happening on the other side of the globe today.
not saying "there is nothing going on there" and "those incarcerations are complete lies" but the whole thing is fishy, especially considering that there are political motives behind screaming bloody murder – for comparison, there is literally zero western pressure on israel on the occupation issue, and the EU is blatantly ignoring the insane conditions migrants are subjected to on the other side of the EU barriers.
China has done a great job of making people frame it as the US/EU lying and the "whataboutism" in your last paragraph. This is also a tactic that Putin loves to use. Using Western shortcomings to justify their own tyranny.
Those may well be actual death camps. The stated amount of people disappeared (2m+) far exceeds just how much people you can physically fit into those camps. They may fit few hundred thousands, but not millions.
on the data: if by "we" you mean adrian zenz then you're out of luck when it comes to quality. i'd like to see better sources than someone who thinks he's in a mission from god like he's the blues brothers. china hasn't done "a great job" at framing the west for lying otherwise there wouldn't be a wikipedia page and we wouldn't be discussing this on hacker news. the sad reality is that china doesn't give a shit about its reputation abroad, which is why many of the rebuttals to those claims are in chinese. one is here: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13029926735409111... – it's by the chinese state media so one can still claim they're lying.
on the "cities that were once heavy uyghur communities ..." as i mentioned above: kashgar still has a lot of uyghurs. they go to their mosques and so on.
what is true, however, is that china is encouraging resettlement of han chinese (they've been doing it for decades), for the sole purpose of making the uyghurs a minority in their own land. this is something that personally i don't like, but (here comes the whataboutism) i have not seen a single piece of criticism when this happened literally everywhere else, minus of course when it was accompanied by planned extermination, which only applies to anatolia's christian minorities, as the jews were already a small minority in the locations that were affected by the deportations.
What would you propose to do?
on the EU issue: there isn't one single solution since all the cases are different. a few come to mind. i would not pay blood money to morocco and libya to "keep them at bay" because the EU can't just champion human rights at home and then fund concentration camp-like establishments outside of its borders – we are not funding the ones in xinjiang, we are funding the ones in the libyan litoral. a way more efficient refugee processing scheme with the participation of everyone else would be ethically better. much as i disliked him, matteo renzi put it very well for the eastern european extremists: no refugees, no money. on an EU level i'd also crack down on pushbacks (such as the ones happening in spain and in greece), where the carrot should be a better refugee distribution.
let's not forget that europe's exploitation caused this problem, it's also on us to help people and figure out a solution.
as i have said a thousand times though, i don't think they're approaching this "problem" the right way.
I expect evidence. I do not get upset because it is the fashion to do so. If someone calls me a liar and demands proof I didn't mislead them, I do my best to display evidence in my defense. All that the CCP offers is threats to other sovereign nations.
There is a pattern of behavior from the CCP which indicates duplicity and untruthfulness from the destruction of viral lab samples in Wuhan, to entire fishing fleets going dark off sovereign waters. Every day we receive more of these reports of bad behavior. If China wants us to believe them, they need to start producing evidence. Let observers in. Show the world.
on the other hand: am i denying the existence of fishy "re-education camps" targeting one ethnic group and one only, where they are brought in under very opaque circumstances? no, i am not denying that.
if you want a very long read with some context behind some of those claims, here's one: https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/education/xinjiang
there are a bunch of things there, a full timeline of the "conflict", a couple of articles debunking both poor google maps journalism and a few poorly-made BBC & vice docs on the matter.
there's also the fact that some of the "punishments" against the uyghurs are forcing children to go to school, to mandarin-speaking public ones even, which is the same policy most countries in the world adopt (a recent request in france to partially allow schooling in catalan in the region of perpignan has been rejected). there are some claims that state-funded xinjiang schools are even bilingual but i haven't dug enough on it.
i won't comment on the wuhan issue because i don't really know enough about it, but as someone who is born in an island with plenty of US bases i laugh at everyone claiming china is "flexing their muscles" with their navy.
to be clear: nobody approaching any of those bases gets allowed in, just like in the "xinjiang camps". does this excuse china? no, it doesn't, but we should probably be fair in our judgment.
Can you prove that this refutation of those satellite images is false? Let's remember that there were satellite photos of WMDs before the Iraq War also. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1208288.shtml
> Let observers in. Show the world.
According to China many observers have come, and there is an open invitation for more to come as well: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1180917.shtml
Do you have evidence that this is false?
The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490
Do you have evidence that they are lying? Which Muslim-majority countries or non-Western-aligned Muslim interest groups have condemned China for human rights abuses in Xinjiang?
> The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490
There is every indication that these are sanitized media tours. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times
[2] https://wokeglobaltimes.com/aac16063149c4e37a8e3ee58066c4837...
Right, and the Western claims all stem from people or organizations connected to the US state department or intelligence apparatus. These claims are propagated by the same bastions of journalistic truth which stoked popular fervor in the run-up to the Iraq War and every other unjustified US foreign coup or war (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony).
Global Times is an organ under the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP. There is no controversy of its origins or whose authority it acts. Given that no newspaper can be wholly privately-owned in China, conflicts of interest are unavoidable.
I don’t think Wikipedia is objective in any way on geopolitics. I don’t think that’s possible. My point was simply that some geopolitical facts are so indisputable that even Wikipedia admits them (of course this only tends to happen once the US has gotten what it wants). You have to decide whether you’re going to reckon with those facts or just talk more about sources. At the end of the day that’s a cover for not having any hard evidence.
It sounds like a major conspiracy.
Which Muslim?
Objectives (such as bridges) were often missed by hundreds of meters.
I think the same trains or tracks that carried prisoners carried the (paltry) food for the camps, so I guess it's a trolley problem still.
“Of those aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three got within 5 mi (8.0 km).”
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/worldwar2/thea... has data for later years. It got better, but stayed bad.
https://www.airforcemag.com/article/1008daylight/:
“Bombing accuracy was terrible. The average circular error in 1943 was 1,200 feet, meaning that only 16 percent of the bombs fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point”
It might have helped but it’s far from a certainty.
The tools of killing were bullets, disease, and starvation.
The Nazis ran out of many things, towards the end of the war. But never bullets.
Edit: I have no idea why people are doing the drive by downvote thing here? Maybe you think I'm denying that gas chambers were real?
No. I'm saying there were concentration camps without them, where prisoners were mass-murdered as I described above. That statement is not controversial.
I don't think destroying the gas chambers would have been enough to stop Auschwitz.
But how many planes would this have taken? How many would have been lost? No loss was affordable during most of the war; industrial production won it for the Allies as much as anything did.
There were no easy decisions to make.
How he woke up safe on his bed in the middle of the courtyard ; There were walls when he had gone to sleep before, but the walls weren't there anymore.
When I became older, I learned that fifty prisoners in his barrack had died this night.
PBS's "Secrets of the Dead" series did an episode about this last year: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/bombing-auschwitz-wnrzgw/47...
[1]https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresiens...
War is not a video game.
Bombing an enemy concentration camp, especially with WWII-era weapons, would mean killing the people you're trying to save.
"The first proposal to bomb Auschwitz was made on 16 May 1944 by a Slovak rabbi." That was 3 weeks before D-Day (June 6, 1944).
Eisenhower's policy was to defeat Germany, and not get distracted. He had planned to bypass Paris, which wasn't on the route to Berlin.[2] (De Gaulle went off-script and liberated Paris ahead of schedule, but that's another story.) Eisenhower was trying to hold an alliance with different goals together. All the allies were agreed on "defeat Germany", but there were other national goals. Britain was concerned about preserving its empire, for example. To hold the alliance together, Eisenhower focused on "win the war" above all else.
The person this article is about was in the Red Army. "One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong division to survive the war, Mr Dushman suffered serious injuries during the conflict". The USSR had about 20 million casualties in WWII. Never forget that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate
[2] https://www.historynet.com/the-generals-who-brought-paris-ba...
Oh, wait. We can't ask any of those people, because they seem not to exist. Is that because North Korea is so wealthy that no one wants to leave to work elsewhere? Because North Korea is such a utopia that they don't even want to travel overseas? Because their industry is so advanced and self-sufficient that they need no trade deals with others?
You don't have to believe everything you read about North Korea, but to dismiss it all as US propaganda without offering a significant countervailing body of evidence is, well, silly.
While I do definitely mistrust US propaganda on North Korea, I don't doubt at all that it's a terrible place to live in every possible way, I have read several books by defectors (and visited numerous communist and post-communist countries).
My point was more that the reason we have heard about it is mostly because that suits the Western agenda. Otherwise very few would have any idea about what is going on there. Just like few Americans or even Europeans know much about Transdniestria, a present day communist state in Europe. Or Bhutan, a seemingly very happy little country.
Even in the days of Wikipedia and internet news, most people don't know much more about the world than what is convenient for Western media to tell us.
All this to say that it's inconceivable that people outside Germany could be pretty ignorant about what was going on in the late 30s.
Germany was USSR's ally in their planned occupation of Europe, which fortunately never happened.
USSR spent the remaining 45 years of its existence erasing the fact Union-Germany military alliance from the history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_(1926%...
Quite strange to see Chinese in German uniforms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_(1926%...
This sentence comes up a lot and I've never seen it fail as an indicator of either ignorance or Nazi apologism
https://religiondocbox.com/73089029-Judaism/Transcript-of-th...
We were walking to my truck. He said, "What do you think about the event."
I said something along the lines of, "Well--others have had it worse?".
I blame it on stupidity, a bad American education, and an angry 20 something that was completely lost in every aspect of my life.
I so regret how flipped my response was. I don't think I have ever said anything so stupid. I bet the guy I said it to remembers it too. He went into programming after our stint in the snack bar, and I imagine he's on hn.
We live. We grow... to paraphrase Rabbi Hillel.
The Soviets suffered a horrific toll in WWII. 25 million dead is an unimaginable number.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/540744/the-unwomanl...
https://www.nyrb.com/products/life-and-fate?_pos=1&_sid=f10e...
It is.
In the town in the Russian Far East where I spent my last few years in Russia, one old timer was telling me how extreme food confiscations were.
There were people basically solo living in sticks, hunting, fishing, gathering, doing crafts etc. One such guy probably only catches, and dries few fishes a week, and lives off that. He lives in really unpassable wilderness, weeks of travel to get to his place.
Nevertheless, NKVD had few men teams to regularly reach, try in a show trial them for "connivance," do simulated executions, and confiscate their few fishes which rot from improper storage by the time they come back to the city.
At some point, there were nearly equal amount of men drafted into NKVD, and other political police, than the men on front lines. At every moment of the war, communists were equally scared of their own people, as they were of Germans, if not more.
Communists fought the war betting fully on assumption that they had more soldiers than Hitler had bullets. And it was Stalin's fright, and surprise of a lifetimes when Germans somehow popped up within 10km of Moscow. He was hours away from taking a plane away from Moscow. He wasn't afraid of Germans as much as the prospect of meeting his end Gaddafi style.
This just isn't true. The myth of the endless "Asiatic hordes" and the "human wave attack" (a tactic the Soviets didn't really use) is mostly postwar propaganda, a way to save face by German generals in later accounts to their Cold War allies.
I suggest you read "The Myth of the Eastern Front" for more debunking of false narratives about this, as well as any of Col. David Glantz books on the Eastern Front.
The Soviets didn't win the war because they were numberless. They won it because Germany never had any hope of taking their territory, and because they learned fast and outmaneuvered and out fought the Germans.
it’s beautifully made, in a very personally close and intensely emotional style. it’s entirely fictional but based in part on secret diaries and photographs found buried within the camp.
>Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you, which is, in fact, the practical objective for my writing ... that my days of Hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future. I am transmitting only a part of what happened in the Birkenau-Auschwitz Hell. You will realize what reality looked like ... From all this you will have a picture of how our people perished.
i recommend this film, and the book Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski, to anyone interested in the people within the camps.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9e_Geulen-Herscovici
It's quite hard to describe how it feels to be in such a place. Since we were guided, I could understand quite a lot of it, but otherwise I think it would be difficult to realize the horrors that went on here.
The most striking is the sheer size of it. Especially when you enter Birkenau, you only see a range of buildings as far as the horizon.
It's a sad thought really, no number of history books will ever have the same effect as talking to your grandpa about his experiences on the beaches at Normandy, or marching in to liberate a concentration camp. I fear we're on the brink of forgetting a lot of lessons.
The most glamorous thing he ever mentioned was bivouacing somewhere with enough French wine to keep a functional drunk on…that story was over glasses of Port because his war experience inclined him to functional drunks for the rest of his living days.
I don’t recall ever meeting a veteran who thought the important lesson was D-day or liberating the camps. Invariably the point was how much war sucks.
My experience has been that when I meet people who saw actual combat, they invariably focus on how much it sucks. The folks who glorify it seem to always be the people who never experienced it first hand.
If this is true, why not give some links to a few HN comments, if not a lot, to add a lil evidence to what seems, on the face of it, a truly ridiculous claim.
I think this is the thread they were referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414920 or rather at least that's what I found with Google.
Edit: Very relevant follow-up to that post just landed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424421
I'm not in the USA, like about 50% of HN, and know very little about the subjects, so asked only about the HN-part of the claim, that
> a lot of HN ... seem to be fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation.
How many comments or HN users until you get to reasonably call them "a lot"? What percentage? What if it's actually 0.0001%? How bad the "holocaust denialism and misinformation" before "fighting to the death for the right to spread it" is reasonable? Especially in a comment particularly targeting misinformation, such extreme hyperbole and writing like that apparently breaks the guidelines in a lot of ways.
Also, being charitable, different people read different parts of HN, maybe the GP reads mostly the political topics with disgusting comments, and "a lot of HN ... seem to be fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation" is reasonable. UH but no, it's ridiculous exaggeration, is precisely an area such a thing is not helpful, even on a very charitable interpretation. "Fighting to the death" really means literally that, or anything like it? or..just writing one or a few comments on HN?
So, what would you or anyone say the "strongest plausible interpretation" of "a lot of HN ... seem to be fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation" is? (genuine question) I'm struggling to give it any remotely plausible interpretation, even assuming it's extreme exaggeration. Even in the "strongest plausible interpretation", though, it seems to me, drastically changing the meaning of most of its words in favour of the writer, the comment is still hysterical, break a lot of guidelines[0], and is itself misinformation.
Edit: Sorry, I should have had morning coffee before writing above comment. (Also I have the flu!) I reread your comment, you seem to be saying that you thought the GP was trying to say in essence "a lot of people on HN support total free speech" (or whatever you want to call that, if it even makes sense). OK! That does make some sense. But still, describing that as "fighting to the death for the right to spread holocaust denialism and misinformation" seems the kind of writing that regularly gets people banned from HN. It still breaks the same guidelines. Thank you, much appreciated!
[0] You know, like Please don't fulminate, Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive., Eschew flamebait., Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. etc
.
> I thought I was being super-charitable asking for evidence instead of just downvoting, flagging and perhaps complaining.
"charitable interpretation" as in "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." from the guidelines not the generic "charitable" as in you felt you were giving GP something extra because you decided to discuss what you weren't sure you understood instead of immediately flagging/downvoting it.
> I don't hear any charitable interpretation applied to me, rather telling me I was the one exaggerating here!
Same as the above but also there is some bit of irony in saying "I was being super-charitable asking for evidence instead of just downvoting, flagging and perhaps complaining." yet when replying to a comment by someone else giving you the information asked for and a different interpretation of GP's comment you immediately follow up with "I don't hear any charitable interpretation applied to me". Regardless, if there was a different interpretation beyond your doubt of the claim and the desire for evidence of it please give that (as I gave the other interpretation of the GP) instead of just saying you don't feel one was given.
> I'm not in the USA, so was asking only about the HN-part of the claim
Same assumption here, hence only providing evidence for the HN-part of the claim in the response.
> How many comments or HN users until you get to reasonably call them "a lot"?
Hmm, probably something each person gets to decide - that being said the ACLU topic had hundreds of comments on multiple pages, most in supporting of support free speech even in cases the message is disagreeable so I'd hazard to guess that meets most people's criteria for "a lot of comments on HN recently".
> How bad the "holocaust denialism and misinformation" before "fighting to the death for the right to spread it" is reasonable?
Well that's probably the center of the whole debate, crack that and you've got an answer for the whole show. Personally I lean on the "support free speech even in cases the message is disagreeable" side of the fence because I don't think we can trust what's popularly true at an instant to guide what is right to publicly discuss and I imagine GP lives much more on the "if it's even a small amount of denial or misinformation on the holocaust we shouldn't defend it" side of the fence for their own reasons.
I'd be curious of your particular stance and reasoning if you're willing and have the time.
> Especially in a comment particularly targeting misinformation, such extreme hyperbole surely breaks the guidelines in multiple ways.
How much it's hyperbole depends on your interpretation of the comment and how much the comments in the threads do/don't back it up. At the very least it's a bit of a "shoot first ask questions later" approach to start out saying you haven't checked the comments out yet and end saying the claim about the comments has such hyperbole it's surely against the guidelines. Maybe you'll find it is, maybe you'll find it isn't, but it's a bit hyperbolic in itself to claim it beforehand.
Personally I don't think the original claim was hyperbolic because the linked articles are literally about ACLU supporting free speech for card carrying Nazis and there are very many comments in the thread which share my "support free speech even in cases the message is disagreeable" view (which the ACLU does as well, per the articles).
>> How bad the "holocaust denialism and misinformation" before "fighting to the death for the right to spread it" is reasonable?
I was referring to the reasonableness or otherwise of using the phrase "fighting to the death for the right to spread it", not the reasonableness of fighting to the death for the right to spread it. Sorry that wasn't clearer.
Regrettably this sort of trolling has become a pervasive problem on the internet over the last decade or so.
Are they to scatter with the dust in the breeze?
Who will stand before the world, knowing what to say
When the very last survivor fades away?
The chimp brain of ours is highly over rated in what lessons it can learn from blundering about. The more complex the issue blundering is garaunteed no matter what lessons are available and who tells a good story. Look no further than Afghanistan. No lessons learnt.
The only thing to do when things get too complex is get out of the room and run for the hills. Let the buffoon class who think they have a handle on complexity because of their grandpas stories blunder away. When the dust settles return and rebuild.
"get out of the room and run for the hills"
If you're not a member of the majority group in society and you feel a fomenting hatred towards you, it's probably a good idea to sell your stuff and run away quickly. The downside of a false positive isn't that bad.
Fortunately in modern wealthy countries few have had to do that in a rather long time.
What if you feel a hatred fomenting towards you but you're still the projected majority for at least a few more years?
Lolol jk jk please don't take this seriously.
My grandfather helped to liberate Dachau. The only detail he ever told us about that day was how thin the prisoners were. The men were light enough to carry out two at a time, one on each arm; and they felt fragile, like small children.
Liberated Auschwitz. One of 69 to survive from 12,000. Became an Olympian.
What a life!