Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

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From a timing perspective, this was published in March, 1940. Some other noteworthy events with their dates:

* Germany invades Poland (September, 1939)

* Britain, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand declare war on Germany (September, 1939)

* Soviets invade Poland, which is later split (October, 1939)

* Nazis begin euthanasia of ill and disabled in Germany (October, 1939)

* Soviets attack Finland (November, 1939)

So by the time Orwell published his review, it was clear Germany and the Soviets were mobilizing for war, but it was entirely unclear what would happen next.

In the next six months, Germany would invade Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands while beginning their blitz on Great Britain. The Soviets would take Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Mussolini would meet Hitler in Munich, declare war on France and Britain and Italian forces would take Greece and enter Egypt. The Tripartite Pact would be signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan to formalize their alliance.

It's amazing to me how fast things moved during that time.

The "euthanasia" actually began in September 1939. October was when the law was passed, which was backdated to September 1st.

This isn't just to be pedantic, I'm currently reading The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans, and this is an instance of the Nazi emphasis on appearing as though they had a legal basis for their actions, even well into the dictatorship. It's one of the most bizarre parts of the story to me.

The euthanasia was attempted to be done in secret, so under what circumstance the backdating (or even the existence) of the law could possibly have been useful is beyond me. Under Nazi victory, those involved were safe from prosecution, and in case of defeat, the law could not have saved them.

It's like something straight out of the movie Brazil, though not being fiction and having resulted in the death and suffering of countless real people makes not possible to enjoy the insanity of the situation.

I highly recommend the books, though I don't exactly have a weak stomach, and many parts were quite difficult for me. It reminded me quite a bit of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, which was also extremely long and dense with suffering.

I don't think the Nazis felt as secure from internal challenge in Germany during their rule as they appear to have been in retrospect. In any case, whether it was really unnecessary or not, they seem (from the little I've read about this) to have been past masters at controlling potential domestic opposition using the rapier rather than the bludgeon, using a combination of bribery and conciliation, isolation and media control, divide-and-conquer, obfuscation and legal hoop-jumping, and judicious applications of extreme violence. Instead of flattening German "civil society" outright, they won the tug of war with it, dragging it along with them instead of having it pull them back. There was in fact open (though of course not, in the end of the day, effective) opposition to T4 from inside Germany, notably from the Catholic Church which was one institution the Nazis had to handle with some care, and Cardinal van Galen was invoking the German Penal Code against it as late as 1941. So legal changes were probably all part of the minuet.

I also don't think it's inevitable that the T4 perpetrators would have been punished if the Nazis had lost power at some point in, say, early 1941. The western world had been increasingly heading in that direction before the war, and to a large and increasing extent it's arriving back there now, as evidenced by, for example, the mysterious absence of Down's Syndrome children in many places these days. Come to think of it, many of the people implicated in T4 didn't in fact end up facing justice after the war either.

>the mysterious absence of Down's Syndrome children in many places these days.

could you please expand ?

I don't know what places the author's referring to, but according to one study, most fetuses diagnosed with Down Syndrome in Europe [0] and the United States [1] are aborted. The rate of live births has remained steady, but apparently it would be significantly higher if not for prenatal screening [2]. This discrepancy isn't very mysterious, nor is it really an absence, so maybe the GP has something else in mind?

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10521836

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22418958

[2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pd.2702/full

I think is it a lot easier to convince people what they are doing is ok or not so bad, if it is "legalized" by law. NSA also insists that everything they do is covered by the law or at least their secret interpretation.

This kind of legalism is particularly puzzling in cases like the Khmer Rouge, which avoided enlisting sympathetic intellectuals and foreign backers to help build bureaucracies and theoretical justification for their actions and instead massacred them whilst being deliberately obscurantist about their aims and beliefs, but still kept meticulous records of their prisoners and the "confessions" they extracted as if they believed such evidence procedures had been followed correctly would assure history judged their actions kindly.

Anomalies like that can be important, I think. Clearly it made sense to the actors, but to us it seems incomprehensibly bizarre; that means our mental model is wrong, or, at least, has a gap.

I think we tend to err by confusing cruel governments with common criminals. Criminals tend to be irrational and self-defeating. Governments and larger criminal organizations tend to be cold and calculating, and their use of violence is not random; their goal isn't violence at any cost, like an individual who goes on a killing spree. They wanted to operate a government, after all, and they expected it to be enduring. They could not abolish all order and personal responsibility. Presumably, even if you were doing something abominable as part of your job, government workers could still be fired if they showed up late or got drunk on the job, etc. Maybe record-keeping was considered an essential part of maintaining an organized regime.

Edit: I don't want to overstate the calculating aspect-- It's possible that, from the standpoint of the Nazis, persecuting Jews was a drain on resources and served no rational purpose for the organization, and even that some Nazis were aware and privately opposed it. But what matters as far as running a disciplined organization is not so much that orders must serve a rational purpose; what matters is that the orders must come from the appropriate authority.

This is actually true in any disciplined organization: in the army, if you are in combat and your commanding officer orders you to shoot that guy, you're expected to shoot that guy, period. But the order makes the difference; you can't shoot people at random.

It's amazing to me that, in all likelihood, had Hitler decided to call it quits earlier, the world would have sat back and allowed him to keep some of his conquests (eg Denmark, Norway or Belgium). Today it would be unthinkable to allow a large nation to invade Belgium with no counter international military response.

There have been some pretty large scale invasions in the last 10-15 years. Those countries that were anti them faced a pretty dark few years in terms of international relations. At least that's how the deadlines were interpreted by me. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Iraq_War

Do you really consider the Iraq War to be an occupation? Especially one akin to any of the Reich's annexations?...

Given the tensions between the Walloons and Flemings I can imagine circumstances in which an invasion could occur.

It's pretty unlikely, but there are numerous examples of a larger power intervening in another country in support of a particular ethnic group.

Pretty much what dragged the UK into WWI was the German violation of Belgiums neutrality.

Perhaps not Belgium, but consider eastern Ukraine.

OK so any large nation that isn't Russia, China, Great Britain or the United States.

Just FYI Germany was providing training and equipment to the Chinese nationalists to fight at first against regional warlords and then the Japanese until 1941 when the tripartite pact was signed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_until_1...

And the Russia of today in relative terms is weaker than WW2 Germany militarily.

The US is looking to disengage as much as possible from global conflicts. I think that they would be extremely reluctant to be pulled into a head on war against Russia/ China over a lot of 3rd countries.

Do not forget that, whatever the strength of Russia's conventional forces, Russia also possesses nuclear weapons. For that reason, it would be unthinkable for the West to fight a head on war against Russia.

It looks like nukes are off the table. In any way, Russia is invading countries who don't possess nuclear weapons, and uses unflagged troops. From that logic it would be illogical to retaliate with nukes for attacks on troops that aren't yours...

Putin is deliberately isolating conflict regions from each other and from the bigger picture, somehow hoping that no single attack is worth it for NATO to actually retaliate in any form. So far, as long as no NATO countries are in immediate danger, this works extremely well.

I don't think that is really a factor, nukes only really come into it if you have an irrational regime that would rather be destroyed themselves than outright lose.

Russia has strategic as well as a tactical nuclear weapons. They have repeatedly stated that they will use tactical weapons to make up for any shortcoming in conventional forces.

An example could be nuking a large staging area or aircraft carriers. There's nothing irrational about it, once war progresses this far.

Heck, part of NATO's defense strategy against the USSR was to have squads with Davy Crockett missiles stationed along the eastern front. If you're not familiar with those: it's a shoulder-launched device bearing the M388 atomic round. Range: around a mile. Kill radius: around a quarter mile.

The premise is that when the Soviets decided to invade they'd lob a few of these at their forces and pin them down for a little while, so the rest of NATO could mobilize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

> One of the most fervent supporters of the Davy Crockett was West Germany's defense minister Franz Josef Strauss, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Strauss promoted the idea of equipping German brigades with the weapon to be supplied by the US, arguing that this would allow German troops to become a much more effective factor in NATO's defense of Germany against a potential Soviet invasion. He argued that a single Davy Crocket could replace 40–50 salvos of a whole divisional artillery park — allowing the funds and troops normally needed for this artillery to be invested into further troops, or not having to be spent at all. US NATO commanders strongly opposed Strauss's ideas, as they would have made the use of tactical nuclear weapons almost mandatory in case of war, further reducing the ability of NATO to defend itself without resorting to atomic weapons.[7]

It seems that even at that time, the US wanted to keep the conflict nuclear-free as much as possible.

Well they pretty much got Crimea, don't they ?

Crimea also has been historically part of Russia/USSR until 1954.

(I'm French, just stating)

Kalinigrad was Prussian. L'viv and Vilnius were Polish. Szczecin and Wrocław were German. That was only 80 years ago. 100 years ago there was no Poland, and no USSR.

These cities changed hands every 50 years or less for last few centuries. It's useless to argue about these things.

Basically whole C&E Europe is a huge barrel of powder. If you start to do this stuff (this is MINE because history) the powder will explode.

That's why nobody (except Russia) do it. Even the worst nationalists in Poland don't actually want L'viv or Vilnius. Even though L'viv was a very important city for Polish culture and still 80 years later there are songs about how great a city Lwów was (French wouldn't understand, you only have one city ;) ). It was Polish San Francisco, and we don't want it back.

That's because we know that we are only safe because we're past the WW2 era of petty nationalisms. We've learnt our lesson.

Putin doesn't care - he knows EU is not united enough to react, so he basically replays Hitler 1938 strategy and he goes away with it. French traditionally don't want to die for Danzig(Donetsk this time), they even sell weapons to Putin. Great job, guys.

It's very frustrating to see it in real life and see how useless and clueless western politicians are. Like nobody learnt anything from WW2.

Germany had similar claims on some of that land it grabbed and might have been able to hold on to: notably the Sudetenland. So Russia's historical claim on the Crimea doesn't really break the analogy.

Not quite. It was part of Russia from 1783 till 1918 (or so) then it was Part of USSR. But let's make it 1954 as you wrote, so it gives 171 years.

Before 1783 Crimea was part of Ottoman Empire (Crimean Khanate), from about 1449. That makes 334 years.

And before that Mongols ruled there from about 200 years.

And even before it belonged partly to Kiev Rus' and Bizantium for another 300 years.

So basing solely on the years (assuming that what you mean by historically) it looks like Crimea should go back to Turkey or split between Ukraine and Greece, surly not to Russia.

So was Ukraine:) Part of Russia/USSR until 1991. Crimea is a special case - it was always assumed to be "Russian" even under Ukrainian rule. Ukrainians themselves never fully considered Crimea as their own. That is why it fell off so quickly and easily. Historically it has been part of Russia, true, but more importantly is never stopped being "Russian" in terms of self identity (unlike Lwow or Volyn for example, that were Ukrainianized in a rather brutal way).

Alsace and Lorraine have been historically part of the Germanic world (though it is quite true that the populations preferred to remain French). Can I take it that you won't have strong grounds to object if Merkel sends a few divisions over the border?

Yeah, so?

How did Italians take Greece? This was a great moment for the West because Mussolini invaded Greece from the North and he was repelled. The first moment where the Axis forces showed weakness-it showed that Hitler's forces where just humans and that resistance is possible-organized well it could mean victory.

Very good point, I was merely glancing at a timeline and listing the interesting bits and I must've changed some wording with Greece. The Italians definitely didn't "take" Greece, but they had invaded by October 1940 and were subsequently repelled a few months later.

Hitler actually blamed Mussolini's "idiotic campaign in Greece" for his failure in securing major victories against the USSR, so we definitely have much to thank the Greek army for.

> Soviets invade Poland, which is later split (October, 1939)

Wrong, soviets invaded on 17th September. In October most fighting was already done.

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