Explosion near the German Embassy in Afghanistan.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Have you read anything by the authors I mentioned?



I'm not the one inventing the claim, read Browning's Origin of the Final Solution and Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews.

I would have been slammed for posting something like this.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by CroFlames

I think many people overlook the horrors the Soviets committed against the Ukrainians that has become known as the Holodomor. I'm not trying to equate atrocities or argue who was more efficient at committing mass murder, but the Holodomor is right there with the Holocaust.

I think the Germans finally got all the racism and superiority complex out of their system. I think they would make wonderful world leaders. It's no secret Merkel was a young communist, but she has been one heck of a stateswoman now for many years. The world could use more German influence in my opinion.

And just for your information:

Spoiler!

Went to Germany in September/October, and racism is alive and well there. The German left is very anti-racist, but the right is equally pro-racist. The politics there are just far more extreme than in North America. Germany's racists operate quite openly and are on par with the most extreme right wing elements in North America. It's illegal to have swastikas in Germany, but without that rule, you'd see them fairly commonly.

It's also apparently very regional. Where I was in Germany, Munich (which is in Bavaria) things are traditionally very conservative. Berlin is supposed to be very left wing.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Locke

Yes, it seems like they really threw that all together at the last minute. Pretty impressive logistics.

I'm not likely going to read his life's work because I have a finite amount of time, but at the same time I dont think his research really supports your argument.

Lay it out for me, what is your assertion? That the Nazis didnt really plan the Holocaust out? It just sort of came together? Despite 'mountains' of documents evidently to the contrary?

That there was little or no preplanning. That the events that occurred were more like a runaway train that they continuously had to lay tracks for while it was moving than a very careful process that followed through as designed.

Meticulous means showing great attention to detail and planning very carefully. I'm arguing that evidence shows that while things were planned there was very little that was careful about it. It was reactionary and simply answered questions of need like labour, supplies, and resources. Many of the infrastructure used for the genocide itself was not designed for the genocide itself.

To say it was meticulous, I don't really buy but I probably wouldn't say anything about, there was little that was careful about it, even as it was being carried out it was a mess. But to say it was exceptional because of how meticulous it was, over something like what the Empire of Japan was responsible for, means you either don't understand the word "meticulous" or you don't understand the Holocaust. Or both.

Just sitting down for a meeting and making a plan to deal with something that is already happening while using a bunch of infrastructure you already had doesn't scream "carefully planning with great attention to detail."

Even during the period from 1942-45, it's not like everything ran like clockwork and that they had an answer for everything. There were huge gaps, gaps that lead to uprisings and resistance in the camps.

Having a plan of how to do something that's more than "kill them all" doesn't make it meticulous.

[AltaGuy]

As I said earlier - the Holocaust was unique in that it was the bureaucracy of a modern state where a department was tasked with killing people. More people died in the Soviet Union, and many more people died during the European conquest of the Americas, but there's a unique aspect to the modernity of the Nazi state that makes it appalling to me.

They numbered people, like when we get driver's licences or SINs.

Yes, it wasn't this super-effective killing machine and it was messy. Bureaucracies are usually pretty messy, especially young ones. If they had won the war? Scary to think about how that bureaucracy could have "improved" given better resources by the government.

[calculoso]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._by_death_toll

Highest ranked death toll that can be pinned on the British is the Indian Rebellion at 18.

Really? How about this one?

Conquest of the Americas
8,400,000–137,750,000
34,016,173
1492–1691
Americas
[11][12][13] See Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas. These death toll estimates vary due to lack of consensus as to the demographic size of the native population pre-Columbus, which some say might never be accurately determined.[14][15][15][16][17]

Granted it was not all the British (also includes the French, Spanish, etc), but to ignore it completely seems disingenuous

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by calculoso

Really? How about this one?

Granted it was not all the British (also includes the French, Spanish, etc), but to ignore it completely seems disingenuous

The regions colonizied the British were much lower density that those of the Spanish or Portuguese - there were round 5 million indigenous people in North America when Columbus landed. 90+ per cent of the population decline in the Americas post-Columbus was from disease, which isn't something you can attach some kind of moral culpability for. Estimates for indigenous people killed in the various Indian Wars in what today is the U.S. and Canada is around 50,000.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

That there was little or no preplanning. That the events that occurred were more like a runaway train that they continuously had to lay tracks for while it was moving than a very careful process that followed through as designed.

Meticulous means showing great attention to detail and planning very carefully. I'm arguing that evidence shows that while things were planned there was very little that was careful about it. It was reactionary and simply answered questions of need like labour, supplies, and resources. Many of the infrastructure used for the genocide itself was not designed for the genocide itself.

To say it was meticulous, I don't really buy but I probably wouldn't say anything about, there was little that was careful about it, even as it was being carried out it was a mess. But to say it was exceptional because of how meticulous it was, over something like what the Empire of Japan was responsible for, means you either don't understand the word "meticulous" or you don't understand the Holocaust. Or both.

Just sitting down for a meeting and making a plan to deal with something that is already happening while using a bunch of infrastructure you already had doesn't scream "carefully planning with great attention to detail."

Even during the period from 1942-45, it's not like everything ran like clockwork and that they had an answer for everything. There were huge gaps, gaps that lead to uprisings and resistance in the camps.

Having a plan of how to do something that's more than "kill them all" doesn't make it meticulous.

This is a dumb thing to argue about....

Even if the actual decision to speed up the killing process was not "meticulous", the events leading up to it most certainly were. The Nazis had already spent years relocating millions of people into labour/concentrated camps and the vast majority of those people were on the brink of starvation. They had extensive records about who was where. To argue about how much planning was involved in the final fatal blow is of little purpose.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by blankall

This is a dumb thing to argue about....

Even if the actual decision to speed up the killing process was not "meticulous", the events leading up to it most certainly were. The Nazis had already spent years relocating millions of people into labour/concentrated camps and the vast majority of those people were on the brink of starvation. They had extensive records about who was where. To argue about how much planning was involved in the final fatal blow is of little purpose.

Yeah, I have no idea why he is arguing this at all. We get it, Pepsi, Skynet wasn't running the camps, but the Holocaust didn't happen by accident. You aren't arguing that, right?

[Locke]

Originally Posted by peter12

I would have been slammed for posting something like this.

And rightfully so.

No one is going to go and suspend the discussion while they read this book and then come back. Make the relevant salient points and move along.

Originally Posted by peter12

Yeah, I have no idea why he is arguing this at all. We get it, Pepsi, Skynet wasn't running the camps, but the Holocaust didn't happen by accident. You aren't arguing that, right?

I have no idea what hes arguing beyond the fact that the Holocaust apparently wasnt planned.

Despite all of the planning.

[nik-]

He's got a new definition of attention to detail that the Nazis just don't meet.

Sloppy, sloppy Nazis.

Of course this falls spectacularly on its face when he puts the level of planning on par with the Japanese war crimes, but hey ... he's gotta flesh this out.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by nik-

He's got a new definition of attention to detail that the Nazis just don't meet.

Sloppy, sloppy Nazis.

Of course this falls spectacularly on its face when he puts the level of planning on par with the Japanese war crimes, but hey ... he's gotta flesh this out.

Strangely, if you follow Pepsi's line of reasoning, then you would have to agree that the Holocaust lies squarely one the shoulders of the average brutally anti-Semitic German person. I'm sure he doesn't mean that.

[calculoso]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

The regions colonizied the British were much lower density that those of the Spanish or Portuguese - there were round 5 million indigenous people in North America when Columbus landed. 90+ per cent of the population decline in the Americas post-Columbus was from disease, which isn't something you can attach some kind of moral culpability for. Estimates for indigenous people killed in the various Indian Wars in what today is the U.S. and Canada is around 50,000.

Don't know where the number came from, but it is still more than 18.

[nik-]

Originally Posted by peter12

Strangely, if you follow Pepsi's line of reasoning, then you would have to agree that the Holocaust lies squarely one the shoulders of the average brutally anti-Semitic German person. I'm sure he doesn't mean that.

I hate it when you have a little too much schnapps and accidentally implement mass deportations, extermination camps and thoroughly audit it all.

Ugh, my head, how much did I drink last night?

[peter12]

As tragic as the almost complete de-population of North American indigenous people was, I don't think that you can really blame it on a conscious act like you can the Holocaust (sorry, Pepsi).

Most indigenous people died of disease before they ever came in contact with Europeans. There is almost no historical evidence of purposive infection by Amerindians, as well.

It is simply one of the greatest tragedies in history.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by nik-

I hate it when you have a little too much schnapps and accidentally implement mass deportations, extermination camps and thoroughly audit it all.

Ugh, my head, how much did I drink last night?

Where are my neighbours? Why is my city being bombed?

[Enoch Root]

I think much of the argument here is circling around different interpretations of the word meticulous. Which seems pretty trivial IMO.

There is no question that the Nazis were planning and moving forward on the situation from the very beginning. Did they have the entire Final Solution mapped out in 1931? Of course not, but how could they?

The moment that Hitler acquired more powers from the Chancellor, he and the party immediately began pushing the laws, making it harder for Jews to work, to marry, to own businesses. They kept pushing and pushing what they thought they could get away with. But by all accounts, all of the main players had the end game in their thoughts from the beginning, or close to it.

By 38/39 it was becoming evident what might be coming. It wasn't a case of whether they had a plan, it was a case of whether they could get away with it. And by 1939, there was no stopping them.

Is that meticulous? I don't know. But it was most definitely planned and steadily worked toward.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Incidentally, here's a passage of which I was unaware until yesterday that's pretty chilling.

Hitler’s cabinet, established on Monday at midday in Berlin, weighs heavily
on the minds of all German Jewry and, in fact, all those circles that
view the overheated rhetoric of today’s exaggerated nationalistic race fanaticism
as an obstacle to human civilization and historical progress.

We do not subscribe to the view that Herr Hitler and his friends,
now finally in possession of the power they have desired for so long, will
enact the proposals circulating in the Angriff or the Völkischer Beobachter
newspapers; they will not suddenly divest German Jews of their constitutional
rights, lock them away in race ghettos, or subject them to the
avaricious and murderous impulses of the mob. They not only cannot do
this because many other crucial factors hold their powers in check, ranging
from the Reich president to some of the political parties affiliated with
them, but they also clearly do not want to go this route, for when one
acts as a European world power, the whole atmosphere is more conducive
to ethical reflection upon one’s better self than to revisiting one’s earlier
oppositional role: operating as a European world power means that one
seeks an enduring place in the harmonious exchange of peoples of culture.

That is from a paper called "Der Israelit" in 1933, which was a paper aimed at German jews. Strike a resemblance to anything you may have heard last year?

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by AltaGuy

As I said earlier - the Holocaust was unique in that it was the bureaucracy of a modern state where a department was tasked with killing people. More people died in the Soviet Union, and many more people died during the European conquest of the Americas, but there's a unique aspect to the modernity of the Nazi state that makes it appalling to me.

They numbered people, like when we get driver's licences or SINs.

Yes, it wasn't this super-effective killing machine and it was messy. Bureaucracies are usually pretty messy, especially young ones. If they had won the war? Scary to think about how that bureaucracy could have "improved" given better resources by the government.

We are arguing 2 different things. I was just pointing out that Germany didn't declare war the world. Germany was doing something abhorrent and the most of the world went to war against Germany and their allies.

Britain on the other hand, over the course of about 200 years, did more to literally declare war all over the world. Their empire spanned the globe through conquest and committed horrible atrocities.

[peter12]

That isn't even an argument. It's just a banal observation.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction

We are arguing 2 different things. I was just pointing out that Germany didn't declare war the world. Germany was doing something abhorrent and the most of the world went to war against Germany and their allies.

Britain on the other hand, over the course of about 200 years, did more to literally declare war all over the world. Their empire spanned the globe through conquest and committed horrible atrocities.

Germany and its allies invaded or attempted to invade all of the major superpowers at the time. Not to downplay what the colonial power did, it's not an either or argument.