While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Crezth]

If we do a statistical analysis of inhumane deaths caused by Communist regimes versus inhumane deaths caused by fascist regimes, the former comes out on top. Not all of these deaths were personally orchestrated by the Soviets, but all would have been impossible without Soviet support.

Yeah, well, this is actually what I do not consider is grounds for determining how evil something is.

For that reason, I view Lenin and his heirs as a greater evil than Hitler and his fellow fascists. The evil that is intelligent, and self-perpetuating, and able to survive, is aggregately worse than the stupid evil that is obliterated within a decade of coming to full power.

But Soviet evil had no specific aim to murder. It's existence was not predicated on "but these people must die," unlike Nazism, whose very moral fiber was structured around the basis that certain people, for reasons they absolutely cannot help, should be dead.

 

[Tycho]

America is about equal to the Nazis in horror, but the Soviets stand alone.

How does that work out?

 

[Gem Hound]

lolwut

Ya. It was an idea brought up by an American General on how to deal with the Native Americans in the 1800's. The plan was basically to throw them all into camps and work them to death. They scrapped it.

 

[SKILORD]

Nah, we decided to market "fire water" at them and get them to drink themselves to death.

But camps? We did camps. We still do camps. You can gamble there.

But we developed this idea differently. Germany got all caught up on the camps and the murder. We developed the stuff that the San Jose Mercury News would later refer to as "The Dark Alliance."

 

[Luckymoose]

Instead we just relocated hundreds of thousands of them to barren crapholes, then when all the good land ran out we took that crap land from them and tried to force assimilation on them.

 

[Gem Hound]

Nah, we decided to market "fire water" at them and get them to drink themselves to death.

But camps? We did camps. We still do camps. You can gamble there.

But we developed this idea differently. Germany got all caught up on the camps and the murder. We developed the stuff that the San Jose Mercury News would later refer to as "The Dark Alliance."

If you look at it that way. I'm looking in the literal sense though.

Spoiler comparison of similarily warped history :

That is just like we didn't "burn the White House down" in the War of 1812. Nope. We torched the American president's red brick house and he had his people throw white wash on to hide the blackened bricks. They then threw up a permanent white structure ((The White House)) because of us Canadians burning the old one during the war.

 

[SKILORD]

I do not believe that I have ever made a single post in this forum that would indicate that I think in a literal fashion.

And, w/r/t the example then we are just splitting hairs, and I don't see the point when we are talking about the cultural destruction of any race. In America we had more time to screw with the Untermenschen, and we have more devious ways to do it. White house, brick house, crack house, it got burned down and Ollie North and Ricky Ross did their thing.

 

[Thlayli]

Ya. It was an idea brought up by an American General on how to deal with the Native Americans in the 1800's. The plan was basically to throw them all into camps and work them to death. They scrapped it.

The Boer War was almost certainly a more direct inspiration, and closer to the reality of what 20th century concentration camps were. It is also the origin of the modern term.

 

[Gem Hound]

The Boer War was almost certainly a more direct inspiration, and closer to the reality of what 20th century concentration camps were. It is also the origin of the modern term.

And they came up with that horrible thing after that American general stated that.

 

[Dachs]

Ya. It was an idea brought up by an American General on how to deal with the Native Americans in the 1800's. The plan was basically to throw them all into camps and work them to death. They scrapped it.

Aside from the fact that that doesn't fit the definition of a concentration camp and antedates the use of similar camps in antiquity and in early modern Europe (take a look, for instance, at Russian policy in Livonia during the Great Northern War, or the so-called "Greater Wrath" and "Lesser Wrath" of Finland), I'm not totally sure what you're talking about. I've never come across a reference to forced-labor/death camps in American history before, or even a mooted plan that achieved any degree of notoriety. The United States did establish short-term camps during the US Army's forced removal of Cherokee from northwestern Georgia in 1838 which lasted over the course of the summer of that year.

In short: you're making it up.

The classic "concentration camp" as understood in modern usage really dates back to the Spanish operations against insurgents in Cuba from the late 1860s up to the Spanish-American War (that's also where the name originates, and where we can actually start to trace intellectual continuity); extermination camps are, however, a Nazi creation.

 

[Gem Hound]

In short: you're making it up.

Too bad I've forgotten the guy's name. I'll come back when I find it. It takes alot of hunting to find it. Edit: I think I have to type in the guy's name to actually find it. It was somewhere in Montana or something I think. I absolutely remember reading it somewhere...

 

[Dachs]

Too bad I've forgotten the guy's name. I'll come back when I find it. It takes alot of hunting to find it. Edit: I think I have to type in the guy's name to actually find it. It was somewhere in Montana or something I think. I absolutely remember reading it somewhere...

There is essentially no chance of you establishing some sort of intellectual continuity between a (still-theoretical) brainstorming session in nineteenth-century Montana that went nowhere and the "main line" of concentration camps. Just give it up; there are plenty of other things to try to guilt-trip Americans about.

 

[Gem Hound]

There is essentially no chance of you establishing some sort of intellectual continuity between a (still-theoretical) brainstorming session in nineteenth-century Montana that went nowhere and the "main line" of concentration camps. Just give it up; there are plenty of other things to try to guilt-trip Americans about.

I know. If only I could remember that name though... Haven't really looked it up in a year or so. The name brings up very little results and there was actually one from a trustworthy group. Anyways, as I stated -> I am willing to shut up unless I remember the guy's name which will not likely happen.

 

[Northen Wolf]

If I may ask a silly question, how do you do this in either Paint or photoshop?

Avatar Help thread
or

Link to video.

Personally, I have no small place in my heart for the people who sacrificed more than anyone to defeat the Nazis, but to each their own, I suppose.

Not to excuse their atrocities, to be sure, but the Soviets were damn heroes during World War 2.

Edit: operating off the philosophy that the Nazis were vastly worse than anything the Soviets ever did, of course.

I will kill your father as he worked in governmental sector once. I will send your sister to siberia because she was part of school Ballet group for third graders. I will send your mother to siberia because she gave birth to such non communistic child and I will torture you for years, eventually putting you into in work camp in siberia, just because you come from such non-communistic family. Now I am a hero! Yay me! All because Obama commited so many more crimes against spanish minority.

True on that; the Soviets didn't really have a taste for genocide from what I have heard.

Get your hearing checked, You have heard wrong. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag. Estonia lost like 20% of population during the first 5 years of occupation, many who were not 'lost' (deported to siberia or killed), were tortured, enslaved and/or imprisoned in work camps.

I think that people take the moral high ground with the Soviets versus the Nazi's because the Soviets fought on the side of the Allies during WWII. Had it been the other way around, it would have been quite different I think.

Yup.

No nation's history is free of evil. Who are we to judge others, when in the future they may think the subjugation of the Native Americans the most horrible act of them all (or some reason)?

We may do everything with "a good intent". Then again, try to find a Nazi to admit what he or she did was evil during the height of their success...

EDIT: On the Nazi v.s. Soviet debate, extrapolate the death toll of 70 years of Nazi rule.

After jews and homos would have been wiped out, Far lower than soviet death toll and terror.

I do not support neither regimes, but I find it utterly insulting whenever people say that 'soviet' armies deserve respect as "saviors". Both nations were dicatorships that killed many. Neither deserves respect, neither is better than other. But to me, personally (as I'm not jewish), it seems that Nazi regime would have been far kinder to population than soviet regime.

 

[Daftpanzer]

So guys, I hereby pledge to restart DaftNESIV and also to make it decent. Going to eliminate most of the rules and thinking of speeding up the passage of time... Interbreeding and kingdom building fun!

Also, since I have a lot of free time right now, I was thinking of running a quick battle tournament type thing, again using Advance-Wars style graphics. If you think of football teams and star players, this will be where NESers have armies and elite units. Would anyone be interested??

 

[bombshoo]

I'm probably alone in this but I actually liked it a lot better when all the tribes in that game were named "random color random thing" as opposed to the player made up names. It reminded me of Advanced Wars.

 

[Angst]

Get your hearing checked, You have heard wrong. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag. Estonia lost like 20% of population during the first 5 years of occupation, many who were not 'lost' (deported to siberia or killed), were tortured, enslaved and/or imprisoned in work camps.

The thing is, while the Soviet regime was horrible, brutal and unforgiving, yes, they didn't kill Estonians just because they were Estonians. They killed Estonians because Estonians had some powers to circumvent the Soviet regime, and thus needed to be suppressed according to Stalin's power-mongering interests. There was no aim for Estonians; no specific will to have Estonians killed; no particular racism for Estonians. They acted like that to all of their peoples. It was black pragmatism.

The Nazi evils were different simply for the reason that the madness going on there was calculatingly based on a bizarre dream world of an Aryan Neo-Rome with only Germans no no other specific peoples. Their blind genocide had no pragmatical application; it was idealistic. Their research "showed them" that their race was simply superior and was to destroy all others.

One may value either as the worse evil; the lying state of suppression and death or the mad dream of suppression and death. One interesting thing about the Nazis though: They didn't really eradicated most of the peoples they conquered. The Danish population, for example, actually mostly supported the Nazi juggernaut. And in many countries, they met the antisemitism and racism which was everywhere back then. It's a special part of human evil they tapped into. It wasn't just the lust for power.

 

[thomas.berubeg]

I'm probably alone in this but I actually liked it a lot better when all the tribes in that game were named "random color random thing" as opposed to the player made up names. It reminded me of Advanced Wars.

I agree with you, actually.

 

[merciary]

I'd be up for that Daft.(Both things that is)

 

[Starlife]

First of all, Daft, I missed out on your previous NES -- but I don't want to miss out on the next.

Second of all, I'm working on a preNES thread (real preNES, mind you, not "preview" or any aberration in-between, but a good old-fashioned use of the prefix "pre" ). I hope some of you I've never seen in my NESes will read it and assist in development.