Will Hitler be seen in a more positive way in the far future?

[Traitorfish]

Why should I hate Hitler ?

Holocaust

So you really answered your own question, there.

 

[bonefang]

You quoting stuff ... as it benefits you.
I have nothing to do with the unfortunate souls that got killed, bad luck. Hitler killed

What about the several more that got killed by the enemies of Hitler ??
A quote from this

"It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines"

As the saying goes ... a enemy of my enemy is a friend. Without WW2, you think the Pommies would have left India ? Hell no !!

 

[Tahuti]

Plus that the UK and USA sent Jewish refugees away to die in Nazi-occupied Germany. The allies are at the very best only marginally superior to the Axis powers in terms of morality.

 

[Borachio]

Why should I hate Hitler ?

You shouldn't hate Hitler at all. Even if hate were an effective weapon (it isn't) against somebody, Hitler is long dead.

Your hate can do nothing to him. It can only harm you yourself.

 

[Traitorfish]

You quoting stuff ... as it benefits you.
I have nothing to do with the unfortunate souls that got killed, bad luck. Hitler killed

What about the several more that got killed by the enemies of Hitler ??
A quote from this

"It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines"

As the saying goes ... a enemy of my enemy is a friend. Without WW2, you think the Pommies would have left India ? Hell no !!

You are a moral void.

 

[Borachio]

^That's certainly a point of view, Mr Fish.

But where is Mr Fang coming from with this? Is it the extreme right?

 

[bonefang]

Borachio well said.

TF, the and you are so full to moral ?
I do not see, any sympathy for the several millions of Indians murdered by the Brits
Get the Queen to release documents "classified" as to how some of our national heroes have gone missing ? Return the Kohinoor from the Queens Jewels that you stole ?

 

[Traitorfish]

(You would think that the "Ask an anarchist" signature might have given some indication that I'm not 110% on board with the whole Queen-and-Empire business, but apparently not.)

 

[bonefang]

honestly didn't look at that sig

 

[Plotinus]

You quoting stuff ... as it benefits you.
I have nothing to do with the unfortunate souls that got killed, bad luck. Hitler killed

What about the several more that got killed by the enemies of Hitler ??

Morality means, among other things, having empathy for people you don't identify with. You may have nothing to do with Hitler's victims, but that should not prevent you from seeing that what he did to them was wrong.

The fact that people other than Hitler have committed atrocities doesn't make Hitler's atrocities OK.

If you want to discuss the atrocities committed by the British then that's fine - but that's not the topic of this thread. You should start another thread to do that. This one is about attitudes to Hitler.

 

[Masada]

So I was reading about this Indian Holocaust thing, and I had to conclude that I have nothing to do with the unfortunate souls that got killed, bad luck. Britain killed.

 

[privatehudson]

Bonefang: What is wrong with being disgusted by both events, or indeed any such tragedy?

Or to put it another way, how impressed would you be if people responded to the article you linked to with "It didn't affect me, so hard luck - the British empire weren't perfect"

Probably not very and I suspect that's part of where the problem lies.

 

[daft]

of course he will, especially once "Springtime for Hitler and Germany" - the great 8 hr Drama, is the one and only (a million time Oscar winning) movie allowed in theatres.

 

[Leifmk]

- Not forcing all briliant nuclear scientists to emigration and investing into nuclear program, not rocket one

Wouldn't work. The only reason why the USA was able to have a working nuclear bomb design as early as 1945 was that they actually had enough resources to throw at the project so that whenever two or more approaches to solving a problem seemed possible they could try every approach at the same time. (And in fact this resulted in not one but two completely different bomb designs, both of which worked; one of each type was dropped on Japan.) No other power, and certainly not Germany, had the ability to do so, especially not while also fighting a major war; anyone else would have taken at least a couple of years longer than that. By which time the war would be well and truly lost for Germany in any case.

- Not being complete idiot and conquering Britain via air domination (battle of England was lost because of idiotic decision to bomb population centres instead of military targets)

Wouldn't work either. Luftwaffe could only bomb targets in the southeast of England (the limiting factor being the range of their fighter escorts), so the Midlands and beyond were safe. Plenty of airfields to operate out of there, and the bulk of the aircraft industry as well, so they could never take the RAF out entirely. Added to this, aircraft loss ratios over Britain were in the RAF's favour anyway, and loss ratio of experienced pilots even more so (German pilots who survived the loss of their plane would become POWs while British ones could usually return to duty).

As for a cross-channel invasion (which, yeah, you don't even mention, I'm just bringing it up for completeness' sake) it was beyond hopeless; the logistic capability to land enough men and keep them supplied did not exist and would have had to be built. It took the Allies until 1944 to build that capability themselves, and by that time Germany had already lost in the East anyway.

Basically, Hitler's biggest mistake was getting involved in war against an enemy he had absolutely no realistic chance of beating. No wait, three such enemies, at once. And unfortunately for him, this mistake was a more or less unavoidable consequence of his entire ideology.

 

[Borachio]

And unfortunately for him, this mistake was a more or less unavoidable consequence of his entire ideology.

I'm not sure this is true. (Though how much Hitler can be described as having an ideology, a coherent one at any rate, is open to debate.)

If Hitler had been content with irredentism, the Nazi regime could have survived a lot longer.

If the Germans hadn't invaded Poland, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, the Nazi regime might have survived a very great deal longer.

Still, the Nazi regime was inevitably going to overreach itself at some stage. Perhaps because it overcompensated for a sense of inferiority. So, perhaps you're right after all.

And it was very concerned with the threat, real or imagined, from the East.

 

[Masada]

Wouldn't work. The only reason why the USA was able to have a working nuclear bomb design as early as 1945 was that they actually had enough resources to throw at the project so that whenever two or more approaches to solving a problem seemed possible they could try every approach at the same time.

This is such a good point and one that's seldom made, bravo. The Manhattan Project was absolutely massive and soaked up huge amounts of materials and personnel. Wikipedia tells me that in dollar terms it was equal to 94% of the total cost of small arms production and 34% of tank production costs. Nobody but the United States else could have managed to do it.

 

[Leifmk]

If Hitler had been content with irredentism, the Nazi regime could have survived a lot longer.

Sure, Aldo Hilter of the Social Nationalist Party could have managed a decent run with an irredentist fascist regime with few territorial ambitions beyond merging with Austria and adjusting a few borders here and there.

The guy who wrote Mein Kampf, not so much.

 

[Masada]

It isn't like he tried to hide his ambitions either

 

[Traitorfish]

"I'm going to invade Poland."
"Pff, no you're not."
*invades Poland*
"HOW COULD WE HAVE SEEN THIS COMING HE GAVE US NO CLUES"

 

[Krajzen]

"It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews,

Very stupid mistake and complete lack of basic knowledge (I am 18 years old btw and my knowledge on WW2 is limited )

Actually, grand majority of the extermination was done in 3 - 4 years (1942 - 1945), after the Wannsee Conference.

Before that Germans killed 'only' thousands of Jews and 'just' in ghettos/pogroms/concentration camps, Wannsee Conference begun the real genocide made just for the sake of complete industrial extermination.

but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines

1) Great tragedy
2) Although it seems to have very poor documentation
3) In case of mass famines it is never sure if they were made 100% intentionally
4) ...I don't like comparing every huge massacre and famine to Holocaust because there is, in my opinion, a big difference between

a) Famine caused at least partially (??) by government in not clear circumstances, with probably only a bunch of people knowing really about the tragedy and - de facto - nobody personally killing people

b) Perfectly documented extermination fully approved by government and army with thousands of people engaged personally in ruthless murder and torturing and of civilian people to the point of reusing parts of their bodies

Saying they are the same is like saying that finding (or making) your neighbour bleeding on the floor and leaving him to his death in unclear circumstances is exactly the same evil as hiding in his house with a knife, torturing him and disemboweling him. Obviously both of them are evil as they end with a death of a man (and obviously both Holocaust and Bengal Famine are evil), but there is at least small moral difference between them.

Personally I think that
- Holocaust
- Herero Genocide
- Rwanda Genocide
- Nankin Massacre
- Armenian Genocide
- Rouge Khmer Rule
- some Soviet mass purges

should be considered as genocides, while

- Ukrainian Great Famine
- Chinese Great Famine and Cultural Revolution
- Bengal Great Famine
- colonization of Americas

should be classified as another type of crime.

First group has deliberate, definitive and direct physical extermination of huge group of people in short time. In second group we have three unclear famines which partially happened due to evil intentions and partially to the tragic economic planning (I would say the Ukrainian Famine is closest to genocide), one complete mess (cultural revolution ) and the last one is demographical tragedy whose 95% of victims died due to epidemies and 5% due to countless small massacres done by random groups of bloodthirsty people.

Gulag System in USSR should go to the same category as concentration camps - barbaric crime but not matching the genocide in the scale of intentions and methods of perpetrators.


So, why I am definitely not going to say British Empire is Pure, it is sadly on the moral level similar to most of military empires - some amazing greatness and some awful bloodshed. The same with Roman Civilization, Chinese Civilization or USA.

But saying it is on the same moral level as Third Reich/USSR, countries which were systematically, intentionally, deliberately torturing and exterminating civilian people just for the sake of pure extermination (in the name of nothing more but national ideology), is just unfair. Or maybe even very stupid.