Poll: were world war 2 and the cold war clear cut battles between good and evil?

[mega48man]

World War 2 was about as close as one could get to a battle between good and evil, but the cold war was definitely not so clear cut.

.
Fascism is Evil? Really?
One side is Imperialistic in spirit, the way of the last century, while the other side is democratic and... enlightened . Now, who here is the aggressor - that would be Nazi Germany.

*facepalm*

it's ok. if i were you, i'd totally forget about the holocaust and focus on facism to.

when i look at the poll results, i'm frightened by the high percentage of no as opposed to the 3rd option. it's like that entire percent forgot about the atrocities committed by the nazi party. go google dr. mengele with the safe search off. i'm getting kind of sick of telling people in this forum about him and his inhumane experiments.

 

[Vegosiux]

well if the holocaust or Dr. Mengele's experimentation on children (including amputation, disection, injections of uncertain chemicals, and so many more all without anesthetics) doesn't count as evil to you, then i'd assume you're either uninformed or you're the kind of person who'd classify cutting off a child's head while their awake as "OK".

so now that you've heard my definition of evil, i'd LOVE to hear yours.

That was no definition, it was a strawman appealing to emotion.

First of all, Josef Mengele was one man, hardly representative of a nation or movement. WW2 was not fought to stop his practices, which, yes, were a disgrace to humanity.

But saying that his playing god is the reason that makes WW2 a war between good and evil is just retarded.

 

[Trillovinum]

I might sound like a total shit now...

but there is no such thing as good or evil, at least not in war.

In these two conflicts you mention both sides committed shameful acts.
like the American general Curtis Lemay once said "If we had lost the war we would be tried for war crimes."
One side's excesses will always exceed those of the other(s)but no one can claim to fight for "good"

 

[TheIronRuler]

World War 2 was about as close as one could get to a battle between good and evil, but the cold war was definitely not so clear cut.

.
Fascism is Evil? Really?
One side is Imperialistic in spirit, the way of the last century, while the other side is democratic and... enlightened . Now, who here is the aggressor - that would be Nazi Germany.

*facepalm*

it's ok. if i were you, i'd totally forget about the holocaust and focus on facism to.

when i look at the poll results, i'm frightened by the high percentage of no as opposed to the 3rd option. it's like that entire percent forgot about the atrocities committed by the nazi party. go google dr. mengele with the safe search off. i'm getting kind of sick of telling people in this forum about him and his inhumane experiments.

.
This is what happens when scientists get free reign with their work.
The man might have been a psychotic masochistic killer, or a dedicated researcher that worked on people he considered to be not human
.
Wasn't the gestapo the 'secret' military police which worked in the occupied lands of Nazi Germany to weed out opposition?

 

[mega48man]

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I agree with you and consider such things to be evil.

My original statement was to merely highlight the concept that "Good" and "Evil" may be relative terms between each individuals mind.

GAAAH. i'm glad to hear you say that, but i'm growing impatient waiting for someone to argue the point that both sides of the war did bad things;

axis
-holocaust
-inhumane experimentation
-gestapo and SS
-instigate war
-japanese treatment of chinese + korean cities
-sneak attack on pearl harbor
-japanese use of biological/chemical weapons and ignoring rules of geneva convention


allies
-japanese internment camps
-atomic bombings on hiroshima and nagasaki
-soviet treatment of prisoners
-soviet treatment of troops

as you can see, one side's clearly more eviler, but one could argue that the allies weren't exactly the messaih either.

 

[D0WNT0WN]

WW2 was one sided with the Nazis being the "bad guys".
The Cold War was a dick waving contest between to massive dicks.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

so escapits, i have a debate question! i'm having a hard time choosing a side to argue for in this question: were world war 2 and the cold war clear cut battles between good and evil? why or why not?

Not really, no. a truly "clear cut [battle] between good and evil" requires both sides to be exactly that: clear-cut.

Unfortunately, I know enough about the German military to know that it wasn't composed entirely of the SS. Quite the opposite, actually. And the origins of the war more or less fell on the failures of Western Europe and (to a lesser extent) the United States.

After WWI, where there really wasn't a 'good' or 'bad' side, Germany was punished to a ridiculous degree for a conflict it didn't start and only happened to be on the losing side of. For pulling the weight of its underpowered allies (but allies nonetheless), it received the brunt of postwar reparation demands, and it nearly destroyed the country. The German mark became so worthless that Germans would burn them instead of buying firewood.

Then a veteran of the Great War began to rise in power, promising that he would rebuild Germany, give its citizens a nation that they could be proud of again. And the German people trusted him to do that...and for quite a while, he did. Germany received a new infrastructure, the job market expanded dramatically, and the economy recovered. Their new leader even received commendation from Gandhi for his role in Germany's miraculous rebirth.

And then that leader reminded Germany why it had needed to be saved in the first place. It had come to the aide of an allied neighbor, and the then-strongest nations on the planet had all but destroyed them for it. The entire world still had the scars of the Great War, but Germany's had been salted and forced to remain raw. Once a starving man, it had grown strong again, and with mere survival no longer an issue, it grew angry. Its actions became bolder, drawing the worry of former enemies, and finally, the powder keg that had been laid down by the Armistice that had ended the Great War exploded, and claimed more lives than any war in mankind's history.

Whew. Dramatic retelling over.

In short, Germany was vulnerable to someone like Hitler. He knew exactly what the German people needed/wanted, and he gave it to them. But do you think that every trooper in the Heer set out to cause a conflict that would dwarf the Great War? Or to enable the Holocaust?

...although frankly, Japan is a lot more difficult to defend. Its 'science' division committed atrocities that would make the staff of Auschwitz gag, and...Jesus, there's just a shitton of things that make them hard to sympathize with.

Oh, and the Allies included the Soviets. That, too. It's tough to be the 'good' side when one of your teammates' leader murdered more people than your enemy's leader did.

it's the cold war part that gets me, i started off thinking that it wasn't clear cut, but i'm beginning to think the opposite.

Could you be a bit more specific? Because no matter how I look at it, the Cold War was A) not much of an actual war and B) largely a succession of morally-questionable things on both sides. I won't generalize and say that Cold War America was just as 'bad' as its Soviet counterpart.

America wasn't the hero, because there weren't heroes or villains in the participants of the Cold War. The CIA seemed to function under the belief that the only way to be sure that a government wasn't communist was to install a government of the opposite extreme, and the Vietnam war was far worse for Vietnam than it was for us. A fact that a lot of people seem to forget is that Vietnam continued to exist after the war and, Jesus Christ, it did not do very well.

But when you put Hollywood blacklisting alongside Stalin's Russia, it kind of loses its brunt. You know that a government is doing a bad job when you have border patrol guards for the almost sole purpose of shooting people who try and flee from the country. Its space program was absolutely nightmarish, and in all honesty, I think the main reason that America felt so threatened by the USSR was (besides the nukes, obviously) because they were so good at covering up how absolutely shit they were at virtually everything. They even tried to keep Chernobyl a secret. The invasion of Afghanistan seemed like it was the USSR way of minimizing the horrors of the Vietnam War. The US used claymore mines, and the Soviets used regular landmines...and left them there. There are literally millions of Soviet landmines left over. The Red Cross estimates it'd take over four thousand years to find and remove them all.

Again, when you have two nations both using the "If you attack me, I'll destroy you and the entire world, too" as their primary bargaining chips, neither of them is clearly a hero. But on the sliding scale of heroism versus villainy, the US did a good deal better than the Soviets did.

 

[Dfskelleton]

I don't know enough about the Cold War right now to decide on it (I just know the general facts, who was in it, why they were fighting, etc.)
As for WWII, I don't think there were good and evil forces, just good and evil people. It doesn't take a second look over to know that Hitler was evil, and I think it's alright to say that Churchill and Roosevelt were generally good people (probably not perfect, but they didn't force 6 million people into death camps).
However, while I don't know much about the Cold War, I know enough to figure out that Stalin was also an evil bastard.
Clear cut battles of good and evil? Not nessecarily, but the closest we, as a species, have ever come to such a thing? Yes, so far. Until of course some sort of James Bond villain with a robot army wages war on humanity itself.

 

[Blind Sight]

"Good vs. evil" is a term that should not be applied to wars, it's mostly just a propaganda construct to justify conflict. "Good vs. evil" is more a concept of literature then any contextual formation of reality. In terms of modern notions of war, acts by the Allies such as the carpet bombing of civilian centres and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be considered war crimes. Of course the Axis committed plenty of war crimes and crimes against humanity themselves, what with the Holocaust, Bataan Death March, Japanese rape and POW camps, etc. In a modern sense, both sides acted with extreme degrees of violence.

That being said, World War 2 and the Cold War were necessary conflicts for the West. They were marked by clear aggressor nations or concepts (in World War 2's case, the Axis Powers, in the Cold War's case the funding of violent Communist revolutions) that threatened Western hegemony. Of course Western hegemony has plenty of problems associated with it, but I bet that the majority of people would rather have America and liberalized Europe as global centres, rather then a fascist Germany and Japan or the Soviet Union.

 

[rayen020]

ehhhhh... anything commonly thought of as evil (massacre of human populations, stripping away basic rights, censorship and suppression of free speech) was only found after the wars were already being fought. As bad as the Nazi's and the Soviets were I hate the way that people think that the Allies and the NATO were infallible. there has never been a conflict thats a clear cut between good and evil.

 

[ecoho]

In before some clod tries to look smart and say it's all a matter of perspective.

World War two was fought because Germany and it's allies started attacking and conquering their neighbours, and those neighbours had allies who came to their defense (or, in the case of one particular country, rolled in late to the party and took all the credit. Whereas the Cold War was two global super powers engaged in a nuclear penis measuring contest, with some proxy wars funded among.

So in my opinion, WWII was, and the Cold War was not.

i'm surprised you didn't bring up the holocaust, gestapos, or japanese atrocities on chinese + korean cities. (and we might of showed up late, but like in superbad, we had this other problem to deal with (fighting the japanese in the pacific) and when we did show up, we brought the keggar...then threw up on berlin and didn't get laid) thanks for your opinion though, this is really helping me arugue my way through my essay

My comment about the US was partially made as a joke, though I perhaps it was in bad taste. On the topic of the atrocities however, notice how I also didn't mention the atrocites the Allies committed upon Garman/Austrian/Oriental immigrants. Granted we weren't gassing/massacring prisoners, but we had labour camps, and they weren't resorts.

yeah.......we interned maybe a quarter of those immigrants. hell twice as many joined the army after parl harbor. they fought and won honors in both the europe and pacific theaters. also while not a resort they were a paridise compared to what the germans and japanese did.

 

[mega48man]

it's the cold war part that gets me, i started off thinking that it wasn't clear cut, but i'm beginning to think the opposite.

So, what made you think USA WERE evil during Cold War after all?

no no no, i was originally going to argue that the USSR's communist party head a clear goal of world domination with communist rule. this is actually one of the fundamental goals of communism; the spread of communism across the world. right after WW1, lennin created the CCP (similar to the CCCP of the cold war) with the goal of recruiting peripherals from neighboring countries, and even further, teaching them the ways of communism, and then sending them back to their countries to establish communism. after WW2, Stalin established policies like war communism (lennin's idea) and his 5 year plans to further establish that goal. this could of been used that the USSR set out with evil intentions. (remember, Stalin's the guy who single handedly committed the Ukrainian genocide between 1932-1933 http://www.ukrainiangenocide.org/)

HOWEVER, what changed my mind was what happened after Stalin. one could argue that the Soviet union was acting on a moral code to liberate the working class from the grip of the bourgeoisie, and like the occupy wallstreet movement has demonstrated, no one likes it when the bourgeoisie push around the little man. to go further into this, it's could be said that the Soviet Union felt they had the moral obligation to free the working man using similar tactics the United states used to halt the spread of communism, thus make both sides in the conflict look almost perfectly identical.

Nikitia Kruschev succeeded Stalin and began to relax tension with the United States. he Also gave a public Speech in Bejing in 1959 where he essentially told the people of China that President Eisenhower understood as well he did the need to relax tensions. later, in the late 80's, Gorbachev promoted an ideology of Glasnost, or "open mindedness". he opened Soviet Russia, and the satellite nations it controlled, to western culture and the right to free speech. he even encouraged people to question the government as it was now their right to do so. this however lead to the crumbling of the soviet union and the rise of ethnic based nations. the new nations of eastern europe had ethnic backgrounds very distinct from one another and had history of bloody rivalries before the soviet occupation. this eventually lead to bloody ethnic clashes, including the Armenian genocide, but that's free will for you.

so in addition to all that, the United States were also guilty of several wrong doings including the vietnam war, the korean war (both wars were necessary to halt the spread of communism, my brother's korean friend would agree so), the bay of pigs invasion, installment of favored anti-communist but ruthless dictators in the middle east and south america like the shah of iran, supplying afghanistan with weapons to fight the soviets which later lead to the installment of the taliban, and of course richard nixon (however, nixon did succeed in bringing Detente with china and the USSR, but sadly this opened US trade relations with china which have royally screwed us today). using what bad things america did in the cold war could of been used to either argue that the cold war was a lot of shades of grey or to say that both sides were evil (but i'd kill myself before i call america evil).

SO, moral of the story, I've got this topic down so solid that if i don't get a good grade on that essay i will break into tears.

 

[mega48man]

well if the holocaust or Dr. Mengele's experimentation on children (including amputation, disection, injections of uncertain chemicals, and so many more all without anesthetics) doesn't count as evil to you, then i'd assume you're either uninformed or you're the kind of person who'd classify cutting off a child's head while their awake as "OK".

so now that you've heard my definition of evil, i'd LOVE to hear yours.

That was no definition, it was a strawman appealing to emotion.

First of all, Josef Mengele was one man, hardly representative of a nation or movement. WW2 was not fought to stop his practices, which, yes, were a disgrace to humanity.

But saying that his playing god is the reason that makes WW2 a war between good and evil is just retarded.

josef mengele wasn't the only scientist, he was just the most notorious scientist at Auchswitz...Auschwitz being the key word...it's like everyone keeps forgetting that hitler gave the o.k. for the SS to systematically torture and kill millions of people. what the hell do they teach you brits in school across the pond?

 

[Vegosiux]

josef mengele wasn't the only scientist, he was just the most notorious scientist at Auchswitz...Auschwitz being the key word...it's like everyone keeps forgetting that hitler gave the o.k. for the SS to systematically torture and kill millions of people. what the hell do they teach you brits in school across the pond?

So, you're back to appealing to emotion, and to assuming things about other people that you know nothing about. Hint: not a Brit here.

I think we're done talking.

 

[GrimGrimoire]

No, there is no such thing as "Good" or "Evil".
There is only different meanings.
The Nazis did not think they were "evil", they did what they meant was right.
As did The Allies.
The cold war was much the same, communism is no more "evil" than capitalism.

There is no black, nor white.
Only grey.

 

[mega48man]

.
This is what happens when scientists get free reign with their work.
The man might have been a psychotic masochistic killer, or a dedicated researcher that worked on people he considered to be not human
.
Wasn't the gestapo the 'secret' military police which worked in the occupied lands of Nazi Germany to weed out opposition?

yes, mengele was both; a dedicated killer reseacher. in nazi germany, hitler had used propaganda to infuriate the german people and despies the jews, blaming them for their economic depression and losses of WW1. mengele was also effected by this and used his hate for the jews to fuel his experiments, so you could imagine he probably enjoyed the fact that he was doing such horrible things to his despised jews.

and yes, the gestapo, lead by the cruel Hienrich Himmler, were the SS, or secret police. they were given the right to act without judicial pversight in 1936, so they were specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws. the term gestapo wasn't an offical term but was actually coined by a german mailman, can't remember much more than that from class, i'd have to go ask my professor for more on that.

 

[MahBoii]

Neither.
WW2 America's government worked with Nazi elites to subdue the third world and keep its people away from democracy and under dictators in bed with American politicians so that America's private sector could make tidy profits. In years after the war America's government put on their payroll Nazi elites known for their brutality, as their harsh tactics would prove to be useful in subduing the peoples of third world countries who would step 'out of line' and develop democratic policies which would be harmful to the profits of American corporations. I have greatly abbreviated this for the sake of not creating a wall-of-text.

The cold war was basically used as an excuse by the US and Russia alike for their occupation and interventionist policies in foreign countries. Each claimed to their own citizens that in order to protect their own way of life from the communist/capitalist threat, they were required to intervene in the affairs of other countries, by force if necessary. This was to cover up basically the same shit as was going on in world war 2 (at least in america) whose first priority has always been its profitable, private sector, rather than the pursuit of freedom and democracy for humankind, as they would have the world believe.

If anyone is passionately interested in history and politics (specifically North American) I would recommend looking into the works of Noam Chomsky.

 

[TheIronRuler]

.
This is what happens when scientists get free reign with their work.
The man might have been a psychotic masochistic killer, or a dedicated researcher that worked on people he considered to be not human
.
Wasn't the gestapo the 'secret' military police which worked in the occupied lands of Nazi Germany to weed out opposition?

yes, mengele was both; a dedicated killer reseacher. in nazi germany, hitler had used propaganda to infuriate the german people and despies the jews, blaming them for their economic depression and losses of WW1. mengele was also effected by this and used his hate for the jews to fuel his experiments, so you could imagine he probably enjoyed the fact that he was doing such horrible things to his despised jews.

and yes, the gestapo, lead by the cruel Hienrich Himmler, were the SS, or secret police. they were given the right to act without judicial pversight in 1936, so they were specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws. the term gestapo wasn't an offical term but was actually coined by a german mailman, can't remember much more than that from class, i'd have to go ask my professor for more on that.

.
I heard the testimony of a twin that survived... she was the control sample while her sister was the test subject. Horrible. But that's science.
.
Regarding the gestapo - I blame the communists