-Drifter- said:
Therumancer said:
What's more I believe the Concentration Camps were greatly exagerrated. Not as much as deniers who claim that the Nazis simply relocated Jews (impossible since getting rid of the Jews was one of their big selling points in getting countries like Romania on their side), but still nothing like the popular version.
When I was in history 12 we were shown an old documentary made up entirely of actual footage from concentration camps. They were throwing entire piles of near skeletal corpses into huge mass graves. There's no exaggeration.
It's hard to tell whether your being deliberatly obtuse or not. I just got back from vacation, and will say this again though:
A big part of my entire point is that the War Department/Allied Propaganda went to extreme lengths to falsify information during the war in order to demonize the enemy. They did things like talk about how the Nazis made human flesh lampshades, photographed and video taped them, and produced samples taken from concentration camps which upon later examination were proved to be false. What's more some of the people who were accused of having done things like that were never actually convicted. A good example would be Ilsa Kochs who is the prototype for the "evil nazi babe" even if she wasn't all that hot in the pictures I've seen of her. She was brought up on trial, and while she was definatly scum, she was not convicted of any of the war crimes she was accused of. The point being that there was no actual evidence that could be used, despite the claims of the war department. Things like this were however brushed under the rug, not banned per-se, but you weren't allowed to say anything about this kind of stuff in the mass media until decades afterwards and he crisis had passed. Part of the whole idea of war powers.
I've seen pictures and films like the ones your talking about, the point being that there is no way to guarantee that these films were either accurate or are being shown in context. We already know that a lot of this information was faked, or greatly exagerrated.
To put things into perspective, take one of the many "human skeleton" pictures or videos you've seen. Now ask yourself as to why these people looked like that if they were being excecuted with mechanical presician like in that Uwe Boll trailer. I mean if they herd these guys from the trains, directly into a gas chamber, and then dispose of the bodies, none of them are going to look like that.
Those very same pictures actually make an arguement for the "cruel work camp" version of things which also explains why we had survivors. Of course that also brings the numbers into question, I mean the existance of huge corpse piles does mean a lot of people died, which nobody is denying, but at the same time it does not support the six million deaths theory which would have required a much more rapid form of execution than working the people to death as we're seeing.
Was "The Holocaust" a bad thing? Yes it was. Did a lot of people die? Yes they did. Did six million Jews get gassed? It doesn't seem likely because the information including a lot of those pictures of "Nazi Cruelty In Action" do not support it.
Now to be honest, there are plenty of examples from World War II of atrocities that did take place. We have a lot of evidence showing the reality of what Mengela and especially various Japanese "research" groups like the infamous "Unit 731" did. In part because of the conreversial nature of using the developments from that research after the fact. The big moral question if say torturing thousands to death poisons a discovery to the point where it (and things coming from it) should not be used to save lives. Of course, while a lot of people died there we are talking about relatively small groups and numbers of victims.
Also, do not misunderstand my motives in making these arguements. I'm a pretty big supporter of Isreal for example despite some people wanting to call me a Holocaust denier or whatever.
My motive in making these points is that due to the propaganda involved people like to portray "World War II" as a good war, and as some kind of massive confrontation between good and evil that can be argued entirely in absolutist terms. That is not what it was, it's simply that our propaganda people made us think that it was so we could destroy the enemy. That is what "War Powers" are for.
Our current conflicts have not been going well because we have created a system of morality for ourselves based on World War II propaganda about what a "good war" entails, and have ultimatly crippled ourselves. Despite having the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen, the US has pretty much lost every conflict we've been in since World War II not because of a lack of power, but our unwillingness to use that power. Truthfully I do not think The Muslim World is any less evil than the Nazis were, in fact in an absolutist sense I'd say they are probably worse and there is more to work with there than there was during World War II. Especially seeing as The Muslim World hasn't had much of a POSITIVE cultural impact on the global community for a very, very long time, where Hitler could be (and was) defended for his massive societal contributions. He was after all an International Man Of the Year, and one of the reasons so much effort was put into demonizing him and the Nazis was because he was so bloody popular. In addition to the propaganda, the US goverment also pretty much gagged dissenting voices in the US who supported Hitler despite everything, or wanted to maintain an entirely isolationist policy. History tends to portray the US as rallying after "Pearl Habour" and going to war with one voice, that's not true, we only had one voice because all of the guys filling the role of those who speak against our current conflicts were gagged rather ruthlessly. They were however allowed to compile information and (eventually) release it after the fact once the time of conflict was over (which of course is annoying to those who feel they need to derail the war). This is why if you really look you'll find pictures of US/Allied atrocities, some interesting reports on our own leaders and heroes, and of course uncomfortable questions about who we targeting with our bombings in order to win, what happened to groups like "The Hitler Youth", how we beat "The Volkssturm" in the final days, and of course how we managed to reduce an extremely popular global movement (the Nazis) to a tiny, and much hated fringe. It's not popular, but let's just say Hitler wasn't the only one out to committ genocide, by the standards of some people who will define genocide as including ideas as opposed to just ethnicity/geno-type, we very much did set out to commit idealogical genocide on the Nazis. Not a comfortable way of looking at it, but it happens to be true.... and that is what a war is all about, two cultures/ideals enter, one leaves. People tend to overcomplicate war, when in reality it has a simplicity I think people understood better decades ago than they do now.
