I have an interest in the holocaust and I am planning to do an A level causework on – if hitler actually intended the mass-murder of Jews. My main argument is with the fact that Hitler was a weak dictator as he did not take part in government descusions during his time in power.

Hitler did move jews out of Germany so that they could be safe after the war, and he was very gratefull to the Jewish doctor who helped his mother. I am looking for historical opinions for both sides of Hitler’s intentions.

I can see form these other posts that the Jews would seem a threat to Hitler’s rule as they did have striving businesses and were in main industries.

FOrtunately, because Iran isn’t allied with the Iraqi government (that would be due to the fact that Iraq is allied to the US), there isn’t much of a problem in the future.

The claim that the Iraqi government is allied to Iran is just plain untrue. Anyone that understood political realities and national security would also understand that if they thought hard enough about them.

Of the genocide in Rwanda, Anon said: “In short, it’s not murder if you kill someone who is trying to kill you.”

I think that’s the definition of self defense.

In legal definition, that is a claim to self-defense, that is not the de facto condition of self-defense in reality. Just because people percieve the other would attack, doesn’t mean their perception is either true or reasonable.

The facts as he presented them have been proven to be wrong.

Perceptions are not facts, and it is still true that it is very plausible they percieved a threat that didn’t really exist, and launched a first strike because of it. Anyone familiar with the human psychological aspects of the Cold War would understand the logic of that.

If we knew or even thought that Russia would launch their first strike against us, and our retaliation abilities would be destroyed soon, we would have no choice but to attack now. Even if that means attacking FIRST.

Finding out you were wrong at the end, when the world is afire, doesn’t really change the fact of the situation back then. Nor does it change the responsibility afterwards.

Facts are also not reconfigurable based upon hindsight either.

When I pointed out that they were provably wrong, he then produced some other revised facts which were also wrong.

Logically, that is not what happened.

To characterize it in an easier to understand, manner. Look at it like this.

It is not provably wrong that America thought we were going to be attacked, if you point out with hindsight that there were no plans by Russia to attack America. That is because there are two disparate facts, and you can only disprove one of them, not both with the same thing.

What Anony did, as any logical analysis would show, is to show using reason, that there need not be a factual threat for there to be a factual perception of a threat.

That reasoning is both acceptable and not very controversial.

Why you don’t seem to see that, is of course unknown.

You can’t understand the nature of human depravity if you’re basing them on wishful thinking, fantasy or revisionism.

There’s nothing revisionist about sound reasoning.

Look at it this way. If you say, using hindsight, that America did not see a threat when America did see a threat, isn’t that revisionism?

Just because you see something today, does that mean it automatically means back in the day they would have seen the same thing?

Isn’t revisionism defacto using hindsight to automatically assume that people in history would have known the same information and should have acted the same, when in reality people in history did not have the same information as we do and therefore did not act the same?

As my first post said, the facts of a Tutsi slaughter is not inconsistent with a percieved threat of annihilation and decision to first strike by the Hutusi as reasoned by Anon.

You should give that more of your attention, rather than who is or is not a holocaust supporter.

http://users.ids.net/~gregan/lemd_eng.html

Mircion

I think Bush would rather let the Iraqis decide what to do with democracy, than try to force them into any preconcieved mold. I know I would.

No, it wasn’t Heloise. Jews were under concentrated attack well before that– from the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and of course from the Romans under Hadrian, who brutalized the Jewish people worse than Hitler. The Holocaust in the 1930s, moreover, wasn’t the first time the Jewish people had been singled out for specific attack in Europe. During the Crusades, Jewish communities were utterly and systematically annihilated in Italy, England and France (a period when Jews and Muslims were ironically on the same side, targeted by Christian bigots). The Iranian nuts like Ahmedinejad are only the latest addle-heads to blame their own problems on the Jews and single the Jewish people out. This is nothing new.

“You can’t understand the nature of human depravity if you’re basing them on wishful thinking, fantasy or revisionism.”

I agree 100% with this, and this is one of the reasons why genocides and mass murders tend to recur so stubbornly– people always try to claim that the Nazis were somehow aliens, inhuman, that something like their level of genocide could never, ever occur anywhere else. Utter crap. Human nature is capable of genocide through and through, and what happened at the hands of the Nazis was neither unique nor unprecedented nor– for that matter– unlikely to happen again. It’s unfortunately part of the dark human potential to not only identify with one’s tribe, but to hate the other tribes that one considers as competition, so much so that not even the innocents are spared.

It’s even worse when the genocide is committed almost out of sheer contempt. The Belgians killed something like 10 million Africans in the late 1800’s, people who were considered worthless outside of their ability to mine copper. Around the same time, the British slaughtered over 35 million Indians in the decades after the war of Indian Independence in 1857– cut down or seized the farms, executed people in entire villages en masse, even sent millions of Indians to Auschwitzes and concentration camps of their own on the outlying islands in the Indian Ocean. (The British, at the same time, were wrapping up their other genocide against the Tasmanians and other Aussie aborigies.) In the US of course, there’s the little matter of the Native Americans and the many massacres that did, regrettably, occur against them. Hitler had many models to choose from.

The thing is, I tend to see the Jewish people as sort-of canaries in the coal mine, as some wit once suggested. They seem to be especially vulnerable to hatred and envy as you all have posted here (and believe me, I’m seeing a lot of this even in the US these days). If the Jews are being attacked and vilified, you know that thoughts of genocide are in the air (Hitler, after all, targeted quite a few other groups for destruction as well).

All I can say is– I really don’t think that anybody in the world should be owning nuclear weapons, at least no more than a couple here and there to deter an outright invasion. Human beings just aren’t smart or rational enough to control the nukes. The US and Russia still point nukes at each other and we’ve come close to zapping each other over mistakes on more than one occasion– I wouldn’t be surprised if the US and Russia do wipe each other out in the next couple decades despite end of the Cold War. And these are the two countries with the most mature, carefully-controlled nuclear weapons systems. If Iran gets the bomb, the jig is up– we’re f***ed. It’s bad enough that India and Pakistan have nukes, IMHO those two countries may well be in for some nasty nuclear surprises pretty soon. But Iran? Especially if there’s a square-off between a nuclear Iran and Israel, the whole world’s in for a lot of pain. This is why I can’t believe the Bush Administration is stupidly supporting the current Iraqi government, run by the Iran-allied United Iraqi Alliance and defended by their thuggish Shiite militias. We’re essentially delivering Iran and all its resources into the hands of Iran!

Of the genocide in Rwanda, Anon said: “In short, it’s not murder if you kill someone who is trying to kill you.”

I think that’s the definition of self defense.

Anon also said:

“Yes, their response was barbaric, but they had every reason to believe a genocidal attack from the Tutsi was under way, and they carried out their own genocide first.”

The facts as he presented them have been proven to be wrong. When I pointed out that they were provably wrong, he then produced some other revised facts which were also wrong. We can debate about his intentions, but that doesn’t change the fact that his analysis is based on false information, and is therefore useless and most possibly biased.

You can’t understand the nature of human depravity if you’re basing them on wishful thinking, fantasy or revisionism. If you base your actions and tactics on revised or false information, you won’t win.

Regardless of whether they are or they are not, they are perpetrated by humans. We are humans just like Rwandans, Nazis, Jews, and Palestinians.

Regardless of the massacres of a genocide, it doesn’t mean that they are fundamentally different in nature that cannot be compared and contrasted however.

So using the normal laws of war, you can indeed apply it to what happened in Rwanda to get a clearer understanding. I don’t mean laws de jure, but laws de facto. The Laws of Human Nature that operates in the Chaos of War.

‘Know thy enemy’, isn’t a Hail Mary to cleanse your soul. But the simple matter of predicting a foe and defeating him.

The same human nature that controls the chaos of war also may be used to predict the actions in Rwanda. There are no fundamental differences. Genocide and War are called different names, but so are War and Politics, but they are not fundamentally different.

And I don’t think that it makes the points invalid, the points of congruence between the two, without providing a very good reason for that belief.

In the end, just because there is genocide and then there is war to describe certain events, does not mean that they stop being human events explainable by human causes, fears, and motivations.

He’s not explaining history, he’s revising it, as David Irving, David Duke and Noam Chomsky do every day.

I’m sorry, but I’ve read his accounts, and I don’t detect that. What I do detect, and I say this with no real personal malice, is that you became angry at a different point of view and associated it other points of view you were angry about. One of the things that Generals have to learn is not to fight the last war, but to adapt to the conditions of the current war. And to do so, they must overcome their petty prejudices and dislikes of the enemy. Because such emotions will cloud the proper analysis of an enemy General, and thereby increase the chances of ultimate defeat. Just because you think he sounds like these other morally reprehensible people, is not a justification to treat him the same way.

One of the reasons why I went into such detailed study of the nature of man is because of the weird irrational episodes I saw on the internet, when debating. Such irratinal episodes are rarely intellectual exercises in point and counter-point. Aggression and confronting the enemies of the United States are things I don’t shy away from, but you also have to learn how to discipline those things too.

According to nearly every source (other than “Anonymous”, of course) the French government and the Hutu militias worked together to slaughter an entire group of innocent civilians.

Again, that isn’t inconsistent with a perceived threat by the Hutu, of Tutsi first strikes.

I’m not saying Anon was right about the Hutu’s intentions, but it also doesn’t mean I’m angry that the Hutus might have had human justifications. Since they are human, and the French being what they are, it is not really surprising to me if what Anon said were true. Or even if they were not.

They killed them, not because of what they did, but because of who they were.

Now you’re offering their intentions. What evidence and justifications do you have to back that up? Anon uses classical war psychology to back up his statements, ones which sound good to me. If you believe something different, challenge his arguments and the arguments of human nature with your own.

Not only would that make communication easier, but it also helps people form stronger beliefs about previously held ones that were just murky and indefinable.

Genocide is not synonymous with war.

No, but then neither is it radically different. So you can’t say that someone saying it was a war and analyzing it like it was one, is so wrong you’ll call him a knucklehead for it.

It is always synonymous with authoritarian or totalitarian forms of government.

I’m not a real favorite of Occam’s Razor, but I’ll use it just this once.

Never ascribe human actions to actual malice, when sheer stupidity is a much more plausible and simpler explanation. Pol Pot didn’t want the city people to all die, he just didn’t care so long as he got them to farm. And Pot didn’t know how to do it any other way.

Human stupidity is probably easier in totalitarian governments to see, because no one has the guts to tell the leader NO when he says something stupid he is about to do.

The idea that an organized, armed group would slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent, unarmed civilians in self defense, when no war had been officially declared, is absurd to say the least.

You should not use the word “self-defense” with moral connotations. That is extremely false and misleading. Because if you go back to Anon’s first post, the only place he used the word self-defense was in the context of the Nazis. And he was clearly using it to subtly show how that justification was too weak to offer any real protection to the Nazis in their death camps.

So his position is not the one you describe it as.

I don’t have a personal stake in either Mary or Anon’s position, but this kind of gross malfeasance just can’t be toleranted by any intellectually honest person, I tell ya.

Does that sound like self-defense?

Not really, but then the only people I heard saying Rwanda was about self-defense comes from you, Mary.

There are no recognized treatises of war that would recognize these tactics as legitimate.

You miss the fact that there are definitely treatises of war that explain the motivations. Whether you call Rwanda war or genocide, doesn’t really matter when human motivations are human motivations.

The Rwandan genocide, preplanned though it may have been, was not carried out in cold blood. The Holocaust, on the other hand, was, and that, if you could pause in your breathless denunciations long enough to look back, was my original point.

Concerning Anon’s original point.

The Rwanda incident, by reading Mary’s quotes, sounds a lot like a slave rebellion with the promise that their actions will not be retaliated by the international community. And just as brutal, if not more so as slave rebellions have been historically. They must have trusted the French to protect them, as Saddam did. But in this context, that meant that the only retaliation the Hutus expected would be from the blood tribes that they overthrew. So in a tribalistic sense, in which blood feuds occur forever and ever, it then makes real sense to destroy every man, woman, and child of the opposition. If they knew that the US would drop a nuke on their arse if we ever found out about any systematic genocides, they would not have done so. If Saddam knew we’d kick his ass back to Iraq, he wouldn’t have invaded Kuwaitt. Human nature is predictable, because it is constant and everyone has it.

The control of the state, then can be seen in the light of consolidating control after a coup. But without the institutions of security and justice, the Rwandans go back to their tribalistic hatreds and violence and depravities. They must have seen the need to eliminate all opposition, or the opposition would never forgive what they had done and would seek to end them. To understand is not to forgive, nor is forgiveness understanding.

I remember the guy who held Michael Durant prisoner, the actor in Black Hawk Down, who said the lines “Do you think anything will be different, when you leave”? Nothing was different when we pulled out of Somalia, because they knew and we knew it at the same time. If we were not willing to make Somalia part of the US tribe and sphere of control, then they would just have to fight to determine their own destiny. I feel regret, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the facts of reality. People do what they have to do, people learn solutions from the environment around them, and their environment is the most savage in all of the world.

If anyone wonders how I can consider the point of view of rapists, power mongers, thugs, and barbarians so clearly and without emotion, then there is something you must understand. If your duty is to the Constitution of the United States of America and the people, to protect them from foreign and domestic enemies, how could you do your duty without understanding the enemies out there? And could you understand those enemies if you were bilnded by disgust, hate, or fear? Those emotions are nothing but burdens. They provide no benefit to the intellect other than an increase in determination. Or lessening of it. Many good people have been conditioned by fake liberals to scorn “understanding the root causes” or “looking at it from the victim’s POV”, but I’m telling you right now, if you don’t do those things and do them right, you won’t win.

Without a proper understanding of the enemy, you could not find their weak spots. And you cannot understand the enemy without understanding your own nature, the nature that you will always share with these genocidaires. Their Abyss is yours, and until you look in it and It looks back, you will never be confident enough to know that you can resist the lure of the savage human soul.

The difference between a barbarian and a United States Marine warrior is that the warrior has a duty and an oath he will never break while the barbarian is beholden to nothing but his personal lusts and power. In all other matters, they are very similar. Both are savage, both will do whatever it takes to survive/accomplish the mission. Both are hardened to pain and hardship, both are superior individual fighters. The difference, slight as it may seem in their natures, makes all the difference in the world between what is known as the United States Marine Corps and the Hutu tribesman.

The more one understands about the nature of human depravity, the more they seek to protect the only Institution on Earth that has a chance to defeat it, America. Pity those who have no hope that America will save them in their lifetimes, because their lives are living Hells.But those people won’t be saved by giving into human nature instead of harnessing it.

In states with the death penalty, it usually means the difference between life without parole, and a date with the needle.

The Rwandan genocide, preplanned though it may have been, was not carried out in cold blood. The Holocaust, on the other hand, was, and that, if you could pause in your breathless denunciations long enough to look back, was my original point.

I really don’t think you should be insulting people that have shown an excellent understanding of war and the treatise of war.

Ymarsakar, I usually agree with most of your comments, but I have to disagree here. Genocide and war are two different issues, and ‘Anonymous’ description of the events is at odds with every other source available. He’s not explaining history, he’s revising it, as David Irving, David Duke and Noam Chomsky do every day.

Analyst Rudy Rummel calls incidents like the Rwandan Genocide democide, not war or self defense.. According to nearly every source (other than “Anonymous”, of course) the French government and the Hutu militias worked together to slaughter an entire group of innocent civilians. They killed them, not because of what they did, but because of who they were.

Communism is responsible for more than 100 million deaths, and very few of those deaths were the result of war. Genocide is not synonymous with war. It is always synonymous with authoritarian or totalitarian forms of government.

The idea that an organized, armed group would slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent, unarmed civilians in self defense, when no war had been officially declared, is absurd to say the least.

According to Human Rights watch:

By late March 1994, Hutu Power leaders were determined to slaughter massive numbers of Tutsi and Hutu opposed to Habyarimana, both to rid themselves of these “accomplices” and to shatter the peace agreement. They had soldiers and militia ready to attack the targeted victims in the capital and in such outlying areas as Cyangugu in the southwest, Gisenyi in the northwest and Murambi in the northeast. But elsewhere they had not completed the arrangements. In the center of the country, they had successfully disseminated the doctrine of Hutu Power, but they were unsure how many ordinary people would transform that ideology into action. In other areas, particularly in the south, they had not won large numbers of supporters to the idea, far less organized them to implement it.

This was before Habyarimana’s assasination.

More from Human rights watch:

The genocide was not a killing machine that rolled inexorably forward but rather a campaign to which participants were recruited over time by the use of threat and incentives. The early organizers included military and administrative officials as well as politicians, businessmen, and others with no official posts. In order to carry through the genocide, they had to capture the state, which meant not just installing persons of their choice at the head of the government, but securing the collaboration of other officials throughout the system…

..By mid-May, the authorities ordered the final phase, that of tracking down the last surviving Tutsi. They sought to exterminate both those who had hidden successfully and those who had been spared thus far–like women and children–or protected by their status in the community, like priests and medical workers. As the RPF advanced through the country, assailants also hurried to eliminate any survivors who might be able to testify about the slaughter.

Throughout the genocide, Tutsi women were often raped, tortured and mutilated before they were murdered.

Does that sound like self-defense?

As Andre Glucksman said:

Wherever you go, this belligerent [genocidal, terroristic] hubris is considered lethal. In the huts of the Amazon, young men are taught to conquer this capacity for excessive violence. You can fight together, but you cannot fight in any way that comes to hand, and you don’t set out to fight just anyone. The same idea occurs in the teachings of the Greeks, the paidera. All European education is based on the same principle.

War and genocide are entirely separate issues. Genocide often occurs during what the UN would call “peace”, entirely within the borders of a nation that is not aggressive towards its neighbors.

Claiming genocide in self-defense is just plain sick. There are no recognized treatises of war that would recognize these tactics as legitimate. There are very few genocidaires who would have the gall to claim that they acted in self-defense. I’m not sure why this Anonymous person is defending the genocidaires who know enough not to try to defend themselves, but an apologist for genocide (and a revisionist) deserves no respect.

The “crime” of not accepting their children marrying a non-Jew doesn’t justify any action at all. But it does mean the Jews are not quite completely innocent–they were racist first, without being willing to fight to the death for their own country.

Some were willing to fight to the death for their own country. But of course, there were not enough of them to make a difference. Their hardworking traits, inherited perhaps, also made them superior fighters. As you can witness in the IDF. But the problem I see, is that the majority, the middle class Jews, that represented the decision making weren’t like that. They weren’t willing to shed blood, kill their enemies, and etc. They were happy being shop keepers, bankers, usurialists, until the night the Nazis came for them and shattered their glass covered dreams.

I wouldn’t call the Jewish behavior “racism” really, but I would certainly term it rather xenophobic. How else to explain Jewish ghettoes? It wasn’t other people making the Jews into ghettoes cause they hated them. The Jews themselves asked for the ghettoes, to be separated from others. How in God’s Green Earth could a people expect to rise in a society, and also be kept apart from that society? Of course that breeds resentment, hatreds, and petty jealousy. When a Pakistani has never met or spoken to an America, do you really expect a mjaority of them to hold positive impressions of us? Of course not, which is why the polls in Pakistan jumped 25% in favor of Americans after they saw our aid workers and military help them after the Quakes.

The Jews didn’t have to go into Israel for safety from future genocide. All they had to do was to go to America. We would have kept them safe, as they knew it when we liberated the death camps. But they didn’t, most didn’t in fact. Why? Xenophobia, not a rational reason at all, just an instinct. It must have been. Going to Israel was a religious ideological decision, a hope and a dream, the ultimate “ghettoe” as I heard it mentioned here before. But most people would want safety for their children first, rather than zealotry. But the Jews are different. The same hardworking traits and religious faith that makes them superior bankers and workers, also makes them blind to their own shortcomings and irrationalities.

If I was a Jew, fresh from a concentration camp, I would have done my best to move to America and stay there. Forever. That was the smart thing to do. It is not as if Israel would have survived without American help anyways, and it isn’t as if we benefit a lot by having Israel in the ME either. Whole reason why we went to Iraq. Cause Israel wasn’t drawing in the Arabs. Don’t know why they didn’t build a wall in the first place… Did they think that being a nation would accord them respect and love? They didn’t understand the nature of a Jew. What is the nature of a man?

ews from the dark ages (post Muhammad) were required to wear black baggy clothing, strange cloaks, remove their shoes when passing mosques, were beaten at the pleasure of passing muslims, had to make obeisance when passing casbahs, and on and on…

I really don’t think Islam singled out the Jews for special treatment, I rather think that if you look at history, they treated all infidels about the same way.

Let me guess: a paraphrase from “Der Stuermer,” 1936, special edition: “10 easy ways to tell a Jew from an American.”
Holy David Duke.

Never read that book.

But the Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan did had some Jacksonian leanings. But we phased racism out a long time ago. Jacksonianism version 5.6 now, please get updated ASAP.

Good night and good luck. God I wish Bush could have said that at the end of one his speeches decrying the media’s anti-American efforts. His approval rating would have jumped up by another 10%.

I hope I haven’t offended anybody dishonestly.

Most intellectually honest people, who are open minded and don’t have an axe to grind, probably wouldn’t be offended. You will offend the people who are dishonest however. But I never worry about those Jeffersonians anyway. They wouldn’t know a Jacksonian Nuclear Bombardment if it hit them on their arse.

They love Cindy Sheehan too. Wonder why.

Cause she is free, white, and 21?

I remember the incident – the bombing, and the remarks that followed. Unlike Ms. Malter, I think the Prime Minister said exactly what he thought. Oh, not that he wished to say it in a public way, of course not. But I believe it is the belief of Jew-Haters that Jews are ‘Guilty’.

This is why Jacksonians like me are so distrustful of the French when they start acting “Complex” and “nuanced” and “diplomatic”. They wouldn’t know how to do those things if we injected it into them.

Jews have a reputation for helping “their own”. So do other ethnic and religious groups, but the Jews are the ones who have remained in existence for millenia as a recognizable group.

The only other congruent group I can think of are the Gypsies. They were as much hated as the Jews, and for much of the same reasons.

Judaism is not about blood. Anyone on earth, from any race, can (and has) become a Jew. It is about membership in both a religion and what’s called a “people”. You will find Jews of all racial backgrounds.

We probably will. But that doesn’t change the fact about the Jew’s “special insularity”. Even people who don’t see the Jews in the light I do or Jacksonians do, notice this trait you know. It isn’t made up.

Are you the same anonymous who claimed that the Hutus (and their allies, the French) committed genocide in self-defense? You have to be. There can’t be two.

Much of what he says, Mary, does make sense. Wars happen cause of perceptions, it really doesn’t matter if those perceptions are accurate or not. But explaining the causes, also doesn’t mean people are excusing them.

I really don’t think you should be insulting people that have shown an excellent understanding of war and the treatise of war. We need far more of them than we have currently.