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incontrol that is very hypocritical, the only reason this man is being pursued is political correctness. American troops did very nasty shit to Japanese and Korean people, Russians also did the same to German speaking people around Poland/Czech. Japanese to Chinese and Koreans. I think that if we put a German prison guard under trial then we also have to put the American soldier who made "sandbag" walls with the corpses of north Koreans as well.
I remember one German politician talking about one of Hitlers policies in an agreeable way, and although the policy had nothing to do with war or extermination (it was an economic policy) that politician got sacked ASAP. Germany is now very conscious of its past and their actions reflect that.
*edit: also that conflicts with the fact that we help child soldiers in africa, instead of prosecuting, both are human with a moral choice right?
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On May 12 2009 11:45 {88}iNcontroL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 12 2009 10:57 Mastermind wrote:On May 12 2009 10:30 {88}iNcontroL wrote: Yes yes yessssssss WE GET IT people follow orders.. that doesn't mean you fucking spare them when those orders are illegal or fucking grotesque. That means you punish the people who issued the orders most severely, than punish the people who executed the orders to a lesser degree. I'm sorry but it has never/will never be ok to justify atrocious actions with "he ordered me to do it." You are still accountable. Should Americans be held accountable for Hiroshima? That was fucking grotesque wouldnt you say? What about allied bombings of German cities killing a half million innocent civilians? Should the soldiers involved in those incidents be held responsible as well? Had we lost the war we WOULD be held accountable.
Worst fucking argument ever. Everything is ok as long as you win? Lets say your father got the order to drop napalm on vietnam, lets say he was a guard at guantanamo, where they sleep deprived people of sleep for 11 hours along with other torture methods. Should he be sentenced? according to you no because whos gonna prosecute him? America won!
And your saying how germany did all these aweful things to the jews. This is correct, but this is only one camp. How would a guard at one camp know all the things they are doing to jews in all the camps. Not a very good argument but still.
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I wandered into a bookstore once and noticed this little book with a picture of a 13 year old black kid carrying bazooka on his shoulder. For some reason I bought it, turned out to be real good. "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah, supposedly its real popular? Anyways, its about this kid who got involved in some serious shit in Sierra Leone, basically became a soldier and spent next couple years popping painkillers, looting towns and killing people. Fucking amazing, all of it did happen. Slicing throats, shooting civilians, everything you can imagine. He lives in US now, went through a long rehabilitation only so that he can live in peace with new surroundings. This is the proper way of dealing with the problem, not the holocaust victim showoffs( just IMO)
On May 12 2009 15:53 ShaperofDreams wrote: *edit: also that conflicts with the fact that we help child soldiers in africa, instead of prosecuting, both are human with a moral choice right? please stop expressing my thoughts before i do k thx
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On May 12 2009 10:12 {88}iNcontroL wrote: I know people like to fall back on the "just obeying orders" argument especially in regard to Nazi veterans but I am sorry.. that just doesn't fly with me.
And save me the "you weren't there, you don't know" argument as well. None of us were there, we are all speculating. That is a huge part of the forum. After all, very few of us are professional bw players yet here we are mostly discussing just that!
He didn't decide to be a guard at an internment camp but he was. On some level that is incredibly unfair but that is life. Sometimes you accidentally hit someone with your car, that doesn't mean justice simply turns away. The penalty might be less severe.. and in this case he probably won't be put to death. But the fact remains, he participated in something that was heinous and atrocious. Whether he decided to do it willfully or not he was an active participant in acts against humanity.
Guess who else didn't choose this fate? The 29k jews that were slaughtered in the camp he guarded.
And you're aware of the Milgram experiment? You're aware he was probably not only convinced the cause was just yet it was his entire country/government ordering him to do it? You're aware of the anti-Semitic feeling of the era? You're aware he probably was worried about his own family and worried of being a Nazi sympathizer?
I probably would have done the same thing as him assuming I had a family to take care of etc. Should we have killed all the slave owners for having slaves and treating them inhumanely in the United States when it was legal? No, everyone around them was doing the same thing, and blacks were truly believed to be inferior.
Personally I don't like the idea at all of charging people of war crimes that aren't the people that decided to enact the policies, assuming they had little other choice. All the pawns of the policies should generally get off with no punishment.
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also what about the firebomb that America dropped on a wooden Japanese village, killed 80 000 vilagers, the pilot most likely received a medal and benefits.
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On May 12 2009 16:08 ShaperofDreams wrote: also what about the firebomb that America dropped on a wooden Japanese village, killed 80 000 vilagers, the pilot most likely received a medal and benefits.
oh you must be forgetting it was JUSTIFIED!
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maybe someone could shed some light onto my understanding of this situation. This happened so long ago and like some people already said, he probably didn't have much of a choice. Should he still be held accountable for it so many decades later? I'm sure he deeply regrets what happened..
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
On May 12 2009 15:59 Guss wrote:Show nested quote +On May 12 2009 11:45 {88}iNcontroL wrote:On May 12 2009 10:57 Mastermind wrote:On May 12 2009 10:30 {88}iNcontroL wrote: Yes yes yessssssss WE GET IT people follow orders.. that doesn't mean you fucking spare them when those orders are illegal or fucking grotesque. That means you punish the people who issued the orders most severely, than punish the people who executed the orders to a lesser degree. I'm sorry but it has never/will never be ok to justify atrocious actions with "he ordered me to do it." You are still accountable. Should Americans be held accountable for Hiroshima? That was fucking grotesque wouldnt you say? What about allied bombings of German cities killing a half million innocent civilians? Should the soldiers involved in those incidents be held responsible as well? Had we lost the war we WOULD be held accountable. Worst fucking argument ever. Everything is ok as long as you win? Lets say your father got the order to drop napalm on vietnam, lets say he was a guard at guantanamo, where they sleep deprived people of sleep for 11 hours along with other torture methods. Should he be sentenced? according to you no because whos gonna prosecute him? America won! And your saying how germany did all these aweful things to the jews. This is correct, but this is only one camp. How would a guard at one camp know all the things they are doing to jews in all the camps. Not a very good argument but still.
Where the FUCK do I say it is "ok" ? I am stating facts as a realist. Please do not inject your projected emotion or morality with what I am saying. Of fucking COURSE it isn't ok that victors determine what is right or wrong. But that is how it is so fucking deal with it.
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
On May 12 2009 15:52 Guss wrote: iNcontroL do you think we should prosecute every american who dropped napalm over vietnam with no other intention then to cause pain and anguish?
do you think carrying out normal war missions like dropping bombs is comparable to guarding an internment camp where they tested pain tolerance on pregnant women and the fetus inside them before they died?
War is fucking ugly I agree. I would never sit here and tell you napalm is the balm of love and tickles but I certainly would hope you agree what the Nazis did was something special.. something especially fucking evil. Hence the trials that have continued to span the better part of 100 years.
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On May 12 2009 16:15 {88}iNcontroL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 12 2009 15:52 Guss wrote: iNcontroL do you think we should prosecute every american who dropped napalm over vietnam with no other intention then to cause pain and anguish? do you think carrying out normal war missions like dropping bombs is comparable to guarding an internment camp where they tested pain tolerance on pregnant women and the fetus inside them before they died? War is fucking ugly I agree. I would never sit here and tell you napalm is the balm of love and tickles but I certainly would hope you agree what the Nazis did was something special.. something especially fucking evil. Hence the trials that have continued to span the better part of 100 years. yea but the guard is not directly involved into those murders.
If the American soldier decides to not drop the napalm, his choice will save alot of people. If the guard decides that those experiments are crazy and that he don't guard this camp anymore...WTF is that gonna change? he can't go there and kill every other guard. So even if he did make the "right" choice like you said and stood up to not let this happen, he would just had been killed and replaced by another soldier willing to do the job.
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3) People who committed high treason in Nazi Germany were executed, along with most of their friends and family.
So were Lucia Rommel, or Nina von Stauffenberg and her sons executed?
But Nazi Germany wasn't a perfectly tyrannical state. Hitler wasn't a thousand feet tall, wasn't the baddest motherfucker on the face of the planet, didn't know what every German soldier was doing all the time, and (more importantly) relied on a massive military bureaucracy to make sure any German soldier that disobeyed orders.
There is something to be said for the relatively conservative, aristocratic army's record in the observation of the laws of war, as opposed to the young revolutionary radicals who volunteered in the SS and Gestapo. That much of the latter's brutality was spontaneous is without a doubt. The adherents to the new morality was not isolated to the German revolution, but its imitators throughout Central-Eastern Europe, the most radical of whom often went beyond the tolerance levels of their otherwise pro-Nazi leaders. Consider Antonescu's forced liquidation of the Iron Guard, after their anti-Carolist rampage in 1940/1, or Hitler's preference for Vladko Macek to succeed to Croatian leadership over the genocidal radicalism of the Ustace.
The events of the years, with the breakdown of the leadership of the monarchy and republican elites throughout Central-Eastern Europe revealed no small resevoir of popular brutality.
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On May 12 2009 16:15 {88}iNcontroL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 12 2009 15:52 Guss wrote: iNcontroL do you think we should prosecute every american who dropped napalm over vietnam with no other intention then to cause pain and anguish? do you think carrying out normal war missions like dropping bombs is comparable to guarding an internment camp where they tested pain tolerance on pregnant women and the fetus inside them before they died? War is fucking ugly I agree. I would never sit here and tell you napalm is the balm of love and tickles but I certainly would hope you agree what the Nazis did was something special.. something especially fucking evil. Hence the trials that have continued to span the better part of 100 years.
The amount of atrocities by committed by Americans in the Vietnam is pretty comparable to the Nazi. I mean children screaming while burning to death, charred bodies, women being gang raped then shot, entire villages being leveled in Vietnam and Cambodia (famously coined as "collateral damage") doesn't seem too different from the Nazi. But I digress, I stand by my previous post that this case is absolutely nothing about morality but it really is about political gesturing. Edit: Oh yea don't forget our good friend Agent Orange. Anyone see some of those pictures, absolutely horrific...
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On May 12 2009 16:15 {88}iNcontroL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 12 2009 15:52 Guss wrote: iNcontroL do you think we should prosecute every american who dropped napalm over vietnam with no other intention then to cause pain and anguish? do you think carrying out normal war missions like dropping bombs is comparable to guarding an internment camp where they tested pain tolerance on pregnant women and the fetus inside them before they died? War is fucking ugly I agree. I would never sit here and tell you napalm is the balm of love and tickles but I certainly would hope you agree what the Nazis did was something special.. something especially fucking evil. Hence the trials that have continued to span the better part of 100 years.
Yeah, getting orders to guard a death camp isnt a war order. So your saying that a man guarding a death camp where he may or may not have known about what goes on in there is much worse then a man dropping a napalm bomb on civilian so their skin burnes off?
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Zurich15302 Posts
You guys seriously need to get your Nazi facts straight before jumping to conclusions.
- German soldiers were drafted into the Wehrmacht, yes - Desertion meant death sentence, yes - It did NOT mean your family ended up in a concentration camp or would be killed too
However, this does all not matter because
Concentration camps were run by the SS and SD, NOT the Wehrmacht. SS and SA were initially armed branches of the party, the NSDAP. You were not drafted into the SS. In fact, it was considered an elite Nazi organization. The Fuehrerprinzip by which the SS was run makes sure that if you advanced there means you were the worst kind of human being on the planet.
The Eastern divisions of the SS that guarded the death camps and were comprised of Fremdvoelker were notorious for their cruelty even among SS circles. I guess if you were not Arian you had to prove more.
This whole romantic idea of an innocent that was forced to help kill the jews is nothing but a legend.
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On May 12 2009 17:11 zatic wrote: You guys seriously need to get your Nazi facts straight before jumping to conclusions.
- German soldiers were drafted into the Wehrmacht, yes - Desertion meant death sentence, yes - It did NOT mean your family ended up in a concentration camp or would be killed too
However, this does all not matter because
Concentration camps were run by the SS and SD, NOT the Wehrmacht. SS and SA were initially armed branches of the party, the NSDAP. You were not drafted into the SS. In fact, it was considered an elite Nazi organization. The Fuehrerprinzip by which the SS was run makes sure that if you advanced there means you were the worst kind of human being on the planet.
The Eastern divisions of the SS that guarded the death camps and were comprised of Fremdvoelker were notorious for their cruelty even among SS circles. I guess if you were not Arian you had to prove more.
This whole romantic idea of an innocent that was forced to help kill the jews is nothing but a legend.
Would you say that everyone who joined the SS or SD knew what was going on in the death camps when they joined the SS or SD?
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On May 12 2009 11:44 {88}iNcontroL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 12 2009 11:17 LaSt)ChAnCe wrote:On May 12 2009 10:12 {88}iNcontroL wrote: I know people like to fall back on the "just obeying orders" argument especially in regard to Nazi veterans but I am sorry.. that just doesn't fly with me.
And save me the "you weren't there, you don't know" argument as well. None of us were there, we are all speculating. That is a huge part of the forum. After all, very few of us are professional bw players yet here we are mostly discussing just that!
He didn't decide to be a guard at an internment camp but he was. On some level that is incredibly unfair but that is life. Sometimes you accidentally hit someone with your car, that doesn't mean justice simply turns away. The penalty might be less severe.. and in this case he probably won't be put to death. But the fact remains, he participated in something that was heinous and atrocious. Whether he decided to do it willfully or not he was an active participant in acts against humanity.
Guess who else didn't choose this fate? The 29k jews that were slaughtered in the camp he guarded. if someone were going to kill you and your family if you didn't obey orders, you would do it, don't try the self-righteous shit, when you're on the spot things are different and you shouldn't be held accountable for something like that if you had no morally sound choice read the thread before posting.. I already addressed that very issue. You'd have to ignore the post to get where you did.
You answered it by saying "he should be sentenced to death on the mere basis he was there."
Your answer is fucking terrible. You're essentially saying that "life isn't fair and no matter what he did he should be sentenced to death." Bullshit sir, bullshit. And referencing the car is completely and utterly unrelated, how you form any connection there is beyond me. Car accident is the result on negligence. If it wasn't your fault, aka someone jumped out in front of your car, you are not going to be charged. It would be if you directly did something that you shouldn't have that resulted in the person dying. The guard, on the other hand, is a completely different situation associated with authority, his own life at risk, etc. You can't draw ANY parallels really whatsoever from the two scenarios that are applicable in coming to a conclusion.
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WTF?
back then the people were taught, directly and through propaganda that jews were some kind of bane to society and needed to be gotten rid of. so his GOVERNMENT told him this, so he's supposed to source his deep seated conscience that all men are equal from where? god? keep in mind blacks weren't allowed to vote at that time either so it's not as if USA was totally inline with current thought. i mean sure he MAY have suspected in his heart that the camp he was gaurding was on sketchy moral ground, but if he protested he'd be probably be shot or at LEAST lose his job which who's gonna do that in wartime. is it the LAW to risk your life/job to defend your own personal morals that are out of whack with current thinking? thats the dumbest thing ever, people are a product of their environment, you can't hold people accountable for action only deemed totally unacceptable AFTER THE FACT
in nazi germany racism wasn't considered ok enough to be a part of government policy, you can't expect people to risk their lives making whacked out moral decisions that aren't even part of the social fabric of the time. say in 50yrs smoking is illegal, should be go back and give fines to today's smokers because they've should've realized that its fundamentally wrong? i know its a crap example but the gist is clear
dumbest thing ever, they are totally scapegoating this guy over just to win friends
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Zurich15302 Posts
On May 12 2009 17:18 Guss wrote:Show nested quote +On May 12 2009 17:11 zatic wrote: You guys seriously need to get your Nazi facts straight before jumping to conclusions.
- German soldiers were drafted into the Wehrmacht, yes - Desertion meant death sentence, yes - It did NOT mean your family ended up in a concentration camp or would be killed too
However, this does all not matter because
Concentration camps were run by the SS and SD, NOT the Wehrmacht. SS and SA were initially armed branches of the party, the NSDAP. You were not drafted into the SS. In fact, it was considered an elite Nazi organization. The Fuehrerprinzip by which the SS was run makes sure that if you advanced there means you were the worst kind of human being on the planet.
The Eastern divisions of the SS that guarded the death camps and were comprised of Fremdvoelker were notorious for their cruelty even among SS circles. I guess if you were not Arian you had to prove more.
This whole romantic idea of an innocent that was forced to help kill the jews is nothing but a legend. Would you say that everyone who joined the SS or SD knew what was going on in the death camps when they joined the SS or SD? I don't know that but what I am saying is they were most probably OK with it. Should the very unlikely scenario have happened were an "honest" SS officer suddenly finds himself in a death camp prison tower (oh noes) he could have resigned and joined the Wehrmacht.
Oh and also, my point also touches this whole discussions about war crimes: We are not talking about war crimes. This is murder, plain and simple. The Wehrmacht committed their share of war crimes, sure, but again we are not talking about the Wehrmacht here.
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Zurich15302 Posts
On May 12 2009 17:25 no_comprender wrote: WTF?
back then the people were taught, directly and through propaganda that jews were some kind of bane to society and needed to be gotten rid of. so his GOVERNMENT told him this, so he's supposed to source his deep seated conscience that all men are equal from where? god? keep in mind blacks weren't allowed to vote at that time either so it's not as if USA was totally inline with current thought. i mean sure he MAY have suspected in his heart that the camp he was gaurding was on sketchy moral ground, but if he protested he'd be probably be shot or at LEAST lose his job which who's gonna do that in wartime. is it the LAW to risk your life/job to defend your own personal morals that are out of whack with current thinking? thats the dumbest thing ever, people are a product of their environment, you can't hold people accountable for action only deemed totally unacceptable AFTER THE FACT
in nazi germany racism wasn't considered ok enough to be a part of government policy, you can't expect people to risk their lives making whacked out moral decisions that aren't even part of the social fabric of the time. say in 50yrs smoking is illegal, should be go back and give fines to today's smokers because they've should've realized that its fundamentally wrong? i know its a crap example but the gist is clear
dumbest thing ever, they are totally scapegoating this guy over just to win friends I don't even know what to reply. So you are morally in the right and should not be prosecuted if you helped killing tens of thousands because you might have lost your job otherwise?
The current recession isn't doing any good to people's judgement I suppose.
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Well morals doesn't really fit into what he's described because morality is nothing but a result of the environment we're brought up from. So based on our morals, yea it's immoral for this guy to have done what he did. But in the society this dude lived, this was a perfectly normal behavior. I mean take for instance those airheads in North Korea. Do you think any one of them would be kissing over Kim Jong Il if they were born in South Korea. The answer is no. I mean, I'm not defending this old fart whatsoever (although this case is still nothing more than political grandstanding) but you gotta realize that there is no universal code of morality.
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