This post may contain Mildly Adult content.
Mildly AdultUpdate
Only logged in members can reply and interact with the post.
Join SimilarWorlds for FREE »

81 years ago today the US did a half baked job at doing what we should have done 91 years ago—and then took credit for it.

Ideological language dehumanizing certain groups had been developing in German academic and cultural circles since the mid-1800s.

By roughly 1928 the man who wrote Mein Kampf—which clearly and unequivocally dehumanized people based on their skin and hair color—had risen to power.

Blatant, antisemitic propaganda was publicized and violence was used against people deemed "unfit" through no objective process.

The Nuremberg Laws stripped people of citizenship based on ethnicity. By 1938, Kristallnacht left hundreds dead and thousands imprisoned. It was openly sanctioned by the state.

The gestapo had rounded up and kidnapped innocent people at gunpoint, in public. Tens of thousands of political dissidents and marginalized groups were detained in concentration camps.

The (American) Red Cross physically visited a single Nazi concentration camp but decided that the reports of piles of dead bodies, with surviving photographs, were irrelevant because they managed to get some pictures of a few people wearing clothes and breathing.

Germany was expanding aggressively and violently with the excuse of acquiring "lebensraum" (livingspace) and "annexing" countries, which is a pretty word for committing political warfare and enforcing your screwed up "laws" in someone else's home. Einsadzgruppen (mobile killing units) skipped the kidnapping and did things the easy way by just shooting victims in public, sometimes after forcibly stripping them naked and violating them in front of their families and neighbors.

And when the US coast guard encountered ships of women, children and elderly people seeking refuge from this, no "immigration" regulations were revised, no diplomatic efforts were made. Most of these people were turned away and many died exactly how they feared they would.

By 1941, hundreds of thousands of innocent people had been systematically kidnapped and murdered over the span of a decade. We didn't do anything until the Nazi regime allied with Japan and brought the violence to us. We decided to wait until the attack on Pearl Harbour threatened US commerce and infrastructure before even acknowledging that any injustice was happening. By this time, millions were already being killed by industrialized mass genocide.

So what did we do then? We microwaved Japan because we were afraid, and played a small roll in taking a part of Normandy Beach from the Nazi regime in France. In the process, we likely also killed some slave laborers to the nazi war machine. We call this D-Day because to us, it was "the end".

It didn't stop the killing though. The nazis continued executions until the very end, some even after liberation was imminent. The death toll reached around 6 million. Then we traumatized and guilt tripped German citizens, some of whom were inevitably nazi sympathizers but many of whom were victims of the violence themselves, by plastering images of their dead, naked, loved ones all over towns and writing phrases like, "Who is guilty? You are" in German. This wasn't some act of vandalism, it was a large scale operation involving many Americans and our officials. We also tasked German civilians with cleaning up the aftermath, so they had to see (and smell) the horror in person.

Almost a century later we haven't learned a single thing about how awful our government is. We still dehumanize people based on affiliation, ethnicity, country, or even just who they associate with, minimize or entirely fail to report atrocities committed overseas, often by our own people, and kick our feet back drinking lemonade while expansionist regimes "annex" other countries just like before.

Happy D Day, everyone. Go watch the Diary of Anne Frank and remember that was a real person.
Top | New | Old
sarabee1995 · 26-30, FVIP
One thing worth mentioning... The total death toll from the Holocaust was closer to 11-12 million. The six million figure you quote is just the jewish victims.
sarabee1995 · 26-30, FVIP
@Elessar @Thinkerbell I just want to tell you both that I very much appreciate the discussion you are having here. You are both presenting perspectives with examples in a respectful manner. The world needs more of both of you and I'm proud to have you both as friends. 🫂
Elessar · 26-30, M
@Thinkerbell Strasserism wasn't a socialist ideology by even the most lax definitions of "socialism", let alone a leftwing one; and it never had more than a couple thousand members which make it a tiny minority relatively to the total size of the German voting population, or even just the actual socialists.

It was anti-capitalist at most, but anti-capitalism isn't synonym for socialism. Italian fascists were strongly opposed to lasseiz faire capitalism (/liberalism) too and in favor of rationalizations and strong regimentation of the economy, yet Mussolini wasn't anywhere socialist or leftist either. Socialists and leftists were literally the original anti-fascist block, that later expanded more and more to encompass the political center and eventually even the center-right.

The working class is the largest electoral basin so obviously even ideologies that by definition oppress it will need to be voted in by it. Consequently, trying to appease the masses (especially when it's merely posture) doesn't make you a socialist/leftist. Still to use modern Trumpism as a parallel, the fact that Trump campaigned on (allegedly) lowering inflation costs doesn't make Trump anywhere socialist or leftist.

Oh I don't disagree with that, I brought up Latinos for Trump as a modern example of people voting against their own primary (if not existential) interests, not as an example of a tiny minority.
Thinkerbell · 41-45, F
@Elessar

If you define socialism as necessarily left-wing (in the modern sense), then naturally Strasserism wasn't socialism. But what if a party (or a non-insignificant portion of it) is nationalist and also favors redistribution of wealth, breaking up landed estates, nationalizing banks and heavy industry, etc? Then you have national socialism.

"...and it [Strasserism] never had more than a couple thousand members."

You are overlooking the 3 million working-class storm troopers in the SA that Roehm was in charge of.

I suggest you read the recent book Hitler, by Volker Ullrich.


And as for Mussolini, he started out as a socialist, but then found an easier path to political power via fascism. But he later fell in with bad company, and it didn't end well for him.
This comment is hidden. Show Comment
@jshm2 The evidence of gas and crematoria can be tricky because many of the death camps were designed simply to detain people until they died of starvation or violence. But look at places like the Drancy camp with railways leading to Auschwitz which did have 4 gas chambers built for mas extermination of human beings.

No, not every camp had them. Many were made of simple lumber and little more. But the entire system was meant to starve, execute, or else transport prisoners out to places with greater capability for the "Jewish solution" (extermination).

I don't believe whether every single camp had these facilities or not is an important issue. They existed and were used.

As for the ballpoint pen, that sounds like a bent truth.
Elessar · 26-30, M
@jshm2 It was not ballpoint pen, it was fountain pen, which definitely existed back then.

akindheart · 61-69, F
my son married a Jewish lady from austria, they live in the birthplace of Hitler...unfortunately

 
Post Comment