Oh, this open city hypocrisy again. Belgrade had actually been declared an open town a week or so after the coup detat just before the bombing of the city. The problem was if there really were still Yugoslavian troops there, that would have given the Germans reason to consider it defended, right?
Was the US worse in some aspects than Nazi Germany?
- Thread starter Mrbsct
- Start date
Either the Nazi crimes are unique – in which false equivalences are to be avoided – or the Nazi crimes were not unique, but are then also open to relativization, rationalization and explainingh-away.
Either outcome is bad. Take your poison. (And maybe declare your agenda over this? You want the unique status of the Nazi crimes, to weaponize to go after someone else.)
Hitler and the Armenian Genocide | Genocide Education Project
Also @charlie ia
While no one can speak on behalf of Hitler, Hitler definitely appears to have been inspired by historical events although not in a positive way. Of course Hitler had a more focused bureaucratic mechanism for genocide then anyone before him .
The premise of @Mrbsct OP that the Americans are in anyway worse then the Nazis is simply ludicrous.
The American Indians or Native Americans were not genocided. One can visit their reservations and see how they live and talk to them. One can at least fly a drone over say the Morengo Band of Indians who own a casino near Palm Springs , California ( among other Indian/ Native American owned casinos) and see how they live and their definitely not poverty stricken.
Not to argue all Native Americans are rich far from it and yes alcoholism is certainly an issue in their community but many are assimilated; n to the general American community and are living quite well others paycheck to paycheck as are other Americans. American Indians also receive free tuition at Ft.Louis College in Durango, Colorado and possibly other post secondary educational institutions.
So what happened; n the past as to be balanced against what is happening now.
Leftyhunter
Joined Mar 2019
2,175 Posts | 1,701+
seúl
i dont agree 'either outcome is bad'. engaging into a conversation of a historical topic without the tenet placed by a modern ideology is just a natural development from a merely historiographical point of view larrey.
?
im a bit confused over this. why the suggestion shall be made that if we are to analyze this, then immediately 'you have an agenda', 'you want to weaponize'. its puzzling.
I also would not take Hitler's takes on history – whether he found them inspirational or not – as bona fide descriptions of what happened.
The OP sets things up so that this is what everyone should do, not questioning the premise.
The premise does bear some questioning though.
The OP sets things up so that this is what everyone should do, not questioning the premise.
The premise does bear some questioning though.
I think its relevant to discuss why Hitler thought they way he did and his argument is an interesting one based on actual historical events. Genghis Khan didn't face any negative repercussions for killing as many people as he did although its hard to pin a number on that since its so long ago. The massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire also did not involve any negative repercussions on the perpetrators nor on the successor nation of modern Turkey. Hitler had reason to think that the Nazis could do whatever they wanted and getaway with it.
Leftyhunter
Joined Mar 2019
2,175 Posts | 1,701+
seúl
we can indeed have different positions lefty.
as you said hitler looks to have been inspired from american westward expansion as his rational for seeking 'lebensraum'. now what larrey said just above is also important, just because the fuhrer was enamored of american actions, that doesnt necessarily render them of the same nature: of course, those acts need to be considered independently.
you have suggested an important point for approaching the discussion: did a genocide was conducted by the usa against indigenous tribes of north america?
attempting to answer that question will have a lots of impact on this discussion. from my perspective there was a clear intent of destroying indigenous nations both by high profile politicians as andrew jackson but also from everyday regular americans, there was a clear & systematic policy of forced removal and extermination (we dont need to explain the meaning of 'the indian removal act ' of 1830), and of course, there was a policy of forced assimilation (i dont want to get into modern politics, but fresh official apologies were issued these days).
from these aspects, i think its possible to conclude a genocide of indigenous people indeed occurred in the usa.
It depends. If the Yugoslavian government was withdrawing the troops and/or would not oppose a peaceful entry of German troops, then no, it could not be considered defended.
Not exactly. There was an attempt in the US and Canada to assimilate Native Americans at boarding school's where unfortunately many children were abused. Still there was no real genocide in which American Indians or Native Americans were systemically killed there were a few massacres but also Indians fought each other as I noted many times . American Indians did indeed keep their culture and some still speak their original languages.
American Indians have fought in every war the US and Canada ever had and in the case of the French and Indian Wars,The ARW and ACW often against other Indian tribes.
The Nazis didn't have Jews and Roma serving in the armed forces who could openly acknowledge their religious or ethnic identity.
The Nazis didn't have openly Jewish or Roma serving in their Parliament ( even if said Parliament was a rubber stamp) so no there simply was no genocide in the US. Yes there was violence and forced removal just like in much of Latin America but not a genocide. A true genocide is a systematic killing of each and every single member of a people deemed to be the enemy .
Leftyhunter
Joined Jun 2014
17,822 Posts | 9,478+
Lisbon, Portugal
It's important to note that Nazi Germany mostly conducted their mass-murderous campaigns also within the context of war and escalated its killings as the war escalated. The two variables were inter-related and mass murder of undesirables and Jews was very much viewed by the Nazis as a necessary effort to win the war, and especially to prevent a repetition of 1918, which was the most important Nazi point of reference. The totalitarian racial ideology of National-Socialism provided the paranoid and delusional worldview in which enemies of the "German nation" were everywhere and should be eradicated to win the war which they considered as existential and apocalyptical.
Just like Alex J. Kay (2021) said: "While each of the killing programmes possessed a racial (and racist) component, the logic of war was central to the rationale for targeting each and every one of the victim groups, for they were regarded by the Nazi regime in one way or another as a potential threat to Germany's ability to fight and, ultimately, win a war for hegemony in Europe. This view was informed and justified by Nazi racial thinking, so it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate German wartime strategy from Nazi genocidal racial policies." (p. 2)
There is a very interesting study that I'm currently reading titled "Targeting Civilians in War", by Alexander B. Downes (2008). The study is innovative in providing sophisticated large N-statistical methods, but also very provocative in the 2 main hypotheses the author is trying to support. For the first hypothesis, Downes supports the idea that the essential causal mechanism of civilian victimization is the desperation to win and to lower the costs—human, financial, or reputational—to one's side. In other words, the most immediate reason for deliberately - or negligibly - killing and massacring civilians is out of "desperation to achieve victory and lower costs" (p. 29).
Specific variables such as the type of regime (if it is democratic or dictatorial); whether they perceive the enemy as barbarian or civilized; or the type of military organization, don't at all change the decision to deliberately target civilians, it just rather change the scale and degree of the killing process (pp. 60-82).
The other main hypothesis of the study is the "war of territorial conquest" hypothesis, in which any war that intends to conquer and annex territory inhabited by a different population from the belligerent, will result in large-scale civilian victimization. That scenario will inevitably lead to many civilian deaths since the population inhabiting the land you want to take will be regarded as a potential fifth column (pp. 35-6).
This is a kind of interesting approach in which we can present the argument that either Nazis, or Americans - or any belligerent faction in history - are fully capable, and did, deliberately kill civilians en masse, and they shared roughly the same causal factors that made them decide to do that. What they ultimately differed, were the variables that affect the scale and degree of those killings.
- Downes, A. B. (2008). Targeting Civilians in War (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs Series). Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY.
- Kay, A.J. (2021). Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing. Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut.
Just like Alex J. Kay (2021) said: "While each of the killing programmes possessed a racial (and racist) component, the logic of war was central to the rationale for targeting each and every one of the victim groups, for they were regarded by the Nazi regime in one way or another as a potential threat to Germany's ability to fight and, ultimately, win a war for hegemony in Europe. This view was informed and justified by Nazi racial thinking, so it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate German wartime strategy from Nazi genocidal racial policies." (p. 2)
There is a very interesting study that I'm currently reading titled "Targeting Civilians in War", by Alexander B. Downes (2008). The study is innovative in providing sophisticated large N-statistical methods, but also very provocative in the 2 main hypotheses the author is trying to support. For the first hypothesis, Downes supports the idea that the essential causal mechanism of civilian victimization is the desperation to win and to lower the costs—human, financial, or reputational—to one's side. In other words, the most immediate reason for deliberately - or negligibly - killing and massacring civilians is out of "desperation to achieve victory and lower costs" (p. 29).
Specific variables such as the type of regime (if it is democratic or dictatorial); whether they perceive the enemy as barbarian or civilized; or the type of military organization, don't at all change the decision to deliberately target civilians, it just rather change the scale and degree of the killing process (pp. 60-82).
The other main hypothesis of the study is the "war of territorial conquest" hypothesis, in which any war that intends to conquer and annex territory inhabited by a different population from the belligerent, will result in large-scale civilian victimization. That scenario will inevitably lead to many civilian deaths since the population inhabiting the land you want to take will be regarded as a potential fifth column (pp. 35-6).
This is a kind of interesting approach in which we can present the argument that either Nazis, or Americans - or any belligerent faction in history - are fully capable, and did, deliberately kill civilians en masse, and they shared roughly the same causal factors that made them decide to do that. What they ultimately differed, were the variables that affect the scale and degree of those killings.
- Downes, A. B. (2008). Targeting Civilians in War (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs Series). Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY.
- Kay, A.J. (2021). Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing. Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut.
Joined Oct 2007
1,080 Posts | 1,526+
New York, NY, USA
Ugly juxtaposition there. Yes, Hitler was inspired by the displacement of Native Americans by 'racially superior people' to produce 'living space' for the rightful latter! But he ignored the complexities and specifics. He was also inspired by the British rule over India, in which a small force could govern millions of 'inferiors'. But neither inspirational model consisted of legal persecution akin to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, ghettos, concentration and extermination camps, SS death squads, etc., all part an assiduously orchestrated policy of mass purges and murder. The vast majority of Native American deaths from European contact over three centuries resulted from the European pathogens to which they had no immunity.
Food for thought:
Yes, fine, but the key word here is "mostly". The Aktion T4, for instance, began before the war. The Nazi theory of the "undesirable" population groups existed well before the war. A case could be made that while it's true that the Nazis viewed their extermination programs as necessary for war purposes, the war also provided a cover for what they had planned to do all along. And note that the pre-war campaigns to eliminate the disabled people or the Communists were not racist; the Nazis happily murdered Down children and Communist activists who were 100% "Aryan".
Well, that is surely interesting, but by the very title it tells you it will not cover the issue of regimes who want to target civilians outside of war. Which is, on the contrary, the remarkable difference I point out above. Nazi Germany may not have been unique in this, of course, since Stalin's USSR or the Khmer Rouge did quite a job in this sense, too; but not the USA.
Well, no. There are further differences. Just to name one, bombing Hiroshima did target civilians, but those civilians' well-being and survival was not the responsibility of the country that killed them. They were in enemy territory, within a legitimate military target; it was up to Japan to defend them - or to save them by surrendering. On the contrary, the well-being and survival of the defenceless and harmless Chinese civilians in Nanking was the responsibility of the Japanese, under whose control the city had fallen. The Japanese officers organized beheading contests, in which the heads were civilians'.
Joined Jun 2014
17,822 Posts | 9,478+
Lisbon, Portugal
Actually, no. Aktion T4 and its mass-murder begun in earnest with the invasion of Poland in September/October 1939, with the planning of such program, and the killing of certain individuals, initiated months prior with the expectation of a larger war coming. Most of its victims between 1939 and 1941 were in fact patients from the annexed Polish territories/General-Government, and the forced euthanasia program, its development, execution, and acceleration was directly linked with the exigencies of war (Kay 2021: 27-28/40).
Lots of people still died in Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s as a result of the massive and coercive eugenic sterilization, but its death rate was relatively low, and at the same level as of the peaceful and liberal democratic Sweden.
Like the same author I mentioned said: "Racial-hygiene motives and perceived usefulness in wartime were at all times closely interrelated" (p. 32).
According to Christian Gerlach (2016), 95% of the people killed by Nazi Germany throughout its reign were foreign according to the German point of view; and if you have to be more precise: 95% of civilian deaths by Nazi Germany occurred after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941 (pp. 8-9). The bulk of German killings of civilians and other non-combatants took place during World War II, as a result of direct warfare and conquest/occupation, which goes well into the two main hypothesis of Alexander B. Downes in his study (2008) that I referred earlier.
Christian Gerlach (2016), clearly says that if the Nazi regime ended in the summer of 1939 it would have been remembered for causing several thousand deaths; for expelling hundreds of thousands of Central European Jews; for imprisoning 100,000 political prisoners and forcibly sterilizing 300,000 people by force, but it wouldn't be as bloody as other regimes in Europe and elsewhere at the time (p. 8).
Nazi Germany is an extremely violent regime, not because of the way it treated its own citizens in times of peace, but mainly because it waged a large-scale imperialist-colonial war against its neighbours, which they incorporated a totalitarian mode of conducting warfare combined with a delusional and paranoid racial-ideology. The Third Reich shared some parallels with the Communist regimes, but if you want to explain its most violent nature, than it shares more - not in the matter of degree but of nature - with the imperialist-colonial Western, many times liberal, regimes and what they did outside the European continent, such as the late British and French Colonial Empires, or the United States expansion to the West and Pacific regions. With the very clear exception the anti-Semitic paranoia of Nazis, which its mass-murder crescendo also being directly connected with the war.
As Donald Bloxham (2009), said succinctly in his very interesting book: "The Nazi empire would have the shape of one of the traditional dynastic European empires as it expanded into territory adjacent to Germany, but the empire was built with the mindset of the settler-colonialist in Africa or the Americas." (p. 21)
I don't clearly understand how that argument contradicts mine, since I was referring and explaining about the decision to target civilians in warfare, not about trying to make arguments on which circumstances one is morally acquitted - or has the higher moral ground - in targeting civilians. Besides, I don't think your line of argument is normative in a moral debate.
Besides, I was not referring just to the Atomic attacks or aerial bombings when referring to the US willingness to target civilians. The United States also carried out wars of territorial expansion in which the results have been genocidal.
- Bloxham, D. (2009). The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford Histories). Oxford University Press: Oxford, England.
- Gerlach, C. (2016). The Extermination of the European Jews (New Approaches to European History). Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England.
- Downes, A. B. (2008). Targeting Civilians in War (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs Series). Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY.
- Kay, A. J. (2021). Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing. Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut.
I suppose "begun in earnest" is your way of admitting that it had actually begun before the war, as I mentioned.
Joined Jun 2014
17,822 Posts | 9,478+
Lisbon, Portugal
I'm not entirely certain that such a mass-murder policy would accelerate its pace if there wasn't a war and that it would continue to be a policy practiced just as much as in many other countries at the time, including liberal democracies.
Forced sterilization/euthanasia was always a risky move on the part of Nazis, considering their large Catholic population that disapproved of any eugenics policy. The war provided legitimacy for that practice, and they had plenty of "undesirables" in the annexed Polish territories that could be killed without causing uproar within the German public. Nevertheless, such policy reached a scale that the Catholic establishment in Germany could not tolerate anymore, and they protested, in which they were partly successful.
Sorry if I did not address several points yesterday. The first one here is: does the "German point of view" include the stripping of citizenship from people who had it, by birth or by naturalization, but who happened to be Jews or other "undesirables"? If so, that's easy for any state to target its own citizens while denying that it's doing so.
Sure. Nobody says the Nazi policies did not target foreign civilians. What I'm saying is that the Nazis were entirely ok with mass murder and extermination to genocidal-like levels from the get go. Unlike most other states in history, let alone several other states in the 1933-45 time frame, such as the USA. I'm not addressing just your posts here, but the gist of this loopy thread. If one wants to find genocidal-inclined states in that time frame, there are such cases, of course: Japan, Italy, the USSR. No shining beacon of democracy.
Fine, true, but evidently irrelevant to a general assessment of a regime or government. By this token, if Roosevelt had not been re-elected in 1936 and his successor had killed the New Deal policies, these would be remembered as an abysmal failure, an expensive daydream that obviously did not come true. If Mussolini had died in 1934, he would have been remembered as somewhat of a strongman who nevertheless had stopped the "red menace", made the trains run on schedule, and made Italy a success story. And so on.
We lack the luxury of knowing for a fact what the Nazi peacetime policies would have been after a German victory in WWII. But I firmly believe we can make an educated guess.
Really? Two big problems here.
The first one is that by the 1930s, the colonial expansion of those Western Empires had ended. Actually, the wiser ones (i.e. bar the French) were already planning divestments. The USA had laws in place to grant the Philippines independence, the UK had passed the 1935 Government of India Act, and so on. You are comparing a Germany of 1939 with the policies of the previous century. The states who still were on a colonial rampage that late in history were, once again, the same that were on the side of Germany, i.e. Japan and Italy.
Secondly, I don't see why you should give the Communist regimes a free pass (actually let's make that a singular, there was one Communist regime at the time). The USSR was every bit as imperialist, colonial, murderous, to the verge of genocidal, in this time frame - as well as later - as the Nazis; and on top of that, it culled its own citizens, like Nazi Germany and unlike those Western countries. Just ask the 1930-45 Ukrainans and several internal ethnic minorities of the USSR, then add the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians, and the Eastern Poles.
Joined Jun 2014
17,822 Posts | 9,478+
Lisbon, Portugal
Last edited:
Ok, that doesn't change my overall opinion. They mostly died within the context of WWII.
From the "get-go"? I don't know. This is not how things generally happen, at least throughout modern history. Genocides by and large, possibly all within modern history, happen within the context of warfare, revolutions, or territorial conquest. Japan, Italy, and the USSR, all took their most murderous episodes within the context where the country was going through massive upheaval, revolution, political struggle, war, or military expansion, and there's a complete logic behind it. States are far less motivated to go into a killing spree from an environment of peace and stability. There are fewer incentives to do it, and fewer actors to be convinced to do it, if there's no climate of danger or the perception of a security risk, whoever delusional that perception is. Ideology does play a factor in shaping who is the "enemy", and the scale of the killing, but it doesn't, from what I've read, play a factor in the decision to kill civilians in large numbers if they face the same circumstances of warfare or territorial conquest. Democracies committed fewer killings, because they are generally more stable, especially internally, but democracies in the context of external wars and territorial expansion have been just as willing to decide to target civilians as dictatorships have, with the difference being regarded in the scale of violence that dictatorships usually apply.
I was not making a general assessment of a regime or government. I was explaining that states, whether democratic or dictatorial, can and did, make decisions to victimize civilians in specific circumstances. My point is not that Nazis were more good or bad - and I'm not interested in making such a stupid argument. My point is that being the United States or any liberal democracy, doesn't prevent the decision to attack and kill civilians deliberately.
I don't understand the point of this. Do you think I don't know any of that? Even though I've debated this topic with you plenty of times already?
Why should I mention Communist regimes, if the thread is about comparing the USA with Nazis? Yes, the USSR was imperialist and colonial, and? How does that disprove anything that I said? My all point is that Nazis were not such a unique dictatorial regime. Saying that the USSR also did it adds more to my initial point. But, this thread was meant to compare a fascist regime with a democratic one.
So, I find it pertinent that Nazi imperialist-colonialist wars do share a genealogical relationship with the Western imperialist-colonialist expansion from prior generations. That connection is true in the sense that Nazis themselves said so, quite openly and clearly.
Their entire foreign policy stems not only from an ultranationalist pan-German utopia; but also from the frustration that Germany was unable to create a vast colonial empire in the last 100 years like other Western colonial empires like Britain and France did. And that colonial-imperialist frustration was equally shared by fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. This was the "Axis Commonality" variable - among some other variables - that Christopher Szpillman (2004) declared as an "Imperialist latecomer" syndrome that was fundamental in creating their expansionist worldview (pp. 73-4).
Joseph Sottile (2004) in the same book explains further this overblown anxiety:
"At the time Italy, Germany, and Japan arrived on the international stage, the Great Powers held the lion's share of prosperous, strategically located, and natural resource-rich colonies. Although the future Axis partners set out to acquire colonies, the remainders fell far short of their imperial aspirations. This was the age of 'static imperialism,' a time when the spoils of imperialism were already largely claimed and the geopolitical system became inflexible and intolerant of change. Italy, Germany, and Japan found nothing comparable to the Belgian Congo or the Dutch East Indies, let alone the vast resources held by Great Britain, France, and the United States. (p. 22)
. . . During the Age of Imperialism, however, it was a nation's success or failure at colonial expansion that defined peoples and generations. For the latecomers, Japan, Italy, and Germany, their aspirations for national identity collided with an international order that sought to contain their expansionist ambitions. By the turn of the century a situation of static imperialism developed. Those frustrated by the inability of these new powers to gain what they considered their just deserts blamed the situation on the corruption of international liberalism, on one hand, and the weakness of their own governments on the other." (p. 27)
- Sotille, J.P. (2004). The Fascist Era: Imperial Japan and the Axis Alliance in Historical Perspective. In E. Bruce Reynolds (Eds.), Japan in the Fascist Era. Palgrave McMillan: New York, NY.
- Szpillman, C. (2004). Fascist and Quasi-Fascist Ideas in Interwar Japan, 1918–1941. In E. Bruce Reynolds (Eds.), Japan in the Fascist Era. Palgrave McMillan: New York, NY.
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