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Originally Posted by Michaelangelica
The Nazi camps where cattle slaughtering yards not Concentration camps.
The west's worst in recent times is Guantanamo bay. Even with its torture and sensory deprivation it does not compare to the Nazi Death camps.
My father once said to me after I had criticized the Japanese "Don't you EVER let me hear you criticising the Japanese--because WE did just as bad back to them".
He never spoke of his war experiences but I now know he buried his whole platoon in the jungles of Borneo. The war screwed him up for life.
Contrast this with the attitude of some WW2 veterans who won't buy a Japanese or Italian car!
Some WW2 war stories are just emerging now. Like the New Guinea native tribe that captured a whole lot of Japanese during WW2. They decided they couldn't eat them as they were "White Mans' enemy" so after much deliberation they decided that they should be punished the "White Mans' way".
So they crucified them to trees all up the Markham valley.
How come the war criminal Wernher von Braun got a"get out of jail free card"? Designing and developing terror weapons, to kill civilians, does not make a war criminal?
Please read "Stalingrad" it will make you feel sorry for the Germans!
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I would like to know more about why your father said what he said, since he seems to have been in a position to know. I remember, when I was growing up and even into the Vietnam War, hearing that "those people" don't feel pain or grief the way we do. That's possibly an excuse for squashing a bug, but it goes considerably beyond simply demonizing the enemy. I will research Borneo, but I'd like people to submit any other personal stories.
I believe it was William Tecumseh Sherman, arguably the inventor of modern, total war, who said he wanted to make war so terrible that people would feel less inclined to appeal to it in the future. That hasn't worked very well so far, possibly because we all like to forget about war as soon as possible. That's one of the things I'd like this thread to accomplish, in the way Mathew Brady's photographs made Sherman's war visible for the first time in history.
It's hard not to laugh at the New Guinea story and then embarrassing to have laughed at it. It
does show those missionaries accomplished something beyond sexual restriction after all.
The way we peopled our space program is obscene. It is only imaginable by seeing everybody in that extensive project as Dick Cheney. (Every spy I've ever met acted somewhat like Dick Cheney, without the quacking.)
I will add "Stalingrad" to my reading list, which will simply grow that much longer, since the only reading I do now is Hypography.
Thank you for all the new information.
I hope people understand this thread isn't meant to be just about WWII. I picked the German postwar authors because not forgetting is vital, because they took it upon themselves, at a time when other Germans were already starting the denialist movement, to preserve a sense of unfathomable moral devastation, and simply because it's shining a light on that global prism from a slightly different angle.
Thanks for the help.
--lemit
