Well, I guess they were planning on recycling the shoes of Jews...so I guess that means we should look up them as being environmentalists as well!
Forcing medical experimentation* on people is okay? You should be sent to an institution if you think that's fine and dandy.
If the members of Unit 731 were simply studying natural outbreaks of plague, anthrax, and other diseases in Manchuria by dissecting cadavers, that would have been fine. However, Unit 731 personnel deliberately infected civilian populations with those diseases and vivisected their subjects in order to study them, and that's not even getting into all the other things they did.
It's just a classic example of moral relativism. Sure, ______ *may have* done some "bad" things during ______, but they also ______.
This. Totally this. It's like in the 90's when Congress apologized for overthrowing the Queen of Hawaii. Like, really?
You say "it's wrong" but there is nothing to support your statement besides something along the lines of "killing is wrong"; I'm afraid you're going to have to justify that notion beforehand, and then in turn justify the reason, and so forth.
I hope you're not arguing that killing isn't wrong. Killing = wrong. It takes away others' rights, namely the right to live. Killing is rarely justifiable and atrocities like the Holocaust don't qualify. Not by a long shot. Yes, that is my cultural perspective, but my argument is sound.
Sometimes you apologize even when you don't think you've done something you have to apologize for. Is that wrong? Maybe. Does it hurt you? No. You don't even have to frame it in personal terms. A simple "I'm sorry that happened to you" goes a lot further toward healing old wounds than "I didn't do it."
Why single out the left when the right was just as fervent in its support for fascism? You forget that Fascism was very much in favor with both ends of the political spectrum in the 1930s. You can also find countless examples of those on the political right going to great lengths to kiss Hitler and Mussolini's collective asses.
Just as long as you recognise that.
There are still people alive and not just in China. A number of Koreans who were taken as "comfort women" are still looking for apologies. And what about indirect harm? What if it was your parents or other family that suffered? If my grandmother had been abducted and forced to work in a brothel I'd want an apology for her sake even if she were no longer alive and I wasn't born at the time. The harm isn't limited to the direct victims.
Because they weren't. Unless you're going to redefine what a conservative is or use a foreign definition, which I won't. Europeans and others seem to have a very different understanding of left-right politics, so that's something to consider.
Actually it really wasn't. Fascists were just socialists in opposition to global Communism. The difference between a Fascist and a Communist isn't socialism, but nationalism. Fascists seek revolution on a national level, Communists seek world revolution. They were once one and the same, but split because Fascists in say Italy understandably didn't want to take orders from Moscow. The Communists deemed them not socialists and waged a lengthy propaganda campaign from the early 1900's to WWII and through the Cold War and convinced the world Fascists were right wing rather than left wing, but the fact is that the whole "Fascists are extreme right and Communists are extreme left" polar opposite line is a complete fabrication.
Yes, many did suck up to the Fascists. That was out of fear or self-service, not out of agreement. What conservative supports socialism and nationalization? It wasn't until Hitler tightened his grip over the country that bodies of law, entire religious sects, free enterprise supporters, and so on gave support to Fascists. This is evident when looking at all the complaints they filed against Hitler, especially the battles fought between Hitler and the churches.
Hitler and Mussolini were socialists. Mussolini was a lifetime member of the Italian Socialist Party and Hitler adopted Nazism, national socialism, after investigating several leftist political groups and being attracted to a speech titled "By What Means Shall We Destroy Capitalism?"
That's not a contradiction; that's a fact. Blomberg was a nationalist soldier, not an internationalist laborer.
So you're shocked that nationalists are hostile to others? Again, part of national socialism is nationalism and opposition to international socialism.
Interesting you pick this quote from Goebbels. Because, well, it doesn't contradict anything. Read in context, he's saying that the only real religion is his political philosophy. That's not anti-socialist. That's pretty socialist in fact. Dedication to your government movement and not God is evidence of, not against, secularism and anti-clericalism. Martin Bormann, another Nazi you go on to quote, was also an outspoken atheist even more so than his colleagues. Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher, Richard Darré, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, and other Nazis were pagans and opposed traditional religion. Goebbels himself discarded his religion. Though it is also odd you choose Joseph as evidence against Fascist socialism, and Goebbels himself even said he didn't think enough was being done for socialism, even under Hitler. Joseph was an extremist, socialist activist in favor of wealth redistribution.
Joseph Goebbels said "We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns."
Right. And... how does this contradict anything? They supported gun control, so they didn't want people having guns. They pushed state struggle over class struggle, which emphasized their nationalist socialism. This is really evidence without a claim or warrant.
Right. Dissolving organizations of antagonism. You're looking for proof here that the Nazis betrayed their supporters and didn't believe in socialism, but all you're posting is the opposite, that they punished those in opposition to them. Again, hate to defend socialists, but this is common sense for tyrants; you suppress those that oppose you and raise up those that support you. Tell me, how could Hitler betray people that never confided in him and were antagonistic? He couldn't, and he didn't.
This is actually an interesting point, if it could be called that. Nationalism emphasizes the unique characteristics of a nation. Germany was known even before Hitler as distrustful of intellectuals. The German culture was suspicious and untrusting, and the nationalist tendencies of the National Socialists is evidence of this fact. Notice, there are differences between Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Why? Because the two countries had two different societies and thus their socialism was parallel but their nationalism brought out different aspects of their nations.
I don't see any ideology here. It's social darwinism, but overall it just sounds like he's stating a fact about the then-current situation.
The full quote is "It is absurd to believe in the possibility of perpetual peace...Fascist education must be education for battle. Fascism believes in sanctity and heroism." Fascists were more realistic about world affairs than their utopian Communist twins who believed in world revolution, and as nationalists it's expected that nations shall have wars and be prepared for them.
Nationalism was just as represented in Nazi ideology as socialism was. Not concerning themselves with foreign or conquered territories but rather focusing on preserving the pristine homeland was never in contradiction with their movement.
Wrong. Both the Fascists and Nazis hated organized religion and wanted to purge the church from the state and outright eradicate Christians and Jews to return Europe to a pre-Christian, pagan society where the Bible hadn't "weakened" man. Like the Bolshevist, the Fascist sought to remake man without the "crutch" of God. It's true that they opposed the churches because they interfered with government authority, but that's the rule that proves the point- totalitarianism can't exist if man has to answer to God rather than the state. It's the same reason the Marxists in Russia destroyed the churches and synagogues and murdered the priests. The elimination of God from society is central to Marxism which at its core is about perfecting man which is contradictory to the Biblical religions in which man is born imperfect.
National Socialists are, shocker, socialists that oppose internationalism in favor of nationalism and state sovereignty against global governance. The state struggle supersedes global struggle.
"For the folk-community does not exist on the fictitious value of money but on the results of productive labour, which is what gives money its value." - Hitler
Once again, a lack of understanding of the philosophy behind the movements. William James greatly influenced Benito Mussolini and from there on Fascism and Fascist thought. The ideas behind Fascism and National Socialism were always about building up children for the future instead of using them for this bogeyman military industrial complex you fail to understand. The Axis resorted to child soldiers as a last resort once the war turned disastrous for them.
Yes, their own kind. They're nationalists. And do you even know what the military industrial complex is? Even under Hitler, Nazi Germany stayed in a peacetime economy even through the war until 1943 when the country had no choice but to move towards a wartime economy to prevent further economic collapse brought on by the war.
And the Communist one didn't?
Within their own borders = their nations = nationalism = (national socialism - socialism) ... Forget it, I could sarcastically break this down further, but the point it pretty obvious. A dirty lake in Guyana was of no importance to a nationalist in Italy. I stress this, the National Socialists were socialists that supported nationalism.
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty." Hitler and every other socialist tyrant used gun control to limit the capacity of their citizens to fight back. The last thing a dictator wants is armed revolt.
This quote was during WWII. The United States, even during WWI, was feared by the Germans as possibly contributing to Allied efforts. They attacked our ships in WWI, tried to start a proxy war with us by convincing Mexico to invade and retake the Southwestern portion of the United States gained from the Mexican-American War, and overall were convinced that America had to be kept out of the war. We entered the war and beat them.
Ah yes, a quote from when WWII was already underway. This was from 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor. Context, it's what's for dinner.
And? "From the vulgar bourgeois standpoint the terms dictatorship and democracy are mutually exclusive." Lenin opposed the idea that democracy and dictatorship were opposites, and Marxists always preached "liberating" the masses with a dictatorship of the proletariat, a mob rule to get what was wanted to transform society. There's no liberty or freedom in what the Marxists preached; Mussolini was just honest about the philosophy while Marx and Lenin sugar-coated it with feel-good, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy labels to fool people into fighting their battles. Mussolini and Hitler were just a heck of a lot more popular and often didn't even have to try as hard.
Hitler and Mussolini saw FDR's rise to power. FDR was granted unprecedented powers by Congress to fight the Great Depression, powers never before granted to a president in peace time. This was almost parallel to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. They didn't overthrow the government and stage coups; they were bestowed power to deal with national issues. They also saw FDR's activism and involvement in extra-constitutional matters, working beyond the powers enumerated to government that were so associated with liberal democracy and republicanism.
Yeah, you keep thinking that. "Indirect harm" is a bunch of bunk. Maybe the dead deserve a posthumous apology, but people that didn't have anything happen to them don't deserve anything.
I believe ancestor can refer to any group above and including parents, so yeah. However, the people that participated in World War II are either dead or barely coherent. Assuming 16 as an entry age for soldiers (I don't actually know what it was), and WW2 ended in 1945, a person who was enlisted at the end of the war at age 16 would be about 70 today. If you can find enough of those people to sign a statement of apology, go ahead.
So let's say that I'm in a good position partially (not entirely) because my parents were dicks. I should apologize for their deeds why, exactly? I didn't do anything wrong; why should I apologize to people I haven't done anything to? Oh, and I love the passing implication that the people in that situation that DON'T apologize for their ancestors' decisions are not decent. :/
Maybe not as decent.
