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How many Germans do you need to change a lightbulb?
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Compared to Japan, Germany is doing just fine, but it is difficult to conceive of a lower bar than that.
If the Germans were any good at actually understanding the history of fascism and not just the superficial details, they wouldn't be one of Israel's staunchest allies. Furthermore, though it is of course cultural convention there to condemn Nazism, as you mention, that does not mean fascists don't have cultural sway and, after zionism, probably the best demonstration of that is the clean Wehrmacht myth, which tries to draw a dividing line between the Nazis and the main force that fought the Nazi's war for them in order to exonerate the latter. That's what my comment was making clear reference to (it was basically just rattling off clean Wehrmacht talking points).
There it is! The legendary both sides!
We can see by their conduct in the war that that is not the, uh, limit of their aspirations with regard to killing.
Flagrant lie. They certainly want to destroy the state of Israel to re-establish Palestine on land that was stolen from it, but they don't want to kill all the Jews in Israel, let alone the world. But pretending this is true lets you say:
Which is just lunacy. "We need to support this genocidal settler colony because otherwise we'd be tacitly supporting wiping out all the Jews on Earth". So you're using a fake threat of genocide to justify a real, ongoing genocide. Germany does the same, which is vitally important in my bringing up Israel as unambiguous evidence that Germany only engages with the superficial details of its Nazi past. The closest analogue to Nazis today is Israel, but they support Israel under the false cover of fighting bigotry and ethnic persecution.
Congrats, you did a full hasbara! I wonder if you're going to do exactly what I made fun of with the Wehrmacht too . . .
And there it is! It doesn't. fucking. matter. if the Wehrmacht soldiers "tried to avoid civilians," they were creating the material conditions for the Holocaust and all the other genocide by "merely" restricting themselves to killing the soldier of the countries they invaded (which should also be regarded as murder because they had no business invading). It's not a more moral position, it is a way of avoiding confronting the immorality of your position. It doesn't matter if they pulled the trigger on the trainloads of slaughtered civilians, it was because of their violent destruction of the various states that they (the SS, etc.) were able to carry out the slaughter in the first place!
So forgive me if I'm not moved by "they could be shot" when they'd merely be reducing themselves to a position that is still probably more favorable than the position a Jew was in. There has long been a history of means to escape the draft depending on your level of desperation, from escaping the country (surely with a bit less difficulty, I might add) through the various means Jews used to escape, to getting into an "accident" that broke a leg or caused some other injury that left them unfit for the military. Moreover, there is the arguably much more viable alternative of defecting after you are drafted and reach the front, because you have people happy to receive you and protect you with arms right over there. Some Wehrmacht did, in fact, defect, and deserve credit if they did so expediently on not merely when they understood the Nazi war machine was dying, but most did not defect at all.
Ah, so fascists
Ah, so more fascists
Hitler didn't cast a magic spell on the German people, contrary to the liberal portrayal of him (on the one hand to cover for fascism growing out of capitalism, on the other to cover for the inadequate (or sometimes just absent) denazification of the West), brainwashing does not exist, as our friends in the CIA proved extensively with the failures of MKULTRA. People are responsible for their own actions, and we can talk about mitigating or aggravating factors, but mitigation does not actually overturn a charge.
So literally what my initial jab was talking about.
No it isn't. The myth was not created by the bizarrely sentimental descendants of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, it was created by Nazis and Nazi collaborators (and Americans, it turns out). You'll get a better summary than I can provide here.
If it's a criminal war, helping to execute it makes you an accomplice. During the Vietnam War, if you didn't get out of the draft and were brought to the front, if you were just a smol bean who focused on killing Viet Cong and left the slaughter and rape of the villagers in the village you just rendered defenseless to the other soldiers, you're a criminal and should be regarded as such. There was no shortage of soldiers doing the right thing (not always for the right reason, but who cares?) of fragging their officers, and others taking other sabotage actions. All soldiers at the fronts of criminal wars should be held to the same standard because it's the only one that makes sense.
Goddamn.
I thought about replying to the wall of text that was entirely lies but just got tired at the thought.
Well done.
To even be citing this, you must know that it is out of date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter
I obviously object to antisemitism in the old charter, but that's a significant part of why the new charter was introduced.
The rhetoric of the old charter is also misleading, because Palestinian Jews have been existing openly in Palestine from the time of the Nakba to the present day. Hamas has not been perpetrating a Holocaust within Palestine, though clearly antisemitism in the population is a problem and the old charter is both an symptom and a cause of it, but Hamas has never actually been eradicatory.
Furthermore, even if they were, that still doesn't justify a genocidal settler-colony's existence! Opposing the slaughter of a people whose main military opposition to that slaughter -- which exists entirely to oppose that slaughter -- is antisemitic is not an endorsement of antisemitism! That's a completely unhinged position!
If Germany was so fucking devoted to Jewish people, it would take in the population that wishes to flee what was formerly Israel. Palestinians being allowed to live without colonization is not antisemitism. But Germany isn't devoted to Jewish people. Like Israel itself, it seeks to weaponize the memory of the Holocaust to provide cover for vicious imperialism.
This is just nonsense, as evidenced by the high number of defectors. There are so many problems with this pat syllogism that it's hard to deconstruct, but let's start with that military fronts mostly don't exist in a state of being imminently about to shift to another location [i.e. "winning" or "losing" from whichever perspective]. They spend most of their time with at least a shaky level of stability. Then, once you get to the enemy encampment to surrender, you don't just sit on your hands until the front shifts, you'll be taken to an encampment away from the front in some kind of provisional detention and, depending on various circumstances, placed either in a POW camp or assigned a position in the enemy military. It's a completely viable strategy that can hardly be said to be more dangerous than fighting a war for years.
But people did do otherwise, and so many did that it was a substantial factor in the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging#U.S._Forces_in_Vietnam
You've almost got it. You can also defend other countries, there's no nationalist slant to what I'm saying. With that provision, yes, many, many soldiers are accomplices to terrible crime, though few fit this description as gravely as the Wehrmacht.
The counter-invasion of Germany was defensive, especially for the Soviets, who faced extermination at the hands of the Nazis, so that's a bunk example. It's like calling tackling a shooter an act of aggression. No, they have demonstrated that they want to use their military force to destroy you, so it is necessary to your existence that you destroy their military force.