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Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

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Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Old Pio said:
You're right about the west dragging its feet on Jewish emigres, the tragedy of the St. Louis comes to mind.We had our own issues with anti-semitism in those days, albeit not the lethal maniacal kind we saw in the Reich. And while I'm certain you didn't intend to blame the west for lack of prescience when it comes to the Holocaust, some might not understand about how accurate hindsight is. After all, the Final Solution and the Wannsee Conference that put it in motion, was far in the future.
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I completely agree that we tend to judge in hindsight rather than by the evidence that was available at the time -- that is one of the diseases of Currentism. But in this particular case... I dunno, Mein Kampf was published in 1925, so all the evidence one would need was there, and not subtly put forward. Perhaps the West is somewhat exonerated because they literally couldn't believe those psychopaths actually meant it. But as you point out, to let the Jews come "flooding" into the US would have provoked easily exploitable narratives about The Menacing Other. As so often happens, the "leaders" followed and didn't stand by our true values.

Or to put it another way, if Iran occupied Israel tomorrow, I'd hope we'd all agree to let all the Jews emigrate here, immediately, no boarding pass required. And we probably would. But if the Sunnis decided to rid the world of the Shiites once and for all, try selling that in Peoria.
 
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Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Kepler said:
I completely agree that we tend to judge in hindsight rather than by the evidence that was available at the time -- that is one of the diseases of Currentism. But in this particular case... I dunno, Mein Kampf was published in 1925, so all the evidence one would need was there, and not subtly put forward. Perhaps the West is somewhat exonerated because they literally couldn't believe those psychopaths actually meant it. But as you point out, to let the Jews come "flooding" into the US would have provoked easily exploitable narratives about The Menacing Other. As so often happens, the "leaders" followed and didn't stand by our true values.

Or to put it another way, if Iran occupied Israel tomorrow, I'd hope we'd all agree to let all the Jews emigrate here, immediately, no boarding pass required. And we probably would. But if the Sunnis decided to rid the world of the Shiites once and for all, try selling that in Peoria.
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Iran's plans do not involve "occupying" Israel, IMHO. Their plans involve picking through the rubble looking for survivors to execute. Mein Kampf left out the part about industrializing death, to the extent that trains needed to get troops and supplies to the Russian front were diverted instead to the vital work of murdering Jews. And for folks who didn't read, there was the Hitler address to the Reichstag where he says (I'm paraphrasing): if the Jews are successful in plunging Europe into another war it will mean the death of the Jewish race. Well, in light of what we learned later, who could possibly misunderstand THAT?

Holocaust denial is an unpardonable intellectual sin. Did all those Jews just move away and forget to file change of address forms? They're all in Skokie or Miami Beach or on Long Island? And if, despite the overwhelming evidence of what happend then, we still have people denying it happened, who would have believed it was happening contemporaneously? As it turns out we DID know much more about it than the public was aware of. Still.
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Old Pio said:
Iran's plans do not involve "occupying" Israel, IMHO. Their plans involve picking through the rubble looking for survivors to execute. Mein Kampf left out the part about industrializing death, to the extent that trains needed to get troops and supplies to the Russian front were diverted instead to the vital work of murdering Jews. And for folks who didn't read, there was the Hitler address to the Reichstag where he says (I'm paraphrasing): if the Jews are successful in plunging Europe into another war it will mean the death of the Jewish race. Well, in light of what we learned later, who could possibly misunderstand THAT?

Holocaust denial is an unpardonable intellectual sin. Did all those Jews just move away and forget to file change of address forms? They're all in Skokie or Miami Beach or on Long Island? And if, despite the overwhelming evidence of what happend then, we still have people denying it happened, who would have believed it was happening contemporaneously? As it turns out we DID know much more about it than the public was aware of. Still.
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I don't follow this. Everybody this side of The Tehran Stand Up Comic excoriates Holocaust denial. I thought we were discussing whether there was ample evidence before the fact that the Nazis meant what they said, and weren't just stoking hatred for expedient ends, and I'm arguing that, even correcting for hindsight, there was in fact enough of a trail to establish they were in earnest, as opposed to everybody's favorite CPAC fascist drag act who is presumably only in it for the money.
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Kepler said:
I don't follow this. Everybody this side of The Tehran Stand Up Comic excoriates Holocaust denial. I thought we were discussing whether there was ample evidence before the fact that the Nazis meant what they said, and weren't just stoking hatred for expedient ends, and I'm arguing that, even correcting for hindsight, there was in fact enough of a trail to establish they were in earnest, as opposed to everybody's favorite CPAC fascist drag act who is presumably only in it for the money.
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As usual I didn't make the point clearly. Here we are a decade into the 21st century and we still have David Irving and Willis Carto and the IHR all denying the Holocaust happend. You can argue that the only people who buy into this mendacious nonsense are marginalized boobs, and you'd be mostly right. But impressionable, ignorant, young people could be victimized. Think of the (millions?) of people whose only knowledge of what happened in Dallas is the tissue of lies called "JFK"

So I'm arguing that if we haven't closed the sale on the Holocaust yet, why should we think that we could have closed it while it was happening? I just disagree that the "trail" you refer to was as unambiguous as you suggest. There was a documentary a few years ago that showed the extent to which the Holocaust WAS reported in the NYT. But not on the front page and not in screaming headlines. And so nobody much noticed.
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

I tend to agree that there was a lot of evidence out there that Hitler was heading the direction he was, though I think it's also fair to say that it would have been hard to fathom just how monstrous his campaign would become. But, as happens all too often in history, nations look past a lot of really nasty stuff going on if it suits, at the moment in their minds, more important goals to let it go. It's easy to blast those back then who made obviously very bad calls on what was going on, German motives, etc. But, in honesty, a lot of bad calls, whether through ignorance or choice, have been made since then that have allowed a lot of really bad stuff to be done to people. But, for the most part in human history, the will-power to stop such monstrosities has been slow to arise, if it does at all.
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Old Pio said:
As usual I didn't make the point clearly. Here we are a decade into the 21st century and we still have David Irving and Willis Carto and the IHR all denying the Holocaust happend. You can argue that the only people who buy into this mendacious nonsense are marginalized boobs, and you'd be mostly right. But impressionable, ignorant, young people could be victimized. Think of the (millions?) of people whose only knowledge of what happened in Dallas is the tissue of lies called "JFK"
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I think there are millions, if not hundred of millions, of young Arabs who are completely clueless about the Holocaust because they are fed a constant diet of poisonous nonsense by, oops, allies to whom we sell billions of dollars of weapons. Imagine if Fred Phelps was the official voice of Mississippi and Alabama.
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Bob Gray said:
I tend to agree that there was a lot of evidence out there that Hitler was heading the direction he was, though I think it's also fair to say that it would have been hard to fathom just how monstrous his campaign would become. But, as happens all too often in history, nations look past a lot of really nasty stuff going on if it suits, at the moment in their minds, more important goals to let it go. It's easy to blast those back then who made obviously very bad calls on what was going on, German motives, etc. But, in honesty, a lot of bad calls, whether through ignorance or choice, have been made since then that have allowed a lot of really bad stuff to be done to people. But, for the most part in human history, the will-power to stop such monstrosities has been slow to arise, if it does at all.
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QFT. Another thing is, horribly, genocides and mass exterminations aren't all that rare. They are history's number one solution to the riddle of how two different peoples can resolve a disagreement over territory to ensure lasting peace.
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Old Pio said:
But impressionable, ignorant, young people could be victimized. Think of the (millions?) of people whose only knowledge of what happened in Dallas is the tissue of lies called "JFK".
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I'm not sure there's millions of people who could sit through JFK. Let alone the impressionable young'uns.
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

5mn_Major said:
Big difference Stewart on the 'left' or pretty much any Fox or radio talk show pundit on the right. We're saying we're not sure if there was bias for Stewart...on any of these conservative talk shows, there would be no question and there's never a debate about biased interviews.
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You're not sure?
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Kepler said:
QFT. Another thing is, horribly, genocides and mass exterminations aren't all that rare. They are history's number one solution to the riddle of how two different peoples can resolve a disagreement over territory to ensure lasting peace.
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Sadly, they're not. While Stalin was starving millions of Ukranians to death, Walter Duranty of the NYT was earning Pulitzers and at the same time denying the terror famine, despite the fact that he knew he was writing lies. Sweet.

What makes the Holocaust unique, IMO, is that a modern industrial state put all of its resources to work on the problem of eliminating a race of people. Not crude camps in Siberia. Not starving them to death in Ukraine. Not murdering them in the interior of China. No, we're talking about I.G. Farben designing gas chambers and crematoria. We're talking about death factories. We're talking about a high level conference where the language and plans for genocide were refined. We're talking about experiments to determine the most efficient way to commit mass murder, since shooting the victims was "tough on the troops" We're talking about Eichmann running the railroads, to make sure the requisite number of Jews was made available to keep the gas chambers operating at maximum efficiency. We're talking about collecting and using hair, gold teeth, flesh, reading glasses, shoes, suitcases and whatever else they wanted from victims. We're talking about studies and meticulous records kept to determine the useful life of inmates, and the cost of maintaining them, how many calories it took to get so much work, before murdering them. And keeping accurate records of who was brought to the death camps and when and how long they were permitted to live before being slaughtered. And let's not forget "Dr." Mengele.

To me, we've never seen anything like it. Germany was a world leader in just about every academic endeavor, yet thousands of them participated in this abomination. Even so, Hitler "only" ranks third on the list of most successful mass murderers behind Mao and Stalin. And on a per capita basis, Pol Pot was the all time champ. It's certainly true that the end result is the same, millions of people dead, but I believe the Holocaust is uniquely evil.
 
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Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

Kepler said:
QFT. Another thing is, horribly, genocides and mass exterminations aren't all that rare. They are history's number one solution to the riddle of how two different peoples can resolve a disagreement over territory to ensure lasting peace.
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Wouldn't the treatment of native americans be one that is close to home? I think a lot of folks assume this type of stuff only happens in places with crazy dictators etc. Not sure of the exact definition of each term but I'd submit that native americans were either eliminated or marginalized and until the last 20 years were basically living in government camps.
 
Re: Obama XVII: Do You Take Your Tea Party with One Sugar or Two?

pirate said:
Wouldn't the treatment of native americans be one that is close to home? I think a lot of folks assume this type of stuff only happens in places with crazy dictators etc. Not sure of the exact definition of each term but I'd submit that native americans were either eliminated or marginalized and until the last 20 years were basically living in government camps.
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Ward Churchill anyone? Don't forget the small pox infected blankets, that's always a crowd pleaser.
 
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