this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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The worst maker mistake humanity has ever made was not killing every nazi after ww2.
I've gotten some nasty responses to that one lol
But I'm fucking right
I have a similar one for our country - we were occupied by Soviets and to this day I fucking hate that the communist party wasn't outlawed after revolution. They tortured people for fuck's sake. And the even sadder part is that it took 30 years after revolution for the communist party to not have any presence in the parliament - the last elections were the first where they didn't gain any seat.
Yeah same with east Germany, we should have made the commies illigal and at least put them in prison. (our Revolution was peaceful)
May I ask which country?
Czechia.
Cool. I used to live in Brno (although I am Norwegian). I had a coworker from Praha who used to curse commies on a daily basis when we worked offshore together. "What kind of asshole party man designed this commie piece of shit??!". He grew up in the 80's.
Heh, lived there as well for a while! Yep, commie hatred is huge here. Especially because they fucked up so much for us. Throughout centuries we were part of the west, one of the most innovative countries in the world and one of the richest! Then decades of occupation by those fuckers (the previous occupation by Nazi Germany didn't help as well, thank you all the countries who sold us over because that would definitely stop Hitler from going further!) and suddenly everyone calls us eastern, we're far from our former prosperity and have basically become a factory for Germany. I'm a little salty about that.
Mate, you're looking for approval from westerners by kicking ~~down~~ east. You internalized the whole racial hierarchy some imperial fucks invented with them on top, and you're trying to climb it.
It's not a made up hierarchy and I didn't internalize anything - I agree with the hierarchy! Soviets were in the wrong, they illegally occupied many, many countries. If we disagree on this simple fact, we have nothing further to discuss. If we agree, then there is a logical conclusion: everyone, who supported them was in the wrong as well.
And as much as I hate to admit it, they would've never been so successful here if we didn't welcome them. I think it's kinda understandable - we were torn by war and our western allies has fucked us over to save their asses (which they didn't in the end and honestly that, for me, is the only good thing about the war) and suddenly a big Slavic country comes and says they will help us, unlike those big bad guys that fucked us. While I personally would be looking for the catch were I alive back then, I understand that people just wanted peace.
Anyway, that was kinda detour, the fact remains that we welcomed them, so we we're correctly labeled as the "eastern bloc" for that. What pisses me off about it is that we were part of the western culture with western values for centuries, while we were part of the eastern bloc for measly 23 years (and most of the time it was involuntary when people found out that there indeed was a catch with the "brotherly help").
We were fucked by west and then fucked by east, truly a wonderful country to live in.
This is fucking gold.
Do you have any actual argument?
You just said you agree with the Nazis racial hierarchy. Idk if you’re aware of this.
Sure, gay hitler 420, sure.
Wouldn’t this be a perfect time to trust an expert opinion?
Then comes the question who was a nazi? And who just feard them and not spoke up? Look at Russia or China, propaganda is also very much a problem, would you kill a 19 year old because he was in SS after all his life he was told thats a good thing?
I agree that Nazis are absolute garbage, but you can't justify a genocide with a genocide, same with Japan after WW2 (and they did worse stuff)
Also, whats with the "Commies" from USSR? They where basically the same level of evil. (and yes the Holodomor was a genocide and not the only thing they did)
Well, killing all Nazis isn't genocide, it's just mass murder.
And it isn't about a scale of how bad various regimes have been before or since.
And yes, that's the entire thing. They should have killed every last SS, Gestapo, every brown shirt and soldier, no matter how young. The motivation of the victims of killing every nazi wouldn't matter because the point is to eradicate every last one of them, and there's no way to prove they didn't believe in what they were doing other than their actions. There weren't very many Schindlers that showed by their actions that they actively resisted from the inside. And if it took their deaths to achieve the goal, then it was a mistake to not do it then.
TBH, despite being against the death penalty for several reasons, I'm worried we might be faced with such a decision again in my lifetime because they didn't do it then.
Obviously, eradicating the nazis wouldn't prevent the kind of insanity and hatred that exists as part of the human mind. It would have changed the face of that hatred though, and it would have sent the message that some things will not be forgiven or forgotten. It would have meant less rallying points, less bullshit. And it would have set the precedent that if humans behave like that, they can be put down like a rabid animal to protect the rest of us.
Again, I'm aware of exactly how ugly this opinion is. I do not like looking at the world and thinking that there wasn't enough death done back then. I do not like looking at the world now and wondering when it is going to happen again. But it's an ugly fucking world, and they're coming back. They're coming back exactly the same way they did before because they were allowed to survive.
I think you are kinda insane, at the wars end most German soldiers where literally underage, there is no justice in killing them, not the smallest bit.
At the end of the war literal children were being drafted. Are you seriously arguing that we should kill a 13 year old because he got a threatening letter and followed it's instructions?
Ahh, I'm not arguing we, as in humanity today, should do anything yet.
I'm saying that the people alive and in charge at the time made a mistake in not wiping out every nazi they could find.
Age is no barrier to such things at all. A 13 year old can be tried as an adult in many places for extreme crimes. Child soldiers have been sent to war for millennia, and still are today. Children are quite capable of committing atrocities. I wouldn't want to do it, I wouldn't want to see it get that far. But it was a mistake not to go as far as necessary to eradicate anyone that served the nazis because there's absolutely no way other than actions to prove what the individuals believed, and even that has flaws.
How many children had already been killed? I'm not even talking about by the nazis. Look up the Dresden fire bombing. Plenty of children were burnt to ash there. Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The are just the famous ones. The allies had already killed children of all ages by the end of the war. Pretending that there's a moral difference between that and executing them is not useful. Executions would even be arguably less horrible since it would only target those that were in the armed forces.
But what good would it have done? Those boys were victims themselves.
Well, this discussion has been less contentious than in the past, so I've actually had a chance to cover this.
Before I go copy/pasting things already covered, would it be too much to ask that you give a quick scroll through the thread and see if any of that changes your question, or if there's follow ups that you might have? It would help streamline the thread overall if there's not a lot of repeats.
I read the whole thread and didn’t see a single argument about what good would have come from that. I think you’re looking at this from a very removed point of view that lets you forget the actual individuals involved. I’m German. Let me introduce you to my grandparents and let’s see how they would’ve fared under your proposed processing:
Grandpa A was drafted at the end of the war, he was 13. He didn’t want to be there and plotted a “genius” plan with his two buddies two lie to his general about a super important mission from the general next town and run off. He probably only survived that because his general wasn’t in the mood to shoot him on the spot.
Grandma B wasn’t drafted obviously, she worked in (basically) social services while WWII because she actually was a supporter of the Nazi party and felt like that’s how she could do her part. She didn’t commit any atrocities, probably simply because as a woman she never got anywhere close to the front.
Grandpa C was a party member. He didn’t want to join at first – we still own a news paper page where he (and a few others) were openly shamed for refusing to join party and front. After his brother, who had turned down an SS position, was transferred to an extra risky combat unit as cannon fodder and died on his second day, he caved. I can only assume that, as a soldier, he actively participated in the fighting. He tried to disobey where easily possible, but he didn’t desert. When his general told him to “take care” of a woman he abused, he brought her away from the front, pointed her to the nearest town and told her to flee.
Grandma D didn’t do any of that, but she was proudly engaged to a Hitler Youth leader (who thankfully died, so she met my grandpa after the war). While WWII she absolutely was a Nazi, but she didn’t actively do anything that would mark her as such. She got into a personal crisis after the war when she stopped lying to herself about this horrible system she had supported. Until the day she died she was convinced she would go to hell.
Killing every active supporter, as you suggested, would have both my grandpas executed, although they both condemned what was happening and, limited by their sparce abilities to do so, tried to disobey. My grandmas would’ve ironically been spared, even though they were (when it comes to their attitude) more Nazis than my grandpas. Neither of the four were Nazis at later points in their life, I’d like to add. And the generation after them would have never existed - an anti-nationalistic, anti-patriotic, highly political, highly critical and socially active family, influenced by traumatized men and rueful women.
So it would have achieved nothing. I'd argue the world would be even worse if that would have been humanity's answer to WWII back then.
The holodomor as it is reported in the West appears to be a myth. There was a widespread famine where more Kazakhs and Russians died than Ukrainians, and the USSR did try to send Ukraine provisions but not enough. Also there is under reporting in the West of kulaks burning their fields instead of giving them up to the govt. Stalin even thought the West might have been responsible but that seems to just be Stalin being Stalin.
That's not exactly a genocide, just more incompetence as usual.
The man whose work is most often cited has been refuted by his own wife and the initial publishing came with doctored photos that he removed when they were called out.
That's a very Tankie opinion...
But killing every Nazi wouldn’t have killed the ideology.
That isn't the point of it.
What would the point be then?
You ever hear of the idea of some act being a warning to others?
If you wipe out all known nazis, the rest of them are now aware of the price of their practices. You can then freely stomp them out as they arise, like the cockroaches they are.
No, not like roaches, because roaches have a role in a healthy ecosystem (when it isn't an invasive species). Nazis are a fucking cancer. You eradicate cancer, you nuke it, poison or, and cut it out, you don't tolerate it. Because if you do, it grows and spreads and kills everything else.
No... to kill the ideology (of which nazism was merely one expression), you have to dismantle the thing nazism (and other right-wing ideologies) served.
Right-wing ideology exists for one reason and one reason only - to protect the power and privilege of elite establishments. You have to kill that which it serves.
ah yes "nazis are bad" is very unpopular
"Nazis are bad" is not unpopular.
"We should have systemically hunted down and killed every member of a political party" is unpopular, not because of the sentiment, but because actually doing so generally goes against the foundational beliefs of most modern societies.
No, that's not unpopular.
Saying that every single Nazi should have been killed is.
Every nazi party member, every soldier, every sympathizer, everywhere in the world.
That would have included Nazi supporters in the US, all the nazi scientists that got a clean slate by agreeing to work for the allies after the war, every single member of their armed forces from the top to the bottom, and every civilian that worked for them voluntarily. That's the only way to come close to eradicating something like what the Nazi are. You can't let a single one survive to pass on their beliefs, so you end up killing people that didn't believe in it as a side effect.
That's why it's an unpopular statement.
It would have also included a fuckton of people who had nothing to do with naziism but were disliked by someone with the power to decide who was a Nazi. And probably also a whole separate fuckton of people who fell into some bucket that was arbitrarily "close enough" to naziism when the original Nazis were running out. Etc etc
Yeah, thats actually a good point. Its really abusable. Basically just witch hunts.
When the quest to eradicate Nazis turns the eradicator into something at least asbad as the Nazis themselves...
There were so many people, even children, drafted and forced to serve the Nazis, either in the military or in other capacities. Many of which returned as broken, disabled and traumatized shadows of themselves. Genociding them for being abused by the Nazis would seriously not be better than what the Nazis did.
(Disclaimer: I am totally not defending Nazis or Neonazis here. But history is complicated and messy and there where millions of people who just did what they were told out of fear of their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. Also, history is largely written by the winners. Had the Nazis won the war, then we would now talk about the concentration camps for Japanese people in the US, and about the gulags. I wish that we could get rid of Nazis, but genocide cannot be fought by genocide and you cannot fight fascists by becoming one.)
Yeah that’s the problem with systematically killing tens of millions of people, sure.
Because sometimes some non-bad people get caught in the death machine that would otherwise be no problem.
/s
Yup, that's why people dislike the opinion. I still think not doing it was a bad mistake.
In the end not really that much better than the Nazis.
Yup, I agree.
What would that achieve though. You can kill people but not an idea, they'd just be made martyrs for the inevitable Nazis that pop up again.
Mostly fucking right for sure.
With some rare exceptions of course (e.g. Oskar Schindler), every single Nazi member either contributed to or wilfully ignored the industrial deathmachines in the concentration camps. Let those who profiteered work in the same conditions as a slave for a few years and let those that were actively involved (e.g. the camp guards, developers, and all high level party members) be gassed.
How do you feel about the people who were technically nazies because of the peer pressure, social environment etc? They probably wouldn’t have been into any of that stuff if only they had been born 50 years later.
Did they participate in the party and government?
If so, they were nazis
Or, you know, maybe the US just shouldn't have filled West Germany's intelligence and security services with them. Just a thought.
No you’re not lol that would have made us not any better than nazis
My homie, what "we" do you mean? The allied nations? They all had sympathizers to some degree or another. Humanity? I think it should be self evident that humanity was (and is) full of that kind of person.
We have never been better than nazis because we is completely capable of spawning that kind of thing at any time.
The allies were only better in comparison.