1914-18 : The Great Slaughter - Challenging A Year Of Myth Making.

[co-op]

Again, I see your point. The difference I would note is that the things the Armenians had done to the Kurds were physical. While the things the Jews had allegedly done to the Germans were metaphysical or (which comes to the same thing) "financial."

But then again the moral difference is that the former things were real and the latter unreal. The Nazis' inability to tell reality from unreality compounds their crimes rather than excuses them.

But from a Nazi point of view the crimes of the jews (being metaphysical) were worse, since part of the philosophical point of Nazism was to reject materialism in favour of idealism. The jews polluted the ideal of purity - and there was good evidence that they did this quite systematically (if you were a Nazi).

I mean they swung for it, but even though I agree with the verdict it's obviously victors justice.

 

[ViolentPanda]

The 'evacuation' of Germans from East of the Elbe is the largest ethnic cleansing in history; between 10-12 million iirc.

IIRC Gita Sereny reckoned that if you counted those who died in the resettlement camps after expulsion, as well as those who died en route, the death count would be about a million higher than is generally recognised.

 

[stowpirate]

I mean real communism not some fuckin stalinist/state capitalist nightmare.

Stalin the fascist dictator destroyed the true meaning of communism?

 

[frogwoman]

Stalin the fascist dictator destroyed the true meaning of communism?

i don't think he was a fascist although there were similarities between his regime and fascism (there are similarities between neoliberal capitalism and fascism as well but it's not fascist). my point was about north korea. and i also don't think he destroyed the meaning of communism. people like to blame it all on him but it was earlier than that.

 

[Pickman's model]

i don't think he was a fascist although there were similarities between his regime and fascism (there are similarities between neoliberal capitalism and fascism as well but it's not fascist). my point was about north korea. and i also don't think he destroyed the meaning of communism. people like to blame it all on him but it was earlier than that.

=> lenin

 

[frogwoman]

=> lenin

well yeah.

 

[Hocus Eye.]

well yeah.

Doesn't anyone want to make a bid for Trotsky in this diversion?

 

[stowpirate]

Lenin had a problem in trying to please all involved ?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Otherwise I'm going to call Game Over on this one.

Go ahead. You aren't going to ever admit anything different here.

Doesn't change the fact of the genocide against the Armenians.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Excerpt from the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of Genocide

"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm

It seems to me you're confusing the terms 'genocide' and 'Holocaust'.

 

[Pickman's model]

http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm

It seems to me you're confusing the terms 'genocide' and 'Holocaust'.

very easy for the academic to confuse.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

on a grim side note I read that the katyn masacre was carried out by one man, shooting people one by one all day. Apparently he used to cry to his grandmother after work 'I don't know if what I'm doing is right'

ffs

Not true.

Polish officers were actually killed in more than one location. Some were killed at the NKVD prison at Kalinin. They were shot individually in the neck while two other NKVD soldiers held their arms. The officers held at Kozel'sk were taken in batches of several hundred to Gniazdovo station and then bused to Katyn, where they were shot en masse and put in mass graves. Around the same time, Polish officers were being killed in Kiev, Kharkov and Kerson. 18,000 prisoners were killed, of which 10,500 were ethnic Poles. Burial sites are still being discovered.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Sioux tragedies .

What is the 'Sioux tragedy'?

The estimates of the reduction in the aboriginal population in the Americas from pre-contact populations to the aboriginal population in 1900, varies from 90 - 99% reduction.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

You bet. In fact I would argue that the Nazi Holocaust is an indictment of science in general. But not here.

How about the development of the Gatling gun, and its role in the killing of aboriginal Americans?

 

[phildwyer]

How about the development of the Gatling gun, and its role in the killing of aboriginal Americans?

We did the thing that he projected,
The caravan grew disaffected,
And Sin and I consulted ;
Blood understood the native mind.
He said : " We must be firm but kind."
A mutiny resulted.
I never shall forget the way
That Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath :
"Whatever happens we have got
The Gatling Gun, and they have not."

 

[butchersapron]

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

We did the thing that he projected,
The caravan grew disaffected,
And Sin and I consulted ;
Blood understood the native mind.
He said : " We must be firm but kind."
A mutiny resulted.
I never shall forget the way
That Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath :
"Whatever happens we have got
The Gatling Gun, and they have not."

'Maxim Gun'

 

[phildwyer]

'Maxim Gun'

I should have known you'd be too sharp.

Are you a Belloc fan then? I loves him I does.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I should have known you'd be too sharp.

Are you a Belloc fan then? I loves him I does.

When George's grandmamma was told
That George had been as good as gold
She promised in the afternoon...

I recited it at the schools competition in I think Grade 5...

 

[Pickman's model]

I should have known you'd be too sharp.

Are you a Belloc fan then? I loves him I does.

a fan of right wingers. i thought as much.

 

[phildwyer]

a fan of right wingers. i thought as much.

He was not a right-winger, fool.

You are though.

 

[phildwyer]

When George's grandmamma was told
That George had been as good as gold
She promised in the afternoon...

I recited it at the schools competition in I think Grade 5...

Always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

There must be something to that whole 'young minds are fertile for learning' thing. I can still recite most of it from memory.

 

[frogwoman]

I should have known you'd be too sharp.

Are you a Belloc fan then? I loves him I does.

No he was a cunt,did some funny poems though

 

[phildwyer]

No he was a cunt,did some funny poems though

Most good poets are wankers.

 

[Pickman's model]

He was not a right-winger, fool.

You are though.

the problems with you are a) you're full of shit; b) you're full of fail & c) you're easily caught out. from the oxford dnb article on belloc:

Belloc entered the post-war period ‘an unhappy and a disappointed man’, in Morton's words (Morton, 118); to his existing resentments were added disgust with public affairs and sorrow at personal losses. Two books from the 1920s develop some of his basic ideas. Europe and the Faith (1920) sets out a mythologized reading of European history: true civilization has been preserved by the Latin Catholic nations as the legacy of Rome, with France the senior partner; Belloc is hostile to the protestant nations and ignores the Orthodox ones. The Roman Catholic church has continued and transformed the Roman empire; he argues ‘that the Catholic Church which accepted it in its maturity caused it to survive, and was, in that origin of Europe, and has since remained, the soul of our Western civilization’ (p. 163). England, which Belloc loved, was a special case; it had been a province of the empire but was lost to the barbarians; then it was redeemed by a thousand years of communion with Christian Rome. Europe and the Faith is a work of personal mythmaking, written with passion and energy, rather than of accurate historiography.

In The Jews (1922) Belloc argues that the Jews are an essentially alien people who cannot be successfully assimilated in Christian societies; he refers to the Jews with respect and even admiration and denies that he is antisemitic. There is no doubt, though, that that was the case, as is evident from his novels and references in his essays and verse. He rejects any suggestion of persecuting or expelling the Jews and proposes that they should be recognized as a special community, with the rights and responsibilities of resident foreigners; this is, in effect, an extension of the ancient institution of the ghetto. Despite its conciliatory tone, the book is offensive as well as unconvincing; it reflects not just personal prejudice but Belloc's adherence to the attitudes of the French right, evident in his lifelong belief in the guilt of Dreyfus. The deepest cause of his antisemitism seems to have been the ancient Christian hostility to the Jews as deicides.

Belloc's qualities as a writer are much more happily expressed in two other books of the 1920s. The Cruise of the ‘Nona’ (1925) is in the relaxed, digressive vein of travel writing first evident in The Path to Rome. It recalls a voyage which he made round the coast of England in his small boat on the eve of war in 1914. Belinda (1928) is a romantic novella subtitled ‘A Tale of Affection in Youth and Age’; it has a fairy-tale setting in early Victorian England and is written in a sparkling pastiche of the minor fiction of the period. It possesses a delicate charm and tenderness, and is quite unlike most of his writing.

 

[frogwoman]

Most good poets are wankers.

I got given one of his books as a child, it was funny but disturbing.

 

[phildwyer]

the problems with you are a) you're full of shit; b) you're full of fail & c) you're easily caught out. from the oxford dnb article on belloc

Where does it say he was a right-winger, fool?

 

[phildwyer]

I got given one of his books as a child, it was funny but disturbing.

Funny because disturbing.

 

[frogwoman]

He was a proper cunt. He was part of some society specifically set up to hate Jews.