Posted on 09/27/2009 5:04:44 AM PDT by J. Neil Schulman
Glad to see that you consider your own opinion and/or interpretation of scripture to have equal authority with the Son of God.
****Glad to see that you consider your own opinion and/or interpretation of scripture to have equal authority with the Son of God.****
Yes, I agree with Jesus that he is our savior. You can’t change the truth.
Disagree.
Whether modern methods were used or not makes little difference to those who are murdered.
At the height of the Nazi Empire it controlled approximately 12M soldiers. To kill 6M Jews every other soldier would have had to fire one shot.
That they used “modern methods” rather than the Roman/Mongol methods of just having the army kill everybody was largely a result of the detrimental effect using the army had on discipline and morale.
Shipping people all over Europe using transport desperately needed for military purposes was about as inefficient a murder method as can be imagined. Much simpler to just kill them where they were.
I am curious about something. Exactly why do you consider “modern methods” so much more heinous than the old-fashioned version of massacre?
I don’t agree with your assertion that everyone is looking for 100% agreement, and if they don’t get that 100% agreement, then the discussion is done.
If someone makes ten statements, each one cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. Every statement bears on every other statement, even if they are not logically related.
I may listen to Ron Paul and agree with 90% of what he says. But I won’t vote for him on the basis of that 10% that I disagree with, because that 10% disagreement reveals a basic and fundamental flaw in my eyes. Take the following example of three statements someone might make about what is wrong with America:
1.) The government spends too much.
2.) Taxes are too high.
3.) We aren’t doing enough to combat global warming.
Even though I disagree with only 33%, that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with the other 67%. If I am not interested in discussing the 67% percent, that doesn’t mean I am rejecting 100% of the premise. It means I am rejecting 33% of it.
People support various causes or candidates for various reasons. While I might or might not support someone even if they believe global warming, I won’t support someone if they think we are not paying enough taxes. However, you don’t have to look very far to see someone who might support someone who believes the inverse.
I think you are simply wrong in the conclusion you draw about contemporary debate of issues.
My wife says: "If it ain't life, then you ain't pregnant."
The Great Purge?
Of course, these people were selected for class and/or political reasons, not "racial" ones.
Somebody please explain to me why killing 6M "enemies of the people" is any less wicked than killing 6M "racial enemies of der volk."
41And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost: And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy."As far as your rationalization about appearances goes, that's just a different degree of what's seen in ethnocentrism and picture thinking:
”It gets down to the question of whether being human is something you are or something that you have become. I suspect that something akin to ethnocentrism (ontogenocentrism?) is involved here--those folks running around with sticks through their noses aren’t like us and we’re civilized, so they probably aren’t, yet. Some have said the fetus is “much more actually human after the first 12 weeks of gestation” and that it “little resembles a human being” during the first few weeks of gestation, meaning that it does not look much like, well, a post-birth body. It doesn’t look like me and I’m human, so it probably isn’t, yet.
Interesting post, the discussion will be firey....get ready for some incoming...I agree w/ #8, the Jewish Holocaust was only one of numerous such actions, most fall under Semocide, murder by mostly leftist Governments.
"Democracy is or ever has been democratic... in any iteration.."
Democracy is now has always been MOB RULE by mobsters..
Socialism is the mobsters "Protection Scam" to protect you from THEM...
Democracy CAUSES socialism..
Because Hitler vocally espoused a rival, socialist idealogy, railed against communists due to that rivalry, eventually betrayed and attacked the Soviets as a result, and the intellectual heirs of those communists have captured academia and the news media in most of the western world following WWII, writing the subsequent history and shaping popular opinion ever since.
That, and some deem class or religious belief mutable and therefore more escapable than race, as far as just who gets killed off. That somebody, in the millions or billions, gets killed off, is a given with such people. They're merely quibbling over the selection criteria.
Ugly, ain't it?
I would suspect the author is Mormon - they are the group that believes in the pre-existent soul, not the orthodox Christians.
What non-"leftist governments" were you referring to?
One interesting phenomenon is that after reading your article, all the rest of the type on the page appears incredibly tiny ... :)
Do you know what late-term abortion is? If you do, how could you not have removed that from your number 3? The only thing that keeps OB-Gyn abortionists out of jail for macerating the brain of a baby and being charged for murder is that the baby's head is in the birth canal rather than in an Isolette when the doc does his/her deed.
Most of your other stuff is great, but you really need to research the abortion thing a bit more...and I am no religious zealot, but rather a physician who has seen some of this stuff during training: THAT'S what changed my mind.
It was the application of modern technology to murder.
As long as there have been people, there has been murder, and while I agree that a person run through with a sword or having their head lopped off with a guillotine may not care about the difference between that and someone packed on a train, shipped across the continent and herded into a gas chamber, there is a difference.
It is the difference between a farmer who can slaughter three pigs a day, and a meat processing plant that leverages technology and business practices to slaughter 10,000 pigs a day.
Genocide is not new. But if you can show me where in history the techniques of mass production were employed to ensure that nothing went to waste from the murdered humans, ranging from hair to waterproof torpedoes, clothes to have the cloth recycled, spectacles to be reprocessed and human teeth for the gold in them, I would like to see it.
You make the mistake of thinking it is easier to hunt down law abiding citizens and shoot them on the in situ in front of their family, friends, neighbors and townspeople than it is to use bureaucracy to round them up and ship them to central spots for processing.
If the Nazis went to every single village and shot people, how long would it have been before that became impossible? The reason the Nazis were able to accomplish what they did on the scale they did was because the horror was largely hidden from the people they were rounding up.
I presume you know the mechanics of the mind set which are well documented in this instance of the Holocaust? That is, people did not want to believe. Even as late as 1944, there were Jews who refused to believe the Nazis were doing what they were. People who knew were ridiculed in many cases. Have you ever read “Night” by Elie Weiesel? There was a man who had escaped and made it back to his hometown. He tried to tell everyone what he had seen, and how they should all flee for their lives, but he was ridiculed, scorned and made a pariah in the town. That was in 1944.
There was a reason the Nazis did it that way, and it wasn’t that they were trying to protect the morale of their troops. It was that they didn’t want to panic the “cattle” on the way to the slaughterhouse, because a bunch of placid “cattle” walking into a building with no windows is much easier to handle than a herd of crazed cattle that have watched and smelled their brethren being slaughtered in front of their eyes.
That is why the Nazis were able to kill so many people in such a short time, that is why they did it that way. And that is why it was different.
Quite. I agree 100%.
BTW, a good many people killed by the Soviets were murdered for ethnic reasons. Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars, etc. Even the Polish officers killed at Katyn were probably murdered as much for being Poles as for being officers.
The Nazis killed roughly 12M innocents. The Commies killed roughly 100M. Yet somehow the Nazis are considered the ne plus ultra of evil while the commies largely get a pass.
The guy is a libertarian so you can't take him too seriously. Look at his home page.
In actual fact the Nazis were remarkably inefficient at killing lots of people quickly.
The Mongols routinely killed 100,000+ people in under an hour after capturing a city that had the nerve to resist them. Just distribute a few captives to each of your soldiers and on the signal everybody chops heads. Some claims are as high as 500,000, though this is probably exaggerated.
I believe Auschwitz never got much above an hourly rate of 1000.
I also disagree that rounding up the Jews for murder in their home locations would have been difficult. In most locations in Europe, unfortunately, most of the local gentiles were willing and eager to point out and even help round up the Jews.
The industrial uses Jewish resources and even bodies were put to is disturbing, of course, but surely the relevant point is that they were killed, not how they were treated after death?
You fail to convince me. Dead is dead.
The Nazis were vile beyond belief. Certainly some characteristics of their genocide were unique. They were different from those carried out by other peoples. That doesn't make them worse than other atrocities of similar scale.
The Great Purge doesn’t compare, in my opinion. It was the same thing that happened in Cambodia later, but on a comparatively smaller scale than what the Khemer Rouge did. Just a bit more efficiently, due to the existence of Soviet bureaucracy.
I think you are making the mistake of thinking about this in the same mindset of critics of hate crime legislation (which is valid in that context). It isn’t that it was was somehow worse because they were Jews. It was worse because the state bent its penchant for efficiency in every single form to the task of genocide.
In the past, orders were given (or not) to eradicate people. Kill them on the spot, get them buried if you can, use whatever means at hand to accomplish your task.
The Nazis took their purported efficiency that made their autobahns great to drive on, their trains run on time, their institutions respected world wide and cradle to grave efficiency of documentation of their citizens, and bent those efficiencies to the task of genocide.
That is what made it different. Not because they were Jews. It could have been Catholics or anyone else.
Somehow, I don’t think that convincing you is possible.
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