Rest home for the wicked (Canada allows many ex-Nazis living in the country to live in "peace")

Next theyll start putting up the racists here from the KKK, NAACP, LaRaza et.al.

I certainly don’t dispute that the Allies may have committed unlawful acts. Hiroshima I know is a touchy topic here, but some may argue that incinerating civilians was not lawful. Although since learning recently that the Japanese had been working to develop their own A-bomb, America’s rush to finish it seems a lot easier to defend. The flames of Dresden was not a pretty entry into the war either – but one could argue the Germans bear collective guilt for allowing members of their citizenry to fall under state persecution – not only allowing it, but even rejoicing in it.

So for those that argue the tired refrain that the victors become the judge can be turned on its head. It is easy for Germans after Victory Day to claim ignorance of what was happening in their own nation; but one wonders if that wasn’t a case of the losers saying what anyone caught red handed would say to save their skins.

I understand clearly the point you and others are making on this point. And it is a great point to make. For some weird reason we have arrived in the Western World to think Fascism is bad, Socialism is good – when really they are simply factions of the same belief system. One reason this is so is that the generation that fought Hitler were largely a generation that embraced socialism. Many of them were elated when the Fascists and Communists made a pact to divide Poland. Only after Hitler’s betrayal did they come to demonize Fascism – and perhaps make their distinction between National Socialism and “pure” Socialism. So there is a anti-Fascist bias in our striving for international justice. It explains why Pinochet was destroyed, but Castro will die of old age.

I think what is particularly disgusting about Hitler’s followers is they not only sought to eliminate political opponents, as Stalin did, but were obsessed with racial purity. They followed the logical conclusion of eugenics to its very end. I admit we can argue until the cows come home who were the worse villains.

Boy are you going get in trouble. It was somewhere in the wicked land of the east. ƒº I should have paid more attention ¡V maybe it was United or Episcopalian ¡V which would make a world of sense.

We can argue until the cows come home, because Fascism, after its demise 60 years ago (and please let's not include Pinochet among Fascists) was propagandized till no end, and still is propagandized, as the ultimate evil. The lie repeated 100 times becomes the truth. No, it's gone, it was gone in 1945, while Siberian gulags lasted for another 15 years, murdering in that time as many if not more as the Nazis had done (and certainly Mao did his share of murders during the same time.) All this does not register in your or mine conscioussness as the endlessly repeated crimes of Hitler. It simply doesn't exist. So it's a matter of perceptions, individual and societal, and those have been shaped by the propagandists, many of them sympathizers, fellow travelers or paid lackeys of the Communists.

There is no argument which is more evil, there is a question why we stubbornly continue to disregard the crimes of Communism.

Communist/socialist countries are very up on class background purity (witnessed by my dad personally when he was a young boy growing up in early years of Communist People's Repiblic of China just prior to the Great Leap Forward years). The only thing it is different from the Euro snobs in places like Edwardian Britain is that it is turned upside down in favour of those who are from humbled class origin and who are not wealthy. This type of classification is, as one historian in the 1970s put it, a form of mental racism.

But no leftists in the West would seriously consider this. This is one great hypocrisy they exhibit.

I would like to learn more about Pinochet. Some regard him as a victim of a leftist international community. Nazism may not be as dead as you think. Hitler and his crews’ ideas live on in the Middle East mind unfortunately.

Today I do agree that socialism is the greatest danger, especially since it has embraced anti-Semitism as a part of its creed, and has allied with the Islamists. (The chief reason I was horrified by the movie Sum of All Fears was that the enemy was a Neo-Nazi. The premise was ridiculous if not devious)

Clearly most people, my self included, recognize the Nazi regime as inherently wicked, as were regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

I don't think the crews who dropped the A-Bombs were evil and I don't think they thought they were doing evil.

However, there were unecessary measures taken after the war in Operation Keelhaul in which about a million Russians were repatriated by the U.S. and Britain. These Russians faced death by and large, and our side knew it. Those who took part in Operation Keelhaul knew it was a terrible thing they doing and felt very guilty about it for the most part, I imagine. I think they are very comparable to German soldiers involved in deporting innocent people to concentration camps. I think the analogy is very apt. I think both the German soldiers (and Ukrainians, Latvians, etc.) AND ours did what was morally wrong in these instances. I don't think we should hunting those people because they are "evil" because they are no more evil than their American and British counterparts in these two similar crimes. To be fair, the guiltiest in Operation Keelhaul were our top commanders, and I don't think it would serve any purpose to try them post-mortem for a terrible crime that somehow they excused themselves of in their own minds. They, however, committed as serious a crime against humanity as almost all the "Nazi war criminals" being pursued today.

I feel I ought to clarify some of my thoughts on this matter.

First, I don't think we should be trying to put our own veterans who may have taken part in atrocities in WWII on trial. In the heat of battle and war, bad and morally confused decisions are made. Even though Operation Keelhaul occurred after the war ended, it could be considered to be part of the war, a terrible thing, in its own right, though it was.

The point I am trying to make about pursuing people designated by some as "Nazi war criminals" is that any crimes they may have committed were done over 60 years ago. They almost certainly didn't think they were committing crimes that they would be punished for 60 years after the fact. Their cause was wrong and evil, I believe. But that fact does not make them evil in itself.
Leaving them alone is far more just than pursuing them
because they are NOT, in my opinion, the human devils some think them to be or, in fact, necessarily particularly wicked at all.

In my lifetime I have heard from a teacher, a co-worker, and a retired Army Colonel, stories of specific atrocities committed by our guys during and after the war.

1) My high school Latin teacher told us how his commanding officer told one of his men, who had just lost his best friend in battle to take a German prisoner out for a walk. What he meant was: "I'm giving you license to kill this German in cold blood." And that's exactly what happened.

2) A retired U.S. Army Colonel told me of his brother witnessing, during Operation Keelhaul, Russian deportees breaking the glass windows of the trains they were in with their heads and then cutting their own throats on the broken glass. He said his brother felt terrible about this. But what could he do to stop the deportation of these innocent people and their ghastly fate? (See any parallels here?)

3) A co-worker of mine who served in Japan in the USAF during the Korean War told me of a U.S. G.I. who befriended, if that's the word, a Japanese family of five after the war. For some reason the father of the family said something that offended him, and he proceeded to shoot the entire family. He was punished by receiving literally lowest form of reprimand from his commanding officer for committing this appalling quintuple murder, in other words, the mildest slap on the wrist.

My point is evil acts were committed by individuals on our side and their side. I am not defending the evil policies of mass murder of the Hitler regime. I can understand how some people still want revenge, although they say and may think it's justice. What the "Nazi-hunters" are doing is wrong, though, and they should cease and desist in committing the cruel and incredibly vindictive (and short-sighted) campaign they are on.

I hope this gets my point across a little better.

I don't think we or at least object to what you are saying. If the fellow in question was a mere soldier, that is different. But if was a concentration camp director, then he is a criminal. If he is in the same league as say Goring or Goebells then he has escaped justice for 60 years. For example, the scientists who conducted experiments on the aged and infirm should have seen justice. Contrary to what many believe, the majority of these scientists were more than eager in the 1930s to conduct such experiments - no one had to force their hand.