Posts by Rich Lock
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Just interested in how climate change can be linked to volcanes
I am aware that volcanoes can change the climate but the other way round or are you thinking of the raising of the sea levelWhat exactly are you getting at with the climate change, out of curiosity?
I believe what Andre is getting at is the recent research which suggests that climate change and the warming of the seas and atmosphere is having an effect on the earth's tectonic plates.
One relevant link from a quick google search here.
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I've never been totally convinced that, based on what they knew at the time, Munich was such a major miscalculation on the part of the British government and should not be used a reason to subtract from that sense of national chest puffery, as it often is.
Not so sure about this. A few weeks ago I probably would have agreed with you, but I've been reading a lot recently about the Spanish Civil War, including the actions (or lack thereof) of the secondary players (UK, France, etc).
Chamberlain's Italian ambassador, Lord Perth, was described by the Italians as 'a genuine convert [to fascism]'. Chamberlain himself corresponded directly to Mussolini in very friendly terms during the course of the war. and he also used his sister-in law, Lady Chamberlain, as a personal envoy, despite the fact she openly and proudly wore fascist badges and insignia.
If we take a slightly longer view than just the run-up to WW2, I'm beginning to think rather less sympathetically to Chamberlain and his appeasement strategies.
How does the cliche go? Do the same thing over and over and expect a different result?
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generally those branches of the military weren't involved in atrocities against civilians
During the fall of France in 1940, Luftwaffe planes deliberately bombed and strafed columns of civilian refugees. It was a cold and calculated decision made by their commanders, the rationale being that the additional disorder and panic this caused would add to the disruption of Allied military activities on the ground.
They got it back in spades when the Russians advanced into Germany, though. The Red air force caused quite horrific casualties amongst German refugees being evacuated from the Baltic ports.
But for all that, who knows what any of us would've done if we were in such a position. It's very hard to pass judgement
As you say, I don't think the pressure felt by individuals living in a fully militarized totalitarian state should be underestimated.
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I was responding to a person saying a KKK party would only be making fun of rednecks
Kyle, that would be me.
But the point I was making was in response to someone else, who more or less said that it [the lincoln party] wasn't a big deal and they couldn't really see what the problem was.
I was hunting for an appropriate example that I thought might demonstate that it couldn't be dismissed that easily.
In Germany that only the extreme right would wear Nazi gear
Well, not in public they wouldn't. Because it's illegal.
And it's probably worth noting that what the Lincoln students did would have been illegal in Germany, and it isn't here.
Legally, they did nothing wrong. But it was exceptionally poor taste. They either didn't really know how poor, or they didn't care. Both of these options are troubling.
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Man-Woman is crazy? He/she's worth an infinite number of Mengeles
Agreed. So let's say merely mildly eccentric.
And much more than that, they remained the judges, police, elected representatives, civil servants, miltary and industrialists of Germany, especially in the west. De-Nazification was largely a fiction after an initial rush. Simply put, the Allies couldn't have run the country without them so a blind eye was increasingly turned.
Yes. but thinking about it, it's hard to see what else the allies could have done? Try large percentages of the population for war crimes? Put them all in jail?
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new neo-nazi movements in the US were largely funded by older nazis who were still living out their lives as "ordinary, decent" citizens in West Germany.
Crap. That should have read new neo-nazi movements in Germany
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Is it too late to write in appreciation of this post? It's all very well put and one cannot but enthusiastically agree.
And a very belated thank you from me, too, Anke
Except that many (most?) Nazis were fairly quickly rehabilitated after WW2, and even those who were jailed were mostly out and often in positions of power and authority from the 1950s onwards. Most camp guards died peacefully in their beds in the 60s-90s.
This does trouble me. The way so many committed nazi's were spirited away to a new life in the US, for example, to work on the space program. Effectively they were given a free pass.
It's also clear from the reading I've done that the new neo-nazi movements in the US were largely funded by older nazis who were still living out their lives as "ordinary, decent" citizens in West Germany.
Thinking about Mengele escaping scott-free is still enough to raise my blood pressure seveal degrees.
However, the entity of the German State has made long-term and on-going efforts to rehabilitate itself, even if quite a few of it's citizens don't want to go along with it.
Japan may not have apologised as verbally as they should but they have as a nation spent vast sums in many of the formerly occupied Asian territories by way of reparations and still do. They have, for example, completely rebuilt the washed away beaches of the parts of Bali where they landed in 1942, at no cost to the island
I did not know that. Thank you.
Nice Swastikas
Oh, you want swastika redemption? Then allow me to
show you the crazy.In my soul's upward flight, I had entered the womb of the sacred. This inner light was a swastika of creative energy -- the source of all life! This is how I began my lifelong search for the historic truth about the swastika and my journey to detoxify it from the sins of the Nazis -- my journey to re-sanctify it. Because , if there was an image that represented the gods for me from this point on it was the swastika. Yes, I choked big time on it because I was a little boy during the war and some of my Polish relatives were in Auschwitz. They were going crazy because I was telling them that this hated swastika which had killed millions of people was a sacred symbol for God.
My dreams were my guide:
A radiant holy man showed me glowing symbols of the Eternal. One of them was a swastika. He said, "Take this as your sign and redeem it so that it will strike love in all hearts that behold it." He then marked a white swastika on my throat with his finger so that I would be able to speak the truth about it. I choked, as I knew what hatred was stricken in all hearts by this sign and what an impossible task lay before me! This unleashed a flood of swastika dreams, hundreds of playful swastika dreams. I thought of the torture, the racism, and the cruelty of the Nazis which looking at the swastika invoked in me. But my dreams insisted on calling the swastika "Angel Power" in reference to its spiritual meaning: I went upstairs to an art studio. All the woman's paintings were nude self-portraits in a pose imitating a Swastika.
Um, yeah...
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Ridiculing, debasing, and making powerless objects of humour of Nazi regalia is the surest sign I can think of that their defeat was total.
The risk is that in doing so, you trivialise the horror associated with it.
And as has been pointed out several times in this thread, there were plenty of participants dressed in concentration camp prisoner outfits (oh, my sides! Stop it, you're killing me!).
I'm quite happy to laugh at someone caricaturing a self-important nazi fool like Goering, if it is quite clear that the intention is caricature and mockery, and not just because the tittering imbecile in the uniform thinks he can get a cheap rise out of someone.
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For most of us here, the War is something that happened to our parents' or grandparents' generation. For today's Lincoln students, it is one further generation removed, and that extra generation makes all the difference in the world.
More or less the point I was going to make. We're on the cusp of this part of history passing out of being 'living' history, to 'not living' history.
But as Danielle has pointed out, the peculiarly horrifying and vile thing about the holocaust was the way it was so efficiently industrialised on such a mass scale.
That is why is deserves to be remembered in all it's horror, and not trivialised as part of some infantile shock party.
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Raymond, focussing on the omissions in the apology and reparation suite is to miss the broader point that the German state as a whole has, for the last 60-odd years, made huge and ongoing efforts to make amends for, and come to terms with, the evil acts of it's citizens. And, not incidentally, make sure it never happens again.
That was my point.
In contrast, Japan has been heavily criticised for it's ongoing failure to satisfactorily acknowledge any culpability. But still doesn't receive half the crap that the Germans do.
It is my impression that Austrian culture, unlike German, is still distinctly and overtly anti-semitic in places
The Austrians, to a large extent, have managed to convince themselves that it was their German neighbours who were to blame for that unpleasant and distasteful business. So they're just as much victims as anyone else, y'see?
They've managed to side-step the national soul-searching that Germany has had to carry out, and so there are still some really nasty characters in Austrian Nationalist politics.
I highly recommend the book 'Fuhrer-Ex' to anyone who is interested in German/Austrian history and culture before, on and around the time of the fall of the Berlin wall.
Written by a guy who grew up in Communist East Germany, where guilt for WW2 was force-fed to children growing up, along with totalitarian communist philosophy. Naturally the two became indistingushable. So natually when the guy rebelled, he became a neo-nazi in the new unified Germany, until he came to his senses, realised what a load of crap it all was, and left the country.