From "Oskar Gröning, the ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,’ Is Dead at 96" (NYT)(My post headline is a quote from a BBC journalist.)
For many years, Germany prosecuted only those suspects whose wartime actions could be proved to be directly linked to specific atrocities, a principle that emerged from a series of trials in Frankfurt in the 1960s. So sure was Mr. Gröning of his own position that he went public in 2005 with long interviews retelling the minutiae of his experiences as what he termed a tiny cog in the gears of the Final Solution....
[He told Der Spiegel in 2005] that throughout his early life, as a member of ultranationalist movements including the Hitler Youth, he had been raised to believe that Jews were Germany’s enemy within. His concerns about what he saw at Auschwitz related more to the modalities of killing than to its rationale or supposed principles....
On the first day of his trial [in 2015]... Mr. Gröning addressed the judge, Franz Kompisch, saying: “It is beyond question that I am morally complicit. This moral guilt I acknowledge here before the victims with regret and humility.” But “as concerns guilt before the law,” he added, “you must decide.”...
When the trial ended in mid-July 2015, Judge Kompisch ruled that for all his protestations, Mr. Gröning himself had taken the decision to accept “a safe desk job” at Auschwitz. “It was perhaps affected by the era, but it was not because you were unfree,” the judge said, adding that he “had freedom to think” and yet “asked to join the SS.”
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89 comments:
There are millions of socialists all over the world who are just as guilty as this guy.
There are millions more taking “safe desk jobs” at college campuses right now.
Mitchell and Webb SS are we the baddies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
The point of Lord of the Flies wasn't that kids are monsters but that they revert back to civilized order in an instant.
Another woman didn't receive an obit after this guy bumped her from the queue.
#Sexism
99 percent of people would have done the same thing as this man under the circumstances. It doesn’t matter if the victims were Jewish. People go along and keep their head down and don’t want to get involved, Jewish people included.
It takes an exceptional person to stand up to people in power. Almost all the individuals who did were killed along with their families.
The lesson of the Hilocaust is that there are very few exceptional people just as there are very few evil people.
/sarc
mccullough:
America barely avoided the Hilocaust. Most of us wake every day thanking our lucky stars for Donald Trump, who also bumped a woman from the queue.
#Sexism
/sarc
In 1994 in Rwanda, all the “never again” was exposed as the talk it has always been.
People in DC and Hollywood can’t even stand up to their colleagues who abused, harassed, and discriminated against women.
Hillary Clinton couldn’t stand up to Bill.
We see every day what human nature is like.
Most of the Socialist in America are liberal Democrats and they are only interested in controlling the masses and how they think and what they do all socialists need to be brought to their knees including Hillary Clinton who needs to be strapped in irons.
mccullough said...
In 1994 in Rwanda, all the “never again” was exposed as the talk it has always been.
Never again except in every place the leftists seize control.
South Africa is following Venezuela is following Nigeria is following Vietnam is following North Korea is following Germany...
Obviously, we despise Nazis, and some of our grandfathers actually fought the bastards in WWII. So, we have no sympathy for Mr. Groning.
Yet when he finally came to trial in Germany, [Oskar] Gröning was accused as an accomplice in the murder of some 300,000 Hungarian Jews who had been transported to Auschwitz in 1944.
However, a little perspective is in order.
WWII in Europe started when the Nazis and the Soviets made the non-aggression treaty in 1939. That treaty gave the Nazis the green light to invade Poland, from the West. The Soviets delayed their assault from the East for about 2 weeks.
In sum, the Soviets collaborated with the Nazis to start WWII (in Europe).
Let me repeat that:
The Soviets collaborated with the Nazis to start WWII (in Europe).
So Hitler and Stalin were ruthless allies.
Let me repeat that:
So Hitler and Stalin were ruthless allies.
Of course, Hitler broke the ruthless alliance by invading USSR, where 20 million died, and we supplied tons of money and materiel to help the Commies stave them off.
My point? The Communists were as evil as the Nazis, and had a large role in starting WWII.
Carry on.
[Oskar] Gröning
Homer Simpson's biological father?
His Wiki biography is interesting (NYT might cover it, but, ya know...) -
"After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning was captured by the British on 10 June 1945 when his unit surrendered. He was eventually transferred to Britain as a prisoner of war and worked as a forced labourer.
Upon his return to Germany he led a normal life, reluctant to talk about his time in Auschwitz.
However, more than 40 years later, he decided to make his activities at Auschwitz public after learning about Holocaust denial.
He openly criticised those who denied the events that he had witnessed, and the ideology to which he had subscribed. The recorded accounts he provided to the BBC, however, contributed to the decision and ability to prosecute him."
Auschwitz office staff, taking an off-site break.
Because everyone needs a break sometimes.
It takes an exceptional person to stand up to people in power. Almost all the individuals who did were killed along with their families.
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One thing I've read from a few historians is that there does not appear to be any evidence of the German military punishing soldiers who objected to being part of the Sonderkommandos (the 'death squads' executing civilians).
The decision to create the 6 main Death Camps within the German concentration camp system was based on two primary reasons:
- Lining people up and shooting people takes too long and is too expensive in manpower and ammunition
- Soldier morale was taking a big hit from seeing or participating in these actions.
Sentence commuted. How do you even haul a 94 year-old person off to prison?
JohnAnnArbor said...
Auschwitz office staff, taking an off-site break.
Nazis don't put presents under the Christmas tree. That's how you can tell.
BAG said...
“My point? The Communists were as evil as the Nazis, and had a large role in starting WWII.“
The Communists were international socialists and the Nazis were national socialists.
The national socialists have cronies run the corporations and the international socialists nationalize corporations and put Party operatives in charge. In the end the difference is semantic at most.
Socialists just end up murdering their political opponents and starving millions of people to death. It is what they do.
Cue Hannah Arendt.
Livermoron said...
It takes an exceptional person to stand up to people in power. Almost all the individuals who did were killed along with their families.
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One thing I've read from a few historians is that there does not appear to be any evidence of the German military punishing soldiers who objected to being part of the Sonderkommandos (the 'death squads' executing civilians).
I've read the same. German army officers would give orders to commit some atrocity, and uusually were obeyed, but when soldiers refused the order, they weren't punished. IIRC, this was to avoid a paper trail. Again IIRC, this fact was used to nullify the "I was only obeying orders" defense of some war criminals.
At its height, the Nazi Party had 8 million members. About 10% of Germany.
Probably the vast majority of those members were like Hugo Black, who was a member of the KKK to advance his career.
Hitler was never elected to any office. He wasn’t even a German citizen until 1932.
Natural born citizen requirement. Right to keep and bear arms.
The men who founded the US understood human nature. They are light years ahead of “world leaders” today.
I am planning a trip to Poland in September. After thinking about it and talking to people who've been there, I decided to visit Auschwitz in part because my mother's cousin was an Auschwitz survivor. I remember him. Whenever I read accounts of the differing responses of people to the circumstances of the very brutal Nazi occupation, I wonder what I would have done. I know what I hope I would have done, but I have to ask myself whether I would have had that much courage. There's no answer because I don't think anyone would know unless they were faced with those decisions.
The essential, almost frightening, point about Oskar Gröning is that he is one of the least exceptional human beings you are ever likely to meet.
Hannah Arendt makes essentially the same point about Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Has anyone here ever heard of Aleksandr Fadeyev? He was head of the Soviet Writer's Union during Stalin's tenure. He didn't reach that position by speaking truth to power. When Stalin turned explicitly anti- Semitic, Al joined the fun and denounced and informed on many of his Jewish friends in the Writer's Union. Al was definitely not anti Semitic. He regarded these men as his friends but the triumph of the Revolution took priority over such petty concerns. Just a hill of beans......After Stalin died, there was a thaw and some of the political prisoners were released and rehabilitated. Al, to his credit, worked for the release of those men who went to the Gulag because of his false witness. He had some residual amounts of character and his misdeeds haunted him. Eventually the guilt drove him to suicide. Perhaps a true antisemite would have handled the guilt better........Question: who is the worst person: the anti Semite or the good person who goes along with antisemitism in order to achieve a higher goal and a greater good than transient antisemitism? Asking for a friend who knows Farrakhan and is active in Democratic Party circles,
"one of the least exceptional persons who ever likely to meet"
That's just the point. Otherwise decent people can so easily be swept up in the maelstrom of evil. Think Nazism, Communism. Think Islam.
If your underlying ideology is evil so will anything that perpetuates it, even keeping the debits and the credits.
The truth of the phrase "the banality of evil" demonstrated once again.
As has been discussed here before, I think, that 'banality of evil' notion has been, if not debunked, at least seriously questioned. As this piece argues: " Eichmann gave the performance of his life, and Hannah Arendt was entirely taken in."
Bay Area Guy:
"So, we have no sympathy for Mr. Groning."
Indeed, I had very little - until I came to the part where he sets straight a Holocaust-denier. "I was there." That counts for something, or should.
To your larger point: I can discern just enough difference that I can justify allying with Stalin to stop Hitler, whereas I couldn't if it had gone the other way round. But it's close, and when I see someone wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt I'm always tempted to ask whether their swastika shirt's in the wash.
According to Anne Applebaum in her book Gulag, there were about 28 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag and about seven million of them died. Can anyone name a Gulag administror or guard who was ever punished or even condemned for his service? Most of them went to their graves proud of their service to Stalin and the Revolution.....,,The essential almost frightening point about leftists is that they commit these extraordinary crimes without ever once realizing that they might be in error.
Law vs morality.
From a moral view point, I wish his sentence had been to go around dispelling the myth the holocaust did not happen.
The prison sentence was from a legal view point, and political cowardice. Much of what caused the Holocaust. The idea I was just following orders. It says something about the culture.
Statism is great, isn't it, folks?
Must be nice to live till 96 AND get your name in the NYT.
Pretty amazing for a bookkeeper.
What about the Cook who prepared the SS guards meals? Did he get an Obit too?
The most shocking thing is that Germany was arguably the most civilized society on earth in 1932; ten years later it was murdering huge numbers of its own citizens.
The reason they can never answer the question "How could it possibly happen?" is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is "Why doesn't it happen more often?
From about 1991 to 2001, I translated hundreds of documents for the US Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations. (I was not on the OSI staff; I worked for a translating company.)
In particular, I translated from German several long judgments that had been written in those trials that took place during the 1960s. To convict a defendant in those trials, the prosecutor had to prove that the defendant personally had assaulted or killed specific people.
Evidence that showed mere belonging to a camp staff did not suffice for a conviction.
The judges were quite careful and detailed in weighing the evidence. The specific crimes had to be proved.
Of course, many of the defendants were acquitted.
While translating such judgments, I came to appreciate the wisdom of these judicial standards. Germany needed to restore the rule of law, which includes fundamentals such as being considered innocent until proved guilty of a specific crime.
The last trials of very old men were conducted by young German zealots who were born after the War. These zealots deserve conempt.
Oskar Gröning was a bookkeeper.
Ivan Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian guard. I translated a lot of documents about Demjanjuk. I even translated his identification card. I have read a lot about his case.
The prosecution of Demjanjuk was a travesty of justice that went from OSI to the US courts to the Israeli courts to the German courts. He was accused of being a notorious Ukrainian guard who was nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible".
Eventually the Israeli Supreme Court acquitted him because the evidence proved only that he had served as a guard. That Supreme Court decision, which I read in English translation, explained the travesty very well.
Nevertheless, some young German zealots managed to put Demjanjuk on trial and to convict him on vague charges of participating in mass murder. I was astonished by the lawlessness and stupidity of that German trial.
One of the best books I ever read is Defending 'Ivan the Terrible': The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk, written by Yoram Sheftel, the Israeli lawyer who defended Demjanjuk before the Israeli courts.
https://www.amazon.com/Defending-Ivan-Terrible-Conspiracy-Demjanjuk/dp/0895264587/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520962202&sr=1-1&refinements=p_27%3AYoram+Sheftel
Sheftel explains in great detail how he collected evidence exonerating Demjanjuk and represented Demjanjuk, who was convicted in the lower courts but ultimately was acquitted by the Israeli Supreme Court.
My question is "Could it happen here in the U.S.?" Would "Deplorables" be executed by some branch of Antifa?
Question: who is the worst person: the anti Semite or the good person who goes along with antisemitism in order to achieve a higher goal and a greater good than transient antisemitism? Asking for a friend who knows Farrakhan and is active in Democratic Party circles
The ends never justify the means.
But I understand your sarcasm.
Obviously, we despise Nazis, and some of our grandfathers actually fought the bastards in WWII. So, we have no sympathy for Mr. Groning.
Or fathers. :)
My grandfathers fought in WWI.
The NYT thinks corporals are officers.
My grandfather fought in WW1; my father fought in WW2; I served in Vietnam.
Banality of evil means that it's based on common decencies, protection of family and so forth.
Evil takes intellectual work to recognize, in short. It always passes as decency.
Look at flag protection, for a domestic meme.
Mike Sylwester @12:25 and 12:35: Interesting comments. Thanks.
"I was just obeying orders"...
Judging from the comments people don't like Nazi's or the Holocaust.
A bold stand indeed.
And quite surprising.
Gröning was 17 to 23 years old during the war years.
The Nazi government was indeed evil, but it was not run by teenagers.
Taking these doddering old wretches to court at this late date is a disgrace.
"99 percent of people would have done the same thing as this man under the circumstances. It doesn’t matter if the victims were Jewish. People go along and keep their head down and don’t want to get involved, Jewish people included.
It takes an exceptional person to stand up to people in power. Almost all the individuals who did were killed along with their families."
Yeah, it takes courage to stand up to the liberal Dems and the liberal media today, political correctness rules.
He's charges with "War Crimes" for making lists of property?
This case is nonsense, an example of mission creep. They couldn't find any war criminals but declaring victory and finding new jobs was unthinkable. So they changed the definition of war crime to keep their institution and its power alive. Institutions are first and foremost concerned about themselves.
It takes a pretty unaware person to think that they would never cooperate with evil.
A good comparison to the German zealots who convicted Oskar Gröning and Ivan Demjanjuk is the US zealot Robert "The FBI Whitewasher" Mueller.
Just as the German zealots conducted kangaroo courts, so our US zealot and his gang of Trump-hating lawyers are conducting a kangaroo-court "investigation".
The common feature is guilt by association.
If you were a bookkeeper or a guard working at a German concentration camp, then you were guilty, by association, of mass murder.
If you were an associate of Donald Trump and if you also ever visited Russia or met with some Russians or did business in Russia or watched RT television shows, then you are guilty, by association, of conspiring to steal a US Presidential election.
There is a difference between accepting a job at a concentration camp where you definitely see what is going on and remaining silent when you hear rumors. The trouble is that many Germans must have had definite knowledge and yet it would be impossible in the case of individual persons to show who was quite certain about what was going on and who was not. In the case of Harvey Weinstein those who worked for him knew what was going on while people at a distance had no idea of the prevailing brutality. But the middle there is Hollywood where many must have known how vicious and ugly Weinstein's behavior had become and where others probably discounted 90% of the worst stories which, in fact, were the truth. But who was which? The women at the bottom were silenced; the "feminists" at the top knew and did not care what was happening - that's really all I can see.
Brings to mind someone asked about the death penalty for a. Psychopath. Replied, "if they need someone to throw the first stone, I will throw all of the stones."
The indigenous savages raiding European settlers to exterminate them was the original reason for the tenents of the NRA. The survivors of King Philips War passed on the need for weapons to stop ethnic cleansing and they never again trusted in anyone but themselves.
Nothing has changed except the mass fake Propaganda regurgitated by our enemies to disarm Americans.
The Euro Left get high and mighty over prosecuting ex-Nazis (probably 37 left) for 75-year old sins, yet ignored and enabled the Soviets for decades, and, today, ignores and enables the threat from radical Islam.
“Taking these doddering old wretches to court at this late date is a disgrace”
I like the idea of having them allocute, if they have any clear memories. It never hurts to know more about what happened. Let them know they’re off the hook if they tell the truth as best they can.
85 years ago this month, the German people voted in the parliamentary elections (March 5th) that elected the people who then passed the Enabling Act (March 23rd) that empowered Hitler.
Here were some of his bookkeeping entries for the month of August 1944:
1. 1,050 Juden Shrunken Head Paperweights
2. 1,023 Juden Human Skin Lampshades
3. 1,211 Canisters of Zyklon B Gas
4. 1,444 Pairs of Juden Eyeglasses.
5. 2,112 Pairs of Juden Shoes
6. 1,200 Juden Gold Teeth (Pulled Out with Pliers)
Of course, Oskar had no idea what was going on in Auschwitz. He was just a humble bookkeeper.
I read somewhere that only two or three people involved in the Cambodian genocide have ever been convicted. One of the higher ups died of old age while undergoing his trial. Cambodia is a small country. People run into the functionaries who killed or tortured family members all the time.......The conviction of this aged Nazi just shows how perverse and discriminatory the administration of justice is. I would urge all those who wish to engage in mass murder to do so for respectable left wing causes. This goes double for those who wish to slaughter Jews. I understand that it is more emotionally satisfying to kill them because they're Jews, but they're just as dead when they're murdered because of their middle class or Trotskyite sympathies. The plus side of this is that no one will ever come looking for you years later and your descendents can take pride in your revolutionary zeal.
Required reading:
Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
The most shocking thing is that Germany was arguably the most civilized society on earth in 1932; ten years later it was murdering huge numbers of its own citizens.
You forget the "rape of Belgium" in 1914:
"Germany invaded neutral Belgium on 4 August 1914. From the next day, civilians were executed en masse, as the invasion force advanced on its first obstacle, the ring of forts around Liège. To retaliate for the shelling from these forts, the German troops rounded up inhabitants of surrounding villages. Victims were selected and shot, those still alive being killed off with bayonets. By 8 August, nearly 850 civilians were dead. ...
The general German advance started on 18 August; by 28 August, the invasion force had crossed Belgium. The 10 days in between saw the worst violence. The troops, exhausted from the forced marches and often under the influence of alcohol, committed a series of large-scale massacres, pillaged and burned towns and villages, and deported survivors. The hardest-hit places were Aarschot on 19 August and Andenne on 20 August; the small industrial town of Tamines on the Meuse, where 383 inhabitants were killed on 22 August; the city of Dinant, where, on 23 August, the worst massacre of the invasion left 674 people, one out of every 10 inhabitants, dead; and the university town of Louvain (Leuven), where the treasured university library was burned and 248 civilians killed. Further south, hundreds of people were executed in the Belgian Ardennes; on one occasion 122 alleged francs-tireurs were killed in groups of 10; the last ones had to climb on the mound of corpses to be shot."
Hannah Arendt is a total fool.
Eichmann was an evil bastard. Only a fool would take Eichmann’s denials seriously. There are people like Eichman and Himmler and Heydrich around us. But seldom to the get power like they had in Nazi Hermany.
Her boyfriend Heidegger was a typical go along get along Nazi. Another brilliant mind with the integrity and fortitude of the average Fritz
The best Germans came to the US long ago.
Just like the best Brits, Irish, Italians, etc.
"The point of Lord of the Flies wasn't that kids are monsters but that they revert back to civilized order in an instant."
No, the point was how superficial "civilized order" actually is, and how quickly it can be cast aside, how quickly a compelling individual can lead ordinary people to savage behavior, (or can arouse the savagery within them and erase their learned behavioral inhibitions).
"As has been discussed here before, I think, that 'banality of evil' notion has been, if not debunked, at least seriously questioned. As this piece argues: 'Eichmann gave the performance of his life, and Hannah Arendt was entirely taken in.'"
The notion of the "banality of evil" is perceptive and true. It doesn't matter if Eichmann was acting, (and I don't know that he was, not having read the contrary materials). Humans at large do evil when they participate in bureaucratic duties the end result of which is suffering and death for others. Health insurance functionaries who get bonuses for finding ways to deny sick people's coverage for life-saving treatments are "just doing their job," and they're doing evil. When CEOs decide to cut thousands of jobs to inflate his company's stock price, even though his company is already profitable,he or she is doing evil.
I share the doubts expressed by others as to how they would have acted in Nazi Germany and am not proud of my self perception. But one ordinary person who acted in an extraordinary manner was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor. He ended up at the end of piano wire in the very last days of the war.
"The most shocking thing is that Germany was arguably the most civilized society on earth in 1932; ten years later it was murdering huge numbers of its own citizens."
THAT is the point of LORD OF THE FLIES.
"My question is "Could it happen here in the U.S.?"
Of course it could...it can happen anywhere. Humans are the same everywhere.
Could the Holocaust "Happen here"?
No.
Could Mao or Stalin happen here?
Yep. We already have the "Red Guards" beating up Counter-revolutionaries on Campus.
"85 years ago this month, the German people voted in the parliamentary elections (March 5th) that elected the people who then passed the Enabling Act (March 23rd) that empowered Hitler."
Wow, only 85 years ago!
It seems like yesterday.
Thank you, Lydia, for making my point. Germany did indeed inflict atrocities on the Belgian population during WWI, but if you want to read about Industtrial strength atrocities, then the go to place is the Congo under Belgian occupation. There's something arbitrary and discriminatory about the way we prosecute or compute war crimes. There's a bias in favor of Britain, its allies and, of course, us and against Germans. The Germans deserve all the opprobrium that is directed against them, but it seems wrong headed and perverse to posit that they are uniquely criminal. What is unique is that they are the only people who have been held,albeit to a limited extent, accountable for their crimes....... Mass murder for reasons of preserving ideological purity is not considered a crime equal to mass murder for reasons of racial or religious purity. The crimes of Stalin and Mao have never been as dramatized and vilified as those of Hitler.... Even here there's a lot that is abribtrary and discriminatory. People in Africa and Asia are allowed to murder each other for ethnic or religious reasons without too much criticism. Sometimes there's a Truth & Reconciliation meeting after the massacre, but it's really not necessary........I venture to say that there are many people in Rwanda, Syria, and Burma who committed far worse crimes than this ancient German. They will lead out their full lives and be honored by family members at their funeral, as will the people who directed their activities.
Sinclair Lewis' book, "It can't happen here," written in 1935. The story of how it does happen here.
The irony today is that the left sees it as a cautionary tale of Trump. Corrupt Huey Long of Louisiana, had he not been shot, might well have been able to beat Roosevelt in 1936. Rob from the rich, or in Hitler's case from the Jews, nothing new. Read the history of the fall of Rome. Don't cry for me Argentina, Peron and his promises.
In California, the irony is that the rich support the left, thinking they will be able to buy power. It will not end well for them.
Eichmann wasn’t just some bureaucratic.
Bystander indifference isn’t the same as evil.
Stalin, Mao, and Hitler were evil so were many of their underlings.
The Aztec chiefs were evil. Like a lot of “Native Americans” they deserved what they got.
Robert Cook espouses a belief system responsible for 100 million deaths last century. A few million have died already this century.
I trust him to put me against the wall if ever he gets the power to do so.
Birkel, you have got to stop with these unseemly sexual fantasies of yours...I'm not interested!
You are the one who supports a murder cult posing as political philosophy, Robert Cook.
Your effort at humor is cute, especially in light of all your murder apologizing.
He was either Pro-Choice himself or a "good" German who went along to get along. He may have also been a diversitist who judges people by the their class, based not on principle (i.e. character), but rather the "color" of their skin.
I think it was ridiculous to prosecute him - unless the penalty would have been marginal. He had done a great service in speaking against Holocaust denialism.
Mr. Cook, Birkel, like many right-wingers, seems to love the idea of victimhood/martyrdom/being persecuted. Notorious right-winger Mel Gibson often fantasized publicly about being tortured at the hands of his detractors in the media - and in an usually disturbing and lurid way. Right-wingers love this stuff.
"Bay Area Guy said...
"My point? The Communists were as evil as the Nazis, and had a large role in starting WWII."
Of course, to be fair, they also had a large role in ending it.
I guess that's why Churchill and FDR called Stalin "Uncle Joe". Confusing. One day the enemy, the next a comfy uncle, then the enemy again. No wonder the horrors of the Soviet regime escaped serious scrutiny for a long time. Not to mention Nuremberg, where, of course, the Soviets were judges as well.
Churchill and FDR and Truman were practical men.
They weren’t arrogant fools like W and Obama.
Stalin was preferable to Hitler. The Soviets were going to get Eastern Europe. And their idiotic communism was going to collapse. Just like China’s.
FDR was a Communist dupe. He supported the Criminal Morgenthau plan that would've destroyed the Ruhr coal mines and industry. Came up with "Unconditional Surrender" and never met a Commie he didn't love.
FDR wasn't "Practical" at all.
The Best thing is that the peeps that loved FDR the most, were the ones most likely to get drafted and Killed in WW2. They loved their War-Emperor and were happy to die for him.
"Mr. Cook, Birkel, like many right-wingers, seems to love the idea of victimhood/martyrdom/being persecuted. Notorious right-winger Mel Gibson often fantasized publicly about being tortured at the hands of his detractors in the media - and in an usually disturbing and lurid way. Right-wingers love this stuff."
Toothless...I think you're right. This masochistic fantasy of being tortured (to live out a form of imagined martrydom?) is the obverse of their more overt sadistic tendencies.
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