Finally, I got a chance to respond in this thread.
F_alk, about what you said about other groups being targetted, I know they were and no one is denying that they were. But the others, such as the Roma, were not considered threats to Hitler’s “Aryan Race”. Unfortunately, around 50,000 of them were killed but many others were allowed to live in homes under strict living conditions. The Jews, on the ohter hand, were not so lucky. To the twisted Nazi psyche, the Jews had “tainted blood” and had to all be exterminated. The German peopple helped Hitler. Many Jewish children were publicly humiliated and beaten in German schools, by their fellow classmates and teachers. There were beatings in the streets and attacks such as Kristallnacht. The Germans knew EXACTLY what was happening.
Ozone, there’s a BIG difference between the Japanese and the Germans. As horrilbe as the Japanese were (and they were horrible), the Germans were much much worse. The German people helped Hitler to kill Jews and did so on the street. The Japanese might have known about the massacres in China and Indo-China, but there is a difference between seeing it and hearing about it. The German people and other European people lived near the concentration camps. They saw the misery and continued to hate the Jews and help the Germans. The Japanese may have heard about the military’s massacres, but think of fathoming that. It’s very hard to magine such genocide, so many would not believe it. And hte Germans didn’t just “gas them in camps”. Mny werre tortured in such things as Dr/ Mengele’s experiments. For example, he was eager to study twins so he took two identical Jewish twins from a family and sowed them together back to back like Siamese twins. The children suffered teribly and the parents gave them morphene and took Morphene themselves to stop their sufferieng. Another difference between what happened to the Jews and other mintrities in Europe. The Jewish children were targets while they were not in other minorities. Jewish babies had their heads smashed against birck walls in front of their parents, Jews were hung, forcedinto slave labour and even burned alive. There are many other stories of horrible atrocities that the Germans committed, many of them MUCH worse than Japan.
About General Patton, it surprises me that he did such a thing as he was an anti-semite himself. I guess the horrors of the concentration camps convinced him to renounce his anti-semitism.
If you think, Ozone, that modern governments do not operate on pride, that is your choice. WE cna analyze history differently and have our bitter arguements too. I don’t think the world has changed at all since the beginning on the 20th century or even before that. Pride is what runs countries. I still believe that the long range ballistic missiles were not the issue. Pride was. The Soviet Union would have looked horrible if it had withdrawn without some sort of victory against its arch-enemy, the United States. THe United States couldn’t withdraw because it would have looked bad if it had stood down in front of its rival, the Soviet Union. Each ahd to protect its pride. Modern day politics as you put it, are based on pride. Politics come a a result of each coutnry trying to protect its pride.
I still feel that the Germans deserved every bomb that hit them in Dresden and other cities. They helped Hitler with his crimes (don’t forget about the ghettos & that there were death camps in Germny too) and deserved the napalms and other weapons dropped on them. In crimes against humanity you mustresist even your government, and they failed to do so. It’s horrible that they had to suffer, but it was justice.
Nagasaki was America’s attempt to kick things up a notch. Hiroshima had been a military target and the Japanese had not surrendered. The next step up was to hit a civilian centre in order to show Hirohito that America would do whatever it takes to end the war, even wipe out the entire Japanese population. That forced Hirohito to rethink his position. His people woul die for him, and I’m sure he’d die for his people. But he wouldn’t want his people eliminated. So he was forced into the unconditional surrender. The winners of wars write history, that’s why Nagasaki may look like it had military value, but I still firmly believe that it did not, at least not anything negledgeable. Winston Churchill himself said that history would not look bad upon him for any of his decisions because he would be the oen who would write it. And looking at things today, Churchill was right. His decisions and the decisions of other leaders are accepted. I accept Hiroshima, but not Nagasaki.
Also Ozone, not ALL the Japanese government members were evil. Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consulate in Lithuania, saved THOUSANDS of Jews by giving them visas that allowed them to travel through Japan to the Dutch Indies, Curacao I believe. Many Jews even settled in Japan herself and started the Jewish community there. The killers that you claim were just as bad as the Nazis, which I still disagree with, actually saved thousands of Jews from Hitler’s death camps. Ironic, isn’t it?
BTW, I am not anti-German. My father even studied in Aachen, Germany. He lived there for quite a while.
Moses, yo forgot to ask them if people form Frankfurt are called Frankfurters. I belive that they are called Hamburgers and Frankfurters. BTW, did you know that President Kennedy said in a speech ot the Germans, “Ich bin ein Berliner” which he thought meant “I am a Berliner”. It really meant “I am a jelly doughnut”.