The WWII Thread

[Trollheart]

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

No. King Sargon organized the first military well after the first civilizations in Mesopotamia.

Organised war, maybe. But you can bet the cavemen weren't going around apologising each time one tribe stole another's woman, or played their crude home-made drums outside their cave entrance, or led their pet T-Rex up to it to take a dump there. Sure, man has always been in conflict with his fellow men. But whether or which, you're again avoiding the point of the question, which is, what would you have done different when Hitler rolled into Poland, or when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? Easy to sit there and say "I wouldn't have done that". But what would you have done? How would you have handled a situation like FDR and Churchill were faced with?

[OccultHawk]

Originally Posted by Trollheart

I'm intrigued. I know you think in absolutes, often esoteric absolutes - war should not exist, people shouldn't pay for goods, there should be no politicians etc - but man has been at war probably since one cave dissed another, or one tribe wanted the land of another. War is hard-coded into our genes, it would seem. So, while we all wish it wasn't, war is a part of the human makeup, and horrible, bloody wars have been fought down the centuries, and back as far as human history is recorded, and probably before.

So, given all that: World War II. You had a jumped-up little ****er thumbing his nose at the world and invading where he liked. The circumstances that drove him to this - or perhaps more accurate to say, gave him the excuse and the licence to do so - were of course already in place, and the Allies have that to deal with forever, so hardly blameless. Nevertheless, stepping outside of your box of absolutes for a moment, what would you have done, as Hitler annexed country after country, making a play for world domination? Do you not think, horrible as it was, that it was right and also necessary, even imperative, to stop him? And could that be achieved any other way? He lied through his teeth to get what he wanted, then turned on countries that were essentially defenceless. How would you have stopped the threat of the Nazis coming to power and taking Europe?

You can call FDR and Truman war criminals, and certainly they would have had cases to answer had the Germans won the war (as is always the case, the victors call the vanquished war criminals and dictators, and ignore the fact that they are, at bottom, as bad as them) but didn't they also have a duty to stand up to the evil of Nazi expansionism and take Hitler on?

Many wars can be described as unjustified, but WW II, to me, was not one of them. I hate war of course, but sometimes it's the only option, would you not agree?

What if Hitler had won? Completely victorious. All non-Germanic people eradicated from the planet. The means would have been very ugly but the ends might have been damn close to utopian.

Today’s human population could be as low as 500 million. Perhaps there would be world peace. Germany isn’t presently involved in any sort of civil war. Perhaps the oceans and the continents outside of Europe would be left to their natural ecosystems unmolested by humanity. No global warming. No mass extinctions. No arms race. German engineering without global hassle. Space exploration. No Iran. No Syria. No Russia. No America. No OccultHawk.

It’s rarely said but the world would likely be a much better place, ultimately, if the final solution had been fully implemented. Not just Jews but all of us.

So why was it Germany was the bad guy again?

[Trollheart]

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

So why was it Germany was the bad guy again?

Ask the Jews.

It's pretty crazy to say "maybe the world would have been a better place if Germany had won." There'd be a worldwide dictatorship, no room for diversity, disabled/mentally retarded/undesirables executed by state order (Karen and I would be gone: I'd be seen as "disabled" due to my poor eyesight and perceived intelligence no doubt). How do you know the Nazis wouldn't have mined the **** out of the world and destroyed the climate? Hitler was insane: maybe they would have done. Again, you're either avoiding the question or saying "I'd have let them win". But the latter is an easy option, as it simply means, as you say, that you would not exist and so you would not have had to live in the world the Nazis would have created. Have you watched this?

[Trollheart]

Originally Posted by elphenor

though correct when isolated as a moral quandary and mostly responsible for the Good Guys Vs. Bad Guys narrative that's followed ever since, WWII shouldn't be removed from the context of WWI whereby the Germans were treated terribly unjust in the aftermath

I know that. That's why I said the Allies created the means for Hitler to do what he did. I'm not disputing that, and I'm far from exonerating the Allies from blame or calling them the good guys. In war, there really are no good guys. But, given that that had happened anyway, my point to OH was, what would he have done to counter the Nazi threat? You can go centuries back in history and link one war to another, back to Rome and beyond. But you can't rewrite or change history, so given that that's where we were in 1939, I'm asking for his take on what was done. It's not enough, in my opinion, to just say "oh that was bad. I wouldn't have done that." You need to have an alternative solution or plan, otherwise you kind of have to accept that going to war was the lesser of two evils. Evil, sure, but the lesser of the two, and better than allowing Nazi Germany to rule the world.

[OccultHawk]

If I had been FDR I would have ignored Pearl Harbor because America didn’t have any business keeping a big ass navy in the middle of the Pacific. Instead I would have met with Hitler and had him build Nazi death camps all over America and then organized a giant mass suicide of all North Americans except the natives. Using Prussian Blue <3

[Trollheart]

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

If I had been FDR I would have ignored Pearl Harbor because America didn’t have any business keeping a big ass navy in the middle of the Pacific. Instead I would have met with Hitler and had him build Nazi death camps all over America and then organized a giant mass suicide of all North Americans except the natives. Using Prussian Blue <3

Guess we're lucky your plan to take power never came to fruition, then, aren't we?

Seriously though: you actually believe all this? Or are you just ****ing with me? If the former, then any real debate between us here is meaningless, as you are just operating on so different a premise to me - and, I would think, most others - that we will just never see eye to eye, nor even come within sight of each other.

[OccultHawk]

To be fair, I said at the get-go my particular political lens would make that portion of the conversation fruitless

[Trollheart]

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

To be fair, I said at the get-go my particular political lens would make that portion of the conversation fruitless

You did. I would be shocked at your particular brand of nihilism, but then, you know, it's you.

[Isbjørn]

Been listening a bit to lectures from historian and political scientist Michael Parenti. This one about World War II is especially interesting.

Part I
Part II

[DwnWthVwls]

Originally Posted by Isbjørn

Been listening a bit to lectures from historian and political scientist Michael Parenti. This one about World War II is especially interesting.

Part I
Part II

^Read this for one of my history classes in college. You might find it interesting, history bores me to death.