The blurry line between religious and crazy

Moral relatism. heh, I knew that was coming!I know I have a undeveloped, simplistic view of the evils that was the Third Reich. Every SS Death camp officer thought he was doing his duty. Only following orders.
When the Nurmberg trials began those assholes could hardly look at what they did. They knew that shit was wrong. They knew and they did it anyway. Because they were in power and no one could stop them. Well guess what? The Allied powers did.
Hoorah! If you do not think there was a right and a wrong side during WWII good guys and bad guys, please take a tour of Dachau and get back to me.

Stalin was on the side of the "good guys".

Because the enemy of my enemy is my frenemy?

For the most part, we weren't fighting the camp officers. They had, erm excuse the term, cushy jobs well away from the front lines. The people that we were actually fighting were basically patriotic Germans. A non-zero amount of whom were ex-patriots who then fled to Germany due to being ostracized and persecuted in their new homelands such as the USA and Britain.The awful treatment of the Jews started a decade before anyone declared war on Germany. I suspect that if Germany had not invaded Poland, or anywhere else, and the holocaust became public knowledge in Britain, that we still wouldn't have declared war. We would probably have said it was awful, and maybe we would have funded resistance units, but another war...just to save the Jews? I doubt we would have bothered to be honest. Oswald Mosley almost beat Neville Chamberlain in an election, and counted Harold Macmillon (Future PM) among those that endorsed him, Britain would soon become embroiled in a Jewish insurgency overseas....I'm not sure the will was there. There were plenty of people that weren't anti-semitic of course, the majority maybe, but another Great War?Incidentally, a better example might be The Milgram experiment(s). A large percentage of ordinary people were convinced to give other humans lethal electrical shocks on the say so of an authority figure. Indeed - when the context was that the participant had to physically force the confederates hand down onto a metal plate that would 'lethally shock' them making it 'immediate' and personal - 30% of people would still murder someone if a suitable authority figure tells them to, even while feeling awful for doing it. The experiments were designed with Nazism in mind during the trial of Adolf Eichmann.So yeah, we were the morally most justified guys, but 'good'? I'm not sure following self-serving interests deserves the title, even if it was the right thing to do. If we lost of course, we may be arguing otherwise...

Tell that to the people who where freed from concentration camps. There is great evil in war but also moments of great good.
Tell that to the families who lost sons and daughters who volunteered to fight for nothing more than the concept of doing good.
D-Day invasion of Normandy anniversary is 06 June.
The beaches ran red with blood. Brave men, good men died on a scale unimaginable. Please remember folks it was not self serving, but selfless sacrifice to do ones duty and to protect your brothers.
I know, I know...propagandized. But can't help it.

Tell that to the children of Dresden who were incinernerated by the "good" guys.

I never said that horrible decisions, horrible outcomes and losses did not occur at the hands of the good guys.
Dresden would not of occurred if the bad guys did not start a war. Edited by 1.61803, : grammer

So "good" guys do bad things and "bad" guys do good things. The labels seem pretty meaningless. Who "started" the war is ambiguous.

What good things did the Natzi do?
And did it out weigh the evil shit they perpetuated? Perhaps if one is a Natzi apologist. Granted history is written by the victors, however it was not so lost to history that the world has forgotten.
Argue all the moral relativism you want Ringo, it does not and will never change the fact that Germany was on the wrong side of history during WWII. Even the Germans know that, at least the ones that arent Natzi apologist or Hitler fans.

They fixed the German economy that was ruined by the "good guys" of World War One. If you want to measure "goodness" by body count, you'll have to say that Hiter was "better" than Stalin. If you recall what started this whole sideshow, I was the one complaining about people minimizing the Nazis' efficiency. I'm no apologist.I'll repeat: The danger here is not in questioning the black-and-white of history; it's in underestimating the evil in ourselves.

Hi Ringo. I was going to let you have the last word. Natzis fixed German economy is another myth perpetuated by Natzi propaganda. That staggering recovery was attributed to new laws instituted by the Natzis. ie women not being included in out of work workforce figures, Jews losing citizenship and not included in figures, Manditory conscriptions in the Army. etc...
And what ever recovery was made was completley erased by the absolute destruction of the Reich taking the German people with it. As a matter of fact Hitler said the German people did not deserve to survive and wanted to destroy them for failing him.The Good guys ruined Germany's economy after WWI because they wanted them to pay for the war they thought they were responsible for along with the Austria/Hungry. You would think they'd would of learned a lesson the first time.The side show started because some people think the Natzis where effcient. But in the scheme of things they were feckless fuck ups. btw, my wife is from Halle Germany and I have lived there twice. I love the German people and think very highly of them.

I should tell them that the allied forces were morally justified? I think they already know. Should I also speak to them of the fact that going to war in Germany was to defend Poland and France and Belgium and consequentially Britain, and that freeing them from concentration camps was the happy and fantastic consequence of their combating Germanic aggressive expansion? Yes. And often that is true of both sides. You are referring to just the 'good guys' now? Or should I also take a trip around Europe, tell the families who lost family who had volunteered to fight for nothing more than the concept of doing good in Germany and Italy and Russia and head over to Japan and continue the trend. Or is it only the ones whose politicians and media manipulated them into committing acts for King/Country/kill the krauts that ultimately justified the means I should be doing that to. The ones that were relentlessly propagandized to while living in cultures where education for the common man was served with side of nationalism who were, like Milgram's participants doing ultimately immoral acts while rationalising it was 'orders'? Because the ends of their politicians didn't justify their means, all of their mental abuse victims should be dismissed as evil or the 'bad guys' because....German blood? In both scopes you are wrong in some way.On the one hand - the scope of the soldier, what you say equally applies to German soldiers. Undermining the 'good' vs 'bad' guy hypothesis.
The other scope, the one I was using it in, is at the governmental scope. In which case, politicians were in short supply on the battlefield, but very eager to persuade men to go get killed for them.But yes, going to war with Germany was in the self-interest of Britain. I am sceptical we would have gone to war with Germany for just the humanitarian reasons occurring within German borders, and if we did it would probably have been too late. Of course, I'm confident that many men and women would feel strongly about intervening should the government allow them to learn it, which they frankly probably wouldn't have done.

Hi Modulous, as usual you make level and fair points. None of which escape me.
I am not so naive to think that good guys vs bad guys was the end all of WWII. I know there where examples of good and bad being done on both sides.
My main point from which I would hope you and others understood was the Natzis and their policies were especially heinous. They wanted to base their Country and eventually the world on racial purity. They wanted to exterminate a complete culture of people. They invaded and desimated their neighboring countries. They started the war. If that is not "bad" what is?
Your right the world leaders would of probably stood by and watched if Hitler kept it within his borders.
North Korea comes to mind.
Was there a good guys verses bad guys during WWII?
In my mind there was.

Read the thread. I said - and clarified - that the Nazis were efficient at killing Jews. Gas is more efficient than bullets.Lee Oswald was also a "feckless fuckup" in most of his life but he was pretty damned efficient at killing the President. Dismissing people as "feckless fuckups" is what dooms us to repeat history.

--Percy