Do not mod up people who point out cut-and-paste trolls logged in.
Many of these are folks who post plagarized articles and then point it out with another account to gain karma.
Do not mod up ACs who point out that people who point out people who post plagiarized articles.
Many of these are folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
Oh, wheels-within-wheel-within -- oh just take the blue pill!
"How about that US CITIZEN that is currently being held with out trial and who has been denied a lawyer? "
Bad example.
a.) The operative word here is 'one'.
Well, you know, it always starts with one.
One Bolshevik, one kulak, one "Enemy of the People", one Jew, one Japanese-American, one Communist, one educated person, one literate person, one Arab.
(Roughly in chronological order; I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to connect each "Enemy" to the society that demonized them. Feel free to add other examples.)
That one is supposed to be our warning that it's time once again to fertilize the tree of liberty.
Because if we don't, suddenly it's not "just one" anymore; it's a thousand, a hundred thousand, six million, 20 million. And then everybody exclaims in surprise, "how could this happen in a civilized nation?!"
I was going to call a close to this contentious thread, until I say the parent post, which blames the treatment of slave laborers on the Allies:
Blame the problems for 'slave workers' on the allied forces that didn't make a rule
Holy Christ. How about we blame problems for slave laborers (and I'll dispense with your disbelieving quote marks) on the fucking Nazis who enslaved them???
No, you want to blame the Allies???
Don't forget that in London the Queen even erected a memorial for a war criminal. And what about American war crimes? The German view towards this issue is quite more serious.
The Germans managed to kill nearly 11 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals, and whomever else they didn't like, and you're complaining about -- implying it's comparable to -- Air Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris's Dresden raid. Honest men can debate the justifications (or not) of Dresden, as they can the morality of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on civilian London. But neither rises to the stain on humanity that Auschwitz does -- except in the minds of Germans eager to claim that everybody is equally guilty.
As to American war crimes, I'm sure there were scattered American war crimes -- but again, there were no smokestacks, no ovens, no cattle cars filled to bursting with entire german families "evacuated" to the East for slave labor and mass murder. Instead we brought Germany the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift.
Waffen SS was the expanded military organisation of the SS. Also regular soldiers and foreigners (as Lituavia) served in this group. It was a kind of elite corps compared to Wehrmacht with harder policy.
I take this as an implication (as others have posted explicitly) that the Waffen-SS -- and the Wehrmacht in general -- were "common" soldiers, and not war criminals like the Sonnderkommando and the Einsatzgruppen. Sadly, this is not entirely true.
In fact, especially in the East, as this order, later cataloged as Nuremberg Document D-411, by General Walter von Reichenau, then Commander in Chief of the German 6th Army, makes clear:
[...] Thus, the armed forces are facing tasks that do not belong to the domain of the usual tasks of the military. A serviceman on the eastern territories is not just a soldier, fighting by the rules of combat, but the carrier of the national idea and an avenger for all the calamities inflicted upon the Germans and peoples related to them.
That is why a soldier should be deeply aware of the necessity of the stern but justified punishment of the Jews. Another goal is to nip in the bud rebellions in the rear of the German Armed Forces. These rebellions are always inspired, as our experience shows, by the Jews.
A Wehrmacht armament inspector, in his report to the Wehrmacht High Command (the OKW or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) notes the consequence of the "common" soldiers' complicity in genocide (Nuremberg Document PS-3257, emphasis orthogonal's):
From the outset the attitude of the Jewish population was anxious-willing. They tried to avoid anything that might displease the German Administration. That they hated the German Administration and the Army in their hearts is obvious and not surprising. However, there is no evidence that the Jews, either as a body, or even in any considerable numbers, have taken part in sabotage, etc. Without doubt there have been some terrorists or saboteurs among them, just as there have been among the Ukrainians. But
it cannot be claimed that the Jews as such present any kind of danger for the German Wehrmacht. The troops and the German Administration have been satisfied with the work output of the Jews, who are of course motivated by no emotion except fear.
Immediately following the military operations, the Jewish population remained undisturbed at first. It was
What about the allied soldiers from other countries?
Yeah, honestly I considered substituing "Allies" for Americans, but I was worried that
1) as an American I should speak only for Americans, and
2) Allied soldiers in World War II included the Soviets, and the Soviets did commit war crimes -- most notably, the Katyn Forrest massacre of 11,000 Polish officers (which was for a long time blamed on the Nazis) and lots of brutal rapes and murders of German civilians at the end of, and immediately after, the war.
So as to not muddy the message, I just wrote about "American soldiers". But I do not mean to minimize the sacrifices of our Allies -- indeed, had it not been for the stalwart British as led by Mr. Churchill, America might never have been able to take the war to the German homeland.
Poster also did not compare American soldiers to Nazis; he just pointed out that soldiers are paid to follow orders....
He (FFFish (7567)) explicitly said "There's a very good chance that your country has soldiers engaged in a military action that others see as warfare against an ethnic group. Presumably those soldier continue their action because they have promised on their honour to uphold their country's decisions.
What that ignores is that fighting against enemies predominantly of one ethnic group, as for example, America fighting against Italy in WWII, is very different than targeting one ethnic group, as the Nazis did with the Jews, the Slavs, and the Roma ("Gypsies").
The two are not at all morally equivalent, and it's pure sophistry to conflate Nazi-style genocide and "normal" warfare as practice by America.
And before anyone objects, yes, there were some war crimes committed by Americans, and yes, there were some "good Germans" who avoided or actively opposed Nazi criminality. The difference is one of policy and intent: U.S. soldiers aren't trying to commit genocide; the Nazi Einsatzgruppen were trying and succeeding at genocide. And that's why FFFish (7567)'s comment is so objectionable: because it sees no difference between these two very different kinds of soldiers.
Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.
There's a very good chance that your country has soldiers engaged in a military action that others see as warfare against an ethnic group. Presumably those soldier continue their action because they have promised on their honour to uphold their country's decisions.
What a specious argument -- while I disagree with the war in Iraq, I can tell the difference between that and Hitler's invasion of Poland (and then France, and Russia, and.... ). Anyone who claims there's a general moral equivalency between American soldiers and Nazi war criminals has either decided to jettison decency in order to make a point, or simply has no real grasp of the historical realities -- or is a despicable troll.
Son, if you can't distinguish between American soldiers defending their country and Nazi members of the SS invading Germany's neighbors, if you can't tell the difference between decent soldiers and war criminals, then no amount of argument on my part is going to make you see the light.
I don't begrudge Germany's common soldiers getting a small pension, even if their service was in Nazi aggression. Yes, some of the Waffen-SS were "common" battlefield Soldaten -- but some were war criminals.
But I have to ask why slave laborers get no more that about $7000 total, when some former SS get that much in a year.
And I have to draw the line at war criminals. Germany giving pensions to Nazi war criminals is just a slap in the face to Germany's victims and to all Americans who sacrificed to bring an end to Hitler's Reich -- it's those American soldiers I'm standing up for.
I don't think those American veterans would call me a bigot for thinking they're not the moral equivalent of Nazi war criminals.
I won't ask that you apologize to me, but I do ask that you apologize to the American soldiers you've compared to Nazis.
Yes but where can I get some original Nazi's to send them to?
Well, the flippant answer is Argentina (Or Brazil).
On a more serious note, you might try Latvia; in 1998 about 500 Latvians, former members of the Waffen-SS marched through Riga to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the SS.
Kazys Ciurinskas, a former member of the Lithuanian SS division accused of killing Russian and Lithuanian Jews and POWs, lived in Indiana since the end of the war. Ciurinskas collected a $540 monthly pension from the German government since 1960 while living in the US and being a US citizen. In a 1995-97 United States of America v. Kazys Ciurinskas case the US District Court in Indiana stripped Ciurinskas of US citizenship.
Interestingly, the amount of the pension paid to these former SS by the German government varies based on their final rank in the SS -- higher ranks get a bigger pension. Only recently -- and only after international pressure -- did the German government modify its pension law to strip the pension from war criminals, and even so, there is no requirement that any investigation be made of recipients, nor is there any mechanism to do so, so even known war criminals can continue to collect payments from the German government.
Ironically, some war criminals even receive, in addition to their normal pensions what are called "victim's" pensions -- including those believed to have massacred American soldiers. The following was written in 1997, and thus may be slightly out of date:
The well-respected German military historian Gerhard Schreiber estimates the number of war criminals receiving these extra payments from the German government at 50,000. Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden, from Ochtendung near Koblenz, is one of the "victims." According to a German federal court, Lehnigk-Emden killed 15 unarmed women and children in Caiazzo near Naples in Italy in October 1943. Because Lehnigk-Emden was later injured (shot in the leg) while trying to escape from an allied POW camp and suffers a mild handicap, he receives an additional "victim" pension.
Another current recipient of victim pensions is the former SS Hauptsturm-fuhrer Wilhelm Mohnke. Mohnke, who was a close confidant of Adolf Hitler and commandant of the "Fuhrerbunker" in Berlin during Hitler's last days. According to the US Department of Justice "there is very substantial evidence pointing to Wilhelm Mohnke's personal involvement in the perpetration of Nazi war crimes" -- for his role in the massacre of 72 American POWs in 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge.
[U]nder an agreement... brokered by the U.S. and German governments, however, survivors of slave labor under the Nazis will be awarded only $790 each for back pay and a lump sum of $7,894 each in recognition of the 55-year delay. Those who were exploited as "forced labor," such as Nazi prisoners working in agriculture, will get a mere $5,000 each.
So, frankly, any Old Folks (Pensioner's) Home in Germany should provide you with plenty of "original Nazis", living comfortably thanks to the largess of the current German government, while their victims -- those who survived at all, those who haven't died while waiting for their reparations -- continue to suffer.
For example, I haven't gone to www.washingtonpost.com since they introduced their new "super-nosy" registration policy (and I used to go there almost every day). On some other web sites I give fake information(OK this doesn't really solve anything, but dammit I am not going to let them win...)
Ah, big deal, just give the Post your email and information.
If I recall correctly (it took several attempts to provide the information, as I had to simultaneously disable three layers of cookie eaters, in the browser and two proxies), I'm an Egyptian woman who works in manufacturing (but without a salary) and you can email me at example@example.org.
Seriously, I was willing to register with the New York Times -- mostly because they were one of the first serious sites to require registration, before I'd had time to be fed up about it.
But the Post wants too much information. So they get a database full of bogosity. If the Post wants to become increasingly irrelevant, they can make it increasingly harder for me to anonymously and conveniently access their site. At some point, I'll stop buying their hard-copy newspaper everyday too, and they can explain that to their advertisers.
With the exception that fewer people will die because of such controversies in Knuth' case, because there aren't too many militant guerilla groups fighting for the right way to do seminumerical algorithms.
That's the problem with kids today: no priorities, no gumption!
And if reading the fascicle is too heavy going, remember that you can watch the movies instead, at http://scpd.stanford.edu/knuth/. Fourteen videos of Knuth's lectures are aavailable, inclusing last years's "Tenth Annual Christmas Tree Lecture: Finding All Spanning Trees".
I watched the Tenth Annual Christmas Tree lecture live (the "trees", of course, being various computer science graphs and structures, not pine trees hung with colored lights) and found it surprisingly engaging and accessible even to an educated lay-person. If you have any interest in computer science or algorithm design, it's a fascinating way to spend an hour. (Disclaimer: I'd just watched the 1998 lecture to better understand Garsia-Wachs coding.)
I was so excited about watching it live that I submitted the Knuth Christmas lecture as a story about it to Slashdot, but the editors didn't think it important enough to accept. (Nor the story on "brain fingerprinting" -- a kind of polygraph based on direct reading of brain waves -- casting doubt on a death sentence, nor Eagle's drummer Don Henley's op-ed piece in the Washington Post attacking the music industry and ruminating on p2p, nor the story about Anglo-German scientific rivalry and the resulting pickled baby "dragon".)
I say he's german, and that he's speaking through [the] Google / Altavista [language tools / automatic translator]. Quite remarkable, actually.
I say we set aside one day, and make all our posts to Slashdot via Google translation to some arbitrary language and back to English (non-English speakers can just translate to English directly).
I can actually understand the case against Lindows to some degree, because Lindows is a name that might confuse consumers. wxWindows, however, is a tool for developers.
You'd understand it better if the Slashdot headline were not misleading.
The Slashdot Headline reads (emphasis orthogonal's): "Microsoft Forces wxWindows To Rename", but the notice in the wxWidgets.org page says (emphasis orthogonal's):
After a polite request from Microsoft, and a lot of thought on our part, we have decided to change the project's name to wxWidgets.... There will be modest financial compensation, of which the residue (after fees) will be used to fund library development and tools. Contributors can submit claims to Julian Smart to compensate for time lost because of the name change.
Now, this is not to claim that Microsoft didn't suggest they'd litigate if a voluntary change wasn't made; I'm sure that threat was at least implied, if not explicated. But the actual resolution has money going from MS-Windows to wxWidgets, not damages going from wxWindows to MS-Windows.
So if wxWidgets is willing to call it voluntary, I'm going to take wxWidgets at its word.
Yeah, but that means letting them use cookies. No thanks
I, too, prefer not to let Google set cookies. So far Google has been -- so far as I know -- a good respecter of privacy, but their insistence on recording all searches, along with the requesting IP address, gives me serious pause.
It's not that Google is evil, but that reposing that much information in any hands is a temptation to evil -- either on Google's part, or on the part of whomever ends up controlling it when and if Google goes public, or on the part of whatever government can issue subpoenas, or whatever lawyer can get subpoenas issued.
I'd feel much more comfortable if Google would purge its records of searches, or at least remove the IP addresses, but I suppose they have their reasons. I'll let you guess what those reasons might be.
Imagine Microsoft subpoenaing Google for the IP of whomever searched for "leaked Microsoft source" and then using that to allege an open source project is built on top of proprietary Microsoft code.
This is why I won't use the Google toolbar, and why for especially sensitive searches, e.g., "STD symptom" or "John Ashcroft calico cat", I go through an anonymizing proxy.
But while the easiest and permanent way to set image search SafeSearch off is through a cookie, I believe it can also be set per individual search using a check box that is sent to Google in the http GET as a parameter, bypassing cookies.
If I could lose 10 lbs. do you think they'd let a guy be a test pilot? 6'2" 130 lbs....
The first male "test pilot" will be Lieutenant (Commander posthumously) Seki Yukio, 70th graduate of the Naval Academy of Imperial Japan and officer of the First Air Fleet; he'll be leading the Special Attack Force (Tokkotai, or Kamikaze Squadron) flying (in)to the U.S. aircraft carrier St. Louis, off Leyte Gulf.
All hail Emperor Hirohito and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere!
(I know, making reference to history is considered uncomfortable, politically incorrect and flamebait, unless it's to bash America, Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay, Sir Arthur Harris, or the U.S. 8th Army Air Force for "unprovoked" attacks on "gentle" and "misunderstood" Germans and Japanese. Bullshit. Fascism happens most easily when we're so polite that we don't remember. I'm a liberal, but that doesn't mean I'm forgetful or stupid. Now mod me down because this makes you uncomfortable.)
The lesson that we drew from history is that democracy has to be defended at all cost. I don't mind that an administration that I trust knows who I am and where I am knowing that this information will not be abused. I have this level of comfort and faith in the German as well as EU institutions and the contemporary German governments (may they be social-democrats or conservatives)
I'm going to ignore your other points not because they are not valid, but because they'll lead us far off topic, and are very much subject to argument.
(As to Germans referring to Turks as "niggers", I gave the reference for that (Kempe's Father/Land) when I originally posted about it.)
You say that you're comfortable with the contemporary German government having information about you and your whereabouts, because have a "level of comfort and faith" in the German government and the current European Union institutions.
Fine. I congratulate the German people on living under a democracy, and I do not seek to minimize the effort that must have taken, emerging from dictatorship, ruin, and division in 1945. (And to some extent I must also claim credit for my country and, specifically, the Marshall Fund and the US policies toward the BRD after the war.)
But that's not my point. Currently you see no reason to fear the German government, and its retention of information about you.
You also wrote that "[t]he lesson that we [Germans] drew from history is that democracy has to be defended at all cost." I've noticed that Germans often talk about defending "democracy" and less often about defending "liberty". Perhaps it's merely a matter of translations, but I'm not sure -- perhaps it's also a matter of outlook or Weltbild. But it's not a matter of opinion that Hitler was democratically elected, winning a plurality votes and seats in the Reichstag in 1932.
So in addition to defending democracy, I think we need to defend liberty. Part of that is never allowing government -- no matter how good a government, no matter how well intentioned, no matter what checks and balances the Constitution promises -- to accumulate too much power over, or information about, the individual. Because a good government today can become a Fascist dictatorship tomorrow -- and more often than not it will do so with the enthusiastic support of the people, a people often fearful and hungering for the security only a Fascist government can promise ("A Volkswagon in every garage and death to the Bolshevik and Jewish untermenschen!").
I suspect that, like you, Berthold Guthmann also felt no reason to fear the German government, or its records on him.
In World War I, Fliegerleutnant ("Flight (second) lieutenant") Guthmann, an observer and gunner on military aeroplanes, earned the Iron Cross, 2nd class (the same as that also awarded to Adolf Hitler), the Tapferkeitsmedaille (Medal for Bravery), and the Verwundetenabzeichen (the wound medal, equivalent to the Purple Heart). His recommendation for the Iron Cross reads, in part, "Lt. Guthmann is brave and a fine officer, although Jewish...." In 1943, Guthmann and his family were arrested for being Jewish; Guthmann was eventually murdered at Auschwitz.
I'm not saying the current German government will abuse its iris-scanning. It probably will not. But how sure can you be -- especially in the face of German history -- that every future German government will resist the temptation to use these records in abusive ways? That's the lesson Germany needs to have learned from the Nazi era.
Your comment, well-intentioned as it is, as civilized a picture as it presents of 21st century Germany, is evidence that that lesson has not been learned. (But it's a lesson only incompletely learned in the U.S as well, not that that should be any consolation to anybody.)
younger generations of Germans should not be held responsible for what their grandparents might have done...no more than younger citizens of the US should be held responsible for slavery, or that Jews should be held responsible for the death of christ.
Your racist suggstion (sic) that the opposite is true is little better than the more blatant racism that you claim to oppose.
I'm afraid that you, in your haste to remove the racist label from Nazis and place it on me, missed my point.
I'm not saying that Germans born after the Nazi era are responsible for the Nazi sins of their ancestors.
What I am saying is that Germany went from awarding Iron Crosses, and otherwise accepting Jews into mainstream German society, circa World War I, to putting those same Jews on train to the East in 1942.
What I am saying is that even self-described "liberal" Germans today feel it's acceptable to refer to Turkish Gastarbeiteren as "Germany's niggers" while denying Turks born in Germany the franchise and full citizenship (as cited in Father/Land: A Personal Search for the New Germany by Wall Street Journal reporter and German-American author Frederick Kempe (I don't have the book at hand to give the page number, sorry)).
What I am saying is that as it was possible for Germany to slip from basic acceptance of Jews in 1914 to the Nuremberg laws by 1935 to genocide in 1942, Germans have a special responsibility, not so much to repent for the sins of their fathers, but to be watchful that they don't repeat similar sins today.
To be frank -- if not politically correct -- and with the risk of offending our German friends, the U.S. is far less likely to repeat slavery (or Native American genocide), than Germany is to oppress its Turkish or other minorities.
well think of it as free govt. sponsored testing that could lead to early warning signs of serious eye problems..... or not
Your eye scan has revealed serious problems, Citizen!
It appears your iris is not Aryan. We're not sure, these days, if the problem is that your iris is Arab, Turk, or Jewish, but to be on the safe side we'll be sending you for Aussiedlung im Osten, "resettlement in the East"; you'll be going to a special clinic there!
Before you mod this flamebait for its allusions to the Nazi era, please recall that the Holocaust began with (comparably) innocuous decrees announcing that all Jews would be peacefully "resettled" in the "the East", and that even with Germany's "rehabilitation" since the Nazi era, ethnic violence and discrimination against Turkish "Gastarbeiter" ( "guest workers") has continued despite official condemnation.
Given the general feeling among the younger German generations that Naziism is "merely" historic, and something they have no special responsibility for as a people, and abetted by those Germans who, growing up in Communist East Germany, were taught that they were the victims, not the perpetrators, of the Nazi crimes, I don't thing it's flamebait at all to question a renewal of the "your papers please!" mentality in Berlin.
It's cliche'd shit like this: "The man hunkered down, sweat dripping off him. He looked everywhere, breathing hard. He was in deep trouble."
Let's try some different cliches:
The geek hunkered down on the couch in his mother's basement. As long as the Doritas were near at hand, he could camp out on the cushions forever. Break a sweat? Breath hard? That crap was for jocks, except when he was watching the tentacle monster catch school girl. He hoped Mom wouldn't find his cache of tentacle-porn anime. Then he's be in deep trouble.
Yeah, but I'd consider a high-level analysis of my email headers (either sent or received) to be a violation of my privacy
And in reply to myself.;)...
Since the whole point of this is to build social-connection-webs, it's ideal for government crackdown via the guilt by association angle: not only can you find everybody who is emailing to dump.ashcroft@new.american.revolution.org, you can also find -- and investigate -- all the friends of the dissenter, too.
And for anyone who isn't worried that the FBI occasionally oversteps it bounds in investigating dissent, just consider that the social affinity networks of p2p traders could also be subpoenaed: we know Joe uploads mp3s, let's subpoena his email "buddy list" and investigate all those people too.
The system would be ideal for implementation at a fairly high level, (e.g. the ISP level) where systems can aggregate email headers across many different users in order to come up with meaningful graphs. The advantage it claims of no false positives means that it would be feasible at this level.
Yeah, but I'd consider a high-level analysis of my email headers (either sent or received) to be a violation of my privacy. Whether or not I'm mailing to kinky@alterate.life.styles.com, fringe.politcal.groups.require@free.speech.too.org , unpopular.opinions@free.thinkers.net, or falun.gong@is.banned.by.my.dictator.org, it should be nobody's business but my own.
Someone will undoubtedly argue that since headers are sent in the clear anyway, it shouldn't matter, but keeping a database of who mails what to whom only makes abuse -- by freelance busybodies or government spies and censors -- that much the easier.
This is a case, I think, were the threat inherent in the cure is worse than the disease.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a German, I would like to elaborate on this.
Cogently, informatively, and dispassionately -- without any special pleading -- put. Thank you.
Do not mod up people who point out cut-and-paste trolls logged in.
Many of these are folks who post plagarized articles and then point it out with another account to gain karma.
Do not mod up ACs who point out that people who point out people who post plagiarized articles.
Many of these are folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
folks who are stuck in a bizarre recursive process of accusation and counter accusation against
Oh, wheels-within-wheel-within -- oh just take the blue pill!
"How about that US CITIZEN that is currently being held with out trial and who has been denied a lawyer? "
Bad example.
a.) The operative word here is 'one'.
Well, you know, it always starts with one.
One Bolshevik, one kulak, one "Enemy of the People", one Jew, one Japanese-American, one Communist, one educated person, one literate person, one Arab.
(Roughly in chronological order; I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to connect each "Enemy" to the society that demonized them. Feel free to add other examples.)
That one is supposed to be our warning that it's time once again to fertilize the tree of liberty.
Because if we don't, suddenly it's not "just one" anymore; it's a thousand, a hundred thousand, six million, 20 million. And then everybody exclaims in surprise, "how could this happen in a civilized nation?!"
Blame the problems for 'slave workers' on the allied forces that didn't make a rule
Holy Christ. How about we blame problems for slave laborers (and I'll dispense with your disbelieving quote marks) on the fucking Nazis who enslaved them???
No, you want to blame the Allies???
Don't forget that in London the Queen even erected a memorial for a war criminal. And what about American war crimes? The German view towards this issue is quite more serious.
The Germans managed to kill nearly 11 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals, and whomever else they didn't like, and you're complaining about -- implying it's comparable to -- Air Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris's Dresden raid. Honest men can debate the justifications (or not) of Dresden, as they can the morality of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on civilian London. But neither rises to the stain on humanity that Auschwitz does -- except in the minds of Germans eager to claim that everybody is equally guilty.
As to American war crimes, I'm sure there were scattered American war crimes -- but again, there were no smokestacks, no ovens, no cattle cars filled to bursting with entire german families "evacuated" to the East for slave labor and mass murder. Instead we brought Germany the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift.
Waffen SS was the expanded military organisation of the SS. Also regular soldiers and foreigners (as Lituavia) served in this group. It was a kind of elite corps compared to Wehrmacht with harder policy.
I take this as an implication (as others have posted explicitly) that the Waffen-SS -- and the Wehrmacht in general -- were "common" soldiers, and not war criminals like the Sonnderkommando and the Einsatzgruppen. Sadly, this is not entirely true.
In fact, especially in the East, as this order, later cataloged as Nuremberg Document D-411, by General Walter von Reichenau, then Commander in Chief of the German 6th Army, makes clear:
A Wehrmacht armament inspector, in his report to the Wehrmacht High Command (the OKW or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) notes the consequence of the "common" soldiers' complicity in genocide (Nuremberg Document PS-3257, emphasis orthogonal's):
What about the allied soldiers from other countries?
Yeah, honestly I considered substituing "Allies" for Americans, but I was worried that
1) as an American I should speak only for Americans, and
2) Allied soldiers in World War II included the Soviets, and the Soviets did commit war crimes -- most notably, the Katyn Forrest massacre of 11,000 Polish officers (which was for a long time blamed on the Nazis) and lots of brutal rapes and murders of German civilians at the end of, and immediately after, the war.
So as to not muddy the message, I just wrote about "American soldiers". But I do not mean to minimize the sacrifices of our Allies -- indeed, had it not been for the stalwart British as led by Mr. Churchill, America might never have been able to take the war to the German homeland.
Poster also did not compare American soldiers to Nazis; he just pointed out that soldiers are paid to follow orders....
He (FFFish (7567)) explicitly said "There's a very good chance that your country has soldiers engaged in a military action that others see as warfare against an ethnic group. Presumably those soldier continue their action because they have promised on their honour to uphold their country's decisions.
What that ignores is that fighting against enemies predominantly of one ethnic group, as for example, America fighting against Italy in WWII, is very different than targeting one ethnic group, as the Nazis did with the Jews, the Slavs, and the Roma ("Gypsies").
The two are not at all morally equivalent, and it's pure sophistry to conflate Nazi-style genocide and "normal" warfare as practice by America.
And before anyone objects, yes, there were some war crimes committed by Americans, and yes, there were some "good Germans" who avoided or actively opposed Nazi criminality. The difference is one of policy and intent: U.S. soldiers aren't trying to commit genocide; the Nazi Einsatzgruppen were trying and succeeding at genocide. And that's why FFFish (7567)'s comment is so objectionable: because it sees no difference between these two very different kinds of soldiers.
Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.
There's a very good chance that your country has soldiers engaged in a military action that others see as warfare against an ethnic group. Presumably those soldier continue their action because they have promised on their honour to uphold their country's decisions.
What a specious argument -- while I disagree with the war in Iraq, I can tell the difference between that and Hitler's invasion of Poland (and then France, and Russia, and.... ). Anyone who claims there's a general moral equivalency between American soldiers and Nazi war criminals has either decided to jettison decency in order to make a point, or simply has no real grasp of the historical realities -- or is a despicable troll.
Son, if you can't distinguish between American soldiers defending their country and Nazi members of the SS invading Germany's neighbors, if you can't tell the difference between decent soldiers and war criminals, then no amount of argument on my part is going to make you see the light.
I don't begrudge Germany's common soldiers getting a small pension, even if their service was in Nazi aggression. Yes, some of the Waffen-SS were "common" battlefield Soldaten -- but some were war criminals.
But I have to ask why slave laborers get no more that about $7000 total, when some former SS get that much in a year.
And I have to draw the line at war criminals. Germany giving pensions to Nazi war criminals is just a slap in the face to Germany's victims and to all Americans who sacrificed to bring an end to Hitler's Reich -- it's those American soldiers I'm standing up for.
I don't think those American veterans would call me a bigot for thinking they're not the moral equivalent of Nazi war criminals.
I won't ask that you apologize to me, but I do ask that you apologize to the American soldiers you've compared to Nazis.
Well, the flippant answer is Argentina (Or Brazil).
On a more serious note, you might try Latvia; in 1998 about 500 Latvians, former members of the Waffen-SS marched through Riga to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the SS.
Up until 1996, you could have looked in Indiana in the United States:
Interestingly, the amount of the pension paid to these former SS by the German government varies based on their final rank in the SS -- higher ranks get a bigger pension. Only recently -- and only after international pressure -- did the German government modify its pension law to strip the pension from war criminals, and even so, there is no requirement that any investigation be made of recipients, nor is there any mechanism to do so, so even known war criminals can continue to collect payments from the German government.
Ironically, some war criminals even receive, in addition to their normal pensions what are called "victim's" pensions -- including those believed to have massacred American soldiers. The following was written in 1997, and thus may be slightly out of date:
At the same time that Germany provides monthly pension payments to former members of the SS and war criminals, persons forced to be slave laborers for the Nazi regime get far less:
So, frankly, any Old Folks (Pensioner's) Home in Germany should provide you with plenty of "original Nazis", living comfortably thanks to the largess of the current German government, while their victims -- those who survived at all, those who haven't died while waiting for their reparations -- continue to suffer.
(Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist, becaus
A polite threat is no less a threat.
You got that my (grandparent) post was a joke, right? Talking about being polite while using all sorts of rude words?
Doesn't the very presence of the goons, in this case the lawyers, automatically imply a threat, turning the politeness into a meaningless gesture?
:)
Politeness is never a "meaningless gesture", dumbass!
Only a moronic jerkwad asshat like you would ever be stupid enough to think so.
For example, I haven't gone to www.washingtonpost.com since they introduced their new "super-nosy" registration policy (and I used to go there almost every day). On some other web sites I give fake information(OK this doesn't really solve anything, but dammit I am not going to let them win...)
Ah, big deal, just give the Post your email and information.
If I recall correctly (it took several attempts to provide the information, as I had to simultaneously disable three layers of cookie eaters, in the browser and two proxies), I'm an Egyptian woman who works in manufacturing (but without a salary) and you can email me at example@example.org.
Seriously, I was willing to register with the New York Times -- mostly because they were one of the first serious sites to require registration, before I'd had time to be fed up about it.
But the Post wants too much information. So they get a database full of bogosity. If the Post wants to become increasingly irrelevant, they can make it increasingly harder for me to anonymously and conveniently access their site. At some point, I'll stop buying their hard-copy newspaper everyday too, and they can explain that to their advertisers.
Like the one that asks: Prove that there is no solution for a^n+b^n=c^n for n>2
If only Addison-Wesley would print the volumes of TAoCP with bigger margins, we might have an answer to that already!
With the exception that fewer people will die because of such controversies in Knuth' case, because there aren't too many militant guerilla groups fighting for the right way to do seminumerical algorithms.
That's the problem with kids today: no priorities, no gumption!
And if reading the fascicle is too heavy going, remember that you can watch the movies instead, at http://scpd.stanford.edu/knuth/. Fourteen videos of Knuth's lectures are aavailable, inclusing last years's "Tenth Annual Christmas Tree Lecture: Finding All Spanning Trees".
I watched the Tenth Annual Christmas Tree lecture live (the "trees", of course, being various computer science graphs and structures, not pine trees hung with colored lights) and found it surprisingly engaging and accessible even to an educated lay-person. If you have any interest in computer science or algorithm design, it's a fascinating way to spend an hour. (Disclaimer: I'd just watched the 1998 lecture to better understand Garsia-Wachs coding.)
I was so excited about watching it live that I submitted the Knuth Christmas lecture as a story about it to Slashdot, but the editors didn't think it important enough to accept. (Nor the story on "brain fingerprinting" -- a kind of polygraph based on direct reading of brain waves -- casting doubt on a death sentence, nor Eagle's drummer Don Henley's op-ed piece in the Washington Post attacking the music industry and ruminating on p2p, nor the story about Anglo-German scientific rivalry and the resulting pickled baby "dragon".)
I say he's german, and that he's speaking through [the] Google / Altavista [language tools / automatic translator]. Quite remarkable, actually.
I say we set aside one day, and make all our posts to Slashdot via Google translation to some arbitrary language and back to English (non-English speakers can just translate to English directly).
You'd understand it better if the Slashdot headline were not misleading.
The Slashdot Headline reads (emphasis orthogonal's): "Microsoft Forces wxWindows To Rename", but the notice in the wxWidgets.org page says (emphasis orthogonal's)
So if wxWidgets is willing to call it voluntary, I'm going to take wxWidgets at its word.
to start filing patents like mad. They're the new gold.
The new alchemy, the new "philosopher's stone", is more like it.
Yeah, but that means letting them use cookies. No thanks
I, too, prefer not to let Google set cookies. So far Google has been -- so far as I know -- a good respecter of privacy, but their insistence on recording all searches, along with the requesting IP address, gives me serious pause.
It's not that Google is evil, but that reposing that much information in any hands is a temptation to evil -- either on Google's part, or on the part of whomever ends up controlling it when and if Google goes public, or on the part of whatever government can issue subpoenas, or whatever lawyer can get subpoenas issued.
I'd feel much more comfortable if Google would purge its records of searches, or at least remove the IP addresses, but I suppose they have their reasons. I'll let you guess what those reasons might be.
Imagine Microsoft subpoenaing Google for the IP of whomever searched for "leaked Microsoft source" and then using that to allege an open source project is built on top of proprietary Microsoft code.
This is why I won't use the Google toolbar, and why for especially sensitive searches, e.g., "STD symptom" or "John Ashcroft calico cat", I go through an anonymizing proxy.
But while the easiest and permanent way to set image search SafeSearch off is through a cookie, I believe it can also be set per individual search using a check box that is sent to Google in the http GET as a parameter, bypassing cookies.
If I could lose 10 lbs. do you think they'd let a guy be a test pilot? 6'2" 130 lbs....
The first male "test pilot" will be Lieutenant (Commander posthumously) Seki Yukio, 70th graduate of the Naval Academy of Imperial Japan and officer of the First Air Fleet; he'll be leading the Special Attack Force (Tokkotai, or Kamikaze Squadron) flying (in)to the U.S. aircraft carrier St. Louis, off Leyte Gulf.
All hail Emperor Hirohito and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere!
(I know, making reference to history is considered uncomfortable, politically incorrect and flamebait, unless it's to bash America, Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay, Sir Arthur Harris, or the U.S. 8th Army Air Force for "unprovoked" attacks on "gentle" and "misunderstood" Germans and Japanese. Bullshit. Fascism happens most easily when we're so polite that we don't remember. I'm a liberal, but that doesn't mean I'm forgetful or stupid. Now mod me down because this makes you uncomfortable.)
The lesson that we drew from history is that democracy has to be defended at all cost. I don't mind that an administration that I trust knows who I am and where I am knowing that this information will not be abused. I have this level of comfort and faith in the German as well as EU institutions and the contemporary German governments (may they be social-democrats or conservatives)
I'm going to ignore your other points not because they are not valid, but because they'll lead us far off topic, and are very much subject to argument.
(As to Germans referring to Turks as "niggers", I gave the reference for that (Kempe's Father/Land) when I originally posted about it.)
You say that you're comfortable with the contemporary German government having information about you and your whereabouts, because have a "level of comfort and faith" in the German government and the current European Union institutions.
Fine. I congratulate the German people on living under a democracy, and I do not seek to minimize the effort that must have taken, emerging from dictatorship, ruin, and division in 1945. (And to some extent I must also claim credit for my country and, specifically, the Marshall Fund and the US policies toward the BRD after the war.)
But that's not my point. Currently you see no reason to fear the German government, and its retention of information about you.
You also wrote that "[t]he lesson that we [Germans] drew from history is that democracy has to be defended at all cost." I've noticed that Germans often talk about defending "democracy" and less often about defending "liberty". Perhaps it's merely a matter of translations, but I'm not sure -- perhaps it's also a matter of outlook or Weltbild. But it's not a matter of opinion that Hitler was democratically elected, winning a plurality votes and seats in the Reichstag in 1932.
So in addition to defending democracy, I think we need to defend liberty. Part of that is never allowing government -- no matter how good a government, no matter how well intentioned, no matter what checks and balances the Constitution promises -- to accumulate too much power over, or information about, the individual. Because a good government today can become a Fascist dictatorship tomorrow -- and more often than not it will do so with the enthusiastic support of the people, a people often fearful and hungering for the security only a Fascist government can promise ("A Volkswagon in every garage and death to the Bolshevik and Jewish untermenschen!").
I suspect that, like you, Berthold Guthmann also felt no reason to fear the German government, or its records on him.
In World War I, Fliegerleutnant ("Flight (second) lieutenant") Guthmann, an observer and gunner on military aeroplanes, earned the Iron Cross, 2nd class (the same as that also awarded to Adolf Hitler), the Tapferkeitsmedaille (Medal for Bravery), and the Verwundetenabzeichen (the wound medal, equivalent to the Purple Heart). His recommendation for the Iron Cross reads, in part, "Lt. Guthmann is brave and a fine officer, although Jewish...." In 1943, Guthmann and his family were arrested for being Jewish; Guthmann was eventually murdered at Auschwitz.
I'm not saying the current German government will abuse its iris-scanning. It probably will not. But how sure can you be -- especially in the face of German history -- that every future German government will resist the temptation to use these records in abusive ways? That's the lesson Germany needs to have learned from the Nazi era.
Your comment, well-intentioned as it is, as civilized a picture as it presents of 21st century Germany, is evidence that that lesson has not been learned. (But it's a lesson only incompletely learned in the U.S as well, not that that should be any consolation to anybody.)
younger generations of Germans should not be held responsible for what their grandparents might have done...no more than younger citizens of the US should be held responsible for slavery, or that Jews should be held responsible for the death of christ.
Your racist suggstion (sic) that the opposite is true is little better than the more blatant racism that you claim to oppose.
I'm afraid that you, in your haste to remove the racist label from Nazis and place it on me, missed my point.
I'm not saying that Germans born after the Nazi era are responsible for the Nazi sins of their ancestors.
What I am saying is that Germany went from awarding Iron Crosses, and otherwise accepting Jews into mainstream German society, circa World War I, to putting those same Jews on train to the East in 1942.
What I am saying is that even self-described "liberal" Germans today feel it's acceptable to refer to Turkish Gastarbeiteren as "Germany's niggers" while denying Turks born in Germany the franchise and full citizenship (as cited in Father/Land: A Personal Search for the New Germany by Wall Street Journal reporter and German-American author Frederick Kempe (I don't have the book at hand to give the page number, sorry)).
What I am saying is that as it was possible for Germany to slip from basic acceptance of Jews in 1914 to the Nuremberg laws by 1935 to genocide in 1942, Germans have a special responsibility, not so much to repent for the sins of their fathers, but to be watchful that they don't repeat similar sins today.
To be frank -- if not politically correct -- and with the risk of offending our German friends, the U.S. is far less likely to repeat slavery (or Native American genocide), than Germany is to oppress its Turkish or other minorities.
well think of it as free govt. sponsored testing that could lead to early warning signs of serious eye problems ..... or not
Your eye scan has revealed serious problems, Citizen!
It appears your iris is not Aryan. We're not sure, these days, if the problem is that your iris is Arab, Turk, or Jewish, but to be on the safe side we'll be sending you for Aussiedlung im Osten, "resettlement in the East"; you'll be going to a special clinic there!
Before you mod this flamebait for its allusions to the Nazi era, please recall that the Holocaust began with (comparably) innocuous decrees announcing that all Jews would be peacefully "resettled" in the "the East", and that even with Germany's "rehabilitation" since the Nazi era, ethnic violence and discrimination against Turkish "Gastarbeiter" ( "guest workers") has continued despite official condemnation.
Given the general feeling among the younger German generations that Naziism is "merely" historic, and something they have no special responsibility for as a people, and abetted by those Germans who, growing up in Communist East Germany, were taught that they were the victims, not the perpetrators, of the Nazi crimes, I don't thing it's flamebait at all to question a renewal of the "your papers please!" mentality in Berlin.
Let's try some different cliches:
Yeah, but I'd consider a high-level analysis of my email headers (either sent or received) to be a violation of my privacy
;)...
And in reply to myself.
Since the whole point of this is to build social-connection-webs, it's ideal for government crackdown via the guilt by association angle: not only can you find everybody who is emailing to dump.ashcroft@new.american.revolution.org, you can also find -- and investigate -- all the friends of the dissenter, too.
And for anyone who isn't worried that the FBI occasionally oversteps it bounds in investigating dissent, just consider that the social affinity networks of p2p traders could also be subpoenaed: we know Joe uploads mp3s, let's subpoena his email "buddy list" and investigate all those people too.
The system would be ideal for implementation at a fairly high level, (e.g. the ISP level) where systems can aggregate email headers across many different users in order to come up with meaningful graphs. The advantage it claims of no false positives means that it would be feasible at this level.
g , unpopular.opinions@free.thinkers.net, or falun.gong@is.banned.by.my.dictator.org, it should be nobody's business but my own.
Yeah, but I'd consider a high-level analysis of my email headers (either sent or received) to be a violation of my privacy. Whether or not I'm mailing to kinky@alterate.life.styles.com, fringe.politcal.groups.require@free.speech.too.or
Someone will undoubtedly argue that since headers are sent in the clear anyway, it shouldn't matter, but keeping a database of who mails what to whom only makes abuse -- by freelance busybodies or government spies and censors -- that much the easier.
This is a case, I think, were the threat inherent in the cure is worse than the disease.
I wish people would lay off of Bush. I never go hungry since he's put food on my family.
Bush has put food on your family?
Your family would be the Greens?
The Soylent Greens?