Expectations for President Obama

[zahratustra]

And I keep telling you that Kamikaze was a late war development (Oct. 1944) which had no connection with Japanese "casus belli".

 

[JemyM]

And I keep telling you that Kamikaze was a late war development (Oct. 1944) which had no connection with Japanese "casus belli".

"In 1944-45, the Japanese were heavily influenced by Shinto beliefs"

 

[Naked Ninja]

Um, JemyM? You are mad. Jesus commanded Christians to turn the other cheek and love their enemies. If you think that just because Hitler invoked Christianity in his speeches or printed some belt buckles that suddenly makes mass genocide in any way related to the Christian message, well, you're a nutjob. It's completely contrary, even if madmen use it for an excuse.

Here is a scenario. Let's say I go and kill a school full of sweet, innocent children, and shout "For Democracy!!!" while I'm doing it. Would that make Democracy to blame?

No.

Likewise, Christianity and Islam.

Seriously, get a grip here. You can commit atrocities in the name of any philosophy, unless the fundamental message of that philosophy is "hey, go out and kill" that doesn't make the philosophy to blame. Mass murder is not what Christianity is about, no matter how many madmen and fascists have used it as an excuse throughout history. This little war of the wiki links you are having here is pointless in the extreme. All it proves is that madmen are good at twisting things to try justify their motives, what a HUGE revelation that is to us all.

Ofcourse, but most of us with an average level of education realize that war is pretty much meaningless. It costs more than you get from it, and we benefit from having peace.

I have rarely met anyone as naive as you Jemy. Seriously. I think you will find that, throughout history, the people who most instigate wars are often VERY educated, more so than most of the troops they then send to fight. It costs those dictators little and they stand to benefit a lot from the gains their soldiers achieve with their lives and blood. You underestimate the thirst for power and VASTLY overestimate education's ability to counter that thirst.

 

[JemyM]

Um, JemyM? You are mad. Jesus commanded Christians to turn the other cheek and love their enemies.

I am not mad at all. Please calm down and be reasonable.

The specific line you point out is not the end-all-debate line and you are pulling a "no true scotsman" fallacy. You cherrypick that specific line because it's the most compatible with the current world. That's what I mean with "reinterpreting". But that line is just a few pages from uttering lines like "whoever is not with me is against me" and giving instructions to burn apostates, lines which people within previous moral zeitgeists take for end-all-debate lines. When discussing history you cannot take your interpretion of a text for granted, you must acknowledge how it was interpreted in it's time and how it's interpreted by other backgrounds than your own.

If you think that just because Hitler invoked Christianity in his speeches or printed some belt buckles that suddenly makes mass genocide in any way related to the Christian message, well, you're a nutjob. It's completely contrary, even if madmen use it for an excuse.

Not really. I see plenty of vocal Christians uttering similar statements in this modern day and era. Just like Hitler, Martin Luther and previous Christians, the christian antisemites of today refers to Matthew 27:25.

"When Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult was rising, he took water and washed his hands and said, “I am innocent of the blood of this Just person. You see to it.” And all the people answered and said, “His blood be upon us and on our children.”"

The words are reinterpreted and ignored by people like you who have adapted yourselves to the current moral zeitgeist, but the original message hasn't been updated. The flashpoint is there.

Here is a scenario. Let's say I go and kill a school full of sweet, innocent children, and shout "For Democracy!!!" while I'm doing it. Would that make Democracy to blame?
No.
Likewise, Christianity and Islam.

Democracy have no creed that tells you to kill people. Christianity and Islam does. But that's not the main problem. To kill is a natural impulse within humanity. It can only be diminished if it's trained away, using current information available, and if you avoid to provoke it. When some movements take an anti-academic, anti-educational, anti-information stance while teaching children fear, fear for satan, fear for hell, fear of strangers, then you are basically producing killing machines and you do not even know it.

Seriously, get a grip here. You can commit atrocities in the name of any philosophy, unless the fundamental message of that philosophy is "hey, go out and kill" that doesn't make the philosophy to blame. Mass murder is not what Christianity is about, no matter how many madmen and fascists have used it as an excuse throughout history. This little war of the wiki links you are having here is pointless in the extreme. All it proves is that madmen are good at twisting things to try justify their motives, what a HUGE revelation that is to us all.

I know no philosophy which have even a hundred thousand of followers, complete with separate institutions and preachers who promote it as more valuable than life itself. You might need to check your analogies.

I have rarely met anyone as naive as you Jemy. Seriously. I think you will find that, throughout history, the people who most instigate wars are often VERY educated, more so than most of the troops they then send to fight. It costs those dictators little and they stand to benefit a lot from the gains their soldiers achieve with their lives and blood. You underestimate the thirst for power and VASTLY overestimate education's ability to counter that thirst.

Actually, continued warfare and conflict tend to occur when fear is the dominating emotion and intellectual freedoms are diminished. The troops are often picked for being easy to manipulate, young men, poor, usually less educated.

 

[V7]

The specific line you point out is not the end-all-debate line and you are pulling a "no true scotsman" fallacy. You cherrypick that specific line .....

and yet elsewhere you're arguing that 'real christians' can only have a narrow literal translation of the bible or they're not really christians. As far as I can see you're happy to define religion broadly for everything bad (Hitler and facism? really?) but strictly narrowly when it comes to the good.

 

[Pladio]

It's a bit important if you want to search for reasons. Jews aren't genetically inferior according to that pseudoscience, but they were hated all over the western world for cultural reasons.

That's the whole point. Jews weren't hated for any sensible reason, they were hated just because they were Jews.
Religious reasons: Killers of Christ, murdering young children for making matzoh...
Non-religious reasons: Elders of Zion, Conquering the world, poor leeches who steal the people's jobs, rich parasites who take people's money.

They weren't hated just because people saw them as different. They were hated because of the simple fact they were Jews.

Again, ... Read the Nuremberg laws and tell me how that isn't race-defined. Read your own quote of Goebbels' speech and tell me if he doesn't talk about the Jews poisoning their pure race.
Yes, the NAZI's weren't only using non-religious arguments, but they weren't using cultural arguments only neither.

By the way, I have actually met some people who still believe all Jews have crooked noses and can't have blond hair and/or blue eyes.

 

[skavenhorde]

Just a question,

I thought this was about expectations for President Obama? When did Hitler get into this topic and why is it that Hitler and Obama are being talked about so often? I just found it funny because I just saw The Daily Show episode where one congressman associated Hitler with Obama and how much they were alike and now I came here and click on this link about expectations for president Obama and what's being talked about here HITLER, LMAO.

I just found it hilarious that over here at the watch, you guys are talking about Nazis in an Obama thread.

 

[magerette]

It's the unrelenting onslaught of God and religion, skav-- it seems to bring out the fascism/nationalism/religion comparisons, which inevitably produces Adolph.

I've given up. If you want to talk about Obama religion free, you'll have to start a new thread.

Edit--I really can't fault anyone who wanders off topic as I'm guilty as charged myself many times; the nice thing about this board is that people feel free to speak their minds. If I feel compelled to go back to something political, I won't hesitate a second.

 

[JemyM]

Again, ... Read the Nuremberg laws and tell me how that isn't race-defined. Read your own quote of Goebbels' speech and tell me if he doesn't talk about the Jews poisoning their pure race.

I have studied the history of antisemitism up to the Nuremberg rally and I repeat; jewish blood was believed to be cursed and they were also hunted for cultural reasons. The nazi agenda against the jews was based on anti-semitism, not eugenics. Anti-semitism have a very long history in Europe and have taken various forms but up to the late enlightenment, the origin was the Bible and the Qur'an. Also I will point out On the Jews and their lies again because it is important. It was the key document that describes in detail what should be done with the jews, and the Nazi followed it by the dot.

There have been a lot of crap written around Hitler and the nazi since the 2nd world war, most of which is debunked as pseudoscience, including inspiration from paganism, the occult etc. When it comes to history these days I always go back to the original sources. The only source that suggest that Hitler himself wasn't a Christian is an American mistranslation of Hitler's table talk.

So to go back to the original point; claiming WW2 had nothing to do with religion is a false statement. There were several religious motives within WW2, among other agendas.

 

[JemyM]

and yet elsewhere you're arguing that 'real christians' can only have a narrow literal translation of the bible or they're not really christians.

No, I didn't. I said that if you do not take the doctrine seriously or even ignore most of it, I wouldn't count you much of a Christian/Muslim. The doctrine and the scripture is the problem and I do not find it too much to ask that you educate yourself on whatever you subscribe to.

As far as I can see you're happy to define religion broadly for everything bad (Hitler and facism? really?) but strictly narrowly when it comes to the good.

No, I don't. Religion is very complex stuff, and your extremely simplified strawman doesn't fit what I said.

 

[JemyM]

I thought this was about expectations for President Obama? When did Hitler get into this topic and why is it that Hitler and Obama are being talked about so often?

This have nothing to do with the dailyshow episode (which I saw) or Obama really.

Someone made a comment on muslims, which lead to a debate on religion in politics, which lead to a debate on religious wars, which lead to a debate on if religion was behind ww2 or not.

 

[Pladio]

I have studied the history of antisemitism up to the Nuremberg rally and I repeat; jewish blood was believed to be cursed and they were also hunted for cultural reasons. ... SNIP

If Jewish blood was believed to be cursed, then it's not a cultural difference... It's racial.

 

[JemyM]

If Jewish blood was believed to be cursed, then it's not a cultural difference... It's racial.

I wouldn't say that curses is a biological thing.

 

[Pladio]

If I were to say :
"The blood of all Black people is cursed"
Would you agree I'm talking about race ?

It's not the curse itself that is the problem it's the following:
"The blood of ALL[ insert group of people here] people is cursed".

Let me state it in a different way;
"The blood of the Aryan people is pure and the blood of the Jews isn't."

 

[JemyM]

If I were to say :
"The blood of all Black people is cursed"
Would you agree I'm talking about race ?

No, I would like to know what curse you are referring to.

It's not the curse itself that is the problem it's the following:
"The blood of ALL[ insert group of people here] people is cursed".
Let me state it in a different way;
"The blood of the Aryan people is pure and the blood of the Jews isn't."

Still nog eugenics or racial biology. Eugenics meant to track human species based on their level of evolution, where more evolved races were... well... more evolved, thus better. Eugenics naturally considered handicapped people inferior, but african people were seen as less evolved than the whites. By letting the best and most evolved DNA breed you would empower humanity. Or at least, that was the theory.

The jewish blood curse had nothing to do with Eugenics or the kind of breeding for stronger, better DNA that was popular in that era. The jewish blood curse is a purely religious idea, rooted in Christianity. The world was different back then, people weren't as critical to religious theories as people are today. There was no reason to question the bible. People like Naked Ninja was pretty much seen as atheists back then. That means that the idea of an actual supernatural curse planted on jews after killing Jesus was a perfectly acceptable idea.

But there was another level to it. The jews, was seen as a bad influence on the german people for cultural reasons. The suspicion against the jew have taken several different forms throughout the ages. Up to the 17-1800 jews were rumoured to be cannibals since theyhad to eat Christian flesh to breed. The theory was that since jews couldn't eat the flesh/blood of Jesus christ in the communion, they had to eat christians instead. While the economy was evolving, mainstream Christianity had plenty of idea on how you should and should not do in business, which naturally made non-Christians who didn't follow those rules different. Jews often ended up in the upper echelons of the economy which blended previous suspicions with jealousy. This lead to the "Non-religious reasons" you posted before. Now the idea of jewish vampires/parasites simply took a different form, but it was the same old "jews preying on good christians" thing.

 

[Pladio]

Then explain why converts and their children AND even their grandchildren were seen as inferior too ?
They were Christians, true believers ... Yet for the mighty Aryan race they were still Jewish ?
I could understand if only the converts, but their children too ? And then those people's children ? How isn't that racial then ?

 

[Pladio]

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007457

...Like the social Darwinists before them, the Nazis believed that human beings could be classified collectively as “races,” ... not only to outward appearance and physical structure, but also shaped internal mental life, ways of thinking

To define a race, the social Darwinists affixed stereotypes, both positive and negative, of ethnic group appearance, behavior, and culture as allegedly unchangeable and rooted in biological inheritance, immutable throughout time and immune to changes in environment, intellectual development, or socialization. For the Nazis, assimilation of a member of one race into another culture or ethnic group was impossible because the original inherited traits could not change: they could only degenerate through so-called race-mixing.

The Nazis defined Jews as a “race.” Regarding the Jewish religion as irrelevant, the Nazis attributed a wide variety of negative stereotypes about Jews and “Jewish” behavior to an unchanging biologically determined heritage that drove the “Jewish race,” like other races, to struggle to survive by expansion at the expense of other races.

But, Hitler warned, the German “Aryan” race was threatened by dissolution from within and without. The internal threat lurked in intermarriages between “Aryan” Germans and members of inherently inferior races: Jews, Roma, Africans, and Slavs. The offspring of these marriages were said to dilute the superior characteristics reflected in German blood, thus weakening the race in its struggle against other races for survival.

To defeat and dominate the Slavs permanently, the German masters had to annihilate the leadership classes of the region and the Jews, who were the only “race” capable of organizing the inferior races through a brutalizing Bolshevik-Communist doctrine that was a biologically fixed “Jewish” ideology.

Well, whoever wrote this agrees that the Nazi's thought of the Jews as their own race.

 

[Pladio]

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007171

Though secular racists drew upon religious imagery and stereotypes to define hereditary Jewish "behavior," they insisted that alleged Jewish "traits" were handed down from generation to generation. Since "Jews" did not form a religious group, but a "race," the conversion of an individual Jew to Christianity did not change his racial "Jewishness" and was therefore by nature an insincere conversion.

 

[Pladio]

http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/document/DocJewQn.htm

Speeches by Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler before senior SS officers in Poznan, October 4 and 6, 1943.
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol. XIII, p. 323, and Himmler, Reichsfuehrer-SS - P. Padfield, Henry Holt and Co, NY, 1990, p. 469:

I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about, "the Jewish race is being exterminated", says one party member, "that's quite clear, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, and we're doing it, exterminating them". And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of those who talk this way has watched it, not one of them has gone through it. Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.

I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of. We come to the question: how is it with the women and the children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. That is to say I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men - so to speak killing or ordering them killed - and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision has to be taken, to cause this Volk [people] to disappear from the earth.

[This speech was recorded; the magnetic tapes are in the National Archives in Washington, DC]

 

[JemyM]

Just to keep the concepts apart:
Racial Biology or Eugenics treats some races as inferior for being less evolved. It's a rather sophisticated pseudoscience, just dead wrong.
Social Darwinism is based on the "survival of the fittest" concept that justifies why fit humans should live and unfit was fair game.

Nazi germany had nothing to do with Darwin. Nazi germany applied breeding ideas that have been around since the beginning of agriculture, kinda like breeding up horses, but with humans.¨

Yes, jews are a people, and could be called a race. But neither by racial biology, eugenics or social darwinism are they inferior. Hitler considered the jews to be morally, spiritually and physically inferior but with superior intellect which allowed them to thrive by undermining and perverting civilizations built by other races. That's why they are seen as parasites or poison. Not genetically, but for cultural reasons.

Eugenics, racial biology and social darwinism was popular world-wide before World War 2 and even some time after that. Many countries had programs with forced sterlizization of the "less evolved", but not a single one beyond Germany targeted jews.

If you go by class eugenics: link
... then jews belong to the green group.


There's a work out there known as "Hitler's Table-Talk" which is the original source for confusing nazism with darwin. The american translation, by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, make drastic changes to the original text, making it sound like nazism is influenced by science and that Hitler hate Christianity. Unfortunately, that mistranslation have had a huge impact of how many now see WW2 and it's often quoted, despite the fact that other historians have retranslated the text with it's original meaning intact.