German Ignorance

[alva]

# Drop that napalm from the sky,
See the children burn and die. #

They made us sing that in the army way... * spits on floor *

[alva]

EDIT : attached wrong pic, it won't let me fix it for some reason.

[Heresson]

Every nation has some dose of ignorance in the subject of Holocaust/ww2. Also Jews. And while Germans are unaware/ignorant of some aspects of it, I surmise their knowledge about the sufferings of Jews during the war is bigger than most other nations. If they are unaware of something, it's more likely the sufferings caused to other than Jews groups. Judging them by one person is not rationable.

Either way, the Holocaust was the darkest hour in the history of mankind

Mankind or Germany? If it's the darkest hour in the history of mankind, it's the darkest hour in the history of their victims as well... While it's saddening for entire human race that something like this has happened, the guilt is more or less concentrated in one spot - Germany
(and Austria).

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Locutus
Yes, because napalming 4 million civilians is a very
But in reality the only thing many Americans are ashamed of with regard to Vietnam is the fact that they lost

Naaah, what should be our biggest shame is the fact that we betrayed the South Vietnamese and the peace treaty in '75, thus allowing millions more dead at the hands of the communists.

[MrFun]

Shhhh . . . . . .





hyper-patriotic Americans don't want us to know about My Lai.

[alva]

Luckely My-Lai never happened.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe



Naaah, what should be our biggest shame is the fact that we betrayed the South Vietnamese and the peace treaty in '75, thus allowing millions more dead at the hands of the communists.

The South Vietnman government was just as corrupt and repressive as the North Vietnam government. What kind of a choice was it for Vietnamese when they had a choice between a rotten capitalist regime, or a rotten communist regime?

[Combat Ingrid]

Originally posted by alva
Luckely My-Lai never happened.

They were terrorists

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

A choice between life and death perhaps?

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
A choice between life and death perhaps?

They die under the South Vietnam regime, or they die under the North Vietnam regime.


Where does the choice of life come in?

[BlackCat]

Hope DanS doesn't read this thread - he'll go bezerk with all this photographical evidence.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by BlackCat
Hope DanS doesn't read this thread - he'll go bezerk with all this photographical evidence.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by MrFun


The South Vietnman government was just as corrupt and repressive as the North Vietnam government. What kind of a choice was it for Vietnamese when they had a choice between a rotten capitalist regime, or a rotten communist regime?

Rotten capitalist regimes tend to be more effective economically and give bigger chances of democratisation.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by MrFun


They die under the South Vietnam regime, or they die under the North Vietnam regime.


Where does the choice of life come in?

Care to estimate deaths caused by the South Vietnamese government vs. the purges inflicted upon them fromthe North say 72-75 vs. 75-78.

We made the commitment during the negotiated peace treaty that we would protect South Vietnam's sovereignty. When 75 came and passed thanks to the like of Teddy Kennedy we not only stabbed them in the back by not living up to our treaty obligations but refused to provide medical aid.

A bright spot in our recent history no doubt, only obfuscated by the nonsequitorial arguement that the South Vietnamese were as bad if not worse.

[Muad'Dib]

From No More Vietnams by Richard Nixon.

Our bombing provoked hysterical outbursts from our critics. A news magazine wrote that "civilized man will be horrified at the renewed spectacle of the world's mightiest air force mercilessly pounding a small Asian nation in an abuse of national power and disregard of humanitarian principleds." One newspaper wrote that it caused millions of Americans "to cringe in shame and to wonder at their President's very sanity." One columnist said the bombing was the action of "a maddened tyrant," and another stated that we had "loosed the holocaust." One senator said it was a "stone-age tactic." Another called it "the most murderous aerial bombardment in the history of the world" and "a policy of mass-murder that's being carried on in the name of the American people."
Seldom has so much heated rhetoric been so wrong. Our critics denounced our actions as the "Christmas carpet bombing." But they were wrong on both points: We did not bomb on Christmas day, and we never covered whole areas with a carpet of bombs, as had been the case with our bombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II. Our pilots struck only at specific military targets and had explicit orders to avoid collateral damage to civilian areas--even if this exposed them to greater risks.
Our critics should have known better than to make the utterly false accusation that we were indiscriminately bombing civilians. Hanoi at the time had put the number of civilian fatalities at between 1,300 and 1,600. Regrettable though these accidental losses were, they did not approach the death tolls that resulted when the Allies deliberately bombed civilian targets in World War II. Over 35,000 civilians were killed in the triple raid on Dresden, over 42,000 died in six nights of bombing in Hamburg, and over 83,000 Japanese were killed in just two days when we fire-bombed Tokyo in 1945. If we had targeted civilian areas during the December bombings, North Vietnamese losses would have been a hundred times higher than they were.
Our bombing achieved its purposes, Militarily, we had shattered North Vietnam's war making capacity. Politically, we had shattered Hanoi's will to continue the war. Admiral James Stockdale, one of our POWs who was awarded the Medal of Honor when he returned, later described the scene when the prisoners heard the explosions as the bombs began hitting their targets. He wrote that "cheers started to go up all over the cellblocks of that downtown prison. This was the new reality for Hanoi." He observed that the bombing took a heavy psychological toll on the enemy: "One look at any Vietnamese officer's face told the whole story. It telegraphed accommodation, hopelessness, remorse, fear. The shock was ther; our enemy's will was broken." Our POWs knew that they were coming home, even if our editorial writers did not.
Hanoi quickly accepted our first offer to resume the talks. We had forced Hanoi to come back to the negotiating table to end the war through a fair settlement. On January 8, 1973, when our highlevel negotiations reconvened, North Vietnam agreed to our basic terms within forty-eight hours.

pages 157 & 158.

I suggest you dick heads read the rest of the book. It may actually enlighten you, but I doubt it, since you all are beyond enlightenment.