You say that as if I have all of a sudden dragged some pedantic 'degree versus kind' distinction into the thread. It was TAB's point on the very first page of the thread and plenty of people have addressed it before I did. In any case if you don't accept that the two things are the same, in the sense that you think they need to be understood in different ways, then you are saying they are not of the same kind.

Not sure what the point of this disagreement is, it's entirely academic. Crimes were committed. Degree, kind - one was bad and the other was worse.

It's not academic. The entire poppy debate is now predicated on the idea that the soldiers in the first world war died to protect our freedoms, which is kind of funny on a number of levels. History is used in england to justify current and future wars in defence of the British Commercial empire. (and in no small way underpin the conservative party, and euro-scepticism)

Indeed it's getting to the point that I can't believe that britain was even able to win a war in the last two centuries, as the whiteness of their hats must have made it difficult for them to conceal themselves from the enemy.

It has gotten so bad that the English FA, in all seriousness asked FIFA if they could have a poppy on the england shirt last season, because commemorating the british war dead was a non-political gesture. It takes a lot to make the whole world laugh.

You are talking about a country with absolutely no sense of its own history. where it's actual understanding of what it did, and what is does is completely obscured by a deeply ingrained hypocrisy. British history seems to be entirely based on scrounging around looking for the worst people ever to have lived, so that British imperial policy won't look so er evil by comparison.

At least america has the decency to completely make up its history. It's all either Red Dawn if you're from a red state, or if you're from a blue state there's Platoon. (because no-one suffered more during the vietnam war than those boys who were drafted and sent over there)

There also always seems to be a tendency in these discussions to imply that the US/UK war effort against the Nazis is somehow less legitimate because of their own less than admirable track records. I have no time at all for this kind of reasoning.

It's not implying that it's less legitimate, just that it's completely misrepresented. I guarantee you that 99% of all americans who are aware of the second world war will tell you that America declared war on the Germans to protect freedom.

A slightly more jaundiced view is that your ruling elite had its eyes on south east asia, and provoked the japanese empire into attacking you so you could take it from them. The germans declaring war was a bonus and it meant that you could reluctantly establish european protectorates, while all the time pretending that you didn't want to become a global superpower and loot the world.

I mean sure they're not the nazis, and they're not mao or stalin, but virtually no-one is. But as relatively wealthy, white, western hemisphere males, we're clearly inside the bubble looking out, and the scale of the global piracy indulged in by the UK and the US isn't perhaps as obvious to us as it is to the rest of the world.

One, I'm not saying that you dragged pedantry into it.

Two, a cold-blooded murder here and another one there would need to be understood in different ways with respect to different and multivalent causes, but at street-level, they're both cold-blooded murders. One of them might have been done with a single bullet and the other with 50 stab wounds to the neck, which we might decide is a difference in either kind or degree, but which is a separate issue from the large-scale forces behind either of them occurring, which themselves might differ in kind or degree.

Extrapolating from different or similar street-level crimes a parallel difference or similarity in their background causes can be problematic.

nazis= The joker
British empire= The corleones.

You realize this sounds like a conspiracy theory.

REMEMBER THE MAINE/LUSITANIA/PEARL HARBOUR/GULF OF TONKIN....

I agree with quite a lot of what you've said here. The poppy thing has been discussed here before but I find it very odd how perceptions of the First World War have become increasingly rose-tinted in recent years. It seems to have happened very quickly as not that long ago the 'futility of war' view was more or less dominant.

It would probably be a good thing if more people realised that countries go to war (or stay neutral) because they believe it to be in their national interest. This doesn't mean that they might not also be doing the right thing, but it would be a useful corrective to the idea that going to war is a selfless act on behalf of all humanity.

Anyway, if true, we would have been totally and utterly guilty




of nothing more than stopping someone else from becoming a global superpower and looting the world, who already had either a Nanking or a Dachau under their belts.

It just seems from my point of view that it's amazing how american history seems to be made up of countries who desperately want to lose empires, doing things to provoke the most reluctant superpower in the world into kicking the shit out of them and taking all their stuff. It's happened so often that the US wound up owning the world.

And yes, nanjing was terrible, and the imperial japanese were racist monsters, but in fairness, you did vaporize two entire cities with nuclear weapons, burn every building in japan, and bombed "indochina" into the stone age, and wound up in posssession of the entire pacific rim, to work as wage slaves

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:


I actually don't think it is, though plenty of vested interests wish it was. The WWI narrative in England is overwhelmingly about the poor bloody Tommies with the rats and the gas and the shellshock the trench foot, lions led by donkeys. Some of it stresses "sacrifice", which is a slippery concept but is at least a tragic view more than a triumphalist one. But plenty of it uncomplicatedly talks about the pity and the horror and the waste of life. The English wax less belligerent about WWI than about almost any other modern conflict.

Central Rain feels this is changing for the worse, and he may be right. But I think it's got a long way to go while Michael Morpurgo is one of the country's most popular children's authors.

WWII: different kettle of fish. That's what's become our national mythos. That's what badly needs some fucking nuance. But I'm not sure that's quite what you're supplying.

Anyway, back to the Nazis.

I think part of the facination, is due to the fact that, with the right leadership, Germany could have easily won the war in Europe. The more time that has passed since, the more information has appeared showing how close we were to losing.

I think it's also down to the short lived nature of the Nazis. Communism has been around for a very, very long time now, and has almost been normalised. The only time I hear Cuba mentioned these days, is people coming back from their hols.

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:


Well, we too have spent the years since trying to get our heads around what the Nazis were up to, and thinking. It's not as though Europe didn't fuck itself well over and effectively deliver itself to us on a platter. Still, American hegemony turned out alright for Europe, all in all.



It went from being us or Japan to us or China (or Russia). Still is. Which cunts do you trust less, us or them?

Harbinger of Hope's Nazi fascination extends to reading the Daily Mail, dunnit kidda?

G-Man wrote:
For my money that is definitely part of the English fascination with the Third Reich, ethnocentricity. Us Anglo Saxons identify with Germans more than Eastern European or Mediteranean types who we tend to disregard as backward and a little bit madcap. If atrocities of that ilk (if not magnitude) were commited in Romania or Spain or somewhere there would be an element of "look what those eccentrics are upto again" whereas we expect Germans (and Scandinaveans for that matter) to be less volatile, more pragmatic and even keeled. How was it a genocidal lunatic cast his spell on these people? That to me is the eternal mystery which drives the "enduring fascination".

Nefertiti2 wrote:


Man, you should permanently log off from OTF for that one.

Well, we too have spent the years since trying to get our heads around what the Nazis were up to, and thinking. It's not as though Europe didn't fuck itself well over and effectively deliver itself to us on a platter. Still, American hegemony turned out alright for Europe, all in all.

not sure that half of Europe would agree, and given the choice, i reckon most europeans would have preferred european hegemony but WWI did for that.

It went from being us or Japan to us or China (or Russia). Still is. Which cunts do you trust less, us or them?

it would be worse to be under chinese hegemony, much worse. Look at how badly they treat their own people, what would they do to us? But the crucial point to remember is that all of those superpowers you're talking about are all cunts, acting in cuntish ways, for cuntish reasons, and lying about it, their motivations, even when they're doing things that seem like they're for the common good.

anything that we have under american hegemony, we have because it is convenient for them for things to operate this way. If ever the situation arose where it was convenient for them to say kill our prime minister and start a coup, you can be sure they would do it.

All too often that is what is missing from discussion about WWII is that pretty much all the major participant countries were without exception blood soaked machiavellian monsters, who were all experts in going to other countries, taking them over, killing and torturing anyone who opposed them, and ruthlessly exploiting them. all of them had lengthy experience of horrendously oppressing sectors of their own societies, and there are no good guys, only bad guys and worse guys.

I think this is the nuance that is missing in the history of any powerful country, written by people within that powerful country. they generally usually forget to mention just how brutally evil their country has generally been at every available opportunity.

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:


The proverbial checks and balances in our system of government ensure that the confluence of events making such a thing seem "convenient" would be very rare. Probably something terrible that your lot did first. That sort of thing we know how to capitalize on for sure.

Somehow Iraq comes to mind. But look at it: evil fucker seizes power in 1970 and makes an endless nuisance of himself for the next two decades, including a mini-WWI against the creepy bastards next door and the annexation of a helpless bystander. So in we go, and perhaps that's opportunistic and convenient but it also created a major headache for ourselves for the next ten years. Which is not to belittle the bigger headache experienced by the Iraqis.

Then 9/11 and, however tragically bad and inept the decision to take it back to Iraq (and it was), what can't be denied is that the first war had never really ended and, as Hitchens was never tired of pointing out, the status quo there was untenable. We--and much of Europe too--already owned the problem, which we hadn't gone looking for originally.

Was it convenient to invade and take over Iraq? For a few people who got rich off it certainly, but not for the country as a whole. And so that has to work its way through the lumbering political system, and hopefully the upshot is that Bush permanently tarnished the Republican brand, which wouldn't be very convenient for them. I believe he also tarnished the idea of preemptive war for a bit. Not a perfect system, obviously.

Don't laugh, but I think Americans, like most reasonably civilized people, are by and large the peace-loving sort. They also get to elect their leaders. Our giant military can be explained by the less peace-loving superpowers with which we've had to contend, who didn't get to elect their leaders but were run by mafia-style criminals with no accountability to their people. We had a bit of an arms race with the Soviets, and haven't properly de-escalated from that yet. Inertia.

With great power comes great responsibility, which we've repeatedly abused as anyone else would in our position. But I think the fundamentals of the situation are basically as I've just outlined them. Even with a war as bad as Vietnam you can point to worse fuckers stoking the other side. Doesn't excuse anything we did there, which was plenty, but why were we there? Well, it was convenient to address the falling dominoes problem, but who would take a gander at Mao and the Kremlin and not be tempted to do the same? In hindsight, obviously, we should have let Vietnam go, as was clear enough early on in our intervention.



I'm fine with lesser of evils, and I more than agree about the need for nuance. Which, albeit, "blood-soaked Machiavellian monsters" doesn't seem to capture. But it's also important to remember that, if this wasn't all about "freedom," it was about democracy against all the other shit.

Bruno wrote:


I buy most of what you say, but Iraq II was a hubristic act of aggression based on flagrant lies that was presented as little more than a weekend jaunt, with a bit of shock and awe, a statue falling and Dubya flying in dressed up as the military man he never was.

Most of the world spotted the invasion of Iraq for what it was, ethically and militarily. A bunch of semi-coherent football fans on a message board saw it and predicted a protracted conflict.

The US was gung ho precisely because they expected the invasion to be convenient, and the idealism that underpinned the motives was so easily discredited -- by the world and by football fans -- that it cannot serve as a credible basis for a justification.

There was self-interest, there was a thirst for vengeance against any bearded Muslim leader, there was a idealism that cloaked either rank cynicism or utter stupidity or both.

(I'm not ascribing that to all Americans, certanly none here, much as I don't ascribe the same sentiments to all British people.)

I like you irish guys i really do, but....



So now i see why there's a union flag on most of beaches on the baltic coast!



Would love to hear stories abut polish Petain, Degrelle or Hlinka etc.

Are Iranians 'creepy bastards' because of the constant Fox propaganda in your country, or is this scientific fact?