Aslaug's Axe Shed

Following up that post about holocaust denial:

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been involved in a fairly hectic debate against someone online, who takes the completely opposite stance from holocaust deniers.

To the point of going so badly overboard, I finally did something I otherwise hate to do, namely making the classic nazi-comparison: “you’re just as bad as them”.

The situation? It all started out with a statement from this person … clearly of inferior mental faculties … stating that Germans were Nazis and that everyone else should, consequently, not by anything German ever again. That because of what happened during the Second World War, everyone in the world should, forever, boycot everything German and Germans themselves. Oh, and they should all be punished too, of course. All of them.

I was quite stunned. I mean … look at it? It beggars the mind in its rank stupidity and bigotry.

I pointed out to this person, that such bigotry was foolish. That most of the people who were involved in the crimes are long since dead, and the vast majority of Germans today were born long after the crimes took place, or were children when it happened and shares no guilt in the actions of adults.

That didn’t go down too well, to put it mildly. Claiming religious reasons to want to punish all Germans, the person with whom I was debating, ranted on about the evils of Germany. He then pulled the ultimate no-no out of his hat, and stated that the Bible demands punishment for the CHILDREN of the guilty, as in “Let this sin be on the heads of our children”-style punishment.

As I then replied, by his twisted logic, we should punish the child of a rapist … not the rapist himself. And that the Bible preaches forgiveness, which he seemed to have conveniently “forgotten”. And that when he returned from la-la-land (my exact expression), he would hopefully learn that the rest of the Western world lived in societies where religious law holds no weight. Consequently, his holy scripture holds absolutely no sway over me, and I would call him out for what he was. A bigoted hatemonger.

His reply was to fly even further off the handle than I thought possible, declaring that he wasn’t a Christian but that he belived in GOD (his caps, not mine), and that most of the people responsible for the crimes were, after all, dead … as if this redundant comment would somehow convince me that the children of those who did the killing should now be made to suffer, because those who really deserved it were not around to take their medicine anymore.

That was when I snapped, and simply said that by his absurd logic, the innocent would be made to pay for the crimes of the guilty and that that, in fact, was PRECISELY what the Nazis preached. That people who had done absolutely nothing wrong should be made to suffer, because. Not necessarily because OF anything. Just because. Any bogus reason would do. If you were a Jew, Roma, homosexual, Jehovas Witness, political opponent, of slavic ancestry or simply someone they didn’t like, you would be punished for that reason alone! And usually punished in the most gruesome manners imaginable. Roma were starved and worked to death. Many were gassed. Homosexuals were either beaten to death by other inmates or guards, used for target-practice or raped with various damaging appliances like broken rulers until their insides burst … and after the war, they were often forced to serve out the rest of the prison sentence given to them by the Nazis. Jews were gassed in their millions, or worked to death under the most inhumane conditions. Slavs were usually worked to death, often producing the very weapons later used to kill more of their people. Political opponents were starved and worked until they were nothing but skin and bones, then generally either left to die or, like the hero Georg Elser, who tried to blow Hitler up, given a bullet to the head.

The point is, none of these people did anything wrong.

The response I got from the person I was now in a full blown argument with, was an angry retort not to compare him to Nazis because he hated them so fiercely.

I simply told him I’d compare him to whomever I damned well pleased!

And there it ends, because from here on I’m going to ignore the git.

Why am I posting this? I hope it’s obvious, but in case one of you might want more explanation, I’ll give it. I’m posting this, because it is important to maintain the moral high ground. It is important to be just and reasonable, and most importantly, to place blame where blame is due. Not simply in this particular case, but always.

However, in the case of the crimes comitted during WWII, it is all the more poignant to point out, as someone living in a country sharing a common border with Germany.

Germans, like all other people, have good seeds and bad ones. They are no more excempt from the occasional outbreak of idiocy than the rest of us, but as a whole, and as a nation, Germany stands for completely different values today than it did during the Nazi regime, AS WE ALL KNOW!

In the 1930′s, people feared Germany. They feared their countries would be taken over by military force, and that they would be subjugated to a totalitarian regime. Today, that kind of fear is gone. My own experiences with Germans are almost universally positive and good, and when I meet a German, my first thought isn’t “Aha! A Nazi wannabe” or “You swine, your granddaddy helped Hitler!”

I feel like an idiot for writing these things because they are so blatantly, obviously stupid that it constantly makes me re-read what I just wrote, to make sure I got it right. Why anyone today would blame the present population of Germany for what Hitler did is just so damned idiotic I wouldn’t even lower myself to commenting on it if I didn’t run into it so damned often!

Because that is the real problem. It does happen too often. There are way too many people out there with no sense of proportions and, apparently, with no sense of right, wrong and simple justice.

To paraphrase myself: don’t punish the child of the rapist, but the rapist himself.

Blame should go where it belongs. That is the essence of justice, and the essence of our judicial systems today.

When I rage and rail against WWII apologia, it’s my loathing of people trying to say that Hitler was an innocent victim or that the Japanese Militarists were really the good guys in Asia I’m reacting to.

Let’s keep things in proper perspective.

For that purpose, I can recommend watching a little-known TV-movie I found and watched yesterday, called “They Grey Zone”. It was quite thought-provoking, even with its various, inevitable mistakes.