Nazis & Jews

[Peter Percival]

Why did the Nazis want to kill off the Jews? One can see why an
oppressive regime might want to kill off its political opponents. I'm
not saying that it is acceptable that it should, just that one can see
why. One can see why an oppressive regime might want to kill off mental
or physical defectives. Again, I'm not saying that it is acceptable
that it should, just that one can see why. But why seek to kill off the
Jews?
--
Do, as a concession to my poor wits, Lord Darlington, just explain
to me what you really mean.
I think I had better not, Duchess. Nowadays to be intelligible is
to be found out. -- Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

[Dave Smith]

On 2017-01-19 11:50 AM, Peter Percival wrote:
> Why did the Nazis want to kill off the Jews? One can see why an
> oppressive regime might want to kill off its political opponents. I'm
> not saying that it is acceptable that it should, just that one can see
> why. One can see why an oppressive regime might want to kill off mental
> or physical defectives. Again, I'm not saying that it is acceptable
> that it should, just that one can see why. But why seek to kill off the
> Jews?

It was not just the Germans. A lot of people in Europe were anti
Semitic. They had been persecuted on and off all over Europe over the
previous centuries. They were subjected to the Spanish Inquisition. They
had been subjected to pogroms throughout Europe. The Germans had no
problems finding people in the conquered and occupied territories to do
their dirty work for them.

It just the Jews who were targeted. Germans considered themselves to be
a master race and ranked other races below themselves.They also went
after Gypsies and homosexuals. Slavs were looked down upon, but were
not considered to be as low as the Jews. Accordingly, they could be
subjugated and killed to make room for Germans, but they didn't really
need to be rounded up and slaughtered.

Hitler saw the Jews as being responsible for German losing WWI. He
blamed the Jews for the revolution to overthrow the German monarchy in
1918 and thought that Jews has stabbed Germany in the heart.

[Peter Percival]

Dave Smith wrote:

>
> Hitler [...]

> blamed the Jews for the revolution to overthrow the German monarchy in
> 1918

That's interesting. Was he justified in blaming them?

[Stephen Graham]

On 1/19/2017 1:27 PM, Peter Percival wrote:
> Dave Smith wrote:
>
>>
>> Hitler [...]
>> blamed the Jews for the revolution to overthrow the German monarchy in
>> 1918
>
> That's interesting. Was he justified in blaming them?

No more so than the Catholics or Lutherans.

If you want to blame any specific group for the 1918 revolution, other
than the monarchy itself, it would be the military. Most specifically,
Ludendorff.

[Dave Smith]

On 2017-01-19 4:27 PM, Peter Percival wrote:
> Dave Smith wrote:
>
>>
>> Hitler [...]
>> blamed the Jews for the revolution to overthrow the German monarchy in
>> 1918
>
> That's interesting. Was he justified in blaming them?

I suppose that in his own mind, adding that perception to his other
radical views about the Germans being a superior race and playing on
anti Semitic attitudes that were common in the land, he thought he was.
Given the number of people who followed him. It would appear that they
thought he was.

Perhaps it should be pointed out that a ship loaded with more than 900
Jewish refugees not allowed to land at Canada, Cuba or the US. From what
I have read, it sure doesn't look like the of Jews was a primary factor
in going to war against Nazi Germany. Britain and France declared war
in response to the invasion of Poland, which was the last straw in a
series of treaty violations. The US waited more than two years before it
went to war in 1941, and that was only after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against the US.

[Scott M. Kozel]

On Thursday, January 19, 2017 at 11:50:34 AM UTC-5, Peter Percival wrote:
> Why did the Nazis want to kill off the Jews? One can see why an
> oppressive regime might want to kill off its political opponents. I'm
> not saying that it is acceptable that it should, just that one can see
> why. One can see why an oppressive regime might want to kill off mental
> or physical defectives. Again, I'm not saying that it is acceptable
> that it should, just that one can see why. But why seek to kill off the
> Jews?

Because they were influenced, oppressed, and possessed by Satan and demons.

John 10:10
The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy:
I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

[David Wilma]

Blaming someone for The Great War, for being defeated,
and for the economic troubles of the 1920s was an
important feature of the rise of National Socialism. This
built upon centuries of discrimination and repression of
the Jews that only relaxed a bit in the 19th Century. Not
a few Socialists and Bolsheviks were Jewish because of
the egalitarian promises of both systems. It was easy for
the Nazis to rope Jews in with their arch enemies, the
Bolsheviks. As posted above, the Nazis had no trouble
finding non-Germans to help with the final solution. In
Germany the repression of Jews gradually increased
until they were invisible from public life and finally
deported, but Hitler continued to harangue Germans
about the Jewish menace.

Nazi propaganda was so effective that Germans and
others continued to blame Jews for the war and for
defeat after 1945. It all had to be someone's fault.
You can find echoes of this today in Germany.

[Don Phillipson]

"Peter Percival" <peterxp...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:o5qqm3$op3$1...@news.albasani.net...

> Why did the Nazis want to kill off the Jews?

Genocide emerged fairly late in the period of Nazi
government (1933-45.) The original aim was to force
German Jews out of public life, e.g. to dismiss them
from government jobs (done 1933) or the classic
professions (done 1935.) Later in the 1930s this
hardened into a campaign to force them to emigrate
from Germany, which hung on after the war began.
Only in 1941 (after sundry war-linked massacres and
the secret euthanasia of (non-Jewish) mental defectives
had begun) did the government order (in secret) the
collection and extermination of all European Jews.

I.e. the program altered its character over time: but
began with roots in (1) 19th century "racial science,"
(2) historic antisemitism (of Jews as "killers of Christ")
and (3) the quest for a conspiracy to explain Germany's
defeat in 1918, and associated revenge.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

[Don Phillipson]

"Dave Smith" <adavid...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:AObgA.11390$wv.1...@fx29.iad...

> Perhaps it should be pointed out that a ship loaded with more than 900
> Jewish refugees not allowed to land at Canada, Cuba or the US.

The case of MS St Louis is commonly cited with two notable
omissions. (1) Most, perhaps all, the passengers (Jews trying
to emigrate from Germany) had Cuban entry visas -- which
during the voyage were invalidated by the Cuban government,
which ultimately turned the ship away.
(2) The Holocaust had not then begun, i.e. the American and
Canadian authorities who turned away these 900 would-be
migrants did not imagine they might be murdered on return
to Germany. (When reliable intelligence of the Holocaust
reached Western statesmen in late 1942, half of them were
unable to conceive that any modern government would be
so brutal as simply to kill unwanted people.) As it was,
the ship unloaded in Belgium. The UK accepted 288 of
907 passengers and the rest went to France or Benelux
countries, where they were eventually subject to
deporation while those in England were not, cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis

[mtfe...@netmapsonscape.net]

Dave Smith <adavid...@sympatico.ca> wrote:

> It just the Jews who were targeted. Germans considered themselves to be
> a master race and ranked other races below themselves.They also went
> after Gypsies

Actually, they were (relatively) much harder on the Rom than the jews.

> and homosexuals.

Which was ironic, considering Ernst Roehm, and all.

Mike

[Rich Rostrom]

Peter Percival <peterxp...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Why did the Nazis want to kill off the Jews? One can see why an
> oppressive regime might want to kill off its political opponents. I'm
> not saying that it is acceptable that it should, just that one can see
> why. One can see why an oppressive regime might want to kill off mental
> or physical defectives. Again, I'm not saying that it is acceptable
> that it should, just that one can see why. But why seek to kill off the
> Jews?

It was the confluence of several influences

- Traditional anti-semitic bigotry.

- Panic over the changes and dislocations of the modern age.

- Racialist pseudo-science.

- Paranoia over the disproportionate actual influence of Jews,
and the imagined secret influence of Jews.

- The rise of the "revolutionary" mindset.

All these influences were enabled and multiplied by the
totalitarian Nazi state, which was a "revolutionary"
regime.

This last point perhaps should be explained.

Starting with the French Revolution, advocates of
drastic social, political, and economic change became
more and more convinced that their goals were so
transcendent and important that they justified
violence and even wholesale killing. Those who were
recalcitrant had to be exterminated, regardless of
whether they had done anything actually criminal. Thus
during the French Revolution, there were mass
executions of real or imagined opponents of the
Republic: aristocrats, royalists, "speculators" and
"hoarders", priests, and even nuns.

When there was active resistance (the Vendéean
rebellion) the Revolutionary government responded with
wholesale slaughter of the rebel population; some
historians have described this as "the first modern
genocide".

During the 19th century, the great expansion of
scientific knowledge made many of the revolutionits
even more certain that they _knew_ how to perfect
society, and therefore were justified in anything they
did. Many socialists adopted Marx's "science of
history". Other radicals turned to biology, mixing
Darwinism with bastardized anthropology.

Circa 1890, two prominent Russian radicals, Tkachev
and Nechayev, discussed how many people would have to
be killed to bring about the Revolution and subsequent
transformation of society. Their "little list"
included the aristocracy, the clergy and the
religiously devout, businessmen, merchants,
shopkeepers, functionaries of the old regime,
"primitive" or "backwards" peoples such as the natives
of Central Asia and the Arctic... By the time they
were through, they had concluded that the question
was not how many should be killed, but how many should
be left alive.

Fascism originated as a heresy of "Red"
(revolutionary) socialism, with the same orientation
to radical change bringing about a glorious future,
though the details were very different, and most
fascist regimes were comparatively restrained in
killing.

Nazi Germany, however, incorporated a virulent strain
of racialist ideology, which had been festering in
Germany for generations. Long before Hitler, German
intellectuals had written of the inborn superiority of
the Nordic or Teutonic "race", and how lesser
"degenerate" races (such as the French!) should and
would go extinct.

Thus where Communist regimes "liquidated class enemies",
Nazi Germany "eliminated racial impurity".

The Jews were a particularly obvious target for this
animus: an "alien" population _in_ Germany, strongly
associated with everything the Nazis despised, and
(as noted) disproportionately influential and thus
"dangerous".

The Third Reich was a totalitarian dictatorship, where
the ideas of the rulers were systematically imparted
to everyone, and all dissent was silenced, and where
every whim of The Leader instantly became the policy
of the state.

So the Nuremburg Laws and Kristallnacht followed. But
the pre-war Nazi program envisioned stripping Jews of
all influence and property, and driving them out of
Germany, not extermination of all Jews everywhere.

That changed during the war; millions of additional
Jews came under German control. The Nazis saw these
people as intrinsic enemies, in both the short and
long term; and especially dangerous during a war
against powerful enemies. They decided that all these
Jews had to be destroyed. (And besides which, they
were filthy, rotten, villainous _Jews_!!!)

This started in 1939, AIUI, with many local massacres
of Jews in Poland, and continued with mass murders in
the USSR during the 1941 campaign, such as Babi Yar.

But this did not assuage Nazi race paranoia nor
satisfy Nazi race hatred. At the infamous Wannsee
Conference in early 1942, senior Nazis agreed to the
Final Solution.
--
The real Velvet Revolution - and the would-be hijacker.

http://originalvelvetrevolution.com

[Alan Meyer]

On 01/21/2017 12:58 AM, Rich Rostrom wrote:

> It was the confluence of several influences

...

I think all of Rich Rostrom's points are well taken and explain a lot of
what happened. I will add just a few more observations.

While antisemitism was rife in Germany, Europe at large, and even in the
U.S.A. in the 1930's, genocide was not what most antisemites had in mind.

Among most antisemites, the causes were the usual mixture of ignorance,
arrogance, and bigotry. These feelings were common, not only against
Jews, but against Africans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Slavs, and
others - though most of the other groups that were discriminated against
were not nearly as numerous or as visible as Jews or occupied similar
positions in the social milieu as Germany.

I think that what was new in Nazism was the personality and power of
Hitler himself. The man was brilliant in some ways, but quite insane in
others. Hatred of Jews was a mania with him. If he had been told in
1939 that starting the war would result in the death of millions of Jews
but also millions of Germans and even the flattening of Berlin and other
German cities, I'm not sure he wouldn't have gone ahead with the war anyway.

So why did the people follow him? How did antisemitism and
discrimination against Jews turn into mass murder?

Those are harder questions. I'll offer the following possible
explanations. Maybe others can improve on what I say.

First of all, every society contains some percentage of people with very
limited moral feelings. Pushing them into criminal acts isn't hard and,
if all restraints are removed, they turn to criminality easily and with
no push needed at all. These are the bullies of the Gestapo, the S.A.,
the S.S., and the Hitler Youth.

Hitler removed all the restraints. He made it, not only permissible,
but actually desirable, to be a racist, an antisemite, and a violent
thug. He drew people around him like Goering and Himmler who were
borderline criminals before their rise to power and crossed all borders
afterward. They in turn recruited their thugs and bullies, who
recruited theirs - with the most sociopathic people rising to the top of
most of the institutions in society.

But what about the others? What about the people who, even if vaguely
or not so vaguely antisemitic, would never have countenanced murder?
The answers regarding them are simple. In the first place they were
terrorized. They knew that even verbal resistance was not only futile,
but dangerous. Protecting Jews or even speaking up for them would bring
themselves to the attention of the Gestapo and condemn them without
trial or appeal to a concentration camp. In addition, the Nazis learned
that it was a mistake to perform actual murder openly, in Germany.
Everybody knew what was happening, but they were allowed to pretend that
they didn't know. That was a refuge for many non-Nazi Germans. If they
shut-up and retreated into their personal lives, they could at least
continue to live - or at least continue to live unless and until the war
consumed them.

Finally, I'd argue that a planned process of brutalization occurred.
Men who would not have committed crimes in civilian life were turned
into criminals by what they were forced to do during the war. It was
not just the killing of Jews, but the massacre of prisoners of war, of
French or Czech or Russian civilians as punishment for acts of partisans
who had nothing to do with the people who were killed.

There's an excellent book by Christopher Browning _Ordinary Men: Reserve
Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland_. I recommend it
as a well documented account of how ordinary men, non-criminals, are
turned into killers.

Alan

[The Horny Goat]

On Sat, 28 Jan 2017 18:07:51 -0500, Alan Meyer <ame...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>
>Among most antisemites, the causes were the usual mixture of ignorance,
>arrogance, and bigotry. These feelings were common, not only against
>Jews, but against Africans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Slavs, and
>others - though most of the other groups that were discriminated against
>were not nearly as numerous or as visible as Jews or occupied similar
>positions in the social milieu as Germany.

Very true - "The Wogs start at Calais" was a British joke that was
almost but not quite taken seriously.

Sure there were exceptions - the Canucks, Aussies, Kiwis etc and on a
good day the Americans but for the most part that WAS the predominant
British view in the pre-WW2 era. (Some would argue these same
attitudes played a huge role in British debates as to whether to join
the Common Market)

The 1857 revolt in India started with the myth that British cartridges
were dipped in pig and beef tallow. The point is that while the
evidence strongly suggests it was completely untrue, British attitudes
were such that the grand lie was believed by many in India and did
enormous damage to the Raj.. I could cite numerous others.

Now to be sure Germans had the legacy of the Heraros in Africa so
Hitler's genocide wasn't as far removed from the norm as we would
comfortably like to believe but I'm reasonably certain neither
American or Canadian officials believed the Jews on MS St. Louis (aka
'The Voyage of the Damned') were being sent back to murder and
genocide.

For sure anti-semitic attitudes were common in North America and
Europe; equally certainly those attitudes didn't extend to tolerance
of killing. I think public reaction to Patton's actions at Buchenwald
were overwhelmingly popular in America and that says more about
American attitudes to anti-semiticism in 1945 than anything else
could.

I would argue that the main thing that allowed the restoration of
Germans to "polite society" in western Europe was Japanese atrocities
discovered almost immediately thereafter. In the comic books I read as
a boy in the 60s the foe was almost always the Japanese not the
Germans.

[Peter Percival]

Alan Meyer wrote:
> On 01/21/2017 12:58 AM, Rich Rostrom wrote:
>
>> It was the confluence of several influences
> ...
>
> I think all of Rich Rostrom's points are well taken and explain a lot of
> what happened. I will add just a few more observations.
>
> While antisemitism was rife in Germany, Europe at large, and even in the
> U.S.A. in the 1930's, genocide was not what most antisemites had in mind.
>
> Among most antisemites, the causes were the usual mixture of ignorance,
> arrogance, and bigotry. These feelings were common, not only against
> Jews, but against Africans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Slavs, and
> others - though most of the other groups that were discriminated against
> were not nearly as numerous or as visible as Jews or occupied similar
> positions in the social milieu as Germany.
>
> I think that what was new in Nazism was the personality and power of
> Hitler himself. The man was brilliant in some ways, but quite insane in
> others. Hatred of Jews was a mania with him. If he had been told in
> 1939 that starting the war would result in the death of millions of Jews
> but also millions of Germans and even the flattening of Berlin and other
> German cities, I'm not sure he wouldn't have gone ahead with the war
> anyway.
>
> So why did the people follow him? How did antisemitism and
> discrimination against Jews turn into mass murder?

Now you are getting to the question that nags me! (And if my OP wasn't
quite clear, my apologies.)

[Rich Rostrom]

Peter Percival <peterxp...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> > So why did the people follow him? How did
> > antisemitism and discrimination against Jews turn
> > into mass murder?
>
> Now you are getting to the question that nags me!
> (And if my OP wasn't quite clear, my apologies.)

As I wrote: I think the key factor was the "revolutionary"
mindset. It gave radicals (of various flavors) a
_messianic_ view of their own importance and deeds.

When one is transforming the whole world, ordinary
concerns of right and wrong are transcended.

One common trope of revolutionaries was the "medical"
or "surgical" metaphor. A surgeon does dreadful things
to a patient - cutting him open, spilling his blood,
slicing up his internal organs, carving out parts of
his body. But all this is justified, because the parts
removed are diseased or defective, or have to be
rearranged.

"Red" revolutionaries used this metaphor to justify
the "liquidation of class enemies". The Nazis used it
to justify the "removal of racial impurities" - to
begin with, the mentally ill or retarded, and the
permanently handicapped. The first wave of Nazi
murders was the mass "euthanasia" project; AIUI, until
the war started, those murders far outnumbered race
murders.

The Nazis regarded German Jews as such an impurity,
and also as intrinsic enemies. Reds declared that any
person of the wrong class background would therefore
automatically oppose the Revolution. Therefore they
had to be destroyed.

So too, the Nazis with the Jews, though in their
thinking it was not a matter of circumstances as
inherently bad character (as asserted by traditional
anti-semitic propaganda). And Jews were linked
together internationally. Thus Jews anywhere in the
world were enemies to be annihilated.

[Geoffrey Sinclair]

"Peter Percival" <peterxp...@hotmail.com> wrote in message

news:o6nkks$mjg$1...@news.albasani.net...

> Alan Meyer wrote:
>> So why did the people follow him? How did antisemitism and
>> discrimination against Jews turn into mass murder?
>
> Now you are getting to the question that nags me! (And if my OP wasn't
> quite clear, my apologies.)

Whole libraries have been devoted to answering that question, with plenty of
disagreement.

It was not so much the public anti Semitism and discrimination that enabled
the killing as the amount of resources and people to run the killing system
proved to be small. You do/did not need to find much to kill large numbers
of people if the system decides to go that way.

You do know being Jewish was the reason for about half the killings, Polish
intellectuals, communists, Roma, handicapped, homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses, clergy and so on were the other half. To be Polish and Jewish
was to hit the mark on a strand of German racism to Poles as well as the
official anti Semitic policies. If you follow the logic of rating "races" as
superior or inferior then doing something about the inferiors can be claimed
as a public good. See for example attitudes to the native peoples of the
Americas and Australia, letting them die out in peace was considered by many
as a humane and sensible policy, given how inferior they were declared.
Colonialism justified as bringing good government to the inferiors. Once
you have a program in place mission creep often occurs and others the system
dislikes can be added without too much extra effort.

In the 1930's the Nazis tried to rid Germany of their definition of
undesirables, originally mainly by migration, encouraged by violence,
including killing and theft.

Essentially the large scale killings started in Poland after the war had
begun, a war which gave the average citizen a whole new set of things to
worry about, along with more stringent wartime censorship and a higher risk
of being accused of treason when speaking out. Plenty of people knew there
were large scale killings in the 1939 to 1941 period because they were
mainly (semi) public executions, with the extermination camps in operation
the killings became very hard to know about.

Start with the premise of the Germans. How many Germans actually
participated in the killings, given greater Germany was around 80,000,000
people in August 1939, did 1% kill? In fact it would be closer to 0.1%.
Remember some of the killings were done by non German nationals, plenty were
indirect via neglect and the extermination camps ran on minimal staff. The
Nazis found you needed most of the population indifferent, a small number to
actively discriminate which generally caused the targets to withdraw from
society, thereby overcoming the Nazi complaint that all Germans seemed to
have their good Jew who did not deserve bad treatment, also actively going
after supporters of the targets upped the cost of support and most of us
feel we have something to lose. Once war began and non German territory was
available it was short step from harassment to expulsion, though by that
stage the killing squads were active. The final step was the small number
of people who would kill and keep killing the targets and even then ways had
to be found to minimise the direct killing.

The killing programs were organised by the Nazi government, using those who
could be made to treat the prisoners according to Nazi doctrine, the
tormentors included many non Germans. Also it should be noted the German
government and military were using hostages and killings to suppress
resistance movements, many more people knew about them but many were able to
simply think of these killings in terms of war is hell. And of course the
groups the Nazis labelled as undesirable were much more likely to join the
resistance, they often had little choice.

If you mean people who supported the killings or refused to believe or
looked the other way then the quest of the one reason to rule them all is
absurd. People made their choices for a mixture of reasons and the reasons
changed over time. They also lie to themselves. Also a mass killing
program in Europe was simply unbelievable and even if it was possible surely
only able to kill thousands, not millions.

There is a long tradition of claiming a better society is possible by
getting rid of enough of the right people, like criminals. The different
claims usually disagree on the definitions of getting rid of, enough and
right people but show everyone is different enough to become the other as
needed, all fail because as the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn noted, the
dividing line between good and evil cuts through everyone. History shows us
that the theme is one that can be reused despite the obvious flaws and its
attraction increases in bad times. We use an immense amount of trust every
day just walking around, at the same time there is definite desire to be in
the company of people like us and to help whom we like ahead of those we do
not. People have a tendency to have the good guys and the bad and a
hierarchy of who should be helped and how much help should be provided. The
unsafer we are or the closer we are to losing the basic food, clothing and
shelter the less we usually worry about others and the more we are willing
to take what we decide is needed.

That bad times tends to make for worse overall human behaviour helps to
explain the economic growth mantra. Since perception matters, that is if we
believe a down turn is coming or an upturn has arrived humans as a group
tend to act to reinforce the trend, politicians generally try and avoid
saying bad times are coming, and when they are obviously arriving it is fish
in a barrel questioning to ask a politician about the economy and then
repeat what are usually non or incorrect answers.

Start with the early 1930's German elections, what was the standing of the
non Nazi candidates, realistic ideas about making the depression better?
Good ideas for the given voter? Not corrupt, proven competent, able to
deliver? And so on. Remember the groups in charge when bad times arrive
tend to be discredited.

Authority has various meanings, including being an expert. If a government
is serious about an issue there is a lot of work involved figuring out the
best answer. The amount of material you need to not only read but absorb is
high and most of us only have time for the summary. The public tends to
believe authority figures, the ones who are doing the work, reinforced by
the idea people become leaders because they are competent, and of course
they would say that, along with how they care.

The Nazis had their true believers, then those that decided on balance the
ideas would work best for them and once you invest your support in something
you tend to stick with it, rather than accept you made a mistake. Then
those who decided the Nazis were the best of the offers being made.

By deficit spending and the imprisonment of Nazi opponents the average mid
1930's German had a physically safer environment, less political violence
and better economic prospects, but at a very real cost in terms of what
ideas and views were permitted. With the Nazis controlling the news more
Germans found themselves being convinced of Nazi ideas, like a lot of the
improvement was removal of undesirables.

Public language defines the allowable problems and solutions, these days a
government enforced rule that is liked is called a law, as law and order is
good, a government enforced rule that is disliked is called a regulation, as
deregulation is good. You will generally not hear the expression "marriage
law or marriage deregulation?" because law and deregulation are reserved
words in public speech, for specific purposes, and so must be kept "good",
free from being associated with the wrong view. Similarly Politically
Correct is meant as a label for some public speech, not all the words
politicians and other public figures decree are correct when discussing the
issues. For business costs there is the return on investment for the time
and effort the staff make and the wages paid to the money employed. Both
are costs, with differences of opinion over which is the more acceptable.

So the Nazis went with the final solution as the terminology.

All news organisations have their culture (by the way if your mind saw
culture and shoved bias into your thoughts, congratulations on being a well
trained news consumer) in terms of what they consider important and news,
given how much information is generated each day. The culture selects the
stories presented and how prominent they appear, then comes things like the
adjectives and images, with the latter being a wonderful editorial tool.
The mediums also have their demands, good pictures will increase TV
exposure, providing the story all laid out, only needing an introduction,
helps as well. Good stories will be rapidly copied by many outlets thanks
to the news culture of being first is more important than being accurate,
along with the reality fact checking is expensive, opinions are free. Also
those who write the narrative can omit their mistakes.

As audience help the news tends to add labels, left, right, big or little
endian and so forth to enable the consumer to quickly decide whether/what to
absorb or ignore. In the reporting of the different mass killings today is
the killer's religion/ethnicity always mentioned and then added to the word
terror(ist) as the description?

Then comes things like the relevance tests, one local death is worth several
non local deaths is worth large numbers of deaths on another continent, more
for the usual suspects, less if they are doing something the audience does,
like fly. I assume plenty of non coverage over 2 current issues, the large
number of deaths and maybe proto genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar/Burma,
and the major costs of the drought on Africa.

Seen a lot of news in the Nazi press about the plight of Jews and other
undesirables? Seen the Nazi press labels of the issues and people involved?
Seen the Nazi views building on Eugenics that people with physical and
mental handicaps were better off dead which would also improve society?
Admittedly kept quiet but still the official conclusion.

Democracy requires an informed electorate, which leads to evidence on how
few of the people involved in public life, those making the announcements
and those involved in disseminating them, believe in democracy, since so
much of their output is misleading, exaggeration, selective or simply lies.
So the announcement by that group or person is more how they are against
democracy, while all the little lies and tricks make it much easier for the
big lies to flourish. Language matters, truth matters.

It should be pointed plenty of truths are unacceptable to enough of the
electorate to cause politicians to lose elections. It is at least partly a
two way street.

So we now have covered the power of authority, true believers, the more good
than bad, the best on offer and the only alternative being offered or the
official truth reasons. And the people ordering and providing resources to
the Nazi killing program were mostly true believers but do not discount
other reasons. And the killings were done outside of Germany. The physical
resources necessary to kill large numbers of people proved to be small, the
knowledge of poison gasses providing a cheap killing mechanism.

The Nazi program was a series of steps, salami or creeping actions, starting
with boycotts and exclusions, then new laws, the first concentration camps
were marketed as the do crime do hard time answer and deliberately released
many prisoners to ensure people understood what punishments were possible.
Over the 1930's the plan was to largely get rid of undesirables by migration
after stripping them of assets. Each step made the next one easier. So in
1933 non Aryans were removed from government and legal service, in 1935 came
the official definition of Jewishness and the restrictions on marriage,
extended that year to other Nazi defined inferior groups. In 1936 a
remission for the Olympics, in 1937 and 1938 came the confiscation or forced
sale of property, the major violence of Kristallnacht and subsequent
increase in repression, at the same time reporting of anti Jewish measure
was banned as it was clear the majority of Germans did not like the pogrom.
The need for secrecy was clear when using violence.

Most people have dealt with someone who makes it very clear it is their way
or lots of pain with the result you disengage or let them do things you
dislike because the cost of fighting is not worth it. More so if they are
powerful, which means a trivial amount of effort on their part can cause you
a lot of trouble. Governments have lots of power which is often used in
internal fights and rarely totally focused on an individual but it really
does not need to, labelling someone a trouble maker often seems to be
enough, then comes things like taking advantage of the wide range of
discretionary powers that can be applied after say an anonymous complaint.

Much modern politics carries the subtext the electorate is there as an
audience. You can turn up at the pro or anti rally, carry or mouth the
approved slogans and generally leave without anything happening. If you in
fact make an effective contribution then things change, say for example
making it obvious in a very public way the gap between a public figure and
reality. Then you can expect change, an investigation into you with full
public focus on your failures and embarrassments seems to be standard along
with lots of negative comments from individuals, including threats.
Democracy requires participation, but there is plenty of encouragement for
the electorate to stay as a passive audience. The bonus of individuals
issuing insults and threats to those identified as opponents is it tends to
bind the individuals closer to the cause, after all to be fooled is bad
enough but to be fooled into helping make the world a more ugly place is
worse. Better to believe the opponents deserve it, and the sooner they are
driven out the sooner the ugliness will stop, so the ends justify the means.

Of course the encourage the supporters has its limit as Japan found in the
1930s, the military leaders encouraged their idea of radicals then
discovered the radicals judging and then acting on whether the leaders were
radical enough.

So encourage your supporters to be active, that increases their enthusiasm,
but add encourage them to attack opponents to lock the supporters in more
tightly and increase the (potential) pain for anyone who is not a supporter.
Simple enough to do even without government powers.

Authoritarian governments make it more official, using things like police or
the law to encourage correct thinking and hinder incorrect. And after all
the law, the police and courts are there to enforce correct behaviour,
thinking is simply taking it a step further.

So we have covered the creeping changes and the cost of dissent, and think
about how many people have physical courage versus moral courage, or for
that matter how whistle blowers tend to be treated.

Next on the list of reasons is we all have things we need to do like making
a living and want to do (Wheee!) and these absorb lots of our time and
effort, meaning we delegate off to the system lots of tasks, like keeping
government clean and sane. Or put it another way given food poisoning is a
regular enough occurrence and can be fatal do you test all your food or do
you delegate testing and quality off to the system? Do you have at least
the definitions of junk and good food? After all both groups have the three
essential food groups, salt, sugar and fat, one just has excess amounts.
Anybody you know delegating off to the medical system the responsibility of
compensating for a poor diet?

People have their life to live and many want to be largely left alone.

So at different times various combinations of the leader was believed, the
doctrine was believed, the doctrine was more good than harm, the
alternatives were worse, the cost of dissent too high and time and effort
not available.

People today, with all the information available now follow the Nazi ideas
and the hatreds.

As a final point governing is the activity politicians tend to do between
coping with unexpected events, things like natural and man made disasters.
Putting a government in place has an element of predicting the future, what
actions will be taken and what will not, what promises will be quickly kept,
what will be delayed and what will be broken and then comes judging why the
changes were made. Even running for President requires putting together a
program that appeals to enough voters and usually contains policies not
really liked by the candidate, as can be seen by the way they are treated
post election. At the same time opposition or circumstances force changes
and most absolute dictatorships still worry about public opinion.

So there is a final reason, they really would not/could not do the bad
things in their policy program, the system will moderate them and probably
the bad bits are the usual political exaggerations anyway, besides we can
remove them from power at the next election.

Add this, would anyone believe you in say late 1942 if you stood up and
announced the Nazis had industrialised mass murder and were killing
millions? How would you tell the Germans and what could they actually do
about it then? The very size of the program (small) and the numbers it
could kill (large) worked to keep it undiscovered and unbelieved. The
allies knew something about the program but ran into this problem and in any
case the people doing the killings were unlikely to worry about allied
announcements.

Geoffrey Sinclair
Remove the nb for email.

[Mario]

Rich Rostrom 22:02, lunedì 30 gennaio 2017:

> So too, the Nazis with the Jews, though in their
> thinking it was not a matter of circumstances as
> inherently bad character (as asserted by traditional
> anti-semitic propaganda). And Jews were linked
> together internationally. Thus Jews anywhere in the
> world were enemies to be annihilated.

The Nazis didn't see that Catholics are much more
internationally linked than Jews... there isn't a Jew Pope...


--
oiram

[Rich Rostrom]

Mario <ma...@mario.mario.invalid> wrote:

> The Nazis didn't see that Catholics are much more
> internationally linked than Jews... there isn't a Jew Pope...

Catholic organization was formal, explicit, understood.
Its goals were limited and quotidian, and its influence
clearly demarcated.

By the 1930s, "Popish plots" were long forgotten.
The Nazis disliked the affiliation of German Catholics,
but did not fear the Church.

By contrast, in the Nazi view, Jews were conspirators
operating in secret for malevolent ends.

[The Horny Goat]

On Tue, 31 Jan 2017 15:27:36 -0500, Mario <ma...@mario.mario.invalid>
wrote:

>The Nazis didn't see that Catholics are much more
>internationally linked than Jews... there isn't a Jew Pope...

Maybe not now - seems to me St Peter's credentials were pretty good in
that department not to mention Peter's boss.

[Don Phillipson]

"Geoffrey Sinclair" <gsinc...@froggy.com.au> wrote in message
news:Br2dne4AgIYAOw3F...@westnet.com.au...

> Essentially the large scale killings started in Poland after the war had

> begun . . .

Some historians disagree about "essentially." German culture is
highly legalistic, viz. respectful of statute law and scientific
authority. The "racial science" of the early 20th century was
eugenic, i.e. envisaged the planned improvement of the
race (however defined) by public control of births and deaths
(e.g. forcible sterilization of people deemed "unfit" by current
science, cf. "Three generations of imbeciles is enough.")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4 summarizes the first
(secret) Nazi government action to kill off the unfit, viz. mental
hospital patients (nearly all non-Jewish, totalling 70,000 killed
in the first two years, cited sources total.) This was a huge
legal precedent (some historians judge) -- the first time any
modern European government agreed simply to kill
by administrative decision a subset of their own citizens.
The ultra-secrecy of this "euthanasia" programme suggests
Nazi officials understood its significance as a precedent.
When information reached London and Washington some
years later, most right-thinking people simply could not
believe any modern government would do this.

[Don Phillipson]

"Rich Rostrom" <rros...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:rrostrom-A2C1A2...@news.eternal-september.org...

> One common trope of revolutionaries was the "medical"
> or "surgical" metaphor. A surgeon does dreadful things
> to a patient - cutting him open, spilling his blood,
> slicing up his internal organs, carving out parts of
> his body. But all this is justified, because the parts
> removed are diseased or defective, or have to be
> rearranged.

This is attested by Nazi propaganda of the 1930s e.g.
in films that presented Jews as a "racial bacillus" that
loyal Germans should clean out and destroy, just as any
sensible person would destroy the TB bacillus or
syphilis spirochete. The other biological analogy was
disease-bearing vermin, e.g. lice or rats, also illustrated
in Nazi propaganda.

> So too, the Nazis with the Jews, though in their
> thinking it was not a matter of circumstances as
> inherently bad character (as asserted by traditional
> anti-semitic propaganda). And Jews were linked
> together internationally. Thus Jews anywhere in the
> world were enemies to be annihilated.

This is documented by some holocaust historians e.g.
Saul Friedlaender, who quotes some very odd Nazi
obiter dicta, e.g. that Churchill and Roosevelt were mere
pawns of the Universal Jewish Conspiracy even when the
USA was nominally neutral.

[Geoffrey Sinclair]

"Don Phillipson" <e9...@SPAMBLOCK.ncf.ca> wrote in message
news:o7q197$2rq$3...@news.albasani.net...

> "Geoffrey Sinclair" <gsinc...@froggy.com.au> wrote in message
> news:Br2dne4AgIYAOw3F...@westnet.com.au...
>
>> Essentially the large scale killings started in Poland after the war had
>> begun . . .
>
> Some historians disagree about "essentially."

Interesting. Please name some of the historians.

> German culture is
> highly legalistic, viz. respectful of statute law and scientific
> authority. The "racial science" of the early 20th century was
> eugenic, i.e. envisaged the planned improvement of the
> race (however defined) by public control of births and deaths
> (e.g. forcible sterilization of people deemed "unfit" by current
> science, cf. "Three generations of imbeciles is enough.")

Sort of like the some ancient Greeks, like the Spartans abandoning
babies deemed to be too handicapped to survive. There are plenty
of examples throughout history.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4 summarizes the first
> (secret) Nazi government action to kill off the unfit, viz. mental
> hospital patients (nearly all non-Jewish, totalling 70,000 killed
> in the first two years, cited sources total.)

Now please explain to all of us. I said "Essentially the large scale

killings started in Poland after the war had begun "

You quote a reference that says the Eugenics killings began in
September 1939 and killed around 70,000 people in two years
either in Germany and Austria or Germany, Austria and Poland.
A table later in the article indicates the death toll is for Germany
and Austria, starting in January 1940.

It also says "The first adults with disabilities to be killed on a mass
scale by the Nazi regime were not Germans, but Poles.....
in which 36,000-42,000 people including Polish children died
before the end of 1939 in Pomerania"

Also the table detailing the Germany and Austria death toll has operation
T4 commencing in January 1940. The article does point out local actions
in 1939 where thousands of German patients were killed to free beds for
German military wounded from the Polish campaign.

Please state, rather than finding "some historians", why my original
claim was wrong or misleading, preferably with evidence that backs
the claim, not indicates what I said to be correct.

You seem to read documents but not absorb the information.

The large scale killings began in 1939, initially most in Poland, because
at about the same time the killings in places like concentration camps
and under the Eugenics program were increased in Germany.

> This was a huge
> legal precedent (some historians judge) -- the first time any
> modern European government agreed simply to kill
> by administrative decision a subset of their own citizens.

Some historians appear again.

> The ultra-secrecy of this "euthanasia" programme suggests
> Nazi officials understood its significance as a precedent.

Try the Nazis had decided the German public would not agree
with the killings, based on the evidence they had. The secrecy
was more about keeping the Germans loyal.

> When information reached London and Washington some
> years later, most right-thinking people simply could not
> believe any modern government would do this.

The entire killing program was largely disbelieved, by right and
non right thinking people alike.