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[Flying Dice]

Heck, just the fact that people talk about concentration camps indicates how skewed the Western perspective on the Holocaust is. Something like 3/4th of the victims were dead before the end of 1943, and a vast number of the deaths (as well as, proportionally, most of the mass shootings) occurred in Eastern Europe in places that a lot of westerners have never heard of. Half the reason that Auschwitz is "our" vision of the Holocaust is because people actually survived going to Auschwitz (though all those death camps in Poland &c. going behind the Iron Curtain after WWII ended didn't help things either, nor did many of them being dismantled).

[MonkeyHead]

I was a bit worried that this whole "The Nazi's were actually OK" thing stemmed from my WTF a few pages back about discovering my Grandfather helped liberate a concentration camp in WW2. Reading back a page or two, I am glad that it is nothing to do with that.

[Helgoland]

They wouldn't have exterminated the Polish - to have a master race you need slaves after all. I believe one of the higher-up Nazis once said something like "The Poles only need to be able to count to 100. The Russians only need to be able to count to ten." about the education of the Polish and Russian population under German occupation.

On the subject of being able to look away: Compare medieval torture devices and those used by modern totalitarian regimes. The medieval ones were very much hands-on, with the torturer immediately inflicting pain on the tortured. But all the torture chambers of the Gestapo were designed for 'hands-off' torture, allowing the torturer to escape any negative emotional repercussions. It's much easier to lock a guy in a room so small he can't stand upright filled to thirty centimeters with ice-cold water with a German shepherd than putting them on the rack.

[MonkeyHead]

Same for the killing - herding people into a "shower" chamber where they would be gassed out of sight it a lot easier to put to one side emotionally than hands on stabbing/burning alive.

[Lord Shonus]

Heck, just the fact that people talk about concentration camps indicates how skewed the Western perspective on the Holocaust is. Something like 3/4th of the victims were dead before the end of 1943, and a vast number of the deaths (as well as, proportionally, most of the mass shootings) occurred in Eastern Europe in places that a lot of westerners have never heard of. Half the reason that Auschwitz is "our" vision of the Holocaust is because people actually survived going to Auschwitz (though all those death camps in Poland &c. going behind the Iron Curtain after WWII ended didn't help things either, nor did many of them being dismantled).

There's also the (partially successful) attempt by nazi apologists and hardcore anticommunists to muddy the water on who was actually responsible for most of the Eastern European massacres, with many being blamed on Stalin's Soviet Union. It doesn't help, of course, that there were many massacres that were indisputibly Soviet, and there's a reason Hitlers forces were initially welcomed as liberators, before the SS moved in and proved to be even worse than the NKVD.

@Hegoland

I've seen statements attributed to Hitler where he outright stated that he planned to deal with Poles and "Slavs" in a rather permanent manner, and a few others where it was pretty heavily implied, even before the war. Not Peace But A Sword (published in early 1939 as a call for an immediate first strike against the Reich) presented several speeches where Jews and Poles were referred to in the same terms, and included some variant of the phrase "Jews first, then the Poles". It should be pointed out that this particular book predicted the Holocaust down to casualty totals, propaganda methods, and in a few cases dates.

[Aseaheru]

I wonder if any of the Nazi planners used that as pert of the planning.

[Tawa]

I am apparently the only person in my grade who knows what a fjord is, judging by a geography review game we played in History today. Even the teacher didn't know what a fjord is.

thx 4 the halp slartibartfast

[Jervill]

Kids these days didn't watch "Pinky & the Brain"...

[mastahcheese]

Hell, back in 8th grade English I was the only one that knew a group of crows was called a "murder", not a flock.

Kids are dumb these days.

[Sirus]

Hell, back in 8th grade English I was the only one that knew a group of crows was called a "murder", not a flock.

Kids are dumb.

I fixed it for ya.

[Bauglir]

Re: Moral Relativism

I've found that the best heuristic for approximating universal laws of morality is figuring out what people try to rationalize and come up with euphemisms for. To go with our running example, nobody's okay with genocide, so call it something else. I mean, you do wind up in some tricky situations when you try to define what constitutes rationalizations and euphemisms (I wouldn't agree with a Libertarian on how to classify taxes, for example), but it's served me a lot more reliably and simply than anything else I've worked out, and at least the "look at how people behave" gives me a basis for empiricism that the usual approach of "The things I think are fundamental are universal, obviously" lacks.

[mastahcheese]

...
Literally at the other end of the library hall.
Parent: "what does a fire need to burn?"
Kid: "Air!"
Parent: "And what's in air that makes it burn?"
Kid: "...Fire?"

Good god.

[Tawa]

Kids these days, man.
My favorite line from a little kid is what John Cleese's daughter supposedly said during the filming of the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Daddy doesn't like that man, does he?

[Arcvasti]

Good luck making air burn WITHOUT fire.

[Loud Whispers]

Kid needs to know about his phlogiston.