NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 1661939" data-attributes="member: 4720">It's true.  All internet conversations ultimately come down to the Nazis...His reason, however inadequate to the act, was neither fake nor small.  He wanted to rebuild the crippled and despondent German nation.  Best way to do that was to get the people motivated.  Best way to do that was to appeal to their baser instincts.  So, you unite them against some scapegoat group who is a)ubiquitous, and b) sufficiently alien.  Jews were (and are) everwhere.  Jews tended (still do) to maintain their own communities, traditions, and even language (though not to the exclusion of the common language, at least).  That made them sufficiently different.  They tended, in that time and place, to be more prosperous than their neighbors (and still do).  This made it easy to turn envy loose on them (still is - see Farrakan (Sp?)).  Combine their deliberate social separation, their prosperity, and their ubiquitousness, and they are perfect targets for conspiracy theories and envy.  Of course, once Hitler had the motivated populace he wanted, there was no reason to call them off of the Jews.  In fact, since it was a pillar of the process, he couldn't.  Besides, he had gone to all the trouble of dehumanizing these people.  Might as well get labor camps and medical experiments out of it. To be clear, I'm not defending this thought process or its result.  But let's not pretend that the motivations for doing evil are "fake", "small", or in any way hard to understand.  If they were, why would anyone bother?  Evil needs to be either self-gratifying or expedient (preferably both), or its obviously inferior to good.While I'm on the subject of the Holocaust:Why?  It was neither as total as many others nor as recent.  How is it different than the systematic eradication of many native American groups by the Spanish, English, and Americans?  It happened a bit faster and killed a LOT less people.  And it was honest.  None of the "please take these blankets for your children" crap.  At least the Germans were honest about it.  In what way other than scale is it different than what's going on in the Sudan right now?  Or what's happened to the Kurds on and off for a long time?How about this: We can still find lots and lots of Jews.  The Holocaust is rather notable as a FAILED genocide.  Go find me a Canaanite.  They didn't get so lucky.</blockquote>

Verification