"Polish Death Camps"

[rjmacs]

Black wrote:
[quote=rjmacs]
[quote=Carnos Jax]
Do any of y'all believe that if the same were to happen in this country, that a similar percentage (not necessarily majority) of the population (as evidenced by our almost divided politics) would not be complicit in the same activities?

In fact, historically we have been.
Complicity is certainly a worthy topic of discussion, but it's a departure from this one as the poles were not just complicit but instrumental.
Janit nailed it w/ "thou doth..."
I don't see Americans as having been any less 'instrumental' in the American Indian genocide, or institutionalized slavery, if we're making comparisons... We own those horrors wholesale - no Nazis to point to.

[cbelt3]

Politician gets his terminology wrong. Gets bitched at for it.

Next !

FWIW.. my inlaws commented briefly on the concept of 'complicit' or 'resistance'. They were ethnic Germans living in what became Bosnia (DonauSchwabenlanders) . Here were their comments:

When the Nazis took control, if you did not join their party right away, you were declared an enemy. If you were lucky they just let you starve to death, because nobody would do business with you. If you were unlucky you got shipped to a death camp.

When the Russians took control back, they just lined all the men with military cards up and shot them. They lined all the women over the age of about 12 up and took them to their camps and raped them and made them camp whores. They lined all the boys over the age of 12 up and put them on rail cars and sent them to work in the mines in Siberia. They took everyone else and put them in death camps.

For a 21st century American to make judgements about that time in history and the pressures and trouble experienced by the people who lived there is... naive at best. And then to make arrant claims like "I would have resisted"..... pfft. You would have been killed. Right there and then, and your body left for the crows.

[Black]

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[Black]

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[hal]

anyone see the film 'Shoah'?

The interviews of the poles that actually lived near the camps was chilling. See this film THEN tell me the poles didn't carry some responsibility...

[rjmacs]

cbelt3 wrote:
For a 21st century American to make judgements about that time in history and the pressures and trouble experienced by the people who lived there is... naive at best. And then to make arrant claims like "I would have resisted"..... pfft. You would have been killed. Right there and then, and your body left for the crows.

Some causes are worth dying for. When one man rises up, resists, and is struck down - he is a fool. When a handful rise up, resist, and are struck down - they are martrys. When a people rise up, resist, and face death as one - it is a revolution. The Nazi regime was functionally dependent on terror and fear; broad enough resistance would have made the Holocaust a practical impossibility.

Everyone is free to claim and defend his own cowardice, but it is precisely those excuses that allow genocide to occur.

[Robert M]

Hal,

I remember those interviews. Enlightening yet terrifying. Truly a terrifying film.

Robert

[Carnos Jax]

I guess I'm having a little difficulty painting the Poles with such a wide brush. But I may be very well ignorant of the matter as a whole.

Would we be then complicit in the on going tragedies in Africa/Middle East and elsewhere by facilitating the economies of those who commit attrocious acts via our purchase of their oil?

Technically, we do have a choice. I understand the Amish lead contented lives...

[$tevie]

Maybe they are contented, but the Amish treatment of animals has made me write them off as a bunch of creeps.

[Carnos Jax]

I was not aware they treated animals badly/worse than the rest of us. Again, I don't know much about these sorts of things. Then again, we don't have to be 'exactly' like the Amish.