Interesting, I did notice the other day that several comments here were deleted. Curious indeed.

The tragedy was everywhere and affected every ordinary person. It’s the truth of these times. We should do everything to prevent it from happening in future, nothing else, blames won’t help.

“Given the evidence that confronted them, it was not surprising that soldiers, observers, journalists and Congressional investigators should have assumed that the bodies found in the mortuary, on the floor of the gas chamber, and next to the old crematorium had been victims of the gas chamber. A report in a U.S. Army newspaper of the time reported:

“The Dachau crematorium is a long low brick structure with a tall smokestack from which smoke poured day and night. The gas chamber is 20 feet square and has 18 nozzles across the ceiling that look like shower outlets… 32

“It is generally accepted today that most, if not all of the dead found in these areas, perished through starvation, exposure, sickness — particularly typhus — mistreatment, and execution by means other than poison gas. Nonetheless, one survivor of the Dachau camp, Joel Sack, a Polish engineer, who visited the homicidal chamber soon after liberation reports:

“Outside, there was still a plentiful supply of cans with the Zyclon-B [sic] poison. The cans bore the name of the manufacturer, A.E.G. [sic] FARBEN INDUSTRIE

“To the outside of the gas chamber door were attached forms for keeping records:

“Gasheit, Time of gassing. Zu, Close . . . Uhr, Time …

“Auf, Finish . . . Uhr, Time . . .

“Below that was the sign of a skull with two cross bones and a warning:

“Vorsicht, Careful . . . G A S

“Lebensgefahr, Danger to Life

“Nicht Offenen, Do Not Open 33

“Neither the reports by the U.S. Army, Father Hess nor Sack prove conclusively that the homicidal chamber was used to kill people. Until further evidence is discovered, historians will have to conform themselves with the knowledge that it was technically possible to have murdered human beings with poison gas in that room, and that the room, some 16x16x12ft high, was designed for the exclusive purpose of carrying out such a grim task.” etcetera

http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/

In reality this has been the official response: “The final shove out the door came after a denunciation from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who called her statements “offensive and reprehensible.”

“Gibbs added that her remarks “do not reflect certainly the opinion of most of the people here and certainly not of the administration.”

“Thomas was also denounced by the White House Correspondents Association, which said it was considering whether to boot her from her customary front-row seat at the White House press room.”

So I would say she’s been promptly censured and chastised, both by the White House and by the press association. Additionally, I would offer that this is very far from the standard left view of Israel. No one anywhere on the left, from Hamas and Hezbollah to ordinary liberals and progressives here, is saying the Jews should get out of the Middle East. Instead what everyone is saying is that Israel should become like every other civilized nation, and extend full citizenship and civil rights to every ethnicity living inside its borders. What we all object to is their categorization of the world into members of the Jewish nation (good) and a subject race with no rights, including neither life nor property.

The divide, pretty much, is between people who believe in a two-state solution, with independent Israel and Palestine living side by side, and a single-state solution (my preference) in which everyone learns to live together in a unified Israel-Palestine, and all enjoy the same rights and privileges under law.

The State of Israel likes neither approach, preferring to follow a pre-1945 notion that the master race should do whatever it wants without the need to consult the people being ruled. It’s very out of fashion, and corrosive to the movement toward world peace.

Israel, stay right where you are. But please, don’t stay ‘just the way’ you are.

“Hitler never had conquest plans against the West. His focus was entirely on regaining German territories. If he had any imperialist pretensions and the record doesn’t show that, then it would have been towards the USSR, certainly nothing for the West to deplore. France and the UK declared war on Germany because of a totally untenable pledge to Poland, which they knew couldn’t be fulfilled at the time they made it and in fact when the USSR took the eastern half of Poland Churchill & Co. said their pledge didn’t apply to that part of Poland ! So much for “defense” against aggression.”

Diplomatic alliances had been the norm for centuries in Europe. However in this instance it had become obvious by mid-September, 1939 that France had informed Poland they could not rush to her defense in the case of invasion. The Germans knew this. So as soon as the ink had dried on Molotov-Ribbentrop, the tanks marched across Poland from either direction. And while the Soviets were mopping up the Baltic states, Hitler’s panzers were securing their side of the line. The plan included dividing up the world into spheres, where Germany would occupy everything from Hungary and the Balkans out to India. Italy would get Africa. Japan would get China, SE Asia and the Pacific Rim. Etcetera.

Then Hitler invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and France. Did all those countries also pledge themselves to attack Germany? Britain was supposed to surrender, which they did not– so the Battle for Britain proceeded.

None of those nations, from Britain out to the Indian Ocean, were former German territory to the best of my knowledge. What they were were lands occupied by the untermenschen, people fit only to be slaves.

And if we complain about the Sudetenland only having been part of a country cobbled together in 1920, we should keep in mind that Germany itself was only invented in 1871, a mere 50 years earlier. Whereas the Kingdom of Bohemia (historically Slavic since the sixth century) had been part of the Austrian Empire since 1526. See Wikipedia on this.

The history of Europe is one of mixed populations where one ethnicity is temporarily on top and all the others feel like they’re getting the shaft. The Germans had sent colonies out nearly everywhere, from central Russia around Orenburg to Transylvania, through what became Yugoslavia and the Alps. That doesn’t mean they enjoyed the sole right to rule such places, and to kill off populations like the Ukrainians, Poles and Jews so they could have more room for themselves.

I do have that book by Alperowitz, Atomic Diplomacy, and on your recommendation will pick it up again for a closer look. But if you recall what we knew back in 1945, it was that Japan had no culture of surrender. In fact our prisoners were mistreated so brutally because they had no respect for any soldier who permitted himself to be captured. You were supposed to die fighting.

That means that even though the writing was on the wall, they were prepared to fight to the last man defending the Japanese Empire. Estimates were that we could lose up to a quarter million soldiers trying to secure Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu and the hundreds of smaller islands. A good case can even be made that fighting our way up the archipelago, one kilometer at a time, would have resulted in the loss of more Japanese civilians than the two bomb drops claimed.

It was a very dirty war. All sides committed atrocities. But we should allow first blame to go to the aggressors, the citizens of a defeated and angry Germany who followed Hitler in his crusade to conquer the world. Plus, of course, Stalin, Tojo and Mussolini, for entering into an agreement to divide up the loot.

Why are you a Christian (I assume)? Why not Muslim? Their book tells them it is true just as much as yours tells you. Why aren’t you a Buddhist? Do you worship the ancient Roman gods? There is no logical way to decide which religion is right, so how can you possibly take your religion on faith while refusing to have faith in Vishnu?

I hope you can explain it to me, because I sure can’t figure it out.

if I were vaporized while eating my lunch on a Hiroshima sidewalk when the bomb hit, or I was obliterated while walking to the Pearl Harbor commissary to buy a sandwich for a relative I was visiting when the attack occurred, I think I’d probably feel they were comparable.

Not really. Here’s a link to a description of the killing that took place in Dachau, along with some pictures of the gas chambers there:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/

High-end estimates of the number of the gassed range around a quarter million people. If that doesn’t quite qualify as being an ‘extermination’ camp, the distinction is purely semantic.

Czechoslovakia was an artificial state created by the unjust Versailles Treaty.”Not really. The Sudeten territories had been part of a multi-ethnic empire for centuries– Austria-Hungary. Germans lived there, as they did in the Bachka, in western Hungary and in Transylvania. So did lots of other ethnicities.

These lands were transferred by international agreement to a new authority. And ethnic Germans were not mistreated by the Czechs. Quite the opposite, in fact. Then the land was gobbled up by the familiar process of invasion and occupation. It was an act of predation, not one with any legal justification.

At the end of Germany’s attempt to kill the populations of Eastern Europe and take their land, there was quite a lot of retaliation. Bloody and lawless, certainly. But I think, in light of the events of 1939-45, understandable. Several million Germans living in Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere were forcibly removed, with accompanying atrocities.

To say that one side was blameless and the other totally in the wrong would be to misread history. Which brings me to this:

“Since many more Germans were killed during AND after the war than Jews your right that there is no comparison.

“Holocaust denial isn’t pretty, nor is it fashionable. What you seem to be peddling is the idea that if the Germans hatched a plan and proceeded to coldly murder 12-15,000,000 Jewish, Rom and Slavic civilians (Hugh Trevor-Roper gives 13 million), it’s no big deal. THEY killed more of US in retaliation!