No better than them

[King Henry V]

Not good enough.


I'll continue to put the ball in your court. You say: 'the allies were no better than the axis on moral terms'
This I take as an intolerable insult to the Americans who lay buried in our soil. Who's sacrifice I hold in the highest esteem.


America's fallen are the moral equivalent of nazis, or are they not. Which is it Panzer? A simple yes or no will suffice. Either they are, or they are not.

I would say that the average American, British or Canadian soldier was pretty much the same as the average German soldier. Both fought not because of some great belief in what the ideals they were supposedly fighting for, but because their country came calling and they couldn't refuse. True, the idealists in the Allied armies believed that they were fighting for the cause of freedom in liberating foreign countries from the yoke of an oppressive tyranny, a cause that turned out to be justified and no one is saying that they are sorry that they won. However, many in the Axis believed that they were fighting for a similar cause: for the freedom of Europe from the scourge of communism, a scourge which had threatened to destroy Europe for the past twenty years and without which fascism and national socialism would never have gained the support that it did. Had Germany won, there would not doubt have been many, albeit misguided, people in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia who would have eulogised the fallen German soldiers for having freed them from the Soviet Union, just as you do the same for the fallen allied soldiers.

THAT is not true. Of course they knew about the massive oppression, they saw it every day and participated in it themselves! They might not have know about the industrial killings, but they sure as hell knew about the arrests, the torture, the concentration camps, etc. They knew and saw more than enough to know that their government were murdering, torturing and oppressing innocent people.

To put it another way; they knew about 100.000 of the 6 million jews killed. And that should be way more than any person requires to know that their government is a tyranny.

But they chose not to act. The vast majority, at least. You're vastly underestimating the extreme racism of those days, PJ. The question isn't whether they knew; the question is 'why should they care?'

Hundreds of millions of people in Africa, Asia, Latin America have since the war faced almost exactly the same situation as you described: persecutions, summary executions, torture, imprisonment, labour camps. Of course they knew that their governments were tyrannies. So did the Germans. Few did anything about it. Why? Because they knew that the government response would be terrible, and this was even more the case in Nazi Germany where even any murmur of a resistance was punished not only with one's own torture and execution, but that of one's family as well. The sad fact is, is that for the majority of humanity, when push comes to shove, the safety of one's family and oneself will invariably come first.