Was World War Two Worth it?

[trekgeezer]

Hey Lester I just have one question for you.  Can you not read the title of this Forum, it say BadMovies, not Bad Politics.    Can you occasionally get with subject.


As much as you would like to say that you are just expressing opinions, I think you just want to rile people up.  You might want to consider starting your own political forum so the rest of us can get back to the purpose of this board.

[Menard]

Hey Lester I just have one question for you.  Can you not read the title of this Forum, it say BadMovies, not Bad Politics.    Can you occasionally get with subject.

This specific forum does say 'off-topic'. 

Want me to clean those specs for you?

[trekgeezer]

Yeah, it says Off-Topic, I just get tired of the political trestises. They would be better suited to forum designed for that purpose.


Since I usually try to avoid commenting on those posts, it really doesn't bother me that much, but I can see the potential of it driving some folks away from the site.

[Menard]

Yeah, it says Off-Topic, I just get tired of the political trestises. They would be better suited to forum designed for that purpose.

I don't care for political discussions on this forum myself as it can lead to too much dissention; besides, I can get into enough trouble on my own without politics.

There is a forum I set up for topical subjects, and it even has a cage fights area for really mixing it up. Nobody uses it, but anybody is welcome to use it as they wish.

http://www.dracoforums.com/thecage/

[ulthar]

Hey Lester I just have one question for you.  Can you not read the title of this Forum, it say BadMovies, not Bad Politics.    Can you occasionally get with subject.

No doubt Lester posts OT stuff with regularity; but in his defense, he DOES post on-topic quite a bit, in the appropriate places, as well.

[Killer Bees]

I don't think that war by definition can ever be "worth it".

Is it a good idea to get rid of bastard leaders that make their countrymens' lives miserable?  Yes. 

Is it a good idea to use those countrymen and/or men of other countries to lay down their lives to get rid of them? No.

Maybe I'm being a little simplistic here, but surely it would be easier to get a sniper in to do the job on the person/people most directly responsible for ugliness?  One forehead, one bullet.  Bam!  Problem solved.  Then you could get other countries involved to send in the troops to keep the peace until a new more moderate leader is elected in their place.  It would cost less in terms of dollars and lives, which surely has to be a better thing for everyone.

Again, maybe I'm being naive or simplistic or just plain thick, so all counter arguments are gladly accepted.

[indianasmith]

There were at least four separate assassination attempts on Hitler . . . all failed, though one came close.  manical dictators can be surprisingly hard to draw a bead on.  I for one wouldn't mind seeing a small handful of heads around the world explode . . . but then, that isn't very nice.

[Killer Bees]

There were at least four separate assassination attempts on Hitler . . . all failed, though one came close.  manical dictators can be surprisingly hard to draw a bead on.  I for one wouldn't mind seeing a small handful of heads around the world explode . . . but then, that isn't very nice.

"Nice" and "right" aren't always the same thing.  Of course "right" has to come first.

[soylentgreen]

Without commenting on Buchanan's essay, let me challenge you to read Harry Turtledove's chilling alternative history novel IN THE PRESENCE OF MINE ENEMIES for a view of a world in which Germany won World War II.  Or, perhaps Thomas Harris' FATHERLAND.  One is set early in the 21st Century, the other in the 1960's.  Both provide a cogent rationale for our involvement and intervention.

Holy crap, did I miss a potboiler with this thread. 

Anyway, as to Indiana's suggestion of the Harris book.... 
In addition to what he mentions, FATHERLAND, while fictional, helps people get beyond the newsreels and caricatures, not to mention the dangerous generalizations of tomes like Goldhagen's HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS, to see just what life was like inside the 12 year reich.  For the civil servant, for the homemaker, for children, for the soldier, for the party stooge, for the "full" Aryans, for the "not-so-full", for the untermensch.  As with the misguided carping about the film DER UNTERGANG, the fact that these people were not demons, but in fact human beings, makes the whole ordeal(for them and the world!) much more sad and, certainly, more horrific.

On the flipside Turtledove can be a bit dense(his writing style, that is!) for the average reader.  My biggest beef with him is his tendency to over-over-over-over-complicate his plots, and that's in the one off titles.  His series' tend work better, but have the drawback of almost being "endless".   One thing is for sure though, he never fails to come up with genuinely intriguing what-ifs.

His second civil war book HOW FEW REMAIN was pretty moving and his book co-authored(more ghostwritten, I suspect) with Richard Dreyfuss about a world with an amicable American Revolution settlement, THE TWO GEORGES, while not Hemingway, was clever and a good example of how to extrapolate far beyond an interesting divergence point. 

I tend to use his books as springboards for serious investigation into alternate history possibilities.  It's quite rewarding, intellectually speaking. 

Allohistory is probably my most cherished genre to read in.  For anyone here I would suggest Whitley Streiber and James Kunteka's WAR DAY, set (in 1988) five years after a very limited nuclear war with the Soviets.  Fictional, yet written as themselves, it's a pretty well thought-out picture of what even a limited national catastrophe would do.

[AndyC]

Maybe I'm being a little simplistic here, but surely it would be easier to get a sniper in to do the job on the person/people most directly responsible for ugliness?  One forehead, one bullet.  Bam!  Problem solved.  Then you could get other countries involved to send in the troops to keep the peace until a new more moderate leader is elected in their place.  It would cost less in terms of dollars and lives, which surely has to be a better thing for everyone.

Again, maybe I'm being naive or simplistic or just plain thick, so all counter arguments are gladly accepted.

It takes more than one person to run an evil empire, and knocking off the leader can do more harm than good. If somebody succeeded in assassinating Hitler, who's to say a bigger psycho wouldn't have taken his place? He was surrounded by quite a few.

And countries don't just lose their will to fight when you kill their leader, no matter how bad he was (and there will be those who didn't consider him bad at all). It's as likely to stir them up.

And with the population stirred up and leadership unpredictable, we also can't forget they have a new martyr and a new reason to fear us.

[Rev. Powell]

There were at least four separate assassination attempts on Hitler . . . all failed, though one came close. 

From an "eyewitness account" I uncovered in my recent research:

"The rumor was that Hitler was getting his daily shots of hormones, but the truth was worse than that.   He had a tremendous fear of death, and created a succession of Mr. Hs.  There were attempted assassinations.  None of the assassinations failed to kill someone---but not Mr. H."   

[soylentgreen]

Maybe I'm being a little simplistic here, but surely it would be easier to get a sniper in to do the job on the person/people most directly responsible for ugliness?  One forehead, one bullet.  Bam!  Problem solved.  Then you could get other countries involved to send in the troops to keep the peace until a new more moderate leader is elected in their place.  It would cost less in terms of dollars and lives, which surely has to be a better thing for everyone.

Again, maybe I'm being naive or simplistic or just plain thick, so all counter arguments are gladly accepted.

It takes more than one person to run an evil empire, and knocking off the leader can do more harm than good. If somebody succeeded in assassinating Hitler, who's to say a bigger psycho wouldn't have taken his place? He was surrounded by quite a few.

And countries don't just lose their will to fight when you kill their leader, no matter how bad he was (and there will be those who didn't consider him bad at all). It's as likely to stir them up.

And with the population stirred up and leadership unpredictable, we also can't forget they have a new martyr and a new reason to fear us.

Exactly.  Hitler's #2 for most of the war would have effectively been Himmler.  Though Goering was nominally the second banana, Himmler would've been able to placate him in some other way.  Plus, as the war rolled on, Goering became less and less interested in..*cough*...reality.  A cold, calculating monster whose singular devotion to the superiority of the Aryan Reich, Himmler was outdone only by the troll Goebbels in the fanatic department. 

The funny thing about "Loyal Heini" is that, at the twilight, with the Reich collapsing around them, he was one of the first party stooges, an alterkampfer no less, to start sneaking overtures to the allies.  Of course, it was the Brits/Americans he wanted to deal with.  The Russians would have turned Germany into a parking lot for the Warsaw Pact offices, if they could've.

The Third Reich was less a monolithic tyranny lead by a singular despot and more a mess of competing offices and martial branches each stuffed with plenty of party faithfull.  Decapitation was an avenue that, in this instance, was bound to create more problems than solve them.

The efforts of the internal resistance elements, like the Kreisau Circle, Rote Kapelle and von Stauffenberg's group towards an effort to arrest(or kill) Hitler was to complimented by a coup of large enough scale as to send a clear signal to their fellow countrymen.  Something an ops mission by the Allies was lack to it's disadvantage.  Though, they did cook up a few plans.

While Tom Cruise is the probably the last actor I would have chosen to play Stauffenberg, it's clear that without him, Bryan Singer's upcoming VALKYRIE, about the July 20th plot against Hitler, would not have been made...and I'll take films about little known intriguing events in history any way I can get them. 

In the meantime, may I suggest THE PLOT TO KILL HITLER, a great tv movie about the event with Brad Davis(another short American!)as von Stauffenberg.  Great assists from Brits Michael Byrne, Ian Richardson, Kenneth(Admiral Piett)Colley and Jonathan Hyde.  It gets all the details right(for the most part) and as a Wolper production, it's well made.  It does a great job of showing the struggle of officers torn between a nationally ingrained sense of loyalty and overwhelming sense of desperation to save what remained of their people and their cultural dignity. 

[indianasmith]

interesting comments, all!

When I do my introductory lecture on Nazi Germany, I tell the class that seldom in human history has there been a bigger collection of thugs, goons, perverts, and misfits than the entourage that followed Hitler on his ride to power . . . there is not a normal, functional personality in the lot with the possible exception of Albert Speer.

One aspect of Hiter's management style was that he did not allow any one of his subordinates to accumulate too much power, and he encouraged rivalry.  Thus he made himself indispensible to the Nazi party.  Goring and Himmler hated each other, and Goebbels cordially detested both of them.  The most ruthless member of the crew, Reinhard Heydrich (ironically 1/4 Jewish) might have had the moxie to replace Hitler had the Allies not taken him out in 1942.

Certainly Nazi Germany was an evil place, but there were some decent human beings there who tried to save their country.  I'm glad someone - even if it's Tom Cruise - is honoring their memory.

[AndyC]

This topic reminded me of that piece on psychopaths that came up in a thread a while back, suggesting that Goering fit the diagnostic criteria for a phsychopath but Hitler did not. I'm inclined to agree that Hitler might not have been the most dangerous man in his regime.

From what I know of his life, I'd even go as far as saying that Hitler sincerely believed he was doing a necessary thing for his people, but his perspective was twisted. Kind of a Darth Vader situation of evil deeds springing from good intentions. I mean, at his core, was Hitler different from anybody who fails in his endeavours and blames other people or "the system" for keeping him down? The only difference I can see between him and a thousand other raving s**t disturbers is that he arrived at exactly the right point in history to get the power to fix things the way he wanted. And in doing so, he inevitably attracted every power-hungry sadist in Germany to his cause. Genuine psychopaths who were basically given a licence to indulge their crueller impulses.

Far from making Hitler less of a frightening figure, I think this leads to a more unsettling realization that the world is always full of Hitlers, just waiting for the right set of circumstances to come again.

One of the best speakers I've heard in a while was a Holocaust survivor who spoke in my community a few months ago. She mainly does anti-bullying presentations at schools, and her take on the Nazis is that they were nothing more than bullies who carried it as far as they could. And she presents her message with personal accounts that include Josef Mengele himself (speaking of psychopaths) pointing to the barracks for her and the "showers" for most of her family.

[Andrew]

WWII is possibly the easiest war in recent history that can be held up as an example of "We had to fight."

Certainly Nazi Germany was an evil place, but there were some decent human beings there who tried to save their country.  I'm glad someone - even if it's Tom Cruise - is honoring their memory.

Of note here is a story I happened across on Snopes.  The German fighter pilot who, because of his own sense of right and wrong, did not fire on the damaged B-17 bomber, was impressive.  Check down at the end of the article for his words on why he didn't open fire and finish it off.

http://www.snopes.com/military/charliebrown.asp

That is a sense of honor.