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Author | Topic: The blurry line between religious and crazy | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes:
Yup.
... we would judge their efficiency by how many got away, what it cost per Jew.... Dr Adequate writes:
No. You can't do that. You might as well say that it would have been "more efficient" not to start the war in the first place. You might as well say it would have been "more efficient" to be Polynesians instead of Germans. ... and indeed whether that was a good use of their resources rather than fighting the Allies. You can only compare what they did with previous attempts to do what they did.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 310 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
No. You can't do that. You might as well say that it would have been "more efficient" not to start the war in the first place. Well, yes. I might as well say that. Moreover I can and I will. Michael Q. Furterburger inherited his father's office supply business. Instead of spending his time on reducing overheads or increasing sales or anything else that might have made his company more profitable, he decided instead to visit each one of his clients personally and hit them in the face with a fish. Was that an efficient use of his time? I say "no", because he drove down his profits. Would you say "yes" because he successfully hit a lot of people with a fish?
You can only compare what they did with previous attempts to do what they did. "What they did"? THEY LOST. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
They killed a lot of Jews, but we would judge their efficiency by how many got away We might do it that if we had any respect or grudging admiration for the ability to achieve the outcome. We might instead recoil from a description of the murder of millions and judge the result on a horror scale.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes:
They killed six million Jews. They considered it an incomplete victory. THEY LOST. They had killing factories. They stole their victims' shoes, their clothing, their hair, their teeth. When, in the course of human history, have their cost-recovery efforts ever been matched?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 310 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
They killed six million Jews. They considered it an incomplete victory. They suffered a crushing defeat. Just sayin'.
They had killing factories. They stole their victims' shoes, their clothing, their hair, their teeth. When, in the course of human history, have their cost-recovery efforts ever been matched? Well, in the first place, did they in fact get their money back? How much did the Nazis make on second-hand footwear? This is one of the things that the Nazis did to convince themselves that they were being efficient, but do we have figures on the success of their used-shoe-shops? How much did they get for second-hand Jewish teeth? In the second place, it is usual, when carrying out a pogrom, to steal the goods of one's victims. Who knows --- not I, not you --- whether it was cheaper per murdered Jew to let loose a bunch of Cossacks on horseback. How much did the Rwandan genocide cost the Rwandan government? Did they have to build camps and railroad tracks? And in the third place, we may still question, as I have questioned, whether it was efficient to do the thing at all. Discussing this is making me very depressed. To cheer us all up, here's the story of Goering's brother Albert.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes:
I find the Holocaust itself depressing, and the fact that the perpetrators tried so hard to be efficient. Discussing this is making me very depressed. I find discussing it slightly cathartic and I find your comments fairly disgusting.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 310 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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I find the Holocaust itself depressing, and the fact that the perpetrators tried so hard to be efficient. Of course they thought they were doing the right thing, operationally and indeed morally. People rarely think of themselves that they're a bunch of slapstick buffoons and also the epitome of evil to boot. You say the Nazis tried to be efficient? Yeah, they also tried to be the good guys. And they tried to win WWII. They failed in all these aims because of being dumbass fuckwits who didn't know a good idea from a bad one, or right from wrong.
I find discussing it slightly cathartic and I find your comments fairly disgusting. I am sorry that I've disgusted you by suggesting that the Nazis were, amongst their other obvious mental defects, also halfwitted incompetents. It was not my intention to disgust you, and if saying so has that effect on you I shall press the point no further. I shall however continue privately to think that the Nazis were not all that bright.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes:
Six million was, tragically, a huge success.
They failed in all these aims....
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 310 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I could argue that killing six million Jews was not, in fact, a "huge success". But apparently not without disgusting you. I'm gonna let this one go.
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MFFJM2 Member (Idle past 3232 days) Posts: 58 From: Washington, DC Joined:
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If you're going to consider the effects of the Holocaust you should consider all of the effects. WWII was not part of the Holocaust and was ancillary to it. The Nazis stole the property of displaced Jews, whether they were sent to concentration camps or simply decided to emigrate. This property included art, jewels, money in bank accounts, cars, real estate, and raw materials. It is estimated that $18 billion in Jewish property was confiscated (stolen) by the Nazis, and most of it was never returned after the war, as the owners were dead. This property funded at least one third of the German war effort.
"Prof Ullmann said, "Conservatively, their money financed at least 30 per cent of the German war effort." Christine Kuller of the University of Munich, who also worked on the study, said tax offices built whole hierarchies of bureaucrats "who discovered dwellings and bank accounts and emptied them". The bureaucrats then disposed of all traces of those who disappeared in the extermination camps." Yes, the Nazis were extremely efficient, and ultimately unsuccessful, but their lack of success doesn't mean they weren't also efficient. Edited by MFFJM2, : No reason given.
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Theodoric Member Posts: 9196 From: Northwest, WI, USA Joined: Member Rating: 3.3
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Here is an article criticizing idea of Nazi efficiency.
The Myth of Nazi “Efficiency” | Coffee Cup HistoryFacts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts "God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness.
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ringo Member (Idle past 437 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Theodoric writes:
Before we go rushing off on a tangent about "Nazi efficiencey", let's recap the statement that started the deflection:
Here is an article criticizing idea of Nazi efficiency.quote:I was referring to the efficiency with which millions of people were killed and robbed. Whether they were efficient in any other area is irrelevant to my statement.
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MFFJM2 Member (Idle past 3232 days) Posts: 58 From: Washington, DC Joined: |
Exactly. The article is specifically about the economic inefficiency of Germany under the Nazi regime. The Nazi final solution was not formally decided until the Wannsee Conference. Given the requirement that most of the atrocities had to be hidden from view and that the mechanism used to kill millions was ad hoc, the Nazi death machine was extremely efficient.
Edited by MFFJM2, : sp.
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Not just to pick on your post, but it is currently the last post in this thread taking the position that the Nazi's were efficient.
One might note that killing and taking people's stuff in a situation in which you need fear no reprisal from the local government is easilly going to be profitable. So if you must insist on describing the result of huge benefits as being efficient, then we should at least consider the inputs and outputs and then the end result of having your country reduced to ruble and having to pay back your ill gotten gains whenever the rest of the world can manage to find them.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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MFFJM2 Member (Idle past 3232 days) Posts: 58 From: Washington, DC Joined: |
Once again, the description of efficiency was in regard to the Holocaust, not in every other area of Nazi endeavor. In 1933 there were approximately 3 million Jews living in Poland, and by 1945 there were only 45,000. There were nearly 1/2 million Jews living in Germany in the same year, and by 1945 only 37,000. In Greece there were 100,000 Jews prior to the war, and by its end only 7,000. In the former Yugoslavia from 70,000 to 3,500. The position I am defending is not that the Nazi's were efficient in everything they did. Far from it, but in conducting their final solution they were mercilessly efficient, far beyond anything ever seen before.
I was not describing anything except what recent studies have shown about how much property was stolen from displaced and murdered Jews, and subsequently used in the German war effort. The population figures on European Jewry from the Holocaust shows the effectiveness of the Nazi attempt at a final solution.
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