Actually, I do feel a little sympathy for the Nazi soldier. (Not a death camp guard, though-- for obvious reasons.) The common foot soldier was just “doing his duty” for his country. I can’t blame him for the policies of his government, any more than a Iraqi should blame our soldiers for the policies of GWB.
Look, I’m not saying that these people are right. What I’m saying is that from their point of view, they are. They sincerely believe in what they’re doing, just as our soldiers do. But you’re wanting to hold them to our moral standards when perhaps he’s never been exposed to them. People are not born with an inherant knowledge of “right” and “wrong”-- those are socially constructed concepts.
Five hundred years ago, you may have been cheering at the foot of a stake while a “heretic” burned-- something we regard with horror today. However, that’s the way that you would have been raised. You probably would have loved the sport of bull-baiting, in which bulls are tortured and ripped to shreds by vicious dogs. Today, such a spectacle would probably make you vomit, but back then, you may have thought it a jolly good time. That’s the way the world was at the time.
So, knowing this, I don’t judge these people too harshly-- as my grandma would say, “They don’t know no better.” Yes, their actions are reprehensible, but without them ever having been exposed to an alternative, how can we hold them to the standards of a person raised in our liberal environment?
It’s really immaterial whether their religion specifies those actions or not. After all, the Bible did not teach hatred of blacks, yet our Christian culture reveled in the idea a hundred years ago.
I don’t think that analogy holds. Hitler was quite clear about his aims: Jews were to be killed and non-Aryans were to be enslaved. I hate GWB as much as the next liberal but I haven’t see any speeches where he calls for slavery and concentration camps.
If that really were his aim in Iraq, unlike the goddamned Nazi soldier, I would be out on the street in protest every day of my life.
Germany of the 1930’s was one of the most sophisticated and techologically advanced societies on the planet. The men fighting back then knew exactly why they were fighting and what they fighting for. All they had to do was listen to one of Hitler’s speeches. Like the Taliban they don’t deserve any sympathy.
I find it hard to believe that a man could find it okay if his wife died needlessly in childbirth. I find it hard to believe that a man could fight for an organization that would not let his sister go to a hospital.
Everyone has a point of view. And everyone still gets held to basic moral standards. If everyone believed all points of view were okay just because others held them we’d still be bull baiting and buring heretics.
Actually I would disagree with this analogy as well. Many abolitionists were religiously Christian and used Christian beliefs to back up their moral arguments against slavery. You should no more tar all Christians with supporting slavery even a hundred years ago anymore than you should tar all Muslims with supporting the Taliban.
I happen to think the solution is obvious: remove them from Guantanamo and ship them all back home. Then gather all the Afghani women they ever treated like chattel and let them stand in appropriate judgement.
Hitler never specifically said in any of his speeches: “I’m gonna round up all the Jews and kill them.” He talked about them as “vermin” which needed to be “exterminated”, but such rhetoric was relatively common in that time. Some Germans have claimed that they sincerly had no idea that Jews were being slaughtered in droves in the camps. After all, the newspapers didn’t print: “Five Thousand Jews Killed Today.”
But, even if the soldier did know, you’ve got to understand that he had been taught all of his life that Jews were dirty, sneaky, evil people who tried to subvert the government and corrupt children. The Jews were dehumanized,. He may honestly have believed the propaganda. He may have thought he was trying to save his country.
The common foot soldier cannot be held accountable for the decisions made at the highest levels, no more that a private in the US Army can be held accountable for the policy decisions of the President. Personally, I disagree with the war in Iraq, but do I spit on the infantryman for doing what his superiors order? No.
All I’m trying to say is that you can’t expect people to rise above their upbringing in response to some sort of an instinctive notion of a higher moral code. As I said before, you can’t hold people to a standard that is totally foreign to them. There is no inborn knowledge of morality.
You don’t have to go to Taliban-controlled territory to find men who think this way. There may be one living on your block. Once in a while, you see in the media stories of parents letting their children die because they belong to a Christian sect which doesn’t believe in going to doctors. They believe that it is up to God who becomes sick, who will get better, and who will die, and that man’s intervention is trying to subvert the will of God. They may grieve intensely for the one who has died, but they see it as it being better that the person died and went to Heaven than disobeyed God and is doomed to Hell.
I am not familiar with this aspect of Islam, but I imagine it’s probably something along the same lines. Their faith is not an “excuse” for neglect: it’s what they sincerely believe.
This may surprise you, but a lot of the women probably believe the same way, and would refuse medical help if it were offered. Free Western women look at their condition and think they must be yearning to throw off the shackles of their subjugation, but many of them wouldn’t see it that way. It’s the way they’ve been raised, and what they’ve been taught is right. I’m sure there are a great many who do want to escape, but I think it’s foolish to assume that they all do. It’s their culture, too.
Imagine a woman of an Amazonian tribe who goes around bare-breasted. She must look at the Western anthropologists who visit her villiage with sympathy-- How hot and constrained we must feel in our bras and shirts! Why don’t we throw them off, rebel against the society which decrees we must cover our breasts? Aren’t we subjugated and constrained by our culture’s rules about modesty?
What basic moral standards? Are you referring to those which have been developed in the last hundred years or so in Western cultures? There is no such thing as a set of universal basic moral standards. There is only that which is currently acceptable to a specific group. If you ask a thousand people from various points around the globe what a set of basic moral standards are, you’d get widely varying answers. The answers would be even more eclectic if you broadened your time range to include those of the past, and probably even more varied if you include those of the future.
Yes, and a hundred or so years before that, they were using that same Christian faith to justify burning witches. I think this further backs up my point: morals change drastically according to time and place.
Within a society, not everyone agrees to the same moral code. Just read some of the threads on this board about abortion, the death penalty and drug use. “Right” and “wrong” are defined by individuals living within a culture, and formulating their beliefs based on what they’ve been taught and what they see around them.
I’d say that if you did that, you would probably see a lot of the women running toward their husbands with tears streaming down their faces, their arms spread for a hug.
Do you really think that all Afghani women hate and resent their husbands and fathers? You’re putting yourself in their shoes, not vice-versa. You’re assuming that your reaction to their treatment is how they must feel.
It may come as news to some US citizens, but the world outside the US does not need what you name here “historical perspective” (and what in most cases needs more then 10 years to become established) to detect the US barbarism and arrogance at Guatanamo Bay.
Unfortunately yes, this is the mindset of many but fortunately there are also others who do question all of this.
Not taken into account the disproportion you ignore about the intensity, the scale and the final purpose of the Holocaust, I think there is indeed some comparison possible with the mindset of the people who don’t care about what the US does (and not only at Guatanamo Bay) and the Nazi indoctrination.
It is founded at dehumanising “the other” which has the goal to create a mindset that accepts or even finds it completely normal to threat the “subhumans” in a way you would normally never threat any other human.
Yet you can not seriously mean to say that the USA is in its whole blindly falling into such a trap, like most of the Germans indeed were.
Regardless the rethoric of the US government and no matter the amount of US’ers who buy into it or “do not want to know”, there are still a vast amount of people left who “do want to know” and do not agree and shall never agree.
This alone is enough to make this whole mindset which this US government tried and still tries to create floating on quicksand.
Salaam. A
Aldeberan, I appreciate that you were one of the few to comment on my actual point: that I was comparing mindsets, and not atrocities.
I do admit that the comparison isn’t completely valid, as was pointed out by some previous posters. Turning a blind eye to Guantanamo is easier (and perhaps, more easily justified from a moral standpoint) than turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. The mindset may be the same, but the degree of the wrongs being committed influences the mindset.
I hope you’re right in your optimistic assessment of the American people. We do have an advantage over the citizens of Nazi Germany, in living in a free society where we can question the actions of our government.
While I agree in great lines with what you are trying to bring across in your posts, I must disagree with this.
I would not disagree if the US soldiers were not volunteers who joined the army out of their own free will.
Actually, this mindset has no foundation at all in Islam.
There is no foundation to claim that God would not want you to cure your child or relative or a passing stranger. It is a command to help them (which is even extended to animals). And especially a command for men to provide for all the needs of those who are part of their household ( including whomever who might be under your roof at a given moment).
The Taliban and their weird rules have such an enormous disconnection with Islam that it would be a complete hijack of this thread if I would go on about this.
The truth is that this has its solid foundation within the dominant culture and the traditions in that part of the world.
A mix of this with indoctrination Wahabbi Style (and Wahabbi-founded) false and twisted teachings of Al Qur’an, and you have what you see there.
You must not believe that this has ended because “officially” the rule of the Taliban has ended.
It is however not true that women in such cultures can not see a doctor. They can (if there is one around, that is) although the conditions under which that happens are not what we would call “normal” doctor/patient contacts.
Salaam. A
Although I am in agreement with most of what you write, I do not agree with this.
I would, if the US army was not composed of volunteers.
No it is not. Such a mindset is the opposite of the commands of Al Qur’an and the teachings of Islam.
And speaking of the Taliban: Their weird mindset in its whole in contradiction with Islam. It has no more to do with Islam then being the unfortunate result of the mixing of the dominant - feudal orientated -culture in that part of the world and the Wahabbi Style (and Wahabbi-funded) indoctrination with falsified twisted interpretations of Islamic teachings in general.
But if you think that this is now gone, then you are misled. There is nothing “gone” at all about it and it is not limited to Afghanistan and has also not its origin there.
But it is not true that women in such societies can not see a doctor. They can… If there is one around, that is.
Most of the time however this is limited in the sense that the patient stays behind a curtain and the doctor only has a little hole in that curtain to “examine” her “at view”, while he does not directly speak to her and she not directly to him.
I would not call that such a great occasion for practicing medicine, but for the patient it is still better then receiving no treatment at all.
Salaam. A
Yes… I read the predictable attacks on your OP.
It is a common tactic to immediately attack a few flaws in a person’s post and ignore the underlying message completely.
*Me - while me is ethnic minority on this board not speaking Enlgish - is victim also myself often of this… People go act as if not understand while me is always completely innocent and extremely harmless… *
I must admit that I am not all that much optimistic… For the simple fact that people in the USA are not known for flocking towards the voting boxes as bees to a beehive. Which makes that even there is a rising disagreement with the policies of this administration, I still see the Bush Maffia as having a good chance at a second term.
They are POWs, not innocent women and children. They don’t have the same rights as citizens.
I do not necessarily think they should be held this long, I don’t know, I have no inside knowledge of what is going on. But I do know that some German prisoners from WWII being held in this country were not taken back to German until several years after the war was over. Don’t know why that happened either.
Heck, there were American soldiers that were not allowed back into our society until several years after the war was over. The government felt they were too dangerous, had to rehabilitate them so they wouldn’t kill people at the slightest provocation.
Best to find out the reasons before making assumptions.
Actually, they don’t have the same rights as POWs. They have been identified as “enemy combatants”, not POWs, which puts them in a neither-fish-nor-fowl state. Among other things, not subject to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs.
And since POWs are normally repatriated when the war ends; and no one will be able to say when the war on terror ends – I see no reason why they wouldn’t be held in Guantanamo forever.
I don’t know how many of you read annaplurabelle post, but the quotes from Excerpts from the rememberances of German citizens after the war chillingly mirrors what’s going on today in this country.
Some posters (including the OP) still do not comprehend that a) it is perfectly proper to condemn apathy or (in a tiny minority) satisfaction regarding the way some prisoners have been treated by U.S. authorities, and b) it is improper and counterproductive to drag the Holocaust into such a discussion, for reasons previously cited.
If you want to create sympathy and understanding, rather than arouse hostility and contempt, choose a different analogy. “It is founded at dehumanising “the other” which has the goal to create a mindset that accepts or even finds it completely normal to threat the “subhumans” in a way you would normally never threat any other human.”
A good example of this mindset can be found among radical followers of Islam who call for the destruction of “infidels”. The lack of investigations and hearings into this problem in the countries that harbor such people leaves much to be desired.
Remember what’s-his-name’s Law (I wish I could remember the name…) – that all internet discussions will eventually involve one party accusing the other of being a Nazi? I’d like to propose a corollary:
JSC1953’s Corollary: Any internet discussion that includes a reference or analogy – however well-intentioned or well-reasoned-- to Nazi Germany, will immediately run off the rails and into a ditch.
Not “any Internet discussion”. If you want to invoke the Holocaust in discussion of another government-sponsored program that killed millions in an attempt to exterminate an entire group (as in Armenia, Cambodia etc.) you’ll be on far more solid ground.
And it’s Godwin’s Law you were trying to think of. You tied a long-standing record in the OP.
“Godwin’s Law prov. [Usenet] “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin’s Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin’s Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.”
