Oh, I don’t know… maybe gas chambers? Ovens? Einsatzgruppen?
We’ll just have to agree to disagree. In my opinion, one war of aggression and acquisition is the same as another.
I was comparing two invasions, not doing a point by point comparison of Bush to Hitler.
Having said that, Bush does have concentration camps and he did, at one point, want to start having secret trials and assembly line executions at Gitmo.
So we can’t agree that one war herded civilians by the millions into gas chambers and another didn’t?
And before you start carping on the Iraqi civilians, every war since the beginning of history has claimed innumerable innocents. What we’re ultimately dealing with here is a matter of intent.
Do you really want to assert that US troops in Iraq have also been slaughtering civilians as the Einsatzgruppen did?
Most of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were innocent civilians.
My comparison had to do with the illegality of the invasions, though. Of course the Nazis were far, far worse in their execution and in their actions during the occupation. I’m saying the decisions to invade were equally unjustified.
This is a truly repulsive comparison if you have any semblance of what went on in places like Dachau*.
This is leaving aside the question of deathcamps like Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, of which there are obviously no American analogues.
Thanks.
Well, I have no wish to redo the “Was the war justified?” argument. So, for the sake of this argument we’ll simply stipulate that it was not. I can respect your beliefs here without sharing them. This is easy, because what your opinion is of the decision makers may be a separate issue from what you think of Tony Snow.
Snow came in after the war was under way. He had no part in creating the lie. His job was simply to relay information, and the viewpoints of the administration to the press. I think we’d both agree that the job of press secretary is a necessary one, and that the lines of information and communication that it opens between the people and an administration are crucial.
Why I think Dio is being attacked and you are not is that Dio has A. Presented a much more over the top indictment, and B. Specifically held Tony Snow personally responsible for all the actions of the administration, even those before he came into the job.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem to me that you place the same extreme burden of guilt and wish for retribution on Snow as does Dio.
As for Dio, I haven’t participated in this thread because I was kind of shocked. I don’t think things are black and white and I think the measure of Snow as a human being is much greater than simply the last job he held.
I think opening your heart to the kind of blanket condemnation and hatred that Dio is shown is the kind of thing that takes a toll on one’s humanity. I think it’s a dangerous device to indulge oneself. Allowing yourself the luxury of such extreme viewpoints and condemnations of one’s fellow human beings is, I think what allowed KKK member to lynch black people, and the Nazis to gas jews.
I don’t think Dio is actually capable of such things. I think he’s just angry and talking on the internet, and I apologize for Godwinizing, but I still think such simplistic blanket condemnations and hateful indulgences lead one into a dangerous place.
I don’t think your post is the same at all.
Good point.
Let’s sum up:
Dio: “America and Bush are like Germany invading Poland! Snow is like Hitler!”
Everyone else: “Wuh?”
Dio: “it’s a matter of scale! Bring it on bitches!”
Everyone else: “Oh, sorry. I don’t provoke those guys on the street who talk to themselves.”
Do I have it about right? 
OK. At least here, we’re getting back on rational ground.
The concept of legality in the prosecution of wars is a fairly novel and recent one, and personally, I don’t subscribe to it. Nevertheless, as I pointed out earlier, Germany killed about 5 million Poles out of a pre-war population of about 13.7 million. Mind you, these killings were almost entirely a consequence of a murderous ideology that was explicitly laid out for the world to see a full 14 years previously.
How the hell can you say this is even in the same moral universe as the US invasion of Iraq?
To clarify your opinion, would you consider the American effort to kill Native Americans, or the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia comparable to the Shoa?
Over a million people have been killed in Iraq since the US invasion. What’s the minimum number of people who have to die before you would consider it to be the same moral universe?
Seeing as how for much of the period in question, the extermination of Native Americans was actually the result of the actions of British, not American, colonists, and even subsequent to 1783 that much of the killing/expulsion of Native tribes was done by private actors, no. For actions that were government sanctioned, as in the Trail of Tears, these would be close to, but not at, the same level of evil as Auschwitz, IMO.
I am unable to even attempt to speak in a comprehensive fashion about the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, but from what I’ve gleaned from scattered readings, I would also put them on the same level of evil as the Holocaust, considering that they both involved wholesale deliberate indiscriminate slaughter of innocents.
I’m well aware of the Wolfowitz group’s intention to wage war against Iraq at the soonest opportunity. However, I don’t recall any proposed policy which involved the deliberate depopulation of the country to facilitate its colonization by American settlers.
ETA: Your quoted casualty estimate is not exactly accepted without contention, as even your source indicates.
Might be as little as a quarter of that, a mere 250,000. But this is distracting us from the horror of dissing a dead guy. Focus, people, focus.
Truth hurts, doesn’t it? If war crimes are being committed, then by definition, soldiers must be involved in their commission. There’s no line from Tony Snow to a dead Iraqi that doesn’t go through an American soldier’s weapon.
What specific things about the Iraq invasion don’t you like? I bet most, if not all, are committed by soldiers. Rapes have been committed, tortures, bombing of civilians, mass imprisonment without trial. Who’s doing those things? It wasn’t Tony Snow raping teenaged girls or hooking up prisoners to car batteries. It was America’s finest. Soldiers, Marines, slaughtering innocent Iraqis at soccer games, killing a whole family so they could rape their daughter, packing them in to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. American soldiers, men and women of the United States armed services, killing innocent Iraqis and invading their country. Many of those American soldiers are bona fide war criminals, and now you’re their apologist. Like Tony Snow, you’re just a bitch for wrongdoers, but at least it was in Snow’s job description.
You may not have the cojones to admit the logical trap you’ve put yourself in, but you know it’s true and you just don’t have the balls to admit it.
Trolls, at least, are consistent. You’re just a coward.
Where’ve you been? We’ve been talking Fourth Reich for pages now.
Oh yeah, BTW - Tony Snow RIP.
And more seriously, a quarter million deaths is still pretty fucking horrible and not something that posterity will easily forget.
You’re conflating deliberate war crimes with the the actions of those just doing their jobs and not knowingly following any illegal orders. I have been the first to start some of the Pit threads condemning the atrocities committed by some American personel over there, but it does not follow that everyone over there is therefore a criminal or has any evil intent. I know better.
I’m going to have to chime in here on this whopper. Are you seriously going to go on record and compare Gitmo detainees to Jewish concentration camp prisoners?
There IS no comparison, even if every single fucking Gitmo detainee was waterboarded every single fucking hour of every single day. They LIVED, idiot.
And that’s a bare minimum attempt at apples to apples, which they aren’t. Not even close.
Oh Jesus Christ, here we go again. Cite that please. NOBODY is saying that the treatment of prisoners or their detainment at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo or any other place is RIGHT, but that they weren’t treated properly with regards to what are SUPPOSED to be a higher standard with Americans as the captors.
I simply cannot wrap my head around your comparisons between what we have now and the age of Nazi Germany. There are only superfluous comparisons.