All (or almost all) people think they are good. Deep, down where it matters they are a good person and what they do is for the best. I would bet Hitler thought that deep down he was a good man doing what is needed/best.
Now, a few people are really ‘good people’, a few really bad and most just completely selfish…therefore most people are not really all that much of a ‘good person’.
It’s like a sense of humor. Most everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but many don’t.
In the long run, it’s reasonable to assume that an aggressive, militaristic dictator who tries to kill all of ethnic group X in a region might want to kill all of that same ethnic group in other regions. If you’re saying that Hitler would have left the rest of the world’s Jews alone forever if he had conquered Europe, that seems like a pretty bold (and ridiculous) thing to say. I’m saying that it’s reasonable to assume that he would not have left the rest of the world’s Jews alone.
By attacking the North, you mean Fort Sumpter? The island that was part of South Carolina?
Southerners believed they were fighting for self-determination: the same right their grandparents fought for during the American Revolution. If you’d asked the average Southern soldier why he was fighting he’d have said, “because you (Northern soldiers) are down here.” (Paraphrasing Shelby Foote.)
No argument there.
Hitler couldn’t make it across the English Channel - which you can see across, on a clear day, or so I’m told. How the heck was he going to make it across the Atlantic?
I’m glad too, but we can be glad and still stick to the facts.
Not counting the millions of slaves - actual slaves, in the sense of being owned people - in the United States, of course.
Yes. They shot at United States soldiers (I should have said “the US” instead of “the North”). Think about that- think about any servicemen that you may have known in your life (like me, for example :))- and think about a group of armed men shooting at them on American soil.
Undoubtedly, for the average Confederate soldier. But their leaders attacked American soldiers because of slavery. The South seceded because of slavery. Any “self-determination” was about the right to own slaves. So said the leaders at the time, and so said the documents of secession. There was no doubt why the South started the war back then. Any talks of “states rights” ultimately boiled down to slavery, 90% of the time.
I was hypothesizing a world in which he conquered Europe (which would have included crossing the channel).
Which I have… along with reasonable supposition.
Any talk of “self-determination” as a cause for the Civil War is laughable, of course, considering that there were millions of people in the South who did not have the slightest bit of “self-determination” in their own lives, and almost certainly would have been against secession had they the rights to express themselves.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Some states seceded because they didn’t believe Lincoln when he said he said he wasn’t going to free the slaves. Others left after Lincoln began mobilizing troops to invade the South.
Perhaps a little more complicated, but it’s still true to say that the Civil War was mostly about slavery, and the South’s secession was mostly about slavery.
The same was true during the American Revolution.
True, although the American Revolution had the virtue of not being about slavery. The South seceded because of slavery- we declared our independence due to other things.
That was three days after the CSA declared war on the United States. This seems to be in keeping with your earlier posts about Churchill. You blame the victim for fighting back against the attacker.
Sure. And that’s why I fully support ‘surgical’ drone strikes on sanctioned terrorist targets in Pakistan. An air-to-surface missile from a drone to the noggin of a known terrorist is aeons more in-keeping with the rules of war and justifiable than any bread knife decapitation of a journalist could ever be.
However, my gripe is more to do with Israel’s ‘creep’ in the region and how it enforces this ‘metastasis’.
I’m not sure what you mean by “declared war”, unless you’re talking about Fort Sumter. The South seceded, and the North invaded. The first actual battle was in Virginia. In fact, almost every major battle was in the South, except for Gettysburg.
Fort Sumter was taken in a battle. Armed men (Conferates) attacked and shot at US soldiers at Fort Sumter. The Battle of Fort Sumter was a battle that happened.
It should also be noted that the attack on Fort Sumter was only the last, and most intolerable, incident of a pre-war campaign of seizure of federal property - arsenals, post offices, mints, court houses, custom houses - by the Confederacy.
Yet another non sequitur. How is this in any way relevant to the statement that ‘Countries do not routinely go about enslaving the vanquished, and haven’t done so in millennia’ or back up your outrageous claim that German occupation of France was not particularly harsh when they used 1.5 million of them as slave labor. Here’s a clue for you: the Union did not enslave the citizens of the CSA when the war was won.
Indeed. There’s little point in debating someone so blind to reality that they claim the US Civil War started when the North invaded the South.
Nobody’s claiming the Confederate decision to declare war was a wise one. Robert Toombs, the Confederate Secretary of State, told Jefferson Davis the CSA could not win a war against the United States and should do everything it could to avoid a war - even accepting America keeping possession of Ft Sumter if necessary.
The benefit in strategic bombing is debated, as well as the morality. Generalizing, German and English people tend to think that strategic bombing is moral but ineffective. Japanese and American people tend to think that strategic bombing is effective but immoral.
Thread started out as Was Hitler a good man?, and
…Always comes back to the American Civil War, doesn’t it.
Not that I’m complaning. Adds a little levity to an otherwise ponderous and predictable discussion.
In fairness, many Civil War threads (and many threads in general) always come back to Hitler and the Nazis.