Were Nazi death camp guards any more "evil" than Gitmo guards? Both followed orders

[Aeschines]

@Der Trihs

People have died. How is that “not that bad”?

Are you even reading the posts? I said the forms of torture that were being used officially are “not that bad.” Mind you, I think it’s all bad. But not hang-people-with-piano-wires bad. That is, not Nazi-bad.

[quote]
Children were raped, chunks torn out of people by dogs, people have been crippled; how is that “not that bad”?

[quote]
Bad apples vs. official policy. Context. Facts. You’re not making your case very well.

Nor do you have any evidence that we are torturing Al-Qaeda leaders, instead of random people we grabbed.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed seems definitely an al Qaeda leader and probably to have been tortured.

Finally, why does their affilation with Al-Qaeda justify anything if we are as bad or worse than they are?

You’re begging the question, since it’s under dispute how bad the US is in this thread.

Obviously, torturing innocents is worse than torturing murderers. Again, I do not condone torture.

With an administration that justifies torture, what makes you think they aren’t part of official policy ?

What evidence do you have that they are? He who posits must prove.

If I understand your logic correctly, one is as evil as possible no matter the degree of evil one commits; or perhaps you have a rather low threshhold value, after which someone is “as bad as the Nazis.”

Your logic is poor, and you don’t seem to be engaging with the facts at all. I never thought I’d have to defend the Bush regime to this extent, but there you go.

[Aeschines]

By the way, Der Trihs, in your attempts to educate yourself on this topic and make what you say more meaningful, it behooves you to read the testimony of Rodolf Hoess, the SS man who ran Auschwitz. He was captured and tried at Nuremburg (and later executed). He is also asked questions about the psychology of what he had done; it’s a great lesson in the history and nature of evil.

[Wesley_Clark]

@astro

Just curious how that moral calculus pays out. People will do amazingly cruel things under the rationale of “just following orders”. Do Gitmo guards terrorizing prisoners to get information get a pass vs Nazi guards terrorizing Jews to get information?

You can’t compare Nazi atrocities with US atrocities. Gitmo has air conditioned cells, a healthy diet, respect for religion and now, hopefully, legal counsel.

However despite all the claims that ‘moral relavism’ is a bad thing, for the most part people excuse their own countries behavior more than others. So if you ask an american they will say that US soldiers deserve more of a pass than German soldiers.

And as for torture in the US, the US has always been pro torture in some respects. Virtually all nations have, even nations that claim moral superiority on the issue. Torture wasn’t even illegal here until 1936 when in Brown vs. Mississippi the SCOTUS decided it wasn’t admissable to use evidence gained by torture in criminal trials. And since '36 we have still supported 3rd world dictators who used torture instead. Instead of us torturing them, we just use the rendition program to get them transferred to Egypt. What I don’t get is how does the US get away with rendition when we signed the ‘UN Convention against torture’ which states plainly in article 3 that you can’t transfer people to other nations for torture. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China & others have ratified the CoT and it doesn’t stop them so I guess it is just a toothless piece of feel good international law.

[Wesley_Clark]

@Evil Captor

Yes, I have a question: what kind of psychelic crack are YOU smoking? See, the US didn’t USED to detain prisoners without trial and deny them access to legal counsel or fair trials. The US didn’t USED to torture prisoners. The US didn’t USED to have a government that openly supported torture.

The US government doesn’t support torture. I’ll admit the Bush Admin does, but congress voted overwelmingly to ban torture, the senate vote was 90-9. The supreme court recently said that Gitmo detainees deserve legal rights. Thank god for checks & balances because there are limits on what is acceptable to fight terrorism and legal black holes shouldn’t be among them. I don’t hate Bush, but he will only be in power for 2 more years.

[Chotii]

I’ve done a lot of reading about the lives of American soldiers during WWII. I will extrapolate from that that the behavior of American soldiers during WWI, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and every other armed conflict the US has ever been in…has been more or less the same.

In WWII, there were reported rapes of civilians. Those US soldiers, if caught and convicted in a military court, were TAKEN OUT AND SHOT, usually in very short order. Hey, the guys get a pretty good free ride now. They only get court-martialed and maybe sent to prison, and it sure as heck ain’t Gitmo. Personally, I think the Army has wussed out if they’ve changed their rules to be more PC.

In WWII, some soldiers killed enemy prisoners, tortured them, injured and no doubt crippled some of them. Some of them also killed plenty of civilians, especially if they felt those civilians posed a threat to their lives (as in the killing of small children in Vietnam, following incidents where small children were booby-trapped and used to kill squadrons of soldiers.) Think of the civilian massacres that happened at the hands of the armies during the Civil War??

War is hell. War is horrible. War messes with peoples’ minds and emotions. I have no idea why people think the US Army today is somehow above having absolute bastards in its ranks. Even domestic police forces have been known to have corruption, wife-beaters, killers, and so forth among their numbers. How is it that soldiers are expected to be better people somehow? It’s horrible. But it’s not new, and to blame Bush for every act of malfeasance strikes me as remarkably ignorant of history and war.

Do not, even for a second, think I condone things done wrong by the military. I do not. I merely expect such acts to happen, because people are no different now than 50 years ago, 150 years ago, or ever. And I no more blame Bush for individual acts of cruelty by soldiers or even individual commanders, than I blame Lincoln for the atrocities committed by Sherman during the Civil War. The blood for those things is on the hands that committed them.

[Little_Nemo]

The OP is the reason Godwin’s Law was enacted. No serious comparison can be made between what happened at Auschwitz and what’s happening at Gitmo. The worst accusations being made about prisoner abuse fall a world short of genocide. And Bush, while a terrible president, is no Hitler. Losing all sense of proportion about the real problems that are going on will not help fix them.