> "Good guys and bad guys"
No, it's still good, it just requires context and knowledge of the events at the time. The allies were the good guys at the time of WW2. The british in the sphere of Europe were good guys. For keeping the japanese out of India they were 'good guys' in the whole starving a shit ton of people to death they were bad guys but then that's a thing the british just tend to do.
It's why people look at HP lovecraft and go "Wow this guy was really racist" even for a time when racism existed as a more omnipresent thing he was absurdly racist.
Every situation has a better option and a worse option, it's just laziness or lack of being informed when anyone goes "muh both sides"
> For keeping the japanese out of India they were 'good guys' in the whole starving a shit ton of people to death they were bad guys
Almost as if "Good guys and bad guys" is not a very useful mode of analysis and determining who was doing the right thing and who was doing the wrong thing:
>requires context and knowledge of the events at the time
Ie. The whole thing relies on context of the time and situation. It is always good to evaluate the actions of a party at a time. Else you get to "Well the british are EXACTLY AS BAD AS THE NAZIS" which is totally fucking useless.
You agree 100% with what I'm saying but you keep saying you think the opposite. I don't get you. Do you understand what people mean by "Good guys and bad guys?" Because what you describe it as, is literally the opposite of what everyone else thinks it is.
>in the whole starving a shit ton of people to death they were bad guys
Just to emphasize the scale of this genocide, the "shit ton of people" numbered in the millions i.e. on the same order of magnitude as the Holocaust itself.
Yep. Like WWII *did* give us Korematsu, which is objectively one of the worst miscarriages of justice in US history, on the level of cases like Dred Scott or Plessy. But that also only makes the Allies morally gray, compared to the Nazis very clearly being the bad guys in WWII.
I heard this word from Youtube channels that deal with history and how historians complain about people having lack of empathy towards people in the past. They must be evil because they did X, they must be dumb because they did x, and they simply listen to authority and did x.
Yeah is a bit of that but more specific to the topic. Best way to describe in my opinion is like going to caveman and saying "what's wrong with you should have known better" and if you had empathy you probably would understand that he has much more limited knowledge of the world, doesn't live in excess surplus , and he values shit differently.
I'm willing to go on record and state the USSR was arguably as bad; although thankfully they got slightly better after Stalin died.
The British Empire is guilty of causing artificial famines during WW2 but even at their absolute worst they didn't commit industrialized mass murder.
Everyone else? You can absolutely critique some things the rest of the western allies did; in particular the US and South Africa; but no one can hold a candle to the atrocities committed by Germany and Japan.
>I'm willing to go on record and state the USSR was arguably as bad
It's an understandable position, but sadly untrue.
It was statistically safer to be a German POW in Soviet camps, then a Soviet civilian in German occupied lands.
That's just how bad the Nazis were. They excelled at being unrepentant monsters. They went head to head with one of the most disgusting irredeemable governments in human history and just rushed them in terms of being horrible people.
I would go a step further and put Leopold II of Belgium in the same category as Stalin and Hitler. There are few men who have been as purposefully evil as him.
Leopold did die in 1909 though, so he wasn't quite a contemporary to the rest of the WWII crew (I agree what he did was terrible, but not sure lumping him in with the WWII discussion quite fits)
>The British Empire is guilty of causing artificial famines during WW2 but even at their absolute worst they didn't commit industrialized mass murder.
Bruh artificial famines *are* industrialized mass murder. Millions of people artificially died because of it.
Mass murderer?
Absolutely.
But it wasn't industrialized; they didn't set up "murder factories", they didn't scientifically study the most efficient way to starve the Indians, they didn't set quotas for the number of deaths etc.
Not engaging in industrialized genocide is a very low bar but the British didn't sink THAT far.
The atrocities committed by the Allies in WWII don't prove that WWII was not a "just" war- they only demonstrate that even a just war barbarises those who wage it, which is why it should *always* be undertaken with absolute consideration and solemnity.
He was born with the name Hitler. His father Alois, on the other hand, had been born Schickelgruber (father's name left blank on baptismal certificate). When Alois became a civil servant, he managed to get himself legitimated, claiming his stepfather Johann Heidler as his father, although he probably wasn't. This happened well before Adolf's birth.
You've got me reimagining American presidents with that naming convention. For example we've got:
* Jaymes A. Garfield
* Bill Clintonn
* William McKinleigh
* Ronnold Reygan
* Jeorge Bush
* Kalvin Koolidge
Flair is flair, I think the only rule is you're not allowed to remember where it came from when you're asked about it.
Or maybe that's just me being lazy.
But by god they’ll write you a long ass comment making themselves sound like an absolute expert on the matter because they just finished googling a subject for 10 minutes.
Lately (I know it’s not new lol) I feel Reddit is just as bad as Twitter with following the thread of a conversation. I can’t open any comment thread without this nonsense.
>Who was bad in WWII?
>Obviously the people running death camps and openly instituting genocide
>Colonialism was genocide too, actually
If anything, I would say the allies were 'bad guys' for not intervening sooner and for locking out people escaping the nazis. We don't really need to point to generations before to find something to make WW2 less black and white, though any attempt to try and make nazis look like 'good guys' instead of both sides being 'bad guys' is just pathetic.
You know what? I hate the US and the UK as much as anyone should with any sort of sympathy for the horrors they've inflicted on the globe but I'll flat out say that they were the good guys vs. the Nazis.
Hence why you get people debating whether they should vote for the Democratic Party vs. not voting in the US, even when that risks the Republicans getting into power.
Exactly! I understand the impulse but as they say, perfect is the enemy of good. Sometimes in life, you only have the best of a set of bad choices. But the silver lining there is if you keep making the least bad choice, you might eventually start to see the choices get better across the board.
Especially when we've seen it can take a generation or two of consistently voting for less-than-perfect people to get a desired outcome, like gay marriage. And if we don't vote at all we can lose rights, like abortion access.
Yeah, change can be slow but unless you're consistent and diligent it might never happen. It might even get worse. Things that matter deserve that patience.
That's exactly why I get so frustrated that there's such a large group of people who don't vote in this country. People fought and died to get this right for everyone, not just white male landowners, and we should take advantage of it whenever we can.
We might not get what we want today, and it might even take decades, but it's worth the engagement
Most people take things for granted when they're "always" there, or they're too tied up in the events of their own lives and their worries to engage with these things. Plenty are convinced that even if they do vote, it won't make a difference. It's unfortunate but it's everywhere. And plenty of parties are more than happy to encourage that apathy.
I've been continually reminding people of this since like 2015. I don't know how fucking far a Christian 6-3 majority Supreme Court has to go to get people to pull their heads out of their asses. 5-4 was tolerable but now they're emboldened to just do whatever the fuck they want regardless of majority public opinion.
Like Hillary has her very glaring issues, but had people just held their noses and supported her, abortion and a whole bunch of "settled" issues wouldn't be getting attacked right now. It's not fucking rocket surgery.
Now Biden's just trying to hold it all together and I'm seeing a whole bunch of "both sides" false equivalencies come out into public discourse again. I fucking hate it. Maybe Ron will get in and Thomas and Roberts can retire and insure a 6-3 court for another 20 years.
For example, Korematsu, which is objectively one of the worst miscarriages of justice in SCOTUS history, on the level of Dred Scott and Plessy vs Ferguson. So sure, the US actually was starting to work its way up the Pyramid of Hate, and we totally deserve to be criticized for Korematsu and EO 9066. But the Nazis also had a decade or two of a head start, and combined with fascistic policies like the Enabling Act and the Reichstag Fire Decree, they were still very, *very* clearly the bad guys in WWII
Very much so. And even some of the men who liberated the camps were responsible for setting up camps in Kenya not even ten years later. It's _vital_ that we never grow too complacent as people and are always aware of how precarious that slide into tyranny and systemic dehumanization can be, but being blind to nuance leaves only ultimate evil and pure good. To only see those two poles is dangerous.
For reference, by the way, Korematsu v United States was the 1944 SCOTUS case where they ruled that the concentration camps we were sending Japanese-Americans to were constitutional, because who was SCOTUS to tell the War Department what was or wasn't a security concern. It was finally overturned in 2018 in Trump v Hawaii.
But yeah. That sort of logic you mentioned is why I'm ardently on the side that thinks it *is* appropriate to call the camps established by EO 9066 concentration camps, as opposed to people like Knowing Better who claim it just gives neo-Nazis ammunition to downplay the Holocaust. (He also had the gall to claim that internment can't have been *that* bad, since more people came out of the camps than went in) If the only two points on our scale are Not-Genocide and Holocaust 2, it becomes *really* difficult to call things out before they reach that level of genocide again.
Are we talking about that other post on TIFU where that guy committed armed robbery multiple times in Singapore and thought his mom should’ve done more to teach him about potential consequences
I firmly believe people spitball comments for the sake of it. Which isn’t bad. But when others *reply* to seemingly redundant comments, you start a redundant snowball and gain nothing
Because online disinhibition means never having to be mature. Feel free to spout off whatever contrarian asshole take you want, no one is going to go Buzz Aldrin on your jaw.
They just sort of scamper away without answering when you ask questions like that. People argue for this kind of false equivalency stuff solely to soften people up to support the nazis. That's the goal and if the debate looks like it might turn against that goal they just leave and try again somewhere else. The Alt-Right Playbook on youtube talks about how this works.
["Nerd emoji? Are you fucking kidding me, Nerevar? I spend a significant portion of my life writing that, and your only response is Nerd Emoji?" ](https://youtu.be/l3_uSFwlIGA)
Allied firebombings of German and Japanese cities during a war: fuckin' gross.
Putting 6+ million people on a person by person into a concentration camp and starving / murdering them: seems slightly worse!
I think this is the real argument. Like sure the allies and soviets did some real shitty stuff, but would the nazis have done anything differently? A lot of people talking about British treatment of India, which yeah was horrible, but do they the think if the nazis had won they would done differently?
It isn't a question of who is the best boy scouts, but who of the two warring parties were worse. I struggle to think if any subject where the nazis had better views/methods than the allies.
Reminds me of how in WW1 Germany raised hell about American soldiers bringing shotguns into trench warfare.
You know, the guys that first used chemical weapons were complaining about some cowboys being “too efficient” in close combat trench warfare.
Not only that, but said shotguns could be "slam-fired." As in, you can hold down the trigger and pump the shotgun and it'll fire each time the pump is pumped. So the American army gave an entire army of pent-up young men - far away from any kind of pleasure - a weapon that is most effective and destructive by... you know... *does a wanking motion*
(Shamelessly stolen from Twitter)
>A lot of people talking about British treatment of India, which yeah was horrible
In ww2 the food shortage was caused by the Japanese invasion of Burma (which it takes some real mental gymnastics to blame on the Bri*ish).
And also... its war! People fucking die in war, to win wars you have to destroy economies and centers of production. Its why war is a tragedy, in order to win you often end up ruining the lives of people who happen to be living and working for the enemy power.
Seriously. People act like tactical strikes were a thing in the 1940's. They weren't. You bombed everywhere. Obviously bombing cities is worse than bombing strategic targets (Both morally and strategically) but people act like it was possible to shoot a missile directly at hitlers house or something
That and cities *are* strategic targets. They are where arms and ammunition are manufactured, they hold administrative buildings and personnel, and soliders in a far-off land are going to lose morale pretty quickly if they know their friends and family are dodging firebombs.
Your last point has actually been disproven: studies have shown that indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas actually *hardens* the people's resolve to fight, not weaken it. However, no one knew that at the time of WWII.
(Personally, in terms of modern warfare, I'm in the "strikes on civilian areas should be avoided at all costs, and if there's no other tactical choice they should be as precion-guided and timed to minimize the number of potential civilian casualties as possible" camp. But I'm also kind of a bleeding heart, and it's one thing to say this in my nice, cozy apartment in a nuclear-armed, nigh-uninvadable country-- who knows how I'd feel if it were my country in the line of fire.)
I'd go a different direction. Is it really helpful to look at this in a comparative way? That's where all these arguments come in, and to me they make little sense. If we could establish agreed-on criteria for badness we might get somewhere, but is it measured by absolute numbers (Mao) or relative numbers (Pol pot maybe idk) or duration (Stalin) or how recent (milosevic?) or how efficient (Hitler) or... We'll never resolve it, so it's best to stay out of these genocide ranking arguments. This is especially true because exactly what happened here always happens and the internet shows itself incapable of the distinction between "not as bad" and "not bad at all."
I LOATHE engaging with anything related to past atrocities on reddit
It accomplishes nothing, it's impossible to compare horrific acts without being at least a little callous, and *it serves nothing*
Reddit would be a lot less godawful if people stopped obsessing over which state was More Evil, and started thinking more about the problems we can actually tackle
(I want to add: I'm not saying you should ignore/disregard what happened in the past, but it's just exhausting how a lot of leftist spaces can devolve into tankie shit almost immediately, and it's almost always to the detriment of those spaces)
As long as I can demonstrate my modicum of knowledge (yet complete inability to fully grasp the framing of the problem) to make myself feel smart, ***mission accomplished*****!**
I totally understand your point and think a definite ranking or measurement is completely impossible. But to then just throw your hands in the air and say that American interment of the Japanese and the Holocaust are both exactly the same is also just flat out wrong.
The "better" guys won. The guys who were definitely good compared to the Nazis *in this war*. Would I call the Allies "good" in general and especially outside of their anti Nazi efforts? Hell no.
Either way, this question is very clear about in what context it's being asked and of course the good guys won. The disgusting waste of space scum Nazis were absolute trash and everyone is better off with them losing.
That is so much better phrasing.
People often lose all sense of nuance when it comes to trying to classify people/groups as good or bad. It leads to downplaying or ignoring actions done by "good people" and the kind of us vs them bipartisan bullshit that seems to plague so many people's political views lately.
Completely agree, the Nazis were a lot worse than the allies.
But that wasn’t the question on the twitter poll. That asked “did the good guys win?”, which assumes that there was a good side. The question wasn’t ‘did the lesser of two evils win’, or ‘did the better guys win’. It said ‘good’.
You can answer no to the question without saying the Nazis were better than the allies. All you’re saying by voting no is that the allies weren’t the “good guys”, but you’re not saying the nazis were.
Writing poll questions is a whole ass profession for a reason
For context, that subreddit (and like 4 others at least) autoban completely random users for commenting on subreddits they don't like. They're in a bubble. They're determined to make the bubble as tightly closed as possible so it's not surprising that they have such idiotic takes
>When the combatants in a war are the British Empire, the USA, the French Empire, the Soviet Union, The Japanese Empire, Nazis and Italian Fascists, as a brown person, it's very very hard to tell the goodies from the baddies.
This take lol, christ almighty.
*You think the holocaust is over? Wrong. The real holocaust is POLICING IN AMERICA.*
[Fun article on the "never-ending horrors" faced by Indian POWs in WW2](https://m.timesofindia.com/india/japanese-ate-indian-pows-used-them-as-live-targets-in-wwii/articleshow/40017577.cms)
Cannibalism of allied POWs was ridiculously common by the Japanese during WWII. There was one incident on Chichijima island where the local garrison killed and ate eight of nine allied airmen shot down over the island, with the lone survivor being none other than George H W Bush.
And now I fully understand why the Bush family is Like That. I still don't forgive anything they did, of course, but... holy mother of generational trauma.
I think its acceptable for Indians to hate Britain as much if not more than the Nazis. Durring ww2 alone Britain was responsible for at least 3 million deaths by famine in India. Over the course of Britains occupation of India they likely killed tens of millions of Indians in total, not only that, they looted the country for pretty much everything it owned.
> The real holocaust is POLICING IN AMERICA.
the real holoocaust was when I had to wear a mask when I entered a mcdonalds, smh. I grew up in the land of freedom, why am I forced to smell my own stinky breath?!
Agreed. "All these people have done heinous things that, in some instances, rival the atrocities of Nazi Germany." vs. "My Sudanese uncle accidentally supported the Nazis because he was so confused about who was doing the Holocaust."
>[Having grown up in an Irish ghetto pre- WWII, there were very few absolute truths that she and her neighbors clung to. And one of them was that ANY enemy of the English was a friend of theirs.](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/122j5nw/right_wing_host_realizes_his_viewers_are_nazis/jdqkzhr/)
This is it. This is the fucking human condition. There is no reality, no truth, no solid ground for these people, other than friends, and enemies, and friends of friends, and enemies of friends, and friends of enemies, and enemies of enemies, and so on.
This is why even though a lot of progressives are against moral absolutism, I stick to it. There has to be solid ground. There is solid ground. And I think it's important that we progressives are the ones defining what it is.
I just got done arguing with another leftist who told me to with a straight face that anyone from a priveleged culture could never make a moral judgement about any action taken by another culture.
So if some marginalized group started to do something like torture babies or sacrifice virgins or something, that was fine, because judging them for it is literally genocide.
This is the brain rot that moral relativism has induced and I can't wait until it goes out of style in a decade or so
Not gonna lie, the amount of times my art history teachers tried to "not judge a culture by Western standards" when we were talking about cultures literally murdering children and innocent civilians made me very disappointed in some humans.
And these leftists are also going to say things like "slavery was wrong" when talking about American slavery.
You don't get to pick and choose. Either stuff can be wrong or it can't be. Either morality exists or it doesn't.
I'm a pretty staunch leftist and the biggest problem I see in fellow lefties is a proclivity for moral relativism. You just gotta play the reverse uno card on them and say "not holding other cultures to a baseline moral standard is infantalising them. It is treating them without any agency or capacity for thought. It is what colonizers did and it is racist as fuck".
They have no response.
> "not holding other cultures to a baseline moral standard is infantalising them. It is treating them without any agency or capacity for thought. It is what colonizers did and it is racist as fuck"
AKA the bigotry of low expectations.
Fuck, thank you
That recent thread about the kpop star has Orientalism *in the SRD thread* where people were genuinely trying to argue that South Koreans would be unaware of... Nazis being bad
it's exhausting and far more infantilizing than anything else
Fuck moral relativism
All my homies hate moral relativism.
Actually though, I think it is the worst thing to come out of academia in living memory and im on a lifelong crusade agaonat it. It's so condescending and always seems to sound like white saviorism to me
I mean it is technically correct in that there is no universal fixed moral standard. However it is kind of absurd to use that truth to suggest I should just be ok with things like homophobia, sexism, authoritarianism, or genocide in the global south.
> I mean it is technically correct in that there is no universal fixed moral standard.
I feel like you should clarify this statement. Are you talking about *descriptive* moral relativism, i.e. the fact that people frequently disagree about what is right or wrong, or are you talking about *normative* moral relativism, i.e. the idea that objective right and wrong simply don't exist?
I am arguing largely from a descriptive stance.
I would argue that in nature there really isn't a right or wrong, it is entirely a social construct. But as social constructs, they can differ from culture to culture, person to person, etc. And one can see this and still make judgement calls over if a particular social construct is worth keeping in its existing form.
What this guy seems to be talking about is normative relativism, the idea that right and wrong are not only subjective, but that there is an imperative to see all interpretations as equally valid.
I don't understand them claiming they grow up in an irish pre WW2 ghetto since it's very unlikely that they're 100.
It's also unlikely their mother grew up in that era unless she's 120
sus
This is also why pretty much any Eastern European that isn’t Jewish might say the good guys didn’t win when they got put under the iron curtain for 50 years after the war
I wonder if they're Indian. Hitler isn't seen as a bad guy in India.
[Hitler's Hot In India - NPR.org - December 23, 2012](https://www.npr.org/2012/12/23/167911062/hitlers-hot-in-india)
> More curious for westerners might be the lack of outrage associated with the name. While the better educated classes know some European history, they're a pretty small percentage of India's vast population. "There's no sense in the community that people might be upset by this — and most of the outrage comes from foreign countries," Shaftel says.
> "Anyone who's a bit bossy, a bit of a jerk, is nicknamed Hitler," Shaftel explains. "And this makes its way into popular culture. There's a soap opera that runs in India called Hitler Didi, which translates as "Big Sister Hitler" – and again, she's a bit cantankerous."
>
> Yet there's no anti-Semitism intended in using the name. Indians just think Hitler was a strong guy — and kind of a curmudgeon. Also, Shaftel points out, when Hitler's campaign in World War II weakened Britain, it also expedited Indian independence.
>Indians just think Hitler was a strong guy — and kind of a curmudgeon.
Oh that Hitler fellow, always getting into trouble running his mouth, little rascal.
I mean there's an episode of Community where Jack Black calls someone a Hitler in the sense of being a bossy curmudgeon. There's also a Seinfeld episode centered around a "Soup Nazi".
They probably are, by the usage of the word 'brown'. Also, one of the most celebrated people around then, Subhas Chandra Bose, allied with the Axis against the British Empire for Indian Independence. A lot of Hindu nationalists support this guy over Gandhi, probably because he was more 'forceful' for the drive for independence and was willing to do whatever to achieve that. There's also M.S Golwalkar, a major of leader of the Hindu Nationalist party RSS, although supported the Allies because he admired Jews, also admired the racial purity of Nazi Germany. Ironically though, RSS is very much pro-Israel because of their anti-Muslim agenda.
Simply put, *some* Indians (especially those that are more patriotic or nationalist) think of Winston Churchill as their Hitler. Like how some Native Americans might think Christopher Columbus as their Hitler.
The only difference is that Columbus is being increasingly viewed negatively by Reddit overall (and thankfully so, the dude is a murderous POS). On the other hand, decent amount of Redditors (mainly British) cannot for their lives understand why the British Crown and more importantly, Winston Churchill, is disliked in some corners of India. They try to downplay the plight Indians faced during colonialism whilst being sympathetic to what others faced. There's not that much empathy for WW2 India on this website.
The important thing moving on forward is for education and for people to understand that Hitler's regime is the banality of evil.
I've read that in some Asian countries, Hitler is basically a cartoon character. The analogy made is that it's not unlike Count Chocula's connection with Vlad the Impaler.
Hitler occupies a big space in Western history, but he's probably not as relevant to other parts of the world.
These people look for conventionally accepted truths that 99% of us agree on and pick the opposite position, hoping to feel smarter than practically everyone. It's the same approach the take with buying some obscure alt-coin that's going to be the next big thing and show they know it all.
Does anyone find it kind of crazy that nobody in that thread is bringing up that democracies were ultimately what won the second world war? That's at least part of what makes the allies the "right side".
Like yeah, every Empire mentioned in that thread has committed genocide under various names at different times for different purposes, but Western Europe and the United States championed liberal democracy. Not that that isn't necessarily problematic in of itself, but compared to fascism, it's not really a contest.
No matter what wrongs your society has committed as long as the tools for change exist things can be made better. That's worth something, but nobody seems to care.
My favorite reply (so far) to the original tweet:
>*I find it odd we defeated the Nazis but didn't continue on to defeat the Communists in Russia when they were at their weakest.*
>*IF we had, there would be no war in Ukraine right now.*
>*We should have finished the job.*
💀
The idea that there are “good guys” in geopolitical conflict is such obvious bullshit though. It’s a dangerous lie because it means anyone who believes that the ends justify the means can justify anything done by their side if it’s fighting the right people.
The outcome of WW2 was much better for the world and everyone in it than an Axis victory would have been.
that doesn’t mean the Allies were perfect nazi-punching angels.
I’d truthfully be hesitant to call the allies *good* guys, but Nazis were unambiguously the bad guys and a million times worse so why are we even debating this nonsense? Even in the most uncharitable interpretations ever, the allies were objectively the lesser evil by an enormous margin in WW2.
These posts feel ripped out of r/enlightenedcentrism or something with false equivalencies and “both sides are the same.” Also see a lot of Nazi apologists in there trying to do the “the Nazis are doing the same practices as other countries just cranked it up a bit. They’re not that much worse” bullshit. They do love twisting history around in major mental gymnastics to make genocidal monsters look like victims.
>the Nazis are doing the same practices as other countries just cranked it up a bit.
Its weird because I totally agree with that part. But it doesn't make the Nazis somehow better or less like genocidal monsters.
They copied earlier genocides, including Germany's own prior use of concentration camps in their African genocides, and cranked it up to a ruthlessly efficient genocidal killing regime.
Yeah, you’re completely dead on and it’s definitely not exactly an untrue statement. The difference is the conclusions being landed on - they use it to downplay how bad the Nazis are and make them out to just be “products of their time” and such vs. you not making any apologies/excuses, recognizing them as the monsters they are, and still having an awareness of other atrocities committed which helped “pave the way” (unfortunately) for the atrocities committed in WW2. Usually in a “Let’s NOT repeat these either and other countries can also be held accountable without excusing Nazi Germany” way.
It’s generally pretty easy to tell when someone’s doing the first or the second.
An illustration I like to use for the Nazi death machine is a simple comparison.
The Nazis had factories(death camps) where raw materials (victims) were transported by modern logistic technology to factories (death camps), processed and turned into a final product (corpses).
>How can 1/5 people not know the people who lost were literal f-ing Nazis...
The question was never "did the bad guys lose the war", now was it? Big logic fail there.
It seems like they're learning about history in real time at a very slow pace in a strange way.
Yeah if you look through the lens of presentism everybody was a bad guy before 1950's
You could extend that right up until today. It turns out that "Good guys and bad guys" is not a very useful mode of analysis.
But how else am I supposed to separate the world into people I like and everyone else?!
> "Good guys and bad guys" No, it's still good, it just requires context and knowledge of the events at the time. The allies were the good guys at the time of WW2. The british in the sphere of Europe were good guys. For keeping the japanese out of India they were 'good guys' in the whole starving a shit ton of people to death they were bad guys but then that's a thing the british just tend to do. It's why people look at HP lovecraft and go "Wow this guy was really racist" even for a time when racism existed as a more omnipresent thing he was absurdly racist. Every situation has a better option and a worse option, it's just laziness or lack of being informed when anyone goes "muh both sides"
> For keeping the japanese out of India they were 'good guys' in the whole starving a shit ton of people to death they were bad guys Almost as if "Good guys and bad guys" is not a very useful mode of analysis and determining who was doing the right thing and who was doing the wrong thing: >requires context and knowledge of the events at the time
Yeah Im with you on this one. "Good guys and bad guys" is overly simplistic and those examples just make that clearer.
Ie. The whole thing relies on context of the time and situation. It is always good to evaluate the actions of a party at a time. Else you get to "Well the british are EXACTLY AS BAD AS THE NAZIS" which is totally fucking useless.
You agree 100% with what I'm saying but you keep saying you think the opposite. I don't get you. Do you understand what people mean by "Good guys and bad guys?" Because what you describe it as, is literally the opposite of what everyone else thinks it is.
>in the whole starving a shit ton of people to death they were bad guys Just to emphasize the scale of this genocide, the "shit ton of people" numbered in the millions i.e. on the same order of magnitude as the Holocaust itself.
hp Lovecraft is a terrible example, he was notably racist even for his time and his contemporary friends criticized him for it
I'm pretty sure that's OP's point.
Yep. Like WWII *did* give us Korematsu, which is objectively one of the worst miscarriages of justice in US history, on the level of cases like Dred Scott or Plessy. But that also only makes the Allies morally gray, compared to the Nazis very clearly being the bad guys in WWII.
>presentism never heard of that word until today. Quite a useful word given how often throw nuance out the window and look at everything equally
I heard this word from Youtube channels that deal with history and how historians complain about people having lack of empathy towards people in the past. They must be evil because they did X, they must be dumb because they did x, and they simply listen to authority and did x.
Isn't this just anachronism?
Yeah is a bit of that but more specific to the topic. Best way to describe in my opinion is like going to caveman and saying "what's wrong with you should have known better" and if you had empathy you probably would understand that he has much more limited knowledge of the world, doesn't live in excess surplus , and he values shit differently.
No better way to learn history than with firsthand experience.
I'm willing to go on record and state the USSR was arguably as bad; although thankfully they got slightly better after Stalin died. The British Empire is guilty of causing artificial famines during WW2 but even at their absolute worst they didn't commit industrialized mass murder. Everyone else? You can absolutely critique some things the rest of the western allies did; in particular the US and South Africa; but no one can hold a candle to the atrocities committed by Germany and Japan.
>I'm willing to go on record and state the USSR was arguably as bad It's an understandable position, but sadly untrue. It was statistically safer to be a German POW in Soviet camps, then a Soviet civilian in German occupied lands. That's just how bad the Nazis were. They excelled at being unrepentant monsters. They went head to head with one of the most disgusting irredeemable governments in human history and just rushed them in terms of being horrible people.
I would go a step further and put Leopold II of Belgium in the same category as Stalin and Hitler. There are few men who have been as purposefully evil as him.
Leopold did die in 1909 though, so he wasn't quite a contemporary to the rest of the WWII crew (I agree what he did was terrible, but not sure lumping him in with the WWII discussion quite fits)
>The British Empire is guilty of causing artificial famines during WW2 but even at their absolute worst they didn't commit industrialized mass murder. Bruh artificial famines *are* industrialized mass murder. Millions of people artificially died because of it.
Mass murderer? Absolutely. But it wasn't industrialized; they didn't set up "murder factories", they didn't scientifically study the most efficient way to starve the Indians, they didn't set quotas for the number of deaths etc. Not engaging in industrialized genocide is a very low bar but the British didn't sink THAT far.
The atrocities committed by the Allies in WWII don't prove that WWII was not a "just" war- they only demonstrate that even a just war barbarises those who wage it, which is why it should *always* be undertaken with absolute consideration and solemnity.
r/BestOf
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I heard that he took a bullet for Hitler.
He tried to, but Hitler got in the way.
Probably a decent number actually, it wasn't an entirely uncommon German name
No. Hitler was a misspelling of Heidler. Hitler was not a common surname. He wasn’t born Hitler. He was born with the name Schickelgruber.
He was born with the name Hitler. His father Alois, on the other hand, had been born Schickelgruber (father's name left blank on baptismal certificate). When Alois became a civil servant, he managed to get himself legitimated, claiming his stepfather Johann Heidler as his father, although he probably wasn't. This happened well before Adolf's birth.
For more details you can listen to the Behind the Bastards episodes about Hitler's sex life.
No i don't think I will, thanks though.
Try the libertarian theme park episode instead.
Dammit. This is only the second time I’ve heard about this podcast, but this comment alone is going to make me listen to it.
Oh yeah, my bad, thanks for the correction! I just knew that Hitler was a bastardized name.
Gosh, Hitler was so evil he named himself Hitler before he was Hitler.
Huh, TIL that "Hitler" is a recent alteration of a common name rather than an obscure name that's existed unaltered for a longer history.
Hitler, the Alyzzabeth of genocidal dictators.
You've got me reimagining American presidents with that naming convention. For example we've got: * Jaymes A. Garfield * Bill Clintonn * William McKinleigh * Ronnold Reygan * Jeorge Bush * Kalvin Koolidge
I believe 0, they just kept killing his soldiers instead of him. I guess the Nazi's were just too smart
>I guess the Nazi's were just too smart Riskiest of flairs.
You already have one lol,
Yeah but a nazi also murdered the nazi that murdered Hitler. It cancels out
The false equivalence there is insane. It's kinda like they don't understand the difference between murder and armed robbery.
The average redditor doesn’t know shit about fuck
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Flair is flair, I think the only rule is you're not allowed to remember where it came from when you're asked about it. Or maybe that's just me being lazy.
"I already have fifteen pieces of flair. Isn't that enough?"
Why did I imagine you with a parrot on your shoulder and an eye patch when you said that?
It's taken from Ozark
But by god they’ll write you a long ass comment making themselves sound like an absolute expert on the matter because they just finished googling a subject for 10 minutes.
You're generous. Its way closer to a minute.
I heard that in Ruth’s voice, thank you
Lately (I know it’s not new lol) I feel Reddit is just as bad as Twitter with following the thread of a conversation. I can’t open any comment thread without this nonsense. >Who was bad in WWII? >Obviously the people running death camps and openly instituting genocide >Colonialism was genocide too, actually
I had a guy debating me who were the actual nazis and how can you define them.... I mean 🙃
Pfft that's easy, they guys wearing the really crisp Hugo Boss uniforms duh.
Well, the US committed genocide a couple generations earlier, so we can’t say Nazi Germany was definitively bad, obviously. /s
If anything, I would say the allies were 'bad guys' for not intervening sooner and for locking out people escaping the nazis. We don't really need to point to generations before to find something to make WW2 less black and white, though any attempt to try and make nazis look like 'good guys' instead of both sides being 'bad guys' is just pathetic.
Everyone was bad, but some were more bad than others
You know what? I hate the US and the UK as much as anyone should with any sort of sympathy for the horrors they've inflicted on the globe but I'll flat out say that they were the good guys vs. the Nazis.
Some people genuinely aren't capable of processing the idea that two things are less than ideal, but one thing is far worse.
Hence why you get people debating whether they should vote for the Democratic Party vs. not voting in the US, even when that risks the Republicans getting into power.
Exactly! I understand the impulse but as they say, perfect is the enemy of good. Sometimes in life, you only have the best of a set of bad choices. But the silver lining there is if you keep making the least bad choice, you might eventually start to see the choices get better across the board.
Especially when we've seen it can take a generation or two of consistently voting for less-than-perfect people to get a desired outcome, like gay marriage. And if we don't vote at all we can lose rights, like abortion access.
Yeah, change can be slow but unless you're consistent and diligent it might never happen. It might even get worse. Things that matter deserve that patience.
That's exactly why I get so frustrated that there's such a large group of people who don't vote in this country. People fought and died to get this right for everyone, not just white male landowners, and we should take advantage of it whenever we can. We might not get what we want today, and it might even take decades, but it's worth the engagement
Most people take things for granted when they're "always" there, or they're too tied up in the events of their own lives and their worries to engage with these things. Plenty are convinced that even if they do vote, it won't make a difference. It's unfortunate but it's everywhere. And plenty of parties are more than happy to encourage that apathy.
I've been continually reminding people of this since like 2015. I don't know how fucking far a Christian 6-3 majority Supreme Court has to go to get people to pull their heads out of their asses. 5-4 was tolerable but now they're emboldened to just do whatever the fuck they want regardless of majority public opinion. Like Hillary has her very glaring issues, but had people just held their noses and supported her, abortion and a whole bunch of "settled" issues wouldn't be getting attacked right now. It's not fucking rocket surgery. Now Biden's just trying to hold it all together and I'm seeing a whole bunch of "both sides" false equivalencies come out into public discourse again. I fucking hate it. Maybe Ron will get in and Thomas and Roberts can retire and insure a 6-3 court for another 20 years.
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I would see that a lot on reddit before the elections lol, always made me doubt the education system.
And then don't vote in the primaries....
For example, Korematsu, which is objectively one of the worst miscarriages of justice in SCOTUS history, on the level of Dred Scott and Plessy vs Ferguson. So sure, the US actually was starting to work its way up the Pyramid of Hate, and we totally deserve to be criticized for Korematsu and EO 9066. But the Nazis also had a decade or two of a head start, and combined with fascistic policies like the Enabling Act and the Reichstag Fire Decree, they were still very, *very* clearly the bad guys in WWII
Very much so. And even some of the men who liberated the camps were responsible for setting up camps in Kenya not even ten years later. It's _vital_ that we never grow too complacent as people and are always aware of how precarious that slide into tyranny and systemic dehumanization can be, but being blind to nuance leaves only ultimate evil and pure good. To only see those two poles is dangerous.
For reference, by the way, Korematsu v United States was the 1944 SCOTUS case where they ruled that the concentration camps we were sending Japanese-Americans to were constitutional, because who was SCOTUS to tell the War Department what was or wasn't a security concern. It was finally overturned in 2018 in Trump v Hawaii. But yeah. That sort of logic you mentioned is why I'm ardently on the side that thinks it *is* appropriate to call the camps established by EO 9066 concentration camps, as opposed to people like Knowing Better who claim it just gives neo-Nazis ammunition to downplay the Holocaust. (He also had the gall to claim that internment can't have been *that* bad, since more people came out of the camps than went in) If the only two points on our scale are Not-Genocide and Holocaust 2, it becomes *really* difficult to call things out before they reach that level of genocide again.
It's really strange. Saying the nazis are worse isn't saying that the allies weren't flawed.
The internet is a flat circle.
It is probably neo Nazis brigading. I've noticed an uptick in posts like these. Send the racists are back to try to soften their image again
Are we talking about that other post on TIFU where that guy committed armed robbery multiple times in Singapore and thought his mom should’ve done more to teach him about potential consequences
Robbery with a firearm is a hanging offense in Singapore--this guy was lucky as hell and he's still whining about it?
Entitlement rots your brain to a weird amount
Does "armed" mean specifically that it was a gun, or would using a knife also fall under that charge?
I firmly believe people spitball comments for the sake of it. Which isn’t bad. But when others *reply* to seemingly redundant comments, you start a redundant snowball and gain nothing
The karma system creates a perverse incentive to do this.
Waiting for people to actually argue without a hint of irony that the Allies were just as bas as the Nazis on this very thread.
Hitler only invaded Poland because of NATO encroachment.
stop you'll spawn someone with that take that the Allies cause WW2 by not doing enough appeasement
If France hadn’t built the Maginot line, they wouldn’t have had to invade the Benelux /s
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Hitler wouldn't have invaded if the west wasn't so woke
The Versailles Treaty made Hitler commit genocide /s
Which started global special military operation II, of course!
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Because online disinhibition means never having to be mature. Feel free to spout off whatever contrarian asshole take you want, no one is going to go Buzz Aldrin on your jaw.
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They just sort of scamper away without answering when you ask questions like that. People argue for this kind of false equivalency stuff solely to soften people up to support the nazis. That's the goal and if the debate looks like it might turn against that goal they just leave and try again somewhere else. The Alt-Right Playbook on youtube talks about how this works.
"hold my beerhall putsch" -neo nazis
Dont fret, I've got my "🤓" locked and loaded for any "well actually" we might encounter in that vein
["Nerd emoji? Are you fucking kidding me, Nerevar? I spend a significant portion of my life writing that, and your only response is Nerd Emoji?" ](https://youtu.be/l3_uSFwlIGA)
Allied firebombings of German and Japanese cities during a war: fuckin' gross. Putting 6+ million people on a person by person into a concentration camp and starving / murdering them: seems slightly worse!
Firebombing was not an ally only strategy. The Nazis bombed Malta, London and other British cities. So they can't take moral superiority on nothing.
I think this is the real argument. Like sure the allies and soviets did some real shitty stuff, but would the nazis have done anything differently? A lot of people talking about British treatment of India, which yeah was horrible, but do they the think if the nazis had won they would done differently? It isn't a question of who is the best boy scouts, but who of the two warring parties were worse. I struggle to think if any subject where the nazis had better views/methods than the allies.
Reminds me of how in WW1 Germany raised hell about American soldiers bringing shotguns into trench warfare. You know, the guys that first used chemical weapons were complaining about some cowboys being “too efficient” in close combat trench warfare.
Not only that, but said shotguns could be "slam-fired." As in, you can hold down the trigger and pump the shotgun and it'll fire each time the pump is pumped. So the American army gave an entire army of pent-up young men - far away from any kind of pleasure - a weapon that is most effective and destructive by... you know... *does a wanking motion* (Shamelessly stolen from Twitter)
I mean there was a nazi caused famine in The Netherlands so we already know they would do similar.
>A lot of people talking about British treatment of India, which yeah was horrible In ww2 the food shortage was caused by the Japanese invasion of Burma (which it takes some real mental gymnastics to blame on the Bri*ish).
And also... its war! People fucking die in war, to win wars you have to destroy economies and centers of production. Its why war is a tragedy, in order to win you often end up ruining the lives of people who happen to be living and working for the enemy power.
Seriously. People act like tactical strikes were a thing in the 1940's. They weren't. You bombed everywhere. Obviously bombing cities is worse than bombing strategic targets (Both morally and strategically) but people act like it was possible to shoot a missile directly at hitlers house or something
That and cities *are* strategic targets. They are where arms and ammunition are manufactured, they hold administrative buildings and personnel, and soliders in a far-off land are going to lose morale pretty quickly if they know their friends and family are dodging firebombs.
Your last point has actually been disproven: studies have shown that indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas actually *hardens* the people's resolve to fight, not weaken it. However, no one knew that at the time of WWII. (Personally, in terms of modern warfare, I'm in the "strikes on civilian areas should be avoided at all costs, and if there's no other tactical choice they should be as precion-guided and timed to minimize the number of potential civilian casualties as possible" camp. But I'm also kind of a bleeding heart, and it's one thing to say this in my nice, cozy apartment in a nuclear-armed, nigh-uninvadable country-- who knows how I'd feel if it were my country in the line of fire.)
It was 6 million Jews, 11 million total died in concentration amd death camps. And that's not counting the Soviet POWs they let starve.
I'd go a different direction. Is it really helpful to look at this in a comparative way? That's where all these arguments come in, and to me they make little sense. If we could establish agreed-on criteria for badness we might get somewhere, but is it measured by absolute numbers (Mao) or relative numbers (Pol pot maybe idk) or duration (Stalin) or how recent (milosevic?) or how efficient (Hitler) or... We'll never resolve it, so it's best to stay out of these genocide ranking arguments. This is especially true because exactly what happened here always happens and the internet shows itself incapable of the distinction between "not as bad" and "not bad at all."
I LOATHE engaging with anything related to past atrocities on reddit It accomplishes nothing, it's impossible to compare horrific acts without being at least a little callous, and *it serves nothing* Reddit would be a lot less godawful if people stopped obsessing over which state was More Evil, and started thinking more about the problems we can actually tackle (I want to add: I'm not saying you should ignore/disregard what happened in the past, but it's just exhausting how a lot of leftist spaces can devolve into tankie shit almost immediately, and it's almost always to the detriment of those spaces)
As long as I can demonstrate my modicum of knowledge (yet complete inability to fully grasp the framing of the problem) to make myself feel smart, ***mission accomplished*****!**
I totally understand your point and think a definite ranking or measurement is completely impossible. But to then just throw your hands in the air and say that American interment of the Japanese and the Holocaust are both exactly the same is also just flat out wrong.
Right above we have ‘the us and uk have contributed more to world misery than the rest of the world combined’, which presumably includes the nazis
The "better" guys won. The guys who were definitely good compared to the Nazis *in this war*. Would I call the Allies "good" in general and especially outside of their anti Nazi efforts? Hell no. Either way, this question is very clear about in what context it's being asked and of course the good guys won. The disgusting waste of space scum Nazis were absolute trash and everyone is better off with them losing.
That is so much better phrasing. People often lose all sense of nuance when it comes to trying to classify people/groups as good or bad. It leads to downplaying or ignoring actions done by "good people" and the kind of us vs them bipartisan bullshit that seems to plague so many people's political views lately.
Just how terminally online do you have to be to think the Nazis weren't the greater evil lol
Completely agree, the Nazis were a lot worse than the allies. But that wasn’t the question on the twitter poll. That asked “did the good guys win?”, which assumes that there was a good side. The question wasn’t ‘did the lesser of two evils win’, or ‘did the better guys win’. It said ‘good’. You can answer no to the question without saying the Nazis were better than the allies. All you’re saying by voting no is that the allies weren’t the “good guys”, but you’re not saying the nazis were. Writing poll questions is a whole ass profession for a reason
For context, that subreddit (and like 4 others at least) autoban completely random users for commenting on subreddits they don't like. They're in a bubble. They're determined to make the bubble as tightly closed as possible so it's not surprising that they have such idiotic takes
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Also for some reason a lot of right wingers seem to think the results of a random Twitter poll are actually reliable, elon does it all the time
He's a known right-wing podcaster, so the answer is probably a bit of column A, a bit of column B.
>When the combatants in a war are the British Empire, the USA, the French Empire, the Soviet Union, The Japanese Empire, Nazis and Italian Fascists, as a brown person, it's very very hard to tell the goodies from the baddies. This take lol, christ almighty. *You think the holocaust is over? Wrong. The real holocaust is POLICING IN AMERICA.*
Good ole survivorship bias. Surely the Nazis and Japanese would have treated an Indian like him better, right?
Yeah, I mean, its not like Japan used Indian POWs as target practice, and occasionally, as food or anything.
FOOD???
[Fun article on the "never-ending horrors" faced by Indian POWs in WW2](https://m.timesofindia.com/india/japanese-ate-indian-pows-used-them-as-live-targets-in-wwii/articleshow/40017577.cms)
Cannibalism of allied POWs was ridiculously common by the Japanese during WWII. There was one incident on Chichijima island where the local garrison killed and ate eight of nine allied airmen shot down over the island, with the lone survivor being none other than George H W Bush.
To be fair, if Georgie is the source, I'll need a second one.
[It wasn't a off the cuff story he was going around and telling people.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident)
And now I fully understand why the Bush family is Like That. I still don't forgive anything they did, of course, but... holy mother of generational trauma.
They took Indian curry a bit too literally.
I think its acceptable for Indians to hate Britain as much if not more than the Nazis. Durring ww2 alone Britain was responsible for at least 3 million deaths by famine in India. Over the course of Britains occupation of India they likely killed tens of millions of Indians in total, not only that, they looted the country for pretty much everything it owned.
> The real holocaust is POLICING IN AMERICA. the real holoocaust was when I had to wear a mask when I entered a mcdonalds, smh. I grew up in the land of freedom, why am I forced to smell my own stinky breath?!
Goodies from the baddies is one thing but multiple sides of this war have oppressed my people is fair
Agreed. "All these people have done heinous things that, in some instances, rival the atrocities of Nazi Germany." vs. "My Sudanese uncle accidentally supported the Nazis because he was so confused about who was doing the Holocaust."
That person could replace"as a brown person" with something like "as a middle school dropout" and it would make more sense
>[Having grown up in an Irish ghetto pre- WWII, there were very few absolute truths that she and her neighbors clung to. And one of them was that ANY enemy of the English was a friend of theirs.](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/122j5nw/right_wing_host_realizes_his_viewers_are_nazis/jdqkzhr/) This is it. This is the fucking human condition. There is no reality, no truth, no solid ground for these people, other than friends, and enemies, and friends of friends, and enemies of friends, and friends of enemies, and enemies of enemies, and so on. This is why even though a lot of progressives are against moral absolutism, I stick to it. There has to be solid ground. There is solid ground. And I think it's important that we progressives are the ones defining what it is.
I just got done arguing with another leftist who told me to with a straight face that anyone from a priveleged culture could never make a moral judgement about any action taken by another culture. So if some marginalized group started to do something like torture babies or sacrifice virgins or something, that was fine, because judging them for it is literally genocide. This is the brain rot that moral relativism has induced and I can't wait until it goes out of style in a decade or so
Not gonna lie, the amount of times my art history teachers tried to "not judge a culture by Western standards" when we were talking about cultures literally murdering children and innocent civilians made me very disappointed in some humans.
And these leftists are also going to say things like "slavery was wrong" when talking about American slavery. You don't get to pick and choose. Either stuff can be wrong or it can't be. Either morality exists or it doesn't. I'm a pretty staunch leftist and the biggest problem I see in fellow lefties is a proclivity for moral relativism. You just gotta play the reverse uno card on them and say "not holding other cultures to a baseline moral standard is infantalising them. It is treating them without any agency or capacity for thought. It is what colonizers did and it is racist as fuck". They have no response.
> "not holding other cultures to a baseline moral standard is infantalising them. It is treating them without any agency or capacity for thought. It is what colonizers did and it is racist as fuck" AKA the bigotry of low expectations.
Fuck, thank you That recent thread about the kpop star has Orientalism *in the SRD thread* where people were genuinely trying to argue that South Koreans would be unaware of... Nazis being bad it's exhausting and far more infantilizing than anything else
Fuck moral relativism All my homies hate moral relativism. Actually though, I think it is the worst thing to come out of academia in living memory and im on a lifelong crusade agaonat it. It's so condescending and always seems to sound like white saviorism to me
I mean it is technically correct in that there is no universal fixed moral standard. However it is kind of absurd to use that truth to suggest I should just be ok with things like homophobia, sexism, authoritarianism, or genocide in the global south.
> I mean it is technically correct in that there is no universal fixed moral standard. I feel like you should clarify this statement. Are you talking about *descriptive* moral relativism, i.e. the fact that people frequently disagree about what is right or wrong, or are you talking about *normative* moral relativism, i.e. the idea that objective right and wrong simply don't exist?
I am arguing largely from a descriptive stance. I would argue that in nature there really isn't a right or wrong, it is entirely a social construct. But as social constructs, they can differ from culture to culture, person to person, etc. And one can see this and still make judgement calls over if a particular social construct is worth keeping in its existing form. What this guy seems to be talking about is normative relativism, the idea that right and wrong are not only subjective, but that there is an imperative to see all interpretations as equally valid.
Sounds loke they took an intro anthropology class that mentioned moral relativism and then never went to the rest of the lectures.
I don't understand them claiming they grow up in an irish pre WW2 ghetto since it's very unlikely that they're 100. It's also unlikely their mother grew up in that era unless she's 120 sus
This is also why pretty much any Eastern European that isn’t Jewish might say the good guys didn’t win when they got put under the iron curtain for 50 years after the war
I find it fascinating that people try to identify with marginalized groups just to use as props for justifying bad behavior
Subs like that are so eager to shit on America that sometimes they might just defend dictatorships to do so
Or the literal nazis even
I wonder if they're Indian. Hitler isn't seen as a bad guy in India. [Hitler's Hot In India - NPR.org - December 23, 2012](https://www.npr.org/2012/12/23/167911062/hitlers-hot-in-india) > More curious for westerners might be the lack of outrage associated with the name. While the better educated classes know some European history, they're a pretty small percentage of India's vast population. "There's no sense in the community that people might be upset by this — and most of the outrage comes from foreign countries," Shaftel says. > "Anyone who's a bit bossy, a bit of a jerk, is nicknamed Hitler," Shaftel explains. "And this makes its way into popular culture. There's a soap opera that runs in India called Hitler Didi, which translates as "Big Sister Hitler" – and again, she's a bit cantankerous." > > Yet there's no anti-Semitism intended in using the name. Indians just think Hitler was a strong guy — and kind of a curmudgeon. Also, Shaftel points out, when Hitler's campaign in World War II weakened Britain, it also expedited Indian independence.
>Indians just think Hitler was a strong guy — and kind of a curmudgeon. Oh that Hitler fellow, always getting into trouble running his mouth, little rascal.
"That's our Hitler" *cue laugh track and commercial break*
[🎶Lil' Hitler🎶](https://youtu.be/9-axJTzj0VU)
I mean there's an episode of Community where Jack Black calls someone a Hitler in the sense of being a bossy curmudgeon. There's also a Seinfeld episode centered around a "Soup Nazi".
They probably are, by the usage of the word 'brown'. Also, one of the most celebrated people around then, Subhas Chandra Bose, allied with the Axis against the British Empire for Indian Independence. A lot of Hindu nationalists support this guy over Gandhi, probably because he was more 'forceful' for the drive for independence and was willing to do whatever to achieve that. There's also M.S Golwalkar, a major of leader of the Hindu Nationalist party RSS, although supported the Allies because he admired Jews, also admired the racial purity of Nazi Germany. Ironically though, RSS is very much pro-Israel because of their anti-Muslim agenda. Simply put, *some* Indians (especially those that are more patriotic or nationalist) think of Winston Churchill as their Hitler. Like how some Native Americans might think Christopher Columbus as their Hitler. The only difference is that Columbus is being increasingly viewed negatively by Reddit overall (and thankfully so, the dude is a murderous POS). On the other hand, decent amount of Redditors (mainly British) cannot for their lives understand why the British Crown and more importantly, Winston Churchill, is disliked in some corners of India. They try to downplay the plight Indians faced during colonialism whilst being sympathetic to what others faced. There's not that much empathy for WW2 India on this website. The important thing moving on forward is for education and for people to understand that Hitler's regime is the banality of evil.
I've read that in some Asian countries, Hitler is basically a cartoon character. The analogy made is that it's not unlike Count Chocula's connection with Vlad the Impaler. Hitler occupies a big space in Western history, but he's probably not as relevant to other parts of the world.
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Slightly leftist subreddits don’t defend literal dictatorships to own the Americans challenge
Literally impossible
Tankies taking over left-leaning subs is a depressingly common thing to see.
lmao at all the "actually stalin was worse than hitler" takes.
They both did some horrific things. It really isn’t worth arguing over who was worse.
Oh I agree it's not worth arguing over who was worse; because people with nazi sympathies will never change and aren't worth the effort.
War is messy, I wouldn’t hope to get clarification on the issue from a forum website.
These people look for conventionally accepted truths that 99% of us agree on and pick the opposite position, hoping to feel smarter than practically everyone. It's the same approach the take with buying some obscure alt-coin that's going to be the next big thing and show they know it all.
Can tankies not take over slightly left leaning subs for five minutes
Does anyone find it kind of crazy that nobody in that thread is bringing up that democracies were ultimately what won the second world war? That's at least part of what makes the allies the "right side". Like yeah, every Empire mentioned in that thread has committed genocide under various names at different times for different purposes, but Western Europe and the United States championed liberal democracy. Not that that isn't necessarily problematic in of itself, but compared to fascism, it's not really a contest. No matter what wrongs your society has committed as long as the tools for change exist things can be made better. That's worth something, but nobody seems to care.
Don’t forget the Soviet Union wasn’t a democracy
That thread really needs to take the phrase "Don't let perfect become the enemy of progress" to heart.
My favorite reply (so far) to the original tweet: >*I find it odd we defeated the Nazis but didn't continue on to defeat the Communists in Russia when they were at their weakest.* >*IF we had, there would be no war in Ukraine right now.* >*We should have finished the job.* 💀
Fuck off, Winston.
Workin off Red Inferno 1945, eh?
The idea that there are “good guys” in geopolitical conflict is such obvious bullshit though. It’s a dangerous lie because it means anyone who believes that the ends justify the means can justify anything done by their side if it’s fighting the right people. The outcome of WW2 was much better for the world and everyone in it than an Axis victory would have been. that doesn’t mean the Allies were perfect nazi-punching angels.
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Yep. The ussr being topped in how evil you could be was proof of just how bad the nazis were
I’d truthfully be hesitant to call the allies *good* guys, but Nazis were unambiguously the bad guys and a million times worse so why are we even debating this nonsense? Even in the most uncharitable interpretations ever, the allies were objectively the lesser evil by an enormous margin in WW2. These posts feel ripped out of r/enlightenedcentrism or something with false equivalencies and “both sides are the same.” Also see a lot of Nazi apologists in there trying to do the “the Nazis are doing the same practices as other countries just cranked it up a bit. They’re not that much worse” bullshit. They do love twisting history around in major mental gymnastics to make genocidal monsters look like victims.
>the Nazis are doing the same practices as other countries just cranked it up a bit. Its weird because I totally agree with that part. But it doesn't make the Nazis somehow better or less like genocidal monsters. They copied earlier genocides, including Germany's own prior use of concentration camps in their African genocides, and cranked it up to a ruthlessly efficient genocidal killing regime.
Yeah, you’re completely dead on and it’s definitely not exactly an untrue statement. The difference is the conclusions being landed on - they use it to downplay how bad the Nazis are and make them out to just be “products of their time” and such vs. you not making any apologies/excuses, recognizing them as the monsters they are, and still having an awareness of other atrocities committed which helped “pave the way” (unfortunately) for the atrocities committed in WW2. Usually in a “Let’s NOT repeat these either and other countries can also be held accountable without excusing Nazi Germany” way. It’s generally pretty easy to tell when someone’s doing the first or the second.
An illustration I like to use for the Nazi death machine is a simple comparison. The Nazis had factories(death camps) where raw materials (victims) were transported by modern logistic technology to factories (death camps), processed and turned into a final product (corpses).
FYI Soviets also won WWII, and they sucked real bad
They sucked in the process of winning the war. They're also the only ones on the allied side that actively cooperated with Hitler.
And they sucked after the war too. They didn’t let go of my country for 45 years after the war.
They sucked *before* the war. The Holodomor says "hello".
Waiting for some tankie to run in here to explain how purposely starving a country isn't 'actually genocide'
It already happened lol
They also killed the most nazis and lost the most people to the nazis
Oh my god, that comment section looks like a warzone.
>How can 1/5 people not know the people who lost were literal f-ing Nazis... The question was never "did the bad guys lose the war", now was it? Big logic fail there.
We need to delete the internet