Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: Re: what if tom chick and icycalm had a baby and named it bink?

[quote name="Lizard_King"][quote name="Zsenitan"]1. The Axis Powers opposed the Allied Powers, so when the two sides went to war, all the soldiers involved knew they were going to a place where fighting and killing would happen. There was no way to stay ignorant of that.[/quote] The key variable is who won and got to write the histories. Stalin weaseled back onto Team Win and carried it across the finish line with his zombie horde, so now you get to rationalize away his atrocities with who-gives-a-shittisms about how he was less German about his mass murder. Curtis LeMay (American architect of strategic air bombing) was acutely aware of the fact that if the US lost against Japan, they would be well within their rights to try him as a war criminal for deliberately torching civilian centers in order to terrorize the opponent. He wasn't thinking about being the kind of moral relativist that Anne Coulter would like to see fed to lions in coliseums, but rather in strict terms of the acts he'd signed off on and their consequences. [quote] 2. Totally aside from the fucking CONCENTRATION CAMPS, the Nazis, like the Japanese, fought a war of aggression against neighbor states. Their military victories were communicated across the entire country, and nobody could possibly avoid the truth that they were soldiers on the aggressor's side of a major war.[/quote] That relies on a uselessly linear view of history. Aside from the concentration camps, the Japanese and Germans only made the mistake of losing. Both sides did what they felt was needed to win the war, and a war crimes trial would have been earned no matter the outcome. Both sides did extra shit which is impossible to create an equivalence around, especially when we treat history as a team sport. All genocide can be rationalized away with the proper motivation, and it would have, too. Just ask an Armenian. With the concentration camps included, you still have the problem that the Final Solution was not a product of German innovation in a vacuum. It was the result of a convergence of active and passive anti-semitism with seemingly paradoxical effects like having the Nuremberg laws result in Jews feeling safer in Germany than in, say, the United States. Because 2nd class citizen was still better than no citizen at all. Combined with the concept of total war WWII style, for which Churchill and Roosevelt bear just as much responsibility as their opponents, and you have a recipe for steadily escalating barbarism. We could have ended up with Israel Mark I in Madagascar or a tremendous influx of Jews into the United States, but neither was compatible with political and military strategies of the Allies. Because they didn't give a shit about Jews, either. This does not excuse the killers themselves or their immediate chain of command, but it provides one with context. Why vent any more anger towards the psychopath when his bankers and his enablers from all over the world walked away mostly unscathed in the historical record? [quote] Maybe you need me to say that war is awful and always wrong: I'll go 90% of the way with you on that! I agree that it would have been awesome if WWII had never happened as long as it means that the Holocaust also never happened. It would be great if nations never fought at all. [/quote] Again, what? That only makes sense if you view Germany as uniquely anti-semitic prior to Hitler's particular escalations and those of the war. That's simply not a fact based view of causality. [quote] But since nations do fight and wars do happen, it does you no credit to have a moral code that talks about the humanity of soldiers of aggressor nation states. It is basically like saying "I love peace <i>no matter how it has to happen.</i>" And all I've been saying for this entire thread is that when I'm given a choice between justice (beating the shit out of Nazis) and peace (leaving those poor gardening Nazis alone), I pick justice. I mean, the Nazis weren't like a terrorist cell flying a plane into a financial center. They actually took over countries and killed millions of people. The only ways to deal with that shit at all are: complete surrender, or fighting back. To put it another way: nobody's talked about the French terrorist cinema lady. Is it because she was hurt enough to justify her revenge?[/quote] This is where I end with the beginning: You are still right, in a way, because bringing this up with respect to a Tarantino film is fucking stupid. Of course it's ok to enjoy the murder of Nazis in such a film. There's been an NPR <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112085605">Tarantino</a> <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112286584">frenzy</a>, so it's fresh on my mind, but I won't pretend that I've gotten to seeing the movie or care about the moral dimension of it in the way that Bink suggests one should. Also, I am confident that where I agree or appear to agree with Bink, it is for entirely different reasons. So he still loses, but only by default. Your counters based on the mythology that creates magical distinctions between good and bad wars for propaganda are not as self evident as you say. I say that not as someone who wants to mail the enemy of the day a hug, I say it as someone that finds the laws of war a laughable marketing conceit designed around the presumption of military superiority, with the ever-present asterisk that all bets are off when you start losing. [/quote]