Has anyone else read Mein Kampf?

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

After seeing you say you'd "maybe call Hitler a bad man" its really really hard to take what you say seriously. But you say someone is "evil" in order to accurately describe them. I get nothing personally from calling the sun bright, nor winter cold. They are simply descriptive facts. You don't like adjectives because they don't personally fulfill you. That's fine. I happen to find them USEFUL.

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Oh, and that accurately describes the Wirtschaftswunder and Kraft durch Freude, does it? That describes the fact that he was the brains behind the Volkswagen (literally 'the people's car') concept, a car which is still doing good business these days. That accurately describes that he stopped hyper inflation in the mid twenties. It also accurately describes that he 'unlocked' Germany by all the motorways he built, does it?

I said we were not talking about adjectives in general here, keep with the discussion you started.

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

If you do not think Hitler was all of those things in spades then I don't know what to say to you. Worse than my head-splitting hangover is reading such lame, absurd, almost depressing opinions. And you are obviously hinting that he wasn't, since you would only "maybe" call him a "bad" man.

And in that larger post you said Hitler cannot be held "personally accountable for all that his army did." You ask the question "who was responsible?" That's what I'm talking about. You confirm my suspicion that you Kiki do not hold Hitler responsible. A reverse Nuremburg defence. I suppose you would argue that those beneath Hitler weren't responsible because they were only following orders.

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I despair at your reading skills sometimes...

It has nothing to do with 'not being responsible' ultimately. It has to do with that he did not, cannot, have personally planned it all. For the simple reason that there is not enough time in the day to plan such futile details (as they must have been for them).

Look at that last disaster in Afghanistan where that soldier shot 16 innocent civilians because he went potty (rightly so, the military should not have sent him there so many times and in such a short space of time). Can you hold Mr Obama personally accountable for that? I hope you are going to say 'no', but I fear the simplistic answer will be 'yes', though.

Granted they can court martial if they find it necessary, however, was he, if he had disapproved of the Einsatzgruppen going to put them all in prison? Really?

I repeat it again, for the umpteenth time, he is responsible like a minister is responsible for what happens in his ministery or like a president is responsible for what his civilians in their official functions do in cases of violence. he is not personally accountable.

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Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi

So, why is it so important to you that we don't call Hitler evil? How does that fulfill you?

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That does not fulfil me, no. That was not my purpose when I came to this discussion. I was attacked (as that often happens when you talk about people like this) and I retalliated.

The only thing I have been trying to do is show that calling people names (whoever they are) is useless. It does not resolve anything as JuniperWoolf said.

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

To be fair, I recall saying it earlier somewhere. I believe her definition of evil is a very strange uncommon one. She may not be the only person to hold it, but its rare and its rare because it makes no sense.

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Uncommon? Approximately 2.2 billion people should hold this definition and I should hope that there are many more (depending on what they believe in).

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Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi

It's kind of funny when you think about it. This whole time you've been using different definitions for what evil means, so of course you're going to disagree. :lol:

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:lol:

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Originally Posted by mona amon

For some reason this reminds me of the story of the man who killed his mother and father with an axe, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.

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Tell me where you read that. I said no such thing.

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Originally Posted by kiki1982

I despair at your reading skills sometimes...

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Hey! Look at that! You accused Darcy of having bad reading skills again! :smilielol5: It never gets old.

Look, he continuously misreads what I say. If you choose to do so too, by all means do so, but it does not make it more right.

How the army executes orders can significantly differ from the order in itself. Only look at the differences in what Hitler's own orders were for the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union and what the final direct orders were. Over-zealous anti-semitism that is. The fact that he did not punish them for it or in the wake of the atrocities in Poland made them only answerable to an independant Himmler (so not answerable to himself even!), makes him responsible, but not personally accountable.

Think about it. It doesn't exhonerate, but it emphasises the personal responsibility of the commanders on the ground who actually did it. They were not (all) 'following orders', but basically satisfied their own despicable feelings of hatred and encouraged them in the civilian population.

Making Hitler personally accountable for everything that happened is not only a simplistic intentionalist view (criticised many times over by now) and perfectly impossible to maintain, it is exhonerating everyone else who contributed and thought out the plans in the first place. Essentially, such a defence was also tried at Nuremberg, but had no effect.

I still don't see why someone can't agree with all that and still see the man as an evil person.

Because the Third Reich was not only the killing and he as a man was not only the orderer/authoriser of it, but also the man of Volkswagen and the man of Nazi holiday camps. We may call it creepy, but the people back then did not think so, they thought it was wonderful.

It is not because his acts were evil that the man himself is evil.

To take a very very stark analogy: if the muslims believe everything comes from their God (whom I am not allowed to name, I think), is He 'evil'? He definitely sends evil unto the human race in the shape of disease and natural disasters (or so they believe). Is He, then, evil? No, surely.

And in case Darcy comes back, no I am not, I repeat, not comparing Hitler with God.

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Originally Posted by kiki1982

Oh, and that accurately describes the Wirtschaftswunder and Kraft durch Freude, does it? That describes the fact that he was the brains behind the Volkswagen (literally 'the people's car') concept, a car which is still doing good business these days. That accurately describes that he stopped hyper inflation in the mid twenties. It also accurately describes that he 'unlocked' Germany by all the motorways he built, does it?

I said we were not talking about adjectives in general here, keep with the discussion you started.

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We are talking about adjective in general. Evil is no different than any adjective. Someone who is grumpy 80 percent of the time is a grumpy person despite 20 percent of the time being affable and of good cheer. A brunette is not defined, not in her entirety represented, by the fact that she is a brunette - but she is a brunette. Brunette does not convey that she is a mother or a collector of stamps, but it does represent a certain aspect of her physical being accurately and well. Hitler was not 100 percent evil. But he did enough evil that in the final summation we can say with confidence - Hitler was evil.

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I despair at your reading skills sometimes...

It has nothing to do with 'not being responsible' ultimately. It has to do with that he did not, cannot, have personally planned it all. For the simple reason that there is not enough time in the day to plan such futile details (as they must have been for them).

Look at that last disaster in Afghanistan where that soldier shot 16 innocent civilians because he went potty (rightly so, the military should not have sent him there so many times and in such a short space of time). Can you hold Mr Obama personally accountable for that? I hope you are going to say 'no', but I fear the simplistic answer will be 'yes', though.

Granted they can court martial if they find it necessary, however, was he, if he had disapproved of the Einsatzgruppen going to put them all in prison? Really?

I repeat it again, for the umpteenth time, he is responsible like a minister is responsible for what happens in his ministery or like a president is responsible for what his civilians in their official functions do in cases of violence. he is not personally accountable.

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So you say its not about being "ultimately responsible," but then you say he is not "personally accountable." That Kiki is double-think. You are holding two contrary things as true simultaneously inside your mind. Its quite fascinating really.

But I am afraid that comparing the 16 year old soldier in Afghanistan to the young German guard at Auschwitz who does the actual dirty business of killing Jews is quite possibly, and I mean this genuinely, not as an insult - is quite possibly the stupidest, most agonizingly and fantastically asinine analogy that I myself have in all my 23 years on this planet ever heard. It just really might be.

The Holocaust was a government POLICY. It was ORDERED. It was ORCHESTRATED FROM THE TOP. It was not a host of scattered acts of independently arisen atrocities. It was a government policy. Hitler and the rest of the Nazis were not personally accountable for the holocaust in the same way Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper is not personally accountable for the billions of dollars that since the recession have gone into building roads and other public works projects. Is he totally responsible? No, not at all. But is he responsible and does his responsibility make him evil - YES, YES, YES, YES A MILLION YESES HE WAS, IS.

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The only thing I have been trying to do is show that calling people names (whoever they are) is useless. It does not resolve anything as JuniperWoolf said.

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Aww, I call poor little Adolf names. I'm sorry Kiki. I know I'm such a big mean bully. Kiki never again call anyone smart nor stupid, nor fat, nor skinny, nor anything, because you are making the same error calling anyone any adjective in any circumstance that I am apparently making calling Hitler evil here.


Really though, the way you write about Hitler, even though I know you think the holocaust was horrible and wrong, just the way you alleviate his awfulness and evil and attribute everything to other causes makes me think that as a German in 1945 you might have voted for him had his name been miraculously on the ballot in an election.

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

We are talking about adjective in general. Evil is no different than any adjective. Someone who is grumpy 80 percent of the time is a grumpy person despite 20 percent of the time being affable and of good cheer. A brunette is not defined, not in her entirety represented, by the fact that she is a brunette - but she is a brunette. Brunette does not convey that she is a mother or a collector of stamps, but it does represent a certain aspect of her physical being accurately and well. Hitler was not 100 percent evil. But he did enough evil that in the final summation we can say with confidence - Hitler was evil.

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We were not talking of trivial adjectives, the discussion was about the word 'evil'. As such, I regard it as an adjective that is quite distinct from the rest like 'brunette'. If the analogy doesn't work, there is something wrong with it.

Again, is the God Muslims believe in evil because he sends them evil (or so they believe)? The answer is clearly no. Yet you would call Him evil. That does not work, that is all there is to it.

Is the Christian God evil because ultimately Satan is a fallen angel, hence made by Him? No, surely.

Well then. No man is evil, but he has the potential to do evil things. That is a marked difference.

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

So you say its not about being "ultimately responsible," but then you say he is not "personally accountable." That Kiki is double-think. You are holding two contrary things as true simultaneously inside your mind. Its quite fascinating really.

But I am afraid that comparing the 16 year old soldier in Afghanistan to the young German guard at Auschwitz who does the actual dirty business of killing Jews is quite possibly, and I mean this genuinely, not as an insult - is quite possibly the stupidest, most agonizingly and fantastically asinine analogy that I myself have in all my 23 years on this planet ever heard. It just really might be.

The Holocaust was a government POLICY. It was ORDERED. It was ORCHESTRATED FROM THE TOP. It was not a host of scattered acts of independently arisen atrocities. It was a government policy. Hitler and the rest of the Nazis were not personally accountable for the holocaust in the same way Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper is not personally accountable for the billions of dollars that since the recession have gone into building roads and other public works projects. Is he totally responsible? No, not at all. But is he responsible and does his responsibility make him evil - YES, YES, YES, YES A MILLION YESES HE WAS, IS.

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It is not the same. One can be ultimately responsible, but not personally the perpetrator.

The soldier in question is 38. Do you watch the news at all, actually? Again: is Obama personally accountable for those 16 poor Afghan people? No, surely. The soldier is, and his commander should also learn from this as he should be aware of how his soldiers are feeling (he shouldn't be punished, though, because he has not 'done' anything).

The Nazi ideology came from the top, the actual killing orders came from further down the ladder. You can rave and rant all you like, documents show that the orders given by Hitler for the Soviet Union Einsatzgruppen were very distinct from the direct orders that were given to them and which explicitly authorised killing Jewish men, women and children (probably I would say because of the combination of Jewish Bolshevism and the words 'potential enimy'). At that point they were not even answerable to Hitler anymore, so he was frankly not interested. Holding him personally accountable for all of it is clearly simplistic and that intentionalist view has been criticised.

Functionalists (I turn out to be one) have argued that there was in fact no plan directly. The Armenian quote was dismissed from the Nurmberg trials as disputed. Heydrich changed the explicit task of these troops from 'liquidating any party that was deemed hostile to Germany' (ad thus putting up and securing an occupational administration) into 'killing anyone who those commanders deemed hostile.' You can see where the problem lies. Where in Holland and Belgium Einsatzgruppen also operated but did not commit any crimes directly like in Poland for example, in the east they committed gruesome things. If you let a bunch of fired up SS indoctrinated ideologists whom you have blown up with 'Poles are inferior' loose on the population with carte blanche then what do you expect?
Einsatzgruppe D committed far worse crimes than any other in the Baltics. Just because they were free to do as they pleased.
The Wehrmacht was outraged because they saw it, not as wrong, but as bad for discipline (which it is - how to stop it if you wish?).

After the military had tried to court martial these people, Hitler diverted any answerability from the Wehrmacht to Himmler to have done with it. And then of course, you can guess it, the real problems started. They were just wild animals let loose.

The question can be asked who actually gave the order to do those things? Good question.

You can argue that Hitler voluntarily let it happen by not punishing these people (and so indirectly approved it), but you cannot argue that he explicitly ordered it.

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

Aww, I call poor little Adolf names. I'm sorry Kiki. I know I'm such a big mean bully. Kiki never again call anyone smart nor stupid, nor fat, nor skinny, nor anything, because you are making the same error calling anyone any adjective in any circumstance that I am apparently making calling Hitler evil here.

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No, not a bully. A simplistic mind who thinks someone like Hitler had more minutes and seconds in the day than any other person and could plan these details.

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Originally Posted by Darcy88

Really though, the way you write about Hitler, even though I know you think the holocaust was horrible and wrong, just the way you alleviate his awfulness and evil and attribute everything to other causes makes me think that as a German in 1945 you might have voted for him had his name been miraculously on the ballot in an election.

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If you read that in what I have written...

ok... I see this thread has wandered a bit off the topic of Mein Kampf..

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Has anyone else read Mein Kampf?
I am re-reading it right now and I am having difficulty trying to find people to discuss it with without the fear of them being like "OMG! NAZI!"

Uhm, no. Not going to turn me into a Nazi. I just want to discuss it.

Obviously it's a political text. It has a lot of hate-speech in it. Interesting autobiographical narratives that are probably more than a bit slanted. Nontheless, I find it interesting.

Yes I know this book has been a favorite of a few school-shooters. Yes I know the author has killed a lot of people.

Why is it then, such a crime to find it interesting?

Anyway, what do you think of this book?

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If you again want to try to discuss good versus evil or Mein Kampf, or perhaps The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds ??? please start another thread sans negative personal comments directed towards oneanother :)

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