Why is Hitler our Moral Compass? We're Better than Hitler, so We're Freakin' Awesome!

[Capitalocracy]

Run time: 15:31 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szQOf7uH8II   Posted on YouTube: December 10, 2010 By YouTube Member: funkalunatic Views on YouTube: 8   Posted on DU: December 12, 2010 By DU Member: Capitalocracy Views on DU: 895

 
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In this segment, we talk about the Tea Party as a potential fascist movement, and discuss whether using the word fascism automatically invalidates your argument, turns people off, or makes you seem like an alarmist.

It seems like we compare everything a government in question does with Hitler, and if it's something Hitler would do, it's fascist, and if not, it's OK. Isn't there something in-between? Why is Hitler our moral compass? We're better than Hitler, so we're freakin' awesome?

[The Second Stone]

1. As long as we are better than Hitler

we are alright

[cpwm17]

2. WWII is one of the worst things to happen to the US

People got such big heads.

We defeated the Nazis. We're number one. We're morally superior. How dare you criticize us. We're not the Nazis.

Don't even mention the permanent war state we've had since then.

[RZM]

4. So you think we should have stayed out?

And let the Brits and Soviets take on the Germans by themselves? Perhaps they would have won anyway, though they might not have achieved the total victory that the full Grand Alliance brought about -- many more people (mostly civilians) would have died in the process too because no US participation would have lengthened the war.

That's pretty ridiculous. BTW, you do know that the Germans declared war on us, right?

[Capitalocracy]

5. I'm pretty sure that's not the argument this person is making

But maybe it's time that we, as a nation, stop looking in the mirror and seeing a superhero instead of an only slightly less murderous supervillain than the one we helped destroy. Then maybe we can start trying to improve ourselves.

[RZM]

7. That's an absolute crock

I think the 'slightly less murderous supervillain' on the Allied side would be Stalin, not FDR. While the Soviets payed the bulk of the human and material cost for the victory, the US and British contributions were very important to the final outcome and vital in ending the war sooner rather than later, which saved a lot of lives. It was a just war and the US was right to have participated in it. End of story.

[Capitalocracy]

8. I think you're assigning an argument to me that I didn't make

I absolutely agree it's a rare example of a just war. (Now dropping the atomic bombs, that's a little more questionable). But I stand by the statement that we're not that much better. Millions of deaths in the Middle East, Vietnam, a million people in Cambodia, military dictatorships planned and executed by the CIA toppling democratically elected governments around the world and torturing and killing millions of people around the world, economic devastation caused by policies we control leading to many more deaths by disease and starvation...

Seriously, with the Soviet Union gone, we're the undisputed champion of evil empirialism in the world today. Billions of people around the world are suffering because of our broken democracy, and it's up to the 300 million of us to fix it.

[RZM]

10. I'm not sure I agree with all of that

But I at least understand your point. It's a common one here at DU, that the US is the real 'evil empire.' You seem to be arguing that WWII cemented our superpower status and allowed the US to run amok in the postwar world. But what would have been so different had we stayed out of the war? Europe still would have been devastated and the US would still be anti-Communist. De-colonization would have still happened and Marxism would still have had plenty of appeal in the underdeveloped world. One of Stalin's most impressive accomplishments was that after the war he managed to convince the world that his totally devastated country was a 'superpower.' Had the US not been involved, the USSR would have been even more crippled and quite possibly Stalin wouldn't have been able to pull this off. That would have meant even less of a check on US ambitions. I don't see how no US participation in the war would have made the postwar world any better, even in the framework of your argument.

[Capitalocracy]

11. No, I wasn't actually talking about WWII at all

That was another poster... my argument in the OP and in the video has nothing to do with the U.S.'s involvement in WWII, just with the fact that a lot of people, when you start talking about the state of U.S. democracy or the U.S. as an empire or fascism in the U.S., or compare U.S. policies with Nazism, people always use Hitler as the moral compass by saying that as long as we don't reach that level, anything else is justified and reasonable, and any comparison to Nazism or fascism or a military dictatorship is hyperbole and alarmism, when in fact it's actually the grim reality we're facing today... that our democracy is broken to the point that we have to question whether democracy is even an appropriate word for what we have anymore.

[cpwm17]

6. I haven't made up my mind whether the US should've entered

Some people make a good case that we should not have entered the war.

The US intentionally provoked the Japanese to attack and force our entry. The Nazis would have lost regardless of our participation, though Western Europe might not have liked the outcome if we didn't enter. We probably would have been better off staying out. So I'm not sure what the US should have done.

During the war, the US fire bombed and nuked civilians, which didn't help the Allies win. Also, Truman returned millions of POW's and others back to the Soviets to be murdered, tortured, and imprisoned in Operation Keelhaul:

http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/Keelhaul.shtml

So our morality was suspect during the war. As it happened, some 70 million people were murdered in the war - that sucks. I'm not sure that we were really that much help.

But after the war the US has gone on a violent crusade with our newly acquired military powers. The US has directly murdered many millions around the World since WWII, and is indirectly responsible for millions of more deaths. Americans and the World haven't benefited except for some war profiteers. This could be our ultimate downfall. WWII is partially responsible.

[RZM]

9. Wrong

Some people, such as Pat Buchanan, make a shitty case regarding US involvement in the war.

You're quite wrong about the bombing campaign as well. While I too have my issues with the bombing of civilians, remember that the British that did a lot of the incendiary bombing of residential neighborhoods, including the first major raid on a German city in 1942 -- though we certainly did our fair share of it as well. But the bombing campaign also helped out the Soviets. The constant threat to German cities meant that the Luftwaffe had to use a lot of its fighter strength there and every plane patrolling German skies was a plane that wasn't on the Eastern front. Same thing with the Allied landings in N. Africa, Italy, and France, all of which drew off fighters (as well as everything else) that the Germans needed in the East.

You're also ignoring lend-lease, which was important as well. The Germans took some of the most developed regions of the Soviet Union and while the Red Army checked the Germans before lend-lease starting arriving, it was quite helpful once it really started flowing in in 1943. Though the Soviets were already winning by then, the US assistance hastened the end of the war. The US provided hundreds of thousands of trucks to the Soviets -- without them, they probably wouldn't have been able to pull off the huge successes of Operation Bagration in 1944, which destroyed German Army Group Center and remains the worst military defeat in German history. US machine tools, food, and many other items were also very important to the Soviet war effort.

US participation shortened the war in Europe. I don't see how you can argue otherwise. Quite possibly the British and Soviets would have been able to win without us, though it would have taken longer, which would have meant longer German occupation regimes and more dead civilians. It's also possible that they would not have been able to achieve total victory and might have even had to leave the Nazi regime intact and let Hitler keep some of his conquests.

[RZM]

3. The Nazis serve as a marker of 'absolute zero'

That is one of their lasting contributions to history. It's tough to get worse than that and most people know it. Comparisons of just about anybody and anything in contemporary American life to the Nazis usually makes little sense. I don't think anybody here is saying 'I'm ok, because I'm better than Hitler.' Most people find Nazism abhorrent and know that a large distance separates event he most craven people from Hitler.