I brought up Gaza because of what’s happening there. In the context of this discussion the silence is fully deserving of mockery.
delete this comment too.

The United States military is investigating an incident in which U.S. soldiers shot dead at least seven women and children in a car at a checkpoint in central Iraq.
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And, with its hinkiness index considerably higher:
As soon as news broke on March 4 about U.S. troops firing on reporter Giuliana Sgrena’s Baghdad airport-bound car and killing Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari in the process, the clash of accounts began almost immediately. The Americans put the blame squarely on the Italians for driving too fast and not heeding supposed warnings; Sgrena and the surviving Italian intelligence officials, however, said the car was going at a reasonable speed, and that no warnings were given.
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The deadly shooting of an Italian intelligence officer by U.S. troops at a checkpoint near Baghdad on Friday was one of many incidents in which civilians have been killed by mistake at checkpoints in Iraq, including local police officers, women and children, according to military records, U.S. officials and human rights groups.
U.S. soldiers have fired on the occupants of many cars approaching their positions over the past year and a half, only to discover that the people they killed were not suicide bombers or attackers but Iraqi civilians. They did so while operating under rules of engagement that the military has classified and under a legal doctrine that grants U.S. troops immunity from civil liability for misjudgment.
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Possibly Virgil, your contention is with “indefensible”, which ends up being sort of pretty much subjective. Which was the point of the original statement.
What should be morally indefensible is shifting over to the defensible by virtue of being a response to threat.
This is neither a marginal nor unique to me view. The entire so-called War on Terror comes right out of that mind-set, or rather support for it from the little people does.
And calling Abu Ghraib “singular” is perp-talk.
We know about Abu Ghraib, therefore it’s all there is to know about. Not itself a defensible position.

Just what EXACTLY were those “indefensible acts” that the soldiers were “defending?”
And please don’t begin with Abu Ghraib; no one defended those singular acts—neither the soldiers in the field nor their fellow citizens at home.

You haven’t had access to the Web for very long, obviously.

Look, I’m not blaming European Jews for not following Gandhi’s advice. Arguably, there wasn’t much in his advice to believe in anyway, since the Quit India movement hadn’t even achieved its objectives until after the Holocaust. In any case, as I said to Beryl, I’m mainly talking about how Gandhi might have been misinterpreted here.

If you need to take offense at anything I else didn’t say, why not Google on the word “the”, start down the list, and pin on me every offensive statement you find? I promise I won’t respond violently. Or at all, actually, since I’m now leading the Quit Crooked Timber’s ‘Ayers on Fresh Air’ Comment Thread movement, and I will be too busy planning the publicity campaign for my hunger strike to bother cheating and sneaking a peak now and again.

I agree with you actually. Who knows, such actions may have worked. There is no way of knowing, mind you, and the arrogance of saying “if you’d just done that, then this would have happened” is exactly the kind of crap that leads into trouble, well, pretty much anywhere.

In my mind the point is to look at alternatives and see if there’s one that might work. And it looks to me like that one could possibly work, though in the specific case of nazis and jews it looks pretty doubtful.

Why look for better choices? We can’t do anything to change the past, but we might possibly do better in the future.

There’s something else that might have an effect too. Real americans don’t like to admit when there’s nothing they can do. We always want to think there’s some possible way to win, if we can only find it. That’s a good thing when the alternative is to give up and die, though it causes us trouble in places like vietnam and iraq and afghanistan where we just refuse to pull out and defend somewhere else.

So when we see something that looks like no-hope, it really bothers us. We look for a way out. And it isn’t disrespectful to the victims who did not find a way out. The attempt to look at what happened and try to find ways to keep it from happening again—no disrespect implied.

Dan Simon 11.28.08 at 4:41 am:
…they feel perfectly comfortable expressing them here…

Keeping in mind that the strawman, the alternate me these arguments, such as they are, are leveled against, subscribes to, believes in, espouses the “conspiracy theory” that the US is being run by, has been run for some time by, a zionist-occupied-government, or “ZOG” as Dan Simon helpfully reminds us, and keeping in mind that the US is a much less free society now than it was 7 years ago, one in which people can be disappeared, can be tortured if they appear to be a threat to the government or its citizenry, and that the head of the Homeland Security Dept, a government agency with seemingly unlimited power to deny freedom to, to detain and torture anyone they want with impunity, Mr. Chertoff the Homeland Security Secretary is, it is my understanding, a Jew, as is I believe the Attorney General of the United States, Mr. Mukasey, keeping in mind that the strawman holder of those beliefs in ZOG, in Jewish conspiracy, would be expressing those antagonistic beliefs in that perceived as oppressive and dangerous context, then no, not comfortable.
You would not expect comfort to be the experience of those espousing that view and speaking against that ZOG business publicly.
But that’s the strawman me.
The real me sees Jews as as capable of perfidy and iniquity as anyone else, and equally as capable of nobility.
One need go no further than comment 88, 2nd para. closing sentence, to see Edenbaum’s filial piety rise to the level of inspiration.
In fact I thought to not say that here as it may appear to be propititating, which it is not, nor intended to be.
Also I thought to mention that my disappearance from this thread, in the midst of having leveled at me what was, and is, real calumny,
Beryl 11.27.08 at 8:52 pm:
Now that I see what was crawling underneath…
Beryl 11.28.08 at 4:00 pm
The stench from this thread is hard on my breathing…
Dan Simon 11.28.08 at 4:41 am:
…people with odious, despicable views who live in freedom and comfort and even receive completely undeserved respect and deference, but nevertheless imagine themselves to be lonely, oppressed defenders [...] Thomas’ and Belmont’s supposed arguments, which consist mostly of hateful ad hominems impugning the motives of their enemies, larded with historical ignorance and ugly stereotyping…
thank you Drs. Freud, Jung, and Adler.
As I say I thought to mention that my absence from the conversation, which was due to purely practical domestic cause as my writing workstation is also the house dining table, which was, in its fashion, yesterday laden with Thanksgiving fare, set to by a merry company til late in the evening, thus occupied, and only now this afternoon returned to its mundane role, as my desk.
And I have photographic evidence to back that claim.
I thought to mention it but then thought “No, it’s no one’s nevermind why. Explanation’s too close to ass-kissing.” Then I thought “Yes, because image is important in this” then “No” then…
I won’t presume to speak for my own efforts, but there is nowhere in JThomas’ writing here the stench of the odious, only the odor of honest sweat figuratively speaking earned in service to the truth as he sees it, sincerely delivered against dishonest and unhealthy attempts to silence, not him, or me, but the truth itself, of which neither of us nor any other can claim to have the whole part, but that we both in our own way have tried to reach through conscientious application of an individual open mind to the task at hand, explicated with an open heart, J Thomas far more eloquently than I, who spend far too much effort on self-amusement in these things than I should.

My point was not that no one could or should do anything to protest injustices, and I think that’s clear. It’s also clear that some people did try to do so at the time.

My point is that to look backwards with 20/20 hindsight and say “oh, if only a hundred thousand Jews had the imagination to offer themselves up for death, then they’d have saved millions” is victim-blaming of the worst kind.

Some people believe they own the Holocaust, but it’s been shared so widely it’s public property.

I hope that Michael and I both take early action when the big threats come again. But times have changed and it’s too soon to say what could work. The germans had asked for mercy after WWI and they didn’t get it. So they decided they weren’t going to be all hypocritical, they were going to say openly that nobody liked them and the only way they could get by was to take what they wanted by brute force. And millions of jewish civilians wound up individually begging for mercy from them and they didn’t get it either. What’s particularly horrifying is the lack of hypocrisy, the germans came right out and said what they were doing.

And so after the war a lot of israelis took the wrong lesson from all that, they went out and took what they wanted too, though they kept a halfway-decent level of hypocrisy.

Very different from the british in india. Indians tolerated british rule just fine when they were clearly better than the Raj. They set up telegraph and railroad, they built textile factories that made cloth cheap, etc. The british didn’t begin to have the military force in india to suppress revolt—they depended on native troops for much of that. So when a whole lot of indians were ready for the british to go, the british were going to go. Gandhi figured out that it didn’t take violence, and his plan worked that time. It was a best-case example. Note that the british didn’t and couldn’t control communications in india. There just werent enough brits there. They could impose some censorship on some official channels, but it was mostly hopeless.

So, say that something like the Holocaust was starting in the USA. The official communications are all tightly controlled. We have things like blogs, but bloggers mostly get their news from official sources and then discuss it.

So, like, we find out we’re putting illegal immigrants in camps while they wait to be deported. Nothing special there, right? We do that.

And say we find out that death rates in the camps are higher than you’d expect. That’s old news too. Well, we aren’t putting them up at the Ritz. They shouldn’t have come here.

And say we find out that advocates for illegal immigrants are getting thrown into the camps with the IIs. Hey, it isn’t strictly legal but it’s what they deserve. I haven’t seen this in the news. Maybe it won’t happen.

And by the time rumors about what’s actually happening in the camps leak out, would maybe a lot of americans approve? We’ve had such a series of wishy-washy PC administrations that haven’t actually gotten anything done. At last a US government that means business. And as the rumors persist, there’s just that little bit of fear—if you stand out in your disapproval it could happen to you.

Would you organize a sit-down strike? Get a parade permit? Say the police decide the parade is cancelled and tell everybody to go home, and they arrest everybody who doesn’t go home, how many details would get into the news? They call your boss and tell him you couldn’t make bail. They call your family. “We understand that you didn’t know Katherine was a terrorist, or you would have turned her in. None of you are in trouble.”

And if you’re in a camp and your story never got told, what good did your sacrifice do to anybody?

The technology is different. The hypocrisy is different. The responses would have to be different too. But if nobody does anything preventive, then I guess we just have to hope nobody will choose to do the bad stuff.

Oh well, if that’s all it demands, then the path was clear. Sacrifice yourself, your children, your spouse and your parents (the suggestion was a few hundred thousand, yes?) on the chance that death by riot police would be preferable to, well, death. If only those silly Jews had had the imagination to realise it!

God, I think I’ve rarely heard something so offensive. I’m sure you’ll be the first in front of the guns next time your imagination leads you to the conclusion that the unimaginable is coming.

I think that was part of it. Sure, the camps where political dissidents including jews were worked to death were bad, they were as bad as the russian gulag. Ideally we would have conquered germany and russia both over that.

But it was hard to believe in the industrial-scale genocide. It was easy to think that was just disinformation, lies intended to fan the war effort. And in reality it was not the major thing—perhaps 4 million people died in the death camps, including probably more than 2.5 million jews, when the other stuff—work-to-death, rifle and grenade raids, etc—killed something like 7 to 9 million including around 3 million russian POWs.

But the information before 1945 was not obviously reliable. People had every reason to think they were being lied to about german atrocities just as they had been in WWI. The death camps were hard to believe, and the stuff that was clearly true was true of our russian allies too.