Night Will Fall and German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

Singer says the film was never shown because only a few months after its commissioning the Allied leadership wanted the German population to cooperate in rehabilitating their country so that it could be a bulwark against the Soviet Union, and therefore thought it counterproductive to showcase ordinary Germans’ complicity in the Holocaust.

Dachau wasn’t a death camp; it was one of the first KZs, set up soon after the Nazis first came to power, but its purpose was merely(!) to detain people indefinitely without trial. There were six extermination camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The first two were in territory annexed to Germany, the other four in the territory of the Generalgouvernement; all of them are in the middle of what’s now Poland.

Ordinary Germans certainly couldn’t escape knowing about the internment of political prisoners – and of anyone else who put a foot wrong, for that matter – and about the deportation of Jews. But the Holocaust itself wasn’t going on under their noses, and I’m not sure it’s fair to charge them with complicity in it.

Dachau and Buchenwald were death camps, places of grave horror and inhumanity.

The technical distinction that scholars of the Holocaust have made between the concentration camps and the extermination camps should not lead anyone to imagine that the concentration camps belonged to some distinctly better moral universe. The horror did occur under the noses of the Germans and they smelled it every damn day. Go look at the pictures of prisoners at the liberated concentration camps, the dead bodies stacked like cordwood, the skeltal prisoners crowded into dormitories.

. . . they didn’t, in all probability, know about the Holocaust.

I don’t know what the point of excusing them from knowledge is. They knew. They didn’t care. The not-caring is the scary, reprehensible thing.

Shatterface 09.17.14 at 7:02 pm:
I probably won’t get to see this at the cinema but hopefully the film will join BFI’s impressive series of Blu-ray releases.

I am surprised material of this importance has not long since been placed on the Internet in high-definition format, along with supporting material. What are they waiting for?

Most people don’t care much about things that don’t affect them personally. In any case, one might say opinions differed very widely in Germany about the Nazis and their doings during the period in question.

I’ve seen film of American soldiers herding crowds of German civilians through camps amid piles of bodies so they couldn’t claim they had never seen what was going on within a few kilometers of their town. However I think this was something that the commanders did on their own initiative, rather than being an official policy.

Anarcissie #7: I live in Canada and had to resort to illegal means to find a full version of “Shoah” a few years ago – no North American DVD and no decent YouTube version – which is insane. Thank goodness Criterion came out with its version, and it is also now on YouTube in semi-watchable form.

Maybe pedantry and Nazism don’t mix. All I’m saying is that, while ordinary Germans certainly lived quite close to concentration camps in which appalling things were done, few if any of them lived close to death camps in which Jews (and others) were systematically exterminated. If they were complicit in the Holocaust, their complicity had nothing to do with geographical proximity to Dachau, Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen.

September Song by Geoffrey Hill

born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

#14 Peter T.

In Germany, Jews were a routine part of forced labour, worked to death. They were in most large factories.

What I saw was all in the context of people discovered to be Jews or gypsies or homosexuals or opposed to the Nazis, were sent to camps (and some never arrived, killed on the way) where they were worked to death. I did not see that most large factories had their own starving Jews forced to work in them. Was that the norm and just not as much emphasized in the later literature?

When I was a kid the DMV had a prison on the road my house was on. My school bus went by it every day. They had fences with barbed wire on top, and some buildings, and about 3/4 of it was regular DMV stuff. Every now and then I saw men in black-and-white-striped uniforms working beside the road with leg-irons. A distant relative visited there some, he passed out programmed-learning texts and he said the inmates liked them a lot. He let me try out one of the prisoners’ texts, about astronomy. He said they kept it very hot in there, and it nearly killed him coming inside from the winter cold but it didn’t seem to bother them.

That’s all I knew about them. If prisoners were being killed in there nobody told me. Of course I think they weren’t, and I don’t really know whether I would have gotten hints of it if they were.

10: “no-one had a right to be surprised, it’s not as though Hitler *hid* what he wanted to do!”

When I do my Holocaust lecture in World History, I show my students a (fairly local, from here) newspaper clipping from 1934 in which the American Zionist conference is explicitly raising money to rescue German Jews, with national journalistic attention.
“The Jew is always ready to die for his country,” said Dr. Wise, “but he is not ready to die at the hands of his country.”

I also go through the NSDAP party platform, which predates that by ten years. It’s pretty effective.

Sorry, forgot the link to the clipping: I have it on Flickr.

#18

Forced labour was very widely parcelled out to farms and firms. There was a racial hierarchy – French, Belgians and Dutch treated best (though still badly), Poles and Russians underfed and punished harshly, Jews worked to death.

Yes, but the impression I had was that Jews and the others treated similarly were kept in camps away from most civilians, not worked to death in regular factories among regular employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II
This link gives that impression. Some POWs were forced to work but treated relatively well, others were paid less, fed less, put under curfew etc but still allowed significant freedom, and still others were kept in camps and never allowed to leave, and badly mistreated there.

#20

To those who say the ordinary Germans might not have known what happened to the Jewish, Gypsy, Queer etcetera neighbors after they were marched out of their homes penniless at gunpoint and disappeared into boxcars: even if this were plausible (and what could happen to them, after that?

Americans saw US citizens of Japanese descent marched out of their homes at gunpoint and disappeared. However, we did not have a government policy that people of Japanese descent should be killed, though we did have a policy that everyone of Japanese descent should be removed from the western hemisphere. Tens of thousands of inmates were eventually allowed to leave the camps and go to the east coast, where they could report on camp conditions. So it was not really parallel. Still, seeing people marched away with only the clothes on their backs was not enough in itself — we did that ourselves and our intentions were much milder.

However, a number of Jews had been ransomed from the labor camps before the war heated up, and they explained that people were worked to death there. Any Germans who paid sufficient attention to the foreign press would hear about that. It would scare them, because anybody who was accused of opposing the Nazi regime could be sent there and worked to death.

@24 — Americans (that is, inhabitants of the US) exterminated about 99% of the American Indians. The last known ‘wild’ Indians were hunted down and captured or killed early in the 20th century, just twenty years or so before the beginning of the Third Reich. (Hitler was born the year before Wounded Knee, 1889.) Most Americans of the extermination era were sort of aware of what was going on but didn’t worry about it too much, although later on there was occasional sanctimony. We’ve got the talent.

We know about slave labor, too.

‘What the war changed was not their knowledge but their attitudes.’ (Peter T, comment 14)
Contemporary attitudes got recorded.
http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2013/02/secret-second-world-war-tapes-german-pows

There is a debate going on in Sweden on a similar topic: what did the Swedes know about the Holocaust and when did we learn about it. It relates to a new book by Jan Guillou. A great number of newsarticles from 1942-1944 have been unearthed to prove Guillou wrong – the Swedes knew by spring 1943 because the relevant information was presented to them by the papers, including on frontpages. Guillou isn’t giving in. It seems he argues that to have knowledge, it is not only necessary to have true information which one is justified to believe in, but one actually has to believe in it.

IIRC, Dachau was the camp portrayed in Bent; don’t know how realistic. The protagonist, to have a better chance of survival, swaps his pink triangle for a yellow star.

Every society has undesirables. Few people care about the US prison population (probably close to 3 million now). I’ve watched documentaries trying to raise awareness, so I know. The conditions are appalling, and a lot of them are mentally ill, apparently, so that’s a bit of similarity right there. What do you want me to do about it? Write to my congressman?

Some internet crap I was looking at the other day.
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/i/irving-david/jackel/jt-1-5.html
The following is all quoted (including formatting, which I’d double-check if there were a preview button):
While the bloody work was being carried out in secret, and
although along the whole military and home fronts it was known by rumor, Hitler developed the peculiar ambition to mention it again and again in his public speeches. Thus in 1942, at the zenith, he did so no fewer than five times.

On January 1:

The Jew will not exterminate the European peoples,
but will instead be the victim of his own assassination attempt.

On January 30:

Already on September 1, 1939, in the German
Reichstag,[40] although careful not to indulge in premature prophesies, I declared that this war will not lead to the result the Jews imagine, namely that the European peoples would be exterminated; instead, the conclusion of this war will result in the destruction of Jewry.

On February 24:

[…] my prophesy will be fulfilled, namely that
this war will result not in the annihilation of Aryan humanity, but in the extermination of the Jew.

Whatever the war may bring with it, or however
long it may last, this will surely be its end result.

On September 30:

Back on September 1, 1939, I addressed a session
of the Reichstag about two things: […] secondly, if Jewry managed to instigate an international world war, intended to exterminate the Aryan peodles, it will not be the Aryan peoples who will be exterminated, but rather Jewry.

On November 8:

You will recall the session of the Reichstag at
which I declared: "If Jewry were to fancy that an international world war would result in the extermination of the European races, then the result will not be the extermination of the European races but the extermination of all of Jewry all through Europe. I have always been ridiculed as a prophet. But of those who laughed then, innumerable ones are not laughing any longer, and those who are still laughing will also shortly stop. Before long this realization should come to dawn on Europe and on the whole world. International Jewry will then be recognized for the demonic danger that it is. We National Socialists [Nazis] shall see to it.

Nitpick:

André Singer didn’t “make” The Act of Killing, he was executive producer on it.

That nit has already been picked.

There is a worryingly complete set of Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels (the rough equivalent of Pathé) on Youtube. Watching them in context, as opposed to short excerpts, gives a remarkably good feel as to how Nazi propaganda worked in practice; it’s ostensibly real and vivid in what it does show (apparently unfaked front-line footage), but very clever in the gaps of what it leaves out – no German dead, and only the most shell-shocked and asiatic looking Soviet prisoners.

Having watched a few, the only one I’ve found which explictly addresses Jews is a jocular filler piece about one of the Baltic states in early July 41, of which the tone is basically ‘look at these lazy Jews we’re now putting to work hard – now they’re being productive members of society at last’. Their fate after the shots of them sweating away under the eyes of German soliders while they dig anti-tank ditches and trenches is left unanswered.

The argument that one should have known (that all undesirables would be systematically murdered, worked to death, gased doesnt make much of a difference to me) because Hitler said it is pretty dangerous. First, he did not spell it out that directly. His flowerly lanaguage from 1939 quoted here for example could have much less radical implications. Second, typically people that anounce crazy things fortunatly dont do them. That includes politicians that pander both to a mass audience and radical supporters. Its that slipery slope that leads to demands of a preemtive war against Iran because of the “wipe Israel from the map ” sentence.

The concept of collective guilt has been thoroughly discredited.

The concept of collective punishment has been thoroughly discredited in many academic and ethical circles (if not policy institutions) but I don’t recall ever seeing an argument suggesting that a community can’t be considered to have collectively failed its normative responsibilities

The community to be judged would have to be fairly well-organized so that it could be held to exhibit identifiable collective will. Thus, maybe, in the case of the Nazi atrocities, the German state, but not the German people, who included many people who were opposed to the Nazis and some of whom actively opposed them at great risk to themselves.

The westernmost of them is over 200 miles east of Berlin.

That‘s pretty far.

I always got the impression these speeches generally went over well.

I had read that too, but now that I think about it, the only place I remember reading this for sure is an Agatha Christie novel (Passenger to Frankfurt, which was the first book of hers I read).

“All” is a distraction.

#50

Ok, the guilty Germans were guilty – I give you that.

Merian @ 54 (09.18.14 at 10:27 pm) — Thank you for that comment.

#22 -” My grandfather didn’t personally fight to open the gates at Auschwitz but he was there just a few days later and has photos in his war journal.”

Unlikely, Belle. Auschwitz, in Poland, was liberated by Soviet soldiers at the end of January 1945. At the time, the US Army was still west of the Rhine.

Your grandfather was more likely at Dachau or at Buchenwald. Both were liberated by American soldiers in April 1945.

Dachau was well-known in Nazi Germany because people from all over Germany sojurned there in its initial role as a political prison. Everyone knew someone, who had been a political prisoner there. And, being sent to Dachau was a news worthy event since it served a propaganda purpose. So everyone knew of people sent to Dachau.

The concentration camps and, later, the extermination camps, were part of an extensive system for carrying out projects on a nationwide and continental scale. It was not isolated activity in an isolated place.

@60, by dax
Götz Aly, in ‘Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden’ describes a German Jewish writer (can’t remember the name and don’t have the book at hand) who saw Very Bad Things coming way before anyone took Hitler seriously. All you had to do was listen to people and believe that they meant what they said about the Jews.

@58

Those are a lot of questions, and I’d feel more like answering them if your first paragraph made more sense. “If Boston and New York are that close together”? Are you saying you think maybe that’s a fact in need of further verification? And what does the second part even mean? Maybe you could explain. I might have time to answer the rest of it later in the day.

As another example, though, it’s the same distance from Liverpool to London. In the nineteenth century, was there almost no awareness in London of what living conditions were in Liverpool? Would we feel silly saying “people in southern England were just too far from the industrial north to be expected to care”?

I thought Sybil was about multiple personality disorder.

The purpose of the film described seems to be punishment of the Germans and self-justification by the Allies and in particular the British, since, obviously, if the point is that the Germans well knew what was going on, the film would have little or no informational value when shown in Germany: The surviving Germans of the immediate post-war period had to be presumed to have a generally better understanding of what they themselves knew than any external observer could possibly demonstrate for them. The message therefore would not be “you knew,” but “we know you knew,” and, further, “as grossly guilty people under our power, you can expect us to deliver further punishment or otherwise do with you as we see fit without undue regard for your feelings, wishes, or protests.” In addition to serving in this way as a kind of warden to prisoners communique, the film itself would also have qualified as emotional punishment, if perhaps somewhat trivially in context.

In The Third Reich at War, Richard Evans concludes that the Germans by various means (as mentioned in some comments above) knew more than enough about their horrendous treatment of the Jews and others to consider themselves guilty and to expect others to do so as well. To the disappointment of contemporary analysts reporting to the SS, many Germans seemed to regard, or Germans may even generally have regarded, the bombardment of German cities and other suffering caused by the war as their own just deserts. As for the question of contrition, a perceived lack of it could therefore be explained by two factors: 1) a belief that the Germans collectively had already suffered gravely, or done penance, for their sins; 2) a natural desire to deflect responsibility and shift blame, in the hope of avoiding imposition of further punishment or vengeance.

Given the complexities of human psychology, in particular the common ability to hold contradictory viewpoints at the same time – or common inability or unwillingness to think consistently or to align conduct and intellect – we shouldn’t be surprised if people were able to hold these positions and also to hope for or fantasize about victory, to continue to fight or to support the war effort even with recognition of its gross self-destructiveness, and, to varying degrees and even under general and heightening skepticism, to continue to absorb Nazi propaganda and find some comfort, hope, or renewed self-justification in it.

CK MacLeod @ 67

Think about the way the Turks, even today, fiercely deny any responsibility for the Armenian genocide. Holocaust denial was always a predictable response, a scaffolding waiting to be built, to support a revival of right-wing authoritarianism.

The film, in the context of the Second World War and contemporary thinking about its genesis, may have been intended as truth-telling prophylaxis against pathological denial that might facilitate a revival of pathological right-wing politics. It wasn’t a matter of informing the Germans that they’d shit the bed — they knew that, but were motivated to forget and rationalize in ways that could be destructive, and not just to themselves. It was sticking their noses in the smell, while it still stank unmistakably.

The Second World War was caused, in large part, by the stories that the Germans had told themselves about the First War: Dolchstoßlegende and so on. The overweening German imperial ambitions and disregard for international norms, which had driven the first World War had been reincarnated in Nazi lebensraum and aggression. The Jews were dead, because of how anti-semitism informed and interacted with those stories. The Allied policy of seeking unconditional surrender, with the aim of undertaking an occupation and a forcible reconstruction of German politics, was a response to the failure of Versailles to provide an adequate means to nurture a successful liberal state or contain the reaction to the failure of the liberal state that followed the revolution of 1918.

Awareness of what was going on, during the 1930s and during the war, within Germany was hopelessly mixed up with pervasive Nazi propaganda and with the psychological stresses imposed by the war, itself. The Nazi propaganda apparatus, contrary to the imaginings of some commenters here, wasn’t about keeping secrets; it was about the expert mixing of lies and threats, so that people could mire themselves in uncritical embrace of contradictory, but sometimes convenient beliefs. The film, using the power of the unblinking eye, might usefully cut through that accumulation and catalyze the adoption of more moderate and humane attitudes, anchoring subsequent reflective thought in facts.

Several commenters have mentioned that the “awareness” of what was going on with the Jews and others in Germany, among the allies before and during the wars had some of the same mixed quality. The Soviet offensives of the Summer of 1944 made the first contact with the networks of labor camps and the remains of the network of extermination camps. The Germans were scrupulous in their treatment of western prisoners of war, but they often treated Soviet prisoners of war very badly, engaging in forced labor, starvation and mass executions, and the Soviets noticed. The extermination camps, with the possible exception of some facilities within the labor camp at Majdanek, captured early on by the Soviets, were gone. A Soviet correspondent reported on Treblinka in 1944, but he was witnessing little more than debris fields and his estimates of the death toll was exaggerated, giving his report the quality of Soviet propaganda.

The holocaust was anticipated — people were fleeing Europe in desperation before the war came. And, the holocaust was reported during the war, but was no doubt discounted in many minds amidst the propaganda and the general horror of total war. The emaciated bodies of the concentration camps at the end of the war became the first face of the holocaust, the incontrovertible proof of the nature of the Nazi regime. I don’t think I would dismiss the first raw reaction, the shock — and it was a shock despite the nominal awareness previously — as mere self-justification from the Allied side.

It may be worth noting that despite the shock people did not behave necessarily behave well. Many concentration camp survivors, deemed petty criminals, were not released from custody immediately. Some of the camps were repurposed to hold other classes of prisoners. Survivors were not always, or even usually, able to fully reclaim looted property. Resentments against the victims surfaced quickly enough. Promised programs of compensation were often stingy or compromised. (I have a Dutch friend, who was in a concentration camp as a teenager, who has received a pension ever since — he’s shown me the checkstub: the Dutch government loads so many fees and deductions, that the net payment is practically nil.)

On the whole, Germany became a better country, a better people and a better culture, as they have been able to confront the truth, insofar as they have. Sometimes, that has involved parceling out the truth over time in the slow, generational process of historical digestion. It’s not the only possible path, and though the films referenced in the OP may have been diverted from their first purpose, they can further a good purpose now.

I once asked a Turkish (teenage) guy what he thought of the Armenian holocaust, and his response was not to deny it, but to say that it was the Ottomans that did it, not the current government.

godoggo @ 72 Aggressive denial that there was an Armenian genocide has been the policy of the Turkish Republic for many years. We can count ourselves lucky that holocaust denial is a matter for nutjobs at the Institute for Historical Review and not the German government.

Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners works from the thesis that apriori or aposteriori knowledge would have made little difference.The “final solution” proceded from an eliminationist antisemitism so deeply embedded in the German culture along with nationalism that the outcome was all but inevitable. Even Martin Niemoller generally accorded a heroes status before becoming conscience- stricken preached sermons that extolled the eliminationist perspective.

Other historians like Christopher Browning have rejected Goldhagen’s thesis. The alternative, and much more economical, theory is that a quite large but minority group of eliminationist fanatics, including the top leadership of the Nazi party and a substantial part of its membership, were able to use the machinery of the state they had captured to carry out the extermination they had always wanted. Its cxecution was only possible through additional factors: a very widespread, probably majoritarian, discriminatory anti-semitism, little different from that general in France, Britain or the USA; the processes of obedience and group solidarity which allowed “ordinary men” to become mass killers; and control of the media, concealing the Holocaust from certain public knowledge to the end.

One key item of evidence against Goldhagen is Kristallnacht. The Nazis had it seems hoped to start a true pogrom, with ordinary Germans joining great mobs rampaging and killing Jews as in Tsarist Russia. It didn’t work out. The Nazis did what they could, which was bad enough, without help. They drew the conclusion that the mass of the German population would neither cooperate in nor obstruct violence against Jews. So they could get away with deportations to Somewhere Bad.

A striking confirmation of Browning’s “ordinary men” hypothesis comes from the sack of Isfahan by the Tatar army of Timur the Lame in 1387. In retaliation for an uprising within the surrendered city, Timur ordered all its inhabitants to be killed. Each army unit was ordered to supply a quota of heads, and this filtered down to individual soldiers. Marozzi:
“At first, Yazdi observed, there was great reluctance among the soldiers to murder fellow Muslims in cold blood. Many bought heads from more willing executioners. heads changed hands for twenty dinars apiece until the soldiers lost their scruples and the torrent of slaughter raged unabated throughout the city; the price plunged to half a dinar.”
Yazdi was a court biographer and very pro-Timur. There seems no reason to doubt him.

Bruce Wilder @https://crookedtimber.org/2014/09/17/night-will-fall-and-german-concentration-camps-factual-survey/#comment-566545: “sticking their noses in the smell, while it still stank unmistakably” is close to the actual purpose I described, so I’m not sure whether you intended to disagree with me. The expression derives, of course, from common housebreaking methods which, as you may be aware, are considered counterproductive – the preferred theory now being that the dog won’t recognize that its act led causally to the punishment, and may pick up other bad behaviors in reaction to what amounts from its perspective to random violence. That dogs punished in that way actually do become housebroken is considered correlation, implying that the human being may also be confused about cause and effect, just from the opposite direction. All that we know for sure is that the dog making a mess on our carpet causes us to feel anger, and that punishing the dog seems to cause us to feel better.

How much our preferred causational narratives regarding great historical events are similarly flawed is an interesting question, but one hesitates to push it too hard in relation to the German crimes, since doing so will tend to be taken as an attempt to extenuate the unforgivable. All the same, perhaps we can consider just for sake of argument that supposed and actual purposes for “rubbing their noses in it” may diverge, and that production and distribution of guilt-demonstrating narratives are meant as much to remind the guilty who is in charge and how those in charge feel about remaining in charge, in other words can be associated with “victor’s justice.” That would only be wrong, however, if implementation of victor’s punishment and reminder of victor’s power were bad things – if, for instance, we just felt angry about a mess, and it made us feel better to punish the Germans collectively, regardless of consequences or fairness, and even though we were the side that supposedly means to get rid of collective guilt. If, however, the victory was a just victory, or a good and necessary one – because, say, the world including the Germans cannot handle German ethno-nationalism at a tolerable cost – then victor’s justice might still be some combination of just, good, and necessary.

You’re a GOOD Nazi, yes you are, yes you are!

“What the Nazis were scarily good at was to immediately shut down any organisation that could serve as a crystalization point for resistance”

This sounds like the essence of it. An atomized population is helpless; it doesn’t matter if every one is aware. The trick is in proactive and careful elimination of agitators. But this is, of course, well-known from the times immemorial, it’s trivial. Where’s the mystery?

How was Mao post-’53 any more desperate than a Hoxha or a Tito?

How was Mao post-’53 any more desperate than a Hoxha or a Tito?

They started out with more people than they could feed. The USSR gave them some help but not very much, not nearly enough. As things got worse Mao could face problems not just from nationalists but from “reformers” in his own party. Meanwhile the USA made public hints that it might nuke Chinese cities.

Mao arranged a collection of distractions while he tried to bring food production up and population down. For example, the attempt to make backyard iron mills did not actually produce much iron, but it ensured that for at least 70 years nobody could literally bomb China back to the stone age.

I know less about Hoxha or Tito, so I could be wrong about them. Yugoslavia suffered terribly during the war, with various attempts at ethnic cleansing etc. Tito enforced peace without too much ethnic discrimination, and people were glad of it. They didn’t start fighting again until the people who remembered the war were no longer influential. Plus a whole lot of citizens didn’t want the Russians to take over. Tito had a lot of citizens who wanted him to stay on top. I don’t think he had it as hard as Mao, but I could be wrong.

Hoxha I know even less about. He could have been militarily defeated by either of his neighbors but nobody wanted to occupy a bunch of albanians. He could make cement without having to import anything, so he built lots of pillboxes to persuade his people he was big on defense. Things got materially better for a long time, and I have the impression his people mostly tolerated him. Their biggest complaint was the attempt to enforce atheism.

But you may know enough to disagree and be right. I’m open to finding out I’ve been misinformed.

Well, I am under the impression that most of Mao’s crises were self-imposed. China started extremely poor, but only slghtly poorer than India, and better-off even in the’50s in terms of infant mortality. Tito could face Soviet invasion and escaped a few attempts to kill him. Ot: reading of Mao (or Stalin, or Robespierre), I always get the feeling they were in a hurry or something. Which they were, being revolutionaries. Conservative dictators have it easier, they don’t have to actually do anything but survive.

Well, I am under the impression that most of Mao’s crises were self-imposed.

You could be right. Stalin’s purges made it harder to organize against him. I think. Stalin probably thought so. Borodin wrote about two Ministry directors in Georgia who spread rumors about each other of plotting to secede Georgia from the USSR, each trying to get the other fired and shot. They were arrested for plotting together. Mao’s purges etc probably had similar effect. His detractors said that his schemes resulted in crop failures, but if the crop failures were coming anyway his actions at least distracted people and helped keep them from organizing against him.

You don’t know enough and have not thought enough to be open to evidence. “Stalin, not a nice guy” isn’t open to anything — it’s Dunning-Krueger as rendered by Dali, it’s a Monty Python skit without a sense of humor.

James Wimberley @77
A striking confirmation of Browning’s “ordinary men” hypothesis comes from the sack of Isfahan by the Tatar army of Timur the Lame in 1387.

The list of confirmations of that hypothesis is probably fairly lengthy. The Albigensian Crusade. The Peninsular War. The Mylai massacre. The Rwandan genocide. The Cambodian genocide (probably; I don’t know enough about the details). Etc.

#93

You don’t know enough and have not thought enough to be open to evidence.

You think? It would be possible to attempt the experiment. That’s a pretty sweeping conclusion to draw ahead of time. ;-)

95: Cambodia, yeah, definitely. See “Enemies of the People” on this. Incredible film.

J Thomas @ 97 that’s a pretty sweeping conclusion to draw ahead of time.

Except it’s not “ahead of time” — it’s after you have stepped into the comment thread’s consideration of evidence and swept it away with absurdly facile generalizations.

3,0000,000 people died in Vietnam, 2,000,000 in Korea. I wonder what the death rate was in some of the Gaza-sized areas we bombed. Not defending israel, but occasionally I allow myself to be irked by Thomas’s monomania.

Not Vietnam particularly, the US strategy was braindead but the idea was mainly to kill enemy soldiers until they gave up, and when they didn’t give up then the idea was to kill more of them.

Certainly, believing in the righteousness of one’s cause (I’m upholding the banner of Good) is no protection against committing atrocities. And I don’t think intentions are the best measure of what is or isn’t a ‘holocaust.’ By my lights the US visited a holocaust on Vietnam, hands down. Let’s judge it by the results, not the rhetoric.

And fwiw, I agree with Bruce that you’re too quick to generalize.

I’m in a testy frame of mind. Been looking at some of the comments here.
http://www.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2014/09/11/henry-rollins-why-joan-rivers-was-a-champion#readerComments

p.s. In the Native American case, it was a slow genocide over decades, thus unusual, and the explanation accordingly may be somewhat different than any general theory of genocide someone might come up with, or might have already come up with. (But I’m speculating, ignorantly. The best kind of speculation.)

J. Thomas., I apologize.

#108 LFC

I don’t think the “nice guys” explanation is esp. compelling (to put it mildly). Genocide is by its nature a rather extreme act or set of acts (what the U.S. did in Vietnam was in various respects criminal but not genocide, imo) and it’s likely going to be produced by extreme circumstances sometimes acting in combination with extreme ideologies.

So let me see if I understand. Your alternative is that genocide and other extreme evilness is just not useful all that often “extreme circumstances” and it takes unusual thinking “extreme ideologies”.

That sounds plausible to me. It fits with my idea — leaders usually feel like “nice guys” more than have extreme ideologies that justify great evils, and also the situation just does not come up that much. I don’t have anything like a decisive argument against that.

In the case of the U.S., the clearest instance of genocide was the treatment of the Native American population, a “problem” (in the US govt’s view) that had largely been “solved” by the time the frontier closed in the late 19th century.

Americans thought different back in those days. A lot of people didn’t think that nonchristians deserved any particular rights. Anyway, if you were a farmer you were only free if you had your own land, and there was a whole country full of unclaimed land, at any given time enough for the remaining Indians to leave the land our farmers wanted and go somewhere else. Once the frontier was gone we could stop making the Native Americans move around, unless they were parked on top of valuable oil or minerals etc.

“And they say Japan teaches history poorly…”

Am I wrong? The settlers wanted land, and they kept pushing Native Americans somewhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Territory

While there was plenty of untaken land, there were places to push Native Americans. It was only after the frontier was gone that there was nowhere for them except land that nobody else wanted enough to take from them.

What is your complaint?

An American veteran commits suicide every 65 minutes, because of the soul-damage of the conflicts they’re being sent into, the things they’ve seen and done, for reasons they’ve found to be lies, and the failure of the ineffectual and incompetent “support” they receive when they return from those conflicts.
American police kill someone every day, a hugely disproportionate number of those deaths are black and brown and poor.
Conditions in some Central American countries are so dystopic now, children travel at great risk 1000’s of miles just to chance the border. In places like Honduras those dystopic conditions are a direct result of the simultaneous War on Drugs and narco-trafficking enabling of American agencies.
The environmental destruction that’s looming just ahead of us is being caused by corporations and policies that have in many instances a primarily American origin.
Those are just a few seriously wrong things that are happening right now, and the ambiguous nature of knowledge and culpability in the American public, the control of information and attitude, means most citizens can legitimately claim not to know, and can still claim to be basically decent people, because most of them really “don’t know”.
More germane to the thread, one feature of the cathartic post-war Nuremberg Trials was the “Doctors’ Trial” where the medical enablers of the Nazi death camps were tried for, among other things, human experimentation. I believe nine of the 20 plus doctors on trial were executed.
At the same time as those trials, and throughout the 20th century, human experiments were being conducted in America, often on the captive institutionalized, often glossed with deceptive legalisms and dubiously gained “consent”. These were not heartless Aryan scientists doing these things. The famous Salk vaccine for polio was developed in part through human experiments that were far from above-board.
But you didn’t know that. You didn’t see it.

The Turks say about Armenia, that it was was ethnic cleansing, what we did here. I’ve seen quoted evidence in support, too, so I believe them.

I’m not a historian — I’m a geophysicist and sometimes play a linguist on the internets — but what Anarcissie says in @117 needs some flagging up even by someone who doesn’t have a claim to expertise. European genocides in the Middle Ages? I have no idea what you’re referring to specifically. Sure, war was a pretty much constant state at that time, but it was also mostly a much more small-scale phenomenon. Sure, Oswiu of Northumbria may have displayed the cut-off head of the defeated Penda of Mercia in 655 or whenever, but there wasn’t much genociding going on. And then you mention the thirty years’ war, which happened about 200 years AFTER the extreme end of the Middle Ages, a time when indeed nation states were beginning to form, though they wouldn’t be done for another 200+ years until most major European states even could be talked of as existing. No, be it the colonial variety, or mass killings around the edges of Europe, or anti-semitic pogroms, genocides by European perpetrators are pretty clearly centering around the 19th and 20th centuries.

#121

“That was how they thought, though. “

That was not how everyone thought at those times – so it was deliberate wickedness by some specific people responsible – not just, “oh there was no other way of thinking possible in them old days” :/

What do you want? The people who wanted land thought that way. People who already had their land could afford to think other ways. But they mostly didn’t go out and intervene. Occasionally they sent out the army to stop the settlers from taking Indian land. Occasionally they sent out the army to clear indians out of land that settlers wanted. You know which approach had the more lasting impact.

When we invaded Iraq, not all of us thought it was a good idea. And then we got the news, one day at a time. Some people protested. I wrote my congressman and senators, I signed petitions and went on peace marches etc etc etc. The government let me. The media was reporting a few arab-americans who disappeared. They got taken away, and their wives tried to get publicity, and ask what happened to them, and a few times they actually did get some publicity. I didn’t know any arabs so I don’t know how often it happened apart from what the media reported. They could have taken me away too if they cared. Instead they let me protest just as much as I wanted to, and the net result was zilch.

Someday people will ask how we could have let it happen. If enough details surface in our lifetimes to expose it, I think most Americans will say they didn’t know. But the media reported enough that anybody who thought about it could have guessed. And none of us were willing to do what it took to prevent it, or to stop it before it went way too far.

Ze Kraggash 09.21.14 at 6:13 pm

“John Yoo begs to differ. He thinks dictatorship in a time of war (i.e.: most of the time) is an essential feature.”

No, he thinks that Republican presidents should rule as dictators. He complained about Clinton and Obama exceeding their constitutional authority.

Maybe a concrete example would help?

Maybe a concrete example would help?

I don’t speak for Anarcissie, but perhaps the Albigensian Crusade is a good example? Religious, political, and linguistic dominance were contested, and according to the Wikipedia article, a million people died.

This

http://securingrights.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/four-dilemmas/

might be useful for people(which is a lit review on the research on mass atrocities, though from a contemporary perspective IIRC- i read it at the time but not since )