Why do we live in a world where people sympathize and side with rapists?

[Yukaphile]

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[Fuzzy Necromancer]

They are not as guilty as the soviet rapists. That doesn't change that they supported absolute evil.

Women who voted for Trump are guilty because they supported somebody who would oppress others, because their hatred of brown and queer people was stronger than their self-interest.

Somebody honestly believed a nearby town knew nothing about the concentration camp...until they learned the townspeople always stayed inside when smoke was rising from the showers.

[Yukaphile]

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[Beastro]

Beastro, are you really making an appeal to EvoPsych?

Yukaphile, I, personally, consider rape worse than murder, because I can see situations where murder would be justified, but none for rape. I am all for rapists getting decapitated at least.

If you want to put it that way, though I find recent talk of it rather odd.

My point is more we are not Tabula Rasa and come into life, and consciousness, with many things. Some in a pragmatic way are no issue for me, like the differences between the sexes, while other are things we must be mindful of and restrain although not all of us come with those aspects, such as predispositions to things whether they be alcoholism or a urge to torture and kill animals (at first) in childhood.

I guess what it comes down to for me is the increasing dissatisfaction with what I call "narcissism of the conscious-self", that the conscious personality is the end all be all to us and that it's whims and desires come before the rest of us as an individual that results in a Gnostic outlook on life: reducing the body to a mere vehicle to abuse and a dysfunctional outlook that leaves one open the other aspects of the mind by ignoring them, such as those that give us our interests and dislikes that can be the source of talents but also of danger, as I described above.

One thing we can agree on is your reply to Yukaphile. A quote I live by, that IIRC is from Churchill, but I can't pick it out is, to paraphrase: "If you're going to kill someone, it doesn't hurt to be kind". Kill someone and be done with it, there is no need to draw it out and be cruel even if they're someone that we all might agree on, if only for the effect cruelty has on those that perpetrate it.

I'd be all for having the death penalty for rape again if it wasn't open to abuse in a way murder isn't - it's rather hard to lie about someone killing you. Sadly, I have had experiences on both ends of the scale that have left me taking a very zealous stance over things like rape - I have a friend who has been sexually abuse more than once and how we met involved a pack of three boys hurting her, and yet both of us have former friend claimed to have been raped, but it turned out she'd lied about it jealous of all the "special" attention our friend had been getting seeing things through the lens of the neglect she'd been getting from her parents taking care of her many siblings and not being properly rewarded for the job she'd done.

That people would lie over something like that, let alone do so to get someone in trouble, which thank God she didn't despite the fact that it happen, infuriates me because it plants a seed of doubt and suspicion in people's minds that will inevitably result in genuine claims being disbelieved on a statistical scale, and the situation my friend was in would have resulted in her suicide as she's confided in me had she not had me to turn to.

@Beastro Exactly. Hell, you think I can't feel the rape and murder potential in me? I can. I hate it. But I restrain it, always. I don't cite war trauma as their reasons for rape because I see many other factors as being far more important. "Trauma" implies being hurt led them to hurt others. More like they felt shit on by life, by their leaders, by the poor living conditions, raised in squallor with backward views on women and cultural customs, so that when the enemy came into town, it was a convenient excuse to behave that way, to steal, rape, and murder.

I have my own special perspective on things given the history of abuse in my father's family, which has been Mennonite for centuries, and then finding myself in the position my father, his father and so on have been in and being left wondering why they chose to make victims of their own than work to stamp that cycle of evil out.

I do know of the sad impulse many abused have, that they want to abuse others so that they know someone else feels what they've had to deal with as deeply as they have. My friend went through her own time dealing with that and thank God she confided it into me so I could help do what I could to prevent her from eventually acting upon it.

To conceive life in suffering. At least all their male victims never had to worry about getting pregnant.

There's a 50/50 chance that the products of such pregnancies were male, and the way many act towards those conceived in such a way is the icing on the cake of rape, that the most innocent person of all involved either gets born living with the burden of being created in such a fashion, or often killed in turn to prevent adding complexity into an already soul crushingly complex matter.

You gotta understand that there were legitimate reasons to support Hitler, ways he improved their economy, that had people cheering for him.

Legitimate reasons do not excuse adding yourself to those who enabled the collective monster to eventually do what it did.

The Nazi's may have improved the economy, but how they did it was unsustainable, war was inevitable due to that and they could only keep things going by continually invading and cannibalizing other countries like a drug addict robbing others to keep their habit going. It effected everything right down to how they waged war trying to win quick and fast without much damage to the infrastructure of nations so it all could be put towards keeping the eventually disaster away for that little bit longer.

Germany of the time was consumed with maddened rage and it went all the way back to Operation Michel when their last gamble failed to win WWI. Germany didn't start WWI, it was just another nation fighting a war for its side at first, but the nation and many of of its people changed over the course of it and a generation later we all go to see the expression of their rage: Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven - if Germany couldn't come out of the Great War on top as king of nations, then the world deserved to burn than have people defeat them. Their genocidal actions that went into even being counterproductive towards the war effect in WWII show what they really wanted.

Most who suspected disagreed with it, and the vast majority of the population once the truth came out were horrified.

As if often said, and yet even when the signs were clear to people and ignored they also ignored the founding documents of the Nazi Party which clearly laid out what they intended to do once in power, and did.

So I don't see them as being collectively guilty, and I hate demonizing the vast majority of women and children abused. I just see them as ordinary people trying to live their lives especially since Germany was very much like any other Western nation of the 1930s and 1940s.

Neither do I, but I also do not like to give the masses a pass for things they are culpable and always shunting the blame off to the leaders they cheered on until things went bad. In German's case it was all the more unsettling given the widespread lack of opposition to the Nazi's compared to other nations and their times of contention, right down to it breaking the belief of many Christians to see how passively so many of Protestant churches went along. How much is made of July 20th Plot failing to realize it was only conceived after it was clear that the Hitler had lost the war, and that even they were fine with the course of the war and its actions so long as Germany came out on top.

The lack of any real resistance is damning for Germany, that we have to scrape around for a few Catholic bishops that spoke out, for the doctors that tried to save their disabled patients from euthanasia and that when things were riding high only a small clique of nobly naive and idealistic kids and a professor made any sort of opposition and paid for it.

One must be careful about always throwing the blame onto leaders. I am reminded of the dysfunctional way Russia has been for centuries where not only do their leaders brutalize their people, but the people see little reason to do things unless they are violently threatened.

Peter the Great was hardly a paragon of virtue as a leader, he had a very nasty violent streak in him, but even he lamented what he did to his people because often times they wouldn't do anything unless under threat - it was why he was always on the move from place to place because he had to stir his people up to do what he'd ordered in the Great Northern War. One place he went through he ordered to make leather saddles and boots, then came back a year later to find a warehouse with all of those the village had made piled into a mass and decaying into soil. When he demanded to know why they hadn't be delivered to the village leaders told him they'd been ordered to make the saddles and boots, not deliver them and so let them rot. The outcome was him threatening beats and death and the village went around to doing the same thing all over again and deliver them this time because they didn't do what common sense would ask of them without leaders ordering them.

They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work can easily be turned around into We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.. Under what circumstances and timeline that mentality developed in Russia, it's something that continues to plague them and is the reason behind the sad opinion that keeps cropping up in the country that they need strong leaders, because individual responsibility and self-accountability is so damn foreign to their culture.

We can point to the Tsars, and the Communists, and the Oligarchs all we want and rightfully single them out for their terrible actions, but that does not mean the masses are clean and they are called the masses simply because they are too numerous to be broken down individually and fingered like Hitler, Nicholas, Stalin and Putin can be.

To me that burns given how much my family is Anglo-Saxon in background and how much that has pervaded my world view given the Anglo-Saxon emphasis on self-accountability - Whatever I do, I know there is at least one witness to my actions and that it is me, how I must never think I can get away with something because of that fact and how it haunts me whenever I have hard choices to make. That is what frustrates me the most about Germany in this era, that a nation of people could so readily slip into such behaviour, and all the more so given how damn close their culture is to my own, and it is why I'm increasingly bothered by trends in the US and elsewhere in the West that sadly seem to show that even when thing aren't forgotten people can always find new reasons to not care and repeat them over again, and in the end the end will always be the same - the finger pointed mostly at the leaders rather than those fair weather supporters who didn't see anything wrong with what was happening until they realized they might lose.

Because going with your logic, simply supporting Hitler made them guilty. By that logic, huge populations of millions of people were guilty.

Sadly in a war Germany conjured up and pushed forward into Total War it became that way where the targeting of civilians became as necessity to end the war as quickly as possible through things like the strategic bombing campaigns.

You do ultimately highlight something and it's why I'm ultimately a theist in outlook when all is stripped away - I don't much care what heaven is, but there certainly has to be a hell where our Creator in His ability sees none as part of the masses and can judge us all on a individual level for our actions.

Plus you can't tell me a lot of it wasn't racism against Germans unrelated to the Holocaust. It was very widespread back then.

The word isn't racism, but a strong prejudice, yes.

My family has had it as a reaction to the World Wars as many have and I've done what I can to highlight that they didn't emerge out of the edges of known history to my family as a walking horde of evil - all the more so given the fact my mother wound up marrying a German, a fact that never sunk in for quite some time, added by the fact many on my fathers side insisted they were Dutch (Which is all the more sadly amusing given the torment many Mennonites suffered during the war, forcibly relocated back to Germany from the Ukraine, but put under a close eye because their loyalties were suspect, then demanded back by the Soviets who then too made them suffer from much the same reasons, all over a group of people that hadn't lived in Germany for centuries, just like the Baltic Germans and how they effectively don't exist now).

What's sad is where Germans were persecuted using the same bloody mindset used by the Nazi's - like the children born from Norwegian mothers and German soldiers that were then incarcerated in mental hospitals and classified as dangerous due to the propensity of German blood to produce violence in people. Yes, Norway continued with Eugenics after the war, only then using it against Germans and children. Anni-Fryd of Abba fame was a product of such a union and her mother fled to Sweden with her because of such policies.

My thesis is that, even if there were women complicit in HItler's evil, that doesn't justify raping them, because nothing does. I wouldn't allow Hitler himself to be raped. I wouldn't let somebody who raped me be raped. Because rape is always evil and wrong.

My thought exactly.

You want to do something to someone? Just put a bullet in the back of their head and be done with it, you do not have to drag things out and savor the suffering.

That is the ultimate evil of cruelty, that it not only destroys those that are the object of the cruelty but it also poisons the perpetrator of the acts beyond whatever circumstances found them committing the cruelty in the first place, no matter how understandable they may be.

There were actually good laws passed that helped the economy. And did you know the Autobahn was built by Germany during that time period?

Look up the book The Wages of Destruction to see what their policies did. It was akin to saying the parents of children were looking after them by providing some heat for their family by burning down their house in a fit of rage.

Simply because a broken clock is right two times a day doesn't make it a good clock.

Just saying, I'm not going to judge and condemn a woman who supported Hitler, who had less rights and opportunities back then, any more than I'll condemn and judge a woman in our country here who voted for Trump.

Except no where in Trump's history, nor of what of the Republican Party or any mainstream endorsed faction supporting him is there something like Mein Kampf.

Should Trump do anything near something akin of that Hitler laid out in the book that came to pass, you are not going to find the same sort of support when his support base is so fractured and divisive over things. One may make the claim that the Alt-Right or Dark Enlightenment folks would be all for such actions, but that then leaves out nominally conservative people who voted to get the US back on track, not jutting out doing insane things like liquidating illegal aliens or something you might think they'd be all for.

Women who voted for Trump are guilty because they supported somebody who would oppress others, because their hatred of brown and queer people was stronger than their self-interest.

This is a big issue with Identity Politics in that those caught up in them cannot see outside of them.

There are many who voted for the man who don't give a damn about those two groups, just as they didn't vote for Obama simply because he was black. There are those who support Trump who are consumed by such issues and they are often those that are obsessed with their own white identity - they are simply the other side of the coin of this problem being simple mindless reactionaries who don't realize the entire problem is viewing everything through the lens of things like race of sexual orientation.

As I said, Hitler didn't run on a campaign of death camps.

Mein Kampf was finished in 1926. The disturbing fact about that book is how much was actually carried out and what little was just him writing fantasies in his own mind.

All of this ignores the undercurrent of ideas that catalyzed as WWI progressed and those which inspired the Nazi Party, like Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

You can't tie the treatment of Jews to the average German civilians.

Because we're only human and don't know what each felt in their heart at the time.

I do however witness the growth of anti-Semitism on the internet in the last ten years and wonder if anything does happen, exactly how many horrified people claiming innocence and that they were just making luls and memes were using things like this ((((shit)))) until they realized after living by the sword that they could potentially die by it.

And guilt over Nazi crimes that we unfairly threw in the average citizen's face to shame them as if they were equal to Hitler were one of the factors that kept them silent for sixty years, and when they come out with the truth, people still call them criminals! I hate that. It's judgment and condemning. I won't! I can't do that! Who the fuck are we to treat ordinary people trying to live their lives as if they are satan? That's one of the biggest problems in the world!

You forget that we are only human, and when it comes down to it, it is better to pragmatically end something and prevent its occurrence than to seek the ideal solution that will leave no innocent victims.

And in your case, it seems you're paralyzed by the thought of having to do anything in such a situation, but I don't know if you've ever even been in anything close to it. I certainly do know when my friend confessed to me what was happened to her my reply was "If I lived anywhere near you those boys would be found dead in a ditch" and on a national level such distinctions are very hard to make.

Another reason I am inclined to treat them as normal people just living through hard times is that those broken, destroyed, deeply wounded, emotionally ruined, traumatized women managed to raise beautiful children, obviously, or they wouldn't be so nice today, so... the demonization of Germans needs to stop.

And it is to the credit of Germans that they've been able to look over their past actions, take responsibility for them and work to prevent a repetition of them. The same cannot be said of the Japanese.

But I don't know how much of that would have come had Germany not be brought to its knees, occupied and then spent decades divide as the center of another war and the Allies were not in a position to risk letting them to get away lightly again after another world war. The Germans, even the innocent ones, were not important enough to allow Germany to do it all over again.

Sadly, today it seems no one demonizes the Germans more than the Germans these days and often in ways seem almost Naziesque in how much they control things, like the display of the swastika. Then there's how they handle things on a international level as well as things like their prison system. They are like a cousin of mine, who after being beaten as a kid by his father grew up and had kids of his own and refused to discipline them because he associate that with his father, so his kid ran wild and now they are suffering terribly because their parents didn't help work their flaws from childhood that remain that is the very reason why discipline exists.

The other issue is something I've been mulling over, how nations are made up of people, but are not people themselves, more like beasts with human beings made up as constituent cells. We can't go down the road of extreme individualism to fail to recognize the beasts and do what we can to keep them inline, if only to not act out to the extent they've done like Germany and Soviet Union have.

If that means innocent cells suffer to punish the guilty beasts they make a part of, then whatever must be done to keep the death toll and deeper damages, like what has happened to Germans and their collective psyche, to a minimum then it has to be done.

And no, that is not espousing collective guilt, but acknowledging the fact that we do not know the border exists where individuals end and nations begin.

[Yukaphile]

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[Fuzzy Necromancer]

The reason Germany is better today is BECAUSE they have taken accountability for their history and worked to make sure that shit doesn't happen again.

Beastro, what you said about the rise of anti-semitism is right, and I can tell you, if the 45th president goes down that road, millions will plead ignorance and innocence. Just look at the way somebody backpedals when their employer finds out about their tiki-torch march.

For my part...i listen to the warnings of germans and of Jews. They've been shouting warnings for a long, long time.

Fascism isn't a bomb that drops. It's a slow erosion of the shores of decency, each one incrimental enough to ignore, and then suddenly the streets are flooded and it's far too late.

Remember the review of The V? That's important.

[Yukaphile]

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[Yukaphile]

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[Beastro]

What happened to Germany was quite unfair that they should constantly apologize while the beasts from the east have not taken accountability.

Unfair???

No, they don't need to keep apologizing and shit today, and haven't needed to for awhile, but that should never be taken as unfair treatment that it keeps happening. That itself is part of the problem now plaguing Germany in that its people are plagued by self-doubt and actually being a strong nation again since the end of the Cold War removed much vestigial need in their minds to maintain what they had after WWII.

To be a strong nation against doesn't mean repeating the past and is something I think you can relate to given you recent thread in GD over what you find plaguing yourself.

All they get when they come out with the truth is judgment and condemnation. It has to stop. I feel sorry for them. And I can't stand people who like to think their attackers were equal victims to them. I tend to think those they left permanently traumatized are a million times more victims. The German propaganda film A Woman in Berlin is just layered with this, sympathy for the attackers as if they were of totally equal and comparable victimhood.

If they want to keep beating themselves up making movies like this, adding to the hurt over them will not help. It's up to them to leave it behind of their own accord and sadly, they have government policies that run counter to that.

It's a fine issue, between remembrance and letting the past fade, but they are not walking it well, just as my cousin did when he found himself in the position of a father.

And we must not forget the Germans had legitimate grievances for being angry with how WWI ended for them.

What were they in your mind?

They got off damn lucky given that things were not pressed and the successor government was willing to come to terms. The damn luck though allowed them to get off well enough to not face occupation and having their people confronted with losing the war personally to realize it was some "stab in the back" and to try again a generation later.

That, and England and France wanted more territory.

Excuse me? Germany didn't have any of worth bothering to take.

Britain didn't want their hegemony threatened and France wanted Germany off it's back given the imbalances of power between the two nations since the latter's Unification.

None of that excuses some of the things Germany did. Much of the reparations France demanded were the directly result of Germany actions in the zone of occupation they'd held that had once been their industrial and mining heartland where Germany stripped all the industry to send back home, and when Michel failed, they flooded France's primary coal mines rendering them useless.

That is part of the problem in how Germany changed over the war. They went in simply aiding an ally, but almost from the start darker things began to emerge, like their treatment of the Belgians, their plans for redrawing Europe after the war when Michel succeeded that were on par with the Nazi's territorial plans and then finally deliberate destruction of things like those coal mines after they knew they'd lost the war.

Fascism isn't a bomb that drops. It's a slow erosion of the shores of decency, each one incrimental enough to ignore, and then suddenly the streets are flooded and it's far too late.

And to assume that everyone who voted for him is a nascent fascist is as misguided and foolish as those on the right who assume everyone who opposes him are nascent communists or globalists seeking to destroy the country and replace it with some world government.

. And I still maintain the USSR was worse, and they don't constantly apologize, do they?

Because they were on the winning side of the war, and making an issue about such things at the end would be causing unnecessary tension at a stage when the USSR could very well have continued on and overrun the remainder of continental Europe when atomic bombs were still being hand crafted one at a time and taking months to complete.

Then they collapsed, they didn't lose a war begging peace at the mercy of those they fought. Besides, Communists are not the kind to apologize and neither are Russians, especially their leadership today which has made an bizarre hodgepodge of nationalism that effectively is "Whatever we can be proud of, we are whatever isn't we'll just ignore" that has them saluting the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, often in contradictory ways while deliberately ignoring the darker sides of both because they're are in an extremely insecure position after centuries of hardship.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

That just dismisses the suffering of their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers. They raised beautiful kids as their husbands kept them silent because they wanted to still think of their wives as "pure and innocent," because of how we shamed them as if the average citizen was satan, so that that passed onto their kids, some of whom were raped as little girls. Or got pregnant and gave birth to those animals and their babies. And it's infuriating that those women are still judged as criminals when the real criminals who endlessly violated them got away with their crimes, and coming forward was a hard thing to do. Women had so little power back then, it's just beyond belief that someone could look on a sixteen-year-old child that was piled on by fifteen men as guilty of Nazi crimes. And I still maintain the USSR was worse, and they don't constantly apologize, do they? What happened to Germany was quite unfair that they should constantly apologize while the beasts from the east have not taken accountability.

Bwa?

Look, I am not excusing rapists.

I am saying it is possible to hold rapists accountable for raping AND to hold the citizens of Germany accountable for turning their heads away when the hospitals spewed smoke that was once retarded and disabled people.

These are two separate ideas.