[youngian]

Not a man who’s usually choosey about his friends. Poland’s running out of friends as fast as the UK.

[The Red Arrow]

I can see a connection with what certain people are trying to acheive here.

[youngian]

Where have the Poles been picking up this desire for WWII myth making? The problem for Polish nationalism is that its larger neighbours can reciprocate the ideology on steroids and make Poland disappear. Frequently over the centuries.

Mikołaj Grynberg, a writer who has documented Polish-Jewish accounts in his books, believes that the state’s agenda to promote Polish heroism goes against historical truth. “The aim is to feel good and be a chosen people – we are the only nation that has only noble people among us,” he says. “That’s adolescent thinking and bad news that we are not growing to be an adult country. So it will stay like this for years.”

[The Red Arrow]

Interesting related points raised here...

Holocaust museums for years have been asking visitors: ‘Beware the Holocaust because you could have been a victim.’ I suppose we are thinking: ‘Beware the Holocaust because you could have been a perpetrator.’

Imperial War Museums gallery to question way Holocaust understood
Exhibition to challenge narrative that genocide happened in the shadows
Caroline Davies
Wed 27 Jan 2021 09.45 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... understood

[cycloon]

Careful now, that's likely dangerous history, everyone knows only Evil People do Evil things and Evil ain't in my name, sooooo.

The question of potential perpetrators is far more troubling and relevant, in many ways, to that of being a potential victim.

[oboogie]

I've been reading a lot of first hand German accounts about the Nazis recently and for me the most chilling and disturbing thing about them is that how very ordinary the overwhelming majority were.
The psychotic psychopaths portrayed by Hollywood certainly existed, but they were the minority.
Most Germans were outwardly decent people persuaded, sometimes with little effort, to do monstrously barbaric things.
Of course we can all look back smugly from the safety of the 21st century and say, had we lived in Nazi Germany, WE would never have fallen for that shite. WE would have resisted. Hidden Jews. Escaped. Joined the Allies.
Statistically that's very unlikely.
I recall a post of Malcolm's in which he told us how few generations we are removed from the baying mobs at Tyburn. Who knows what we're capable of given the wrong circumstances.

[Kreuzberger]

Ravensbrück stands on the other side of the lake, perhaps 300m from Fürstenberg. KZ Flossenbürg is practically in the town itself. The intermittent gunfire would have been a clue and the overwhelming stench was surely the dead give-away.

I am not sure that the "we knew and saw nothing" defence will last much longer. It is patently untrue but the civi population was cowed in to submission with a side order of personal tragedy and the grief of regular Wehrmacht troops slaughtered in the fields before Stalingrad and elsewhere. Mrs K's family will finally talk about it in their twilight years and it is difficult not to feel quite some degree of sympathy, or at least empathy.

On the other hand, there were plenty who made hay. A colleague of Mrs K tells the story of when he came out at age 16, twenty years ago. Grandpa, a concerned citizen, declared that "in my day, we'd have gassed you."

I'll leave it at that.

[Andy McDandy]

When I was 16 I watched the news as a mob tried to break into a prison van and lynch two boys. Here, in the city I love and live in.

It doesn't take much. Tell people that there are monsters or vermin that need killing, and you won't be short of volunteers.

[davidjay]

When I was 16 I watched the news as a mob tried to break into a prison van and lynch two boys. Here, in the city I love and live in.

It doesn't take much. Tell people that there are monsters or vermin that need killing, and you won't be short of volunteers.

And a couple of decades later there are peopIe I know and think of as being decent who say those self same boys should not have been allowed to live.

[The Weeping Angel]

When I was 16 I watched the news as a mob tried to break into a prison van and lynch two boys. Here, in the city I love and live in.

It doesn't take much. Tell people that there are monsters or vermin that need killing, and you won't be short of volunteers.

Those two boys had sadistically killed and tortured a toddler they were no innocents.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Children aren't born bad. Adults make them that way.

There is no such thing as an evil person.

[davidjay]

When I was 16 I watched the news as a mob tried to break into a prison van and lynch two boys. Here, in the city I love and live in.

It doesn't take much. Tell people that there are monsters or vermin that need killing, and you won't be short of volunteers.

Those two boys had sadistically killed and tortured a toddler they were no innocents.

So what would you have done with them?

[Malcolm Armsteen]

If I could, treated them. There would also have to be punishment of course, but to call them 'sadists' is pretty pitiful and goes no way to understanding why they did what they did and possibly learning enough to prevent it happening again. Very few human beings are irredeemable - in this case there seems to have been a 50% success rate.


>deleted due to a misunderstanding<

[oboogie]

If I could, treated them. There would also have to be punishment of course, but to call them 'sadists' is pretty pitiful and goes no way to understanding why they did what they did and possibly learning enough to prevent it happening again. Very few human beings are irredeemable - in this case there seems to have been a 50% success rate.

Nice snippy tone to your reply, by the way. What would you have done?

David wasn't replying to you.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

My apologies - to you and David.


It was the weeping angle I was cross with. The 'sadistically' comment. I've dealt with enough disturbed kids to realise that the only gratification they are seeking is the expression of their own anger at the way they have been treated.