Jason L. Miles wrote:Patrick's point is a big part of why the Nazis seem so horrific to me. Its not so much the acts, but the horrific calculation involved. Everything was calculated and planned and recorded.
I don't know, it just seems like their evil wasn't just malevolence, but something more. Their victims were treated simply as a natural resource to be exploited until it was gone. They weren't even given the consideration that an animal would be. They were just there to be harvested.
This. At the time, even without fully grasping just how far the Nazis were willing to go, Churchill nailed this, describing the results of a hypothetical Nazi victory as:
"...the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of
perverted science."
Now, this was during an era when the idea of technological progress was seen as a (more or less) absolute good, so he's not talking about the "science is evil!" attitude a later generation might roll out. He's talking about the systematic, calculated ruthlessness the Nazi system was capable of, the ability to take the methods of science and engineering and
pervert them to monstrous ends.
Ghost Rider wrote:Night_stalker wrote:It's one thing to kill a million by either neglect or accident, but to do it delibertly is a whole nother ballgame.
How so? While this is not to say the Nazi's actions are lessened, the British Empire inflicted horrific standards of living and conditions to their colonies. Just because they didn't escort them by train to an area to die, to claim that it's *another ball game* is ignorant on many levels given their responsibilities and sheer neglect both intentional and unintentional to a people they served as the government to.
So care to explain it or is this another one of your +1 posts?
To me, the difference is comparable to that between first degree (premeditated) murder and homicidal negligence. When we judge individual murders, we look at intent. Someone who planned out a murder well in advance is likely to get a harsher sentence than someone who committed the murder in a sudden fit of rage. Both will usually get more punishment than someone who "merely" allowed someone to die by ignoring some responsibility of theirs.
The British cause massive famines by just
not caring, often in situations where most authority was in the hands of private organizations like the East India Company and not in the hands of the state. Whereas the Germans specifically sat down and had meetings at the highest levels of government which could be summarized as "We really hate Jews. How can we kill them as fast as possible?" We have documentation of this going on, again at the highest levels. The entire system of government was behind the extermination program, and they were fairly successful at mobilizing the resources of their economy to do it.
It's that extra level of malice and premeditation on the part of the central government that's missing in most British atrocities. You didn't see Parliament planning out campaigns of genocide in advance, even if they didn't do anything to stop them after they were underway. Nor did you see mass public rallies in support of "Let's starve Indian people!" or even "We approve of the East India Company, which starves Indian people!" Partly that's because it was a different era, but it also reflects a disconnect between the actions of the men operating in British colonies and the attitudes of the population themselves.
With the Nazis, there's the impression of a seamless connection between the popular will, the government that mobilizes and organizes it, and the specific people committing the atrocities. And a feedback loop designed to
perpetuate those atrocities, rather than a government which will occasionally step in (or at least have a few of the more honorable MPs register a protest) to stop or mitigate them.
So when people rate the Nazis as worse than the British, I think it's because of the sheer monolithic brutality of their system. Also because they had plans for
worse than what they actually did, worse even than what the British did in India, in the (impossible) event that they somehow overcame their enemies and took over in Russia. The British operated more or less unopposed, and we know that whatever evil they did was fairly close to the upper bound of what they were capable of. The Nazis could have been even worse than they actually were.
And yes, these are relatively small differences. But I think they help explain why there's a split in the perception of British and Nazi atrocities. Though that's on top of the obvious and much less charitable "it happened to brown people" aspect of British atrocities...
Shroom Man 777 wrote:That's terrible. I don't think the subjects of the British Empire, or any other European colonial power, ended up being so completely converted as those poor folks the Spaniards conquered.
On average, no. Although the North American natives didn't fare much better than their southern counterparts, even though they were colonized by British people (who later broke away, yes, but were still in some sense part of the "Anglosphere.") And the people of India suffered a very heavy overlay of British culture, especially considering that they were only ruled from Britain for roughly 150 years. Much of the modern social structure of India cannot be understood as an outgrowth of older Indian culture
without knowing about the British Raj.
