War Atrocities and Holocausts of the 20th century.

[Vic Dale]

To All.

In opening this thread I am touching on a part of human history which is both a painful living memory for some and a source of national shame for two nations who have been singled out by the writers of history. There is one other nation whose people may not even be aware that mass slaughter had been conducted within it's boundaries in time of peace. I refer of course to nazi-Germany and Japan in the first instance and the USSR in the second. The slaughter was utterly horrific and gruesome and in particular in nazi Germany totally cold-blooded, which tends to make that particular atrocity stand out in distinction to the others, yet the total number of deaths does not outweigh or even come near the numbers killed by the other two.

There are many reasons for this seeming lack of balance and not least is the racist belief; that the Germans being white and more civilised than the Japanese should have known better. Russians have also been looked down on by the west as being Slavic and uncultured, so slaughter conducted by them or on them, does not carry the same weight as for a modern European nation such as Germany. Even for the Germans though, the slaughter has been identified as a peculiarly German thing. "The Germans are a cruel race." Was how my Italian father in-law once put it. Such conclusions are simplistic and misleading and unless we learn the lessons and gain a deeper understanding of what went on and why, the same or similar could easily happen again.

It is necessary to separate the domestic atrocities from the miltary acts to realise that armies of all nations do horrible things when they are demoralised, or have been given the idea that those they are fighting and prisoners in their care are sub-human. This I think happened to some extent in Indo-china and in Iraq where surprising acts of cuelty were inflicted on helpless prisoners and civilians and although the numbers involved were not high in Iraq, it shows that even today, the USA is not immune from the possibility that it's troops will in some instances forget their responsibilities and indulge in acts of cruelty.

There appear also to be two elements even to the specific question of war atrocity, since acts of cruelty can be seen where where a victorious force ill-treats it's prisoners; Iraq (USA) Poland (Germany and Russia) and where the Japanese marched into Asia. Yet by contrast, British and US PoWs were treated with respect by the Germans and vice-versa. It appears that a difference of culture plays a major part in how defeated troops are treated and is clearly the main cause of the problem, but it doesn't answer for all cases as in Poland 1939, though the Russians killed far more Poles than the Germans did. There was a political element to the Polish question as far as the nazis were concerned, so possibly the killings were more to do with suppressing hostility and nationalist resistance than anti-Polish sentiment - I doubt that communists and socialists were the target at this particular time, in view of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

It seems then, that as far as military action is concerned, defeated soldiers will be accorded a degree of respect, conditioned by the degree to which the victors feel superior to the enemy. National supremecisim is a strong factor in training and convincing men to go to war, so that is probably something which is and will continue to be a factor in how prisoners of war are treated. It is significant that British and American troops, when captured by Iraqis were accorded all due respect and given good medical attention when required and it is a fact that the same was reciprocated from the other side. Things seemed to go wrong when the Iraqis disapppeared behind the wire and bars of the prisons and compounds and very possibly the acts of cruelty reflect a feeling for revenge, when despite press headlines to the contrary, the coalition was finding it hard to hang onto the victory which had been declared.

I would tend to think that the lowest from of soldiery will be found or will volunteer for this type of work - in WWI they were called trench-dodgers and were hated even by their own side. Possibly a special force needs to be trained and organised with the specific task of looking out for the needs of PoWs - it certainly requires a higher order of life than the rubbish who have been doing the job so far. Perhaps a special medal could be struck - for humanitarianism shown to defenceless PoWs.

Atrocities carried out by troops in the field and in prison camps stand in stark contrast to the hideous barbarity shown to civilians who find themselves over-run. They are suppressed and terrorised on a daily basis according to the grip which the dominant power has on their land. France capitulated entirely to Germany in 1940 and life continued for a time in relative harmony where the victorious Germans bought produce from French farmers at good market prices. Collaboration between the troops and French civilians grew by the day as each side discovered a mutual warmth of feeling which was surprising considering recent history.

This was precisley how it was in Iraq just after Saddam got the boot, but like Iraq, things turned ugly in France after a time as social tension developed and a wave of strikes an protests grew. German soldiers now found themselves caught up in France's domestic life and stern measures were needed to bring the troops back on-side. The gestapo were sent to France and particularly Calais. It is a little known fact that for every French man or woman put against the wall by the gestapo, a German soldier stood beside them to die in the same hail of bullets. Collaboration which had been encouraged by the reich as a useful means of building French/German relations, now turned into it's opposite as the reich became terrified that France would turn to revolution and radicalise the occupation force. Such a development could spread like wild-fire through the whole German army in a few hours, through the slick radio communications network. It had to be stopped and a new ruthless order became the norm. France would now be oppressed.

Japan's conquest in Asia was a most bloody affair and it seems almost as if it was an integral part of Shinto, that acts of cruelty and violence en-masse would accompany the advance of the Japanese army. What is not generally realised, is the countries overrun by Japan were not nations in their own right, but colonies largely belonging to Britain and France, though the USA had it's foot in the door as well.

Where the Japanese army advanced it ventured into territory where long-running battles between nationalists and feudal landlords had been raging and latterly, communists had entered the fray to further complicate things. Generally the nationalists welcomed the Japanese in as liberators hoping that finally they would end the rule of the Brtiish and the French who had treated their people very harshly, especially during the latter phase when they were losing their grip. The likes of Ghandi and Chiang-kia-Shek thought they would fare better under the hegemony of Japan who with a similar culture would be more sensitive to their needs, also Japan was something of an underdog herself. She had recently thrown off the shackles of western domination to acheive full nationhood herself. Surely they would understand these underdeveloped nations and help them grow. How wrong they were and even Mao and Chou Enlai fell for it too.

Japan then, advanced into a world of high expectation and such expectation would need to be expunged forthwith. Having been the underdog, Japan's newly found supremacy was exercised in a far more extreme way than might have been thought, due the the relative closeness of cultures, but it seems this worked in the opposite way as the Japanese strained extra effort to distinguish themselves from these lowly beaten peoples. The Japanese soldier was told that he was superior to everything which moved and in order to give physical expression to this he was given the power of life or death over his charges. Such power clearly went to the head and many Japanese soldiers indulged themselves at the expense of the people under their control. Not all Japanese soldiers behaved badly towards the civilians in their care, but sufficient numbers did and they created a terror rarely equalled in modern history and for this, Japan stands out as having inflicted a worse misery on the civilian populations of foriegn countries than any other during the 20th century. By contrast, her own people were treated very well.

The USSR began life in 1917 as a democratic split from it's feudal past. The capitalist element of it's means of production was extremely weak, there being just 2 million industrial workers in the whole of Russia, yet it was these workers who led the peasants in revolt against the czar. With such a weak capitalist class, Russia could not emerge into the capitalist world - it could not go back and it could not go forward. Russia was still locked in a war she could not win and more than 5 million of her troops now dead. Her industry was choking to death for want of materials and her peasants were starving because their grain was being requisitioned by the state to fund the war.

It Required a little bald man to point the way out of the war, out of the crisis inflicted by the lack of land for the millions of poor peasants and out of the decline in her manufacturing industry. He showed the way for a worker's democracy, by-passing the capitalist stage in Human development and socialising the means of production. He nationalised the land and began a process of redistribution.

Within one year, the peasant was consuming five times as much grain as he had ever done under the czar. Russia had pulled out of the war, though at the cost of vast tracts of land surrendered to Germany, a war reparation through the Brest-Litovsk Pact - anything was better than continuing the war. Russian industry now released from the limiting burden of having to produce a profit began to grow at a phenomonal rate. Even her railways which could not be made to work under the czar were working again and significantly it was the Young Communists, who led the way by example, in giving up their Sundays to work on getting industrial problems sorted out. This example caught on and ordinary workers soon began to join them.

All of this was looked on with scorn by the leaders of nations still locked in a deadly war and when this war came to an end, they patched up their differences and sent their troops to Russia to break up the party. Russia under Lenin it seems was showing them up.

The war of intevention cost the USSR dear. Democracy had had to be suspended in order to put Russuia on a war footing, Industry had had to be geared to produce arms and the peasant's grain had once again to be requisitioned to fight the war. Despite expectations, Russia emerged from this conflict victorious and there began the reconstruction of the socialist state once again. The big problem was that in order to fight the war, Russia had had to call on the military expertise of the old officer class. Trotsky had built the Red Army out of the mutinous ruins of the old one, but that alone could not solve all the problems. These officers and the technicians had been afforded special wages and priviledges in order to keep them on side and though Lenin saw this as a temporary arrangement the officers saw it differently. They found an ally in a little-known Bolshevik who had recently risen to the post of General Secretary of the communist party - Stalin.

Lenin quickly saw this development and warned Trotsky that action would be necessary to stop Stalin, before he caused a disaster. Lenin had suffered a stroke in the Summer of 1922 but was able to return to work, though under the care of his doctors, doctors who were systematically poisoning him. As Lenin's health declined so Stalin's influenced grew, until death claimed the communist leader and Stalin became top dog. At the time of the revolution Lenin's name became known all over Russia but it was never spoken except in conjunction with that of Leon Trotsky. Their names were spoken together as if they were one and for many Russians, that is probably how they understood the title of the leading element of the revolution which had given them such hope.

Stalin was an appalling leader whose blunders rebounded heavily on the leadrship of the party, especially in relation to handling national minorities of which there were litterally hundreds in the USSR which had more then 600 different languages spoken within it's borders. Lenin mounted an attack on Stalin from his deathbed and exhorted Trotsky to go after him and expose him. Too late. Lenin died and as Stalin read out the eulogy, he was plotting to rid himself of Trotsky.

Trotsky was exiled and one by one the old central commitee under Lenin was obliterated. The name of Trotsky had to be expunged from the minds of the masses if Stalin was to continue to rule. The old bolsheviks were wiped out one by one and a wave of terror was inflicted on Russia's millions of workers and peasants to erase for all time any living memory of trotskyism. 23 million men and women died at Stalin's behest, simply in order to rid the nation of the democratic aspect of the revolution. All that remained now was the planned economy. Russia could not go back to capitalism, because it had never properly taken root there and there was no capitalist class to make it run. The new Russia - the USSR - having shed most links to it's revolutionary past would now continue as a hideous dictatorship, but a dictatorship with a planned economy. This was a completely new development in the world which developed a productive force free from the vagaries of the market system, but which was heavily dependent on the decisions of the praesidium which governed it. It would become a model for similar states who broke away from capitalism post war.

The nazi holocaust was a very particular and focussed development with fightening implications for what can happen to human beings caught up in a machine which simply views them as surplus to requirement. Most despotic rulers have indulged in pogorms, even Stalin organised attacks against the Jews when things did not go right for him, but in nazi Germany the pogrom took on the identity of mass production - a whole people were to be processed into piles of spectacles, dentures, clothing, human hair, children's toys, shoes and of course bodies which were to be burned, presumably until a way could be found to render the fat down for lubricants and the rest processed for animal feed. Such a cold-blooded lack of regard for humanity has rarely been seen and it shocks everyone who seriously considers what went on.

The nazis began life as a small nationalist party with aims along the lines of regenerating the nation from the ruins of the war and establishing respect for the armed forces once again. When Hitler joined he was recongised as having a gift for oratory, though given the middle class bias the party's regular members at that time, it is probably their attraction to anything odd which drew them; "Funny little fellow - bit like Charlie Chaplin - may appeal to the lower orders." And there it began, Hitler soon became their public face and their spiritual leader. As a manic depressive, his mood swings will have made him the centre of attention, people who have this disorder are often the most manipulative beings.

The NSDAP began life as a muddled socialist party with a strong bias toward nationalism (anathema to any socialist) and a hard attitude toward Jews and foreigners alike. They would equally be treated as aliens and not allowed to become members of the nation That is about as far as it went at that time, but the closer Hitler came to attaining power, the less socialism had a grip on the party and where socialism was dislodged, other elements of the programme had to be strengthened. Of particular concern was the grip which the Communists (CP) and socialists (SPD) had on the major cities and industrial areas in Germany, the only way the nazi party could break through here was by employment of stronger anti-jewish propaganda. Hitler himslef had had to borrow (see steal) the works of a mad monk by the name of Hubert Lanz, who had produced a series of pamphlets based on certain Hindu teachings about caste and race. In order to get to the bare bone of the matter, Hitler strengthened the party's association with Julius Streicher a rabid anti-jew whose own newspaper Der Sturmer carried outrageous demands for violence and hatred against the Jews, yet he was ejected from the party in 1940 accused of keeping Jewish property after Kristall Nacht, he was stripped of his party badge and offices and went into obscurity - though he did remain very close to Hitler.

Streicher was out of the party and he was not part of the military, and this is odd, if the final solution to the Jewish question was underway at the time. Streicher's biggest critic in the party was Herman Goering, yet even when he fell from favour, Streicher was not brought back, though he continued to publish Der Sturmer.

The nazis seem to have had a truly muddled approach to their final solution and possibly it developed and crystalised in conformity to the undulations in the progress of the war. Although each death was a tragedy in itself the heavy slaughter of millions did not begin until things turned bad for Hitler in Russia. If liquidation of the Jews had been on Hitler's mind from the start, he had enough power to get it underway much earlier - he had plenty of Jews under his control after 1940. It seems that the Jews may have been used as stalking horses for other elements in society.

Many who went to the gas chambers were not Jews and many Jews were not even put in concentration camps. Possibly the Jews were going to be used as camouflage to liquidate an even bigger mass, perhaps the populations of the Ukraine or the socialist element of the USSR - the latter would present one heck of a problem for Hitler if he managed to beat Stalin. Perhaps lessons about the socialist content of people's overrun in the Ukraine had presented their own problem. We know that commissars were planned to be liquidated on capture, perhaps strong elements of the mass populations were now considered necessary candidates to be got rid of.

The example of Japan's rape of under-developed nations and the need to expunge the nationalists and communsts, is the probable reason for their excesses in Asia, perhaps the death camps were nazi Germany's way of dealing with the same problem and the fact that the Jews were the main victims of the camps was due to the curtailment of German expansion.

Vic Dale

[Bgile]

Vic,

Why is it that you point out US atrocities in Iraq (mostly embarrassing and dishonoring prisoners) and you have nothing to say about the terrible treatment our soldiers have recieved from Al Qaeda and other Iraqis who have captured them since the invasion? The are almost always killed and often in horrific ways.

In Viet Nam the atrocities were perpetrated because the soldiers believed the villagers were playing nice during the day and sheltering the VC. This is something often ignored by the media. It wasn't a simple case of organized brutality. It was soldiers put in an almost impossible situation. I'm not say it was right, it's just that sometimes people snap under those conditions.

There is certainly organized brutality going on now by my government, and I have hopes that after the next election the perpetrators will be brought to justice, although it would have such a divisive effect on our country it probably won't happen.

[Karl Heidenreich]

Gentlemen,

You cannot study or analyse war from moral grounds. War is inmoral. War is a reversion of all civilian life standards. I`m not condeming war but those people who believe they can wage war and have their hands clean.
Maybe there can be Just or Fair Causes, but not a just, fair or "clean" way to wage war...

In war there is no substitute for victory (as Old Mac said), and in the pursuit of achieving it many inmoral things happened: destruction, lies, misleading, death, robbery, terror, etc. etc. etc. Call it Auschwitz, call it Dresden or Hiroshima, call it Death March or Rape of Nangkin, or My Lai, or 9/11: war is war. When it`s waged those fighting must be prepared to do what`s neccesary, whatever that may be.

No morals, please, let`s set aside those moral speeches, those "I`m clean but you`re dirty..." That`s BS, that`s pathetic. Everybody has commited war crimes, mainly because war is crime in itself. But going to the definition of war crimes the allies imposed (in a quite ilegal way, let`s face it) then, everybody commited them: nazis, japanese, american, british, russians, etc. Maybe the french were the only ones that didn`t commit crimes in this sense because they varely fought and got defeated quite easily (sorry for this biased comment!).

Well, that`s my opinion. This thread seems a waste of breath, it will build nothing good except acussations, it will contribute "0" to the naval discussions around here and would divert everybody to something that`s political, and as such, open to neverneding discussion, goal less discussion...

[Vic Dale]

I intended no bias or to single out particualar nations for attention, but to try and identify the phenonon of war atrocity. All nations have ill-treated prisoners, including the UK. I gave the example of the USA in Iraq because it is a relatively current event and shows that little has changed despite what has been written about war atrocity. The lessons have been learned, but it seems there is little will to actually change anything. Al Queada did not exist in Iraq until the USA put it's foot there, so very likely they have been able to feed on the discontent caused by US occupation.

The US strategy in Vietnam was little different from the way any invading nation deals with guerilla-resistance - terrorise the base of support. It is well known that guerillas living in forests and jungles depend on food supply from local villages and it is a mark of the respect they earn that villages will support them. There is no defence for the way the US dealt with unarmed villagers - fact, the US did not belong there so each person who died at their hands was a murder. Mi lai was not an isolated case and anyone who tries to say that is either deluded or a liar. Mi lai was the one they got caught for.

It should be remembered that the partisans in Yugoslavia dished it out to the German occupiers and the villages suffered in exactly the same way as villages in Vietnam. Without the villages in Rhodesia supporting the resistance, Ian Smith would still be there. You will also find villages supporting the MDC against Mugabe. The Japanese discovered armed resistance to their rampage in Asia and they terrorised the villages too.

I am sure the troops on the ground feel a degree of resentment at being shunned by the locals and support given to those who will gladly kill them, when all they are doing is trying to help. Those troops are victims of ham-handed foreign policy, their government has sent them there and has largely lied about the true objective. I know this from personal experience. I was lied to on a daily basis about Britain's involvement in Indonesia. Far from protecting the locals from invading communists as we were told, we were helping install a bloody dictator who would murder 1 million of his own people. I met the brother of one who was beheaded infront of his whole family.

Heroic resisters and cowardly terrorists actually are one and the same thing. It all depends on which side of the fence you stand.

In Vietnam, US troops were for a time given a free hand in how they dealt with VC 'regulars' or suspects and I can remember quite clearly the feeling of disgust at seeing a summary execution on my TV. My attitude to US foreign policy changed that very day.

In Aden, Malaya, India, Yemen and other British "protectorates" soldiers fed off the violence they were free to dish out to the locals. Not all indulged, but sufficient numbers did and made discontent widespread and created a dangerous area of operations. At the end of the day the locals only wanted their independence from British rule. So too the North African from French rule and also in Indo China. And if US troops are treated with suspicion and not welcomed around the world, don't be surprised at it. US foreign policy is very aggressive and few of us can see any honest justification for it.

Vic Dale

[Karl Heidenreich]

Please, I recommend for you to see he movie "Apocalypse Now", specially the last part were Cnl. Kurtz (Marlon Brandon) makes his famous monologue about the "horror". I imagine it was written by John Millius because it`s awesome.

But, as Plato said, "only the dead had seen the end of war".

[lwd]

Does this thread really belong here? While it has some WWII content it looks to me like it's going to be much broader than that indeed I wouldn't be at all surprised if the majority of it has little or nothing to do with WWII.

[Bgile]

Vic,

I suggest that Somalia is a good example of what your predicted world revolution of the worker class would come to. No central government and rule by whoever has the strength to control his immediate territory. Without outside intervention, someone eventually controls the whole place, and guess what? We are back to nationhood. It's inevitable.

[Vic Dale]

Does this thread really belong here? While it has some WWII content it looks to me like it's going to be much broader than that indeed I wouldn't be at all surprised if the majority of it has little or nothing to do with WWII.

It shouild settle down to WWII, because that was the major war and most of the atrocities were carried out during that period. I gave the background to try and root out the difference between war atrocities and domestic pogroms which although the latter caused more deaths and were so terribly gruesome, they were conducted regardless of whether or not there was a war on. War though, can greatly influence the degree of terror as we saw with the nazi holocaust.

The Japanese tyranny in Asia during WWII has been singled out as an example of the "natural cruelty of that particular race" yet we have seen the same terror carried out by seemingly civilised nations at different times in world history as a natural consequence of colonial conquest. Basically I am trying to show that Japan cannot be compared to other nations and the way they conducted themselves in WWII because Japan had a completely different aim in mind. Japan was expanding and conquering peoples, whereas the allies were liberating conquered people. There is a distinction, although such a distinction cannot ever excuse the way Japan treated conquered civilians and PoW's.

As the Japanese expansion was conducted with the headsman's sword and the bayonet, the German expansion in Ukraine and other parts of Russia brought the hangman's rope and this has coloured perception of these nataions in the eyes of the world. When Britain went into Africa they taxed the tribe's dogs and the tribesmen then had to work to earn whitemen's money in order to pay the taxes. If the tax was not paid the dogs were shot. A tribe without it's dogs would quickly die out as predators could come into the village and rats and other vermin would flourish. A weakness was exploited and the action seems relatively innoccuous, yet where resitance to this action was encountered, the bayonet was used to instill discipline.

The American Tyranny against the indigenous peoples of North America was the equal of the Japanese onslaught against Asia, for pure savagery, but I suppose we are not supposed to mention that - it would be anti-American. It is a mark of shame which that nation will not be able to shake off and the passing of time will not expunge it either. Do we then label Americans as a cruel race? Yes. OK. I know that the USA is supposed to be cosmopolitan, but there is not a single place on the planet where racial purity dominates. I myself am pure bred anglo-saxon and what a mix that turned out to be.

I don't see how we can learn a single thing by the use of simplistic labels and finger pointing about atrocities, but we can try to learn why these things happen.

Vic Dale

[Bgile]

Vic,

I think you would find most citizens of the USA accept the genocidal treatment of the American Indian. Likewise the slave trade, although for both you would find some apologists or poorly educated people who don't know about them. For the most part those things were dictated by greed.

It would be interesting to hypothesize about what would have happened in WWII if the USA didn't exist and instead there was instead a polyglot group of American Indian nations. The greed of European culture being what it was that would be rather unlikely though, and so what did happen might have been inevitable. Interesting that it gets blamed on US citizens rather than European citizens from which we came and from which we derived our moral fabric, though. Basically the Indians were considered "savages" and therefore didn't count as real people, probably much the same as other less advanced cultures.

[Vic Dale]

Vic,

I think you would find most citizens of the USA accept the genocidal treatment of the American Indian. Likewise the slave trade, although for both you would find some apologists or poorly educated people who don't know about them. For the most part those things were dictated by greed.

It would be interesting to hypothesize about what would have happened in WWII if the USA didn't exist and instead there was instead a polyglot group of American Indian nations. The greed of European culture being what it was that would be rather unlikely though, and so what did happen might have been inevitable. Interesting that it gets blamed on US citizens rather than European citizens from which we came and from which we derived our moral fabric, though. Basically the Indians were considered "savages" and therefore didn't count as real people, probably much the same as other less advanced cultures.

Against that background, hideous as it was, the Japanese aggressions against the peoples of Asia can be understood - as can Germany's aggressions against the Russians. They were military campaigns in which, if the Japanese or German rule was to hold, then resistance would have to be broken by use of the sword and the rope. Equally, when the USSR began to retake it's own territory they killed large numbers of innocent people whose only crime was to try and live under German rule - they had to die because they had been touched by an alien culture. All sorts of justifications where wheeled out to try and cover the excesses, mostly the executions were carried out against "fascist agents" and infiltrators, but the shabby truth is, it was a battle to reassert Russian culture and ideology. It comes from the same stable as the Japanese and German aggressions during their imperial expansions.

The Gypsies of Europe were also caught up in this horror and they died in their thousands in concentration camp and gulag alike and when at the war's end a large number of Russian Gypsies were liberated from Hitler's concentration camps by the allies, Churchill had them handed back to Russia to face certain death at the hands of Stalin. The Gypsy can be likened to the American Indian, unruly and with his own very strong custom and culture. Like the Indians they were deemed to have no place in the modern society and where they concentrated they were slaughtered.

Today, imperial expansion by direct armed force is frowned upon, preference being for indirect expansion using the armed force of sections of the indigenous peoples, favourable to a particular imperial power. They do the work of suppressing their own people by inter-tribal, or religious warfare - Hutus and Tutsis and Sunnis and Shea muslims. The strategy of Imperialist expansion today is more closely aligned to the methods of Britain, France and Holland during the 18th and 19th centuries. In India for example, tribes and castes favourable to British aims - perhaps bought and paid for with British money, would act as mercenaries to attack and overwhelm those who resisted British rule. This is identical to the way Rwanda was hacked about by Britain and France in the 1980s and 90s and which resulted in the Genocide there.

It is a bit rich for the powerful nations of the world to look down on and criticise Germany and Japan for their expansionist actions against harmless civilians, when they themselves have behaved in exactly the same way, but by the use of less direct methods. It is also a bit rich for Americans post-war to moan because of terrorist actions against their own troops in Indo -China and the Middle East, when their relatively recent history shows them doing precisely the same to King George's troops during the war of independence. Britian would have her way over "those unruly yanks" whatever the cost in American blood and the reply was a successful guerilla war which threw the British out. The likes of myself applaud such displays of independence. The Americans were the victims of British Imperialism which they managed to resist and overcome.

I shall open a specifically dedicated thread to the question of Imperialism, so we can discuss in more detail the rights and wrongs, the facts and fictions, of this matter there and leave this thread to the question of war atrocities and in particular the vile atrocities carried out during the second world war.

Vic Dale.

[RF]

I have avoided responding to this thread initially as any question of atrocities and deliberate murder is almost always diverted onto political ideology and the politicisation of race and class. I am reminded of the oft quoted phrases derived from Clauswitz about war being a continuation of politics, and the other way round.

My view is that ideology and meta physics can justify anything. And why stop at war? What about ''Bloody Mary'' and the public burning of Heretics and Heathens back in England in the 1550's? Indeed you could include all religion in this - after all it is often believed that the Christian religion was founded on the basis of anti-semitism, that the Jews were the ''killers of Christ'' and then there was also Hitler's claim in Mein Kampf that ''in defending myself against the Jews I am doing the Lord's work.''