Every once in a while I come across something said on the internet that is so egregiously backwards that it requires a reply so equal in incisiveness that it bursts the bounds of the host site’s normal reply mechanism and the social requirement for the polite give and take of civilized netiquette.  So, today you seem to be victim of another Too Long for YouTube breakdown because of some YouTube commenter who’s replies are so rabid in the defense of the Nazi cause I have momentarily let slip good taste – though hopefully not common sense.

At these moments I feel prompted to act in a way like Atticus Finch, in Harprer Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” when the gentleman lawyer is compelled to shoot dead with one well-aimed shot, a hydrophobic dog wandering the streets of his town before it can cause harm any innocent bystander – or itself continue to suffer with its fatal affliction.

For some reason this ‘once in a while‘ seems to  happen to me more often on YouTube than on any other website I ever have cause to visit.  In today’s case this was in comments following a presentation of the 1944 American propaganda film: “Operation Titanic” – 1944 Bombing Operations Over Germany During WW” from the YouTube channel WDTVLIVE4.  “Operation Titanic” being a deliberate wartime misnomer for the genuine Operation Frantic, the shuttle bombing of previously unreachable targets of the German Reich deep in eastern Europe by the American 8th Air Force operating out of bases in England, Italy, and the Soviet Ukraine.

The video was originally found here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGKETOf1S-U

One commenter known as Outré Ransdir drew a great deal of attention to himself by saying in comments:

 

I don’t usually like to pile on what has developed into an ugly brawl, but sometimes a quick slap-down can show the bellicose Nazi sympathizer his true position in life – or at least let me blow off some steam.

I replied:

 

Not a reply I’m particularly proud of, of course, but there was such an air of woundedness in his tone which seemed to me the antithesis of what a brave and stoic Nazi warrior should be expected to exhibit: intestinal fortitude, and silence.  The “…together with your taskmaster Jews…” bit also seemed a particularly pathetic throw away line.  People need to know when they are actually coming across as whiny and pathetic when the mean to be bad-ass.

If you think I’m failing in this regards, maybe you can let me know precisely how in comments below, as host here I’m required to be polite to all of my guests – even Ransdir.

Ransdir replied back to me:

I’m not even German dude..  I was thinking same before but my thoughts totally changed when decided to research the facts for myself. That’s it.

 

Does sound aggrieved, doesn’t he?  I guess he thinks he has something to teach me about the history of the Second World War, National Socialism, and how unfairly the Western Allies beat up on Nazi Germany – before we rebuilt them.  It turns out I was incorrect though about my prediction that he was going to launch into a tiresome lost cause analysis of WWII that would have assured for sure Nazi victory if only….

What Ransdir did not know, which regular readers here ought to know, is that I have actually written extensively and with some sympathy for the German people, as human beings, in coming to terms with the guilt of their responsibility in creating the Second World War and its Holocaust.  The magnitude of the infamy of Nazi wartime behavior is so overwhelming its completely understandable that nobody wants to deal with it.  I will say this in favor of the Germans and their civilization, if anyone can eventually come clean about such a thing, it’s probably them.

But I digress.

So, now I take up my trusty 104 key shooting iron to drop the foaming varmint in its tracks – the argument, not the man.

My second reply to Outré Randir, with some minor edits and emphasis added:

Ransdir my friend, I never said you were German [an insult to modern Germans], what I am suggesting is that you have shackled yourself to a barbaric and dead ‘kultur’.  If you want to construct a false moral equivalence between the Nazi state, what happened to it, and the Western Allies who put it down, history has shown you to be wrong.  Your arguments come across to me as whining past the graveyard.

Whatever ‘truth’ you think you have uncovered has to be balanced against the reality of the history of the Nazi State from its rise in the torture, murder, and oppression of its internal German enemies right up to the mass suicides and flights from justice of so many of Nazidom’s leaders.  These people had a certain knowledge of their own guilt which they hoped victory would eventually spare them, but they lost and didn’t want to face the terribleness of sword of justice – a very lenient sword as it turned out for many of them anyway.

Nazism was based upon the ‘rights of power’.  They lost their power and were destroyed.

Prior to 1939 nobody was interested in bombing German cities into rubble and the the destruction of their ‘kultur’ – the Nazi state and its actions made that necessary.
Yes, the allies really gave the leather to the Nazi state and the German people, maybe harder than was absolutely necessary, but German intransigence in the face of eventual defeat made the complete destruction of their capacity to resist necessary.  The German people paid dearly in blood for their own folly – their arrogance – something like 15% of the German population perished – but who’s responsibility was that really?? the Jews???  Give us a break – completely self-inflicted.

There is a reason why the German people embraced so enthusiastically [with some exceptions]  the inbred, imbecile, failed artist, half-breed Hitler, [sorry about the half-breed part, I couldn’t resist] he promised them everything they always wanted: martial glory, and the right to invade, plunder, enslave, and murder their neighbors based simply on the presumption of their ‘kultural’ superiority.  While the Germans could and did act with bravery and even nobility, the Nazis encouraged and glorified barbarity towards their ‘kultural’ inferiors.  The Nazi state gave complete permission for these behaviors – the German ‘folk’ eventually paid the price.  You’ve probably uncovered some evidence of this in your research.

This was not an accident, there was something essentially German about Nazism, namely the ‘kultur’ concept of ‘blut und boden’ that drove the Nazis toward barbarity.  That ‘kultur’ concept dates all the way back to the [incomplete] Christianization of the barbarian [in the technical sense of the word] Germanic tribes.  The German civilization was never able to fully assimilate the universality of Christianity and instead perpetuated the barbarian ethos of national identity based on the ethnicity and blood descent of the ‘folk’ and its ties to territory based on previous conquest – clear up to the Second World War.

Wrap that ‘kultur’ concept around the bent mandrel of 19th century romanticism [and its bent of cultural nationalism] and an out of control purity neurosis and you get the Holocaust.

This problem is actually found throughout European civilization by the way – look at their history.  To this day a great deal of European anti-American snobbery originates from this a prior assumption of cultural superiority, “based on the ethnicity and blood descent of the ‘folk’ and its ties to territory based on previous conquest.” rather than recognizing the American civilizational advancement of a nation based not on ‘kultur’ but on an ideal – even if it is the polite fairy-tale – that all people should be treated as equals before the law, and that even if we are blessed with greater genius and ability than our fellows we should never use those divine gifts to exploit or enslave our brothers and sisters – because it preserves our own humanity.

The Nazis, and their supporters threw away their own humanity.  Maybe in your research you have come across some of their quotes on the subject.

German civilization, and I mean that in the technical sense, has produced many great contributions in art, literature, and science for the benefit of humanity – then they sold it all down the sewer by so wholeheartedly reembracing their barbarian past.  The Germans are still sorting it out, only time will tell if the post war generations can come up with a reason to continue to live, have children, and survive as a nation – without reverting back to ‘blut und boden’ as the Russians seem to be doing now.  We’ll see, evolution is possible.

We Americans had that problem as well, we fought a bloody civil war to destroy a segment of our own civilization that seemed intent on spreading a European notion of empire based on cultural and racial superiority and a slave economy throughout North and South America.  Almost a third of Southern manhood eligible for military service perished in defense of the idea [whatever lost causers and revisionists might say].  It’s taken over a hundred years to complete the task, yet every generation there seems to be a new crop  of new young knuckleheads, and some old blow-hards, who cannot grasp their own Christian religion and want to rebel yell, “The South’s going to do it again!”

Knuckleheads, sore losers, whiners. we have a special word for it here: slope-browed-retro-troglodyte.

Don’t be one of them.

W^3