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Zonie63 -> RE: Racism and Islamophobia. (9/5/2014 10:14:41 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SadistDave
I'm going to start with the most obvious bit of stupidity. The Nazi's were absolutely not responsible for all of the deaths in WW2. I know there has to be a history book somewhere on that ridiculous island you live on. You might want to try finding it and reading it.
Here's a spoiler: There were 3 primary partners and about 20 minor members of an outfit known as the "Axis". The 3 core members had distinctly different reasons for their aggression. Being from Australia, I'd have thought they might have taught you about the Pacific theater of WW2, which had not one fucking thing to do with the war in Europe.
This is not entirely true. The fall of France and the Netherlands in Europe weakened the position of their Asian colonies (French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, namely), making it possible for the Japanese to expand their war into those territories. British colonies in the region were also vulnerable. That's what caused the U.S. to sit up and take notice, leading to the breakdown in relations with Japan which eventually led to their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and other U.S. possessions in the Pacific Theater.
Our war with Japan also triggered the German and Italian declarations of war on the United States, so there were at least a few fucking things which connected the two theaters of WW2.
It's not just a question of owning a history book, but also about understanding the connections between events, their causes and effects.
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I don't know where you're getting 55 million as a death toll for WW2, and I don't really care. The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia cites 70 million deaths as a result of WW2, with over half of the death toll occurring in the Pacific Theater. Lets call it an even 50% for simplicity and call it 35 million deaths we can blame on the Nazis.
The estimates for the death toll in WW2 can jump all over the map. I've seen estimates ranging from 50 to 100 million, depending on how they're counted and who's doing the counting. Some estimates may include the millions who died in famines due to the war disrupting food shipments, even if their deaths weren't directly related to combat or even anywhere near a battle. Or the deaths of those in automobile accidents at night due to people driving with their lights off because of air raid blackouts. Those might be considered war-related and added to the death toll for WW2, while other estimates may only count combat-related deaths.
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The lowest estimate I've seen for Communist mass murder in the 20th century is 70 million. Wikipedia cites between 85 and 100 million. Clearly, Hitler was a piker.
I have to say, some of the moral relativism and body counting as a way of determining which ideology is "worse" comes off as disingenuous.
A quote that I recall from the story of Nicholas and Alexandra might explain some of it. While they were in the custody of the Soviets in Ekaterinburg, shortly before the execution of the Romanovs, Nicholas II said: I've never known a heart without some murder in it. I made these men. They are our Russians. I am responsible for what they are. I let them starve. I put them in prisons. And I shot them. If there's hatred in them now, I put it there. But they ARE filled with love. And mercy, too. You must remember that. (I don't know if he actually said this or if it's just Robert Massie's poetic extrapolation, although there is a great deal of truth to it, in my view.)
Both Russia and China were ruled by brutal, despotic, murderous regimes for centuries prior to any communist uprising. That may not excuse anything, although it might explain the intensity and ferocity of their revolutionary fervor. Base emotions and centuries of built-up anger and resentment among the people in these countries need to be taken into consideration and how they may have affected the "ideology" in question. It doesn't excuse murder or any of the other atrocities they committed, but it doesn't mean that the ideology itself turned them into murderers. Generations of oppression, murder, and tyranny by the previous regimes did that to them and made them into what they became.
Both nations also have had long histories with foreign invaders and foreign domination, so that might also affect their ways of looking at the world. Hell, we just had a few airplanes crash into buildings to compel us to pass the Patriot Act and make war; imagine how far we'd go if we had foreign armies marching across our soil, occupying our cities and murdering our people. You don't think Americans would get a bit vicious after a while? (Actually, we were pretty vicious in a lot of ways, although we don't like to talk about these things anymore.)
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But that brings us to Islam and 100 years of mass murder in the 20th Century. By the time you add up the mass murders and genocides attributed to Islam in various wars and acts of genocide, the number is staggering. Muslims started the 20th Century in the middle of an ongoing genocide. Between 1897 and 1922 the Ottoman Empire under Islamic rule killed some 3.5 million Christians in Asia Minor. Between 1904 and 1915 1.3 million people were slaughtered in Armenia alone. Hitler claimed it was his model for the Holocaust. I have no doubt that if you add up the varied and sundry genocides, honor killings, war casualties, and terror victims of the world wide Islamic Regimes between 1900 and 1999, the total will be considerably more than 35 million. 3000 people here.... 500k there... a cool million over there... these things add up over the course of a century.
I'm really not sure what your point is about slavery, considering the largest ongoing slave trade today is perpetrated by Islam in North Africa. Whining about sex slavery in the Bible is pretty poorly timed too,considering the recent events in Rotherham by Islamic rape gangs, and the fact that sexual slavery is condoned in the Quran as well as the Bible.
The primary disconnect here seems to be your inability to come to grips with the fact that Christians are no longer running slave trades in the 21st Century. Nor are they using their religion as an excuse to rape little girls like Muslims have done in Britain, Canada, France, Switzerland, the U.S. and (you guessed it) fucking Australia. But then, unlike the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ was neither a slave trader or a pedophile.
Whether or not these people are "representative" of Islam is wholly irrelevant. What IS relevant is that unlike any other dominant religion in the world, these people keep cropping up to commit atrocities of all kinds over and over and over again. Meanwhile Islamic apologists like you, Politesub, and a few other loony liberals here seem to be unable to grasp the simple fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with a religion that is literally operating under Medieval laws and principles in the 21st Century.
-SD-
Then this still begs the question as to why we still do business with Saudi Arabia or other Islamic regimes which operate under those same Medieval laws which we in the West find so detestable? I've kept asking this question over and over, yet no one seems willing to answer it. Islamic Turkey is now our ally, so we in the West have essentially absolved them of their sins, too. (It's the same with our relationship with Communist China these days. Whatever they did in the past is now forgotten and forgiven, at least from the point of view of Western governments today.)
It's our own diplomatic intrigue and incompetence which has hindered the West's ability in dealing with whatever threats they've had to deal with. It's not merely a question of who killed the most or which ideology is "worse," but it's also a matter of examining our own actions and determining whether or not they were tempered with wisdom and foresight as to what the potential consequences might be. While it may all be 20/20 hindsight now, I believe that there were actions the West could have taken which would have likely prevented the rise of these various threats we had to deal with in the 20th century and up to the present day.
The enmity between Islam and Christendom (both Western and Eastern) is very old, going back before the days of Charles Martel. In the Eastern Orthodox countries, they've also had to deal with more acute threats on their side of the continent. While it's not something particularly new to our historical experience, at least in the past few centuries, we in the West had our eyes on other things. We didn't really consider the Ottoman Empire to be much of a threat to us here in America. The British even sided with Turkey against Orthodox Russia during the Crimean War, so they clearly viewed Russia as a greater threat to their interests than Islamic Turkey, even though they still occupied large chunks of the Balkans at that point. Later on, Turkey joined up with Germany and Austria against Russia and the other Allied nations, but the West still viewed Germany as the primary threat.
During the World Wars and the early part of the Cold War, whatever "threat" Islam may have represented at the time was totally off the radar of U.S. policymakers. Turkey was considered beaten and impotent, while most of the rest of the Muslim world was firmly under European (primarily Anglo-French) hegemony, from the Malay Peninsula to Morocco. From America's standpoint, we didn't really have to worry about those territories or whatever threat they may have posed, since they were mostly in other countries' spheres of influence, not ours - not yet.
If they are a threat today, then I believe it's proper to examine how it was possible for them to rise from the level of a beaten, demoralized, and conquered people to the threat they have since become. It doesn't necessarily dispute what they have become, but the problem that I see today in this discussion is that there seems to be disagreement over how they became such a "grave threat" that many people believe them to be. There also seems to be this tendency to whitewash and gloss over past mistakes made by Western governments, as if we had nothing to do with feeding this threat and making it even more powerful than it otherwise would have been.
I'm not saying that we should do nothing, and I actually believe that I am able "to grasp the simple fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with a religion that is literally operating under Medieval laws and principles in the 21st Century." I think there's something fundamentally wrong with religion in general, although I won't really get into that just now in this thread.
But I think we should learn from past mistakes. I think we should try to look at this rationally and focus solely on the violent extremist radicals and not on the larger community which might be innocent. If we go off half-cocked and slaughter the innocent along with the guilty, then it will only escalate things even more. You say that liberals are loony, but what I see from the right is war fever, which conveys a certain other kind of lunacy.
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