The Auschwitz Volunteer

I think I'll add this to my reading list.

And I'm cursing myself for being so stupid as to not think of this before now. We know that what's going on inside the North Korean prison camps is as bad as anything that happened in Auschwitz, yet we do nothing.

So there's your answer, @oldfella. We know, and we do nothing. And unlike those in WWII, we have the benefit of hindsight.

Hell yes! Martin Scorsese at the helm directing!
He can bring his ever present Rolling Stones music -
"jumpin' jack flash it's a gas, gas, gas......."

Okay that was pretty weak. My blood alcohol content is dropping dangerously fast.
Nurse

Good point - however we were already at war when the peak of the mass exterminations was going on. It's not like we got involved in WWII
just to liberate the death/work camps. We had a lot of different things going on - one more side trip wouldn't have mattered.
Once we got attacked we were all for the most part.

If North Korea never attacks us they are "out of sight, out of mind".
But it would be nice if the combined military might of America and all it's allies could invade and topple that shit-hole.
In recent history has any nation undergone three generations of hell from the same family?

Not that this is any excuse, but NK has very few, if any one, left alive that remembers the pre-Kim days. You'd have an entire nation that was cut off from the world that needs reintergration. Even 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany is still lagging behind the West.

Basically, no country wants to pick up that slack and basically keep to themselves so no one, including Team America, is stepping up to the plate for liberation. Frankly, this should have happened at some point before the 21st century.

Haiti comes close, with two generations (BTW, I met one of Doc Duvalier's grandkids one time. An amazingly charming man.). I think that one of the 'stans which cropped up after the fall of the Soviet Union has been ran by at least two generations as well, but I might be mistaken about that.

What do you think we should be doing? Not challenging you, just wondering, because I have no answers, either. The Nazis were warning the rest of the world to "take the Jews off our hands or else." Stalin didn't bother with such niceties; he just liquidated thousands along with "political" prisoners. NK is so completely sealed off under the pretense that everything's wonderful, that even an offer on the part of other nations to accept refugees would be laughed at. What's the solution?

As cliched as it might sound, I think that education is the answer. I don't simply mean that if everyone gets a college degree the world will be a better place, but teaching people not only an ethical way to live, but also teaching them how to take action when they find themselves in absolutely shitty situations to try and improve things.

I know that folks like to pretend if the US was ever invaded or became a police state that they'd grab their guns and join the revolution, but let's be realistic here, all that's going to do is get you killed, and cause problems for other people. Just as shooting those cops in NYC isn't going to accomplish anything other than creating greater divisiveness in our society, so too, will random acts of violence (or non-violence) not actually solve anything at all.

What's needed is a population who has the capabilities to recognize what the root cause of a problem is, has the ability to formulate a plan of action to solve it, and knows how to carry it out. The skills Pilecki used in the camp can be adapted to any kind of situation, and they don't automatically have to involve violence (though if you're in a death camp, then violence is absolutely going to be needed).

Teach people the universal ideal of respecting other human beings (provided those other people aren't harming anyone) and how to handle situations where people are not being respected. Show them what they can say to try and change things, show them when walking away is the best solution, and show them when to use violence. Once they have those skills, then there's a chance that they can solve the problems, but without those skills, they'll accomplish nothing at all.

^One small ray of hope: Following the 2008 meltdown, many MBA programs introduced mandatory ethics courses; some have even established entire ethics departments. (A bit late to try to convey to these people that Gordon Gekko was not the Good Guy, but better than never, I suppose.) Somewhere there's a survey of MBA students, the majority of whom seemed mystified about the impact of things like stock manipulation and subprime mortgage bundling on real people. The goal was to make money, right? That whole "the borrower should know how to read the fine print in a mortgage, so it's all their fault" rationale that was being peddled after the crash. Closest thing to pure Randism you can find in the real world.

I agree with you that teaching a basic concept that "actions have consequences" is the answer, but if we can't teach it to Harvard MBAs, and we can't show that, for example, building schools in Afghanistan is better (and cheaper) than "bombing them back to the Stone Age," how do we get this across in, say, elementary schools that are historically strapped for cash, and against the general mindset that "it's the parents' responsibility, not the school's"?

Yes, education is key. But with the current perception that Dumb Is Good and any attempt to learn anything new is "librul," whattaya gonna do?

And particularly in the case of NK, how do we penetrate a society so completely self-enclosed?

It is up to us to change these things. Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy" looks to be a good place to start. As for North Korea, I think people sending over translations of his book via helium balloons would do more good than the Bibles currently being dispersed that way.

Need I point out that were one to "file the serial numbers" off Pilecki's story, it could easily be set in a Cardassian labor camp, with a Bajorian hero? And unlike Pilecki, one writing a fictional work has the luxury of going into the kinds of details that Pilecki had to omit.

Excellent thought. Similar to the leaflet drops in Europe during the World Wars. I'm also wondering if a reverse hack into their internal Internet wouldn't be an interesting move. (AFAIK, few outside the government have Internet access, but messing with their heads might be fun.)

Absolutely. The entertainment aspect of fiction has always been the spoonful of sugar whereby you slip in the life lessons that, how ever slowly, change the world.

Here's the problem with building schools in the sandbox. They make easy targets for Taliban and other type
of bad people. So unless somebody could provide protection it would be pointless.

Just as a church can be any building, so can a school. People have always read forbidden material, even though they knew it was risking death. The trick is not in getting them to read it, but in getting it into their hands.

Well, getting in their hands is easy. Not getting them killed for getting them caught with it in their hands is hard. We're also in the difficult position of trying to denounce a cult of personality based on socialist truths when we're a country run by a cult of personality based on socialist truths. Dennis Rodman would have an easier time getting into the White House than Rob Lowe, much less Mitch McConnell, who to date has managed to wrangle a trip there about three times.

Ultimately, we're all dead men. All we can do is choose how we meet that end.

And, just when it appears that you can't get any dumber, you manage to not only dig through the bottom of the barrel, but bore through the center of the Earth, pop out in China, do a flip, and resume digging.

The fictionalized bickerings of politicians has absolutely no business being brought up in this thread, and if you had any sense at all, you'd realize that the kind of claims and counterclaims made by politicians in Washington, have as much to do with reality as does Honey Boo Boo.

I don't give a shit what you think about Obama, but take your dickwaving comments elsewhere.

I'm not surprised that you see things that way.

when Obama starts beheading folks that critizise him policies and all TV and media is owned y the state and the country is entirely closed off from the world, then come back to us.

In light of this weekend's events,

What? Is the government finally going to put us all in those FEMA death camps Jessie Ventura and Alex Jones warned us about?

So you elected Trump to do the job properly?

Nah, your ass is going to Oklahoma.

That's only an OK plan

Andrew Jackson agrees!
The Cherokee disagree!
The Seminole disagree!
Whitey agrees: Manifest Destiny, bitches!
History disagrees:

Just going to drop this here because it's a reminder.

Didja read it yet?

No, still not.

Fucking do it. I don't care what part of the political spectrum one is on, this book should be mandatory fucking reading. It tells people how to survive under the worst conditions possible, as well as detailing some of the worst things that people can do to their fellow human beings.

I just hope Hollywood doesn't get their talons into this story and Disneyfy any movie about it. I have heard about this incident a couple of times on the radio - amazing stuff!

Concomitant with this thread is the story of how Auschwitz was planned and developed. That's told in the HBO movie Conspiracy.



The Behind the Bastards podcast did a two-parter on Reinhard Heydrich.
Part One.
Part Two.

I want to note that the hosts of the podcast repeatedly point out that Heydrich was so evil that all they could do was hit the "high points" (if you could call industrializing genocide a "high point") of his actions. How evil? Goddamned Hitler told the dude at times to "Tone it the fuck down." If you're too extreme for Hitler, then you're pretty much off the charts when it comes to evil.

And if you watch nothing more of this than the guy who starts speaking at about the 7:40 minute mark, you'll hear something about Nazi Germany that isn't widely known.

I recently read "The Phony Victory" by Peter Hitchens, which is an attempt to deconstruct some of the myths of WW2 from a British perspective. One of the things he talks about is the assassination of Heydrich - which he considers to have been the wrong thing to do because of the (predictable) response that it produced from the Nazis - both in terms of the cost in reprisals against the Czech people and in terms of the destruction of the Czech resistance. British intelligence wanted to "do something" high profile and this was strategically inept. But then - he was such an evil Nazi bastard that it feels wrong to be against his death.

I gotta say, I can see making the argument that he was killed in too high a profile manner but I can't see arguing that they shouldn't have tried to take him out at all. Guy wasn't "merely" evil, he was efficient at it. He's the reason the death camps were created and were able to murder so many people in such a short period of time. (The Wannsee Conference happened in 1942, by 1945 places like Auschwitz were killing thousands of people a day.) Who knows what kind of nasty shit and how many people he'd have been able to kill if he hadn't been stopped when he was?

The Auschwitz Museum recently tweeted this photo out.



Just a grim reminder that we had the ability to reach the camps and bomb them. But chose not to.