Hard News: The witless on the pitiless
282 Responses
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This includes the mainstream press, and I'm a little surprised that it includes you.
I regard it as encouraging that the soft left are quite *so* spooked by Hone. That suggests that the Mana Party has a bit of momentum and might get somewhere at the election.
(You don't get this sort of vilification directed at Penny Bright or Grant Morgan, for instance).
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
During WWII, capturing Hitler would have been an ideal outcome, but far less practical in reality than assassination
Plenty of pretty heinous Nazis were captured and put on trial.
That said, I can't imagine a Soviet squad entering the bunker and not firing on sight - although I guess that's not the point either.
My understanding though is that there was agreement, reluctant on the part of Churchill and Stalin, to put all Nazis on trial if caught alive - Hitler included.
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nzlemming, in reply to
You don’t get this sort of vilification directed at Penny Bright or Grant Morgan, for instance)
Penny Bright really doesn’t have a national stage. From those that have been bothered professionally by her (e.g. me, when I worked for the gummint), you would hear plenty of vilification, not so much for what she said but how loudly [ETA and how often] she says it.
I’ve no idea who Grant Morgan is, so will not vilify him in absentia.
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Marcus Turner, in reply to
Thanks. I love to hear about etymolygy in Maori language (_pace_ diacritic enthusiasts). It's not something we hear a lot about.
(Italics not working as I expected: what am I doing wrong?)
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Kracklite, in reply to
In the end... Stalin wanted show trials, Churchill would have been happy with summary execution, and this was after victory.
Assassination during wartime has its precedents, such as that of Reinhard Heydrich and Isoroku Yamamoto. Both could be justified for tactical or strategic reasons - ie. they were active and effective and their deaths served military goals. In the case of the former, I wouldn't gloat, but I wouldn't argue that he didn't deserve it.
We seem to have taken a step back since Nuremburg, but on the other hand, the ICC in the Hague is now a permanent institution.
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nzlemming, in reply to
You need two underscores at each end of the word or phrase.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
the ravings of L. Ron Hubbard
You read those , dear boy that's taking things a bit far.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Ah but you don't know that until you take that last step...
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chris, in reply to
Thanks RA Hurley, you paraphrased my point succinctly with;
How do we know?
An argument in which the protagonist is imposing his perception of a third party's thought processes against others' perceptions is always going to be - somewhat moot. When this third party has managed to evade detection for ten years, I'd emphasize - strikingly.
And if they weren't, that would make him a liar and manipulator of the sincere beliefs of others. Which would be even worse.
Worse than a genocidal maniac? really? This is romanticism.
Speech in Washington D.C., June 1, 2004
"I believe that God wants me to be president."
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Kracklite, in reply to
<eng lit affiliation>Please do not besmirch the memory of Byron by associating Romanticism with such detachment! :) </eng lit affiliation>
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chris, in reply to
Apologies. I say exactly what I erm think..........................people want to hear.
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Chris Waugh, in reply to
Ah, thanks.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
The Moscow Declaration of 1943 was the basis of the Nuremberg trials. By war's end, I think both the UK and the US had moved on from anything but open trial. Stalin, of course, was unable to conceive of a determination that wasn't centred around a show trial and his advocates were furious at the not-guilties and the sentences that didn't include a rope.
Then there is this - just to cloud matters.
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One of the paradoxes of such classified equipment is that on the one hand it offers an advantage, but on the other, if one is shot down, the wreckage can be analysed by an enemy, so there is often reluctance to deploy the very best, gee-whizz hardware.
You can bet that the ISI has sold photos and the like to the Russians and Chinese and will be auctioning the actual wreckage to the highest bidder.
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Kracklite, in reply to
Chiding intended in good humour of course...
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Kracklite, in reply to
Ah, thank you.
just to cloud matters
Fog of war and all that.
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Kracklite, in reply to
Absolutely. That's more or less what happened when an F-117 was downed in the Bosnian wars. Ironically, the principles of stealth originated with a Soviet mathematician.
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chris, in reply to
Ostensibly sure, but within your lavishly furnished mind who's to say what dark missives lurk...
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Marcus Turner, in reply to
Trying now italics.
(Why didn't it do that before?.... I thought that's what I did.)
Thanks for your help.
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I don't know about god (no really, I don't), but I think this proves beyond all reasonable doubt that hell exists.
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Kracklite, in reply to
My mind, I think, resembles Gormenghast.
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The post-WW2 war crimes trials were largely circumscribed by the desire of the Allies to symbolically punish Nazism and Japanese militarism whilst encouraging the rebirth of normal society in Japan and Germany.
If you took a view of complicity akin to todays peacetime standards, hundreds of thousands would have been jailed or executed (under the actual denazification measures in Western Germany, 90,000 were detained and 1.9mln banned for a time from jobs other than manual labour. If similar measures had been attempted in Japan, the numbers may have been much larger.)
On the other hand, by requiring strict evidence and allowing a generous interpretation of the laws of war, one might have been able to argue that some of those executed after Nuremburg (Keitel and Jodl for instance) should not have been.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Why didn’t it do that before?
Because...ummm... the Internets? Oh, look! A demonic duck! </me scarpers>
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nzlemming, in reply to
I don’t know about god (no really, I don’t), but I think this proves beyond all reasonable doubt that hell exists
Oh, goodie!! Dualism, my favourite! ;-)
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Kracklite, in reply to
Have you read Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth? Speer received a 20-year sentence. Her conclusion is that if he had revealed at Nuremburg what he eventually revealed to her, by the standards that others were condemned to death, he would have been hanged too. Evidence that has emerged suggests more knowing complicity than some had assumed, and yet his stance remains, I think, somewhat ambiguous as opposed to being purely duplicitous.
It’s easy to make sweeping moral judgments for (eg. Boris Johnson) or against (eg. “Bomber”) the killing of ObL with the appearance of absolute certainty as if those accused were fully rational agents, and yet we all lie to ourselves and evil works by clouding and corrupting. I can’t find any means to describe ObL as anything but evil, but that doesn’t mean then that any action against him was purely one or the other – if it was a good act, then he was evil and therefore killing him was a purely good act, or if killing him was a bad act, then he must have been good, or at least not so bad and America is therefore definitely bad… those sort of arguments baffle me and seem self-deluding. The only relatively clear arguments I can see are those that are based on tactical and strategic considerations and those are confused enough.
Back to the Nazis, the case of Speer, as I interpret it, leads me to a great deal of disquiet over the death penalty under any circumstances, which is very strange considering that the sheer enormity of Nazi crimes and the collective responsibility of all involved (which Speer acknowledged) would initially lead one to assume that there could be no ambiguity.
I’m struck by two lines from a Neil Jordan film about cycles of revenge in Ireland, Angel :
Mr Bloom, a policeman: “‘Vengeance is mine’ – who said that?”
Danny, a revenge killer: “The Lord.”There’s the basis of my uncertainty over any killing on moral grounds, even under judicial authority… and I’m not a Christian.
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