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Its theoretical reintegration would also be considerably more difficult than what Germany had to go through (and is still going through). East Germany had, if I recall, about half of West Germany's GDP. South Korea has something like 17x North Korea's GDP. Maybe more now.
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May 15, 2015 09:49
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PittTheElder posted:Actually, North Korea used to be the industrialized productive part. Not so much now though of course. It is widely believed that first their chemical and biological agents are heavily decayed or sold off to shady groups over time to raise money for the regime's luxuries, and secondly that their delivery systems would in event of real war fail spectacularly, especially as real chemical and biological weaponry can't just be left ready in artillery to be shot into Seoul, it has to be properly mixed and stored and only deployed right before you want to use it. A useful comparison might be the various wunderwaffe of the Nazis, in that they could only be deployed very sporadically if at all.
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May 15, 2015 13:20
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Nintendo Kid posted:It is widely believed that first their chemical and biological agents are heavily decayed or sold off to shady groups over time to raise money for the regime's luxuries, and secondly that their delivery systems would in event of real war fail spectacularly, especially as real chemical and biological weaponry can't just be left ready in artillery to be shot into Seoul, it has to be properly mixed and stored and only deployed right before you want to use it. Sure, but even if only a very small number of agents are delivered successfully it would be a nightmare for the South (and the world at large) to deal with on just about every level.
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May 15, 2015 17:05
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Veritek83 posted:Sure, but even if only a very small number of agents are delivered successfully it would be a nightmare for the South (and the world at large) to deal with on just about every level. No, not really. Please bear in mind that current estimates is that the North Koreans could only reliably hit the outer northern suburbs of Seoul, and then a bunch of mostly not that populated farmland across from the rest of the DMZ. Like I said, it's akin to the Nazi wunderwaffe in terms of effectiveness. The military threat is greatly overplayed and becomes more so by the year since the Soviets stopped handing out all the free support they could ask for in the 80s, while the economic costs of it finally going under keep getting way more important.
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May 15, 2015 17:11
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Nintendo Kid posted:No, not really. Please bear in mind that current estimates is that the North Koreans could only reliably hit the outer northern suburbs of Seoul, and then a bunch of mostly not that populated farmland across from the rest of the DMZ. Like I said, it's akin to the Nazi wunderwaffe in terms of effectiveness. I don't disagree that the absolute number of casualties and the military effectiveness of any sort of chemical or biological attack by the DPRK will probably be equivalent to the wunderwaffe, but that's not really the point, is it? The political cost of letting such an attack happen- or worse, being seen to provoke such an attack- factors into any sort of decision making about the North.
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May 15, 2015 17:20
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Veritek83 posted:I don't disagree that the absolute number of casualties and the military effectiveness of any sort of chemical or biological attack by the DPRK will probably be equivalent to the wunderwaffe, but that's not really the point, is it? The political cost of letting such an attack happen- or worse, being seen to provoke such an attack- factors into any sort of decision making about the North. No, really, most decision making going on is about the absolutely massive problems that come after their inevitable defeat, not about the relatively short amount of time they'd be able to fight. It's inevitable, and it's going to be one of the hugest humanitarian problems ever, including how to, essentially, restore a nation of 20 million plus people that's essentially already in ruins. Also, the North Koreans have already been shown to initiate attacks on the flimsiest possible pretexts, so there's really no appeasing them to prevent it. But you'll notice that especially since the 80s, they haven't dared to blast a single shell into Seoul because everyone knows what happens to their leadership within a few hours of that. They're in an unwinnable position, and they can't even make a meaningful first strike out of spite, but it's also one where they can sit and be the overlords all they please for probably another couple of decades before they have to fold. You might think of it like if Adolf Hitler had gone on to take over Lichtenstein instead of Germany. He couldn't really project force, but he could be a brutal tinpot dictator and live reasonably free of worry that anyone would bother to roll in and oust him.
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May 15, 2015 17:30
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Nintendo Kid posted:No, really, most decision making going on is about the absolutely massive problems that come after their inevitable defeat, not about the relatively short amount of time they'd be able to fight. It's inevitable, and it's going to be one of the hugest humanitarian problems ever, including how to, essentially, restore a nation of 20 million plus people that's essentially already in ruins. Not saying that the cleanup isn't not the major driving factor, but it's pretty clear that the North Korean WMD capability is a factor in thinking about collapse- and the post collapse rebuilding. I'm thinking particularly of sources like: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR300/RR331/RAND_RR331.pdf. Anyway, time to get back to Nazi's. Here's a major blank spot in my WW2 knowledge- what was the Reich's diplomatic corps like? I know Switzerland became a hub for back channel talks between the belligerents, but can anyone provide a decent summary?
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May 15, 2015 18:11
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Nintendo Kid posted:No, not really. Please bear in mind that current estimates is that the North Koreans could only reliably hit the outer northern suburbs of Seoul, and then a bunch of mostly not that populated farmland across from the rest of the DMZ. Like I said, it's akin to the Nazi wunderwaffe in terms of effectiveness. There is a Russian study on ammunition storage I need to find, but the jist of it is that even 30 year old shells don't work quite as well as they should, and the downright antique North Korean ammunition is probably at way under the projected maximum range. That is if the batteries will even fire.
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May 15, 2015 18:38
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Ensign Expendable posted:There is a Russian study on ammunition storage I need to find, but the jist of it is that even 30 year old shells don't work quite as well as they should, and the downright antique North Korean ammunition is probably at way under the projected maximum range. That is if the batteries will even fire. Do they have just normal field artillery stuff, or do they also have heavier, stationary pieces with longer range?
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May 15, 2015 18:43
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Tell me about Freemasonry and the Holocaust. There's quite literally no information on the Internet about it.
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May 15, 2015 18:50
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Ensign Expendable posted:There is a Russian study on ammunition storage I need to find, but the jist of it is that even 30 year old shells don't work quite as well as they should, and the downright antique North Korean ammunition is probably at way under the projected maximum range. That is if the batteries will even fire. Well I don't know about the rest of them but this battery isn't firing any time soon. 
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May 15, 2015 19:48
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Ensign Expendable posted:Invasions are expensive and sending them some food once in a while is cheaper than trying to unfuck the country. Plus an unfucked North Korea is probably just going to be reunified with the South, and China isn't going to be super happy about bordering a US ally. Also, if there is anything North Korea could actually manage to nuke, it's an invading army. Also, we just did Iraq and Afghanistan and those were both fuckfests.
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May 15, 2015 20:05
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feedmegin posted:Also, if there is anything North Korea could actually manage to nuke, it's an invading army. Also, we just did Iraq and Afghanistan and those were both fuckfests. That would be in keeping with their cold war era tactics. If I remember correctly, this was one of the planned strategies of the USSR, which planned on nuking an area to "soften it up" shortly before invading with ground troops.
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May 16, 2015 05:03
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North Korea and nukes are the other reason nobody wants to topple the Kim regime - sure, it's highly likely that their  nuclear tests a few years ago were just a shitload of conventional explosives with enough radioactive material mixed in that nobody would be able to tell the difference from the real deal (at least from a distance,) but nobody wants to roll the dice on the off chance that they actually do have a nuclear weapon.
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May 16, 2015 06:06
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Ghetto Prince posted:This has probably been covered somewhere upthread, but would handing over Danzig have done anything to improve Poland's situation / at least buy some time? They would have maybe bought themselves a few months, if not weeks. Hitler was dead-set on a war and was actually quite pissed at the Munich agreement that gave him Czechoslovakia, as he saw it as the British and French robbing him of his glorious war.
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May 18, 2015 11:57
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Noctis Horrendae posted:Tell me about Freemasonry and the Holocaust. There's quite literally no information on the Internet about it. No information on the Internet? I found this from a simple Google search: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007187
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May 19, 2015 02:18
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Reviews of six recent books on the concentration camps by Richard Evans http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jul/09/concentration-camps-anatomy-hell/
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Jun 23, 2015 20:19
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What's everyone's take on the book The Holocaust Industry by Norman Finklestein? I've heard him speak a lot and read some of his writings on Palestine, which are all pretty good. However, I just started this book, which was kind of his first big thing, and it doesn't seem very convincing so far (he's arguing that US Jews didn't care about the holocaust or Israel really until 1967). I've yet to read the large section on the Swiss Banking extortions, which I've heard is painted in less broad strokes.
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Jun 24, 2015 02:46
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Last Buffalo posted:What's everyone's take on the book The Holocaust Industry by Norman Finklestein? I've heard him speak a lot and read some of his writings on Palestine, which are all pretty good. However, I just started this book, which was kind of his first big thing, and it doesn't seem very convincing so far (he's arguing that US Jews didn't care about the holocaust or Israel really until 1967). I haven't read his book, so I can't comment on it directly, but I can say that it is (broadly) true that Israel and the Holocaust weren't really a political concern in the US until the late 60s. The general public really only began to concentrate on it as a unique and uniquely horrible thing (as opposed to simply another war crime committed by the Germans) after the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt's subsequent writing on the subject, and some high-profile news about the Mossad's Nazi hunting. What we would recognize as the modern cultural significance of it only emerged in the US in the late 70s, largely a a result of the TV miniseries "Holocaust." The conversation that it started, along with some very savvy outreach efforts from American jewish organizations and the media continuing to dwell on it as a result, really brought it to the forefront of american culture. edit: I should also add that the attitude that American Jews need to look out for the wellbeing of Israeli Jews is a post-1960 phenomenon. The Israeli government (and its various charitable, think tank, etc proxies) did a lot of outreach to do just that. The US always had a policy of mild support for the general concept of a Jewish state after WW2 through the 60s, but it wasn't until LBJ's administration that we went whole hog on supporting them. A lot of that had to do with the Six Days War, the existential threat faced by some of their arab neighbors, our growing understanding of how vital the region was and our desire to have a firm ally with cultural connections (much of Israel's jewish population is of European descent), plus a desire to generally gently caress with the USSR and its client states. poo poo, under eisenhower we directly told the Israelis to go gently caress off after they invaded Egypt alongside France and the UK. There was a whole mess of political and cultural factors which lead to a massive increase in US support for Israel and American awareness of the Holocaust as a unique event that stood apart from other atrocities. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jun 24, 2015 |
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Jun 24, 2015 21:28
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Maybe I have some really wrong ideas, but did nazi officials really rise ranks incredibly quickly? I mean whenever I've read about nazi officers their career seems to be "well I decided to join the party for poo poo and giggles in Münich 1934 and by 1936 I was an SS-colonel commanding some 1000 men". Was this normal or have I just read biographies of really good military men?
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Jun 24, 2015 21:54
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Fish of hemp posted:Maybe I have some really wrong ideas, but did nazi officials really rise ranks incredibly quickly? I mean whenever I've read about nazi officers their career seems to be "well I decided to join the party for poo poo and giggles in Münich 1934 and by 1936 I was an SS-colonel commanding some 1000 men". Was this normal or have I just read biographies of really good military men? Think of it like a Feudal Kingdom. If the King sees you doing something that proves your loyalty, you'll get a bigger fief and a new title, even if you're incompetent in every other way.
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Jun 24, 2015 22:45
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Probably selection bias, they don't write stuff about Hans Sixpack and how he was stuck for twelve years pushing papers for the vaterland in a Bielefeld office under a dick boss. Unless he was remarkable in some other way.
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Jun 24, 2015 23:19
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Mass mobilisation and war also generates enormous officer demand.
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Jun 24, 2015 23:29
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The timeline is also incredibly fast. You have Nazis as a joke in '23, control of the government by '33, and then the rapid militarization between '33 and '39. That's bound to lead to a lot of organizational shakeups and promotions.
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Jun 25, 2015 00:34
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That's Total War in general. Eisenhower was promoted to Brigadier General on 3 October 1941. By December of '43 he was Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, which is an awesome title if ever there was one.
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Jun 25, 2015 06:37
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Disinterested posted:Mass mobilisation and war also generates enormous officer demand. This. It's a fairly common thing for fringe parties that quickly get elected into office to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill the now open positions for qualified personel. War in the east takes this to the next level.
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Jun 25, 2015 06:56
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Isn't that the root of the functionalist argument for the holocaust? Basically, a system which promoted based on enthusiastic action and fanaticism towards the stated goals of a new, pure world encouraged all the lower officers to commit the mass scale of murders that occurred. The goals were vague enough, and the culture cruel enough, that the violence was born out of people mostly looking to please their bosses and get promoted.
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Jun 25, 2015 17:51
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edit: disregard, i cant read
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Jun 25, 2015 17:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:I haven't read his book, so I can't comment on it directly, but I can say that it is (broadly) true that Israel and the Holocaust weren't really a political concern in the US until the late 60s. The general public really only began to concentrate on it as a unique and uniquely horrible thing (as opposed to simply another war crime committed by the Germans) after the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt's subsequent writing on the subject, and some high-profile news about the Mossad's Nazi hunting. What we would recognize as the modern cultural significance of it only emerged in the US in the late 70s, largely a a result of the TV miniseries "Holocaust." The conversation that it started, along with some very savvy outreach efforts from American jewish organizations and the media continuing to dwell on it as a result, really brought it to the forefront of american culture. Ok, I'm just wondering where you sourced this? I ask because this is close to what Finkelstein argues. He goes further and says that America was callous and American Jews didn't really care or want to hear about the Holocaust. I find this a little hard to believe, if only because my Grandparents, who were both alive during that time, have said their memories of the early 40s were of waves of news about the Holocaust coming in, in bits and pieces. People in their different Jewish communities (one in a leftist, commie circle, the other in more assimilated American Jews) both were horrified and changed by the holocaust, and as a result, Zionism was a big deal at 1948 and onward. Furthermore, the Holocaust was something that made them very politically conscious as Jews living in America.
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Jun 25, 2015 18:03
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Last Buffalo posted:Ok, I'm just wondering where you sourced this? I ask because this is close to what Finkelstein argues. It's one part coursework I did in grad school with a prominent Holocaust historian, and one part background reading I had to do for my comps. Basically it's just a summary of about a decade's worth of building a general background on early 20th century German history. That account is a pretty bog standard historical consensus on how public discourse over the Holocaust evolved in the mid-late 20th century. If you want a detailed scholarly account of it I would look at "A Historiography of the Holocaust" edited by Stone. It's a pretty good introductory primer to the way that the subject has been approached in its various forms over the year. There's one article in particular that I'm blanking on the name of at this moment that deals with precisely what you're asking about. It's titled something along the line of "In search of a British and American historiography." quote:He goes further and says that America was callous and American Jews didn't really care or want to hear about the Holocaust. I find this a little hard to believe, if only because my Grandparents, who were both alive during that time, have said their memories of the early 40s were of waves of news about the Holocaust coming in, in bits and pieces. People in their different Jewish communities (one in a leftist, commie circle, the other in more assimilated American Jews) both were horrified and changed by the holocaust, and as a result, Zionism was a big deal at 1948 and onward. Furthermore, the Holocaust was something that made them very politically conscious as Jews living in America. You always need to be careful when assessing personal anecdotes. Individual anecdotes can certainly conflict with the general patterns that emerged during a period of time. There were Germans who actively resisted Hitler's government, for example, but that doesn't change the fact that there were far more Nazis than anti-fascists in Berlin in 1940. Your grandparents could easily have been more connected to international events, more politically aware, or involved in more social circles with strong connections to Europe than was typical. This isn't to say that the plight of European Jews didn't have a profound effect on many, including many American jews, but the fact remains that the antisemitic atrocities of the 30s and 40s were not nearly the cultural touchstone that they are today until well into the 1970s and only began to emerge into public discourse as a uniquely evil event apart from all other massacres, deportations, and racist practices in the 1960s. I have no doubt that what your grandparents told you about their experiences was true, but that doesn't necessarily make it representative of the more general trends in the population. It should also be noted that there is a big difference between being aware of an event and developing an identity as a result and that event prompting many people to become a political pressure group. Zionism did have a remarkable renaissance in the late 40s, and a number of American Jews went so far as to emigrate to Israel. That said, it didn't become a major political pressure point in the American Jewish community until the late 60s. One thing that I didn't mention before that should also be taken into account is the US's domestic political history, especially that related to civil rights and segregation. Confronting the marginalization and oppression of African Americans in the US helped to open a general public discourse on prejudice, race, and discrimination that made things like middle-class early 20th century "polite antisemitism" socially and politically unacceptable. A lot of the impetus for the growing cultural awareness of the particular nature of the Holocaust was spurred by a generation of people who had not been alive for it seeking to educate themselves, asking questions about it, and generally pushing it back to the foreground. The fact that this is the same period when a new generation of Germans was beginning to ask uncomfortable questions of their elders and push for new criminal proceedings against those who escaped the initial wave of post-war justice helped a lot as well. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Jun 25, 2015 |
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Jun 25, 2015 18:29
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Last Buffalo posted:Isn't that the root of the functionalist argument for the holocaust? Basically, a system which promoted based on enthusiastic action and fanaticism towards the stated goals of a new, pure world encouraged all the lower officers to commit the mass scale of murders that occurred. The goals were vague enough, and the culture cruel enough, that the violence was born out of people mostly looking to please their bosses and get promoted. You're not really on the spot, but almost. It's the vague and unregulated hierarchy in the powerstructure that made it necessary to refer to Hitler to clear up any issues whenever the big players came into conflict over something, and that happened constantly. That was intentionally built into the system, so that Hitler could keep controll. Another thing is how orders were issued, not in detail, but as broad goals of sorts. This is called Rahmenbefehl. If you're the person who has to execute it, you may use whatever means available unless otherwise stated to get something done. The question is, what does Hitler really expect of you and what is your leeway? Can't ask him directly, so you have to assume what, based on what you know. What follows are the most extreme solutions to a problem.
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Jun 25, 2015 19:02
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Last Buffalo posted:Isn't that the root of the functionalist argument for the holocaust? Basically, a system which promoted based on enthusiastic action and fanaticism towards the stated goals of a new, pure world encouraged all the lower officers to commit the mass scale of murders that occurred. The goals were vague enough, and the culture cruel enough, that the violence was born out of people mostly looking to please their bosses and get promoted. You're basically describing 'moving toward the fuhrer', though I'm not sure it's quite right to call it functionalist. Kershaw touches on it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00546wh
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Jun 25, 2015 19:12
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I just finished Hitler's Willing Executioners, and I have a few questions: 1) How well regarded is this book among historians today? I briefly googled some criticism of it, and there was some fairly bitter, sweeping criticism. I agree with some of it as it relates to fairly interpreting evidence - Goldhagen sometimes seems to play "heads I win tails you lose," for instance when it comes to people opting out of killing Jews. He uses that as evidence that it was in fact possible to opt out, thus undermining the notion that killing Jews was a mere act of self-preservation, however, he seems to gloss over the fact that some people did in fact opt out, which undermines the notion that eliminationist anti-semitism was universal in German society. 2) Following on 1), he seems to takeaway of his arguments to the extreme when it is simply not necessary. He makes a lot of absolute statements, when such statements seem difficult to sustain on the available record, and a statement of 90% certainty would support his position just fine. 3) In particular, he states that no German was ever punished for opting out of killing Jews. Not just no German in the police battalions or work camps he examined, but no Germans, period. Is that a defensible statement? It seems to me that if you ask "did the nazis ever kill anyone for ______?" the answer is probably yes. None of this is to say I disagree with his conclusions, I basically buy his theses: the starting point ought to be that maybe Germany and Germans were different, given they holocausted millions of Jews while the other countries with traditions of anti-semitism didn't, and it is difficult to account for the behavior of the very mediocre people who populated the police battalions and death marches without there being some vast popular support for eliminationist anti-semitism. I am just skeptical of overreach in argument. Thoughts? I just started wages of destruction, this thread has some great recommendations, thanks. Kazak_Hstan fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 03:55
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Kazak_Hstan posted:I just finished Hitler's Willing Executioners, and I have a few questions: Long story short: It isn't. Cyrano will be along shortly to fill in the exact details.
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Jun 29, 2015 04:52
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I'll do the write up tomorrow but goldhagen is a laughing stock in historical circles. There is also strong evidence he willfully misrepresented some of the evidence in Executioners. Read Browning's "ordinary men". It's an amazing book and he completely dismantled Goldhagen in the afterword. It's a masterful academic smack down.
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Jun 29, 2015 05:24
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Kuiperdolin posted:Probably selection bias, they don't write stuff about Hans Sixpack and how he was stuck for twelve years pushing papers for the vaterland in a Bielefeld office under a dick boss. Unless he was remarkable in some other way. Well, obviously. Bielefeld doesn't exist.
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Jun 29, 2015 05:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'll do the write up tomorrow but goldhagen is a laughing stock in historical circles. There is also strong evidence he willfully misrepresented some of the evidence in Executioners. Welp that was 500 some pages of misplaced  I'd prefer my bogus nazi history to involve wonder weapons, the occult, and ancient pagan rituals. Wages of Destruction is legit, right? Also, I once read a book by Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, titled White Shark. It is about a half man half shark hybrid with razor sharp metal teeth that was engineered by the nazis at the end of the war. It wakes up in a crate at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the late eighties and swims to the New England shore, where it walks onto land (it has legs), and starts killing people. Someone eventually shoots it. Also there is a teenage love subplot that just gets left hanging. Do they gently caress?! I'd like to know. It's basically Jaws, except if the shark could walk on land and was also a nazi. Can any of the scholars in this thread confirm and / or deny that the Nazis had or attempted to have such a weapon, also if they had lots of them could it have affected the outcome of the war?
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Jun 29, 2015 05:56
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Kazak_Hstan posted:Welp that was 500 some pages of misplaced Boss Hitler had a weaponized shark, Megabite, but it was created after he had won the war: 
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Jun 29, 2015 06:38
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It's a real shame that Hitler's Willing Executions was on the loving New York Times bestseller list while Ordinary Men is obscure outside of people who study history.
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Jun 29, 2015 07:35
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Kazak_Hstan posted:Wages of Destruction is legit, right? Very much so, yes.
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Jun 29, 2015 07:36
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