Uh oh... You asked for it. I can just see Dingle working up a steam over that one.

Nope. I am not in favor of return to 67 borders, but I don't like those calling for forcible removal of anyone either.

Yes there are Nazis in the US. The go by the term "neo-Nazi" but it's the same idea. 100% aryan control. There will always be prejudice. And prejudice is different then racism. Racism is hating on a race and forcing them to do things they don't want to. Example, slavery of the African Americans and Native Americans. Prejudice is
making fun of ones race but not causing physical harm to them.

Racism is the belief that race is a primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

Prejudice is a preconceived judgment toward a people or a person because of race, social class, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, sexual orientation or other personal characteristics. Racism is a form of prejudice.

Don't spout definitions that are incorrect like a 13 year old, DaBananaHammock.

"A lot of those French death were us bombing France, plus starvation, plus the German invasion and since the French are counting themselves perhaps a few natural deaths"

Tell me Gopher, how do you feel about Holocaust Revisionists who say that many (or all) of the six million Jews who died between 1936-1945 died from Allied bombs, starvation, natural causes, and armed conflict?

"I think three times as many Stasi officers in 1989 as there had been Gestapo during the war"

That's probably counting all of the Stasi's informants (who were indeed very numerous). Also, Nazi Germany and its puppet regimes throughout Europe had a lot more internal security apparatuses than just the Gestapo.

"Compared to the Pole or the Greeks or the Serbs or the Czechs or the Ukrainians, the French did not resist that much."

So the French resistance was irrelevant because it didn't look exactly like resistance movements elsewhere? The French resistance - particularly the communist wing - did in fact engage in some real large-scale guerilla warfare; one such uprising in 1944 took an entire German division to put down. I would agree that there wasn't as much resistance violence in France as in some of the Eastern countries, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that the terrain there (particularly in the Balkans) is much more conducive to guerilla warfare than in France. Also, France lacked a tradition of resistance to an occupying power as you would find in Greece or Serbia. The last time France was defeated and occupied as it was by Nazi Germany, it was the 15th century and the "collaborators" of the day were all pledging their fealty to Henry V's infant son.

Consider as well that one doesn't need to pick up a gun to combat the Nazis. A Frenchman who helped downed Allied pilots get back to England was a helluva lot more important to the Allied war effort than a Pole who managed to throw a few Molotov cocktails and fire off an antique pistol before getting blown to bits by a German artillery barage. The French Resistance was the eyes and ears of the allies in France; that work was every bit as important (if not more so) to the eventual Allied victory as tying down second- or third-rate wehrmacht troops to guard supply lines in the Ukraine. There's a reason the Germans withdrew from France for the most part without a serious fight. To suggest that the French Resistance was "mythical" and worthless is an insult to the tens or hundreds of thousands who died in it.

"By the way, do still consider me an anti-semitic Nazi asshole? "

I believe I have told you privately what I think of you, which has nothing to do with this particular thread.

Yes, but you never said why...

@Draugnar: History gets embellished by the popular medias? No news here. It does not affect only WWII and the French Resistance...
The French Resistance was very significant (as well explained by Tolstoi). Is the resistance from the Poles and the Greeks known well enough? No certainly not. However I still don't see how undermining the actions of the French Resistance is going to change that.

My Bad. I meant @GOPHER

The Poles efforts were renowned and yet the "super Powers" turned their backs on them and shamed themselves by allowing the Russians to take their homeland while their me were fighting for the French Freedom whilst under control of English Generals. How dare someone supports French actions when their country was restored from the blood of a nation that they would not restore as well. All the allied powers should be ashamed for this. I'm not Polish but this story repulses me.

Response:
1) I think more Jews probably did die from starvation/"natural causes" than gas chambers. The Nazis worked them to death and didn't feed them. Anne Frank died at Buchenwald from malnutrition based typhus, I believe. The Nazis filled pits outside of Kiev with Jews and buried them alive. Back like 20 years ago a Jewish grad student from Columbia, I think, went on a tour of several camps with maps he had found and discovered that certain aspects of the architecture had been renamed to fit a particular narrative, namely he found showers that locked from the inside and had no ventilation labeled as gas chambers. The Treblinka model is the only camp outside of Auschwitz that makes sense for gassing to seem practical. Chlorine based gases would probably stain even tiled walls a deep blue and as a heavy gas would be quite hard to get out of an enclosed room not designed for the purpose. Treblinka used trailers for gassing. The herd them into the showers story has never made that much sense to me. I do not believe that Treblinka's gas trailers were disguised as anything other than what they were.
2) that is actual officers the informants end up being one out of every 27 people, I believe. Officers were just one out of like 90-120. The very old British saying that "England is a country that has an army, whereas Prussia is an army that has a country" was reapplied to East Germany. "The UK is a country that has a secret police, whereas East Germany is a secret police that has a country."
3) I don't believe a damn thing the Communists say about their "resistance". They would be even more likely to lie in service to their cause than the Gaulists in the name of French honor.

It was even worse than that. The Russian waited outside of Warsaw to let the Germans finish butchering the Poles fighting in the Warsaw Uprising that the Russians had called forth, so that they could occupy a Poland cleansed of resistant elements. The Brits and Americans understood, but had little power to affect anything. On the other hand there probably would not have been an independent Poland, if a Democrat had not been President of the US. Ireland either, for that matter.

"Back like 20 years ago a Jewish grad student from Columbia, I think, went on a tour of several camps with maps he had found and discovered that certain aspects of the architecture had been renamed to fit a particular narrative, namely he found showers that locked from the inside and had no ventilation labeled as gas chambers. "

Gopher, care to source that?

@C-K: LOL. You're joking, right? Poland was not saved because english generals decided to save French Freedom??? No more comments necessary...

@gopher: 1) Millions of Jews were killed by Nazis in inhumane conditions. Does it matter if more were worked to death or gased? Not to me.
2) love stereotypes, don't you?
3) What communists are you talking about? From which countries? What Gaulist lies are you talking about?

@Corwin I was asked three fairly specific questions and I answered. If one out of ever 100 people is a member of the Secret Police and 4% are informants, stereotypes seem justified.

And you're right, I should have only accused the Gaulists of exaggerating. There is a laundry list of what one might call professional communists in the West who spent decades prancing around about with their anti-fascist credentials who then were discovered to have been fascists or very active collaborators. I had to laugh when I read Wilhelm Roepke (famous anti-Nazi German) for the first time as he listed off Nazi collaborators who were denouncing Germans in the late 40s and predicted they would end up toadying for Stalin and I recognized them as heavily filled with the above list of famous communists of my lifetime.

I saw the guy on TV when I was in junior high. Like 20/20 or something similar. Cameras in the camps looking at doors. His points seemed reasonable. The building of the camps predate the use of gas. Originally they were shooting the Jews. Then they decided that it was inhumane.....the solders were apparently stressed by it. Hence the mobile trailers at Treblinka.

That was a response to DingleberryJones

@gopher: The problem with Communism is that you have to separate the people who believed in it as an ideal from the ones who use it to gain power. In the case of Stalin, his actions were motivated by ego, power and nationalism. I don't think he ever really cared about communist ideals. He certainly did not care about the Jews or the Poles, I agree. However it does not diminish the bravery of the Russian people during WWII, and their resistance to the Nazis.
Other communists resistants in France and elsewhere were disguted by the treaty of peace Stalin signed with Hitler, and they decided to fight anyway. You can not put all the communists (or so-called) in the same package. After the war many people (communist or not) claimed they were resistant when they were not. One should not let those smear the reputation of the ones who actually resisted.
As for the Gaulist exaggerations, you will have to be more specific. Exaggeration is everywhere in politics, whatever the country. And as I said earlier, popular medias tend to embellish History after the facts. It is not specific to France or the Gaullists.

WWII was about Nationalism. Neither Democracy nor Communism beat Hitler and Nazism. Barbaric working class German Nationalism was turned back my barbaric working class British Nationalism and barbaric working class Russian Nationalism with American Capitalism providing the guns, food and oil.

As for the people who truly believe in communism as an ideal, I think they're morons unacquainted with humanity. In a post-Khmere Rouge world, I would think most of them have come to their senses.

De Gaulle fled and led a resistance and he allowed the French to all pretend they had been with him and all was ignored if not forgotten. His story got to become everyone's myth and the noble resistance papered over humiliating defeat and his politics of grandeur. I'd compare it to the Germans locking up the Stasi files to pretend they weren't all spying on one another. The last few years in Poland show the same thing. Now everyone was in Solidarity. And the communist files will probably be destroyed now that Lech is dead and they can all forget, as the resistance myth becomes universal. And in the American South every white person claims heroism against racial exclusion and no one was a bigot and no one was a coward.

I meant to say his politics of grandeur was all a part of that, but I got distracted making dinner and then came back and skipped it.

@gopher - are you really discounting the American young men that fought and died in the war in Europe? Young men like those in the 101st Airborne? We lost about 400,000 young men in WWII, about half of which were lost in the European theater. For a nation late in entering the war, we lost our share of young men...

But our primary contribution was feeding, clothing, arming and fueling the Red army.....that and bombing the crap out of Germany. The volume of stuff we shipped Russia is hard to imagine. We literally fed a country roughly our own size. A single Texas oil man named H. L. Hunt pumped about 96% as much oil during the war as all of the Axis powers combined. After Stalingrad, Hitler was going to lose, even without us drawing soldiers away from the Eastern front. American workers and American pilots and bombers played a bigger role in victory than American soldiers on the ground. And btw both the army air corp and the merchant marine died at significantly higher percentages than did the ground troops. Stalin's gulags were still running almost exclusively on GM trucks in the mid 50s without spare parts. 200K vs. 20,000,000 for the Russians. I think the Red Army lost more soldiers taking Berlin than we lost in Europe. Bombing German industry and civilians into rubble was our contribution and I don't discount it, but we beat the Luftwaffe, not the German Army.

@ dexter - My point in the first paragraph was taht in America I think anti semitic feeling stem more from real or perceived socio-economic imbalace (the average Jewish household in America is better off that the national average) than a racial thing. If someone wants to hate in America, they can focus that on black people, like the rest of the Klan does. Also, me being an atheist means I have no stake, and I'm reading the Bible as a historical and moral, not religous piece.

@gopher, the Luftwaffe was beaten from the start, their top-line aircraft were some of the best, but there weren't enough of them. The downfall was accelerated by the Battle of Britain, and further destroyed during Barborossa.

@ LJ TYLER, I partially agree, but would like to also add people are generally afraid fo what they don't know, and the racial thing may come into play as they are generally seen as different, and they keep to themselves.

Not true....we did not bet the Luftwaffe until the latter half of 1943-early 1944. It took us time to build the first Mustangs and super-fortresses.

I've always found it interesting that a plane build by Packard was dubbed the Cadillac of the Air. Independent car companies just couldn't win.

@ largeham - Right on the second count , dead wrong on the first. The Luftwaffe had the biggest, best, most modern airforce at the start of the war, and more production than Britain and Russia throughout it. What brought them to their knees was fighting on three fronts, and most importantly, the American daylight bombing campaign.

Goering asked Hitler to wait on the invasion of Poland because he knew the Luftwaffe wouldn't be able to handle a war of that size. Yes, they had the best planes, but not enough, and some masterpieces, such as the Me 262, came too late to make a difference. Also the British use of radar helped a lot during the Luftwaffe raids. The American daylight bombings were generally on civilian and industrial areas, airports weren't primary targets, as by then there wasn't much of a German air force to speak of.