Ferres; bonkers, updates and stuff

[ROBERTS]

Ferres...Would you write to me? Email? roberts@darkstarprods.com

[comicglutton]

We should probably "talk tanks" some day, but yes...the Nazis and their brilliant designers created the most functional armored fighting vehicles ever on Earth...the modern day tanks are direct descendants.
If you examine armored engagements between German and Allied forces, especially against the Russians, yu'll soon find that the Germans rarely if ever really lost a tank battle..their gun power, accuracy, range, and speed of fire was superior to everything..they usually killed more tanks than their opponent in battle. But were outnumbered and overwhelmed by air power.
Tank to tank, even numbers, they always won.

And,of course, Germany's crippled war industry could never match the numbers of tanks being produced by the Russians and Americans towards the end of the war. Simply put, the allies could afford to take the casualties..the Germans could not.

[Ferres]

You have to wonder if the war in Europe was actually necessary for America. If US intelligence bothered to fully vet Stalin and realize the true monster that he was, the ultimate strategy may have been very different.

[Kul Straff]

Actually, we could say that the technology of the nazi Germany kept evolving "gloriously" under USA's imperial rule. The actual PASGT US army combat helmet is clearly a modern version of the classic nazi helmet, and that's just the peak of the iceberg. The classic nazi motorcycle BMW-R75 was captured by the allies and send to Harley Davidson to reproduce a version for the american troops, to me the nazis pretty much invented the modern motorcycle. Allies captured the secret nazi steallth bomber (http://youtu.be/MqgfjXaJxV8) obviously a precursor of the B-2 Spirit and modern stealth fighter technology. The nazis did the first modern assault rifle (StG 44)... And what else can be said about the rocket engineering? the nazis won the space race against the soviets, it was a high ranked nazi officer Wernher von Braun who put the man on the moon, and who also played a key role in CIA's evolution, pretty scary.... the nazi legacy is alive and doing quite well....

[Ernest Greene]

And yet with all that wonderful gear, they still lost. Fancy that.

Weapons don't win wars. Those who use them win wars.

And as a Jew I take considerable satisfaction that the Nazis who tried to exterminate us are all gone and we're still here.

There are important historical lessons to be learned from these things. Nations need to learn them.

[comicglutton]

You have to wonder if the war in Europe was actually necessary for America. If US intelligence bothered to fully vet Stalin and realize the true monster that he was, the ultimate strategy may have been very different.

It is a fact that some of the German top brass were hoping to strike a deal with the British and Americans to push back the Red Army. Churchill himself was a proponent of a similar strategy. His 'Iron Curtain' speech springs to mind. It didn't have much support, though. The western allies were too war weary.

[Kul Straff]

And yet with all that wonderful gear, they still lost. Fancy that.

Weapons don't win wars. Those who use them win wars.

And as a Jew I take considerable satisfaction that the Nazis who tried to exterminate us are all gone and we're still here.

There are important historical lessons to be learned from these things. Nations need to learn them.

There's undeniable truth in your words. All that technology and incredible advance engineering got destroyed by the moral fall and inhumanity of the nazi movement. Churchill himself supported at the beginning the antisemitic crazed rants of Hitler, but he had to see the horror inflicted on his own fellow britons to understand what was at risk. The action against the humanity bring them their own doom, a whole world turned against them. When they ravaged Poland, the world understood that anyone could be "next" to be erased. Hitler is the worst enemy that his own "beloved" Europe had to suffer. One just has to see old films showing how beautiful cities were Berlin or Dresden, all that historical and unvaluable beauty erased forever from the face of the earth. He talked about the European pride and superiotity and all he did was to R@PE AND DESTROY all of that he said to "love" so much. The worst bastard in history, the doom of Europe that's what Hitler was. A doom guided by inhumanity and moral colapse, not by advanced technology.

[ROBERTS]

Hmmm....current events in my country (USA) indicate that the Nazis really didn't lose WW2 or lose Europe so much as they ended up winning the United States..
At war's end, my country brought back 30,000 top Nazis, and integrated them into the technology, industry, science, military, and intelligence sectors. Their influence on every level of American life is fairly strong.
The mega rich bankers and industrialists who backed Hitler's rise to power and funded his war machine are the same rich families in control of banking and industry today. Their dream of the perfect Global Corporate-Fascist Empire, so stupidly ruined by the megalomaniac Hitler, has recovered from that setback and is once more marching across the world. They learned their lessons, made corrections, and now are off once more to conquer the world. Only this time, 5 point stars are on the wings of the drones, instead of swastikas and iron crosses on the Stukas. Red White and Blue has replaced the blood red battle flag. Make no mistake, they learned...Don't put all power in one man's hands. have your domestic security force in place and stupid enough to obey. Use "revolution" and "regime change" to conquer nations..there's a long list.
We are the New Nazis. Engineered, schooled, and equipped by the Old Nazis.

[Kul Straff]

Hmmm....current events in my country (USA) indicate that the Nazis really didn't lose WW2 or lose Europe so much as they ended up winning the United States..
At war's end, my country brought back 30,000 top Nazis, and integrated them into the technology, industry, science, military, and intelligence sectors. Their influence on every level of American life is fairly strong.
The mega rich bankers and industrialists who backed Hitler's rise to power and funded his war machine are the same rich families in control of banking and industry today. Their dream of the perfect Global Corporate-Fascist Empire, so stupidly ruined by the megalomaniac Hitler, has recovered from that setback and is once more marching across the world. They learned their lessons, made corrections, and now are off once more to conquer the world. Only this time, 5 point stars are on the wings of the drones, instead of swastikas and iron crosses on the Stukas. Red White and Blue has replaced the blood red battle flag. Make no mistake, they learned...Don't put all power in one man's hands. have your domestic security force in place and stupid enough to obey. Use "revolution" and "regime change" to conquer nations..there's a long list.
We are the New Nazis. Engineered, schooled, and equipped by the Old Nazis.

I agree in every word. Hugo Boss; VW; Mercedes Benz; the american Icon, the Harley Davidson builded from a nazi heart; the AK 47 born form the guts of the nazi stg44; "our" drones, the evolution of the terrorific V2, Armstrong's: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" our human peak and climax originated from the dream of a nazi mastermind genius... all ICONS of this new world we live in, OUR world, OUR ICONS. We are the childs of the nazi "fathers", who passed their "genes" to us. There's something about the combat helmet, for me that's what defines this world we live in. There's the M1 helmet, portrait of heroism, of the fight against TRUE TERROR... and there's the "nazi" PASGT... You don't relate the heroism of the WWII freedom fighters with the PASGT... "Our" new helmet says something pretty different, it says invasion, it says stump the little people and take it all.... It says: Here's your new ruler, kneel or die.

[Ernest Greene]

I'm not going to start a rumble over this here, which is not the place for this kind of conversation, but I have to point out that the essence of Nazism is its manifestation as what Elie Weisel aptly described as "an ahistorical outbreak of evil." There had been nothing like it before and there has been nothing like it since, nor can there be.

There's plenty of evil in the world and the world's ruling classes, which made their separate peaces with Nazis and bolsheviks alike over the years, continue to rule as they always have. They pick and choose the leaders they can buy and they buy them. They don't care about international boundaries or political ideologies. They care about wealth, power and security for themselves. They did business with Hitler (Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were both great admirers) but when the guys in the black suits and shiny shoes offered then the choice between working for FDR's government or having their property seized and going to jail, they quickly became not only ardent patriots but useful partners in the war effort. Ford made tens of millions of dollars building vehicles for the U.S. army when only ten years ago Ford dealers had been giving out copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with every new Model T. None of this is new. And none of it has changed. Every time you buy a bottle of Bayer Aspirin you're sending money to a holding company in Switzerland that was "appointed" by the victorious allies to oversee the holdings of I.G. Farben, the giant German chemical cartel that had made not only Bayer Aspirin and AGFA film but also the Zyklon B gas used in the camps. Some grandchild of an I.G. Farben corporate director continues to live richly off the dividends of that custodianship.

And yes, we did cherry pick plenty of "useful" Nazis at the end of the war, as did the Soviets.

Nevertheless, there are no Nazis in power anywhere today. There are mass murderers, corrupt thugs, evil and soulless financiers (some of them Chinese these days) who happily do business with anybody if it serves their interests, all holding power over much of the world. But these are not Nazis. Only Nazis were Nazis and to attach that label to anyone whose politics you really, really don't like a whole lot is what Weisel calls "denying the specificity of The Holocaust," which is to deny its unique place in the history of human perfidy. Germany seemed an unlikely place for it in historical terms. If you read Daniel Goldhagen's chilling book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" some comforting assumptions will be severely challenged, among them that there was nothing unique about the evil that Nazism represented. I would be very careful where I used that word, and I've had my direct encounters with those who assumed the label for themselves. The were not Nazis. The leaders of modern nations and modern corporations are not Nazis. There are no more Nazis. Too many of them died of old age for my taste, but whatever the circumstances, they're gone. Better not to use them as a metaphor but rather find accurate language to describe the bad rulers we have today.

And as for the option of staying out of WW2, it never existed. Roosevelt was dead right that we could never coexist with a fascist-ruled Europe and that Hitler and all his works would have to be destroyed at whatever cost to preserve what passes for civilization. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin all did some very bad things themselves but they did rid the world of Nazism and for that we can only be grateful. I wouldn't be here if he'd failed to follow through on that conviction and the notion that any better society could have somehow done business with a descendant government of The Reich is risible.

Bad people here and elsewhere helped them into power. Bad people later helped some of them get away and put them to work on doing bad things in other places.

But the historical fact is that a regime that had embraced evil as no other before it was destroyed and nothing like it has been raised in its place. Yes, you can say what you want about the nasty black-ops side of state capitalism, which is what rules most of the modern world, but why it does not do is make genocide the centerpiece of its worldview, and that is not a minor distinction.