LaxPower Back-Up Stick

PizzaSnake wrote: ↑Sun Sep 18, 2022 7:22 pm I urge everyone to watch PBS' "The US and the Holocaust", beginning tonight at 8.

From a discussion between Burns and Speilberg here:

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the ... -spielberg

"KEN BURNS: I think that we see ourselves as an exceptional nation. If we are exceptional, and I think we are at times, we also must be harder on ourselves than anyone else. And we must come to terms with our great failings.

One of the most significant of these, I think, was our failure to respond adequately to the Holocaust. The United States let in more refugees than any other sovereign nation, but had we done 10 times that many, we still would have failed. Had we done 20 times as many, we still would have failed. We like to see ourselves in our simplistic, sanitized Madison Avenue view of history as a good people and a nation of immigrants welcoming others.

But we’ve in fact been as unwelcoming as we’ve been welcoming. And at the time when the Jews of Europe needed us most, with the power and the space to take them in and embrace them, we failed. From 1870 until 1920 we accepted many, though not all seeking to come to America. But we passed restrictive immigration laws in '21 and '24 and those quotas favored Arian and Nordic races as the National Socialists would say, and though it didn’t mention Jews, it put at the lowest end those countries which had the greatest number of Jews. And that bureaucratic glove was cruelly applied. But even after we knew what had happened, only 5% of Americans wanted to let in more Jews, even when we saw the results of the liberated concentration camps and saw what had happened."

So, how does something like this happen, and is it happening today? China? Uyghurs? Central American states? Plane trips to Martha's Vineyard?

If this awareness is "woke", then wake the fnck up, America!

youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2022 7:23 am Have it recording, will watch at a later date.

Great read by Viktor Frankl in "Man's Search for Meaning', allowing us to walk with him through his experience.

DMac wrote: ↑Tue Sep 20, 2022 11:35 pm Brutal is far too soft a word to describe what so many endured during Hitler's mission to dominate the world, and evil, sinister, diabolical, and despicable greatly understate the man himself. Seeing what we can, and hearing the tales of horror we can, is staggering and jolts one's empathetic emotions for those who experienced such a nightmare, but imagine what it must have been like to have been personally involved, actually being there....there's always a big difference there.
I've long regretted not sitting down with my mother and have her tell me from A to Z what she experienced in Germany from '35 to '45 as a girl who was born in '26. Of course I heard stories about things not being at all good but I never gave any thought to sitting down and asking her to be a history book as told by a teen girl in Stuttgart in 40-45. Lost her at age 23, blew the opportunity, pretty sure I'd have talked to her in more detail and be more interested in hearing it in time.
Ultimately, it's a damn good thing those American GI boys showed up and kicked the schidt out of the Krauts and straightened the place out. Could get some decent detail from the old man about that. Those times were nuts.
On to Part III

SCLaxAttack wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2022 7:02 pm Fortunately I had the opportunity to hear my father’s stories, and it wasn’t because of my interest as a kid but my daughter’s. For a high school report she chose to interview her grandfather about his experiences. He was a B24 tail gunner stationed on the east coast of England about 100 miles northeast of London - essentially the most direct bombing run from the UK to Germany.

As a family we’re very lucky she chose to video the interview that was the basis of her report. His stories about bombing runs, experiences of the English public, and how he dealt with the horrors of war were mesmerizing, and gave me a completely different perspective of what people who have been directly involved with war - be they the public or military - go through.

One answer my dad gave still sticks with me today and explains much of his lifelong stoicism. When asked how he managed to deal with the death of people he knew and the carnage he saw, he matter-of-factly stated he learned to not let it affect him because it would have driven him crazy. He said he saw too many of the people he served with not able to do that and it led them down paths he was glad he never went. Keep calm and carry on.

The airfield where he was stationed still exists, along with a few of the WWII era buildings and Quonset huts, as a private airport on the outskirts of Attleboro England, with a museum dedicated to his bomber group. A trip there is on my bucket list.

SCLaxAttack wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2022 7:02 pmThe airfield where he was stationed still exists, along with a few of the WWII era buildings and Quonset huts, as a private airport on the outskirts of Attleboro England, with a museum dedicated to his bomber group. A trip there is on my bucket list.

NattyBohChamps04 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 22, 2022 12:29 am

SCLaxAttack wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2022 7:02 pmThe airfield where he was stationed still exists, along with a few of the WWII era buildings and Quonset huts, as a private airport on the outskirts of Attleboro England, with a museum dedicated to his bomber group. A trip there is on my bucket list.

Give 'em hell 453rd...

DMac wrote: ↑Thu Sep 22, 2022 8:13 am You've got to give Burns a well done on this documentary, some really powerful and moving stuff. The survivors and their stories are incredible, they're about as dark as it gets. These people remember incredible details, perfectly understandable but also somewhat surprising in that the brain has a way of blocking such nightmarish experiences out. Mendelsohn says when describing the different ways in which his family members were killed that the particularity of deaths is lost in time. I really like the way he put that. In time you lose what it was like to be personally involved, those killed become piles of bones and landfills of dead bodies, a number.
I'm not ready to give the US a fail but I am ready to give them a damn close to failing mark. I will enter presentism again though. Were there the kind of communication capabilities we have today available, I'd like to think we would have done more earlier. A few Tic Tok videos would have shaken us to our core and the scumbags who went to extremes to keep the refugees out would likely have not been as successful in their efforts. Again, I'd like to think so anyway. After all is said and done, I still give an A+ to our GIs. Mission accomplished at a great cost.
I did hear a few stories from my mom regarding the bombings and knock on the door to take whatever they wanted. No worries about being taken off to the ovens but frightening times nonetheless. Can't remember what it was but there was something I wanted to do/somewhere I wanted to go and she wouldn't let me do it. Like an idiot, in my pizzin and moanin' I asked her what she was doing at my age and why couldn't I (obviously my father wasn't in the room at the time, backtalk lasted about one word when he was around ). Her answer was she was spending nights in bomb shelters. That pretty much trumped all, end of conversation.

Kismet wrote: ↑Thu Sep 22, 2022 8:29 am

DMac wrote: ↑Thu Sep 22, 2022 8:13 am You've got to give Burns a well done on this documentary, some really powerful and moving stuff. The survivors and their stories are incredible, they're about as dark as it gets. These people remember incredible details, perfectly understandable but also somewhat surprising in that the brain has a way of blocking such nightmarish experiences out. Mendelsohn says when describing the different ways in which his family members were killed that the particularity of deaths is lost in time. I really like the way he put that. In time you lose what it was like to be personally involved, those killed become piles of bones and landfills of dead bodies, a number.
I'm not ready to give the US a fail but I am ready to give them a damn close to failing mark. I will enter presentism again though. Were there the kind of communication capabilities we have today available, I'd like to think we would have done more earlier. A few Tic Tok videos would have shaken us to our core and the scumbags who went to extremes to keep the refugees out would likely have not been as successful in their efforts. Again, I'd like to think so anyway. After all is said and done, I still give an A+ to our GIs. Mission accomplished at a great cost.
I did hear a few stories from my mom regarding the bombings and knock on the door to take whatever they wanted. No worries about being taken off to the ovens but frightening times nonetheless. Can't remember what it was but there was something I wanted to do/somewhere I wanted to go and she wouldn't let me do it. Like an idiot, in my pizzin and moanin' I asked her what she was doing at my age and why couldn't I (obviously my father wasn't in the room at the time, backtalk lasted about one word when he was around ). Her answer was she was spending nights in bomb shelters. That pretty much trumped all, end of conversation.

The below article from 2019 details the incredible efficiency the Nazis used to murder people entitled
A Biologist Reconstructs the Grotesque Efficiency of the Nazis’ Killing Machine

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... g-machine/

"Stone’s analysis of deportation train records indicates about a quarter of Holocaust deaths was concentrated in a single period, from August through October 1942, at three camps in Poland. And the largest Holocaust murder campaign only abated because so few Jews were left in German-occupied Poland. Stone’s estimates of “kill rates” provide insight into the industrial methods the Nazis brought to bear.

My study looks at the “kill rate,” or murders per day. My graph of the kill rate reveals a sudden massive slaughter after Hitler “ordered all action speeded up,” as one SS officer put it, on July 23, 1942. Approximately 1.5 million Jews were murdered in only 100 days, including shootings outside the death camps. On average, 450,000 victims were killed each month during August, September and October of that year. That’s approximately 15,000 murders every day.

The slaughter then soon terminated, as there were hardly any Jews remaining in the area to kill. The full scope of this genocidal slaughter and hyperintense killing appears to be documented in history in the vaguest of terms. Available information before this study was mostly reconstructed indirectly, partially conjectured and usually given on an annual timescale rather than daily or monthly. That meant missing the intensity of this three-month slaughter. But Arad’s data allowed me to characterize it far better than other attempts, because the data was given on a daily timescale.

While Operation Reinhard is considered the largest single murder campaign of the Holocaust, the extraordinary speed at which it operated to obliterate the Jewish people has been poorly estimated in the past and almost completely unknown to the general public. The minimal time in which the operation took place indicates the enormous coordination involved by a state machinery responsive to the Fuhrer’s murderous will to eradicate a people. The train records show how zones were emptied of Jewish communities one by one in an organized manner, and how intense kill rates were achieved in targeted areas that only slowed as victims ran out. My plots of the data and a film visualization highlight the pace and frenzy of this mass murder.

It was the sheer scale of the atrocities that surprised me. The graphs show with chilling immediacy the huge sudden increase in killings in 1942 in Arad’s data set. At the Treblinka death camp, for example, it was not uncommon that two train transportations arrived in a day, bringing in 10,000 victims who were murdered in the gas chambers within hours of arrival. This high volume of killing could at times happen day in, day out.

As Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, remarked, “Never before in history had people been killed on an assembly-line basis.” Visualizing the dynamics in the form of graphs somehow re-creates the large-scale picture far more realistically than the proverbial 1,000 words. My spatiotemporal visualization shows a sudden drop in killings—pretty much when the huge area of German-occupied Poland had very few Jewish communities remaining and there were few victims left to murder. This type of data-visualization communicates in a powerful way this pure targeted genocide."

Basically, the Nazis were so good at killing Jews, the volume only abated when they ran out of Jews to kill.

Should also point out that they had already killed more than 4 million before we actually could determine with some certainty what they were doing which was well after this period of max murder.