Another Nazis-weren't-as-bad-as-the-evil-western-democracies-paint-them thread on the internet.
(04-13-2014, 10:47 AM)Red Wrote: When the Roman Empire was at its height it had millions of slaves and acted in a truly brutal way to those it conquered and defeated. A quarter of the world population lived and died under Julius Caesars rule. I know due to the timeframe between now and the Romans we have much less knowledge of their real way of life and operations but there are an astonishing amount of links between the Romans and Nazis.
We all know of the actions of the Nazis during 1939 to 1945 and as we'd expect 70 years on our opinions of it haven't changed at all. However the Romans were no better but 2000 years on it's a different story.
I don't know what school you went to, but I learned about all those things about romans in history lessons too, just like about the Nazis.
The fact that they appear to be so similar is linked to the fact that the Nazis actually copy-pasted a lot of ideas, symbolisms, aesthetics directly from the Roman empire. Or rather, they imitated Mussolini's Italian fascism, which did that.
The reason the crimes of the Nazis are more present in todays media/minds is because people alive today are more affected by them than the crimes of the romans, and so are today's politics. And the romans may have also committed crimes (some of them similar), but they also played a very important role in Europe's cultural development. The romans brought positive cultural developments to the regions they conquered, and the crimes they committed such as kill-cause-life-aint-worth-much-to-us was actually not something very unusual at the time, also with the people they conquered. Nazi Germany didn't bring any positive cultural developments. They reverted back to more primitive and brutal ways, wrapped in a pseudo-scientific and pseudo-cultural ideology that was copied from 2000 years ago.
Romans and Nazis may have been similar in some ways (and different in others, for example the more race-oriented ideology of the Nazism while the romans saw it as a cultural thing). But for the romans it was a step forward from the current state of the world, while for the Nazis is was a huge step backwards.
(04-13-2014, 11:00 AM)Bloodl1ke Wrote: Don't forget that the victors write history. If Nazi Germany won the war they weren't going to be in such bad image. Or rather people who exposed them in such image would have been dealt with. You know, like USSR, which did nearly the same crimes, but never lost the war.
(04-13-2014, 02:37 PM)Reidft Wrote: Well in the current age, people see Naziism as the supreme evil, even though much worse things have happened in recent history (inb4 ban because german hosts). In American schools people are taught the bad stuff of WW2 almost every year, so if one thing from history that's gonna stick, it's probably gonna be that
This thread'll probably be locked soon
The communists had a far longer time of rule and a far larger sphere of influence. Also, ignoring whether they actually killed people or not, Communists and Nazis degraded the human spirit in the same way by forbidding free speech, while Nazi ideology additionally degraded human dignity by classifying people according to their "race".
History may to some extent be written by the victors (but only to a pretty small portion, actually, because people remember things no matter who wins, and they write them down), but that doesn't mean the way history is presented is wrong. It more importantly means that what we see today as "moral" and good or bad is decided by the victors. If the Nazis had won, calling someone a racist wouldn't be an insult. Genocide would be called "improving the gene pool" and "justice to nature". War and violence would be considered the natural way of human progress.
User was banned for: Better luck next time, K. <3
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