not to beat a dead horse

[rich]

this is the line that gets me:

'In my view, von Braun was morally no better
and no worse than other patriotic soldiers who take part in the
atrocious killings that are inherent in modern war.'

the einsatzgruppen thought they were patriotic and doing such things
for the greater good of Germany.

i wouldn't equate those scumbags on the whole with the avg GI or Tommy

rich

On Jan 30, 2008 1:34 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/29/08, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dyson's response to Lytton's criticism, I would argue, is, to me,
> > still rather chilling
> >
> > rich
>
> Hmm, I think I part company with you there, Rich.
> To some extent, I found it reassuring.
>
> What Dyson's POV is allowing for is
> a) culpability on both sides
> and b) the possibility of forgiveness
>
> The Holocaust looms large as a reason to condemn
> German combatants, and von Braun is tarred, willy-nilly, with that brush.
>
> But, as Pynchon reminds us, the boilerplate of any contract
> in the USA is injustice against  Native Americans;
> and all WWII scientific research here took place against
> a backdrop of recent slavery, where segregation as well as
> systematic oppression of blacks and other races was still going on.
>
> Dora was certainly no joke; neither are our ghettos and Indian
> reservations.  Germany's racism had greater intensity,
> but as for duration, the US is still hanging in there
> - for instance, the systematic exclusion of blacks
> from the 2000 Florida ballot,
> which really isn't funny and not at all trivial.
>
> The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention
> Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were elective activities:
> the war could have been pursued and
> won without them (though I can't prove that and don't
> even want to try) - but our Western democracies chose
> repeatedly to take war aggressively to non-combatants.
> (kind of like those "Islamofascists" in the news, except
> we really did it, and on a huge scale)
>
> A tribunal for a successful worldwide Socialist
> revolution might have indicted Dyson together with
> von Braun, on the grounds that both these men should have
> withheld their efforts from immoral war-mongering governments.
>
> After the war, there is no sign that von Braun engaged in
> further Nazi activities.  I'm not aware that he really did a heck
> of a lot of science either: mostly he contributed a name, a face
> and a voice to the space program, but that was worth something.
>
> The only way a war ever ends is when people stop fighting and
> start doing something else...
>