Ah, the Nuremberg Trials. Possibly the biggest sham trial in human history.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
It was directed towards this whole thread.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
Thanks. Respect points for you on saying that.
 
As for internationally agreeing to punish crimes against humanity, yes, that’s alright, even good. But the thing is, there’s a principle of ethical law that you can’t punish something that wasn’t a law.
 
Like, stupid example just to make an explicit one: if they passed a law saying it’s illegal to post on pony sites tomorrow, and we never posted on pony sites again, it’s unethical to call us guilty of the crime, because when we did it, it was not a crime.
 

 
By making it intentionally illegal to commit such acts, you hope that somehow you’d keep dictatorships from doing it, that people would just nope out and stop playing the civic game if the order came.
 
But you can’t expect that to work unless it’s an actual, declared thing.
 
And if the UN wants to be world police, then they need to effin do it, because you can’t just selectively enforce stuff. Either you actually do it when crimes against humanity are committed, and you get serious and declare war, invade and have dictators executed, or your laws mean nothing and nobody will be more afraid of you than the dictator who actually will knock your door down and kill you for not following orders.
 
So, in principle, I like the idea, but given that there’s plenty of hells still around on Earth, making an example of the Nazis did nothing.
 
Saddam was committing ethical genocide like Hitler, and still most people seem to say we shouldn’t have been in Iraq. So apparently the Nerumberg trials neither convinced them not to (or Kim Jung, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or…), nor even convinced people that genocide should be stopped by force (as is the case with Saddam).
 

 
So if killing them was meant as some kind of example, it failed pathetically, and if it was supposed to say good guys stop genocide - well it didn’t do that, either, considering how many people say the US is evil for “invading” Iraq (never mind it was actually a U.N. Coalition with UK and other European components, and by definition it was “liberating” since it didn’t become sovereign US territory but remained internationally recognized as Iraqi, even by the Coalition that toppled Saddam).

@Cirrus Light  
First, I apologize for being so abrasive and aggressive in my last post.  
I disagreed with your reply, but being rude doesn’t exactly help justify my own stance.
 
You are right that the Nuremburg Trials were sloppy,  
and biased with contempt and hate for the nazi leadership.
 
However, it also set international precedence for ‘crimes against humanity’,  
which has been brought to the International Court in the Hague sometimes since then.
 
There are some evils that the world ought to agree to punish.
 
 
@★Dark Star  
Lol! I always love this meme.  
I know it’s directed towards me, but it’s still cute and funny.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
Yes, they’re horrible, nobody’s denying that.
 
What I’m saying is even horrible people deserve a fair trial, to the extent that that’s possible (with ISIS, it’s obviously a bit different since they’re an active group with a military, so you don’t “catch and arrest” them so much as actively combat them as you would any active combatants. But once they’re captured and helpless, things change because bombing them from 50,000 feet with laser-guided weapons is no longer necessary to keep them from doing terrible things).
 
“they’re horrible” is no justification to be horrible, yourself, and they’re only responsible for what they’re actually responsible for.
 
If there’s nothing a person could have done to prevent an evil, then how can you hold that individual accountable for it?
 
What made them horrible is how they dehumanized groups and said those groups didn’t deserve basic human rights because they were horrible and/or bad for society (that’s how they viewed the Jews, Roma, disabled, etc). Don’t go and follow in their footsteps.

@Silent Wing  
You are blind or indifferent if you haven’t noticed the rise of fascist tendencies in America.  
It is little wonder the Nazis are getting confident to make themselves known.  
They won’t gain any prominence if they aren’t allowed to.  
The more the public condemns, ostracizes, fires, ridicules, and punishes nazis, the better.
 
You are clearly an arrogant smarty-pants hipster who is too cool for this world, bunny rabbit,  
so it’s just as well you didn’t bother to read the rest of my post.  
Good day to you. Hopefully you’ll never have to deal with nazis in your life.
 
 
@Cirrus Light  
Wow dude, well done, you went into a long stupid excuse to justify treating nazis with kindness,  
because they’re no worse than anyone else.
 
Really? Are you that dense? Let me say it again:
 
WORLD WAR. EVERYONE FUCKING KILLING EVERYONE. No big surprise that there’s bad shit on all sides.
 
Nazism: KILL EVERYONE THAT DOESN’T FIT OUR IDEALS OF HUMANITY.
 
The world war was done.
 
Are you suggesting modern day neo-nazism ISN’T ABOUT KILLING EVERYONE THAT ISN’T A ‘PURE HUMAN’?
 
Well it is, my dear. And that’s why your shitty excuses of the horrors of war don’t excuse the evil desires of modern day nazis.
 

 
Yeah, well, I think everyone who isn’t a white straight christian male would like to feel the same way.  
Guess what disgusting group of shitheads is trying to make that stop being the case?
 
Oh, and to clarify, I have the same attitude and feeling about anyone wearing or praising ISIS ideology.  
ISIS and Nazis: both dangerous extremist genocidal cults that have no place in society.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
Nazis are so vilified because the entire nation was brainwashed to hate them because we were at war with them (that’s what wartime propaganda is), not because they’re more evil than communists.
 
The Japanese propaganda largely focused on racism, and racism has lost a cultural war so that has been undone, but the one against Nazis has not.
 
Also people love to hate, and they love to have a Satan figure that is prime evil, and everyone is taught about the Nazis in school, and everyone else hates them, so why not have fun hating them? And now they’re considered prime evil, when in truth there’s been far worse groups in history, and even are, today.
 
The Twilight series isn’t popular because it’s the best, 50 Shades is not the most widely known bdsm romance because it’s the best, and Nazis aren’t the most widely hated because they’re the most evil. Popular things are kinda a crapshoot, and I think it’s likely wartime propaganda is partly to blame.
 

 
And no, what we did was awful because people who were brainwashed to dehumanize and hate them were in charge. Human rights aren’t “people I like or agree with rights”, they’re Human rights, and there’s a reason we don’t hold soldiers and enemy officers accountable for what they were forced to do under orders.
 
But when you have them in your control, (the war was over) no matter how evil anyone is, nobody is below a fair trial and basic human rights.
 
I promise you, there is an amount of torture and or brainwashing that can break you and make you do anything. Same goes for me or anyone else. That’s why we have rules of war and how to treat POWs that respect that fact.
 

 
There’s a point where you’re just becoming cruel, yourself.
 
And it is an accepted ethical fact that you cannot make up laws during a trial.
 
People were shocked at images of concenteation camps, but obviously not too keen on seeing civilians burning alive in allied bombing raids.
 
Heck, considering our bombing was so successful their nation was starving, the starvation in the camps was inevitable largely because of the Allied bombing. We like to assume they’d have starved them otherwise so as to remove any moral ambiguity by making them more evil, but I’m not so certain.
 
Not that death camps didn’t exist, but those were different from concentration camps.
 

 
Granted, what they did is definitely worse, but the Allies were no stranger to doing horrible things to helpless civilians for what they believed to be (and I happen to agree with) the greater good, either.
 
The difference is, I’m fortunate to live in the timeline where I’m not ostracized, hated, and potentially executed for having my belief on which greater good was the actual greater good. But who knows how much of that is only because of who wrote history and taught me about it.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
>Nazism is uprising in current society  
I have to disagree. The amount of actual nazis in the world is incredibly small. These people are not going to gain any sort of prominence. If you think they will, you’ve already gave into fear.
 
Anyway, I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got work to do. You’re very unimportant to my current life, so I threw out the rest of your comment. I don’t know what it says, but given by what you said previously, it’s probably not worth my time and I’ll pass on continuing this conversation with you. You can wallow and banter and get angry all you want, but I’m no longer interested in hearing you make a joke out of yourself.

@Silent Wing  
@Silent Wing  
Uh, both of those figures are pretty bad, why should there be some kind of difference in ‘badness’ between ‘killed 30 million’ and ‘gassed millions of jews’? If you’re trying to find a ‘gotcha’ from this figure, I’ll pass. Both of those things are bad, mmkay?
 
The reason that Nazis are held in such aggressive contempt in western civilzation,  
as opposed to Stalinists or Maoists, is because they are the twisted dark side of modern society. They are modern western capitialism with zero morality or ethics. If you think current american capitalism is bad, it would be even worse if the country embraces nazism.  
Not only that, they are an insidious growing reactionary group in western societies right now. The threat of their existence is real right now. I can go back in time and talk about all kinds of atrocities, but they’re irrelevant at this moment in time.
 
For these two reasons alone they deserve that hate. Being a dangerous very current threat, and being that way because they are the familiar disturbing darkness that western societies could embrace, if they really want to.
 
Ahh, the good old ‘I was just following orders’ excuse.  
Funny you bring it up, was such a popular excuse from the nazis on trial too!  
No dude, it was decided that there was a point where following orders isn’t a good enough excuse.
 
Humans are hierarchal primates. It is in our instinctive nature to obey leaders no matter what. It’s also in our instincts to hurt or kill ‘outsiders’ no matter what. These are two traits that authoritarian nazism fully embraces.
 
The Allies decided that maybe - just maybe - there should be a limit to what’s an acceptable order. That maybe it is good to stand up for what is morally right sometimes. Especially if the alternative is murdering innocents.
 
So really, the question you should be asking yourself is this:  
Would you rather murder innocent people, or be killed yourself?
 
Hopefully you will never have to be in that situation.  
And if the fucking nazi scum crawling out of the woodwork are driven back, then you probably won’t ever have to.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
No, because fear is what causes people to confirm biases more easily. What causes more fear; the nazis killed 30 million people, or the nazis gassed millions of jews?
 
The soviet government destroyed political opposition by going into their own people’s homes, arresting them, killing them, and doing all sorts of atrocities to suppress political opposition. The Chinese Communist Party, back then called the People’s Republic of China, murdered and starved millions of their own people to ‘recreate’ China, not to mention destroying monasteries, shrines, and farms in the process to ‘recreate’ China.
 
Nazis do not deserve the extent of hate that they’ve received. Yes, they deserve condemnation, but they were by far not as bad as other countries that the west frankly didn’t care about enough to consider any sort of retaliation.
 
You believe nazis are the worst because you fear them. If you didn’t fear them, then you wouldn’t believe they’re the worst, because they were frankly more silly than serious. A great deal of their engineers were mad. Hitler was completely retarded for his terrible tactical sense and ideological expression.
 
I laugh at the nazis because the major individuals aren’t anything to fear. They desired us to fear them because fear is the first attempt at preventing an enemy from retaliating. I do not fear nazis, because that gives them power.
 
In accordance to these individuals here, the war was over and they were only following orders given to them by superiors. We do the exact, same thing here in the US when it comes to our soldiers and military personnel. If they were just following orders from a superior and if they didn’t they would die, you cannot hold them accountable for actions that followed. This also applies to the workplace, because if my supervisor tells me to do something I know is probably bad, but demands I do it or I’m fired, if something goes wrong they are held accountable.
 
How would you like it if you were held at gunpoint to kill your own mother? Would you do it? Probably not. You’d probably turn and attempt to kill your tormentor. Few have such willpower. Many will reluctantly do so and probably commit suicide right afterward from guilt. If you were held accountable for that, that means your tormentor is set free. They did something terrible, and they got away with it.
 
So let’s hang you for it, right?
 
The answer is ‘No’. That’s not just.

@Silent Wing  
Weren’t worst in what context?  
Again, why do you think most western countries have decades of  
‘nazis ARE the worst’ hammered into their heads?  
Because it’s a conspiracy?

@Amethyst_Crystal  
Uhhhhh… We’re just pointing out the issues with the topic, and that the nazis weren’t the worst.
 
Calm down. You’re making a scene of yourself.

@vit  
I prefer to look at Aryanne like a bitter wannabe edgelord that hasn’t gone off the deep end yet,  
and still has hope for reformation.
 
@Silent Wing  
@★Dark Star  
@Cirrus Light  
Aw, I’m so sorry that the Allies were so pissed at the disgusting nazi leadership  
that they felt they deserved to be executed.  
I’m well aware of the law and ethic debates about the trials.  
That it wasn’t done well, that it was shitty and improper.
 
The fact is they wanted these fuckers dead one way or another,  
and they made a big show of it,  
to tell the world this:  
“We condemn Nazism to be SHAMED, VILLIFIED, and DESTROYED.  
We do not want a western civilization to walk this path again.”  
We have decades of being taught to be repulsed by nazis for a reason, you know!
 
May I remind you again that 3 of the 24 defendants were acquitted,  
so it’s not like there wasn’t a complete lack of fairness.  
Remind me again why I should feel bad for these people?  
Did they give a fair trial to everyone who walked through the gas chambers? No?  
Oh, we should instead just let bygones be bygones, right?  
These people who have performed the most cold calculated mass genocide up to that point in history?  
How about no.
 
I’d talk about Japanese atrocities, but that’s not the topic of the OP,  
and there isn’t an influx of idiots idolizing imperial japan in america, is there?
 
Also don’t bother with more of that ‘but the allies did widespread murder atrocities during the war too’.  
Yeah, it was called WORLD WAR and TOTAL WAR for a reason. EVERYONE WAS KILLING EVERYONE.  
The difference is the Nazis started it and were intentionally targeting and murdering innocents because of what they were, whether a certain ethnicality or whatever else.  
So get off your holy horse.

Ha! aryanne your fuckboys are caught once’n for all

@Cirrus Light  
Well, it’s more of what the enemy was doing at the time, and the technology they had. Before World War 2, Germany was already leading in military tech around the world. They had made the first machine guns, albeit patented them second, the first tanks, and already shown quite the skill in making bunkers that were not only an improvement on the allied forces tunnels, but were hospitable. Not only that, but also during this time they made the first microscopes, as well as other advancements in technology. This paved way for industrial advancement, despite the depression Germany had fallen under after the war.
 
Touching on that a bit, time and time again the reason Germany lost both World War 1 and 2 is not because of technology, they lacked tactics and spread themselves too thinly. Both wars their leaders were smart in some aspects but incompetent in others. Both would make great leaders IF they weren’t so bloodthirsty and ideological. If neither focused too much on war, which is what they both were incompetent at, then things may have been very different.
 
The truth is, Germany’s always had terrible leaders when it’s come to war. Don’t believe me? Frederick Barbarossa died while drowning in a river after he attempted to ford it while in full armor and on horseback, leading an attack on another country. His men watched him die. Adolf Hitler made many such mistakes, albeit without him being the direct victim, and instead his men. He also made the same mistake a previous great general did, because he wasn’t good at history.
 
During World War 2, Germany had an incredible advancement in technology after we had learned their previous tech and had copied it or used it to inspire new designs. They made the first handheld guns that had a self-loading magazine and were gas-operated. They invented the first bullets that were small and could be manufactured in-mass, but also carry quite the punch. Keep in mind, all of this was with sanctions and with hardly any standing military, since the allied forces had imposed such a great restriction on them with the Treaty of Versailles. We were not expecting them to be so ready.
 
Oh yeah, and they made submarines.
 
And then came the atrocities they were committing. Demonizing a particular group of people, and then many particular groups, based on nothing more than misunderstandings and a lack of knowledge. Because all of this action and improvement, under Adolf’s economic plan, they needed more living space, for both citizens and camps to put the jewish, so they invaded other countries.
 
This started the war, and because Germany is the one who invaded, a great deal of hate is reserved for those individuals. The US didn’t even want to be involved, in either war, but we were pulled in because of how absolutely useful we were. Even today, we have the best of both worlds. We have a large standing army, some of the best military technology around (though some countries offer things we do not, like Russia with it’s T-14 Armata), and we’re very distant away from any possible World Wars, making it incredibly difficult to attack us. This makes the headcount on men and rifles go up tremendously.
 
Oh yeah, and before both wars we were attacked. Forgot to mention that. The Axis powers decided to attack US, for no reason other than selfish desire.
 
Now, while we had been accustomed to fighting in Europe, and understood it greatly, we had no idea what to be ready for when attacking mainland Japan. This put us at an initial disadvantage, because our troops weren’t ready for the jungle-like islands and in some cases, were too paranoid for their own good. (There was literally a no-longer Japanese occupied island we went to and lost a bunch of men due to traps. Let me make that clear. It was a direct loss on our part, with no losses for the Japanese.)
 
The Axis powers attacked nations first, which is why they were hated. We attacked afterward. We were the last to pick up our weapons, and the first to put them down. However, we did show both the Germans and the Japanese that attacking a country not in the war is… one of the stupidest decisions you can make.
 
Tojo was a moron, though. I don’t believe there were any redeeming qualities in that leader. He loved his country, and did a horrible job running it.

@Silent Wing  
Amazing Alfred Nobel quote. Isn’t he the guy who invented dynamite? So didn’t he come way before nukes?
 
[looked it up]  
Holy crap! He did! Friggin’ prophet! I guess he wondered if there might be some kind of future mega-dynamite or something.
 
Kind of amazing he called it with nukes like that.
 

 
I don’t quite get why the Allies were so much more cruel to Germany than Japan, given those circumstances. Perhaps the Nazi thing was just kind of a hate mob mentality, sort of like what’s going on with Nazis right now. But when we won against Japan - the horrors that they did were perhaps overshadowed by the wonder and awe at the weapon we used to defeat them? I dunno. Just seems odd how strong the Nazi thing has always been, and even continues to this day, yet you don’t see anything like that for groups who were even worse.

@Cirrus Light  
Heh, yeah, somehow we’re the bad guys for wanting to treat people like humans and be unbiased towards those we judge.
 
Yes, Imperial Japan was pretty, well, terrible. Not Japan itself, mind you. It was actually pretty stupid that Tojo thought it was a better idea to attack the US rather than trade for oil.
 
Then again, Tojo was an incompetent leader to begin with.
 
Point is, Japan wasn’t having an absolutely disastrous economic crisis. Yes, there were some economic problems, but all in all they were doing quite well. There was absolutely no need to go to war, and it’s a complete shot in the dark how they’re the only country we’ve dropped nukes on, and now they love the US. Against all odds, Tojo grew a brain and said, “Yeah, uh, look guys. We’re sorry.”
 
Maybe we should nuke North Korea. On the table, last option.
 
The way I look at it is this. World War 2 was gruesome, but it made the US internally economically stable by creating jobs, forced us to advance technology, changed the way war was fought straight afterward AROUND THE WORLD, nukes, and gave us anime.
 
Those are some pretty good global positives. Especially nukes.
 
“The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.” - Alfred Nobel
 
Of course, it also gave us millions of deaths, self-hating germans, and Sweden still exists is still completely neutral, so those are some negatives.
 
All in all, we wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for World War 2.

@Silent Wing  
You don’t want to dehumanize a large group of people and you dare to stand up for people who were brutally murdered under a kangaroo court? You want some mercy for people who were defeated, helpless, and believed they were doing right and would have been executed with their families if they hadn’t carried out their orders?
 
You possibly think that 4 years of intense multinational wartime propaganda might have made them biased?
 
I mean, having human sympathy and refusing to dehumanize people who had to do what they did or have their families executed - not wanting to sprain their necks and torture them to death after they whisper their wife’s name - clearly, not wanting to kill like that makes you a horrible person responsible for millions of innocent deaths!
 

 
Remember, if you aren’t filled with hate at seeing them, then obviously you’re an evil, hateful person.
 

 
(All of this is satirical, of course. The irony of “I think we were too cruel” somehow making you an evil, hateful person in some peoples’ eyes is never lost on me. Of course what the Nazis did was wrong, but it’s not as though the Allies didn’t also kill millions of innocents “to make a better world” by terror bombing Axis cities. Both sides thought they were the good guys fighting defensive wars - except Imperial Japan. Japan really shouldn’t have done Pearl Harbor. Honestly they were far worse than the Nazis. The Imperial Japanese were just plain cruel. Yet for some reason they’re usually just forgotten to the point that people at my college happily hang Imperial Japanese flags to show off where they went on a religious mission - as if living there for 2 years they never learned what Imperial Japan was - but Japan’s not big on remembering that part of history, so…)

@★Dark Star  
Oh, I know full well already I’m some amalgamation of racist, sexist, misogynist, etc. Probably a nazi too, just because I’m considering nazis to be human.

@Silent Wing  
Careful there. The kids are gonna call you all sorts of cancerous buzzwords, because you pointed out facts. Remember, facts don’t mean anything to people who suffer cognitive dissonance.

>Downvoting People Who Followed Orders  
OP, you do know that the Nuremberg Trials are some of the most ridiculous trials in history, right? There was no law that held them under scrutiny of actions taken, mostly under orders. It was literally a murder on highly-known nazi members for the sake of murdering more nazis. Some weren’t even prominent nazis, just people that did the job they were hired to do, like Hans Fritzsche. Honest worker, if apart of new propaganda.
 
But of course, these individuals aren’t human to you. I know how you people think.
 
News flash, OP. No 1 individual nazi committed enough crimes against humanity as a whole to be considered non-human. Hitler COULD be considered non-human, but there was tons of positive things he directed, such as the recreation of Germany after World War 1. Doesn’t change the fact that he was a garbage individual, but it does say that he was a politician that cared about the country. Maybe not the jews, but the country, yes.
 
Meanwhile, nobody’s making fun of Kim Jong Un for being a non-human.

Whelp. Real photo of people to be executed by the winners of a war… with ponies. Have to say this is the first time something here has really made me uncomfortable, since this goes beyond fantasy…

No downvote arrow for Aryanne? Don’t let her feel left out. She too is a Nazi :(

It’s true that 3 of the 24 defendants were acquitted,  
but considering only 20 nazis are packed into the box in that pic,  
there’s a good chance none of those 3 are there,  
and I won’t waste time trying to make sure.