Congratulations!
Sorry for being late, honorable ladies and gentlemen. You know… usual advantages of the regular employment. :roll:
Question: How democratic were Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria during/prior to WW1? I am interested (it seems germane to your questions) and genuinely have no idea.
Oh, they were magnificently democratic by all modern standards of formal democracy, my dear Mr. Pdf 27.
You see, both of them were so called constitutional monarchies, in which the monarch acted as a head of state within the parameters of a written constitution, and presided over a constitutional body of government appointed and approved by the elected legislature, independent judiciary, and freely assembled multitude of coalitions of people organized formally to recruit, nominate, and elect candidates for public office, generally known as political parties. 
…which means you have double standart
Oh, no my dear Mr. Ivaylo. On the contrary. Actually, I am only an legal absolutist who is fighting with all scientifically allowable and available rational means against this incredibly modern provincial tendency to narrow the meaning of a democracy and legal conduct to the institutional patterns of a particular time and place, as well as against that obvious and deliberate attempt of those previous 1968 rioting stone throwers - nowadays very well established and tremendously well-paid and prominent members of the so called High-Society in 5000 $ Armani outfit - to replace logically valid patterns of highly essential critical thinking with their modern variants of phony unanimity. Actually, it is an scientific outcry of an old academic Streber against those in power who would like to make of modern world one Big Happy Non-Thinking In-Group from the cradle to the grave. Ultimately, the old-fashioned individual rebels.
As you know, it has been stated quite a long time ago that the Soviet Union imposed intellectual conformity from the top. Modern EUSSR educators, however, are imposing it nowadays from the bottom. In their Mythology of the Righteous Democratic Man the whole system is actually based upon the fear that too much learning may be a dangerous thing, so they have shied from giving attention to the knowledge on the ground that this might create the specter of an educated and therefore potentially perilous individual. Under such a rationale, we find our schools teaching such subjects as “Clicking with the Crowd”, “How to be Liked in Democratic Society” and “How to get Closer to Debt-Based Prosperity”. And if you are not as close as you should be, there are variants of the “Standard Bell Adjustment Test”, under which a pupil is asked such magnificent questions as “Do you feel your teachers have been unduly strict with you”. That’s all.
Well the pictures you posted are very very good congratulations . But i don’t have the other pictures to post from the same doings by greeks , turks expecially and their non-regular troops , i think such hostility was normal
Please, don’t worry, my dear Mr. Ivaylo. Those pictures were used only because they were highly enlightening. I am assuring you that tons of comparable pictures are also in my tiny repository. Here are some additional snapshots connected with our main theme:
Decapitated Boxer rebels near Kowloon, China observed by enlightened European representatives – 1901.
Decapitation of captured Boxer by Japanese army – China, 1900.
French soldiers are observing decapitation of captured Boxer rebel – China, 1901
As you can see, some indeed beautiful examples of the triumphant democratic and inherently humanistic Kulturträgertum achieved 32 years before the Gestapo and 33 years before the NKVD.
Apart from those distinctions, one must separate law from order. All nations have laws, but many with laws have little order…
In that case allow me a tiny question, my esteemed colleague: do we have the order without the law in our contemporary human society? You see, to maintain order it is essential that we have certain laws of the State, and that those laws have a certain degree of rigidity. It is a platitude to say that law is the skeleton of the body politic which will become flaccid if the bones on which it depends are too soft and pliant. Law must, therefore, have a high degree of strength and permanence if the society is to function orderly.
…what is civilised about war
From the strict anthropological point of view, the fact that war actually is a product of the civilization. As war developed beyond the point of simple individual retaliations among small groups, the business of making the war came to be based more and more on the calculated planning of political chiefs and rulers. In most human warfare the men who make the decision to go to war generally haven’t gotten much into the thick of the fighting themselves. This separation between the aggressive acts and the adaptive decisions of political leaders who play on individual aggressive tendencies when they want to arouse their people to achieve certain goals actually is a product of the civilization in human societies.
The man with the gun decides who lives and who dies, not law.
But the law actually decides who will have the gun and who will be without it, my dear Mr. Rising Sun. :twisted:
In the absence of any universal legal system, it still came back to victor’s justice, or injustice. Or captor’s justice, or injustice.
I see, my esteemed colleague. This stance of yours actually follows the Austinian doctrine that law is command of the sovereign, and is enforced by the sanction attached to it. This conception of law has an ancestry of more than three centuries, and it took definite form with the rise of the modern European state and is intimately related to theories of state, of sovereignty and government. It has given support to the belief in the all-powerful and omnipotent State and to it may be attributed some of the evils which the world has suffered during the past half century. It is therefore of importance to determine whether it is possible at the present time to substitute for this idea of law one which can give us better hope for the future.
This concept of law, which had such a disastrous effect in recent years, actually is based upon a fundamental fallacy. It is untrue that law is always a command or requires a sanction for its validity. Its compulsive character usually is based on other and far more effective grounds. It is the recognition of obligation and not the fear of an evil which gives to law its conative quality. It is the sense of oughtness which distinguishes law from purely voluntary rules. Legal history has shown that a sanction is applied to a rule because it is recognized as being obligatory - the rule is not obligatory merely because a sanction is applied to it! The sanction is only a part of the law enforcement machinery; it is not an essential part of the law itself. As Sir Frederick Pollock has said: Law is enforced by the State because it is law, it is not law merely because the State enforces it.
Briefly, my esteemed colleague – if law is based on obligation and not on command then there is no difficulty in recognizing that the State itself can be subject to law, and that those who exercise its power can be controlled by legal rules in the performance of their functions. And here again law may finally triumph over brute force. 
Ahem. Directive was issued on the 12th of January 1945, and the raid was on the 13th of February 1945. That’s about right for the planning cycle of the time, and indeed suggests that the Dresden raid was one of the first in support of this new directive. As for lacking a war industry, the following armoured vehicles were built in 1945 (source is Wiki because I’m lazy this morning - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_armored_fighting_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II )
Pre-war 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 Wartime Total
Panzer I 1,893 - - - - - - - - 1,893
Panzer II 1,223 15 99 265 848 803 151 - 2,181 3,404
Panzer 38(t) 78 153 367 678 652 1,008 2,356 1,335 6,549 6,627
Panzer III 98 157 1,054 2,213 2,958 5,435 4,752 1,136 16,311 16,409
Panzer IV 211 45 268 467 994 3,822 6,625 1,090 13,311 13,522
Panzer V Panther - - - - - 1,849 4,003 705 6,557 6,557
Panzer VI H Tiger I - - - - 78 649 641 - 1,368 1,368
Panzer VI B Tiger II - - - - - 1 428 140 569 569
Elefant - - - - - 90 - - 90 90
Total 3,503 370 1,788 3,623 5,530 13,657 18,956 4,406 46,936 50,439
That’s roughly a quarter of the figures for 1944 - or the same as the figures for 1942! Allowing for the fact that Germany surrendered early in May and large chunks were overrun before then gives an equivalent figure close to the 1943 value - making the claim that there was “no German war industry by that time” risible
617 squadron were the most highly trained in Bomber Command, and 8 out of 19 were shot down or crashed during the raid. That’s utterly unsustainable - the crew had a life expectancy of 2-3 sorties. That makes the only more dangerous job in the war that of a Kamikaze pilot! So yes, accuracy was possible, but not practical. For comparison, remember that early in the war both Bomber Command and the Luftwaffe had trouble hitting the right country.
I don’t think it would have been very practical to bomb Dresden from 60 feet.
Anyway, the Dambusters were not hugely accurate as a good many bombs missed their target or did little or no damage.
Well on the one side it was named Harris on the other Herman Goering … i bet both of them can justify their bombings because of effective bomber control , railway junctions , necessety of war , because of factories , because Goering hated the Queen whatever …
Well Italians have nothing to do with Einsatzgruppen which you repeat like parrot , and on top of that italians feel already guilty enough as the germans for going into ww2 … except you who don’t say a word about the "great patriotic " allies .,…and turn blind what they did … western world didn’t say a word , but knew what was happening for so many years after 1945 …didn’t pull even a finger against USSR , for very known reasons .
Well it wasn’t so nice everytime for the germans captured by US troops i recal that SS troops from Totenkopf were turned back to soviet ones and killed in the process which is violation of the war rules . Just the americans didn’t have much reputation for mass killing as the soviets did that’s all . I am not very good with the history of the Pacific war so you can say if there were a many cases where US troops mass killed japan ones , because i haven’t heard for that yet .
the double standart was reply personally to Nikdfresh not to you Librarian
There is no law that makes people queue for service in a shop; or enter a lift in an orderly fashion; or disembark from public transport and go through the turnstiles in an orderly fashion, but they do it every day in their millions and in so doing preserve order in society.
There are laws against murder, rape, robbery and so on, but they are still committed every day by a very tiny proportion of the population. The question is whether making those actions crimes stops other people from doing them or just punishes the ones who will do it with or without laws against them.
That depends on what is meant by war.
A tribal war in New Guinea, which occurred until relatively recently and still can in a modified fashion, was not the product of anything resembling civilisation as understood by European and other advanced cultures for many centuries, but it was still a war for the participants.
Which law would that be in the case of soldiers engaged in a revolutionary war against their legitimate, or illegitimate, government?
What about the common situation where the rebels are armed by another nation which is not subject to the laws of the rebels’ nation and may even be acting contrary to its own laws in supplying the arms?
Only as long as the State allows itself to be subject to law.
A simple example here is freedom of information laws which were introduced several decades ago. Then governments began to find them inconvenient in revealing government misconduct, so governments passed laws to restrict their operation to prevent this.
There are countless examples of governments exempting themselves from law, probably none more egregious and odious in a modern democracy than Bush II’s law officers reworking the law on torture to permit the State’s agents to torture the State’s perceived enemies.
The problem with legislation is that the government makes it and, for the term of its office, the government is the State for the purposes of making and enforcing laws. This may produce government excesses which provoke anything from civil disobedience to armed rebellion or it may simply enhance the powers of the government to repress dissent.
What protects us most is not so much the law but the willingness and ability of the extra-government legal machinery to uphold the law. This requires most of all an independent judiciary and the means for the orders of the judiciary to be carried out, which then requires a police force which is independent of government. It is no accident that neither of these features appear in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
And your point is?
Actually, I mentioned Auschwitz in the post to which you are responding.
You mean now, or then?
They didn’t look too upset when they were winning in WWII.
Anyway, my point was in response to your attempt to impose guilt by association with the Soviets on the Western Allies.
Actually, I did. I said that the bombing of Dresden was to aid the Soviet advance.
I could also have said that the Soviets bore the brunt of the European war in fighting, manpower, and casualties (military, POW and civilian) and that without them the Nazis could well still have control of a substantial part of Europe, including where you live. But I suppose that would be unacceptable to you as you seem to be somewhat hostile to the Soviets.
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What has post-war conflict or the lack of it between the West and the USSR to do with bombing Dresden or victor’s justice or anything else that happened in WWII?
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You may have missed the Cold War, which absorbed rather a lot of the West’s military, economic, political and diplomatic resources in facing the Communist Bloc from 1945 until, in part as a consequence of the Western pressure, the Soviets collapsed.
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I don’t know what ‘very known reasons’ you have in mind, but I’m old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis. I can tell you that the prospect of nuclear annihilation, or mutual assured destruction as it became known later, was a very good reason for both sides to avoid armed conflict and I’m glad it did.
Not as harrowing as the British forcing civilian refugees back to the Soviets after the war, but what the **** has any of this to do with bombing Dresden or victor’s justice or the price of fish during the war?
I thought that Tokyo and the nuclear attacks were rather successful exercises in mass killing.
I don’t recall the Soviets doing anything like that.
No, no mass killing, really. Mostly just killing of wounded and prisoners, which was also done by British and Australian troops as a routine post-battle exercise in many instances, primarily as a self-defence measure because of experience with apparently wounded or surredering Japanese wounding or killing Allied troops.
Those figures are risible, are wiki trying to tell us that Germany produced more in 4 months, during 1945 with it’s territory devastated for air raids than 12 month in 1942, get a better source, maybe those were Goebbels’s figures.
It was needed 14 hours of firestorm to destroy a rail junction, yeah right, like burning down a house to kill a mouse.
[b][i]Please lighten up a little bit , Kurt. Surely you can make your valid point without additional remarks bordering on insults. You present some valid points and food for thought, and it can be more appreciated without some of the “asides”. We are very glad to have your input, so be respectful of the input of others. We need to keep this the great site for discussion as it has been. Thank you for your input. I write this sincerely.
TEXAG57[/i][/b]
At least some military objective, …maybe this one?
Winston Churchill: “You must understand that this war is not against Hitler or National Socialism, but against the strength of the German people, which is to be smashed once and for all, regardless of whether it is in the hands of Hitler or a Jesuit priest.”
Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill - His Career in War and Peace, p. 145
I’m really sorry , I didn’t read your post until now.
Yes, you are completely right , I apologize if sometimes anger dominate my posts, my intention is to contribute with this enlightning threads.
Thanks for your advice,
Regards,
Kurt
Speer’s actually I suspect - and again the sheer breadth and depth of your ignorance is showing through. Germany didn’t start moving to a full war economy until after the early defeats by the Soviets around Moscow and Stalingrad - indeed, after the battle of France they demobilised a significant proportion of their armed forces and returned them to civilian jobs precisely to reduce the effect on the civilian economy. The sheer incompetence in the running of the German war economy early in the war is breathtaking - while production was hampered by the bombing, it was so poorly organised initially that fixing the problems led to more than enough of an improvement to make up for the bombing.
When it isn’t your house, you absolutely have to get the mouse, and all you have is a box of matches then why not?
let’s take a look at this figures:
Pre-war 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 Wartime Total
Panzer I 1,893 - - - - - - - - 1,893
Panzer II 1,223 15 99 265 848 803 151 - 2,181 3,404
Panzer 38(t) 78 153 367 678 652 1,008 2,356 1,335 6,549 6,627
Panzer III 98 157 1,054 2,213 2,958 5,435 4,752 1,136 16,311 16,409
Panzer IV 211 45 268 467 994 3,822 6,625 1,090 13,311 13,522
Panzer V Panther - - - - - 1,849 4,003 705 6,557 6,557
Panzer VI H Tiger I - - - - 78 649 641 - 1,368 1,368
Panzer VI B Tiger II - - - - - 1 428 140 569 569
Elefant - - - - - 90 - - 90 90
Total 3,503 370 1,788 3,623 5,530 13,657 18,956 4,406 46,936 50,439
Again, 18,956 total production of panzers in a maximum of 4 months in 1945 against 13,657 on 1944 and 5530 on 1943, after Stalingrad an Moscow, ignorance can be fixed foolishness don’t.
I think history channel can not be considered a neonazi organization, let’s read their point of view of Dresde:
On the evening of February 13, 1945, the most controversial episode in the Allied air war against Germany begins as hundreds of British bombers loaded with incendiaries and high-explosive bombs descend on Dresden, a historic city located in eastern Germany. Dresden was neither a war production city nor a major industrial center, and before the massive air raid of February 1945 it had not suffered a major Allied attack. By February 15, the city was a smoldering ruin and an unknown number of civilians–somewhere between 35,000 and 135,000–were dead.
in other part:
From February 4 to February 11, the “Big Three” Allied leaders–U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin–met at Yalta in the USSR and compromised on their visions of the postwar world. Other than deciding on what German territory would be conquered by which power, little time was given to military considerations in the war against the Third Reich.
In other words, a week before the raid they were already sharing out the cake,
Another paragraph:
Because there were an unknown number of refugees in Dresden at the time of the Allied attack, it is impossible to know exactly how many civilians perished. After the war, investigators from various countries, and with varying political motives, calculated the number of civilians killed to be as little as 8,000 to more than 200,000. Estimates today range from 35,000 to 135,000. Looking at photographs of Dresden after the attack, in which the few buildings still standing are completely gutted, it seems improbable that only 35,000 of the million or so people in Dresden that night were killed. Cellars and other shelters would have been meager protection against a firestorm that blew poisonous air heated to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit across the city at hurricane-like speeds.
So, it looks like if it is not only Irving.
:army:[b][i]Thanks for your reply, Kurt. I understand exactly where you are coming from. I have to wait awhile before I answer , or make a comment, because my temper also gets the best of me sometime. You have a great day, and keep on posting.
Sincerely,
TEXAG57[/i][/b]
No.
According to the table, 18,956 tanks were made in 12 months of 1944 and 4,406 tanks in 4 months 1945.
That is 1580 per months and 1102 respectivly.
This thread is absolutely magnificent, honorable ladies and gentlemen! We do have here an excellent and highly inspiring dialog. What a way to go!
There is no law that makes people queue for service in a shop; or enter a lift in an orderly fashion; or disembark from public transport and go through the turnstiles in an orderly fashion, but they do it every day in their millions and in so doing preserve order in society.
But there definitely is law when you are finding a place to live, when you are examining a lease, when you are building your own home, when you are buying your car, when you are traveling on the road with your car (with those legendary gas-guzzling 250 HP under the hood ;)), when you are buying in the supermarket, when you are writing a check, when you are getting financial advice, when you are changing your last will, when your dearly beloved wife is challenging your last will, when you are divorcing, when your children are in trouble, when you are working in the private company, when you are working in the public corporation, when you are negotiating your community responsibilities, when you are regulating your accidents at work, when you have your unemployment insurance, and finally when somebody else is dealing with your body when your death occurs. Every single previously mentioned and deeply important part of human life is directly regulated by law.
The principal purpose of law is to control and regulate disputable relations among human beings. Law exists to settle disputes and to maintain order. It forbids us to to this, it requires us to do that. But it never tells us what would be good or wise, or even decent for us to do. Law must regulate our conduct in our complex society, if the society is to function in an orderly manner.
That depends on what is meant by war.
Mr. Otterbein defines war as a state of open, deliberately conducted armed conflict carried out between stratified societies with permanent membership and firm socio-economic boundaries.
Egalitarian and ranked societies (kinships, tribes) therefore are excluded from this definition.
Which law would that be in the case of soldiers engaged in a revolutionary war against their legitimate, or illegitimate, government?
Criminal law, my esteemed colleague. Any attempt to overthrow the elected government by violence carries the penalty of life imprisonment! Even conspiring to commit such an act can draw this sentence. The offense of sedition will be committed by any person who teaches, advocates, publishes materials that proposes the violent overthrow of a government, or enters into an agreement wit another person to carry out a seditious intention. All these activities are classified as crimes against the state and rank among the gravest crimes in law.
What about the common situation where the rebels are armed by another nation which is not subject to the laws of the rebels’ nation and may even be acting contrary to its own laws in supplying the arms?
No problem at all, my esteemed colleague. Anyone found with a instrument designed to be used as an offensive weapon (fully automatic rifle, sawed-off shotguns, butcher knife, a shovel, or even a broken beer glass) in his possession can be sent to prison for up to five years. :twisted:
Only as long as the State allows itself to be subject to law.
If and only if we think of law primarily as a command, my dear Mr. Rising Sun! Amazingly, but you and late mr. A. Y. Vyshinsky are somehow on the same wavelength. You know, he said in 1932 that "…the Law is the aggregate of rules of conduct – or norms. Yet not of norms alone, but also of customs and rules of community living confirmed by State authority and coercively protected by that authority."
As a consequence we constantly fix our main attention upon the penalty imposed by the maker of the law for a breach of it and this we term as sanction. But to the 18th century mind, for example, law is primarily reason! To the medieval mind, on the other hand, there was scarcely any definite sanction, but those regulations were nonetheless laws. We are constantly exaggerating the part played by force. Perhaps today, when we have seen the evils of force disguised as law exercised by selfish men uncontrolled themselves by the law, we may hope that a synthesis of humanistic ideas may give us a concept of law on which a better civilization can be built.
By thinking of law in terms of obligation and not of command we will emphasize the most important truth that the State itself can be controlled by law: the inevitability of the all-powerful nation-State will no longer be accepted as an axiom. 
What protects us most is not so much the law but the willingness and ability of the extra-government legal machinery to uphold the law.
Actually it is the obligation conception of law that we may hope to find a means of finally replacing international anarchy by international law. It will make clear the all-essential point that International Law need not wait for the creation of the Super State, or even the establishment of efficient sanctioning machinery before it can claim to be law in a true sense. It is the spirit – the sense of obligation – and not the machinery that has been lacking in the past! We have spoken at length of international organizations already, but we have forgotten that such a society cannot exists unless the members of it recognize that they are under an obligation, ethical as well as legal to obey its rules. Perhaps in time to come the Aristotelian ethics may give to all nations its ideal of freedom and equal justice under the law! 
And now back to certain historical illustrations connected with our highly intriguing discussion. As always, erroneous generalizations are representing some most common mistakes in historical evaluations, and our thread, alas, is not an exception. Despite the obvious exasperation, I shall try to briefly elucidate some minor inaccuracies. For example, this one:
Well Italians have nothing to do with Einsatzgruppen which you repeat like parrot
You are absolutely right, my dear Mr Ivaylo - Italian troops really do not have any direct connection with those notorious German armed formations. However, Italian troops actually did commit certain misdeeds which are absolutely identical with those dishonorable actions undertaken by those notorious aforementioned German formations. Here you have one highly characteristic example:
Italian officers are observing executed civilians – vicinity of Kolašin (Montenegro), 1941
As you can see, German units were not unaccompanied in certain misdeeds, but on the other hand nobody in his right historical mind ever claimed or will maintain that Italian troops actually were slaughterers that had gone berserk! Furthermore, every well-educated historian will tell you that even certain members of the notorious Waffen SS occasionally were real champions of chivalry and absolutely honorable conduct.
And please remember - generalizations and popular prejudices are archenemies of every rational and scientific argumentation!
Well, that’s all for today. Our brand new working day will start in only… 5 hours! You will excuse me, honorable ladies and gentlemen, but even the librarians have to catch some sleep. In the meantime, as always – all the best!
I have. And I’m pretty sure that it preceded WWII, and the 20th century. The War we’re actually discussing here…
Authors such as the Holocaust expert David Cesarani have argued that the government and policies of the United States of America against certain indigenous peoples constituted genocide. Cesarani states that “in terms of the sheer numbers killed, the Native American Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust”.[24] He quotes David E. Stannard, author of American Holocaust.
And your point? Secondly, the number of Native Americans killed would be hard to figure as some died as a result of disease and deprivation rather than direct conflict with whites. Secondly, what bearing does this have on the Holocaust? That America shouldn’t have intervened in a War against Nazi Germany because sixty years or so before they waged War on the frontier? What sense does that make?
And the total number of victims of Nazi aggression, not least of which the German people themselves, far exceeds any atrocities ever committed…
What an interesting statement–and as if they had a choice. You mean the decadent Western Allies solicited the services of the brutal, conniving NKVD? Actually, it was the Germans that resulted in the use of their services if you actually look it up. What were the Western Allies supposed to do? Allow the Soviet Union to collapse resulting in a complete reconstitution of German power? As I recall, it was Hitler’s regime that signed a “nonaggression pact” with the Soviet gov’t and even allowed them to carve up poor Poland…
…and so if someone invade my country for example Turkey do so … from your words i see that i can form for example BKVD - bulgarian komsiariat for internal affairs and when the turk army come to torture , put them in camps , mass kill them , and you will say well it’s ok after all the turks invaded them who cares . But i have strong suspision that you won’t definately say that … which means you have double standart
I have no idea what you mean. I suppose you’re referring to the potential war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact?
The double standard, eh? What about the fact that both the United States and British gov’ts tried and convicted–and even killed–their own soldiers for committing war crimes?