History Taught In Cm Schools

[eek]

Another point I find hard to swallow about Hitler, is that it was always Hitler that did the damage and never the German people.

I must agree with this point.

The same applies to the treatment of indigenous Australians, N. Americans and others.

I understand that times were different and that demagogues can manipulate the human tendency to "group think", but responsibility remains with us all.

I agree that responsibility remains with us all to fix damage in the world (not just what we may, or may not be, directly or indirectly responsible for). My point is that we shouldnt need to point a finger at a nationality, or remind them of the damage their forefathers did. If that was the case, then we are all guilty of various crimes. No point lingering on that one, more productive to take positive action instead.

[RubbaJohnny]

Extremley unlikely or expedient history will be challenged soon when current events and very recent history is still contentious everywhere think Gaza massacres,Gitmo or treatment of lao Hmong Montagnards

Fortunately we Bhuddists will be able to see the full picture in 200-300 lifetimes.

Fortunately we know Thailand crushed the French hence Victory monument.

France never really recovered,Despite Poruguese and British and Americans and Chinese and Japanese the Thai has remained independent while the celts Germans Argentinians were defeated occupied or colonised

The British burned Washington DC the Germans shelled Russian capita and vice versa.

Only one country has ever used weapons of mass destruction THE USA killed most of Japans Catholics in Nagasaki but let Hirohito go unpunished and sold weapons to Saddam Israel and the thugs of Africa

Well Philip the Greek invited him to England

My father like so many others was dissappointed that the thousands of Thais Dutch and Commonwealth men on the railway were betrayed

[PeaceBlondie]

Hundreds of thousands of Germans must have known in the 1940's. Unless we act against war, the orders to kill soldiers and innocent civilians come from me and you. And from Thais.

He's five foot two and he's six foot four

He fights with missiles and with spears

He's all of 31 and he's only 17

He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist and a Jane

A Buddhist, a Baptist and a Jew

And he knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will

Kill you for me, my friends, and me for you

He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France

He's fighting for the USA

and he's fighting for the Russians and he's fighting for Japan

And he thinks he'll put an end to war this way

He's fighting for democracy, he's fighting for the Reds

He's fighting for the good of all

He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die

And he never reads the writing on the wall

He's the universal soldier and he is really is to blame

His orders come from far away no more

They come from him and you and me and brothers, can't you see

This is not the way to put an end to war.

Thais need to be taught this by Thais.

[WaiWai]

Well said, Mr Peace Soldier .

And I doubt that anyone will argue that Thailand's a highly nationalistic country (though perhaps currently beseiged more from within than without) ... a country with "compulsory" military service and rote learning that is rare to find elsewhere in thhe region any more.

"History Boys", anyone?

Edited October 21, 2009 by WaiWai

[Ulysses G.]

Only one country has ever used weapons of mass destruction

Not true. They have been used many times.

The term weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is often used to describe a weapon that can kill large numbers of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures (e.g. buildings), natural structures (e.g. mountains), or the biosphere in general.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction

[Xangsamhua]

Peace Blondie, although I would like to agree with your basic message, it would not be right to ascribe moral equivalence to the armies of the Reich and the Allies in World War Two. The soldiers of both the German army and the SS were prepared to commit the gravest atrocities against Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled and the intelligentsia - men, women and children - in Eastern Europe. They were less brutal in the West because they identified racially with those people, whereas they regarded Slavs as sub-human and Jews as enemies of the human race.

There is a tendency to paint the SS as the real villains and the Wehrmacht as less so, and there is something in that, however the generals and the officer corps of the Wehrmacht were, in most cases, quite willing to implement Hitler's orders, knowing that they were atrocities and fully aware that they were in stark opposition to normal human compassion. They simply accepted the doctrine that certain people were no better than vermin and had to be exterminated. Of course, the SS were worse,as they seemed to revel in cruelty and violence, and frequently didn't wait for orders to conduct acts of genocide.

Among other things that the SS and the Wehrmacht and their local nationalist allies did, as acts of Nazi policy in the East, were the following:

- gassing of Jewish and Romany people in concentration camps

- gassing of men, women and children in vans en route to burial sites, often as the vans passed through city streets full of unknowing pedestrians: when babies survived because their mothers were able to cover them and prevent the gas from reaching them, the babies were taken out and their heads bashed in by soldiers with shovels and then buried.

- intentional starvation of Jews in ghettos and in places of detention

- transportation in over-crowded cattle wagons with insufficient clothing and no rations, to the extent that a high percentage of passengers died en route

- mass executions of Jewish and Romany men, women and children by taking them to a forest, forcing them to dig mass graves, then lining them up and shooting them in the back of the head.

And much of this happened before the more deliberate measures for the Final Solution were agreed on at the Wannsee conference in January 1942. Nothing that has been done by Israelis, Americans, Australians, Canadians or others mentioned in earlier posts matches anything near the scale of malevolence of the Nazi policy of Lebensraum and the genocide of the Jews and Slavs in order to attain it.

I'm heavily reliant on the book "The Third Reich at War" by Richard J. Evans (Penguin 2009), the third part of his trilogy on the Third Reich. I highly recommend these books. Evans was the chief expert witness at the trial of David Irving, a major holocaust denier, in Austria. I'm still reading the last book and haven't decided how much the German people knew or what they felt about it. I get the impression from the diaries and letters of civilians and soldiers cited by Evans that some people were becoming dubious by as soon as 1941, but whether on moral grounds or simply a weakening in confidence I'm not sure. Certainly the German people of those generations were guilty of allowing the Nazis to come to power and complicit in the racial discrimination that took effect in Germany once they did, but culpability, like everything else, arises from causes and having arisen must take effect, often after the responsible person has lost control of events. Evans's earlier books in the trilogy give us an idea of what those causes were.

We must, as Eek said, be slow to judge. I lived in Germany in 1954-55 as a military dependant. My father was with the British Army of the Rhine. Before that, we lived in Japan from 1951-53, not far from Hiroshima. I never recollect my father or mother ever suggesting that the German or the Japanese people were guilty or complicit in the crimes of their leaders. It simply never came up. If people who fought in and endured the War and knew what had happened (we visited a concentration camp shortly after arriving in Germany) could refrain from judgement, then so should we.

Sorry for the long post.

[sbk]

Well, interesting conversation I am sure, but so far, except for the first few posts actually trying to make this relevant to the OP, I see nothing either Chiang Mai or even Thailand related, much less related to the original topic of discussion.

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