Why Hitler Wanted to Kill the Jews

Adolph Hitler wanted to kill Jews because taking that stand gave him power.  When human beings work together, there is a lot of power in their combined efforts. To get many people to work together, it is very useful to make them afraid of something, for them to have a common enemy.  I wish to point out that Gypsies and homosexuals also died in the Holocaust. 

German did not just suddenly wake up and decide to kill Jewish people, to want to annex land from other countries. 

To really understand why one group of people does anything with or to another group of people, you have to understand the history of both groups. 

The Jews are an ancient ethnic group. The Romans thought the Jews were ancient enough to have earned respect when the Germans were still struggling to get out of the Iron Age. At that point in history the Jews had a country of their own. 

The Romans fought with Germanic Tribes and with the Jews. Sometimes they even lost to both. 

When the Emperor Hadrian drove the Jewish people out of Israel for their rebellion against Rome, they traveled to all parts of the world that they could get to.  They did not integrate with the populations where they found new homes though, but instead retained their own language, customs, and religion. 

For much of Europe's history, most of the European population could not read. Stories about the past were told, retold, and embellished hundred of thousands of times. Much of Europe's population also identified as Christian. (It was illegal and a capital crime not to.. meaning they'd kill you if you weren't Christian.) So having a large population within a population that thwarted the larger population's customs caused a lot of friction. One of the stories that was told commonly was that the Jews had killed Jesus. It was very conveniently forgotten that Jesus was a Jew. Most of images of Jesus that were painted in Europe depict him as a causation, which is unlikely. If he had not been Jewish, the would have had no claim at all to being the Jewish Messiah, though that's the stuff of a different answer. 

So while there was historically a great deal of friction between Jewish and Christian populations in Europe, the Jews were tolerated in large part because of a small technical matter of a financial nature. 

The Catholic Church was the dominate authority on religious matters from Charlemagne until Henry VIII and even after Henry on the continent. The Catholic Church forbade lending money at interest. There is a very great deal of money to be made lending money at interest. Any culture functioning above agricultural subsistence level needs a way to borrow money. Europe used the Jews as their bank.

So twenty years after WWII, while most of Germany was still in economic ruin, the Jews had money, they had physically different traits, such as darker skin, cultural differences in language and religion, so it was very easy to motivate a majority of the democratic Germany to see this nearly defenseless population as a danger, an evil. 

And that's why Hitler wanted to kill the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals.

Rambling Thoughts on the Iraqi War

My Thoughts on the Iraqi War

by Nix Winter

This is just my thoughts. I've been studying history and I'm aware that a proper historian should use more formal language that I'm about to, use lots of foot notes to support what they're going to say. This is just an opinion piece. The opinion and experience I'm about to talk about is mine. 

You know what war sucks.

During the combat operations in Iraq, I lived in California, Michigan, and Washington. None of those places got hit by missiles. There were deaths by gunshot, but they were, as far as I know, done by Americans on other Americans. In those three states, where I was living, no human being died by having rocks thrown at them because they wanted to control their own sexuality, or were controlled by their own sexuality. Point of that thought is, no one killed anyone else by throwing rocks at them.

I don't think anyone got stoned in Iraq. Maybe fewer people got stoned in Afghanistan because we were there. 

I guess that matters to be me because throwing stones at someone until they die is a really stupid thing to do. 

For what it's worth, I think killing people in any way because of sexual passion and the acts that come from it, as long as they are between consenting adults, is a dumb fucking thing to do. 

War is bad. Sex is good. 

Back to the Iraqi War...

Now, I know this is going to seem unlikely, but when we were in the midst of "Shock and Awe" I was calling bullshit. Saddam Hussein was trying to comply with UN requests. He hauled those questionable missiles out and destroyed them. 

I wonder how it would have been different if we'd gone to him and said, "Look. We'll give you a house in Arizona. The climate is kinda similar. You get to keep your kids. You don't die, we'll give you couple million USD, and you let us have your country?"

Completely flippant and unreasonable speculation.

What we did was roll in a bunch of military, shoot a bunch of people (even if they were shooting at us first), fucked up a lot of infrastructure, created a refugee flood. The Kurds got what they wanted though, and I'm glad about that. I felt really bad for them in the Iran-Iraqi War.  Horrible things were said about what was happing to them during that war, at least in the church I was going to at the time.  That same church also ranted a lot about how the Soviets were oppressing the Christians in Afghanistan. Today... I want to know if there are many Christians in Afghanistan. I'm not very rational about it, but maybe the Tailiban stones them too.... 

If I had a choice between the Taliban and the Soviet Communists... I'll go with the Soviets, thought I'm pretty sure neither one of them would be okay with me.  I just can't see a pink haired, gender confused, intellectual historian and anarchist getting over real well in either system. I'd trust the Soviets to shot me or work me to death, not just throw stones at me.  It's a practical technology thing, I guess.

Obama is speaking on CNN.. I guess he was at Fort Brag today.  Iraq has an opportunity and America is more secure. 

Today is the day that major combat operations is over. 

Legal speak.

I love President Obama's legal speak. He's intelligent and articulate. I actually saw some commentator that he should speak in smaller sentences so people can understand him and his words won't get twisted around. 

Someone should have said that to the people who were writing the bible. 

*claps hands to face* 

I look back over the last decade and I just stand here in this moment in time.. going ... oh my god. 

In that case, god stands in for all that is valuable, sacred, and true. 

So many people have died. Our own country is deeply divided. 

I'm sure there are a lot of very religious people out there who fear people like me.  There are people who seriously believe that hate speech at dead soldier's funerals is an act of worship to their god. 

Shia and Sunni Muslims have killed the hell out of each other. 

A human being ruled by fear and driven  by a belief that they are right is a terrifying creature. 

What have I learned about life from the Iraq war? Where bombs have not fallen in my cities? 

I have learned that bombs have fallen in my cities. 

Bagdad is my city. 

People are my kin. 

Where ever you live in the world, I'm your sibling. 

My sibs, please... don't freaking kill people!

Don't be afraid. We're all in this together.

If we're going to have peace, we have to do it ourselves.

Nix

What our country's founders were thinking...

There has been a lot of talk lately of our founders having a lot of Biblical intentions in mind when they wrote our constitution.  So what were they reading?  The following passage is from 'The Spirit of the Laws' by Montesquieu. He wrote this in 1731, and the Church put it on Forbidden Book list.  And now, tongue in cheek, but banned books have always been big in Boston. So in 1776, what do you want to bet that our literate, Freemasonry embracing founders had read this bit of wickedness? 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu/
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Name: The Life, Writings and Philosophies of Montesquieu




 Liberty also requires that the laws concern only threats to public order and security, since such laws will protect us from harm while leaving us free to do as many other things as possible. Thus, for instance, the laws should not concern offenses against God, since He does not require their protection. They should not prohibit what they do not need to prohibit: "all punishment which is not derived from necessity is tyrannical. The law is not a mere act of power; things in their own nature indifferent are not within its province" (SL 19.14). The laws should be constructed to make it as easy as possible for citizens to protect themselves from punishment by not committing crimes. They should not be vague, since if they were, we might never be sure whether or not some particular action was a crime. Nor should they prohibit things we might do inadvertently, like bumping into a statue of the emperor, or involuntarily, like doubting the wisdom of one of his decrees; if such actions were crimes, no amount of effort to abide by the laws of our country would justify confidence that we would succeed, and therefore we could never feel safe from criminal prosecution. Finally, the laws should make it as easy as possible for an innocent person to prove his or her innocence. They should concern outward conduct, not (for instance) our thoughts and dreams, since while we can try to prove that we did not perform some action, we cannot prove that we never had some thought. The laws should not criminalize conduct that is inherently hard to prove, like witchcraft; and lawmakers should be cautious when dealing with crimes like sodomy, which are typically not carried out in the presence of several witnesses, lest they "open a very wide door to calumny" (SL 12.6).