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Monday, March 17, 2014

Moral Relativism When Considering Megadeaths

   Jerry Pournelle listed this:

FYI from Wikipedia:
  • 1944 to 1948: Flight and expulsion of Germans after World War II. Between 13.5 and 16.5 million Germans were expelled, evacuated or fled from Central and Eastern Europe, making this the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in recorded history. Estimated number of those who died in the process is being debated by historians and estimated between 500,000 and 3,000,000.[44]
  • November and December 1944: more than 200,000 Danube Swabians in Yugoslavia were expelled from their homes and interned in starvation and concentration camps for the old, young and disabled. Some 30,000 workers were expelled to Russia as slave laborers for war reparations.[45]
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         Though I have long promoted more reporting of the atrocities "our side" & NATO police carried out in the wars against Yugoslavia, it is worth, for balance, remembering that atrocities get carried out by all sides.

        Though our schools and media airbrush these out of history.

         If you read up about the Danube Swabians they certainly did side with Hitler against their neighbours in the atrocities he committed. It is difficult to think of a way in which  locals, assuming they were not saintly, would not have expelled them. Nonetheless they should not be forgotten.

         Also worth noting the enormous dubiety about the number of death. This demonstrates one of the obscene things about genocide - since it is a crime that eliminates the witnesses, and even moreso, tends to eliminate those with an interest in the crimes being known, the numbers quoted in almost all such, owe more to politics than reality.

        This, of course, does not apply to the Jewish Holocaust where the number of 6 million is enforced by both historians and police as being certain. Though in earlier times figures between 3 & 11 million were common. This is fortunate for the western countries since they were able to justify WW2 as being against a uniquely barbaric regime without having to mention that the Germans killed 24 million Soviet citizens (something they would have had difficulty in denouncing as bad during the cold war when we were threatening to wipe out 200 million of them).

       

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Comments:
"in earlier times figures between 3 & 11 million were common": quite - as a boy I had picked up the figure as 8 million. Not that it matters terribly, except to remind me that the figure of 6 million should not be treated as holy writ.
 
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