Poll: were world war 2 and the cold war clear cut battles between good and evil?

[HerrBobo]

so escapits, i have a debate question! i'm having a hard time choosing a side to argue for in this question: were world war 2 and the cold war clear cut battles between good and evil? why or why not?

it's the cold war part that gets me, i started off thinking that it wasn't clear cut, but i'm beginning to think the opposite.

if want to make an essay of it, please use supporting arguments with citation of your sources, you don't have to of course.

No.

The very fact that you asked the question of WW2 and The Cold War illustrates the reason why I picked the no option.

I'm assuming that you are from the West and from an "allied" nation.

OK, so, if we take WW2 and say that the major Nations of the US, UK, France and Russia were the "good" side and they defeated the "evil" nations of Germany, Italy and Japan in a war that lasted form 1939-1945.

Where is becomes apparent that there is no "good or evil" in war is in the next part of your question, the Cold War. Why, because, accord to the West, in the course of one year, Russia is now on the "evil" side. How did happen in the course of one year?

Simple answer, id didn't Russia was never "evil" or "good" to begin with. It was simply a Nation at war for a whole raft of reasons, just like the US, Germany, Poland and and all the others.

There is no evil nations or "sides in a war only evil people. When it comes to nations there are only winner and losers.

sooooo you don't think the holocaust, gestapo, or the nazi's human experimentation preformed by Dr. Josef Mengele doesn't qualify as evil? in the question, i meant everything that happened during ww2, not just the war. this includes the united states japanese internment or the soviet's poor treatment of their own troops, which you could of used to argue that both sides did some bad things.

however, to not consider the nazis evil is extremely far too forgiving, so here's a video that will hopefully change your mind. skip to 3:15 to hear the really ugly stuff.

dr. mengele amputated and/or disected prisoners including children without the use of anesthetic just for the sake of collecting body parts for him experiments. can you imagine doing that to someone? leaning over them as their blood curdling screams of pain pierce your ears? and as dr. mengele did this to those people, he didn't care one bit....and THAT is the definition of pure evil...to kill without remorse.

Have a look at my post again.

I said that in times of war there are no evil Nations only evil men. All of the acts you mentioned above are evil and they were done by evil people. However, that does not mean that every member of the Nazi party was evil.

If you go down that road where do you stop? Where the Hitler Youth evil? Where the Bund Deutscher Mädel evil? What about the Wehrmacht conscripts? Or Hitler's secretaries? Were they all evil?

No, of course they were not.

The majority of them were just people who got on with their lives as best they could. For sure, some of them were evil, but that was because they were people, not because they were Nazis or because they were German.

Nazi does not automatically equal evil. Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi party from 1939, was he an evil man?

Most people living in Germany, including those in the army and in the Nazi party were just normal people, like you and me. They are guilty of nothing more than being born in the times they were.

However, one must consider that they did allow the Nazi party to come to power and then rule for 12 years. If they are guilty of anything it is standing by while an environment was created that allowed evil men to come to the fore. That is a difficulty thing to stop though when the same men are creating jobs and a sense of national pride.

To take one group of people and judge them all on the acts of a minority, as you are doing is dangerous; it reflects some of the Nazi party's own polices.

 

[Hazy992]

or, in the case of one particular country, rolled in late to the party and took all the credit.

You shouldn't downplay what the Americans did. Whether you like it or not, there's a good chance that without them the Allies wouldn't have won the war. At least not on the Western Front.

See my above quote.

Sorry I kinda just skimmed over the thread. Didn't notice it.

Although my point still stands to people in general

That's fair, while my statement was tongue in cheek, there are people who don't appreciate the American (and Canadian) sacrifices made. However the same could be said of any country, I've heard as many "took all the credit" lines as I have heard people making making fun of France for surrendering.

Yeah I guess people get confused with France. They're probably focusing on their surrender and Vichy France but forgetting the Resistance.

 

[MoNKeyYy]

I feel like this is more of an R&P thing, but whatever.

Short answer: No
Long answr: Nooooooooooofine I won't say it.

But actually, No. Things are never a clear cut battle between good an evil. Never. Ever. At all. And any movie, TV show, videogame, play, novel, history or story that ever tries to portay a conflict as a clear cut battle between good and evil is wrong and the writer should feel bad.

Was Hitler a little nuts? Hell yes he was a little fucking batshit crazy. Did he genuinely believe he was doing what was right, just and good for his people? Hell yes he did. If anyone has ever read about Hitler or read Mein Kompf they should probably know that Hitler hated the Jews becasue he attributed all of the problems both he and most of Europe had to Jewish influence. He worked in a Jewish neighborhood for a while and was treated rather poorly there, and I think I recall a Jewish doctor having been present at his mother's death? Might have to double check that one. But he blamed the Jews for his mother's death. Hitler believed that the Jewish people were evil and that he was doing his people and the world a favor by exterminating them. AS for the war? Germany was forced to pay billions of dollars in reparations for a war that wasn't there fault while simultaneously being stripped of the means to do so; most German industrial equiptment was confiscated by the Allies, the Rhineland, the industrial heart of Germany was annexed by France and severe limits to what they could produce were imposed on them. The Nazis reclaimed all that and tried to impose themselves on Europe to ensure it never happened again.

AS for the Soviets, this one is even less clear cut than World War 2. The Soviets/Communist Bloc and NATO were two competing powers with opposing ideologies, neither one could ever be claimed as being more right and both believed themselves to be acting in the best interests of their people. Both sides made some total dick moves too so to appoint either side to mantle of good, which is a totally subjective word I might add, is absolute folly.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

oh don't be a ponce by trying to defend nazi germany. i already knew practically everything in that first essay about germany (except for the bit about ghandi). what you failed to mention was that the german people were totally okay with killing jews,

Alright. Got a citation for that?

hitler's propaganda instilled hate for the jews long before the war.

Yeah, because government-sponsored initiatives to sway public opinion always work. It's not like propaganda or PSAs have ever gone (gasp) ignored! That would be madness!

in addition to that, many other of Hitler's ambitions make him out to be a mad man, i.e. his plans to reconstruct berlin with buildings so large they shouldn't be architecturally sound but the somehow the blue prints made it work. the war of course undermined his plans to make berlin the largest city in the world.

...really? Your first example for why Hitler was utterly insane is "He wanted to rebuild the capitol"?

Hitler had plans for world domination and ethnic cleansing of millions of people. that's not even just evil, that's Cobra Commander's daily routine but with a grim twist that is reality.

Wait, what? Are we looking at the same guy? Because Cobra Commander never set out to murder all the Jews on Earth. His more diabolical plots usually involved making Zartan dress like a glam-rocker [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhp0QSuQ0No] or something insane like that. And last I checked, Hitler never made everyone in his organization adhere to a strict animal motif.

And FYI: the fact that Hitler did successfully kill millions of people within a single ethnic group kinds makes your "This plan is too insane to ever exist!" remark seem a bit...bizarre.

 

[mega48man]

oh don't be a ponce by trying to defend nazi germany. i already knew practically everything in that first essay about germany (except for the bit about ghandi). what you failed to mention was that the german people were totally okay with killing jews,

Alright. Got a citation for that?

hitler's propaganda instilled hate for the jews long before the war.

Yeah, because government-sponsored initiatives to sway public opinion always work. It's not like propaganda or PSAs have ever gone (gasp) ignored! That would be madness!

in addition to that, many other of Hitler's ambitions make him out to be a mad man, i.e. his plans to reconstruct berlin with buildings so large they shouldn't be architecturally sound but the somehow the blue prints made it work. the war of course undermined his plans to make berlin the largest city in the world.

...really? Your first example for why Hitler was utterly insane is "He wanted to rebuild the capitol"?

Hitler had plans for world domination and ethnic cleansing of millions of people. that's not even just evil, that's Cobra Commander's daily routine but with a grim twist that is reality.

Wait, what? Are we looking at the same guy? Because Cobra Commander never set out to murder all the Jews on Earth. His more diabolical plots usually involved making Zartan dress like a glam-rocker [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhp0QSuQ0No] or something insane like that. And last I checked, Hitler never made everyone in his organization adhere to a strict animal motif.

And FYI: the fact that Hitler did successfully kill millions of people within a single ethnic group kinds makes your "This plan is too insane to ever exist!" remark seem a bit...bizarre.

ugh. you are so uneducated

hitlers propoganda to blame the jews for germany's suffering after WW1 WORKED....and it worked REEEALLY good. you don't need to see that scene from 'the boy in the stripe pajamas' where the kid's teacher is telling him about how the jews are evil to know that, just ask a holocaust survivor, they'll tell you all about it.

yes of course hitler was mad for wanting to rebuild the capitol, his plans for the city were insane. go look it up, i saw it history channel, it was really interesting. a center road 4 times as wide as the champs-elysses, a coliseum so large that a full capacity of people could create enough heat to start condensation and eventually rain from the cieling (theoretically), an underground highway under the city, all this crazy stuff. and he began for this just as the war began. great planning right?

and did you seriously critique my cobra commander reference? sheese, you really ARE a ponce. it's the fact that they're both sinisterly evil that make them alike, when the hell did you assume we were talking about animals?

and i never said "This plan is too insane to ever exist!" when talking about the holocaust, that plan unfortunately worked. i was refering to his redesign of berlin. LOOK IT UP.

you know what? fuck this. thanks to you, i just got 2 badge awards.

 

[Doom-Slayer]

And even THEN we may not have won if Hitler didn't pour so many troops and supplies into trying to take Russia (in the winter.) THAT, not the U.S., is what ruined the German army and ultimately lost the war.

QTF

Absolutely true. If Germany hadnt spread itself too thin and hadnt attacked Russian..in the freaking winter...ie when their fuel freezes and they steal boots off the dead...then they potentially would of won the war. I find it slightly sad and ironic that if nazi Germany hadnt poured so many resources into the holocaust and been more sensible, they could of conquered Britain, taken all the way down to Africa and some of the middleeast too. A slightly scary thought that the deaths of so many may actually have saved us all from an even worse world.

OT: No. Hitler I would say is evil, but the armies of each side were doing as their comanders ordered. Even a lot of the higher up nazis were still just blindly following orders and werent genuinely following Nazism.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

ugh. you are so uneducated

...he said, failing to capitalize or use proper punctuation.

hitlers propoganda to blame the jews for germany's suffering after WW1 WORKED....and it worked REEEALLY good. you don't need to see that scene from 'the boy in the stripe pajamas' where the kid's teacher is telling him about how the jews are evil to know that, just ask a holocaust survivor, they'll tell you all about it.

Yeah. Because every Holocaust survivor met every German in Germany, right? And it's not like there were Germans who were A) not directly aiding the Holocaust or B) actually fighting against it. Right?

yes of course hitler was mad for wanting to rebuild the capitol, his plans for the city were insane. go look it up, i saw it history channel, it was really interesting. a center road 4 times as wide as the champs-elysses,

So a road larger than a six-lane highway? Doesn't sound all that farfetched so far.

a coliseum so large that a full capacity of people could create enough heat to start condensation and eventually rain from the cieling (theoretically),

How many people would that mean? Because most modern stadiums can seat 50,000 people, like minimum. The Superdome can seat a good 75,000. Would it have done the condensation thing simply because they didn't have A/C systems back then?

an underground highway under the city,

So...a subway?

all this crazy stuff. and he began for this just as the war began. great planning right?

Oh, certainly. Because I'm sure that the plans wouldn't be turned over to, say, architects, or city planners, when they were to actually be built. Protip: just because a world leader wants something done doesn't mean it'll happen when he gives the idea to people who can actually do it.

and did you seriously critique my cobra commander reference? sheese, you really ARE a ponce. it's the fact that they're both sinisterly evil that make them alike,

Your quote was, "Hitler had plans for world domination and ethnic cleansing of millions of people. that's not even just evil, that's Cobra Commander's daily routine but with a grim twist that is reality." In other words, "Hitler was Cobra Commander, except real."

My response was that, if anything, claiming that Hitler's level of evil is equal to that of Cobra Commander on the basis that they wanted to take over the world is absolutely insane. The former carried out the successful slaughter of over six million innocent people and all but conquered Western Europe. The latter tried to take over the world by putting poorly-concealed subliminal messages in crappy rock music, and seemed physically incapable of building anything/creating any plan that didn't have some sort of snake motif in it.

when the hell did you assume we were talking about animals?

*facepalm*

Now I'm sort of wondering if you even know who Cobra Commander is, and just heard his name mentioned at one point as a fictional villain with goals of world domination.

and i never said "This plan is too insane to ever exist!" when talking about the holocaust, that plan unfortunately worked. i was refering to his redesign of berlin. LOOK IT UP.

Scream all you want. It isn't going to make me do your research for you.

you know what? fuck this. thanks to you, i just got 2 badge awards.

Thanks to me, specifically? Yeah. Sure. Because I totally made 50+ posts in this thread. And viewed it over a thousand times.

 

[mega48man]

one hell of a mother fuckin snip.

holy shit, you just won't leave me alone will you?

i've already finished my essay and turned it in, this thread no longer serves me any purpose as a survey.

i'm a huge g.i. joe fan, of COURSE i know cobra's forces were all named after animals. but as long as we're childish enough to fight about this, let's just list all the things in the army named after animals, shall we?

i'm sure you recongize the tiger right?

really interesting this one; the nazi's were known for making experimental jet fighters near the end of the war, but didn't have enough time to perfect them (thank god). this one here is called "the salamander".

this panther tanks speaks for itself. a little different than the tiger tank.

this here is a german Elefant (or elephant, durr). the explosive power this thing had made it quite feared in tank warfare.

i know you're just a troll exploiting my words for negative attention, and knowing that i shouldn't even be feeding the troll, but could you find it in your brain to just find ANY of this the least bit interesting from a historical stand point?

 

[Char-Nobyl]

holy shit, you just won't leave me alone will you?

i've already finished my essay and turned it in, this thread no longer serves me any purpose as a survey.

lol, really? You were trying to use an Escapist forum thread as evidence in an essay? I'm pretty sure most professors would prefer if you just went to Wikipedia, and they hate Wikipedia.

i'm a huge g.i. joe fan, of COURSE i know cobra's forces were all named after animals. but as long as we're childish enough to fight about this, let's just list all the things in the army named after animals, shall we?

You hear that whoosh noise? It was the sound of my point going over your head.

I said that Cobra had the insane policy of forcing everyone and everything of adhering to an animal motif. As in, one. Naming weapons/vehicles/etc after animals is all well and good, but it starts to be a problem when you need to come up with insane acronymns to explain why you named your latest tank the H.I.S.S., and it becomes even more of a problem when, as Cobra Commander loves to do, you start making most of those vehicles actually resemble snakes.

i'm sure you recongize the tiger right?

And I'm sure that you recognize an actual tiger, right? Let's compare the two.

Hmm...it's almost as if they just named the tank after a fearsome predator and didn't go any further, in much the same way that Russia didn't force its engineers to make the T-34 look like a bear.

really interesting this one; the nazi's were known for making experimental jet fighters near the end of the war, but didn't have enough time to perfect them (thank god). this one here is called "the salamander".

I'd provide an image of a salamander, but I think that'd be stretching the joke. I'm surprised that you didn't know about the jets, though. They actually did complete the design before the war's end, and it was a stupendous air supremacy fighter. The only problem was that Hitler wanted it to be a replacement for the Stuka, which involved crippling its main two advantages (speed and maneuverability).

this here is a german Elefant (or elephant, durr). the explosive power this thing had made it quite feared in tank warfare.

And yet, if Hitler was indeed a real-life Cobra Commander, he'd have gone for something that looked like the mastodon from the original Power Ranger show.

You're confusing "naming something after something that it isn't" with "creating something with the explicit idea of making it look like something it isn't." The latter is what Cobra Commander did. The former is what every military on Earth actually does. Do Apache gunships actually look like Apache Indians? Did the Sherman actually look like Civil War-era General William T. Sherman?

It certainly also helps that it makes actually referring to them immensely easier. "AH-64D" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

i know you're just a troll exploiting my words for negative attention,

Uh-huh. Here's the sequence of events:

1. I posted, addressing your question. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.334469-Poll-were-world-war-2-and-the-cold-war-clear-cut-battles-between-good-and-evil?page=4#13522793] One of the points I wanted to emphasize was that Germany wasn't composed of Nazi party members, nor was their military composed entirely of the SS, and similarly that the main causes of WWII were firmly entrenched in the conclusion of WWI.

2. You responded [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.334469-Poll-were-world-war-2-and-the-cold-war-clear-cut-battles-between-good-and-evil?page=5#13523159]: "don't be a ponce by trying to defend nazi germany. i already knew practically everything in that first essay about germany," which starts by insulting me, and then moves to bragging about knowledge you never actually specified. You go on to say that, "the german people were totally okay with killing jews," which is an offensive lie about an entire generation of people. And to cap it all off, you added that Hitler was just a real-life Cobra Commander.

I'm still waiting on that citation for "All Germans wanted Jews dead" remark.

and knowing that i shouldn't even be feeding the troll, but could you find it in your brain to just find ANY of this the least bit interesting from a historical stand point?

See, here's the thing: you're a massive Soviet apologist, and incapable of accepting viewpoints that aren't in line with your own.

Here [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.334469-Poll-were-world-war-2-and-the-cold-war-clear-cut-battles-between-good-and-evil?page=4#13522963] you equate, in no uncertain terms, that the actions of Hitler and the SS (an all-volunteer organization) are indicative of the entire German people, but that the atrocities of the Soviet Union were committed by Stalin "single-handedly" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.334469-Poll-were-world-war-2-and-the-cold-war-clear-cut-battles-between-good-and-evil?page=4#13522940]. Not very consistent standards you're keeping so far.

Here [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.334469-Poll-were-world-war-2-and-the-cold-war-clear-cut-battles-between-good-and-evil?page=5#13523403], you proudly thrust Wikipedia forward for two of your 'sources,' which is two too many, and (in the continuing trend of making bizarre boasts about your knowledge) claimed that Josef Mengele was some sort of hidden gem of history that only you and a select few historians know about.

And finally, here [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.334469-Poll-were-world-war-2-and-the-cold-war-clear-cut-battles-between-good-and-evil?page=4#13522729], we get a nice condensed summary of how virtually every argument (including ours) you've had in this thread has gone. The response to the OP is either a request for specification or a question about one of the rather general statements you made, and your response is insulting/condescending. And you only get more hostile the more holes in your argument are pointed out.

He was right, you know. An 'appeal to emotion' is an effort to make people overlook the details of a given issue by emphasizing an emotionally-provoking part of it. As an example: some of the more fanatical anti-abortion groups use images of or (most disturbingly) actual aborted fetuses to try and shock people into sympathizing with their cause. In your case, you were rattling off lists of obscene experiments instead of answering the simple request for details regarding your standards of good and evil.

If your "citations" from earlier are any indicator, coupled with your bungling of facts and regular use of double-standards, I'm pretty sure that you won't do very well on any essay pertaining to this topic. Next time, actually try and consider the other side of an argument, because the alternative is looking foolish when you find out that they have valid points.

I'll leave you with this: The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. I'll even Google it for you [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Soviet+Invasion+of+Afghanistan]. Look at some of the things that come up. Pay attention to anything that mentions 'landmines.' Then let me know what you think of the glorious Soviet Republics once free from the 'evil' influence of Stalin.

 

[TheLizardKing]

If it were not for Pearl Harbor, The US would not have entered the war (Lend-Lease doesn't really count, it was just supplies). So don't think they are all white knights who always think of peoples feelings.

Good vs Evil? WW2 wasn't a Disney movie.

 

[Lilani]

The way I see it, World War II was pretty clear cut. The goal was to stop Hitler and his allies. Hitler was never ambiguous about his goals, his intentions, or his hate for the Jews and everybody else he didn't like. His allies may have been a bit more ambiguous in their intentions, but that didn't make the goal of stopping them to stop the Nazi advance any less ambiguous.

The Cold War was a lot more ambiguous, and more fictitious than anything else. It was driven by the paranoia more than anything else, and especially with people like Joseph McCarthy. Luckily, McCarthy himself served to show the people exactly how ridiculous their paranoia regarding the advance of communism was.

And now just in the last generations since Vietnam we've finally shaken off most of those feelings. Though many older conservatives are still scared, I think. Which is why they leap so quickly to call liberals socialists and communists, because that is how the conservatives fought liberalism during the Cold War. They made it seem like liberals were out to take our freedoms, and now they've updated it to the word "socialist" to make it slightly less obvious they're trying to tap into that irrational paranoia in all those older folks.

 

[Saladfork]

No, of course not.

Nobody and nothing in the history of humanity has ever been "evil".

If somebody did something that offends our sensibilities, it was because either 1) according to their views and beliefs, they were doing the right thing, or 2) They were insane and not entrely responsible for their actions anyway; 1 being far more common than 2.

Taking the nazis: They believed that Germany needed to be a strong nation to thrive in and after the depression, and one of the ways they wanted to accomplish this was through the impleentation of a "master race" which would be physically and mentally superior to other men. Today, of course, we know that is ridiculous and impossible (or was at the time; I wonder how the nazis would have liked genetic manipulation?) but to the people that believed it, this ideal represented a stronger, faster, smarter future for Germany, which was an end goal they felt worthy enough to justify purging various undesirables from society.

As for Hitler himself, well, he needed a way to unify his nation under his banner, and few things bring people together as well as hatred, so he scapegoated most of Germany's problems on the jews. It worked, too; despite the scientific and economic flaws in his policies, his party had a lot of loyal supporters because any flaws in the implementation of his policies could be blamed on jews.

If your familiar with moral nihilism, you know my stance on "evil". If not, then it's that there is no such thing as objective morality. Any and all aspects of morality is a purely human invention and mostly serves to support the social contract.

I guess what I'm taking painfully long to say is what I previously said in another post.

Not averse to values dissonance, just to cartoonish villainy. I'm not going to argue that every place the Brits landed was all sunshine and happiness, but to portray them as randomly massacring people for no reason and kicking puppies while on the way to do it is just as ridiculous. Yes, they killed people. They didn't do it just to be dicks, though.

I'd argue the same thing for nazis, too. They were misguided and based their beliefs on faulty science and false preconceptions, but they were most certainly not evil and painting every single nazi as some kind of psycopath is childish at best.

Historical accuracy isn't about picking which side was 'right'. Everyone on every side in history was human, and I guarentee that just about every one (i.e. the ones that were sane) believed that they were morally correct.