More stupid U.S. Marines

[Medic]

Having read through this thread, I think I have to comment on some things.

I don't know about the U.S. military, but at least here in Finland any show of political inclination by professional members of the military will land them in hot water with their CO, his CO and possibly with the whole of the military. A Finnish Army officer was actually reprimanded not only by the Army but also by the public opinion after he had stated to the conscripts he was training at the time, in his opinion 'a lesbian', referring to the female President of Finland, Tarja Halonen who used to be the chair person of an organization for sexual equality long before her presidency, had 'no right to be the Commander-in-Chief', which is the official status of the Finnish presidents during their term at the office.

It is not unheard of for Finnish conscripts having been dismissed from the military service (and sent in to the civil service for the rest of their service period) for tattoes of Nazi-affiliation and the like. The similar treatment is given to those visibly tattooed with the insignias of the white-supremecists, who have become a general nuisance in Finland especially due to the refugees from Somalia and other nations, who have a different skin pigmentation compared to the majority of Finnish nationals.

As said before by others in this thread, if symbols like the U.S. flag are important, you can not choose to ignore the SS-runes either. To say, the flying the SS-runes by an USMC unit isn't significant is hypocritical. But then again, choosing to ignore the warcrimes commited by the Allied troops during the WW2 would be hypocritical as well - my history teacher in high school used to say, 'history, like a sausage, has two opposite ends' and 'the history is that which the victor writes it to be as the losing side hardly ever has anything to say about how it is written'.

Having no affiliation what-so-ever with the U.S. military, I am hardly knowledgeable enough of the U.S. code of military justice to say, what kind of a punishment should be given to the particular servicemen and their superiors who failed to act on something that will tarnish the public image of the force. However, anyone using his common sense (which is a diminishing resource in the society these days) will understand, not dealing with that kind of affiliation clearly and with enough transparency will reflect very poorly on the force in question. Being a badass and being stupid is quite far from each other in my book.

As for the Holocaust, I've studied the matter quite a bit and it is a clear example of industrialized genocide against not only those of the Jewish faith but homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents, mentally ill and other minorities that did not fit the then-popular Racial Science, which was quite rampant in the whole western world at the time. However, the only ones I've seen to use the Holocaust to justify their racistic actions against others is the nation of Israel. By saying this I do not condone the Holocaust at all, on the contrary, nor try to diminish the fates of those murdered by the Nazis. I'm just saying, things aren't that black or white at all times.

Before I go in to the history of Finnish affiliation with the Nazi Germany during WW2, I simply quote Jorge "George" Santayana: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'.

For a little backround (those who don't want to know the background of my opinion can skip this part), Finland, during the WW2, was allied with the Nazi Germany for a couple of reasons:

• The Nazi Germany was a natural choice as it was opposed to the Soviet Union, which was the only enemy nation Finland had and tried to force Finland in to becoming its satellite prior to taking offensive action against Finland after being refused. The Finnish had also a history of co-operation with the Germans during the Finnish Civil War, prior to which, about 2,000 Finns sought military training in the Royal Prussian 27th Jäger Battalion in order to become the backbone of Finnish troops fighting for independence of the nation
• During the 1939-1940 part of the conflict (The Winter War), Finland was pretty much alone - only Swedish and Estonian nationals came to Finland's aid in big enough numbers while a number of countries established they "would have come, but the war ended before they could"
• During the Nazi operation Barbarossa, Finland shared a common front with the Nazi Germany with some German troops fighting on the Finnish part of the front (mostly in Lapland) and recieved substantial aid from Germany having been declared a war upon by the Allied nations due to the affiliation with Nazi Germany and declaration of war against Soviet Union (which, funny enough, had bombed Finland on several occasions prior to the declaration of war) - the Detachment Kuhlmey of the Luftwaffe actually helped the Finns to stop the Soviet attack at Tali-Ihantala, which was the most intense battle of the war on the Finnish front. This was achieved by the then-president of Finland signing a treaty with the Germany in his own name which enabled the delivery of weapons, planes, tanks and other supplies both military and civilian while promising the Finnish partnership in the war and resigning, which allowed the next president to actually refute the treaty on the part of the Finns
• After Finland signed a armistice with the Soviets, the Finns agreed to remove the Germans from the Finnish soil, which led to the Lapland War, in which the Germans burned most of the Lapland while retreating. Also, the Soviets demanded for a trial of a number of Finnish politicians by a war crime tribunal, which was both against the constitution of Finland and the basic principals of any western legistlation. Finland was also forced to relinquish a huge amount of soil to Soviets and rent a part of its still native soil as a military base to the Soviets
• The Finns had used the swastika (rotating the other direction and lying on one of its sides rather than on its tip like the one the Nazies used) as an emblem for both its airforce and tanks, a symbol that had been the personal insignia of count Von Rosen, who donated the Finnish Air Force it's first plane (actually, he donated it to the White side of the Finnish Civil War - the Whites were mostly right-wing rich landowner, who supported the idea of monarchic rule while the Red faction was working class, socialists (from lenient social democrats to hard-liner communists) and supporters of an idea about a democraticly led republic. The swastika was banned after the war by the Allies and only returned around the 1990ies in the Finnish Airforce unit flags
• 1,200 Finns served in the Finnisches Freiwilligen-Bataillon der Waffen-SS between 1941 and 1943, which was practically a lease-unit from Finland in exchange of aid from Germany. They served for a period of two years after which most of them opted to return to Finland and were sent in to various Finnish Army units. Some volunteers had fought in SS-Division Nordland prior to the Finnish Battalion and some stayed in the SS after the majority of Finns returned home. 20% of the recruits sent to Germany in '41 was right-wing affiliated and about 80% had been members of Suojeluskunta, which was a para-military organization run by the State along with the national armed forces

Too bad, there's no spoiler-style option for posting this "appendix". Sorry about that.

[Legbreaker]

Originally Posted by Medic

For a little backround (those who don't want to know the background of my opinion can skip this part), Finland, during the WW2, was allied with the Nazi Germany for a couple of reasons:

That's some very interesting info there. Thanks for posting!

[Medic]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

That's some very interesting info there. Thanks for posting!

I could go on for a load of pages, but I suspect, people would get tired of my slightly off-topic rambling.

I'll just add that Hitler actually visited Finland to congratulate the Finnish Marschal, Baron Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim (who had recieved his original officer training in the Russian Tsar's army before the independence and who became the president after the war). Mannerheim despised the little corporal to such a degree, he did not even shake hands with him. And had the pilot of Hitler's Focke-Wulf Condor not been as good as he was, the plane would probably have collided with a factory smokestack on the way to Finland, which might have led to a bit different history.

[Legbreaker]

Originally Posted by Medic

I could go on for a load of pages, but I suspect, people would get tired of my slightly off-topic rambling.

So go start a new thread and get to it! I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to read all about it!

[Targan]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

So go start a new thread and get to it! I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to read all about it!

+1

[ShadoWarrior]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

So go start a new thread and get to it! I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to read all about it!

vote++

[Webstral]

I’m not going to participate in the discussion about whether or not American military men or even civilian leaders engaged in questionable policies or committed war crimes. In the first place, no American with knowledge of history can claim that our hands are clean. The way we handled the Philippines at the turn of the 20th Century, the internment of the Japanese-American population during WW2, the use of conventional and nuclear weapons in WW2 to destroy urban areas, the entire way we handled Vietnam from 1946 onward, and our support for some genuinely evil leaders like the last Somoza of Nicaragua clearly call into question the consistency of our commitment to our own principles. I won’t even go into the way we treated the First Nations. Angels we ain’t.

In the second place, we don’t have to be perfect to offer comment on and critique of the way other peoples do things. If perfection were the prerequisite for offering comment and criticism, there would be no commentary or criticism. God will have His say on Judgment Day. Until then, we are stuck with less-than-perfect people and nations assessing and even judging from their less-than-perfect standpoint.

Going further, morality and ethics are not black and white. They can’t be, since no human being is perfectly white. The conduct of individuals and societies exist on a spectrum. Nazi Germany isn’t reprehensible because there was nothing admirable about the way they ran their business or because no individual or even organization within Nazi Germany was devoid of value or virtue. Nazi Germany is reprehensible because the state was based on a racist/purist ideology, and it organized an industrial scale slaughter of human beings based on labels like Slav, Jew, Gypsy, homosexual, Catholic, dissident, etc.

Claiming that somehow we should not excoriate the Nazis because other groups were worse, have received less attention, or both is childish. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s how kids think, not responsible adults. Fairness doesn’t mean that every group that does something wrong gets exactly the negative feedback they deserve, though goodness knows we’d all like that. Fairness means that a group is held accountable for their actions. If we’re not hard enough on the Mongols, the Imperial Japanese, Stalinist Soviets, or the Khmer Rouge, this fact doesn’t let the Nazis off the hook for what the Nazis did any more than looting and vandalism become okay because everyone else in the mob was doing it at the time. We should be harder on Imperial Japan and the Khmer Rouge, not less hard on the Nazis to even things out.

One can admire the battlefield prowess of the Waffen SS. As a kid, I played the “what if” game about German victory on the Eastern Front constantly. I have no beef with someone who respects the Waffen SS purely for their fighting ability.

That much said, let’s imagine for the moment that we are people with the power to make decisions. We might say that the people of the world need to wise up and be able to distinguish between the front-line troops of certain SS formations and the folks responsible for murder in the camps and in the field; but as a practical matter, very few people are ever going to be able to do this. Why? There is only so much time for K-12 education, and the list of things worth covering in history seems endless. Having faced the crunch of trying to cover everything that should be covered in a school year, I can say with confidence that I’d be stunned if as many as 1% of American educators responsible for covering WW2 in high school curricula put into their lesson plans a single sentence distinguishing between the SS on the front lines and the SS as murderous card-carrying Nazis. Should they? Possibly. Will they? I’d put more money on getting the wealthiest Americans to sign off on a truly universal draft (which would include their own children).

Given that the average American will never be able to distinguish between the fighting men and murderers, does it make more sense for an organization like the USMC to rail at an ignorant public or squash open displays of Nazi symbols that call into question the values of the Corps?




edit kato13. I am locking this thread. This issue has been covered thoroughly and no need for it to be drug up later by a new user.