Re: Freedom of Speech : Tue May 01, 2012 9:30 pm  

sally cinnamon wrote:

It's just the same mentality as a terrorist.

People over here condemn the Taleban and terrorists etc but if one of your family was killed as 'collateral damage' from an RAF or American bombing raid then wouldn't you be justified getting some retaliation on Western civilians or at the very least taking down some squaddies with an IED?

Acoording to Moore's (lack of) logic, certainly.

Re: Freedom of Speech : Wed May 02, 2012 12:06 am  

cod'ead wrote:

His fiancee died in 1943, I wonder how many German civilians his bombs killed prior to that?

As in any conflict, a devastating personal loss will impact far, far more than anything else.

I know many thousands have died in Afghanistan, but all the empathy and understanding in the world means nothing to me compared to the death of a family member or loved one.

Re: Freedom of Speech : Wed May 02, 2012 12:52 am  

Chief Stinkwort wrote:

:CLAP:

Spot on.
Britain could have bombed the railway lines that led to the Nazi death camps and saved millions of lives.
It chose to unleash a wave of bombing terror on civilians instead.

I can understand Moore's bitterness, but this is not an excuse for his Little England bigotry, which ATEOTD is merely a mirror image of some of the worst nationalistic ravings of the Nazis themselves. Moore's comments are also an insult to hundreds of thousands of Germans who opposed Hitler and paid for that with their lives.

If his fiancee had been killed by a greengrocer in 1940 would he now be waging war on employees of Tesco and Asda?

Britain could not have 'bombed the railway lines'. Accurate bombing was all but impossible, hence the use of huge scale carpet bombing. Even with a direct hit the largest bomb would only remove a few metres of a section of track and an amount of soil. That could be replaced and fixed in a day. Bombing the railway infrastructure as part of a wider campaign was effective, but as a standalone tactic? Pointless.

Britain only chose to attack Germany cities as a retaliatory tactic following the (accidental) bombing of London in 1940. However, things soon deteriorated into a tit-for-tat campaign and cities became fair game, even though figures in both governments questioned the tactic throughout. In the wider scale of things, you cannot ignore the fact Germany was inflicting massive death and suffering in Europe and threatened the same of Britain. Britain was compelled to go on the offensive and show aggression in the name of destroying Germany, and if that meant playing dirty then so be it.

21st Century sensitivities have no real place in judging WW2 issues of morality.

billypop wrote:

Just to be pedantic, I am sure that Germany didn't declare war on the British Empire. I am pretty sure we claimed we declared war on Germany to pprotect the independence of Poland.

Didn't achieve that, did we?

Major fail.

A completely moot point. Poland was nothing more than the centre of an attempt to get tough with Hitler, who admired and even feared the British, envied the British Empire and knew they would be a formidable enemy. Even Chamberlain knew Hitler wouldn't stop unless opposed. Given the events on the continent, war was inevitable.

Seriously, was there any other option?

As for Patrick Moore, if someone can't understand why the death of his clearly much-loved fiancee at the hands of an unwanted enemy he was already fighting and losing friends to, they're an idiot. I knew old fellas who despised Germans and Japanese for the same reasons MF gave. Many of the older generations felt this way, and quite understandably.
Allow him his views. While they have little place in today's society, they are entirely relevant to his personal experiences.

Re: Freedom of Speech : Wed May 02, 2012 1:39 am  

Agree with most of what Cronus said - including debunking the myth that the Allies could somehow have stopped the mass murders in the concentration camps by bombing the railways. I suspect the Allies wished they had tried to do far more once the true horror of the camps was revealed, but the technology available in WW2 really wasn't capable of stopping it from afar.

As for Moore, why is it at all shocking that he should carry an intense dislike based on losing someone he loved to a violent death? I'm sure there are many Germans who have similar feelings. Some people stop feeling hatred, others never get over those sort of events. Unless you have personal experience I suspect its very difficult for anyone to predict how they'd react.

Re: Freedom of Speech : Wed May 02, 2012 8:37 am  

BrisbaneRhino wrote:

As for Moore, why is it at all shocking that he should carry an intense dislike based on losing someone he loved to a violent death? I'm sure there are many Germans who have similar feelings. Some people stop feeling hatred, others never get over those sort of events. Unless you have personal experience I suspect its very difficult for anyone to predict how they'd react.

It's not shocking, it's fooking irrelevant but typical of the Wail to pick up on it and make a story from it. Would they make great mention of Simon Wiesenthal's love of astronomy, in a piece about his life's work?

Re: Freedom of Speech : Wed May 02, 2012 8:55 am  

cod'ead wrote:

But once he'd done it, he's hardly in a position to moan about it happening in return

"Position"? What you on about? He is in exactly the position the article says he is, namely that his whole life was blighted by the killing of his fiancee. Clearly he was so traumatised by it that he has never been able to move on from the hate he must have felt when it happened, and hasn't been able to rationalise and process it like most. Before you patronisingly judge him for his irrational mindset, let's have someone do it to you and see whether your mental processes cope better.

It's a shame he has never moved on from that, but he obviously has long standing mental issues caused by the trauma, and frankly referring to the poor old man's plight as "moaning" or referring to his "position" is as crass as it is irrelevant.

Also I doubt very much he'd be surprised if survivors of his raids felt just the same about the Allies, the fact that seemingly most have found ways to move on and put it in the past doesn't alter that. Personally I find it a shame that, at his age, the press should publish this stuff, even if he wanted it widely known. They should have left an old man with his private grief and irreconcilable bitterness.

Re: Freedom of Speech : Wed May 02, 2012 12:07 pm  

Could Patrick Moore face trial like the student did for writing "all soldiers should die and go to hell"? http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... k-comments The police said it was a "racially aggravated public order offence". Does "the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut" pass under this? What about if a celebrity was rambling "the only good Jew is a dead Jew"...?

Could Patrick Moore face trial like the student did for writing "all soldiers should die and go to hell"? http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... k-comments The police said it was a "racially aggravated public order offence". Does "the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut" pass under this? What about if a celebrity was rambling "the only good Jew is a dead Jew"...?

Re: Freedom of Speech : Wed May 02, 2012 11:22 pm  

People of that generation, who were directly affected by the events of the war will have a different opinion to us who were born long after it. We didn't experience it, we don't know what it was like. We don't live in the East End of London and other places hearing a V1's engine noise stop and hope it isn't going to land on or near us. We don't live in the massive continuing levels of stress and anxiety that brings. Nor how it affected people mentally.

If he hates krauts, then fine. He has a personal reason to. People don't have to like something to at least understand it.

Out there are Jewish people who hate Germans, Armenians and Greeks who hate Turks. French who hate Germans etc. etc. The list is endless. People being at the receiving end of inhumane acts and trauma will often be affected and opinons formed.

Being in Singapore in the 80s, I still saw a massive hatred of all things Japanese. Are the older SIngaporeans bigoted båstards? Hateful, racist scum? And then is that just the Chinese ones, The Malay ones or the Indian ones? Or just the colonial white ones? Or hadn't they all forgotten what they personally experienced at the hands of the Japanese forces.

Accept that some people are more forgiving than others. And accept that some people's trauma had a strong effect on them.

[DaveO]

Re: Freedom of Speech : Wed May 02, 2012 11:57 pm  

cod'ead wrote:

But once he'd done it, he's hardly in a position to moan about it happening in return

I thought he was supposed to have been an Intelligence Officer in the RAF not aircrew.

He probably feels justified in his seemingly hypocritical stance because Germany under Hitler were the aggressors. Had we started the war he couldn't very well blame the Germans for retaliating but we didn't and so I am sure he sees our bombing of Germany as the inevitable consequence of German aggression and bombing of the UK. In other words it was the German's fault his fiancé got killed and it was the Germans fault they got the crap bombed out of them.

[Kosh]

Re: Freedom of Speech : Thu May 03, 2012 7:32 am  

Cronus wrote:

As for Patrick Moore, if someone can't understand why the death of his clearly much-loved fiancee at the hands of an unwanted enemy he was already fighting and losing friends to, they're an idiot.

Oh I understand it. I just find it pathetic. As someone else pointed out, it's the exact same mentality that fuels terrorism. Oddly there's less sympathy around for terrorists and their sympathisers.