site banner
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

That was fun, and didn't go in the direction I was expecting. The real friends were the textiles we made along the way.

I do have to object to a certain WWI metaphor. For all the horror of trench warfare, it lacked various essential qualities of the Holocaust, such as capability to shoot back.

Other than that, the Western Front point was well-made. Netflix's sequence is a perverse counterpart of the famous bullet opening from Lord of War. Rather than the life story of a disposable bullet, it is the durable jacket which witnesses disposable humans.

They couldn't shoot back at the commanding officers and military police forcing them to the front.

Indeed All's Quiet on the Western Front depicts what happened to soldiers who refused to go into battle on nov 11th after the armistice had been signed but before 11am when it went into effect.

The filmmakers make a very dramatic case...

I’m sure they do.

How many of the Germans would you say were there involuntarily? Hitler, at least, was quite enthusiastic in his enlistment.

Its not Germans, its all conscripts across all nations.

Their were mutinies in the French, British, and German armies including the german navy... I think that's a pretty dramatic statement that they didn't want to be there

In addition to the fact the conscription was neccessary to begin with. There wasn't an all volunteer army on any side of WW1

Then the goalposts are receding faster than the Maginot line twenty years later.

I think claiming German suffering in WWI was a Holocaust 1.0 is in poor taste. Going further to suggest

“Was Hitler’s crime simply doing what the civilized nations of the world… the French Republic, the British Empire, the German Nation… had done to him when he was young?”

That’s rather bold apologetics, and it’s also laughably inaccurate. Hitler, at least, was a red-blooded volunteer, and conflating him with downtrodden conscripts is buying into the laziest of Weimar-era Nazi propaganda.

I never claimed Germany suffered a holocaust.

Boys suffered a holocaust.

Boys 14-25 are the most discriminated against group in human history. Full stop.

No group has suffered such violence so Deeply in the moment, vastly across nations, and consistently across time.

The bloodiest day of the holocaust it was calculated 15,000 people were killed.

Bloodiest day of WW1 20,000 British! boys were killed (not counting all the other powers)

.

And notably this is a holocaust that never ended

The world screamed never again after the holocaust... but even our "humane" "modern" "progressive" welfare states reserve the right to drag teenagers from their home and massacre them by the million.

Indeed both Ukraine and Russia are doing this now without a fucking mummer of protest