There is no comparison between the bombing of cities, and Hitler's genocide.

"The defeats of 1944 had cost the Germans 1.8 million men killed. In the first five months of 1945, whilst Speer was encouraging his Fuehrer to one last show of resistance, 1.4 million German soldiers met their deaths, 450,000 in January alone. Nor does this include the tens of thousands of civilians who fell victim to Allied bombing. To describe the destruction of Germany in 1945 in the language of the Holocaust is both obscene and inaccurate. This was a war, not a massacre of the innocents. It may have felt like a slaughter to those on the receiving end, but this was an effect of the means used, not the ends intended. The Western Allies broke no law of war that had not been breached by the Wehrmacht a hundred times over. The Red Army behaved barbarically in the territories it occupied, but the Soviets did not perpetrate a genocide. Nazi Germany had challenged three of the greatest industrial powers on earth. It had taken them five long years to bring their industrial might fully to bear. But now their war machines were fully assembled and in the first five months of 1945 they cut their way into the territory of Germany with truly horrendous effects. The Allies waged war with a volume of firepower unlike that ever used in any previous conflict. The results were nightmarish and would have been even worse but for the fact that the policy of 'Germany first' meant that the Nazi regime was destroyed before the atomic bomb was ready for use."

That is an extract from "The Wages of Destruction - the Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze, who's an economic history lecturer at Cambridge (, England). The comments I made in my last post, about Hitler's motives, are also based on this book.

The late-war destruction of their cities came because the German government wouldn't surrender when it was hopeless, preferring to keep fighting almost to the last man, putting as high a human cost on the nations they'd attacked as possible in the hope of getting a better position at the negotiating table. The Allies needed to get Germany to surrender as soon as possible, because every day of war had a huge cost in Allied lives, and bombing the cities was a legitimate if tragic way to try to force a surrender. (This is true of Germany; I don't know about Japan, or their negotiations with the USSR.) There is no comparison with the German policy of enslaving the populations of the territories they conquered and then working and starving them to death or gassing them in concentration camps.

Sorry, I forgot the page number. Yes I do/Yes it does


P. 532:
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV-TR.
By American Psychiatric Association, American Psychiatric Association

Probably because the only known treatment is the barrel of a gun. Its the perfect way to describe the Japanese population in the latter stages of WW2

Or to put it another way,

You have no clue what you're talking/spewing/ranting about....at all. You're literally just making random stuff up.

I can't access DSM-IV-TR without a journal subscription, apparently. If the term is in use in clinical diagnosis, it doesn't show up very quickly in a Google search. In looking, I did come across this:
http://i958.photobucket.com/albums/a.../Brainwash.jpg
From Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Turner. Oxford Universiy Press, 2004 (p.6).
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=H...washing&f=true

Hardly a clinical term in this context...

Did you seriously just quote Wikipedia to try and prove your point? Seriously, Wikipedia????

Do you hold any qualifications which enable you to make diagnoses of medical conditions?

As for who is 'spewing/ranting', I'd suggest that is a matter of opinion. And what exactly have I 'made up'? Can you provide any evidence of this, or is this you ranting?

By and large, this discussion has been conducted in civil terms, if not always with entirely cordial intent. Katdogfizzow's last comment seems well beyond this.

What I meant was that they are being abandoned to enemies that wish to eradicate them, which is exactly what is happening. Again.

Of course, I think most Israelis would liken a mushroom cloud over Tel-Aviv as an attempt at genocide so your analogy holds true too.

Unless of course there really is no threat to Israel and this is all just US propaganda.....

Splitter

As I've pointed out, I don't have access to the original document. Wikipedia purports to be paraphrasing the document. Obviously Wikipedia needs to be used with caution, but given the quality of the article, it seems better than nothing. I'm fairly sure the American Psychiatric Association doesn't approve of the use of diagnostic terms in the context of a historical debate about the mental state of an entire population.

If anyone does have access to DSM-IV-TR, can they provide the context in which the term 'brainwashing' is used - a page number tells us nothing.

Splitter, your last post makes no sense. I made no analogy. You did.

BTW, Would Iranians consider a mushroom cloud over Tehran 'an attempt at genocide'? By your logic, it would seem that nuclear weapons are weapons of genocidal intent by definition. In which case, I'd have to ask why the Israelis introduced them into the middle east.

My google-fu is strong today lol. Just to clear it up:

"Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified*
...
3. States of dissociation that occur in individuals who have been subjected to periods of prolonged and intense coercive persuasion (e.g., brainwashing, thought reform, or indoctrination while captive)."

Quick note: A certain religion apparently argued to have the term "brainwashing" removed from the DSM IV because it was associated with the word "cult". That implies it had it's own category in the DSM III. Now it is referred to, but not mentioned specifically (which makes no sense).

Splitter