Conservative Derangement Syndrome: The Greatest Generation Ain’t So Great

1:32 pm EST October 6th, 2007 | News | 9 Comments

The one unifying aspect of the right is that it must do whatever is necessary to defend the perverted beliefs of its leaders, especially in regard to the Republican failure to fight terror and provide a good strategy for Iraq.

Today’s example is a Washington Post article about a secret interrogation unit during WWII.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration’s methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army’s Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

These guys, of course, are being attacked as pansies by blogs like Captain’s Quarters:

It must be said, however, that they faced a different enemy in a different war. The Germans fought to expand territory through traditional warfare, at least as arrayed against the US and the West. While they conducted sabotage missions in the US through espionage, they did not use terrorist infiltrators to attempt to kill thousands of American civilians. They also did not face religious extremists who believed that death brought them to Allah and 72 waiting virgins for taking out women and children. One can make a case that the civilized techniques of PO Box 1142 worked because their detainees also believed themselves civilized and members of the Western culture.

You get that, kids? It’s okay to torture people willy nilly (or in the case of the Bush administration, redefine what’s torture and say you don’t torture) because the Nazi threat was nothing compared to the jihadist threat. Yes, folks, the attempted empire that took over much of Europe, caused a global war and killed millions is nothing compared to some guys in a cave who make Republicans wet their beds every time they release a video. So we should be able to torture people now, no matter what guys who faced down Nazis with interrogation happen to say about how fruitless it is.

This continues to explain the "phony soldiers" smear the right is now so invested in.

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9 Responses to “Conservative Derangement Syndrome: The Greatest Generation Ain’t So Great”

  1. El Cid says:
    October 6, 2007 at 1:53 pm

    Well, also, the Nazis were white and from a Judeo-Christian background, and had cool machines and interesting suits and medals and stuff right wingers can collect.

    Muslims are presumably dark and swarthy people from a non Judeo-Christian background, and they use primitive armaments in terrorism with no interesting collectibles (of the late 20th / 21st century variety, we’re not talking classic daggers or whatnot).

    Plus the Republicans liked the fascists early on until it was wartime. That’s how we know they’re not serious when they call Al Qa’ida gangsters “Islamo-fascists”, because if they really were “fascist” Republicans would be finding all sorts of things to like about them.

  2. me2i81 says:
    October 6, 2007 at 2:07 pm

    I see, “civilized” means “white” for these guys. Not that they wouldn’t get their butts kicked in a game of chess with a typical middle-class Iraqi teenager…

  3. pawtrax says:
    October 6, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    I have yet to hear one of these idiots ever present a believable scenario in which Bin Laden and al-Qaeda force American to its knees and join some Islamic empire or something. But this is the ultimate scenario that all these morons keep pushing as the motivating factor in their war mongering: If it weren’t for George Bush and the war in Iraq we’d all be forced to pray to Mecca.

    How in the hell could that ever happen? They pump up the terrorist threat as if it was the greatest threat America has ever faced, but these terrorists have absolutely no conceivable way of ever achieving any of their goals of world domination. It doesn’t matter if they’re willing to die for their cause or whatever, it ain’t ever going to happen.

  4. Diamond LeGrande says:
    October 6, 2007 at 3:57 pm

    You see, these guys are even more vile than Nazis. Bin Laden? Worse than Hitler. Oh, wait, forget about him. I meant Ahmadinejad, or whatever his name is.

    More seriously, this stuff isn’t new. In WWI, a civilized nation became Jerry, the Prussian Hun, reveling in savagery. Two decades later, we had the Slant-Eyed Japs, who were shifty and double-crossing and horrendously brutal. Before actually seeing the inside of the Navy, my brother was often quoting from a book that explained that the Vietnamese were especially brutal because they did not use the Western way of war.

    Hmmm … invade a nation, and complain when the natives don’t fight back according to your standards. Vietnam would be the last time that happened, right?

  5. Enlightened Liberal says:
    October 6, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Funny that people like Cap’N crunch can make the claims above about the threat we face and still refuse to sign up to fight. Maybe he should ask those WWII generation fighters what they called someone like that.

  6. megamoze says:
    October 6, 2007 at 5:51 pm

    There is no logic here or any semblance of a rational argument. The enemy today are savages and so torture is more effective?

    Hmm, if only there were some way to test this hypothesis, to see if torture is any more effective on Muslim detainees. Why, I do believe that we HAVE tortured them and discovered that torture DOESN’T WORK.

    And even if it were, it still wouldn’t justify a vile, despicable practice that we, as civilized people, were supposed to have abandoned at the founding of our nation.

    The purpose of torture is always torture.

  7. OxyCon says:
    October 6, 2007 at 7:05 pm

    Hey kids! Since we’re talking about Nazis, who do these guys remind you of?
    —

    CNN: Neo-Nazi attacks on the rise in former East Germany
    10/05/2007 @ 11:28 am
    Filed by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

    There has been an upsurge in attacks on foreigners this year by skinheads and neo-Nazis in what was formerly East Germany. Although the chief targets are Africans and Indians, even visitors from other European nations are at risk.

    According to the Israeli paper Haaretz, “Some 500 racist attacks were registered in Germany over the past year, a 33 percent increase from the previous year. … At the same time, radical right-wing and neo-Nazi parties in east Germany have increased their power and entered local parliaments, while opinion polls are reflecting growing xenophobia.”

    CNN spoke to a student from Cameroon who said he hears racial slurs every day. In May, he was beaten by a group of several men, led, he says, by an off-duty police officer. CNN also showed a cellphone video from this August of fifty East Germans chasing and beating eight Indians.

    A Jewish group has warned that certain parts of East Germany are so bad they may have to be declared “no-go” areas for Jews and foreigners. Political scientist Hajo Funke agreed, telling CNN, “People of different skin are in danger to go to special festivals in small towns or to special pubs in special hours in evening and night. It’s deadly dangerous to go there, and they shouldn’t.”

    CNN noted that “some political scientists speak of a mainstreaming of radical right-wing culture, fueled by hatred of foreigners,” which the German government has blamed on high unemployment in former East Germany.

    http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=7759

  8. Church Secretary says:
    October 6, 2007 at 8:07 pm

    This is just another example of some of the cowardly scum who are calling themselves ‘conservative’ these days. I don’t go in for that “greatest generation” crap (if they were really great, they’d have been smart enough to stop their wealthy fellow citizens and corporations from bankrolling the Nazis and the German war machine, but I digress). However, it can safely be said that conservatives and liberals alike generally did what needed to be done in WWII when they finally paid attention.

    The best these pissant, wingnut bed-wetters can do is make lame excuses and rationalizations. They’re getting so ludicrous that even the usual wingnuts here at OW’s place are strangely quiet.

  9. hf says:
    October 6, 2007 at 11:18 pm

    The Nazis did of course attack civilians. I don’t know that Hiroshima counted as a military target, if it comes to that. Their faith in “civilization” seems touching but sadly misplaced.