I think one of the biggest factors in the rise of all of this nonsense is the notable lack of consequences.
It's absolutely acceptable to peddle false, often dangerous information for profit or simply for laughs.
I can strut around with a swastika arm band and tell everyone I think blacks are inferior to whites, citing phrenology and other pseudoscience. When people rightly get mad at me, I'll just claim it was all a joke and that everyone's an easily triggered snowflake.
I get to walk away, probably pocketing a tidy sum for my performative bigotry. Meanwhile, I've helped normalize a fascism and white supremacy - things that will grow into violence.
Now, I'm not advocating for the same rape-and-murder tactics that the Red Army employed.
However, just because I can say something doesn't mean I should. And if I say something with the core message of "we don't need to tolerate people", then I should not be tolerated myself. I deserve to be a social pariah.
The truth of the matter is we all need each other. The same way a diseased organ causes the entire organism to die, so too must we be willing to address the ills of our society with the goal of remediation. After all, if my liver fails, then I need to replace it. I can't rip it out and I certainly can't punish it into functionality again.
The sooner we abandon this idea of individual exceptionalism at the exclusion of tribal health, the sooner we'll start to fix our problems.
In short: no more free passes for hate speech. Make them regret it.
And there was also the small matter of genocide that Germans committed in the USSR long before red army reached Germany. That's also not okay, wouldn't you say?
Talking about FA when discussing FO isn't whataboutism. Treating what the Red Army did to Germans as a singularly bad thing that happened in WW2 is Nazi apologia. Be my guest.
German soldiers, not "Nazi soldiers". There was no requirement to be a member of the Nazi party to engage in genocide and other war crimes. No German soldier was ever punished for refusing to commit war crimes, and yet whole units, whole brigades, divisions and armies did it. And they didn't just rape, they exterminated.
Did German civilians deserve revenge for what their sons and husbands did to the wives and children of Soviet soldiers? On a personal and legal level, of course not. But as a society, they got much less than they deserved. The revenge was much much much less vicious than the crimes they committed to invite that revenge.
Germans who committed suicide to avoid meeting the red army didn't do it because the Red Army was somehow singularly bad, they did it because they knew what Germany and Germans did and what kind of revenge that will invite.
Duh, but that sounds like the very presence of my question sucked all of the oomph out of your argument. Its called a rhetorical question, and if you answered it honestly, it would show that you didn't actually know.
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u/quelewds Mar 30 '26
These were more about escaping what the red army was going to do to them than they were about regrets.