Memes

I won’t get into an Israel discussion now, not enough time. I’ll just say both sides

There it is! The legendary both sides!

the IDF declared their goal as wiping out the Hamas

We can see by their conduct in the war that that is not the, uh, limit of their aspirations with regard to killing.

the Hamas declared their goal as wiping out all Jews on earth

Flagrant lie. They certainly want to destroy the state of Israel to re-establish Palestine on land that was stolen from it, but they don't want to kill all the Jews in Israel, let alone the world. But pretending this is true lets you say:

By no longer supporting Israel they’d basically be saying “sure, go ahead, wipe out the Jews”

Which is just lunacy. "We need to support this genocidal settler colony because otherwise we'd be tacitly supporting wiping out all the Jews on Earth". So you're using a fake threat of genocide to justify a real, ongoing genocide. Germany does the same, which is vitally important in my bringing up Israel as unambiguous evidence that Germany only engages with the superficial details of its Nazi past. The closest analogue to Nazis today is Israel, but they support Israel under the false cover of fighting bigotry and ethnic persecution.

Congrats, you did a full hasbara! I wonder if you're going to do exactly what I made fun of with the Wehrmacht too . . .

There were enough people who didn’t want to fight but knew they’d be shot if they refused. Who tried to stay ethical, to avoid civilians etc.

And there it is! It doesn't. fucking. matter. if the Wehrmacht soldiers "tried to avoid civilians," they were creating the material conditions for the Holocaust and all the other genocide by "merely" restricting themselves to killing the soldier of the countries they invaded (which should also be regarded as murder because they had no business invading). It's not a more moral position, it is a way of avoiding confronting the immorality of your position. It doesn't matter if they pulled the trigger on the trainloads of slaughtered civilians, it was because of their violent destruction of the various states that they (the SS, etc.) were able to carry out the slaughter in the first place!

So forgive me if I'm not moved by "they could be shot" when they'd merely be reducing themselves to a position that is still probably more favorable than the position a Jew was in. There has long been a history of means to escape the draft depending on your level of desperation, from escaping the country (surely with a bit less difficulty, I might add) through the various means Jews used to escape, to getting into an "accident" that broke a leg or caused some other injury that left them unfit for the military. Moreover, there is the arguably much more viable alternative of defecting after you are drafted and reach the front, because you have people happy to receive you and protect you with arms right over there. Some Wehrmacht did, in fact, defect, and deserve credit if they did so expediently on not merely when they understood the Nazi war machine was dying, but most did not defect at all.

There also were enough people who were so radicalised that they really thought killing civilians in foreign countries was fine.

Ah, so fascists

And yet many people joined [the SS] voluntarily because they somehow believed it was the right thing to do.

Ah, so more fascists

Hitler didn't cast a magic spell on the German people, contrary to the liberal portrayal of him (on the one hand to cover for fascism growing out of capitalism, on the other to cover for the inadequate (or sometimes just absent) denazification of the West), brainwashing does not exist, as our friends in the CIA proved extensively with the failures of MKULTRA. People are responsible for their own actions, and we can talk about mitigating or aggravating factors, but mitigation does not actually overturn a charge.

Now of course when you go to Germany many people’s grandfather or grandgrandfather will have fought in the second world war. The ones who knew or at least assume that theirs was in the group I mentioned first (forcefully drafted, choosing between fighting and dying) are vocal about it when this matter is being discussed

So literally what my initial jab was talking about.

That’s how the clean Wehrmacht myth appeared

No it isn't. The myth was not created by the bizarrely sentimental descendants of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, it was created by Nazis and Nazi collaborators (and Americans, it turns out). You'll get a better summary than I can provide here.

(but you will find people who - rightfully - say that not everyone in it was a war criminal and Nazi).

If it's a criminal war, helping to execute it makes you an accomplice. During the Vietnam War, if you didn't get out of the draft and were brought to the front, if you were just a smol bean who focused on killing Viet Cong and left the slaughter and rape of the villagers in the village you just rendered defenseless to the other soldiers, you're a criminal and should be regarded as such. There was no shortage of soldiers doing the right thing (not always for the right reason, but who cares?) of fragging their officers, and others taking other sabotage actions. All soldiers at the fronts of criminal wars should be held to the same standard because it's the only one that makes sense.