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Was the President wrong for declaring the Holocaust "senseless"?

See thread title.

  • Yes

    Votes: 2 20.0%

  • No

    Votes: 8 80.0%
  • Total voters
    10
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Elitist as Hell.
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"Those who perished as a result of Nazi terror, millions of individual men and women and children whose lives were taken so senselessly, must never be forgotten."
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- President Ronald Reagan

The National Review seems to think so.

Nazism may have been an ideology to which the United States was — and to which the president is — implacably opposed, but it is hardly “senseless.” By the early 1930s, the Nazi party had hundreds of thousands of devoted members and repeatedly attracted a third of the votes in German elections; its political leaders campaigned on a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points, including the “unification of all Germans,” a demand for “land and territory for the sustenance of our people,” and an assertion that “no Jew can be a member of the race.” Suffice it to say, many sensible Germans were persuaded.
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I think you may be viewing the term senseless differently than I do.

Look how poorly that worked out for Mr. Hitler and his Merry Men. So, indeed, senseless.
 
specklebang said:
I think you may be viewing the term senseless differently than I do.

Look how poorly that worked out for Mr. Hitler and his Merry Men. So, indeed, senseless.
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Oh, I don't think the President - either one of them - was wrong.

But what's sauce for goose is sauce for gander, no?
 
Nope, the article was written in a pitiful attempt to politicize a day set aside for memorial and respect by delving into semantics.
 
Ah! We have our first yes.

Care to tell us why you disagree with Saint Ronnie of Raygun?
 
It was a poor choice of words, because it seemed to minimize and overlook the complex factors that went into creating the Holocaust, rendering a lot of historical, cultural and social issues that existed in Germany during the rise of Nazism into a sound-bite phrase that does not fit the event.

Calling the extremism of the Nazi's "senseless" fails to take into account HOW Nazism took over Germany, lead the German people into an extreme situation using propaganda and desperation brought on by economic disaster, political corruption and a societal resentment of the harsh terms imposed at the end of WW1. By sweeping it under such a simplistic sound bite term it fails to address the reality, that dangerous extremism can rise ANYWHERE under the right set of circumstances, and brushes it away with the comforting thought of "the Germans were senseless in the Nazi era" with a smug feeling of cultural superiority... while probably failing to remember the Japanese internment camps of the same era in our own country (which while not as bad still represented an extremism that now embarasses us).

But, hey... a politician went for a sound-bite phrase instead of grappling with the complexities of the real world, what a shock huh...
 
Goshin said:
Calling the extremism of the Nazi's "senseless" fails to take into account HOW Nazism took over Germany, lead the German people into an extreme situation using propaganda and desperation brought on by economic disaster, political corruption and a societal resentment of the harsh terms imposed at the end of WW1.
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No, it doesn't. Calling it "senseless" simply delegitimizes the Nazi phenomenon; it says, "Nazism was not a viable solution to the social problems of Weimar Germany; it was sense less; it had no intellectual power, and was not based on a reasoned approach to the political issues facing the nation".

Ronald Reagan understood this. Why not the readers of the National Review?
 
Goshin said:
It was a poor choice of words, because it seemed to minimize and overlook the complex factors that went into creating the Holocaust, rendering a lot of historical, cultural and social issues that existed in Germany during the rise of Nazism into a sound-bite phrase that does not fit the event.

Calling the extremism of the Nazi's "senseless" fails to take into account HOW Nazism took over Germany, lead the German people into an extreme situation using propaganda and desperation brought on by economic disaster, political corruption and a societal resentment of the harsh terms imposed at the end of WW1. By sweeping it under such a simplistic sound bite term it fails to address the reality, that dangerous extremism can rise ANYWHERE under the right set of circumstances, and brushes it away with the comforting thought of "the Germans were senseless in the Nazi era" with a smug feeling of cultural superiority... while probably failing to remember the Japanese internment camps of the same era in our own country (which while not as bad still represented an extremism that now embarasses us).

But, hey... a politician went for a sound-bite phrase instead of grappling with the complexities of the real world, what a shock huh...
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This was hardly a historical lecture, it's a day set aside for the sole purpose of honoring the victims of said events, not for the purpose of examining the social, economic and cultural determining factors behind the event itself. Leave that to the historians and academia. Given the setting his remarks were entirely appropriate and hardly shameless populism. (Just how much in the way of variety could one expect given the subject matter?)
 
Can this damned nation leave the politics out for once? The Holocaust should never be forgotten. It was beyond senseless. No one benefitted from the Holocaust. Many either forget or do not realize that while millions of Jews were slaughtered they were joined by Catholics, Poles, people with disabilities and others.

Many Germans were not Nazis and many disagreed with the persecution of the Jews and the death camps. They were powerless. Just as Americans of all political persuasions have been powerless for many years in stopping rendition, torture, secret prisons and Guantanamo.

People seem to think that somehow their administration, their political party, would be different. We know for a fact that that isn't true. It may be that Americans can't accept the truth. The People do not control Washington any more than the German People controlled Nazi Germany. For Obama to say the Holocaust was senseless is really meaningless. It would be no different if George W. Bush had said it.
 
Yes, it was senseless. Millions of people were murdered for absolutely no good reason. Yes, Nazis thought they were doing the right thing. That didn't make the event any more sensible or less tragic and worthy of remembrance.
 
Goshin said:
It was a poor choice of words, because it seemed to minimize and overlook the complex factors that went into creating the Holocaust, rendering a lot of historical, cultural and social issues that existed in Germany during the rise of Nazism into a sound-bite phrase that does not fit the event.

Calling the extremism of the Nazi's "senseless" fails to take into account HOW Nazism took over Germany, lead the German people into an extreme situation using propaganda and desperation brought on by economic disaster, political corruption and a societal resentment of the harsh terms imposed at the end of WW1. By sweeping it under such a simplistic sound bite term it fails to address the reality, that dangerous extremism can rise ANYWHERE under the right set of circumstances, and brushes it away with the comforting thought of "the Germans were senseless in the Nazi era" with a smug feeling of cultural superiority... while probably failing to remember the Japanese internment camps of the same era in our own country (which while not as bad still represented an extremism that now embarasses us).

But, hey... a politician went for a sound-bite phrase instead of grappling with the complexities of the real world, what a shock huh...
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That's quite a reach but it still comes up short, because at the end of the day we are arguing technicalities of the meaning of a word and in that argument no one wins.
 
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