|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: joanna bujes
||
||
|| At 09:52 PM 01/23/2002 -0500, you wrote:
|| >Agreed, but was it not the case that 'success' in getting away with
|| >attcking Jews was precisely what
|| >glavanized the enlargement of 'targets' for the Nazis
|| bureaucratization of
|| >hate?
|| >
|| >Ian
||
|| So far as I know, they went after the political opposition
|| first, and it
|| was this population that went to the camps first.
||
|| Joanna
||
True but a lot of them came back in one piece as opposed to the "inferior races" which were either massacred (Slavs) or treated like cattle (Jews, Gypsies). I've heard Berlin stories of commies coming back home from the camps and having to coexist with the neighbors who'd denounced them. Fascism in the 30's, 40's, and 50's was politically primarily anticommunist but frequently exhibited a greater sadistic cruelty towards ethnical or racial scapegoats (Jews in Europe and blacks in the US) than towards its political opponents (Italy and Spain were somewhat exceptional). Neofascism today still has this character trait. In Western Europe, neofascists will beat up their political opponents, but they'll burn Turks alive. In the Balkans, fascist Serbs will shoot their opponents, but they'll torture Moslems. In Turkey, fascists will go berserk against Alewites and Kurds. I vaguely remember that Russian fascists behave similarly with communists as opposed to ethnical hate-groups.
Hakki