Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry
If you think Germany was "tame" pre war, I suggest you read the fantastic book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
There were organized pogroms, synagogue burning, rape of jews in the street, public execution, jack booted thugs patrolling the street etc. Not a nice place to live, esp if you weren't German
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I have read that book, cover to cover. I had to in college. I know all about Kristallnacht etc. I have seem more documentaries on Nazi Germany than I care to count.
I said it was tame RELATIVE to those other regimes I mentioned.
In Pol Pot's Cambodia, EVERYONE was subjected to his wrath. Pol Pot had this "fantastic" idea that the best cities are the ones with no people. His military forced everyone in the entire city out of their homes and forced them to walk out into the countryside, where they were killed in killing fields. Prior to that radical move, people wearing glasses were killed because they looked "intellectual" and PP despised intellectuals.
In modern North Korea, there actually is a tightly underground culture of smuggled VHS tapes of soap operas from South Korea, watched by North Koreans hungry to know what the outside world is like. I read in a similar book on NK that what the authorities do is this: they shut down the power in an entire neighborhood. This means that if you are "guilty" of watching one of these videos at the time, you can not eject it from the VCR without power. Then, the authorities go house to house and make sure the people aren't watching something "subversive." If they are caught, they are sent to a labor camp with zero hope of getting out and subject to constant beatings and torture.
Oh by the way, the book Rise and Fall of the Third Reich propagates the claim, now acknowledged to be false according to mainstream holocaust scholars, that the Germans made soap and lampshades out of Jews.