Motivational Poster Thread (warning content)

Two boys...different upbringing.....

OOPS...


Because Conservative Christians make the best cowboys.

Yep, another cowboy raised by Christian conservatives....

 

These days I call it intermittent fasting

 

The fourth child got up in front of his class and said,
"Muh name's Jethro an' I'm a member of the Church
of Lord Jesus with Signs Following,
an' these are Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes":

It was the shortest 'show and tell' presentation at that school ever!

 

Hey Chelly.
Maybe post some real pics of your life.

 

"...Please. Stop.
There were 200,000 Jews in Germany. They were of all ages, and from all walks of life. But, there is one thing that they — and every other Jew of Europe lacked — and that was a military tradition #.

Does anyone really think that they would have been able to stand up against an army that would decimate the armies of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Austria, Greece — that would invade the Soviet Union?

Yes, there were Jews who rose up in armed resistance against the Nazis.

Those stories are legendary — the Warsaw ghetto uprising; the Vilna ghetto uprising; the Bialystok ghetto; Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau, among others. Jewish partisans fought in the forests. The Jewish authorities in Palestine sent armed Jews into Hungary and Slovakia to try to save Jews; the most famous of them was the heroine-poet Hannah Senesh.

All of these actions were heroic. The Warsaw ghetto held out against the Germans longer than France did!

They were also, alas, failures.

For it was not just the Nazi armies that were arrayed against the Jews. It was the entirety of German society — its universities, its medical profession, its industrialists, its scientists. The Nazis had willing, eager and enthusiastic helpers in central and eastern Europe.

The idea that Jews with guns could have made any meaningful resistance is the cruelest, most cynical, most ignorant alternative fact there is. It is an insult to the memory of the 6 million.

I can understand why gun fanatics utilize these arguments. They are eager to use any argument, no matter how fallacious, that will suit their political purposes. But, why is this idea so attractive to some Jews? Why is it that I keep on encountering this myth on Facebook, and even from Jews that I know and respect?

It is a variant of a classic theological move. As the prayer book says: “It was because of our sins that we were exiled from our Land.” More crudely: If something happens to the Jews, it’s their fault. They screwed up. (This, by the way, is the way that some ultra-Orthodox Jews interpret the horror of the Holocaust — that it was God’s punishment of a sinful nation. I find the idea so obscene as to be beyond discussion.)

The secular version of this is: The sin of the Jews was their powerlessness. We should not have been powerless. Therefore, if we only had guns, this would not have happened.

More than 70 years after the end of the Shoah, the Jews are still a traumatized people. We are suffering from communal PTSD. But, our collective, inherited anguish cannot distort the truth of Jewish historical experience.

What do we ask of our friends? You can help us mourn.

But, please: Do not distort our truth Could armed Jews have prevented the Holocaust?..."
https://ideatrash.net/2020/06/of-bullshirt-memes-and-statues.html

# Although collectively as a people, the Ashkenazi Jews didn't have a military heritage as such, it is true however, that a number of Jews (numerically relatively small though) did serve in the militaries of a number of nations in Eastern, Northern and Western Europe. Not that serving in the German or Austro-Hungarian Armies in WWI saved those veterans or their families from a Konzentrationlager.

Remember, the holocaust in Europe was made possible when standing armies in France, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and eventually Russia which were equipped with guns and artillery were defeated by the German Wehrmacht...even had all of the adults who passed through the Nazi concentration camps been armed, the outcome would have been little different, just that some Jews (and some Nazis) would have died before the bulk of Jews got transported to Konzentrationslager.

Given that 'good' Christian collaborators* were quite prepared to cooperate with the SS and others to identify, denounce and betray Jews and others (communists, socialists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Romany et al), there was little prospect of escape...Perhaps, armed Jews may have made the round ups somewhat more hazardous for the nazis...but in the final analysis the Jewish citizenry would have in no way constituted an an effective army, even if all were armed and competent with the use of military bolt action rifles, and sidearms of the period.

* Yes, there were some Christians who rescued and protected Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis, and it has to be said, that some Muslims also rescued and saved Jews from the Nazis Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | The Role of the Righteous Muslims....but many Christians remained silent and passive, neither helping, nor hindering the Nazi's in the quest of implementing Hitler's 'Final Solution'....and, In Germany, many of those were armed, and could have protected their Jewish neighbours if they had a mind to, but they chose not to....it was not simply a tyrannical government that the Jews were up against, but the bulk of German/Austrian society who just impassively watched on.

 

Lac Trouble?

 

I wouldn’t count out a bunch of average people with guns fighting armies to stand stills. Look at us in afghanistan.

 

Significant cultural differences...and significant geographical differences....average dudes the Mujihadin and Taliban are not.

The Afghanis had been fighting tribal wars for centuries, when they weren't fighting colonial / imperial invaders. The Ashkenazis are not a martial people...the smart ones with wealth and resources saw what was happening and GTFOOD early, others without wealth and contacts were pretty much stuck where they were...some stayed because of kinship ties, or were deluded that what was already bad, could not get worse. European Jewry were not acohesive a block, and were not culturally predisposed to race off, abandoning everything, into the boondocks to wage some kind of asymetrical warfare against the German war machine...even the French were hard pressed to prosecute partisan warfare without coordination and resourcing by the French government in exile, and supported by the British SOE and the American OSS. The French people were largely liberated by masses of Allied conventional forces, with some subsidiary assistance by French partisans and underground operatives.

 

Actually, there was one, it was called "Alphabet soup"!