Dan Minette wrote: > > If my friend could face down the Communist party > and the KGB, then the excuse that it was the Nazis > and the SS doesn't hold much water. > I don't think it's fair to compare the Communist party and KGB with the Nazis.
Communism, after all, had become just a corrupt form of g*vernment, and its officers were as prone to bribery or flattery as any average normal being. The Nazis, OTOH, were fanatics, with an evil ideal as their goal, and nothing could make them change their minds. Comparing the Nazi occupation of Europe with, say, the Canadian occupation of the USA or even the Communist occupation of the USSR is not a fair comparison. A reasonable comparison might be the Taliban occupation of Afghanistan, or [if you want to use a fictional example] the Prophets' occupation of the USA in Heinlein's Future History. Alberto Monteiro That doesn't square with what I know about either government, Alberto - not from my friends who grew up in the USSR, nor from those people I've spoken to (and the many more I've read about) who were under Nazi occupation. The Nazi elite were fanatics, surely, but the ordinary bureaucrats who were running the occupied countries? They were just guys collecting a paycheck, as Hannah Arendt so persuasively described. The USSR, otoh, employed a level of pervasive surveillance and inquisition that the Nazis never equalled. My violin teacher, for example, would tell me stories of how his family used to gather in the kitchen with the faucets turned on to read poetry published by the opposition. The water was turned on because they were virtually certain that their home was bugged. Not because he was prominent or a member of the dissidents - but because _everyone's_ home was bugged. The Nazis never achieved, and never even aspired to, that kind of pervasive monitoring. They relied upon the essential cooperation of the populations that they were ruling, while the Soviets never did that. Gautam
