[Vision2020] Infiltration by Paul Sperry

[Phil Nisbet]

Andreas

The historical accuracy of those comments is pretty questionable.

First, the National Socialists were not in power in Germany until 1933.  
Prior to that time they were exactly the same as the current terrorist 
groups.  You might recall that they tried to seize power by force in 1923 in 
the famed Beerhall Putsch and that Hitler was sent to prison following that 
particular violence.  While Hitler served his term in Landsberg, his cohorts 
conducted terror campaigns and even organized attacks outside of the German 
borders in the East.

As for Germany being the highest technological nation on earth in the time 
frame, you miss the facts that Germany was actually still very much a horse 
drawn country.  Through most of the war years, for all the vaunted use of 
Panzers, most of the German Armed Forces was wagon drawn and not mechanized.

In 1940, France had more and better tanks, better aircraft and a larger 
army.  They lost because they had a poor force doctrine and terrible morale 
in their fighting force, not because they were technologically inferior to 
the Germans.

Similarly, the Russians had better tanks than the Germans, starting with the 
T34 and other advanced armor designs that were quite able to fight off any 
number of German machines.  The Russians were crushed by poor generalship, 
not by superior technology.

Further, you are assuming that Al Queda is loaded down with ignorant 
peasants with little or no technological skills.  Actually they are mostly 
educated professional with degrees in Engineering, chemistry, Doctors and 
Lawyers included.  They are exactly the same sort of middle class to upper 
middle class ideologues who were behind the National Socialist Workers 
Party.

Seeing the terrorists as inept goat herding peasant fanatics is badly 
stereotyping a group who are actually bright, well educated and dedicated 
cadres for a belief system that they hold dear.  Such a view underestimates 
the potential of these men, just as the west underestimated Hitler until he 
was overrunning country after country.

Phil Nisbet



>From: Andreas Schou <ophite at gmail.com>
>To: "mekt7 at netscape.net" <mekt7 at netscape.net>
>CC: vision2020 at moscow.com
>Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Infiltration by Paul Sperry
>Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 18:12:22 -0800
>
>On 2/12/06, mekt7 at netscape.net <mekt7 at netscape.net> wrote:
> >
> > I know that this will sound harsh and some will take it as insulting,
> > but the Jihadists are just as dangerous as the Nazis were. The people
> > who dismiss this threat are no different than those who dismissed the
> > Nazis back in the thirties.
>
>I'm not insulted, I'm baffled. The Nazis had control of one of the
>most technologically advanced industrial states of the middle of the
>20th century, along with the operational infrastructure to deploy
>anywhere in Europe. They managed to kill a few tens of millions of
>people and started the largest war in history.
>
>al-Qaida has a hole in the ground in Afghanistan and some honey farms
>in Yemen. They are having difficulty holding onto either. During the
>height of their power, they managed to kill a few thousand people, do
>damage to (but not sink) a US warship, and blow up several US
>embassies to inconsequential nations. Since then, the amount of damage
>they've done has been in the low dozens. All told, over the past
>fifteen years, terrorists have been less deadly to American citizens
>than bee stings and lightning.
>
>Currently, al-Qaida doesn't have the capacity to conquer another
>country -- an important benchmark on the dangerousness scale. It's
>questionable whether they even have the operational capacity to attack
>the United States or to seriously damage the world economy. To say
>they're as dangerous as the Nazis is idiotic hysteria at best and
>insulting to the victims of the real Nazis at worst.
>
>-- ACS
>
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