Don't Mention the Armadillo!**

**[UPDATE] please read important new information underneath the body of this post**

DREADNOUGHT has been carrying out a low key blog war with Mark, Mark's cousin Brian and some other possibly related character named 'Alex' over at Troppo Armadillo. Of course, it is a typical aging liberal vs young orthodox Catholic debate. When the going got tough Mark disappeared and his cousin stepped in, then the 'Alex' character popped up to conveniently support both their posting. Basically they support the heretical St Mary's crowd who are so enamoured of anachronistic 60's-style liberal Catholicism that they have forgotten how to baptise children correctly.* Notably also, none of my opponents actually attend Mass regularly or identify as devout.

I don't think I convinced them, but at least it seems the right people (the Rector of the Sydney seminary for one) are with me on this one and I know the Melbourne seminary leadership is similarly disposed, some of them informed my own views!

Now, however, in a post that riffs on Oppenheimer's truly awesome and chilling quotation of the Bhagavad Gita at the first nuclear explosion at Trinity, "Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds" Mark feels:

"a need to see the Germans depicted, for once, as victims".

Which Germans? The Nazis of course, those poor Nazi victims of Allied aggression! DREADNOUGHT is fuming. As a response to Mark's peculiarly verbose question:

""How does one come to terms with "monstrous events" - through a silence and an absence that contain a memory that threatens to disrupt all understanding?"

I posted this:

"I come to terms with the 'monstrous events' visited upon Nazi Germany by looking at my Grandparents. Until liberated by the Allies, they were slave labourers in a work camp run - and supported by, the majority of the populations in 'the larger German cities'. Without Churchill's 'irrational' bombing campaigns they might have been enslaved forever. Indeed, if they'd have been Jewish they'd have perished for sure."

"Blinkered revisionism published fifty years after the fact is at least disingenuous if not morally repugnant. By divorcing the German crimes from their just recompense (the Allied bombing campaign) an insidious moral equivalence - not shared by historians at the time and certainly not by those millions who suffered and died under the German's yoke - creeps in."

"I suppose, however, if one proudly declares oneself 'post-moral' then anything goes. No wonder you are happy to apologise for the Nazi's, they liked Nietzsche too."^

Later, instead of shaving for work, I posted this:

"Nonsense, sheer nonsense Mark. Your claim re the bombing and its effect on the war effort is incredible. If only to demonstrate (to the Axis and the Allies) that the UK was on the offensive and not another France, the bombing campaign was worthwhile. This was, inter alia, how we won the war. I cannot imagine what contrary consensus you are consulting. It is not mainstream."

"I am an advocate of just war theory, the crimes of Hitler perpetrated by the German people were so unjust that they deserved, no demanded righteous intervention, urgently to stop the manifest barbarity being carried out. I cannot believe anyone would consider this a controversial position. Once again, a contrary view is not mainstream, it is extremist. It is not even the German view!"

"The Nuremburg trials, relying on shoddy legal precedent, actually relied more on just war theory than perhaps you'd imagine. The people prosecuted were uniformed military combatants. Terrorists are not. They are not accurately described as such even under the most strained readings of the Geneva Conventions. Again, claiming otherwise puts you outside mainstream legal opinion. Most people claim they could/should be treated as such, but very few if any claim that it is established legal thinking they they must be. Certainly opinio juris is against you."

"Excuse my vehemence, but I cannot understand why an otherwise seemingly intelligent and humane individual would insist on defending terrorists and Nazis while randomly spraying vitriol at Western or WWII Allied interests."

Whoa! These guys sure know how to stimulate DREADNOUGHT's rage spot. I don't need to moderate my vehemence here. Dated liberal Catholicism and historical revisionism carried out to make Nazis look better constitutes a recipe for a righteous-anger-cluster-orgasm in DREADNOUGHT. If you're starting to feel bad for Hitler and the Nazis take a look at what they did. If you still feel bad for them after that, you need to see a psychiatrist and/or a priest.

*(Now DREADNOUGHT was taught along with millions of Catholics how to baptise in a hurry, you know in case a baby was dying and you happened to walk past, or you were in the trenches and your commanding officer decided to convert. It's simple, you use water and say: 'I baptise thee in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'. Not too difficult I thought as a ten year old).

^(The tagline on Mark's site is "Musings on law, politics, society and life from blogdom's cross-disciplinary post-moral majority". Apparently they haven't heard of the post-9/11 'new seriousness' that has fuelled the conservative revolution in Western politics).

**(Mark claims he did not intend to revise history to make the Nazis look good. Indeed, read the full update on this post for complete clarification of the situation. This current post will stand but my position has been substantially modified in light of Mark's claims which, although not obvious from his initial posts, I now accept).