brainiac Offline Dedicated FM Account Locked
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ulrikft wrote:
I somehow suspect that researchers/historians often are better at making valued insightful comments about the war than the low-level participants themselves.
I don't think it takes a historian to understand that annexing or invading Austria, Sudetenland, Poland, Danzig, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, France, Monaco, Yugoslavia, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Soviet Union were at the heart of the disagreement. The genocide wasn't widely credited until the end of the war, and it's not entirely clear that any of the allied countries would have gone to war over that alone, even if they had understood the scale to which it would grow.
>But brainiac downplaying leicas good deeds is "in character", so I should not expect otherwise..
I don't wish to downplay Leitz's good deeds, but equally one mustn't rose tint history so that the rise of the Fuhrer and his spoiling for the most ferocious war in history appear to be a bit of bad luck. Leitz was a complicit part of the Nazi military industrial complex. Individual stories of heroism are all very well, but in real terms Leica had a hand in killing a lot of allied troops as well as saving the lives of German Jews. There is a danger in blaming all that destruction on one man with a silly moustache. They say history is written by the victors, but it's amazing how much of it can be quietly disappeared by the vanquished.
Frankly I object to the suggestion that I have it in for Leica. I would like to see Leica succeed, but I don't think it is producing cameras commensurate with its lenses or its reputation. The market appears to agree with me. In my view that's not prejudice on my part, but simply a degree of honesty that is unwelcome here due to latent brand snobbery. Criticising, for instance, Canon, is a national sport on FM, but criticising Leica is still some kind of taboo.
Let's get back to the EP1, which is innovative and exciting despite coming from one of the Axis countries ;-)
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