I should point out, as I'm sure that a number of people will be tempted upon first reading my opening post, to respond with emotional laden attacks upon me for defending the Axis. I am not defending the Axis for their atrocities. What I am trying to do is to dispell the myths that have arisen around WWII. The myth of WWII is that we of the Anglo-Saxon world won the war because we were the good guys. The world doesn't work that way. We call ourselves the good guys because, #1, we're not going to call ourselves the evil side, and #2, we won. Now, the Anglo-Americans certainly treated Axis prisoners much better than the Axis treated Allied prisoners. No doubt about that. My post was about why this was the case and why even in that we shouldn't consider ourselves to have always been the good guys from the beginning of time. The Allies won the war and didn't have to commit as many atrocities as the Axis because they had already committed a terrible genocide and ethnic cleansing that allowed them to exploit the resources of the countries of these peoples to their own benefit.

It is also easy to say let's all be friends and not discriminate when you haven't had to fight for your very existence on a regular basis. The Anglo-American attitude that most of us have inherited (and that the rest of the world is now going to adopt whether they like it or not) is the result of England's relative immunity to being overrun by enemy forces due to the English Channel. It is not a surprise that the most xenophobic (redneck) attitudes in the US are found in frontier areas while the least xenophobic attitudes are found in the Northeast, where the culture has been quite settled for centuries already.

So now that you've got my position, let the ad hominems begin!