• Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    At least Von Braun actually did his own sciencing instead of, I dunno, purchasing a “founder” title after the fact. Still a nazi tho.

    • mercano@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I first learned about Von Braun from the movie October Sky, where four boys in a 1950’s coal mining town start building model rockets; they look up to NASA’s chief rocket engineer.

      • CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 days ago

        It’s kinda weird to read from people they learned about von Braun in movies first when he was part of history lessons in my school.

    • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Thanks for the song!

      TIL

      To make this song even more spot on, Lehrer used eight bars from the well-known German national anthem “Das Lied der Deutschen” as a song intro :-)

      • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 days ago

        Yea, I kinda fast-forward and skip the personal drama, I just want to know what happens in the universe.

        I hate part where…

        Season 3 Spoilers

        North Korea gets someone to Mars 🤣

        They should’ve just put China and it’d be much better

        Like I just mentally replace any thing “North Korea” with China and its much more realistic.

        But like, its all fiction, gotta maintain the suspension of disbelief I guess… 🤷‍♂️

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I couldn’t bear the cringe anymore when the

          season 3 spoilers

          step-mom-fetish son of Gordo turns into an outright psychopath and starts ruining basically everything.

        • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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          4 days ago

          I ended up stopping it in season 2 because it wasn’t doing anything cool with the alt history, but I think that would have made me quit again.

  • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    For those interested in learning about Operation Paperclip:

    Although he officially sanctioned the operation, President Harry Truman forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members or active Nazi supporters. Nevertheless, officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner to the CIA—bypassed this directive by eliminating or whitewashing incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.

    Although defenders of the clandestine operation argue that the balance of power could have easily shifted to the Soviet Union during the Cold War if these Nazi scientists were not brought to the United States, opponents point to the ethical cost of ignoring their abhorrent war crimes without punishment or accountability.[1]


    I just posted a video of Annie Jacobsen talking about Nuclear War, she also wrote a book about Operation Paperclip.[2]

    In the days and weeks after Germany’s surrender, American troops combed the European countryside in search of hidden caches of weaponry to collect. They came across facets of the Nazi war machine that the top brass were shocked to see, writer Annie Jacobsen told NPR’s All Things Considered in 2014. Jacobson wrote about both the mission and the scientists in her book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America.

    “One example was they had no idea that Hitler had created this whole arsenal of nerve agents,” Jacobsen says. “They had no idea that Hitler was working on a bubonic plague weapon. That is really where Paperclip began, which was suddenly the Pentagon realizing, ‘Wait a minute, we need these weapons for ourselves.’"[3]


    1. [1] https://www.history.com/news/what-was-operation-paperclip ↩︎

    2. [2] https://lemmy.world/post/24646542 ↩︎

    3. [3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-us-government-brought-nazi-scientists-america-after-world-war-ii-180961110/ ↩︎

    • alcoholicorn
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      4 days ago

      Operation Paperclip was publicized, because it’s easy to pretend they were all just apolitical scientists.

      Operation Bloodstone was not, because you can’t twist sending nazi officers to facilitate torture and mass killings in South America and Eastern Europe into anything but what it was.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    4 days ago

    Yes … we can thank the Nazis and their slave labour for getting America to the moon

    and now we can repay those lovely Nazis back by putting them in power again.