> if the parent poster's great-grandfather was a member of a Waffen-SS division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity

Britain and Belgium especially have this all over their history, and no one cares.

Wrt Britain what are you referring to particularly? I know all sorts of terrible things British people have done, and some 'we' are doing (selling weapons to people for murdering citizens, currently) but I've not heard of murder squads in Britain since the civil war??

Boer war for instance. Pretty well everyone in the concentration camps they had died.

Your reference to Britain having done what the Waffen SS did:

"division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity"

I thought you meant that. It's not more palatable, but actions abroad have a different complexion somehow. Governments can get away with actions the citizenry don't witness (or citizens can claim ignorance) which is different to if there's literally squads picking people off the streets in front of your own eyes; which is what you referred to.

Like I said, I'm aware of many atrocities by British people but just not of that particular one in recent history?

I'm guessing they're mostly referring to the history of colonialism by imperial Britain and King Leopold of Belgium. I'm not sure anything was on the scale of the extent of the Nazi regime's worst actions (though Leopold wasn't far off), but there were certainly many atrocities.

Oh my. Well just off the top of my head. The UK has committed widespread systematic war crimes/crimes against humanity for generations in Ireland (+ is responsible for the deaths of the famine), Kenya, India, South Africa and localised war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and many Asian countries. Bombing of Dresden also. To name but a few. Then you can probably argue forcing and dumping opium on China is another one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_war_crimes

Even today that are recent British war crimes where the perpetrators are alive and yet will never be prosecuted.

> Every side was indeed awful, but Nazi Germany's and Imperial Japan's actions in particular were so unprecedentedly awful that far-future generations in those countries probably would've eventually had a reckoning and realized they were the worst actors in the war, like what eventually happened in the US when it comes to treatment of Native Americans, propping up brutal dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, and other things.

You honestly think Americans are aware of even the most common atrocities committed in the name of colonization? My read is a) they mostly don't and b) there is an ongoing effort to victim-blame Native Americans going back centuries.

The alternate reality where Nazi Deutschland won would likely similarly deal with the occupied USA/UK/etc like the US treated the natives.

> there is an ongoing effort to victim-blame Native Americans

For example, CNN's Rick Santorum:

> We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.

https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/138668534052253696...

The real curiosity is why corporate media allows such speech to be broadcast as if it was in any way truthful. Let's all forget that the US Constitution was based in part on the Iroquois Confederacy [1].

Santorum is on CNN's payroll. Who or whatever is supporting Santorum isn't stupid, likely it supports some revenue/marketing scheme. All of this is fully funded.

[1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/indians-and-the-us-constituti...

>You honestly think Americans are aware of even the most common atrocities committed in the name of colonization?

Increasingly, yes. I'm sure it'll be many more decades before it becomes more widely accepted, though.

>The alternate reality where Nazi Deutschland won would likely similarly deal with the occupied USA/UK/etc like the US treated the natives.

Very likely, yes.

>"History is written by the victors" is one of the truest cliches.

It really, really isn't. Like, at all. No Historian would agree with you.

Can you elaborate? Genuinely curious. In what way is it not? Especially for the first few decades after a particular event. I'd agree that the victors don't necessarily have a permanent monopoly on history.

It is a very lazy and ultimately harmful way to introduce the concept of bias. There isn't really a perfectly pithy way to cover such a complex topic, but much better than winners writing history is writers writing history. This is more useful than it initially seems because until fairly recently the literate were a minority, and those with enough literary training to actually write historical narratives formed an even smaller and more distinct class within that. To give a few examples, Genghis Khan must surely go down as one of the great victors in all history, but he is generally viewed quite unfavorably in practically all sources, because his conquests tended to harm the literary classes. Or the senatorial elite can be argued to have "lost" the struggle at the end of the Republic that eventually produced Augustus, but the Roman literary classes were fairly ensconced within (or at least sympathetic towards) that order, and thus we often see the fall of the Republic presented negatively.

Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.

Valid points.

Maybe it'd be more accurate to say "the immediate history that holds the most power in a certain area tends to be the history that's written by the most powerful entities in that area at that time", or something?

Nazi Germany wasn't able to spread its narrative anywhere once it lost its power, while the Allies were able to spread theirs in most places. If Nazi Germany had decisively won and became the top global superpower, I that situation probably would've been reversed.

Genghis Khan didn't hold the most power in certain areas after a certain period of time. When he did hold that power, even if the literary classes under his rule hated him, I assume their narratives probably wouldn't have spread or been believed very widely? Due to self-censorship, direct censorship and violence from his forces, and his counter-narratives. But maybe I'm wrong; I know very little about historiography.