[i] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32529679
[i] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32529679
I can think of worse heuristics[1] to use for deciding "whom should we kill".
The psychology behind committing such crime is beyond the “sexual urge” excuse.
Edit - is this controversial? It’s simply a fact that some men do that, throughout history, in almost all cultures, hence the entire topic... Sometimes units of soldiers are even formed from criminals.
We'd like to replace these, uhm, traditional benefits of war with, say, increased status at home for veterans, but have such efforts been going on long enough to erase the underlying psychology?
Absolutely. As Robert E Lee eloquently said: "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."
In war there is no good. It's just evil. The only difference is between winners and losers.
> The psychology behind committing such crime is beyond the “sexual urge” excuse.
Isn't it innate nature? In the wild, whether it is chimps or lions, you vanquish the males and rape/procreate with the females. For much of human history, rape wasn't a crime. One of the reasons for going to war was for women. Women were considered spoils of war. You can find it in seminal western texts like Iliad or the bible. The entirety of european colonization ( from africa to china ) was mass rape of women. As has been in pretty much all human cultures since we kept records.
I was with you up until then. European colonisation was about exploiting the natural resources of the Africa and the Orient, not the women.
I meant for the entirety of european colonization ( its duration ), that the mass rape of women from africa to china was the norm. Not that rape was the only motivating factor. I think that was fairly obvious if you put that within the context of my other points.
Women, along with resources, land, slaves, etc were part of the equation. It wasn't the sole reason.
It's very deppressing but apparently shape of human penis is very good for shoveling sperm of the guy that was before you. In tribal or pre-tribal times it's possible that war gang rapes were common enough to shape evolution.
My understanding was that the "A team" shock troops and mainline motor infantry/armored divisions were well disciplined, but the later echelon of conscript infantry went into combat and gunpoint, didn't have functional unit leadership and were raping and pillaging.
As for Operation Unthinkable, it is one of the better-known realities of WWII that Churchill and Stalin enjoyed a mutual (and, to a retrospectively large extent, mutually-unfounded) paranoid fear of each others' ambitions. It is in that context that Unthinkable was formed – retaliation for poor treatment of POWs might have been a politically-tasteful façade, but was not the root as the parent might suggest.
I believe in the saying that begins with two eyes and ends with zero. The parent's sentiment seems to preach on the failing moral integrity of the Red Army soldiers – after all, they went for that second eye. I'd like to think that I am morally well-formed enough to not rape and kill, even when provoked to some unknown, but hopefully high degree. When I try to imagine what it was like to be a Russian soldier in 1945, advancing against people whom you see directly responsible for the death by fire and famine of your brothers, fathers, cousins, wives, children; when you've seen men die instantly for standing in the wrong place in line, I can't. We call these things "shell shock", but it masks the depravity that we are unfathomably privileged to not endure. I can't imagine the person I would be. I don't think any of us could. Principles about eyes probably don't seem to carry weight when the only parts of your village left to come home to (that you passed, on your way to the front) are the parts that wouldn't burn.
In that sobering context, one finds that the Red Army's treatment of Germany was (this is very counter-narrative west of the curtain) perhaps shockingly docile. The Red Army did not give orders to execute unarmed political officers on sight, or to burn entire swaths of countryside, with its villages and inhabitants, to the ground. Many German POWs perished for a myriad of reasons, among the biggest being insufficient supply lines, and an incredibly harsh winter of '45. The western allies had much better supply lines, rebooted in place, while the Soviets largely had to make them up as they went along. And yet, at least those take prisoner were treated with enough human dignity, to be taken prisoner in the first place. Their soviet counterparts were not given the same courtesy. I am recalling the diary of a Wehrmacht soldier, who was shocked that his captors did not kill him on sight – so conditioned was he to the reciprocal action, not only towards soldiers, but unarmed civilians, whom he had been instructed to believe were sub-human. Now this sub-human, in the reverse role, offered him bread of his own ration!
Yes, the Red Army committed war crimes. But it is important to consider that the morale of their troops begged for war crimes far worse than those committed.
In all, I humbly submit the idea that we are not in any position to judge. Citations from BBC magazine wikipedia, and youtube notwithstanding.
At this point, I'm surely rambling, but I just want to close by saying that as we inherit our popularly-told modern history, it is important to keep in mind that there are humans in every story, and that we gain nothing but bigotry from deliberately excluding the experiences of one over the other. Lest we repeat their mistakes of irrational hatred, which begets more, and so on.
On that note, I encourage us all to, at some point, read balanced histories of that era, which were inevitably written after the cold war. Shirer, whose account was authoritative while many of us were growing up, is a journalist who was the product of his time. His books are mostly regarded as a primary source by modern scholars. "Concise History of the Third Reich" by Wolfgang Benz, "Bloodlands" by Timothy Snyder, "The Unwomanly Face of War" by Svetlana Alexeivich, and "Burned Bridge" by Edith Sheffer are solid scholarly entry points for those of us for whom this more nuanced and even approach is appealing. For those of you who get to visit Berlin, I'd also strongly recommend the German-Russian Museum in Karlshorst – it's both utterly fantastic and utterly empty (on every day except for the May 8/9, when a large number of observant Russians come to pay respects), due to being so far away from the city centers. The guides there are some of the most knowledgeable people on this subject I've met.
It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office while eating $8 bagel and talk about how horrible decisions people made in the past are.
>Principles about eyes probably don't seem to carry weight when the only parts of your village left to come home to (that you passed, on your way to the front) are the parts that wouldn't burn.
I agree.
If Truman had toured the Pacific theater a little more we probably wouldn't have stopped at two
Sorry, mate, even in your broad context, your trying to justify mass rapes this way can't possibly stand given the present days' values.
Wars to that scale do not happen nowadays, but similar suffering and low morale is encountered in "smaller" warzones, yet the scale of rapes isn't relatively comparable.
Given the various wars my father and I witnessed in the Balkans and throughout the world, I'd say discipline (thus, education) matters more than morale.
In all, the point of my comment was not to cast black into white, to exchange one form of binary bigotry for another, but to remind us that our popular history of that time has, in fact, been dyed in politically-opportunistic ways many times over. Whether we choose to accept those dyeings or not is up to us, but it's important to know that we have a choice to hate or not to hate. And that we should default towards skeptical when we have been instructed to treat people as "The Other". When education and discipline are corrupted by this introduction and emphasis of "otherness", hate crimes and war crimes follow.