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Ofaloaf posted:Who were the first military reenactors? Who were the first reenactors who did it because they wanted a hobby, rather than because Duke Stupendous hired a bunch of dudes to wear woefully inaccurate recreations of Roman armor and make a spectacle to impress some dignitaries? Not the first, but there was also a huge reenactment in the area of The Wilderness (can't remember which particular battle it was - something like 3 or 4 major engagements happened there) in the late 19th century. The US Army put it on as some kind of field exercise/demonstration but it was instrumental in getting enough public support to have the battelfields made into national parks.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 13:59 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 19:41 |
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Tias posted:Much of WW1 was riddled with terrible sunk cost fallacy types of reasoning. It broke their hearts at the time to send so many men to their deaths at the time, too, but that was all the more reason to keep sending guys, so that the first ones did not die in vain! Totally that. All I knew about it beyond "Mel Gibson did a movie once" was that the movie didn't have the loads of Irish who died there in it (probably). VVVV Arquinsiel fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Aug 18, 2015 |
# ? Aug 18, 2015 14:08 |
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Arquinsiel posted:I suspect a large portion of the reason that Gallipoli has a more negative slant to it in the public memory than the Western Front is that the actions there didn't obviously contribute to the collapse of the belligerent opposing the Entente. People kind of accepted that the Germans were beaten by the eventual grinding in the trenches, but the line between tying up troops in the Dardanelles campaign and pressure on the Ottomans there and the eventual collapse of the empire seems to be a bit of a difficult leap of logic to make. Heck, thinking about it, until not that long ago I was half-convinced that the campaign was basically a couple of divisions charging of boats, dying and then the boats giving up and heading home within the week, not a year+ slog. Face it, for people who aren't from an ANZAC country Mel Gibson is the reason Gallipoli is as infamous as it is. I seriously doubt that (especially in the US and Canada, and probably even Britain) there would be much of a poo poo given about it. The other countries formed their wartime identity around major events on the Western Front, such as Ypres and the Somme. There are tons of other battles that are just as pointless, tragic, and hosed up that receive little commemoration outside of the countries who were involved. How many non-Italians or Austrians do you think give two shits about the various Battles of the Isonzo or even know that it happened? Look at any other war to see the same thing happen. Everyone knows about Gettysburg, only war nerds give a poo poo about Spotsylvania Court House. Every American who has turned on a TV or watched a movie in the last 25 years knows about Operation Overlord, but far fewer know about the near-simultaneous Operation Bagration and a whole hell of a lot more Allied soldiers (and Germans for that matter) died there. Media is a huge factor in crafting the collective memory of and demands for memorializing wartime events. edit: it's worth noting that the only other country I can think of that has commemorated Gallipoli in a major way cinematically is Turkey, for obvious reasons. Gallipoli moves are practically their own sub-genre out there.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 14:18 |
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P-Mack posted:no I think you just found your sig Tias posted:Much of WW1 was riddled with terrible sunk cost fallacy types of reasoning. It broke their hearts at the time to send so many men to their deaths at the time, too, but that was all the more reason to keep sending guys, so that the first ones did not die in vain! One depressing but useful thing I've learned from World War 1 is how dangerous ignoring feedback mechanisms can be. In war, some casualties are unavoidable, but going into a battle all the time thinking "and victory will come with mountains of corpses" is a bad idea. Casualties tell you how successful or unsuccessful your current tactics are, and if you are a general that ignores them, you are ignoring one of your most important feedback mechanisms. It's not an iron law or anything - I imagine anyone reading these words can think of counter-examples. (Two that spring to mind just from World War 2 are the Normandy invasion and the second battle of E Alamein) but in the First World War, it seems battles go on for a horrifically long time after it is clear that in any sort of military sense the battle is useless.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 14:20 |
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The thing about the Western front is that for every offensive that resulted in five kilometres gained for a hundred thousand casualties, lessons were learned that were applied to the next attempt. It also wouldn't have been reasonable for the Generals to say "We're not going to fight any battles for the next two years in the hope that we get a technical solution to trenches we currently don't have", nor would it have been acceptable for them to say "We're going to sit on our hands and lob shells at the German lines until one side runs out of money to continue fighting the war, hopefully theirs". Gallipoli on the other hand is a Campaign that everyone contemporaneously knew was horribly flawed and pointless. For a start, nobody actually has any reason to believe that a squadron of battleships threatening to bombard Constantinople will get the Ottomans to give up. Then when the initial plans were drawn up everyone could see that the operation had to be a combined navy/army effort to succeed but the troops weren't available so they went ahead anyway. Then when the troops were available the element of surprise had been lost but we're already a couple of battleships down so to give up would be really embarrassing.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 14:34 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:One depressing but useful thing I've learned from World War 1 is how dangerous ignoring feedback mechanisms can be. In war, some casualties are unavoidable, but going into a battle all the time thinking "and victory will come with mountains of corpses" is a bad idea. Casualties tell you how successful or unsuccessful your current tactics are, and if you are a general that ignores them, you are ignoring one of your most important feedback mechanisms. Another thing that should be remembered is that generals went into WW1 fully expecting the battles to be incredibly bloody. The expectation before the war was that battles would be very short, that the casualties would be immense, but that they would be so decisive that only a few would be needed. The major example given in this argument was the Battle of Sedan and the way that effectively destroyed France in the Franco-Prussian war (although it would be a while before they could force the new government to negotiate a peace). That proved to be wrong, of course, but when you have armies that are built for fighting one particular type of war and generals who are trained to lead one type of war it's a bit hard to shift gears really fast.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 14:57 |
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So, was WWI much worse for British/Empire soldiers than WWII?
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 15:01 |
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JcDent posted:So, was WWI much worse for British/Empire soldiers than WWII? Well, the British army in WW1 suffered about 3 times the military deaths that it did in WW2, and both armies were roughly the same size (~3.5m in WW2 and ~4m in WW1 at their peaks)
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 15:10 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Well, the British army in WW1 suffered about 3 times the military deaths that it did in WW2, and both armies were roughly the same size (~3.5m in WW2 and ~4m in WW1 at their peaks) Jesus. Though wiki'ng statistics, 3% war dead in WWII doesn't look that bad. Is it because they roll both the 'teeth' and 'tail' into the 100% Armed forces number, so the lower 'tail' losses offset the loses in actual combat arms? Those Soviet tank and British ship losses tho
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 15:41 |
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Tias posted:Much of WW1 was riddled with terrible sunk cost fallacy types of reasoning. It broke their hearts at the time to send so many men to their deaths at the time, too, but that was all the more reason to keep sending guys, so that the first ones did not die in vain! That's what bugs the poo poo out of me about how "In Flanders Fields" gets quoted every time Armistice Day rolls around and everyone's wearing poppies. Because nobody ever quotes the third verse, the one that turns the poem from a lament in remembrance of those lost to yet another shallow exhortation to go spill more blood: quote:Take up our quarrel with the foe: If there's one poem that should be quoted every time November rolls around, it's by Siegfried Sassoon. In semi-related news, a new unseen bunch of photos from WWII has been found in the archives of a 4-star: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazing-never-before-seen-wwii-photographs-2015-8
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 15:41 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:How many non-Italians or Austrians do you think give two shits about the various Battles of the Isonzo or even know that it happened? I know this was a rhetorical question, but Hemingway's Farewell to Arms is set during the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo (known as the Battle of Caporetto) where he vividly describes the horrific defeat delivered to the Italians there. As such, many people are actually broadly familiar with the Battles of the Isonzo even if they might not recognize it by name. Interestingly, while Hemingway's famous book was semi-autobiographical (the book is about an American ambulance officer who is wounded on the Italian front and meets a beautiful nurse whom he falls in love with, just like he did) he wasn't even present during the Battle of Caporetto - he was wounded later during the Battle of the Piave River, a battle that was a strategic success for the Italians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Arms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Caporetto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Front_(World_War_I) Kaal fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Aug 18, 2015 |
# ? Aug 18, 2015 16:32 |
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Alchenar posted:Gallipoli on the other hand is a Campaign that everyone contemporaneously knew was horribly flawed and pointless. For a start, nobody actually has any reason to believe that a squadron of battleships threatening to bombard Constantinople will get the Ottomans to give up. There was an endgame in mind for this possibility, which basically boils down to "Not our problem, guv"; with Goeben and Breslau occupied by the RN, the Russians were going to ship an army across the Black Sea from Odessa and Sevastopol. It's still sitting there, waiting patiently.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 17:12 |
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Arquinsiel posted:I suspect a large portion of the reason that Gallipoli has a more negative slant to it in the public memory than the Western Front is that the actions there didn't obviously contribute to the collapse of the belligerent opposing the Entente. People kind of accepted that the Germans were beaten by the eventual grinding in the trenches, but the line between tying up troops in the Dardanelles campaign and pressure on the Ottomans there and the eventual collapse of the empire seems to be a bit of a difficult leap of logic to make. Heck, thinking about it, until not that long ago I was half-convinced that the campaign was basically a couple of divisions charging of boats, dying and then the boats giving up and heading home within the week, not a year+ slog. Yeah, no kidding. I thought the campaign was just a battle, lasting a week at most, before I actually got around to looking into it
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 17:35 |
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Kaal posted:I know this was a rhetorical question, but Hemingway's Farewell to Arms is set during the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo (known as the Battle of Caporetto) where he vividly describes the horrific defeat delivered to the Italians there. As such, many people are actually broadly familiar with the Battles of the Isonzo even if they might not recognize it by name. Interestingly, while Hemingway's famous book was semi-autobiographical (the book is about an American ambulance officer who is wounded on the Italian front and meets a beautiful nurse whom he falls in love with, just like he did) he wasn't even present during the Battle of Caporetto - he was wounded later during the Battle of the Piave River, a battle that was a strategic success for the Italians. Even so, if you walked out onto the street today how long do you think you would have to search to find someone who had read A Farewell to Arms? How long until you found an adult who had read it more recently than high school English? How many of them would remember or care what the battle was? When you're talking the politics of remembrance and commemoration public knowledge of an event is big, and this changes with time. Maybe 60 years ago a lot more American adults knew about Italy's disastrous WW1 experience, but not so much today. Maybe 60 years from today when Mel Gibson is as much in the collective consciousness as Laurence Olivier and Kirk Douglas are today non-Australians/New Zealanders will go back to saying "Galipo-what?" gently caress, for that matter the Holocaust only entered into American cultural consciousness as the capital-H holy gently caress that's the worst crime ever Holocaust because of a late 70s miniseries. Sure, plenty of informed, educated people knew how bad it was especially after poo poo like the Eichmann trial but for the average guy with no personal connection to it it was lumped in under the general category of "bad poo poo Nazis did" and had the same rough moral standing as events like the Malmedy massacre.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 17:51 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Even so, if you walked out onto the street today how long do you think you would have to search to find someone who had read A Farewell to Arms? How long until you found an adult who had read it more recently than high school English? How many of them would remember or care what the battle was? And thus the occasional derail about video games.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 18:28 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:When you're talking the politics of remembrance and commemoration public knowledge of an event is big, and this changes with time.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 18:38 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Everyone knows about Gettysburg, only war nerds give a poo poo about Spotsylvania Court House. I bet 10 times as many people know something about Spotsylvania (or the Overland Campaign in general) than know anything about the nine-month-long Siege of Petersburg. HEY GAL posted:it is actually kind of interesting to me that some germans still call the 30yw "the great war." I think there was a poll where they asked Germans what the worst event in their country's history was and that still topped the charts. This was post World War 2, also. That was mentioned in Wilson, right? I can't dig around in my copy at the moment, but it sounds familiar. dublish fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Aug 18, 2015 |
# ? Aug 18, 2015 18:41 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:gently caress, for that matter the Holocaust only entered into American cultural consciousness as the capital-H holy gently caress that's the worst crime ever Holocaust because of a late 70s miniseries. Sure, plenty of informed, educated people knew how bad it was especially after poo poo like the Eichmann trial but for the average guy with no personal connection to it it was lumped in under the general category of "bad poo poo Nazis did" and had the same rough moral standing as events like the Malmedy massacre. This really does blow my mind. Reading through old Life, the holocaust does come up in a pictorial that if posted here would warrant a tag. So I kind of figured that slotted in as the start of that cultural consciousness you are talking about. I mean, poo poo, why did Americans think the Nuremberg trials were such a big deal?
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 21:47 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:This really does blow my mind. By 1979, the bulk of the adults in the country had been kids or weren't even born yet by the end of WWII and the full horror of what had happened had never really been brought home to them. Their parents understood, but the Holocaust miniseries was basically a consciousness-raising event for a new generation. Basically, all the older adults were saying, "See? I told you it was horrible, but you just couldn't understand" afterward.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 21:57 |
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Nuremberg was muddled with war crimes - you had stuff like admirals going down for submarine warfare and prosecutions for mistreating POWs alongside genicide. Plus there was a big push from the soviets to get the Germans for all the east front atrocities so they didn't want the anti Jewish crimes singled out. Warsaw Pact memorialization is a whole clusterfuck. Until it fell apart you had sites like KZLs dedicated to "victims of fascism" as a group effectively submerging the uniquely targeted anti Jewish policies in the general shitstorm of death in the mid 40s It wasn't just the Russians. The French also played up the camps as the awful place resistance members were killed when captured. Everyone knew the camps were a thing and that nazis hated Jews but the identification of the holocaust as being a special type of evil due to the systematic policies aimed at targeting a single group for extermination was something that took a few decades. The Eichmann trial was really where the current emphasis started
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 22:14 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Ugh, this. Read the Wikipedia bit on Anzac Spirit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anzac_spirit As an Australian, I could tell you heaps about the ANZAC LEGEND and MATESHIP and THE FORGING OF OUR NATION, but very little about the actual details of the campaign. I doubt many Australians could.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 01:15 |
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It'd be interesting to see how many Australians/ New Zealanders today believe Gallipoli was actually an allied victory.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 02:00 |
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The entire Dardanelles campaign was a waste of Allied lives, really. Russia's imperial boner for the Straits had sound strategic basis, including the fact that they'd be very easy to defend.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 03:01 |
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A large portion of the thinking in WWI seems to have been "so they're in this position, right, and it's super defensible. So just imagine how hard it'll be to get us out of it after we take it! What's that? Shelled to gently caress you say? Nonsense, it will be perfectly sound!".
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 03:04 |
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Most of it really stemmed from a "well, we're here, so we better god drat do something" I think.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 03:06 |
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The Dardanelles was also one of Winston Churchill's Brilliant Ideas(tm).
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 03:08 |
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Cythereal posted:The Dardanelles was also one of Winston Churchill's Brilliant Ideas(tm). Imagine if they went along with his plan to invade via the Baltic.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 05:52 |
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Cythereal posted:The Dardanelles was also one of Winston Churchill's Brilliant Ideas(tm). So was the Cold War, considering his relentless poo poo-stirring with regard to Stalin. Dude hated Communists so much he went on a speaking tour in the US to try kicking off a US-Soviet war. Not that transitioning from FDR to Truman hurt that effort, of course.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 06:35 |
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FAUXTON posted:So was the Cold War, considering his relentless poo poo-stirring with regard to Stalin. Dude hated Communists so much he went on a speaking tour in the US to try kicking off a US-Soviet war. Not that transitioning from FDR to Truman hurt that effort, of course. Eh, saying that the Cold War was primarily created by Churchill is oversimplifying things by quite a bit.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 07:38 |
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ArchangeI posted:Eh, saying that the Cold War was primarily created by Churchill is oversimplifying things by quite a bit. Depends on how big you Churchill hate boner is.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 08:04 |
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Kinda deprives Stalin's agency with regards to his own antics in Central and Eastern Europe, no?
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 08:13 |
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Koesj posted:Kinda deprives Stalin's agency with regards to his own antics in Central and Eastern Europe, no? Stalin was actually a pacifist with zero imperialist ambitions concerning his neighbors and a very liberal policy regarding ethnic minorities.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 08:24 |
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ArchangeI posted:Stalin was actually a pacifist with zero imperialist ambitions concerning his neighbors and a very liberal policy regarding ethnic minorities.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 09:22 |
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He had a steely dedication to tolerance and piece, hence the nickname.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 09:37 |
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Stalin was an Oscar Wilde fan. True story.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 09:44 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Nuremberg was muddled with war crimes - you had stuff like admirals going down for submarine warfare and prosecutions for mistreating POWs alongside genicide. Plus there was a big push from the soviets to get the Germans for all the east front atrocities so they didn't want the anti Jewish crimes singled out. Warsaw Pact memorialization is a whole clusterfuck. Until it fell apart you had sites like KZLs dedicated to "victims of fascism" as a group effectively submerging the uniquely targeted anti Jewish policies in the general shitstorm of death in the mid 40s Kinda related to the Eichmann trial (and I remember a couple of you guys talking about this earlier in the thread but I can't find it), was there ever evidence of German soldiers willingly participating in atrocities because they were scared/feared for their lives? IIRC, this wasn't the case and most did it willingly, and those who refused to participate simply said goodbye to their chances of improving their career, but I'm mostly wondering because we had a talk at uni the other day and this popped up - how German soldiers were as much as victims of their army command and state, at least to a certain degree, as - say - the Soviets. I don't think this is willful misinformation, but a relic of the last military dictatorship in Argentina and the public perception of army life - a lot of people got drafted for Malvinas/were under mandatory military service during this period, and the army was a rotten piece of poo poo where corruption ran rampant and physical abuse and denigration was constant, so a lot of people from that generation have a really negative image of the army that has been going strong till today. I remember a Falklands veteran who got "staked out" (held by stakes, through his clothes, to the dirt under an open sky) for some minor offense during the war, with barely any protection against the cold, musing about how he had read about that particular kind of punishment in the loving Martin Fierro, a book written back when the lower half of Argentina was actually indigenous-owned territory (back before Roca's Desert Campaign to erradicate them and "take back" the land). Fun fact: Mandatory military service* here was called "colimba", an abbreviation of the words "corre" (run), "limpia" (clean) and "barre" (sweep), due to the way the army officials would use conscripts as free labor for their private residences. * I might be fumbling the translation. It's when you have to serve at certain age (18) for a certain period of time, even if your country isn't actually at war/going at war with someone else. Azran fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Aug 19, 2015 |
# ? Aug 19, 2015 09:48 |
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Azran posted:Kinda related to the Eichmann trial (and I remember a couple of you guys talking about this earlier in the thread but I can't find it), was there ever evidence of German soldiers willingly participating in atrocities because they were scared/feared for their lives? IIRC, this wasn't the case and most did it willingly, and those who refused to participate simply said goodbye to their chances of improving their career, but I'm mostly wondering because we had a talk at uni the other day and this popped up - how German soldiers were as much as victims of their army command and state, at least to a certain degree, as - say - the Soviets. Sounds like conscription. I'm still stupefied by 10mil Wehrmacht rapes are reported by wikipedia, probably more than the Soviet rapes, since I rarely ever saw numbers matched to it.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 10:06 |
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Azran posted:Kinda related to the Eichmann trial (and I remember a couple of you guys talking about this earlier in the thread but I can't find it), was there ever evidence of German soldiers willingly participating in atrocities because they were scared/feared for their lives? IIRC, this wasn't the case and most did it willingly, and those who refused to participate simply said goodbye to their chances of improving their career, but I'm mostly wondering because we had a talk at uni the other day and this popped up - how German soldiers were as much as victims of their army command and state, at least to a certain degree, as - say - the Soviets. That's a question that you will not be able to answer. People didn't get where they ended up because of some uncontrollable maelstrom of history, but of millions of individual decisions that lead there. Such a question is so broad that the answer doesn't make much sense. What you could ask is how structure played a role and how individual stories played out when people ended up in such paradox situations that demanded something of them that they knew being wrong and criminal. Memory cannot be fully trusted. What these people saw and had to do is so extreme that strange things happen. They don't remember a thing until something triggers them, or they cannot talk about it, the mind invents layers of protection, supresses, invents things, stuff that you heard becomes your own memory, you might be completely convinced that you never killed truckloads of civilians, never heard or saw anything, etc. and then there's all kinds of rationalizations that are deliberate. These things hardly ever square up with what collective memory professes, and people were not eager or able to break the peace. Certain events made this happen quite explosive, but that's another story. There was nothing that could be done in terms of military justice if a soldier refused to kill civilians. From what I've read, peer pressure, culture of obedience and brutalization of the individual were the driving forces behind so many people cooperating to criminal orders on the lower ranks. It's important to understand the sociocultural background where people came from, which is not self-evident for a person who grew up in a liberal democratic society. Then there's the paranoia of partisans, which was a big thing implanted into the minds of the soldiers, although there were hardly any partisans in the beginning of the war in the east. There was big concern in the officer corps that these unrestrained acts of murder would be devastating for discipline, which they were, so on the other hand they were thankful that the SS took over this matter. The distaste for this kind of murder lingered with many people, but it was in conflict with the need for security and the fear of partisan activity. e: That's not to say that you can't get punished informally. Your comrades might beat the poo poo out of you. Your superior could assign you to duties that will get you killed eventually, etc. Yet, even if individuals didn't have enough courage to resist orders outright, they could be carried out incompletely, wrong or too slow to have effect. This is what's called passive resistance in literature, which is hard to trace, but it seems that it was more widespread than one might suspect, on many levels. Let's assume that you're a WM officer who is ordered to assist an Einsatzgruppe with trucks and men guarding the site of the shootings in the next days. Whoops, gently caress these guys, sorry, we don't have enough fuel to follow through, and besides, other orders are more pressing. I had original Einsatzgruppen reports in a book and there's a number of actions that could not be started or carried out completely, because of reasons like this. Sometimes they just give logistical or turf war reasons why things could not be done. Officers had more leeway, and there's many examples of them outright refusing to carry out such orders without consequences. Remembering these people and their deeds is actually one of the more pronounced trends in the last decade in Germany, there was also a room with material about this in the last Wehrmachtsausstellung. I forgot the name of the guy, but there was somebody who ordered his men to shoot the guys from an Einsatzgruppe if they tried to take the women and children from his custody. They didn't, and the people lived. Nothing happened to the officer. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Aug 19, 2015 |
# ? Aug 19, 2015 10:52 |
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ArchangeI posted:Stalin was actually a pacifist with zero imperialist ambitions concerning his neighbors and a very liberal policy regarding ethnic minorities. He liberated them from the shackles of life. Much like Hitler, also a pretty good guy.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 11:03 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 19:41 |
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ArchangeI posted:Stalin was actually a pacifist with zero imperialist ambitions concerning his neighbors and a very liberal policy regarding ethnic minorities. This is the tank gushing thread, not tankie!
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 12:31 |