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HEY GUNS posted:viewing a shitload of internal ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity, whether more or less peaceful, as something that only countries who can't get their poo poo together have, and looking down on them for it (northern ireland, myanmar, rwanda, the balkans, syria, iraq) is not only ahistorical...that the "western" countries were once the same is a surprisingly recent thing to forget, and yet we have I was typing a thing and then realized I only think it to be true so: Is it a fact that Europe was a blood soaked battleground for centuries that only saw peace (some of it under brutal dictatorships of course) after WWII? Are you concerned that a peaceful Europe is an anomaly and the equilibrium state is one of conflict
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Nov 20, 2019 22:41
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PittTheElder posted:I had a random thought the other day while watching this video about the Tiger II; the figure given here is that in dollar terms every Tiger II cost as much to produce as 9 Shermans, and I'm fairly sure that the cost of Panthers and Tigers was similarly some multiple relative to the Sherman. I dunno about manpower but I doubt they'd have enough oil to do much of anything with them.
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Nov 20, 2019 22:45
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HEY GUNS posted:viewing a shitload of internal ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity, whether more or less peaceful, as something that only countries who can't get their poo poo together have, and looking down on them for it (northern ireland, myanmar, rwanda, the balkans, syria, iraq) is not only ahistorical...that the "western" countries were once the same is a surprisingly recent thing to forget, and yet we have I'd argue that internal diversity was looked down upon because it represented a failure of nation-building and a weak state. England, France, etc. went to a LOT of trouble in the 18th and 19th centuries to try and homogenize and create a dominant identity that people could relate to, and thereby foster a sense of belonging, connection to the state, and ultimately patriotism. The French in particular were pretty single-minded in creating a normative "Frenchness" that everyone would recognize as belonging to, even if regional peculiarities still existed in the background. I don't think it's an issue of forgetting that they used to be different (at least for the 19th century), I think it's more looking down on countries that haven't managed to make the jump to being a proper nation-state.
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Nov 20, 2019 22:46
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Splode posted:The Germans did have a normal medium tanks and they were also pretty poo poo, if considerably more sensible. Whatever they made, they didn't have enough steel to make anything good in large numbers anyway. The mark III and IV panzers were very good designs, but they were essentially pre-war/very early war designs that eventually needed lots of modifications to remain in service. They also weren't cheap to produce (though they were cheaper to produce than the Tiger and such and the numbers sort of reflect that, but they were also produced over a longer period of time). See the remark in the last post about German industrial organization.
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Nov 20, 2019 22:48
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Randarkman posted:The Germans only built around 500 Tiger IIs and their industry largely wasn't even able to produce anything so quickly and efficiently as the Americans produced the Sherman, German factories operated closer to an old-fashioned workshop model than true assembly line mass production. This is spot-on. Here's a photo of the "Niebelungwerke" (fans of opera will recognize the reference) where they built medium tanks and later the Porsche Tigers which were made into Elefants/Ferdinands:  Note that there's no production line. They'd just assemble those things in place, moving in huge armor plates and suspension components with a single overhead crane. Also consider that the same "werke" was used to rebuild and/or repair any damaged Elefants. If your Elefant got badly hurt somewhere in Russia it had to be shipped back to Austria to get repaired. This is all documented in The Combat History of German Heavy Anti-Tank Unit 653: in World War II by Munch; it pulls from unit diaries and reading it makes you imagine the logistics officers of the unit weeping. Edit: And it's like this for EVERTHING. Helmets, uniforms, you name it, it was all made with similar systems. Cessna fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 22:51
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Splode posted:I'm pulling these ideas from wages of destruction, which is a fantastic book if you can stomach economic theory.
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Nov 20, 2019 22:51
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zoux posted:I was typing a thing and then realized I only think it to be true so: Is it a fact that Europe was a blood soaked battleground for centuries that only saw peace (some of it under brutal dictatorships of course) after WWII? Are you concerned that a peaceful Europe is an anomaly and the equilibrium state is one of conflict I think both the violence of Europe and the less-violent nature of the rest of the world are both over stated.
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Nov 20, 2019 22:52
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zoux posted:I was typing a thing and then realized I only think it to be true so: Is it a fact that Europe was a blood soaked battleground for centuries that only saw peace (some of it under brutal dictatorships of course) after WWII? quote:Are you concerned that a peaceful Europe is an anomaly and the equilibrium state is one of conflict I'm not concerned that people will automatically "slide" into war because in my opinion war is the result of a number of people backing into a number of situations and a series of choices, and despite Putin's saber rattling I don't think we're there yet. Nothing is automatic. It's not like what cultural historians of the fin-de-siecle or Weimar sometimes imply, that Europe or a single country is like a body, and when things get "degenerate" or "tense" enough then war happens automatically, as a result of that "sickness." It isn't the grace of God that makes our recent history different from Syria; it's the result of a number of specific conditions and actions, which could at each point have not happened. I also can't predict what might or might not happen in the future because I can't predict what might or might not be reasons to go to war for the people making the decisions in the future. Ask a guy in 1618 to imagine 2018 and he will imagine a better, more futuristic defenestration of Prague.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:00
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Milo and POTUS posted:If you're hobnobbing around with people from other services, how stringent are the rules, written or unwritten, about addressing people by their rank. Do nametags include rank or are you supposed to know all those too? That was me and it was on Hawaii (Pearl Harbor) and I brain froze and basically started to do both when he laughed at me and said no worries. I’m also the idiot who slipped on the pavement when greeting a chief at boot camp and accidentally “bowed” to him. He started screaming at me that we don’t bow in the navy especially on Pearl Harbor Day and other choice words. Crab Dad fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 23:01
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HEY GUNS posted:it is. statistically, this three generations of peace is an anomaly. a number of pro-EU germans have said this. My point is that three generations of peace is an anomaly anywhere in the world pre-1945. Europe's peace has less to do with WW2 freaking the gently caress out of Europe and making them drop their arms for a bit and more with it fundamentally altering the power dynamics in the world such that large scale conflicts between developed nations became less feasible. Even then you have a ton of proxy wars and colonial conflicts, a significant number of which European nations were involved in. Sure, France and Germany never threw down, but the French military sure as hell wasn't idle in the 50s and 60s.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:06
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zoux posted:Sorry I thought RNLN meant Norway, but yeah there's not really a European country that was, you know, fine during WWII. Spain I guess. Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Portugal.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:08
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Cyrano4747 posted:I think both the violence of Europe and the less-violent nature of the rest of the world are both over stated. 
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Nov 20, 2019 23:11
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HEY GUNS posted:that you have the moral framework that enables you to make that judgement vitiates your point--since 1945 we have, for the most part, tried to at least do the least bad thing possible. and we have improved. among other things this has formed the morality by which you judge the past. I understand your point, and it makes a lot of sense. And yet, it's almost the same as saying "bombing Afghan weddings is better than letting them being ruled by the Taliban (who are the absolute evil)". Should we be taking pains at excusing war crimes at all? Here in Finland we like to distance ourselves from Nazi Germany - we weren't 'allies', we were in COALITION. And at least we weren't sending Jewish citizens to Germany when asked for. Maybe we sent Jewish refugees and prisoners of war to Germany, but who counts that? In the end we have a wonderful democratic society here and we shouldn't look back at our dealings with Hitler, Stalin or other dictators. In the end, we have it better than Russia.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:19
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:they were not Depends which Nazis. As usual with them it's a mishmash. Don't take the likes of Rosenberg as representative, especially once they'd settled into power.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:29
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feedmegin posted:Depends which Nazis. As usual with them it's a mishmash. Don't take the likes of Rosenberg as representative, especially once they'd settled into power.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: this isn't to say that the US in particular is short of the kinds of atrocities I'm describing here, either. It's just the difference between the late 19th century policies towards the plains indians (collective reprisals for raids, the reservation system, etc) and something like My Lai. I'm curious about this definitionally and how you'd approach it. Granted I just finished reading The Perfect War by Gibson about Vietnam, but one of the arguments I took away from the book is that the defacto policy was body count and the war machine was there to turn dead bodies of civilians into 'enemy combatants'. I guess that plays into turning the blind eye, but I'm not necessarily seeing the distinction between an official policy, and an pseudo-official policy that was perpetuated throughout the active parts of the military.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:51
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Nenonen posted:Should we be taking pains at excusing war crimes at all?
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Nov 20, 2019 23:52
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HEY GUNS posted:if they had won it probably would have depended on who came out on top in court power struggles, a neopagan, an atheist, or an "aryan Christian." Rosenberg and co were already in the shade long before the war after the Concordat and the furore with Niemoeller, plus Hitler himself wasn't too sold on the pagan stuff. It would have been a minimal version of that last in the long term. They would definitely have to do something in the longer term though, saying that the Son of God was a mischling according to Nazi law (assuming God's Aryan) is a biiiit of a logical flaw. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Nov 21, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 23:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: this isn't to say that the US in particular is short of the kinds of atrocities I'm describing here, either. It's just the difference between the late 19th century policies towards the plains indians (collective reprisals for raids, the reservation system, etc) and something like My Lai. You should see how offended some people get when you bring up Guantanamo when they are discussing how evil the North Vietnamese were for not recognizing our aviators as POWs as opposed to criminals since there wasn't a declared war.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:01
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feedmegin posted:Rosenberg and co were already in the shade long before the war after the Concordat and the furore with Niemoeller, plus Hitler himself wasn't too sold on the pagan stuff. It would have been a minimal version of that last in the long term.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:12
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Cessna posted:This is spot-on. Chrysler plant, for comparison: 
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Nov 21, 2019 00:28
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HEY GUNS posted:Rosenberg personally was absolutely hated by the rest of them, but that doesn't mean that some flavour of neopaganism might not have become a prestige belief. This was already happening in the SS, where people went along with Himmler's wacky poo poo because he was powerful Oh if we're talking only committed high level Nazis then I don't see why you might not get all of them simultaneously, that's the Nazi style - until Himmler goes the way of Roehm or something anyway and Hitler nixes that poo poo. I was thinking of Nazi German society as a whole.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:29
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zoux posted:I don’t know what we’re going to do in fifty years after all the survivors and their children are gone. Or will that not even matter, doesn’t seem to matter to a lot of people right now. What does the denier say about an 85 year old woman with a tattoo on her arm Mass murders and campaigns of annihilation have happened in living memory of world war 2, just look at what happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:37
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Dance Officer posted:Mass murders and campaigns of annihilation have happened in living memory of world war 2, just look at what happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Syria been pretty dire too.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:45
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Sometimes when you read about other crimes committed (I've been doing some reading on what the Japanese were doing in Korea/Japan, not fun stuff) it is easy to lose sight, and start comparing it to the Holocaust. As awful as those war crimes were, it didn't destroy Chinese/Korean cultural or national identity and probably strengthened it as people were united against a common enemy. It’s not comparable to what happened during the Holocaust* but the Japanese occupation absolutely did destroy a monumental amount of Korean culture and history; tens of thousands of artifacts were looted (or destroyed) and the vast majority have never been returned, libraries and historical texts were taken in their thousands to Japan or destroyed outright; a huge amount of Korea’s historical arts were lost—Korean traditional dance as an art form only made it out alive (but not really intact) by the skin of its teeth for instance, out of like 200 pre-occupation types of liquor only a handful survived, historical buildings (including the entire main palace) were systematically destroyed; things in basically every facet of Korean traditional society. A lot of parts of society would surely have just been lost no matter what during a transition to modernity, but in large part this was an active effort on the part of the Japanese. Koreans didn’t have to keep their Japanese names after the liberation, but reconstructing this stuff has been an extremely slow process, and for a huge chunk of it, it’s just gone for good. And this isn’t even going into how the Japanese spent the occupation period teaching Korean kids and telling the world how worthless Korean traditional culture and history was, which is something that’s had a persistent and deleterious effect on the general understanding of Korean history to say the least. If you spend enough time reading about Korea online you’ll get to hear a lot of people saying how dull Korean traditional culture is compared to its neighbors’, and... well this is a large part of why. Conversely, in the decades it was destroying Korea’s traditional culture, Japan got to spend that time mythologizing and in places constructing its own. I expect this kind of thing also goes for many/most other colonial relationships, which is something I’ve been meaning to read about more; learning about just how pernicious that period of rule has been for how the world understands Korea has been really eye opening for me. *lots of Koreans are very quick to compare the two though, which is an argument I have been doing my best to avoid having to get into. Even aside from all the well known atrocities, most estimates put it at something like a million Koreans that died as a direct result of Japanese colonial policy, which makes me really not want to go all “well actually,” but as the thread was just talking about there’s still a lot that sets the Holocaust apart.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:47
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LingcodKilla posted:Syria been pretty dire too. Rwanda, Congo, Myanmar, Darfur all jump to mind as well.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:47
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Carillon posted:I'm curious about this definitionally and how you'd approach it. Granted I just finished reading The Perfect War by Gibson about Vietnam, but one of the arguments I took away from the book is that the defacto policy was body count and the war machine was there to turn dead bodies of civilians into 'enemy combatants'. I guess that plays into turning the blind eye, but I'm not necessarily seeing the distinction between an official policy, and an pseudo-official policy that was perpetuated throughout the active parts of the military. I think there's still a difference between a policy where awful outcomes are a side effect of working towards other goals, and where those outcomes are the goal itself. All those policies that you're looking at with Vietnam had some pretty loving awful objectives, but none of them was 'exterminate the Vietnamese people' or 'kill as many civilians - specifically civilians - as possible.' In much the same way the idea of "de-housing" enemy civilians during WW2 was morbid as gently caress and created huge numbers of dead civilians, but the bodies weren't the goal in and of itself. I'm well aware that there's an element of splitting hairs to this. None of this is meant to defend or support any of these policies, and I fully agree that they're hosed up when examined individually. There is a ton of room to criticize American policy in the Vietnam War as everything from monstrous to profoundly misguided. I'm coming at it from the direction of dealing with assholes who try to throw comparisons and whataboutisms around to deflect from how bad that the WW2 Axis powers in particular were, and it's that issue of what the end, desired outcome is that stands out the most to me as a simple usable rubric. It's not perfect, but it works as a short hand. What's the difference between how the US Army treated civilians in Vietnam and how the Wehrmacht treated civilians on the Eastern Front? With the Germans extermination and deprivation was itself a goal. Dead civilians didn't need to be counted as enemy combatants because no one gave a gently caress about that number - there was no fig leaf, no excuse needed. The dead civilians was the whole point of poo poo like the Hunger Plan. Meanwhile, the American bureaucrat deciding that an entire village of dead people were all VC has an agenda besides "kill as many Vietnamese as possible," be it a policy he's working to further or career goals or because he has stock in Rathyon. I fully admit that the difference is academic and does gently caress all to comfort the Vietnamese civilian who gets killed and ex post facto declared an enemy combatant.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:49
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Carillon posted:one of the arguments I took away from the book is that the defacto policy was body count and the war machine was there to turn dead bodies of civilians into 'enemy combatants'. Huh, I was just reading about how “head counts” (i.e. heads taken from slain enemies) as a Ming Chinese policy for assessing the effectiveness of their armies was terrible in a similar way—their soldiers and officers came to realize that a civilian head isn’t very hard to pass off as a military head, and so if they were shy of their quota they could get rewarded by just terrorizing nearby villages.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:53
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Koramei posted:
I don't think I'd want to argue with a Korean about what they went through being worse than the Holocaust or not, but something to also consider is that cultural genocide is a thing. For the people on the pointy end of it it's probably preferable to mass murder genocide, but the end result is still the destruction of the unique cultural stuff that marks a people as a people. What the Japanese were doing in Korea was absolutely cultural genocide. This is also where you can cast a super critical gaze on some of the Soviet resettlement policies directed at minority groups (including their Koreans) and early 20th Century US and Canadian native policies.
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Nov 21, 2019 00:55
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Dance Officer posted:Mass murders and campaigns of annihilation have happened in living memory of world war 2, just look at what happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia. I was looking at the list of genocides on wikipedia to see how those compared in scale and there were an insane number of genocides in the 20th century
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Nov 21, 2019 00:57
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Every once in a while a city administrator would get the bright idea to deal with a rat problem by paying a bounty on tails. This inevitably made the problem worse when people took up clandestine rat breeding.
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Nov 21, 2019 01:00
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P-Mack posted:Every once in a while a city administrator would get the bright idea to deal with a rat problem by paying a bounty on tails. This inevitably made the problem worse when people took up clandestine rat breeding. 
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Nov 21, 2019 01:01
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LingcodKilla posted:Syria been pretty dire too. I picked out Yugoslavia in particular because of what it had gone through in the war. And if you were 20 in 1941, you'd be 75 or so during the break up. It was still in living memory.
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Nov 21, 2019 01:06
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HEY GUNS posted:i love human beings It has an official and badass name: the Cobra effect. Per current thread topic, the name is a legacy of colonialism. The mental image of people breeding cobras, though, to bilk money out of the Raj, is pretty great.
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Nov 21, 2019 01:07
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Vavrek posted:The mental image of people breeding cobras, though, to bilk money out of the Raj, is pretty great. It's a great racket until it bites you in the rear end.
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Nov 21, 2019 01:08
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P-Mack posted:Every once in a while a city administrator would get the bright idea to deal with a rat problem by paying a bounty on tails. This inevitably made the problem worse when people took up clandestine rat breeding. And so the city came to be ruled by rat kings
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Nov 21, 2019 01:08
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zoux posted:I was looking at the list of genocides on wikipedia to see how those compared in scale and there were an insane number of genocides in the 20th century History is better recorded. Also, a lot of pre-modern warfare was debatably genocidal, but aren't discussed within the same context. Sparta razing and enslaving the whole city of Plataea is functionally a genocide, since everybody regarded Plataeans as a cohesive and fundamentally separate group from Thebans or other Greeks. Enslaving a whole population after defeat was just what the Greeks did by convention, and if the fundamental identity of a people is their city or village, then basically any Greek war of conquest or slavetaking was genocidal. I don't think it's helpful to discuss pre-modern warfare in the same context of most 20th century genocides, because it doesn't seem like the Romans or Greeks or Mongols spent any time justifying it to themselves. The aspect that distinguishes genocide to 20th century people comes from the way that its perpetrators take the mindset and apparatus of the post-industrial, bureaucratic world and twist it in order to perpetrate mass murder in the name of some ideology. The Romans just invaded and decided that they now owned everything and everybody, and killed their property as they saw fit because that's how they did things.
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Nov 21, 2019 01:22
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Carillon posted:I'm curious about this definitionally and how you'd approach it. Granted I just finished reading The Perfect War by Gibson about Vietnam, but one of the arguments I took away from the book is that the defacto policy was body count and the war machine was there to turn dead bodies of civilians into 'enemy combatants'. I guess that plays into turning the blind eye, but I'm not necessarily seeing the distinction between an official policy, and an pseudo-official policy that was perpetuated throughout the active parts of the military. Desired head counts for the Americans were always dependent on how many active units of VC or NVA were supposed to be there. That number was usually much much smaller than the total population of Vietnamese civilians in the area. I can't remember the specific operation now but there was one where estimated amount of displaced civilians was like 50,000 while the body count was more like 300. Genocide is unmistakable identified by the intention of the perpetrators to be performing their actions in order to kill or destroy the targeted group. The US military wasn't in Vietnam to destroy the Vietnamese people, the Saigon government is a pretty good indication of that. The unrigorously enforced incentive, to kill civilians in order to meet body count expectations - amounting to a small percentage of the total population- isn't evidence of genocide either.
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Nov 21, 2019 01:44
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FuturePastNow posted:Chrysler plant, for comparison: Real weird to see the M3 and M4 being assembled simultaneously.
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Nov 21, 2019 01:53
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:History is better recorded. Also, a lot of pre-modern warfare was debatably genocidal, but aren't discussed within the same context. Sparta razing and enslaving the whole city of Plataea is functionally a genocide, since everybody regarded Plataeans as a cohesive and fundamentally separate group from Thebans or other Greeks. Enslaving a whole population after defeat was just what the Greeks did by convention, and if the fundamental identity of a people is their city or village, then basically any Greek war of conquest or slavetaking was genocidal. What about Carthage
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Nov 21, 2019 02:00
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