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Flappy Bert posted:I think I've seen you talk about this before - was it because they didn't want to scar a generation out of hosed-up Nazi mercy, or was it because they weren't going to be able to find enough people to agree, even liquored and drugged to the gills? The former. It wasn't just Nazi mercy, they had plans for those dudes. Hitler was huge on the "crucible of the front" being where the best, most patriotic, citizens were made and how necessary those people were to passing on proper German (Nazi) virtues to the next generation. Again, this Veerhoven bit is basically what they honestly, earnestly wanted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBxgrr0wL8M Can't have the Nazi Michael Ironside extoling the virtues of fascism to high schoolers if he's too busy drinking himself into an early grave and having flashbacks to one of a dozen massacres.
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Nov 29, 2021 18:47
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bewbies posted:i had to do a month as a casualty notification officer, man was that fun Saving Private Ryan does that part pretty well I think, here's the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_RS3oBFMjc "I just learned that this afternoon their mother is going to be getting all three telegrams" so they send a car
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Nov 29, 2021 18:56
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Hunt11 posted:Segregation and different treatment was a major issue during both of the world wars. Especially when it came to being stationed overseas where the local population could earn the ire of white soldiers by not being as racist as they were. It was such an issue that when they were prepping soldiers for being stationed in the UK they had to include a segment just about this topic. Is that Burgess Meredith?
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Nov 29, 2021 19:01
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Scratch Monkey posted:Is that Burgess Meredith? Yes, that's Burgess Meredith.
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Nov 29, 2021 19:10
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Nothingtoseehere posted:They cared about the welfare of the executioners - they were brave patriotic germans doing what needed to be done for the motherland. The manpower sink of constant replacement of executioners due to breakdown hammered it home, but it's not like they had to go hunting for hardened immoral killers for this type of work. IIRC it was Himmler in particular who was very concerned for the mental well-being of his executioners. He went to observe some executions of various kinds and generally couldn't take it, then spoke to the local commanders who basically told him "imagine how it is for my men, if that's how you felt as an observer?" which essentially is a catalyst for him and others to go looking for a more "humane" and indirect method of mass execution. There's actually a decent amount of stuff on this in the Holocaust chapters of Athnony Beevors big book on World War II, quite a good book overall actually IMO. Wages of Destruction also includes accounts of an event where (I think) Himmler calls together a bunch of industrialists to tell them of the work his men in the SS have been doing, generally framed as a neccesity an an ultimate good, but also terrible and a great sacrifice on behalf of his men in the SS, that will go unsung, but he wants these men to know, appreciate and remember that so-called sacrifice. e: I wonder if some of the same reasoning as regards mental well-being (or not wanting to have to deal with mass numbers of psychological breakdowns) is part of the reason for what you see in some other cases of organized mass-murder where quite often if you read up on it, it seems like or is implied that the actual number of executioners was very small, often combined with the executions being carried out somewhat discretely in a padded-cell and procedures in place to quickly move bodies and all that, maybe (at least so it seems to me) so that both the inmates/victims and guards in general might possibly delude themselves just enough to put what's actually going on out of mind. Obviously the most extreme example of that that comes to mind is the NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin who basically carried out the entire Katyn massacre by his own hand. He also performed lot of executions during Stalin's purges, like alot of the big ones, Zinoviev, Tuchachevsky, Yezhov, yeah, that was him and he probably did alot of the ones further down the chain as well. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Nov 30, 2021 |
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Nov 29, 2021 19:10
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Hunt11 posted:Segregation and different treatment was a major issue during both of the world wars. Especially when it came to being stationed overseas where the local population could earn the ire of white soldiers by not being as racist as they were. It was such an issue that when they were prepping soldiers for being stationed in the UK they had to include a segment just about this topic. I highly recommend people check out the audible versions (France, UK, and Australia) of the pamphlets they gave to US Troops on how not to be a tool abroad (the tea-coffee stuff is funny) and with a period sounding narrator. Now the US made a poo poo load of these. I've found some of them over the years, including for Iraq and other areas in the ME and North Africa. Very very interesting reads. In fact here is the Iraq one (obviously their originally US Gov, so their public domain), but I'd just google the title. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo5579572.html
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Nov 29, 2021 19:16
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Randarkman posted:Apart from Japanese, who had some segregated (I think) battalions and regiments that fought in Europe, were other non-White soldiers segregated though or statistically separated from the White soldiers? Like IIRC there's been some concern that Hispanic Americans often appear quite invisible in the history of the war compared to African Americans and Japanese, because by and large they served on equal terms as White soldiers, which has presented issues of it being pretty simple to overlook and write out their participation. For a super quick idea of how the US government thinks about race in WWII, check this 1940 census form. If you scroll down near the bottom you can find the codes for "color or race" (question 10): pre:Code Name W White Neg Negro In Indian Chi Chinese Jp Japanese Fil Filipino Hin Hindu Kor Korean The enumerator instructions posted:45. Column 10. Color or race.—For symbols to be entered in this column, see the note at the bottom of the schedule. Any mixtures of white and nonwhite blood should be recorded according to the race of the nonwhite parent. A person of mixed Negro and Indian blood should be reported as Negro unless the Indian blood greatly predominates and he is universally accepted in the community as an Indian. Other mixtures of nonwhite parentage should be reported according to the race of the father. Mexicans are to be returned as white, unless definitely of Indian or other nonwhite race. FWIW I'm interested in Japanese American participation in WWII for familial reasons and as far as I can remember notifications were through the usual telegram method.
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Nov 29, 2021 19:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:And an MIA (note that this is "over Germany" so probably a flier): Good news, everyone! http://www.americanairmuseum.com/person/232173
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Nov 29, 2021 19:42
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Whoops wrong thread
SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Nov 29, 2021 |
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Nov 29, 2021 20:18
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Groda posted:Good news, everyone! Dear Sir or Madam, We regret to inform you your son EXPLODED Best Regards, Adjutant General P.S.: He got better
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Nov 29, 2021 20:43
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Alchenar posted:The fastest period of murders in the Holocaust is in late 1941 where you have groups of Jews being taken out of captured Russian cities in trains out into the woods and literally machine-gunned as they're pulled out of the carriages. It was fast but even the self-selecting virulent anti-semites who volunteered for this duty because they wanted to murder innocents that much were having psychotic breakdowns within two weeks of doing this. This discussion brings in mind one of the most interesting movies about terribly boring bureaucratic meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ave9RHTqkI The jokes, the side discussions dissing other departments, good cognac (for men, but note that Heydrich never actually drinks), the one bureaucrat asking for each detail, and of course presentations with a whiteboard... If it would be not the subject, this would be really normal inter-agency government meeting (with less cognac and uniforms I would guess nowadays). Note also how much Dr. Lange (responsible for the Einzatsgruppe A) drinks... Also  
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Nov 29, 2021 20:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:The former. That movie is insanely under-rated as a critique of fascism. Way too many people come out of it with this idea that it’s just dumb schlock that bumbled into a Nazi costume, instead of it being very purposeful and deliberate in just letting fascists act how they want and let their absurd ideas crash around them under their own weight. Verhoeven even redid parts of Triumph of the Will shot-for-shot! Shameful lack of recognition for a movie that manages to smuggle Actual Serious Art poo poo into a very entertaining dumb action movie. Also Neil-Patrick Harris’s nickname on set was Doogie Himmler and if that doesn’t make you laugh you’re made of stone.
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Nov 29, 2021 20:50
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Letmebefrank posted:This discussion brings in mind one of the most interesting movies about terribly boring bureaucratic meeting: I do prefer the BBC version if only because there's an awful lot of talent on screen and Kenneth Branagh nails Heydrich : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKwvA8ns9wo
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Nov 29, 2021 21:03
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what's 'ulio'
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Nov 29, 2021 21:09
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ChubbyChecker posted:what's 'ulio' James Alexander Ulio was US Adjunt General during WWII
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Nov 29, 2021 21:18
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Cyrano4747 posted:Again, this Veerhoven bit is basically what they honestly, earnestly wanted: 30 year old High School students flirting with 8 bit video games?
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Nov 29, 2021 21:26
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steinrokkan posted:James Alexander Ulio was US Adjunt General during WWII  lol i thought that it was some sort of abbreviation
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Nov 29, 2021 21:30
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Xiahou Dun posted:That movie is insanely under-rated as a critique of fascism. Way too many people come out of it with this idea that it’s just dumb schlock that bumbled into a Nazi costume, instead of it being very purposeful and deliberate in just letting fascists act how they want and let their absurd ideas crash around them under their own weight. Verhoeven even redid parts of Triumph of the Will shot-for-shot! Verhoeven really, really isn't subtle when he starts throwing elbows at authoritarianism in general and especially at fascism. Born in 1938 in the Netherlands, I wonder why that could be . . . . Groda posted:Good news, everyone! I am legit happy to see that. 
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Nov 29, 2021 21:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:That movie is insanely under-rated as a critique of fascism. Way too many people come out of it with this idea that it’s just dumb schlock that bumbled into a Nazi costume, instead of it being very purposeful and deliberate in just letting fascists act how they want and let their absurd ideas crash around them under their own weight. Verhoeven even redid parts of Triumph of the Will shot-for-shot! Too many people didn't get the joke.
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Nov 30, 2021 03:02
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MRC48B posted:Too many people didn't get the joke. This is something that amazes me. I've always been a little annoyed by ST because too many people have congratulated themselves on getting that it's satire. When I say I don't like the movie I'm always met with a chorus of "you just don't get it." Yeah, I got it, it's a satire of fascism. It's like the perfect propaganda movie made by the human empire of the film. It's so blunt that I find it almost tedious. Then I read the comment sections of any media about it and am horrified at the legions of people who didn't get that they're essentially watching a Nazi propaganda movie played straight (which makes the satire that much better.) So, I admire what Verhoeven did without actually finding it a fun movie to watch. That and everyone thinking they're clever as hell for spamming "I'm doing my part," "service guarantees citizenship," and "would you like to know more?" without an ounce of irony considering this is the type of thing that "I'd by that for a dollar!" was making fun of.
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Nov 30, 2021 03:13
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Thanks to everyone for the next of kin info! The reason I was wondering so much, was I didn't know in WWII that personal notifications were extremely rare, or if they even occurred at all (unlike today), so I was wondering how the US handled it (idea of a white officer appearing to do NoK notifications in Black majority area seemed strange). I was also wondering about Dorie Miller, since he was a legit national hero among Black communities (and honestly even with a carrier named after him, he deserves the MOH), how his death was handled from say a white solider of similar stature. Marshal Prolapse fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Nov 30, 2021 |
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Nov 30, 2021 03:21
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I think Starship Troopers is terrible satire. It simply references the aesthetics of fascism without actually saying anything about it. It's the guy at the party who dresses in a Nazi uniform as a "joke". Being misunderstood by the majority of viewers was an inevitability. Insofars it critiques anything, it's much more about the popular image of the Vietnam war than anything else. It's about kids being carted off to the butt end of nowhere to fight an unintelligible enemy with ill defined goals. It's about assault rifles and airdrops, search and destroy operations, drill sergeants with big personalities. It's a fully televised war on live TV news. It's scrabbling around in tunnels. It's not WWII, it's Vietnam with a tiny bit of space Nazi set dressing on top. Fangz fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Nov 30, 2021 |
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Nov 30, 2021 03:22
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PeterCat posted:Then I read the comment sections of any media about it and am horrified at the legions of people who didn't get that they're essentially watching a Nazi propaganda movie played straight (which makes the satire that much better.) This seems an apt time to bring up The Iron Dream, a novel that contains a story-within-a-story ("Lord of the Swastika") supposedly written by Hitler, followed by an in-universe thorough takedown by a literary critic. Spinrad, author of The Iron Dream posted:To make drat sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler's saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable. Almost everyone got the point... And yet one review appeared in a fanzine that really gave me pause. "This is a rousing adventure story and I really enjoyed it," the gist of it went. "Why did Spinrad have to spoil the fun with all this muck about Hitler?" And the American Nazi Party put it on their recommended reading list 
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Nov 30, 2021 03:23
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The starship troopers movie is awful, Showgirls is and will always be Verhoevens magnum opus
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Nov 30, 2021 03:24
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PeterCat posted:This is something that amazes me. I've always been a little annoyed by ST because too many people have congratulated themselves on getting that it's satire. When I say I don't like the movie I'm always met with a chorus of "you just don't get it." I will add that "Desire to Know More Intensifies" is still funny. I'll also add Michael Ironside and Doogie....the cast was....uh lacking. Basil Poledouris kicked rear end as usual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6sOmPCKkK0 It's also possible people didn't care and just went "weird uniforms, but hey lots of gore." I will say the Sunrise adaptation of Starship Troopers is generally regarded as far more faithful (but also boring) for those interested. Regardless I think we can all agree Death of Stalin is a far better movie, even if lacking Basil and Michael Ironside.
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Nov 30, 2021 03:26
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Randarkman posted:Apart from Japanese, who had some segregated (I think) battalions and regiments that fought in Europe, were other non-White soldiers segregated though or statistically separated from the White soldiers? Like IIRC there's been some concern that Hispanic Americans often appear quite invisible in the history of the war compared to African Americans and Japanese, because by and large they served on equal terms as White soldiers, which has presented issues of it being pretty simple to overlook and write out their participation. I did a little digging and there were units that were predominately Hispanic like the Texas 141st NG unit. But that unit had a mix of white officers added. And that seems to be a common thread. Lots of units that are predominately Hispanic are usually mixed with Native Americans as well. The Rough Riders were originally intended to be set up that way as well.
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Nov 30, 2021 03:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:Verhoeven really, really isn't subtle when he starts throwing elbows at authoritarianism in general and especially at fascism. Born in 1938 in the Netherlands, I wonder why that could be . . . . I remember pointing out to my brother that Robocop is a Jesus allegory. My brother was in the process of working toward seminary while finishing up his degree in classics. It was like hitting him with a 2x4 as he processed it. Sometimes Verhoeven can be so lacking in subtly that it kinda wraps around to being subtle.
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Nov 30, 2021 03:43
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Really Verhoeven's stuff is a big old jumbled mess of images that you can project anything you want on to it and insist it's definitely what the story is obviously showing. Calling the guy shooting people's dicks off Jesus is a new one to me though. I prefer the RoboCop as trans allegory reading
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Nov 30, 2021 04:16
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Fangz posted:Really Verhoeven's stuff is a big old jumbled mess of images that you can project anything you want on to it and insist it's definitely what the story is obviously showing. Calling the guy shooting people's dicks off Jesus is a new one to me though. When they kill Alex Murphy, the first time he's shot, he's laying on the ground, arms spread as if on the cross and he gets a hand blown off. Then the whole rebirth and cleansing of OCP of it's sins.
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Nov 30, 2021 04:27
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Yeah and Thomas doubted Jesus' resurrection until he saw Jesus doing his classic spinning his pistol before he holstered it trick.
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Nov 30, 2021 04:40
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Fangz posted:Really Verhoeven's stuff is a big old jumbled mess of images that you can project anything you want on to it and insist it's definitely what the story is obviously showing. Calling the guy shooting people's dicks off Jesus is a new one to me though. desire to know more intensifies
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Nov 30, 2021 04:47
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MazelTovCocktail posted:I will add that "Desire to Know More Intensifies" is still funny. I'll also add Michael Ironside and Doogie....the cast was....uh lacking. Basil Poledouris kicked rear end as usual. Agreed on Death of Stalin. Is this u-nanimous?
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Nov 30, 2021 05:14
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Randarkman posted:Obviously the most extreme example of that that comes to mind is the NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin who basically carried out the entire Katyn massacre by his own hand. He also performed lot of executions during Stalin's purges, like alot of the big ones, Zinoviev, Tuchachevsky, Yezhov, yeah, that was him and he probably did alot of the ones further down the chain as well. I was actually trying to remember Blokhin's name reading the thread prior to your post. Has anyone ever written anything about the psychology of this? I read Lewis Yablonsky's Robopaths years ago, but that was more about low level Einsatzgruppen kind of things. I always wonder if Blokhin was just broken enough to be okay with killing, or whether it was something that had to be done and that doing it himself would ensure it was done quickly with minimal trauma for everyone helping it along.
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Nov 30, 2021 07:37
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Thomamelas posted:When they kill Alex Murphy, the first time he's shot, he's laying on the ground, arms spread as if on the cross and he gets a hand blown off. Then the whole rebirth and cleansing of OCP of it's sins. I don't remember the parts of the new testament where Jesus' story started with him dying and ended with him killing Caesar. Just because something used elementary symbolism, doesn't mean it's really an allegory for the thing it references in any meaningful way.
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Nov 30, 2021 09:09
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Regardless I think we can all agree Death of Stalin is a far better movie, even if lacking Basil and Michael Ironside. Regardless I think we can all agree potatoes are better than turtles ?
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Nov 30, 2021 09:12
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steinrokkan posted:I don't remember the parts of the new testament where Jesus' story started with him dying and ended with him killing Caesar. Uh, did you read all the way to the end?
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Nov 30, 2021 09:58
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Fangz posted:Really Verhoeven's stuff is a big old jumbled mess of images that you can project anything you want on to it and insist it's definitely what the story is obviously showing. Calling the guy shooting people's dicks off Jesus is a new one to me though. read the dead sea scrolls
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Nov 30, 2021 10:30
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Elissimpark posted:I was actually trying to remember Blokhin's name reading the thread prior to your post. Has anyone ever written anything about the psychology of this? I read Lewis Yablonsky's Robopaths years ago, but that was more about low level Einsatzgruppen kind of things. Soldaten has a little bit of that iirc. Wehrmacht troops just casually going "yeah the SS invited us to help out with a mass shooting, some of my mates went, said it was a grand old time." It may have hosed them up after the fact but it's crazy that everyone doing the mass killing was a volunteer.
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Nov 30, 2021 13:06
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On the topic of psychological and other casualties amongst the German ww2 forces, I seem to recall reading somewhere (possibly here?) that there were plans in place to exterminate a large proportion of wounded or psychologically crippled Wehrmacht veterans if Germany managed to win WW2- can anyone expand on this, or is it something I misread? I’ve not been able to find any info from googling around.
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Nov 30, 2021 13:17
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Camrath posted:On the topic of psychological and other casualties amongst the German ww2 forces, I seem to recall reading somewhere (possibly here?) that there were plans in place to exterminate a large proportion of wounded or psychologically crippled Wehrmacht veterans if Germany managed to win WW2- can anyone expand on this, or is it something I misread? I’ve not been able to find any info from googling around. Not something I'd heard about unless you're thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4 maybe.
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