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Dr. Fishopolis posted:Millions of rapes, miles behind the lines, mostly in 1945. You have zero loving clue what you're talking about. You have any idea how loving difficult it was to herd the millions of men in the rear echelons of the Soviet Army, while ALSO commanding the front line formations of millions more, in a country severely depleted of manpower and with constant logistical problems that drew the attention of all the military talent, with an army drawing conscripts from dozens of disparate ethnicities speaking many different languages and at incredibly different levels of familiarity with the modern world? Hundreds of thousands of those conscripts were thrown from villages where they had not even seen a lightbulb in their lives to fight the greatest industrial war in history. And they were kept at the frontlines for months, if not years on end, with virtually no leave or rotation, unlike soldiers from Western Allied armies, subjected to constant stress, material destitution, and to a total, mind warping hatred of all things German for committing the worst genocide in human history. Meanwhile their commanders had the combined struggle of making their formations trudge forward against unceasing resistance, against incredible natural and man-made obstacles found in Prussia, AND of making sure they do not lose favour with Stalin and his political lackeys. With a situation like that, a humanitarian form of war becomes impossible, the root of the problem was systemic, and impossible to fix under wartime conditions with the resources and situation the SU was dealt. Blame could be laid on Soviet political leadership for making the Red Army less institutionally capable than it could have been, but that's it. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Feb 16, 2017 |
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Feb 16, 2017 09:25
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JFairfax posted:I think the point is that even if they wanted to stop the rape of Germans by the Red Army, the Russian commanders would not have been able to for a host of organisational and logistic reasons. Yes, the strain on the Soviet command structure was incredible, and doubled by the existence of an overbearing party apparatus. The idea that they had the resources to particularly care about the ethical conduct of heir troops is dubious at best. Obviously this means I support rape. The other question is, would they have cared if they had that privilege. Also the idea that expecting an army made up of an incredible number of different groups, held constantly as near the breaking point of human capabilities as possible, to behave without discipline when given an opportunity, is racist or something. Those troops, coming from position of extreme destitution that haunted them their entire lives, acted as any such person would when given a free pass - when the Soviets camped near the village where my grandparents lived (which was in a friendly Slavic territory, in the very final days of the war), they took virtually everything they thought was of value, there was a unit of Far Eastern troops that took even the most mundane objects like the aforementioned lightbulbs because for them they were luxury items. Now compond this behavior by ethnic hatred and months of desensitization to violence (also advancing through hundreds of miles of burned land where tens of millions civilians were killed and all civilization systematically eradicated). Finally, yes generals were extremely angry about traffic jams. That is not an example of frivolous wasting of time, those traffic jams were crippling the army, and the Soviets went to extreme, seemingly counterintuitive lengths to relieve themselves of logistical problems because they were loving way over their head for much of the war. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 08:39
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:Explain in detail how raping civilians in occupied enemy territory is a defensive military action. It was a byproduct of military actions. I don't even see what the argument is about, nobody is saying that rape was defensible, the argument seems to be about whether Soviet soldiers should be posthumously indicted as war criminals or something.
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Feb 17, 2017 08:54
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Flowers For Algeria posted:If only the generals had been as angry about rape than about traffic jams... Well, they weren't. It would probably be more productive to ask why that was so. I personally think it was a combination of relatively abstracted command structure where the physical as well as institutional distance between the lowest and highest officers was incredible, of the ideological nature of the war, also due to the bureaucratization and "rationalization" of war under the auspices of the state which made focus on humanitarian concerns and personal ethics of commanders far less likely to come into play, and even unwelcome or disqualifying. Russian generals were probably also less likely to care out of vindictiveness, I will admit that.
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Feb 17, 2017 14:23
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Brainiac Five posted:The number of known cases of rape and sexual assault committed by Sherman's army during the Atlanta campaign, the March to the Sea, and the Carolinas campaign, is in the single digits. Considering that vengeance against civilian populations was a major part of the South Carolina portion and that this includes crimes against the black population, who most of the soldiers would not have seen as fully equal, we must be stunned at this incredible outlier in history, of soldiers that are human rather than subhuman wretches. First off, the life of a Civil War soldier was nothing like the life of an Eastern Front conscript. Second, Sherman wasn't the only Union general, and throughout the war there was an obvious shift from outrage sparked by any act of violence against civilians and their property, and even arresting officers not preventing property destruction, to tacitly endorsing wholesale destruction as a means to an end, which in practice entailed plenty of deaths and rapes, and supply units would scour the land for liquor and loot as much as legitimate supplies with little to no reprimand from their superiors.
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Feb 17, 2017 14:33
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Brainiac Five posted:It is more productive to engage in apologetics and justifications? This only makes sense if you wish to encourage rape and sexual assault in the future. The fact it happened means there was a reason why it happened, or rather an enabling structural factor. Identifying this factor is key to understanding how to prevent events from repeating. Also it is going to uncover the fundamental injustice inherent to war, which makes clean, noble wars only a matter of historical revisionism. It's not as much apologetics of particular acts committed in war, but rather an indictment of romanticizing wars, in general or even in particular, by imagining they can be "improved". Because in war traffic jams will always be million times more important than civilian murders and rape. Brainiac Five posted:who most of the soldiers would not have seen as fully equal, we must be stunned at this incredible outlier in history, of soldiers that are human rather than subhuman wretches. Most Red Army soldiers had good conduct. This is hardly an argument against structural issues inherent in war, since it is at best an argument to a degree in which they manifest at different times under different circumstances. Also are you saying Russians were subhuman wretches? It seems that in a case where on the one hand hundreds of thousands conduct themselves perfectly, while on the other side millions act as a furious mob, there is something wrong with the latter group that can't be explained by chance. Are they, a representative sample of their nation, simply savages, or are they the product of something? steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 14:35
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Brainiac Five posted:You ignorant sack of poo poo, the "wholesale destruction" is what I'm loving referring to! Don't talk about things you don't know poo poo about. lol, ok, the Union army was literally a pure white crusader force shrouded in an aura of pure righteousness. Please continue with your fantasies of a squeaky clean war conducted by rational humans making no mistakes and committing no crimes and always first checking for collateral damage before making any decision, you are doing a lot of good with that. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 14:54
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"War on drugs leads to organized crime and civil wars" "Why are you justifying organized crime and civil wars"
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Feb 17, 2017 14:57
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Brainiac Five posted:So you spend a lot of time fantasizing about rapes that never happened, huh? "The Confederate records were destroyed, but a perusal of only five percent of Federal records reveal that over thirty court martial trials were held due to instances of rape; hanging or firing squad being the usual punishment if convicted.[16]" "Crystal N. Feimster is no stranger to uncomfortable narratives. A feminist scholar in the department of African-American studies at Yale University, Feimster has spent much of her academic career addressing and unpacking the often-controversial stories woven through racial and sexualized violence. In a recent New York Times piece, Feimster writes that sexualized violence was “common to the wartime experience of Southern women, white and black. Whether they lived on large plantations or small farms, in towns, cities or in contraband camps, white and black women all over the American South experienced the sexual trauma of war.” She has found 450 court martial cases from the Civil War related to rape and other sexualized violence, but says that, as we still find today, the crime was “overwhelmingly underreported.” I spoke with Feimster about her research, and on the connection between what happened in the early U.S. conflict and what we’re seeing in places like Syria today." Also how much trust am I supposed to have in crime reporting in the loving 1860s in the middle of a war. You are relying on the judgment of white fighting men to determine their own culpability and the scope of their crimes, so excuse me if i do not put much weight in your arguments. A clean war is a war where the victims were never heard, and no records kept.
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Feb 17, 2017 15:06
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Brainiac Five posted:I see we have someone else eager to write rape off as a natural phenomenon that cannot be eliminated. Guilty conscience, perhaps? It could be eliminated if we only trusted our troops and supported them. That's the way towards progress against violence, sexual or otherwise. Also if we had charismatic, dashing, chivalrous leaders like Sherman who could tame the roguish nature of his men through sheer tyranny of will, and dispel the evil in the heart of men with a single word. The underreporting during ACW is going to hide far, far, far more than 99% of cases. I posted the two cases as two contrasting views, the former, de facto yours, which trivializes the structural problem by focusing on skewed statistics and the good will of your heroes, and the other, which actually unearths the unheard voices, and exposes them as a virtually endless quantity, deliberately pushed back.
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Feb 17, 2017 15:56
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JFairfax posted:IT CAN BE ELIMINATED BY NOT HAVING WARS YOU loving IMBICILE You misunderstand, it's totally possible for commanders to turn blind eye to looting, pillaging, killing, but still make sure that absolutely no rape happens. That's how it works in the world of just, well disciplined armies of the past. When a Union general literally said he willfully closed his eyes to the atrocities his men brought upon their destination for two hours, I'm sure he actually secretly peeked to ensure no raping was going on. When hundreds of thousands of deserters roamed the countryside, they were secretly monitored that they would not misbehave. When supply troops left their commands for days to seek supplies, they never did anything wrong out of fear of shaming their generals. And when something did happen, you can be sure the victim could just march to General Grant and air their grievances. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 16:00
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Brainiac Five posted:Look, if condemning rape and rapists would mean condemning yourself, you should still have the courage to do so instead of aligning yourself with evil. You are a child molester. Now that we have brought the discourse to your level, let us proceed. Brainiac Five posted:It's extremely telling how not raping people is considered unrealistically heroic by y'all. You should turn yourselves in, or take other appropriate punitive measures if your country of residence has statute of limitations on your particular crimes. You would rather whitewash history than admit that humans are susceptible to doing the most wicked things if pressed enough. Rape has been not only known as an individual crime during war, it has also functioned as a form of induction ritual: "former fighters describe participating in rape as a violent socialization practice that served to cut ties with fighters’ past lives and to signal their commitment to their new groups." It is not just a bunch of people failing due to their individual motives, it's the result of inherent forces war expresses on people engaged in it. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 16:10
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Brainiac Five posted:You're insisting rape is an inevitable phenomenon that cannot be stopped without eliminating violence, which is a handy justification for it. Why someone would attempt to justify it if they didn't have a skull that was caved in is, um, fairly obvious to me. Maybe you're just really stupid/enamored with how much of a realist you are? Once again: "War on drug causes a spike in organized violence and state vulnerability" "Why do you justify organized violence?" "Poverty causes people to mug others." "Why do you justify assault?"
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Feb 17, 2017 16:17
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Brainiac Five posted:Why do you all think rape is natural and inevitable? You just assume this without offering any reasoning, which leads me to believe that it derives from your subjective experiences. Do you think that saying "People do commit burglaries" makes you a burglar? Why do people commit rapes in peacetime? There must be a rational reason for it in each case, according to your logic. And does admitting that rapes happen in peacetime make you a rapist? Also prove that a higher portion of soldiers commits rape than civilians, if they think they can get away with it. I don't think so. I think war creates a form of lawlessness that empowers these rapists to act, and even to boast about it and use it as a tool of subjugating fellow soldiers, as commonly happens. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 16:21
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Brainiac Five posted:You are claiming that rape is something that anyone would do and is a natural consequence of violence, so unless you are claiming to not be human yourself... I'm claiming that it's a thing some people do, for reasons I do not pretend to understand. You are the one who is yelling incoherently that everybody is a rapist (or nobody is, and nothing in between).
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Feb 17, 2017 16:54
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Brainiac Five posted:This entire line of argument amounts to an insistence that rapists are not responsible for their actions, inventing a biological theory of war as a justification. Rapists are responsible for their personal actions during wars and those who perpetrate them are responsible for creating an environment where all crimes become exponentially more common. Though it is also undeniable that one's personality is not sheltered from its external conditions, and that changes in conditions and incentives cause changes in behaviour. Which is however just an extenuating circumstance, just like growing up as an orphan would be one for a thief, not an argument for innocence and against punishment. Then again, war also makes punishment infinitely less likely, and does so inherently. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 16:57
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So ultimately the blame lies both on personal pathologies of the culprits, and those whose cheering and scheming enabled the war, such as Effectronica.
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Feb 17, 2017 17:04
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Brainiac Five posted:Your efforts to clarify yourself lead to the argument that there is no connection between misogyny and rape. Typical of your ilk, o bohemian corporal. You aren't even reading my posts anymore, why are you even bothering to respond. Maybe you are, however, a qualified expert on what causes people to rape, and could inform me first hand.
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Feb 17, 2017 17:06
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"There's absolutely no reason to assume that there are rapists in the armed forces, and just thinking so makes you suspect, only a sick mind could conceive of such an unpatriotic thing" says Effectronica, as his country covers up another couple dozen cases of sexual assault by soldiers and cops.
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Feb 17, 2017 17:09
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"Rape culture isn't a thing that exists, and it has no social impacts," says a prominent feminist.
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Feb 17, 2017 17:15
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Brainiac Five posted:You all are arguing that rape is an inevitable consequence of "war", which means that fighting back against the Nazis inevitably meant rape committed by the people defending. Thus, in order to eliminate rape, according to the Snaggletooth-Imperial Wizard brain trust, we cannot ever resist with violence against things if we don't want to be responsible for rapes happening. This opinion may shock you, but the Nazis were bad for starting a war. The idea that the resistance at all instances clean and virtuous is false, but whatever injustices it produces were the product of Nazi aggression throwing entire countries into disarray and giving birth to toxic militarism / vigilantism. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 19:36
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Okay, it's a criminal action, so what's wrong with aggressively prosecuting the rapists and all the people responsible? Absolutely nothing, but an army will never prosecute such crimes in earnest, because it's not how it is structured to work. There may be token concessions to decency as we see these days, but those are few and far between, and arguably the military apparatus fights against making them teeth and nails.
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Feb 17, 2017 21:34
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Sounds easy if - the military isn't in collusion with the rest of the state - the military can't hide the truth and strongarm other institutions It's feasible in small armies that are pretty chill and not really all that important to the working of the country, but hardly in a country like the US, or during a major war.
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Feb 17, 2017 21:47
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stone cold posted:Sure sounds like you like coming up with reasons we as a society should go easy on rapists and give up! Exactly, a fight against militarism is practically a fight for mandatory rape. The military must be politically destroyed before civilian oversight can become a thing. Hell, you know what, I'm gonna say that military personnel having any political clout whatsoever is the chief reason why violence against civilians becomes permissible in militaries. Not just because of the personal activities of these people, but also because it allows the military a privileged position of maintaining institutions parallel to the civilian state and undermining the power of the latter. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 21:49
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Flowers For Algeria posted:All right, let's do both - smash the military's hold on civilian power, and prosecute military rapes and other war crimes. They should have! But my point has been, and I don't know how to express it in any clearer terms, that the state-military complex has many incentives not to deal with it, and very few incentives to tackle the issues, which is a grounds for a strong anti-military push in today's politics. Because just hoping that violence can be remedied within the constraints of the system is wishful thinking.
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Feb 18, 2017 00:35
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Wait, I think that there's a great alternate solution - if you don't want to bother doing all the "hard" stuff such as actively investigating and prosecuting rapes, you can simply ban all men from serving in the armed forces. Again, I'm not convinced that more soldiers are latent rapists (or criminals of any sort) than the average person, they are just in a position where expressing this pathology is easier or outright encouraged / required to fit in. The problem is with the disjointed realities of the concept of a military vs. the civil society. Biopower is very much a thing, and it exists to serve the military, to the detriment of all other beings. Brainiac Five posted:Okay, so we're back to rapists not having responsibility for their actions. You are the worst, and please stop responding to me with these retarded "arguments". It's interesting how the notion of understanding criminals and seeking their rehabilitation is generally seen as a worthwhile endeavor (few posters on these forums would argue that reconciliatory justice programs or the Scandinavian model of restorative criminal justice are worse than conventional retributive justice), but in this particular case any sort of sociological approach to a problem gets flagged as EVIL because it disregards idealist notions of what people should be like, and challenges abstract notions of human nature based on whitewashed history. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Feb 18, 2017 |
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Feb 18, 2017 00:36
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rudatron posted:"Did nothing to stop it" assumes a realistic and reasonable capacity to stop it, which means taking into account constraints of the system and the situation command was operating under. You, therefore, cannot dismiss context as irrelevant, as you admit to have done. This isn't as much defense of the commanders, as it is an indictment of the military. A system where ethics are not possible to consider is not socially acceptable. The thing here is that instead of portraying the Soviet system as heroic, one should see it as it really was, deeply tragic and inhuman, albeit forced into such a state by foreign aggression. Flowers For Algeria posted:It also had a huge bureaucracy and a martial court system that was pretty well developed and used to discipline many offenses, so yes. They had the means to afford barrier troops and penal battalions even when they were actively losing the war. They arrested tens of thousands of soldiers. It once again comes down to traffic jams being more important than anything else for a run-away self-governing military. They are not going to voluntarily lose their expensive bodies for reasons that have nothing to do with military usefulness or political doctrine. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Feb 18, 2017 |
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Feb 18, 2017 09:39
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[quote="LITERALLY MY FETISH" post="469529379"] Yes, the crime of running away from the germans. Like, it's cool that you can jump up on this moral high ground, but there was loving cannibalism going on during some of the sieges in WW2. It's a lot messier of a situation than you're making it out to be, and you know it. If you're arguing it's morally bad, then yeah, so was a lot of poo poo everyone did during ww2. If you're arguing seriously that they really could have done something about it, though, you're kinda huffing your own farts pretty hard. They probably could have done something in 1944 - 45, but institutional inertia is a bitch, and you can hardly expect institutions to self police themselves beyond the extent you pressure them (and in this case the pressure came from Stalin, who, I think, wan't the most warm human being).
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Feb 18, 2017 15:12
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