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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Also for all the people bitching about the strategic bombing campaign, remember that it was the only major way for the West to strike directly at Germany for years. Even if it was as ineffective as people ITT are (wrongly) claiming, after June 1941 it was a political necessity to continue the raids because the Soviets. Interesting how people at the time and immediately after concluded strategic bombing was useless for its intended purpose, but as the Cold War came into being strategic bombing became an extremely relevant and deadly weapon against Germany. It's almost as though the historical record shifted in order to downplay the role of the USSR, now our enemy, in fighting the Nazis. Interesting how this defense neglects to note how bombing shifted from a somewhat effective campaign against shipping and rail networks in the Ruhr to attempting to create firestorms, almost as though it became a deliberate campaign of mass-murdering civilians. Interesting how the bombing raids were not perceived as such by the USSR itself, since pressure to open up an actual second front continued right up until Overlord landed in Normandy. Interesting how both Harris and Spaatz resisted the use of their bombers in the preparations for Overlord on the Douhetist grounds that they could win the war by themselves. These are interesting, but not really relevant, since the objections are on moral grounds, and war crimes are not crimes because they are militarily ineffective, or for any reason having to do with their efficacy. That would be asinine. You could defend the decision on the grounds that they had a choice of committing war crimes or doing nothing, but then all those interesting facts would become relevant and we would have to face the fact that they did not simply innocently walk into incinerating people from the air inevitably and with their eyes shut. And unlike American or Canadian soldiers spontaneously murdering surrendered SS members, these would be war crimes on a systematic level, developed and enacted via strategic and/or operational policy. You would also have to face the facts that they didn't just have a choice to do nothing or massacre civilians- for the purposes of tying up air defenses, as has been outlined as a second line of defense for burning people alive, propaganda leaflets, empty bomb bays, or even just randomly loading different bombers with payloads would be effective as well. That this seems absurd seems to suggest that the basic argument of tying up air defenses is itself absurd. Nude Bog Lurker posted:Why do you think literally every major participant in the Second World War bombed the hell out of enemy cities every chance they got if it was so obviously ineffective? Why did every major participant deploy enormous effort countering enemy bombing campaigns if they were obviously ineffective? So how hard does your dick get at the thought of someone screaming as they're slowly burned to death by thermite? Or of delayed-burst bombs, designed to kill firefighters and EMTs?
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 03:55 |
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:33 |
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Randarkman posted:In order for a defensive measure to be necessary there has to be a credible threat to defend against. Heavy bombers with empty bomb bays and dropping propaganda leaflets are NOT a threat and would have been both a laughing stock, a source of nazi propaganda, and terrible for Allied morale (both civilians reading about it and air crews flying to Germany just to be shot at without offensive weapons). The purpose of the strategic bombing campaign was outlined as 1) winning the war and 2) shutting down German/Japanese military output. It unquestionably failed at both. The war continued until the capture of Berlin, and output increased or remained steady until the actual physical loss of access to resources. In the case of Japan, it was American submarines and aerial attacks against shipping which physically cut off access to resources, which in the end required occupying territory astride the shipping routes to finally chop them off. Even the idea that strategic bombing encouraged civilian discontent was, according to the interviews the USSBS conducted immediately the war, false for Germany (it is unanswerable for Japan because the bombing campaign began after the war was obviously lost). It actually stiffened German support for the Nazi government. Your assumption of ignorance on my part is certainly of a piece with how many people treat the expression of dissent. No one could really think that a wasteful sideshow, morally and militarily more or less equivalent to having the SAS kidnap random German civilians to torture and murder via submarine raids, is bad on both those grounds, they must not have seen the pictures of Dresden or Tokyo! They must be a liberal pansy, unable to make the wrenching, difficult decision of burning people to death in their beds! How pitiful you are, in this inability to handle disagreement. Also, the heavy bombers were an effective part of the operations to cut off Normandy immediately before Overlord. You got that one wrong, but in the revealing way where you admit the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing. How clumsy.
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 14:06 |
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Randarkman posted:I did not say that the strategic bombing campaign fulfilled its overly ambitious goals, nor did any others. I actually said that the most important thing they accomplished was actually not one of their stated goals. And regarding Overlord what I admitted was the ineffectiveness of precision strategic bombing and use of bombers against fortified urban defenders. So, it was an absurd sideshow of mass murder aimed at civilians. Both ineffectual and a war crime. Someone talking down to someone else and therefore insisting that their disagreement is due to ignorance is unable to handle dissent. Sorry that you lack self-awareness. There's nothing brave about deciding to have someone else commit mass-murder via airplane on your behalf. There's no physical or moral courage involved. Your question is, "can you imagine yourself as a worse person than you are today?" which is hardly profound.
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 14:29 |
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Randarkman posted:I'm not sure I called you ignorant or talked down to you. I very much disagreed with much of what you concluded though. Okay, but your argument is that the most salient impact it had on the war had nothing to do with the actual bombardment, which renders the bombardments themselves militarily ineffectual war crimes, on the whole. Fairly comparable to Red Army war crimes, to be quite honest, both in the insistence on their essential morality and in the bald pretense that they were effective at anything other than a sating of bloodlust.
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 16:18 |
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Whorelord posted:always seemed weird that speer got 20 years but donitz only got 10 Allied admirals argued that they couldn't prosecute him for unrestricted submarine warfare when they had practiced it themselves.
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 17:10 |
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The Kingfish posted:It's more humane to let people die quickly while they are fully conscious. Hanging or firing squad imo I bet you have a lot of experience with hanging.
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# ¿ Feb 15, 2017 04:10 |
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steinrokkan posted: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. This is also factually incorrect, beyond the unbelievable gall of thinking being uneducated makes you a rapist. The patterns simply do not make sense with this criminally evil set of apologetics.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 05:50 |
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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. Well, no, funnily enough, they didn't inflict genocide on the Germans, nor would this justify crimes against German Jewish women, Polish women, and liberated Soviet slave laborers, all of which happened with the general indifference or active support of Soviet commanders. Also, the Red Army was quite willing to use the threat of summary execution to resolve traffic jams, and Chuikov regularly punched his staff in the face when they hosed up. The idea that the Red Army was uncontrollable, the officers supine, is apologetics for criminality.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 06:25 |
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JFairfax posted:Well clearly it was uncontrollable because they raped a metric gently caress ton of women. No, the evidence suggests that officers generally either actively supported rapes or were indifferent to them, and that the only efforts to counter it systematically were halfhearted ones involving editorial shifts in Pravda and scapegoating Ilya Ehrenburg. Furthermore, the actual frontoviki, the tankists and infantry, committed crimes at a much lower rate than rear-echelon troops or occupational forces, which complicates this idea of a revenge.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 06:30 |
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JFairfax posted:erm, men on men rape is still being committed by men?!?!! And what does that have to do with the price of beef futures in the Buenos Aires stock exchange?
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 06:40 |
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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.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 12:53 |
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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.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 14:28 |
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steinrokkan posted: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. 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. steinrokkan posted: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". It is apologetics to claim that rape is inevitable and natural. It is apologetics to claim that believing eliminating rape is "romanticizing" war as a phenomenon. It is apologetics to ignore misogyny as a factor. All these are apologetics you are engaging in because you want to be a hard-nosed realist or some other infantile reason. Edit: You are also insisting that being poor or uneducated justifies rape by intimating the difference between ACW soldiers and WW2 soldiers in terms of behavior is explained by these factors. Brainiac Five fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Feb 17, 2017 |
# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 14:42 |
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steinrokkan posted:lol, ok, the Union army was literally a pure white crusader force shrouded in an aura of pure righteousness. So you spend a lot of time fantasizing about rapes that never happened, huh?
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 14:58 |
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steinrokkan posted:"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]" 450 cases over four years and hundreds of thousands of people is uh, much lower than the US Armed Forces commits against itself today. Assuming 99% of cases were unrecorded, that's still lower than what happens today in the US Armed Forces. You're presenting your case for rape and sexual assault as eternal and natural (one wonders at your personal reasons for doing so) by relying on evidence that shows they aren't and differ in different historical situations.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 15:12 |
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JFairfax posted:"it's okay rape in armies isn't a systemic and fundamental problem with war itself, it's just a few bad apples" I see we have someone else eager to write rape off as a natural phenomenon that cannot be eliminated. Guilty conscience, perhaps?
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 15:36 |
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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.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 16:06 |
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JFairfax posted:if you train people to kill other human beings, rape loses its taboo status to them. 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.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 16:10 |
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steinrokkan posted:You are a child molester. 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?
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 16:14 |
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JFairfax posted:you think you can have war without rape? I don't believe rape is a natural and inevitable phenomenon everybody does, no.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 16:17 |
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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.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 16:19 |
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steinrokkan posted: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? 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...
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 16:25 |
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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.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 16:35 |
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steinrokkan posted: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). 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.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 17:04 |
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steinrokkan posted:So ultimately the blame lies both on personal pathologies of the culprits, and those whose cheering and scheming enabled the war, such as Effectronica. Looks like I struck a nerve.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 17:06 |
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Well, steinrokkan, you hit on it exactly. As one of the gods and goddesses of war, I am responsible for all armed conflicts. When you get your rear end beaten in a bar for whining about PC culture run amuck, I am responsible. When Kingfish gets to cross-burnin' and then gets raided by the FBI, I am responsible. And I am not happy that you are displacing blame for your own crimes onto me and my cohort.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 17:15 |
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steinrokkan posted:"Rape culture isn't a thing that exists, and it has no social impacts," says a prominent feminist. You're the one insisting that rape culture doesn't exist, since you're claiming rape as a natural result of violence and conflict. Your propaganda efforts are clumsier than Pravda circa 1943. Indeed, your arguments are that is is not eliminatable, which is contrary to the notion of rape culture, which is understood as a phenomenon that can and must be destroyed. You, snaggletooth mcBrit, and mr. Grand Hobgoblin are very bad at understanding the things you wish to use for reactionary ends.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 17:18 |
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The Kingfish posted:Rape can be eliminated because war can be eliminated. You think that war is an inevitable part of human society because you enjoy the fantasy of just war. So it was wrong to resist Nazism?
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 17:34 |
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JFairfax posted:are you actually retarded? 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 is extremely stupid, but it was extremely stupid and malevolent people like you who developed it.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 19:06 |
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steinrokkan posted: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. Okay, so we're back to rapists not having responsibility for their actions. steinrokkan posted:Exactly, a fight against militarism is practically a fight for mandatory rape. Okay, so in other words, rape is the product of the existence of professional militaries, without which "war" cannot happen. I think that this opinion solely exists so you can wring your hands and weep about how your febrile honky nation is so much better than evil AmeriKKKans but not actually feel any sort of responsibility towards ending rape and sexual assault, by placing the possibility of doing so well outside any likelihood of ever occurring.
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 21:58 |
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steinrokkan posted: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. You're also engaging in abstract notions of human nature, bucko. This is cuttlefish argumentation, throwing up a cloud of ink to distract from your unwillingness to engage with any criticism you don't like. For example,. I've said nothing about what is to be done in response to rape as a crime, you're just throwing out some slanderous propaganda. Your argument that rape is located in the existence of militaries is absurd, your probably intended argument that rape is just something that happens with hierarchy is anti-feminist, and the whole thing amounts to a claim about human nature- that we cannot get people to stop raping without eliminating any form of authority in society, almost as if you were a teenage anarchist hot off Crimethinc. Now, maybe you are simply stupid enough to not think about any of your beliefs long enough to understand why I might make these posts, and maybe you simply don't care about communicating coherently when you've got to keep the fire alive against the PC-SJW tyrants like me, but I don't really loving care.
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# ¿ Feb 18, 2017 03:19 |
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:33 |
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I think a lot of people are somehow confusing the Red Army with the Catalonian militias, since they're insisting that there was no chain of command, that officers couldn't control their formations, that everything was dictated by the urges of the common soldier. In fact, the language used goes even further and suggests the Red Army was more akin to a hive of ants or bees than to human beings, which is fairly loving fascinating as a way to defend mass rapes of German, Polish, Hungarian, and Soviet citizens. Since the idea of the Red Army as a mindless horde is and was a major component of Nazi propaganda and Cold War anti-Soviet propaganda. I suppose that's a sign of how deeply embedded that propaganda is, that it's resurrected as an apologetic for the Red Army.
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# ¿ Feb 18, 2017 17:08 |