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Yes, obviously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libre_des_Mille_Collines The people who ran the radio stations during the Rwandan genocide weren't out there with machetes themselves, but studies directly linked their actions to 51,000 deaths. Three people were convicted by international tribunal in the aftermath and given life sentences. There are plenty of other examples. Goebbels was directly responsible for many, many more deaths, and he would have had a bad time at Nuremburg. There's mountains of precedent for exactly this thing in international law, I'm not even seeing where the other side of the argument is.
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Jan 28, 2017 18:49
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hakimashou posted:They were ok in Ww2 to beat Germany and Japan. Nothing was not ok in that situation. Really? Nothing? Japanese internment camps? The French Moroccan troops raping and murdering their way across Italy? Soviet occupation of Austria and Germany? This is a horrifying way to think, and a complete misunderstanding of war and its consequences.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:08
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hakimashou posted:Soviet Occupation of Austria and Germany was the price the Germans and Austrians paid for their crimes. I can think of worse things of the top of my head pretty easy, like the Austrian/German occupation of the Soviet Union. You are literally apologizing for, and handwaving away the single largest mass rape event in recorded human history. Explain how you come to the conclusion that the rape of 2 million women, including children, near and past the end of the war justifiably prevented German aggression.
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Feb 12, 2017 01:25
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hakimashou posted:The Germans and Japanese were responsible for the deaths of more than sixty million people spangly. How many deaths did the firebombing of Dresden prevent? How exactly did it prevent them?
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Feb 12, 2017 01:27
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Yeah, we know what the strategy was. Practically every WWII historian agrees it was a lovely strategy that didn't work at all. The entire strategic bombing plan was a mishmash of theory cooked up in the 1920's that was a waste of resources, men and civilian lives by every possible measure. I specifically asked you to explain how you thought Dresden was a successful campaign because it's probably the most glaring example of this. Despite killing 25,000 civilians and razing the entire city center, it ended up becoming a huge propaganda coup for Germany. Goebbels (back on topic!) spun it into a rallying cry that, if anything, extended the war. Here's a book on the subject, which you should really, really read before you start talking in definitive terms about your grand opinions about the war. That and probably the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and Speer's memoir. Or gently caress, watch a documentary or something.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:42
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hakimashou posted:But it wasn't wrong for the allies to try, it wasn't morally wrong for them to do because they did it in good faith. No, they literally did not. By 1940 they knew for a fact that it was a completely failed strategy. The Butt report made it a matter of public record. It was extremely thorough, and extremely embarrassing. Churchill doubled down instead, as he tended to do when challenged. They knew that they were targeting only civilians. Bomber Command officers openly worried about being tried for war crimes if they didn't win. The bombers had no hope of hitting anything as specific as a factory, and the industrial regions were all well outside the city centers anyway. As far as anyone can tell, it was a campaign waged entirely for the benefit of the British imagination, the egoes of Churchill and Harris, and at incredible material cost to Britain's war effort. Not to mention the lives of tens of thousands of Allied pilots and millions of German civilians. The British nighttime terror bombing campaign was a completely failed effort by any conceivable measure. A waste of material, energy and human lives. It was an idiotic relic of a strategy mired in politics and the very worst aspects of British military tradition. It was, and remains, indefensible. Please read the book I linked, and Bomber Command by Max Hastings while you're at it. Your narrative of the war reflects the kind of black and white, heroes and villains, ultra-simplified story that you get in high school, and it's frankly wrong. edit: Incidentally, that "dehousing" garbage was invented entirely by Lord Cherwell, who was Churchill's science advisor and piece of human garbage who knowingly condemned 4 million people to die of starvation in britain's southeast asian colonies when he diverted their grain shipments to the already well supplied western front. When Churchill got a telegram from Delhi about the famine, his response was to ask why Ghandi hadn't died yet. Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 08:17
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I never said it said anything different. Britain wasn't explicitly bombing cities until after the Butt report, they were still targeting factories and military installations. You're missing a major element. Harris and Churchill's plan from 1936 onward was to use Bomber Command to win the war entirely from the air. The whole purpose of the bombing strategy was to avoid committing ground troops and ending up entrenched for years like last time. Nearly a third of Britain's entire war effort was devoted to the bombing campaign. The Butt report stated explicitly and with evidence that the entire strategy was useless. Platystemon posted:So your options are bomb city‐sized targets (i.e. cities) or allow the Nazi war machine to operate unmolested on the continent. That's the entire point. Those are not your only options. You could also take the immense amount of resources it takes to churn out bombers and ordinance and use it for literally anything else that's provably more effective. You could have dismantled the Luftwaffe years earlier if you committed those factories, engineers and pilots to fighters instead. Maybe you could have created more armored divisions. Maybe with those divisions you could have defended France. One thing's for certain, they would have ended up buying a shitload less stuff from America, and they definitely would have staved off the financial collapse of the Empire for at least a few years. Bombing just plain didn't loving work. The bombs were so inaccurate as to be ineffective against any legitimate war targets. the British knew it, and they did it anyway, and the cost to the world was immense. Churchill had the good sense to regret it after Dresden, but Harris never did.
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Feb 12, 2017 17:59
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rudatron posted:Soviet high command had, as their first and only priority, winning the war. Given context, that's totally understandable. If they had reports of rapes, and did nothing, it's probably because they were in a life and death struggle for survival, where anything less than full commitment had a cost in terms of human lives. Millions of rapes, miles behind the lines, mostly in 1945. You have zero loving clue what you're talking about.
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Feb 12, 2017 18:07
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Panzeh posted:To be fair, the advocates of bombing as the primary strategy also advocated dropping poison gas on cities, but i'm not sure that would've changed much. I mean, Churchill was a murderous, racist motherfucker who loving loved chemical weapons. I think we can all agree on that? At least by the mid 30's, Parliament wouldn't hear it. He certainly tried like hell to get them to use it against the Indian uprising. "The objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable. Gas is a more merciful weapon than [the] high explosive shell, and compels an enemy to accept a decision with less loss of life than any other agency of war." "Why is it not fair for a British artilleryman to fire a shell which makes the said native sneeze? It is really too silly."
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Feb 12, 2017 18:22
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Spangly A posted:I think you'll find he's the Greatest Briton and proud ugly baby face of the new fiver. “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
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Feb 12, 2017 18:44
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Are you arguing that there was literally no more efficient way for the British to spend their lives and resources than bombing civilian targets behind enemy lines? That, in full view of hindsight, it was the correct and justified strategy?
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Feb 13, 2017 00:16
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DeusExMachinima posted:The question raised was whether intentionally targeting civilians instead of just causing collateral damage was a morally acceptable or pragmatically effective strategy. The answer to that question is no on both counts. Now you're trying to stretch that assessment into saying that thousands of civilians don't have to die when you hit enemy infrastructure with WW2 technology, or if they do have to die then somehow that means the strategy ceases to be effective. These are not the same things. Stop it. I didn't say any of that at all. I'm saying that the bomber strategy should have been scrapped as soon as they knew it was ineffective. I shouldn't have given specific examples, because it's entirely beside the point whether those examples would have worked or not. The failure in this case was a failure to change strategy given overwhelming evidence that it didn't work. Instead of trying to figure out something that would be effective, they morphed it into an equally ineffective but now obviously immoral and illegal campaign against civilian targets. Which, incidentally, still didn't achieve its stated goal of breaking enemy morale.
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Feb 13, 2017 01:31
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:Spoiler: there wasn't overwhelming contemporary evidence it didn't work and only Anglophobe neo-Nazis like you think there was (only not for your beloved Luftwaffe and Goering-kun~~~) The british murdered hundreds of thousands of non-combatant civilians by burning them alive and got very little in return, strategically speaking. Also, the nazis were the loving nazis and deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth ten times over. Both of these things can be true. Try not to hurt yourself thinking too hard, take it in small doses.
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Feb 14, 2017 07:45
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steinrokkan posted: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. No army, no group of humans can accept widespread, routine rape without completely dehumanizing your opponent and everything about them. I understand that that happens in war. I could even consider an argument that it's a necessary part of war. But your argument goes further than that. You seem to think there should be no national meditation on that for the winning side. The total dehumanization and subjugation of a population that let the Nazis commit the acts they did was a horrifying war crime, but somehow an allied nation doing the exact same thing is just boys being boys. This is a kind of moral relativism that I just can't even process. It's sociopathic.
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Feb 17, 2017 06:24
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hakimashou posted:It's not exactly news that the russians/communists are and always have been bad... And yet somehow the British are A-OK in your book.
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Feb 17, 2017 06:33
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stone cold posted:Asserting that all men are rape monsters detracts from the abnormality and therefore undermines the scale of the atrocity of the mass rape, you idiot. He didn't do that, calm down. People in general are rape and murder monsters when you systematically dehumanize another group. That's just a lovely fact about humans. The problem is throwing your hands up and just saying "welp that's just the way the cookie crumbles i guess war is hell" without assigning any responsibility to the actors who did the dehumanization in the first place. Everyone involved in WWII committed atrocities, and they must be acknowledged and examined if we don't want to see the same thing happen again. Not just Germany, but the Allies as well.
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Feb 17, 2017 07:01
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rudatron posted:Nazis did what they did regardless of strategic value or practical capacity. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. rudatron posted:Allied commanders, including the soviets, had the goal of defeating the aggressor in a war of annihilation. An action committed in defense is not equivalent to an action committed aggressively. Explain in detail how raping civilians in occupied enemy territory is a defensive military action.
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Feb 17, 2017 08:19
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steinrokkan posted:The idea that the resistance at all instances clean and virtuous is false To be fair, it was quite easy to interpret this as your argument three pages ago, and it's exactly what rudatron is explicitly preaching.
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Feb 17, 2017 20:41
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