^ Big fan of Mark Felton. He has some amazing historical stories on his channel.
He is a good YouTube watch.
Lots of Ukrainians are descendants of German Mennonite farmers, descended themselves from Dutch immigrants to Russia. They were handed great parcels of land in the late 19thC and given tax breaks and armed to fight in the pogroms (they were pretty anti-Semitic) . Post WW1 saw them being targeted by Nestor Makhnos anarchistic movement because of their perceived wealth. Stalin also wasn't a fan because of their resistance to collectivisation, and so many were targeted in the Holodomor, there was active persecution from the Soviets on anyone who spoke German. You'll hear many Russians on state telly talk about "Kulaks" which is slang for the Mennonites but has come to just mean "Ukrainian". In WW2 many of them sided with Hitler as a result of the post WW1 famines and persecutions and identified Jewishness with communism, hence the Nazi thing being thrown around now.
The whole region has a fascinating and disturbing history.
There were a (fairly large) number of Ukranians who sided with the Germans when they showed up in 1941.
Lots of countries had people who were complicit in the Holocaust, that's another Russian false flag.
I'm still confused that some on here seem to think Putin and Russia are still communist/Socialist. They really aren't, and that's why there are American right wingers backing him
If it’s history you want then Bloodlands by Tim Snyder or his later book Black Earth are very good on this area. I think they may have been namechecked earlier. But I warn you they are not an easy read. I had to take a break from Black Earth in particular so distressing was some of the content. Conversely there are also truly amazing stories of bravery and humanity in the very darkest of times.
"East West Street" by Phillipe Sands also gives an account of many aspects of Ukrainian history, from the perspective of the Jewish Community there. (His family were from the Lviv area.) Aside from being a deeply moving account of his journey into his family history, the other main focus of the book is a history of the development of the idea of crimes against humanity and which formed the legal basis for the Nuremberg trials. If you are interested in the idea of an international tribubnal to hear cases arising from Ukraine (with which Sands is involved), you should read it.
You’ll hear many Russians on state telly talk about “Kulaks”
I thought kulaks were basically anyone Starlin didn't like (I know he originally claimed they were "wealthy" land owners) but that it kind of expanded the definition as the quotas to send people to Siberia
andrewh, RichPenny,
Everyone was slaughtering everyone back in the day, the answer to any accusation levelled at one group or the other is probably; Yes.
Going to have to disagree with you there based on context. It's profoundly odd for the Russians to claim Ukrainian links to Nazism whilst their own State was colluding with the Nazis for half of WW2.
Twitter rumours of a Russian Helo crossing the border to surrender for his $500k
Who's in it?
Who's paying them $500,000?
Maybe a Rudolf Hess moment?
I doubt it, more a Kenneth H Rowe moment.
^ Big fan of Mark Felton. He has some amazing historical stories on his channel.
A lot of his "material" is dredging up old dead forum posts and reading them out verbatim over some stock footage and dramatic music. He also never credits his sources. I have no idea what the quality of his written work is, but his youtube output is largely clickbait bullshit.
I see BJ has indeed stepped up the direct appeals to Russian Citizens.
All this talk of VPNs forgetting they're active systems that give you away. Just receiving information passively is safer.
Ask a radar operator.
I think this is a good summary of Putin's legacy.
https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1511536761167650821
https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1511538024542318605
Yes. I want to see Russia lose, and lose badly. Russia losing requires that a lot of Russian soldiers will die. That's better than Ukraine losing and the inevitable atrocities that the Russian troops would commit. That doesn't mean that I should take pleasure in inflicting unnecessary cruelty on Russians regardless of how brutally they've treated Ukrainians.
If Ukranians brutalise Russians then they will simply provide more material for Russian propaganda.
^ this. War crimes are war crimes, doesn't matter which side initiates it, you don't get a free pass to respond in kind.
Just in case anyone is confused by my last post, it was in reply to a post that seems to have been taken down by the mods.
War crimes are war crimes, doesn’t matter which side initiates it, you don’t get a free pass to respond in kind.
Murdering innocents regardless of war is a crime but in wars it is only considered a war crime for those on the losing side. If the winning side has committed a war crime and there is no higher authority to bear on them then the only way is rely on justice which may not be on the victims side. Are those two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered war crimes? No, because it was committed by the victor in the name of stopping the war.
If you have the time, some useful infographics on Conspiracy Theories, how to judge, work with and possibly counter them. Its aimed at raising questions before sharing on social media...
I used them with some of my students and they were quite thought provoking. Covid obviously gets a mention but there are good general themes in there too.
https://en.unesco.org/themes/gced/thinkbeforesharing
Also - Ukranians clearly aren't all angels, but if I were Zelensky I'd be making a personal call to whoever that was threatening brutality. He's doing a lot of work presenting Ukraine as the good guys to get support, and it's working very well; and that kind of thing undermines it.
Aha - I thought I saw some posts that have gone missing, thought I was going mad when I couldn’t find them 🤪
Except that no Luftwaffe officers were prosecuted after 1945. Goering was prosecuted but not for the bombing of civilians.
Also some people DO consider Hiroshima/ Nagasaki and the strategic bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan to be war crimes. They were never prosecuted but in all probability neither will Putin be.
Anyway that’s a very useful debate to deflect from Russian actions but probably best saved for another thread.
Maybe I'm an idealist but but executing PoW's isn't ever acceptable, treat, detain, question and process them, get them filling sandbags or the variety of other tasks they could help with, details to RC etc, etc.
If they're hardline & non-compliant, they stay locked up in a cell until they can be held to account for being turds. I imagine most would be quite compliant and happy to be out of that meat-grinder.
Beating the shit out of them and killing them just feeds Putin's narrative of a Nazi government and military, UKR playing right into their hands in terms of the propaganda game.
But yeah, Putin is likely never going to be in a dock answering for Russian doctrine, there may be some sacrificial lambs if it ever came to it in the form of some Generals. Or they just leave the PoW's to the mercy of the UKR and never accept or ask for them back.
Which is exactly the aim.
Anyway that’s a very useful debate to deflect from Russian actions but probably best saved for another thread.
the poor ol' Belgians (after WW1) had to put up with the instigator of 4 yrs of death and slaughter in their land, Kaiser Bill, living in the lap of luxury over the border in a Dutch mansion. But he was obviously a nice white haired old Royal.
Murdering innocents regardless of war is a crime but in wars it is only considered a war crime for those on the losing side. If the winning side has committed a war crime and there is no higher authority to bear on them then the only way is rely on justice which may not be on the victims side. Are those two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered war crimes? No, because it was committed by the victor in the name of stopping the war.
This is historically ignorant. The concept of war crimes and the International Criminal Court didn't really take form until after WW2. None of the pilots who bombed enemy cities were held responsible for it, that was how it was done back then and it wasn't considered a crime.
If you look at Iraq and Afganistan, you will find examples of U.S. soldiers being tried for war crimes. One of the things about the ICC is that it is only used when the soldier's own country will not prosecute. Because the U.S. does prosecute soldiers who commit crimes, the ICC does not apply.
The crimes committed by U.S. troops were, with the exception of the CIA torture program, generally small scale crimes by rogue individuals or small groups. That will always happen in war, but that is a different thing to what is happening in Ukraine. The war crimes there are a deliberate strategy on the part of the Russian leadership, not a small scale breakdown in discipline among individual soldiers.
The U.S. torture program was an utter disgrace, but that too was a different thing than what is happening in Ukraine. In that case, the Bush White House put an utterly unscrupulous lawyer on the job and they basically found legal loopholes that let them argue that what they were doing was not illegal torture. It was nonsense and any sensible person would see it as torture, but that legal loophole is why they weren't prosecuted. In that case, they acknowledge the law but argued that it wasn't broken. In the case of Ukraine, Russia's view is that the law is irrelevant and Ukrainians have no human rights. That's an order of magnitude worse than anything the U.S. has done in the last 40 years.
I've been learning how surviving German officers and specialists made a big deal of framing themselves as experts prevented from achieving their full potential and transferring to NATO advisory positions after WW2. This led to a lot of bullshit being spread, especially about the skills and technology actually deployed.
Thanks, LazerPig
@thols2 cracking post, there's a good article about the clash when a country alters domestic law to create those exceptions and international law somewhere, I'll dig it out, was mandatory reading on a career course I did a while back.
I imagine Russia has very similar exceptions so therefore makes it easy to tell the troops they're acting lawfully.
NASA was full of the buggers!
I’ve been learning how surviving German officers and specialists made a big deal of framing themselves as experts prevented from achieving their full potential and transferring to NATO advisory positions after WW2.
Thanks, LazerPig
Eg
(profanity throughout)
Anyway that’s a very useful debate to deflect from Russian actions but probably best saved for another thread.
Not trying to deflect the debate. If the war crimes need to make sense then it should be applicable to all. Hence, my view that victor sets the rules. Innocents on both sides are the victims.
The war crimes there are a deliberate strategy on the part of the Russian leadership, not a small scale breakdown in discipline among individual soldiers.
Until the war is won the notion of war crimes cannot be established because there is no higher authority bearing on Russia/Putih etc.
Yeah, let's let might be right.
Or, no, let's not.
I’ve been learning how surviving German officers and specialists made a big deal of framing themselves as experts prevented from achieving their full potential and transferring to NATO advisory positions after WW2. This led to a lot of bullshit being spread, especially about the skills and technology actually deployed.
I see we have at least one Mark Felton hater on here, so sorry, not sorry, I think he does some good stuff. This is an interesting vid about how WW2 Luftwaffe fighter aces shaped and manned West Germany's cold war air force, well in to the 1980s and even 90s.
And in the army too....
I’ve been learning how surviving German officers and specialists made a big deal of framing themselves as experts
Even in positions in their own government. The process of de-Nazification basically stopped in 1946 ish when everyone realised that without the petty bureaucrats the system of govt would break down. Konrad Adenauer Germany's first post war Chancellor was famous for saying "Until we have clean water, we will continue to wash our faces with dirty water"
No I think Chewy does have a point there. The war needs to be won first. Also the recording of events and crimes scenes is hugely important. Eisenhower was adamant that there should be lots of films made of concentration camps because even at the time he knew there would come a point where people tried to deny it ever happened.
The Second World War was fairly unique in that the trials, imperfect though they were, happened fairly swiftly. Look at Milisevic, Mladic etc - these things take years. We have no idea under what circumstances Putin will leave power, but it cannot always be guaranteed that the Russian state will protect him.
Some good points here re denazification. A lot of people present Nuremberg as a way to draw a line and move on. Lots of soldiers who participated in appalling atrocities in the East went back to their prewar jobs - a lot of them were policemen!
Having said that there were war crimes trials throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s too but they tended to be of middle ranking officers and officials.
Until the war is won the notion of war crimes cannot be established
Nonsense. The evidence is utterly overwhelming. Getting a prosecution is another matter, but there is really no doubt whatsoever that Russia has been deliberately and systematically brutalizing and murdering innocent civilians.
What he said.
Evidence of a war crime is what determines whether it happened which is distinct from justice being served for that crime.
Hence, my view that victor sets the rules.
That's partially true, The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Japanese equivalent of Nuremberg) was accused of this, and it's a difficult charge to refute. In theory there wasn't a specific charge that covered aerial bombing, but it's also true that the Tribunal ignored the attack on Pearl Harbour despite it being illegal under existing laws (no declaration of war, no justification of being launched in self-defence) mostly as away of sidestepping the issue of the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the atomic weapons use, for the same reason the indiscriminate bombing by Japanese forces of Chinese cities was overlooked. (as it was in Nuremberg for that matter of the RAF and USAAF of European cities)
The Indian judges and barristers in the IMT were scathing; one called it "a sword in judge's robes".
Mentioned on here earlier and by me near the start of this thread, but the far right in America is pouring petrol with their disinformation beliefs. Which is being lapped up in Moscow. Article in the Guardian this morning.
If the war crimes need to make sense then it should be applicable to all.
Nicking garden gnomes is a crime. So is murder. They are not equivalent.
Filming and Booting POW's is a warcrime. Raping, murdering and desecrating the corpses of civilians is a warcrime. They are not equivalent.
Let's not assume that Ukraine and Russia are level on the scales of humanity. One side is deeper and dirtier and a whole lot more guilty than the other.
All this talk of war crimes and the connections with the cuban missile crisis reminded me of possibly the greatest and most spine-chilling documentary I've ever watched. Here's an excerpt. Skip to 5.13 to see Mcnamara talk about Japan and how he, Truman and the American generals were war criminals. I can't recommend this film enough, it's the sort of thing that should be shown in schools and drummed into every single one of us.
The full film is here..
https://www.docsonline.tv/fogofwar-elevenlessonsfromthelifeofrobertsmcnamara/
