Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pilecki was not considered a "foreign spy" for his fighting the Nazis, but for organizing an intelligence network of his own and leaking information to the West. That counts as a foreign spy in my eyes, and I'm sure someone who did the same in eg. France would also be considered as such.
Not sure if you are trolling or what. By that logic Jews were rightfully sent to the death camps because they were enemies of the state.
A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
121–130 of 153 posts
Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#122Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Americans arrived in Berlin they were quite horrified. Over 100,000 women in Berlin were systemically raped by Russian soliders [i]. As an American/Englishmen witnessing this and ordered not to intervene created hate and disdain for the Russian forces. The American forces had no concept of what the Russian forces endured -- still not an excuse for rape. Eventually generals on the western side began forming plans…
I hope that readers of this comment understand that this narrative of the "systematic rape" (quoting parent) of Germany by the soldiers of the Red Army, while factual, is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. It is a narrative that has been deliberately narrowed, with a strong political motivation, to the scope of 1945. Modern German historians see this narrowing of the Western European memory as the effects of…
Sorry, mate, even in your broad context, your trying to justify mass rapes this way can't possibly stand given the present days' values.
Wars to that scale do not happen nowadays, but similar suffering and low morale is encountered in "smaller" warzones, yet the scale of rapes isn't relatively comparable.
Given the various wars my father and I witnessed in the Balkans and throughout the world, I'd say discipline (thus, education) matters more than morale.
Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Americans arrived in Berlin they were quite horrified. Over 100,000 women in Berlin were systemically raped by Russian soliders [i]. As an American/Englishmen witnessing this and ordered not to intervene created hate and disdain for the Russian forces. The American forces had no concept of what the Russian forces endured -- still not an excuse for rape. Eventually generals on the western side began forming plans…
I hope that readers of this comment understand that this narrative of the "systematic rape" (quoting parent) of Germany by the soldiers of the Red Army, while factual, is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. It is a narrative that has been deliberately narrowed, with a strong political motivation, to the scope of 1945. Modern German historians see this narrowing of the Western European memory as the effects of…
What an absolutely sickening comment. Appalling even. If you do not realize what you've just wrote, imagine someone wrote: "Slavery, while factual, is a lot more complicated than what meets the eye."
Or: "The Holocaust, while factual, is a lot more complicated than what meets the eye."
I really hope such revisionistic comments don't go unpunished on HN.
Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope that readers of this comment understand that this narrative of the "systematic rape" (quoting parent) of Germany by the soldiers of the Red Army, while factual, is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. It is a narrative that has been deliberately narrowed, with a strong political motivation, to the scope of 1945. Modern German historians see this narrowing of the Western European memory as the effects of…
> Yes, the Red Army committed war crimes. But it is important to consider that the morale of their troops begged for war crimes far worse than those committed. Sorry, mate, even in your broad context, your trying to justify mass rapes this way can't possibly stand given the present days' values. Wars to that scale do not happen nowadays, but similar suffering and low morale is encountered in "smaller" warzones, yet t…
In all, the point of my comment was not to cast black into white, to exchange one form of binary bigotry for another, but to remind us that our popular history of that time has, in fact, been dyed in politically-opportunistic ways many times over. Whether we choose to accept those dyeings or not is up to us, but it's important to know that we have a choice to hate or not to hate. And that we should default towards skeptical when we have been instructed to treat people as "The Other". When education and discipline are corrupted by this introduction and emphasis of "otherness", hate crimes and war crimes follow.
Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is so sad that rape is a common war crime in every war since very ancient time. Rape during WW2 was probably one of the biggest crimes after mass genocide. I am familiar with the Japanese’s rape crime but this is the first time I am hearing about this. Allies are no exception. The psychology behind committing such crime is beyond the “sexual urge” excuse.
> Allies are no exception. Absolutely. As Robert E Lee eloquently said: "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." In war there is no good. It's just evil. The only difference is between winners and losers. > The psychology behind committing such crime is beyond the “sexual urge” excuse. Isn't it innate nature? In the wild, whether it is chimps or lions, you vanquish the males and…
I was with you up until then. European colonisation was about exploiting the natural resources of the Africa and the Orient, not the women.
Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#127Some other good articles on Pilecki: [1] [2] Of his imprisonment under the Soviets he told his wife: "I cannot live. They killed me. Because compared to them Auschwitz was just a trifle." [1] - http://www.poloniainstitute.net/witold-pilecki-bravery-beyon... [2] - https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/story-of-the-m...
Sadly, Pilecki was killed by the fellow Poles, not by Soviet Russians. The article you quoted makes goes even as far as to distort the reality: > His Soviet prosecutor, Czesław Łapiński, died on the way to the hospital, before his trial for judicial murder. This person wasn't Soviet - he was a Pole, born in Silesia, a Polish soldier fighting the Nazi. I know it's more convenient to portray it as "the Russians were gu…
Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope that readers of this comment understand that this narrative of the "systematic rape" (quoting parent) of Germany by the soldiers of the Red Army, while factual, is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. It is a narrative that has been deliberately narrowed, with a strong political motivation, to the scope of 1945. Modern German historians see this narrowing of the Western European memory as the effects of…
> I hope that readers of this comment understand that this narrative of the "systematic rape" (quoting parent) of Germany by the soldiers of the Red Army, while factual, is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. It is a narrative that has been deliberately narrowed, with a strong political motivation, to the scope of 1945. What an absolutely sickening comment. Appalling even. If you do not realize what you've jus…
Why have Germans historians opted to broaden the narrative? I can only imagine. A common story I hear of people growing up in Germany in the 60s, 70s and 80s was that there were a whole list of questions that you weren't allowed to ask your (Grand-)parents. You knew they were in Hitler youth, maybe even in the Wehrmacht or heaven forbid the SS. I do not know about you, but when I was young I asked all kinds of questions. Most of these historians were probably the same, and decided to make their career out of these unanswerable and taboo questions. What we have today, as a result, is a much more complex, nuanced, and complete understanding of the decisions of our grandfathers. This nuance might seem dangerous to you? Should nuance be illegal? Yes, even violence has a context. Perhaps this sense of threat stems from the cultural difference of viewing "Committers of Crime vs Criminals". I won't speculate further.
In closing, it is important to note that what I have provided in my original comment is not revisionist in the sense you seem to be suggesting. The facts are unchanged and undisputed. It is the perspective on the facts that have shifted, with the distance provided by time. I hope we can distinguish between the two, and therefore agree that I was not changing the picture of 1945 (revisionism), but filling in the picture of 1941-45 (contextualizing). There's a sizable difference!
Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope that readers of this comment understand that this narrative of the "systematic rape" (quoting parent) of Germany by the soldiers of the Red Army, while factual, is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. It is a narrative that has been deliberately narrowed, with a strong political motivation, to the scope of 1945. What an absolutely sickening comment. Appalling even. If you do not realize what you've jus…
I can only hope that you continued reading. I wanted to give a brief summary/introduction at the top of my comment; I apologize if it came across at too terse to the point of reducing the rest of the comment. While that sentence taken cut from the top looks quite controversial, the contextualized framing, addressed in the greater comment, is not a controversial view among historians in Germany, where the kind of revi…
It's no less sickening as the contextualizing that Nazis tend to do when someone talks about the Holocaust.
Re: A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)
#130In my book, Witold Pilecki is in the same folder as Irena Sendlerowa, a Polish nurse who smuggled hundreds of Jewish kids from the ghetto, who was tortured so severely that the Nazis bastinado-fractured her feet - to no avail. Un-fucking-believable bravery that inspires me every day to resist the silly trumps and putins of our time.
Putin actually has his opponents murdered. Look up what happened to Boris Nemtsov, he was gunned down right outside the Kremlin. I would take Trump over Putin any day.
Nemtsov was criticizing Putin and the government non-stop for almost 20 years. There was nothing new to be assaisnated for.