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The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

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Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#51

Post by agapon »

hef19898 wrote: post #31
eduction wrote: post #28

Bizarre to write something called "the real war" that is focused on American forces, who were, by any measure, enjoying vast advantages and resources unavailable to other combatants (including being able to choose the time and place of engagement). Below is a table of WWII military casualties by nation: World War II casualties - Wikipedia Soviet Union 8,668,000 to 11,400,000 Germany 4,440,000 to 5,318,000 China (1937…

Russian blood, British intel and sheer stubborness and US industry won WW2. A fact that both sides of the Iron Curtain down played and ignored throughout the Cold War.

Don't package all Soviet nations of the time into "Russians". Especially at this time.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#52

Post by rhn_mk1 »

branko_d wrote: post #18
siavosh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the Chris Hedges book when it came out and it's left a lasting impression on me. I think it got rid of any academic notions of war I may have had. One part that I'll always remember was him saying the war criminals were the pundits on TV leading up to and during the Bulkan war, they held much guilt in leading the masses to the terrible outcomes. The other counter intuitive insight it gives is how wars have thi…

> the war criminals were the pundits on TV Mila Štula comes to mind. I still remember watching the hysteria on Radio-Television Belgrade in disbelief that people would actually believe it. But they did. And the rest is history, as they say. Ugly, murderous, and utterly unnecessary history. I see some signs of this in the contemporary US media landscape, and I worry the consequences might be similar.

What event are you describing? A quick search doesn't reveal any English sources for Mila Štula.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#54

Post by nostrademons »

yamtaddle wrote: post #47
stereolambda wrote: post #42

Not having fought in a war (yet?) I won't dare to speak about the core message here (it's well worth reading), but I sometimes wonder about dissemination of this knowledge. The fragments about Hitler and Goebbels shielding themselves from gory reality on the ground are interesting in this context. This shows well how the leadership operates on the level of its own fantasies, and moves the "chess pieces" while clueles…

> The current difficulty in Russia with actually mobilizing many parts of society gives one a glimmer of hope: they have a handle mainly on marginalized and poor village dwellers. Maybe the modern living standards and communications landscape does ultimately make people more resistant to being mobilized for dumb wars, even if for 100% selfish reasons and (sadly) without necessarily getting rid of imperialistic nation…

Of the 4 U.S. Boomer presidents: Clinton used an educational deferment & Rhodes scholarship to dodge the draft, then enrolled in ROTC when the law was changed, then pulled out of ROTC once his draft number was high enough that he wouldn't be drafted anyway. Bush enlisted in the Air National Guard, which was never called up for Vietnam. Obama was a child. Trump had "bone spurs".

There's a long, recent history of draft dodgers doing well in high places.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#55

Post by hnuser123456 »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #52
branko_d wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the war criminals were the pundits on TV Mila Štula comes to mind. I still remember watching the hysteria on Radio-Television Belgrade in disbelief that people would actually believe it. But they did. And the rest is history, as they say. Ugly, murderous, and utterly unnecessary history. I see some signs of this in the contemporary US media landscape, and I worry the consequences might be similar.

What event are you describing? A quick search doesn't reveal any English sources for Mila Štula.

translated from https://www.espreso.co.rs/vesti/hronika/197603/umrla-mila-st...

Mila Štula is mostly remembered by the public as one of the leading media poets of the Milošević regime on Serbian Radio and Television from the beginning of the 90s of the last century. She became famous for her famous comments in the daily Dnevnik in which she disqualified the opposition and its leaders. Her statement that Vuk Drašković has a villa on Lake Geneva is particularly noteworthy, which has never been proven.

The other side saw her as a victim of Tuđman's regime, who became unwelcome in Zagreb after HDZ came to power, as she provoked, or asked unpleasant questions, to the first president of independent Croatia at media conferences. She was a journalist for "Danas" in Zagreb. The Croats, among other things, accused her of working for the counter-intelligence service of the JNA. This led to her moving to Belgrade in 1991.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#56

Post by hef19898 »

agapon wrote: post #51
hef19898 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian blood, British intel and sheer stubborness and US industry won WW2. A fact that both sides of the Iron Curtain down played and ignored throughout the Cold War.

Don't package all Soviet nations of the time into "Russians". Especially at this time.

Absolutely true, it was all Soviet Nations.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#57

Post by nine_k »

lisper wrote: post #3

The willingness of societies to sanitize the realities of war is easily understood in evolutionary terms: genes that build brains that are willing to suspend disbelief and engage in violence reproduce better than genes that build brains that are not willing to do so because the former can use a credible threat of violence to exploit the latter as resources. The sad fact of the matter is that the answer to Rodney King…

We can definitely go along most of the time. Bigger wars become more and more of a losing proposition with modern (conventional) weapons, and the complexity needed to run a prosperous society. Starting a war to grab riches (as it was in ancient times) usually does not work, and definitely does not work on larger scale.

The only relatively reasonable case for starting a war today is a war for independence, for liberation from someone else's strangling control. It does not always lead to prosperity as a result though; look at Eritrea, for instance.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#58

Post by lisper »

nine_k wrote: post #57
lisper wrote: post #3

The willingness of societies to sanitize the realities of war is easily understood in evolutionary terms: genes that build brains that are willing to suspend disbelief and engage in violence reproduce better than genes that build brains that are not willing to do so because the former can use a credible threat of violence to exploit the latter as resources. The sad fact of the matter is that the answer to Rodney King…

We can definitely go along most of the time. Bigger wars become more and more of a losing proposition with modern (conventional) weapons, and the complexity needed to run a prosperous society. Starting a war to grab riches (as it was in ancient times) usually does not work, and definitely does not work on larger scale. The only relatively reasonable case for starting a war today is a war for independence, for liberat…

> Bigger wars become more and more of a losing proposition

You've missed the point. Yes, a war is generally a losing proposition nowadays. But a credible threat of war often is not.

Even more to the point, wars were often winning propositions in our ancestral environment, and so we are more likely to be descended from people who were willing to wage them in the past. That is a very difficult legacy to overcome.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#59

Post by WalterBright »

> And they knew that the single greatest weapon of the war, the atomic bomb excepted, was the German 88-mm flat-trajectory gun, which brought down thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of soldiers.

I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, and proximity fuzes for artillery shells. This had the effect of doubling the firepower.

Another was high-octane gasoline, which enabled much more powerful aircraft engines.

The Axis did not have these technologies.

Re: The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)

#60

Post by jimbokun »

yibberish wrote: post #45
krrrh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn’t say anything about not revisiting those events personally or with other vets, he said by with “people who weren’t there”. Give a guy a break for choosing to not sit his kids down to hear all the gory details.

I'm not telling him to go scare his kids. I'm pointing out some possible self-deceit. "I did it for them!".. sure, why not? but my point is that first and foremost he's making those choices for himself; which is pefrectly fine. what's not fine (IMO) is to pretend such choices aren't selfish.

Who gives you the authority to judge the morality and motivations behind this person's actions?
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