American war crimes
The only good thing about this movie is that it continues the trend of showing American war crimes, rather then perpetuating the lie that only Germans committed atrocities in war.
shareAwwwww....trying to show some sort of 'moral equivalency'?
Why can't you wretched prey creatures understand that the Universe doesn't owe you anything!?
What American war crimes? Name a single one that is comparable to the Waffen SS's many ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen-SS#War_crimes
And this doesn't include the many atrocities and mass murders committed by the Waffen SS and the German Army on the Eastern Front.
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
Or units like Dirlwanger & Kaminsky or policies like the 'Three All' policy. Trust me I know 'bad stuff happens to people in war' but there was never a 'special unit' designated or a 'policy';
Why can't you wretched prey creatures understand that the Universe doesn't owe you anything!?
stupid fucking signature . read it twice before working out it was just a stupid signature and not part of your stupid post
shareThe Allies, including the Americans, committed some war crimes. They did not approach the scale of the German and Japanese crimes.
The movie was fiction, so the war crime depicted in it was fiction, but the murder of SS soldiers was frequent enough. The Canadians were known for it after Normandy, as were the Yanks after the Bulge.
Entropy ain't what it used to be.
Some Allied soldiers committed war crimes but mass murder- very rare indeed and certainly not numbering in the hundreds (and higher) like Nazi war crimes. Plus Nazi crimes were mostly approved by the authorities who thought it perfectly legitimate to murder innocent civilians and surrendered enemy soldiers if they chose to.
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
Vietnam War... My Lai Massacre.
shareYes, Canadians did this to the SS because the SS did this to our soldiers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardenne_Abbey_massacre
shareFirstly, I'm Canadian.
The idea that "Canadians were known for it after Normandy" is far from fact.
Due to some unverified WW1 story that spread like an urban legend once the Commonwealth troops returned home in 1918-19, it was vaguely believed during WW2, especially by Brits, that "Canadians were the most likely of the Allied forces to commit atrocities."
Nothing would be less "Canadian" than such behaviour. And this idea obviously excluded the Russians as allies.
Do the research. Only one serious war crime to our name, and it's a joke. A sniper fired on troops entering a village; they fired back, consciously killing civilians.
I've no doubt that, after the brutal massacres Canadian troops suffered in Normandy (and even before), there must have been some unrecorded retaliation on our part which resulted in unjust deaths. After all, we're Canadian, not gods. But nothing substantiated or on a grand scale.
Ignorance is bliss... 'til it posts on the Internet, then, it's annoying.
I've heard of the particular incidents, Liebstandarte or who the *beep* it was, but I would not call it a widespread awareness...as for WW1, I've never heard anything about Canadians in particular playing rough and loose in that..more the Australians, if anybody.
When they talk about people being gunned down in parachutes in air combat in WW2, and this sort of thing, doing a strafe-run on a crashlanded Luftwaffe bomber apparently the original regular culprits there were RAF Poles.
Dowding was very clinical about it. Said that Germans were were bailing out over UK territory should not be worried by RAf pilots, as 1. they were falling into captivity and would be out of the game and 2. they were often fruitful sources in interrogation of barracks bugging.
He said, OTOH, that those things did not apply to RAF pilots downed over Britain, and he would not be in the least surprised in fact would fully expect, if Luftwaffe pilots sought to make sure they were finished.
When the fighting transferred to over the Continent, there were certainly no rules or directives to either RAF or American pilots NOT to fire on Germans bailing out.Giving them another burst if they were seen climbing out of the aircraft was common, apparently.Some drew the line out of bounds if they actually made it to their parachutes.
???
Area bombing, recruiting ex-SS and Gestapo, running a school for torture. There's three.
Marlon, Claudia & Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007, 2010. Clio, July 1997 - 1 May 2016.
I don't include area bombing. Not only was it practised by all sides it wasn't technically illegal. Are you seriously saying that the British should have left all their bombers in their hangars and not bombed Germany at all? Even when Britain's cities were being bombed by the Luftwaffe? The British people wouldn't have believed such a thing. It had to be area bombing because bombing wasn't accurate enough at night- it wasn't even that accurate by day for that matter. It was the only way to hit back at Germany and the Nazis in 1941-42, the alternative was to do nothing and give them free reign. If area bombing hadn't been carried out the invasion of the USSR could have been successful and the Nazis could have won the war. Would that have been the preferred outcome to you?
So, Squeethie, should the Nazis have been just left alone in their peaceful untouched cities to carry out their total war on others? Which included the destruction of villages, towns and cities by the bucketload, along with the people who lived in them. Are you accusing the men of Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force of being war criminals?
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
I mean that an atrocity is an atrocity because it is, not because the British state finds it expedient to condemn some perpetrators and collaborate with others. Dropping explosives and fire on people from an aeroplane is as atrocious as shooting them in the neck. They started it is OK as a description but it is not an alibi for the immorality of the behaviour; the point is that morally, the British state was as disgusting as the nazi state, because that's what they are, cruelty machines.
Marlon, Claudia & Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007, 2010. Clio, July 1997 - 1 May 2016.
Is there anything moral in the actual waging of war?
war is only governed by law and never by morals. Thus, I'd prefer the people who stick to the rules over those who don't (UK over the Nazis).
Though I think the whole UK focus on bombing seems to have been a mistake.
Though I think the whole UK focus on bombing seems to have been a mistake.
But it might have been the only real way to strike at the German heartland...
Why can't you wretched prey creatures understand that the Universe doesn't owe you anything!?
share
the German civilians were perceived as being very much a part of the German war effort...in fact, that would be pretty much impossible without them.
It was perceived as the most effective return on the huge deployment in men and resources of Bomber command against Germany, at a time where pinpoint attacks on military or even industrial targets simply did not have the means to be accurate enough at night.
We were not just fighting Hitler and the SS, we were fighting all of Germany, all Germans.
Same as, these days, inspite of the dreamy platitudes in denial, we really are at war with all Islam and pretty much all muslims.
Most of the people who don't have bombs or guns are subscribers to the exact same ideology and mindset as the one who do.
All that is is being a militant, vs being a mobilised militant.
If you were a beautiful young blonde German woman in pigtails who went to Nurnberg and saluted and chanted 'Sieg Heil", were you not part of the same problem as a squad of SS Waffen infantry, should you get a pass?
war is only governed by law and never by morals.
Were the war crimes of the Nuremberg trials based on laws that existed and applied at the time of the crimes?
Entropy ain't what it used to be. share
Pretty sure genocide has never been legal.
shareIt wasn't until the Hague Conventions of the decade before the First World War that the customary laws of war were properly codified. Even then, internal affairs of sovereign nations were not subject to international law. Even in 1946, it was entirely legal under international law for the Nazi government to murder as many German Jews as they wanted just as it was for the Ottoman government to murder Armenians thirty years earlier. Murdering Jews and others outside Germany was covered generally by other parts of the Hague Conventions and other post WWI agreements.
sharePretty sure genocide has never been legal.
It wasn't legal. It was practiced, accepted and undefined.
A documentary was made in 2014 about the origin of the word:
Four modern stories of remarkable courage while setting out to uncover the forgotten life of Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the term 'genocide'. Inspired by Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 'A Problem From Hell', 'Watchers of the Sky' traverses time and continents to explore genocide and the cycle of violence.
"Watchers of the Sky" trailer link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2049589/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt
Susan, "but I was thinking..." Leo, "STOP! Thinking is for losers!" - Scandal's satirical message. share
Were the war crimes of the Nuremberg trials based on laws that existed and applied at the time of the crimes?
Yes. share
Thanks, Dave. IIRC, one charge was "waging war of aggression" or similar. It sounded to me like something the Allies made up and applied arbitrarily. I wonder how a Soviet might sit in judgement of a German for attacking Poland, Denmark, Belgium, etc, given that the Soviets attacked Poland, Finland, Japan, etc.
Entropy ain't what it used to be.
It sounded to me like something the Allies made up and applied arbitrarily.
I'd say selectively rather than arbitrarily. The Soviets were clearly guilty of it as well, but the West had no way to bring them to justice and they were also victims of the Germans.
Wars of conquest were outlawed by a number of interwar treaties, like the Kellogg–Briand Pact. share
No, at best it can be a lesser evil.
Using a C19th technology to take people to factories where they were made dead by an early C20th technology is not qualitatively different to using a C20th technology to take C19th and pre-C19th technology to make death.
Treating the nazi regime as peculiarly evil, rather than circumstantially different, provides a false alibi to the slave empires of western Europe and north America. Their successor, the US empire, hasn't been slow to use the traditional methods of colonial repression, especially since the USSR went out of business. No wonder its propagandists concentrate on the means to kill 10% of the dead of the war, rather than the "normal" means used on the 90%.
Marlon, Claudia & Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007, 2010. Clio, July 1997 - 1 May 2016.
No, at best it can be a lesser evil.
My point was that you can't really compare the morality of the British and the Germans in waging the war because war has nothing to do with morality. You can only compare by whether they stick to the rules or not.
Treating the nazi regime as peculiarly evil, rather than circumstantially different,
They weren't circumstantially different, they were philosophically different, and the nazi philosophy was evil. eugenics and nazi race theory meant to kill people for what they were. share
Bloody right Hotrodder, my granddad was a tail gunner on Lancs.
All the crews of bomber command were volunteers and bloody brave men.
I'm proud of my grandfather. It was the only way to hit back at the Jerry.
i like trumpets and bookmarks.......
Dropping the Atomic bomb just as the Russians were invading Japan which is what arguably the Japanese feared more than the bomb considering that the US had cart blanche rule over the skies of Japan resulting in dozens of Hiroshimas pretty much every day?. I would guess that no small part of the decision to drop the bomb was to show the Russians just who was the post-war boss.
Dresden?, oh wait that was the Brits as well.
Dropping the bomb did get them to surrender before Russia could take over half of Japan Look at a past map and one now. Japan will never get those islands back from Russia.
share