In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren’t undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle’s exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
Everyone: “It seems we, as humans, have a pretty strong dislike of executing other humans. A biological aversion to commiting genocide, one might say.”
Nazis: “Halten Sie mein Bier!”
But in all seriousness, your comment reminded me of “The Banality of Evil”.
For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
There was a Sonderkommando of Jews in Auschwitz forced calm down inmates before murdering them and to rob and cremate them afterwards. Exactly to keep the psychic toll lower on the SS and to ensure fewer witnesses.
My opinion of humanity was already so low…
It’s funny, I had the opposite reaction, I see this as pretty strong evidence of our decency. It’s really, really hard to get most people to behave this way, and the ones who do wind up fucked up from it (as they should).
True. It’s hard to make people kill, but it’s much too hard to teach soldiers to refuse an amoral order.
Gee I fucking wonder why you have trauma and PTSD??? Fucking moronic fucks, zero sympathy
Oh, I can’t wait for the sympathy piece on Auschwitz guards to drop any day now. They must have seen some very, very, very difficult things too, poor souls.
Gil Hochberg described “shooting and crying” as a soldier being “sorry for things I had to do.” This “non-apologetic apology” was the self-critique model advanced in Israel in many politically reflective works of literature and cinema as “a way of maintaining the nation’s self-image as youthful and innocent. Along with its sense of vocation against the reality of war, growing military violence, occupation, invasion, [there was] […] an overall sense that things were going wrong.”
Interesting read thanks.
Karen Grumberg noted that “the Zionist soldier, a man with a conscience, loathes violence but realizes he must act violently to survive; the dilemma causes him to weep while pulling the trigger. Looking inward, he despairs at the violence he feels compelled to enact this way because he fears his moral corruption.”
Amir Vodka wrote “It typically depicts the IDF in a critical light, as a traumatizer of young soldiers, yet the genre itself is often criticized for turning the assailants into victims, and in a sense allowing the continuation of war under the guise of self-victimization.”
So, basically every war movie the US makes about itself.
Sympathy for the devil
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Ah yes, those hundreds of “terrorists” all nicely lined up in the road.
How the fuck do you run someone over with a bulldozer… no matter what i think of it’s not coming up good…
Riskiest click of the day. But I’m so glad I clicked it.
You win this thread.
Austin Powers was a war criminal!
That link stays blue
ah Israelis and playing the victim, name a more iconic duo.
One of the reasons for creating the system of death camps was that Nazi soldiers and policemen tasked with murdering Jewish people and other undesirables had elevated rates of PTSD. Also, during the Cultural Revolution, the People’s liberation Army switched to a lower caliber sidearm because all the executions were giving them carpel tunnel.
You don’t want to loose sight of humanity just because you’re committing atrocity.
I know that another driving force for the gas chambers was to preserve ammunition.
The earliest versions of gas chambers were essentially “piping truck exhaust into a building.” They moved on from that in order to preserve metal (from the piping), fuel, and vehicles for other purposes.
I think they were using vans or buses, not filling buildings with carbon monoxide. Smaller spaces.
That doesn’t seem very efficient if you want to gas dozens of people at once, which happened many times.
And yet, they still did it
They did it throughout the war and not merely at the start? So weird that there’s photographic and video evidence of people being gassed in buildings then.
Edit - Here’s evidence that the Germans used chambers (often called “showers”) from 1941 onwards:
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/types-of-camps/ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations
While I’m sure vans were still used for their mobility/convenience and in cases where not many people were to be executed, Germany created extermination camps specifically to kill people (in more ways than just gassing) and those locations contained constructed buildings meant for execution with gas, not vans.
Even a few concentration camps had their own gas chambers, which were not vans, that were used to execute people that could no longer do forced labour.
Holy Shit Dude.
When extermination methods were tested to relieve the Einsatzgruppen which had up to that point in the war been shooting people close up, by hand, gas vans were used. As tests. Until Zyklon B was introduced.
I don’t know what you’re on, but it is a historic fact that before the gas chambers were used, gas vans were a method of murder.
I didn’t deny that, it’s in the links I posted. What I deny was that vans were the dominant method after 1941.
Maybe? I know for sure they were doing piping into a building early on.
Let me go get my Planck length sized violin.
and if he had refused to do as commanded would he have been shot himself?
No he would sit in a jail cell. As a trained soldier no one would fuck with him
Essentially a perfectly risk-free environment. But he chose murder instead
If the army starts shooting its own soldiers, it’s not going to exist for very long. You can read very obscure stories about occasional killings during the Vietnam War, but those are almost always things that happened in the jungle when nobody would ever find out.
If they try that kinda thing in Israel today, it’s not going to be a secret, and all of the other infantry and their family are going to wonder who is next, which in turn would massively reduce support for the Israeli military.
there was a story of an iraq war soldier killed by his own squad a couple years ago. thats what put the thought in my head
Child murderer.
So, I hate to be this guy for Israel. But there are legal ways for this to have happened. I know the first picture in all of our heads is them running over prisoners. But it is a valid tactic to collapse your enemies trenches or building on top of them. The US has been doing that since at least Vietnam. Armored bulldozers are, of course, uniquely pretty good at this tactic. Although it is usually a tank with a bulldozer blade attached to the front.
Here is a video of the soldier in the bulldozer with his friend in gaza bragging they destroyed 5000 houses https://files.catbox.moe/sgmc5b.mp4
The friend already killed himself.
Yeah that’s not a great visual. But the house was clearly already badly damaged and had explosives in it. This is standard for combat clean up. We can certainly talk about why 5,000 houses were damaged bad enough to need demolition though.
They’re gloating about it, absolute monsters.
“Everything squirts out,” he added.
Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza
Yeah. This ain’t that.
That logic doesn’t follow. Did you think collapsing a trench means you don’t see anything?
Maybe just read the article from the many links in this thread about how they were being used to push bodies instead of talking out your ass.
A bit rude I realize but you would rather sound like you are from the middle and spout a fact that you know than just read and properly participate in the conversation. It’s not helpful and it’s infuriating at best.
I did read the article. Nothing in there screams war crimes for this guy specifically. Bodies do need to be cleared, badly damaged buildings have to come down, and it’s normal for a person to feel pride in their work.
Seeing dead bodies is a traumatic event all on its own. Soldiers in every war this century have reported that as a problem.
I’m not saying he’s innocent or that he definitely didn’t commit war crimes. I’m saying there is not evidence of it here.
I’m sure this guy operated his bulldozer with all of the due care and concern for innocent human life as the IDF bombing campaign that by their own reports have killed twice as many civilians as militants.
Yup, they get very little benefit of doubt at this point. I’m just pointing out that it’s not 100 percent straight to war crime from this description.
Except we already know that they were doing this.
Rachel Corrie was a civilian.
How can Isreal use TOTAL WAR while claiming HAMAS using hostages is bad ?
She was also a long time ago. Why not use the unarmed American they shot in the head recently?
