Most things in life are strongly g loaded, from obvious things such as socio-economic success and chess ability to less obvious ones such as an appreciation for Indian cuisine or quality terrorism.
Assassinations are no different.
Assassination quality seems to be a function of national IQ, plus the levels of remuneration and prestige with the national intelligence services.
Mossad is really, really good at this game. Stands to reason. High IQ, incredible prestige, decent money.
The Soviets were also very good at it. Again, very high prestige – the KGB only recruited from the best universities. Incidentally, the post-Soviet penetration of the Russian state by former KGB men was not so much the result of a conspiracy as the natural effects of a high concentration reservoir of human capital gradually spilling out into society.
Modern Russia has rather less to write home about, with its current spies seemingly unfamiliar with the very concept of OPSEC. Not surprising, considering the sort of people it hires.
Phrenology doesn’t lie. Just look at that fellow above, parading after his graduation. Highfalutin espionage work?… cryptography? foreign languages?? fuggedaboutit! His level is that of a nightclub bouncer. At best.
This is because the quality of people who are attracted to work in Russia’s modern espionage agencies is much lower than in the USSR. Talented people have many more options.
But even Putin’s hapless spies have nothing on the Saudis.
Not only did they whack a harmless dissident who did happen to be very well connected in Blue Checkmark circles – you know, the people who run the West – in THEIR OWN CONSULATE, but apparently they even neglected to consider he might be wearing a smartwatch. Which, like, every second SWPL does these days (and a WaPo columnist is going to be culturally SWPL regardless of his skin color). They had a squad of 15 people – incidentally, involving a movement of people that the Turks must have noticed – and nobody thought of it.
I know there’s counter-arguments that the Apple watch can’t transmit data that far, and that the Turks are using it as a cover story to avoid admitting that they were bugging the Saudi consulate.
But it really wouldn’t surprise me if this story was true after all. Everything else hints at rock bottom incompetence, so why not this too.
Not sure if it’s incompetence, the Saudis probably just think they can get away with anything anyway. They’re conducting a starvation campaign in Yemen after all, with support by the US, Britain and probably other western countries as well, so it’s not a completely unreasonable assumption. At least so far Trump doesn’t seem to be really inclined to punish them for the assassination of that journalist.
The Soviets could apply all sorts of strong pressure on a desirable candidate to undergo their training, and to take part in their pernicious lifestyle. Russia is supposedly a ‘federated’ presidential republic. The free market supposedly reigns supreme. You aren’t advocating a return to a more authoritarian form of government now are you, where Putlereque men assign the citizenry to their future role in society?
The KGB had absolutely no need for people who didn’t want to be there. Why on Earth would they. They’d be a liability.
I know plenty of people who were made offers (given my background) and who refused them with no consequences.
No, I do not advocate that; you are merely projecting your own sovok-svidomy values onto me. The only thing I advocate is downsizing the intelligence agencies by an order of magnitude, to a per capita level comparable to that of the US, the UK, or for that matter Tsarist Russia (<10,000 Okhrana agents in an Empire of 150 million), while greatly increasing their salaries and demands on professionalism.
[strongly g loaded … such as an appreciation for Indian cuisine]
Actually, that’s strongly a loaded. If you like exotic spicy food, you probably enjoy getting fucked in the ass.
Well, technically the Saudi affair is not an assassination. It was a lost sheep coming home as far as they were concerned. Assassinations and spying are also not an essential skill for a state. It is what the surplus hanger-ons do to show some activity, they cannot all be bodyguards.
Their incompetence can be embarrassing, but most states could do quite well without them. A botched assassination can have a salutary effect on other non-conformists. It re-establishes the animal pecking order and disabuses silly intellectuals from thinking that this is about words and ideas.
The early CIA, which was staffed by high WASPs and lace curtain Irish, was also quite effective. The preceding OSS was less effective since it was thoroughly penetrated by British intelligence, something the FBI uncovered but was swept under the rug.
KGB and Mossad success is probably also related to extreme levels of aggression, shamelessness, and cruelty in communists and Jews.
When the Germans broke into various Soviet embassies throughout Europe in 1941 they found elaborate torture labyrinths along with specialist equipment for disposing of corpses.
Is it, really? They get away with a lot. When they screw up it is always covered up or at most it is just a local affair so you never hear about it. They are brazen. Dancing Israelis anybody? They know they will get away with anything. Perhaps there should be a website of Mossad fuck ups:
Lillehammer affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
Lavon Affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
Khaled Mashal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Mashal
2004 Israel–New Zealand passport scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Israel–New_Zealand_passport_scandal
There are many cases like the one in NZ where they were caught on doing something but unlike in NZ it was always whitewashed or covered up.
They have a great advantage because Israel and its Mossad operations have a backup of security companies that originated in Israel among Mossad operatives. This security industry became so big that they can afford resorting to a racket. If you do not buy their services something bad may happen at your airport, subway or olympics game or whatever. And if you are small and shitty country you are a goner unless you buy protection from other big guys.
There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the decline in the American character began round the time they started loving Mexican food. (This seems to be what Americans in the UK miss most about home). Ditto the British with chicken tikka marsala.
Under the social credit system in the future white ethno-state anything spicier than hot salami will result in a bad score.
There is such a thing as “Sopranos” style. The incident would have been worse outside of the embassy. A car carrying the unfortunate, would have a flat, no spare coincidentally. Or the tied up victim would have kicked the head of the trunk of the rented sedan, at crossroads, and a traffic cop would have arrested the meeky driver and his companion. The other dozen team members still being in a taxi or two coming in from the airport. It is not always incompetence, it can be coincidence, bad joss, the weather. It is all in the hands of the Almighty.
In your original article, you wrote that the ” Okhrana secret police only numbered one thousand in 1900.”
Shurely shome mishtake, there.
It’s well known that pressure was put on Bogdan Stashinsky to join the KGB. When the KGB wanted somebody to work under their supervision, for whatever reason, they knew how to ratchet up the pressure. So, why haven’t you or other of your friends not signed up, to ‘serve mother Russia’ yet (or perhaps you secretly do, I wont tell anybody)? 🙂
In the modern world, there is one country whose embassies visibly stand apart from all others.
I wonder what we will find in your fortress-embassies around the world once your Empire of Evil crumbles.
говно́ loaded
I would like to read something about how good Okhrana really was and how big budget it had compared to Germany, Austro-Hungary, France, UK. Let’s look at pre-WWI standards. Because by the current standards when democracy and its freedom and liberalism reign it was several orders of magnitude smaller. They did not know then what the police state was.
I would like too see why Okhrana was so meek with respect to subversives and revolutionaries whom they apparently had all well penetrated but they could not strike at them. It might be no different than with various Muslim an not Muslim terrorist organization who while thoroughly penetrated yet they exist and they are from time to time released from the leash they are held on.
The equation is who is penetrating whom. Was there a third party that penetrated Okhrana and made it useless when it was really needed? Was it just an ideology? A meme: let show the West how we Russians love liberty and human right? Is there similar meme at work in security apparatus when it comes to Muslim terrorists?
There is something about hot spicy foods and the decline of civilization. Similar to music tastes. Like liking loud and busy rhythmic music. It overloads senses and gives you instant gratification by suppressing the side that is contemplative and reflective, i.e., the side where the actual rational thinking process occurs where you plan and anticipate.
Probably a lot of boring and/or embarrassing stuff. Dweeb State operatives are absolute embarrassments.
AFAIK the US outsources most torture to client states.
Not that anything unsavory or even unspeakable would surprise me.
“They had a squad of 15 people … ”
Okay, let’s assume that Khashoggi weighed 200 lbs. That equates to a 13.3 lbs Khashoggi cutlet in each of the conspirators carry-on bags during the return flight to Saudi. Also, 13.3 lbs is slightly more than the average weight of a human head, so one of them was able to transport whole the new wall trophy for MbS’s office. Khashoggi’s remaining parts wont go to waste since they can be mixed with dry kibble and fed to the royal pets. It seems to me that this whole operation was well thought out, supported with adequate resources, and executed flawlessly. What am I missing here?
Anatoly,
Have you studied much about the Stalinist penetration of the American government? It probably fits your framework.
Some, like Harry Dexter White (really Weit), were Jews, but many were not. I can’t think of any who didn’t come from the Eternal Jew/Eternal Anglo axis, though. Whittaker Chambers (later repented, of course) and Aldrich Hiss coming from the latter. (Mind you, I’m quasi-Jacksonian when it comes to hating the American Protestant elites, so I have my biases).
This might of be interest to you: https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Snow-Soviet-Triggered-Harbor/dp/1596983221
Good old Stalin.
Ron Unz has hinted at this in some of his American Pravda series
What’s your point, Spisarevski?
I, for one, agree with you that the American CIA is basically a keystone part of the world’s Evil Empire. I am an American, and I agree.
With that said, that doesn’t change the fact that the Soviet intelligence apparatuses were a bunch of scumbags under Stalin.
I would like too see why Okhrana was so meek with respect to subversives and revolutionaries whom they apparently had all well penetrated but they could not strike at them.
Perhaps this can be explained in part by the attitude of Tsar Nicholas II in relation to the nature of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Via Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#Stolypin's_fraud_investigation,_1905
Mossad is good at assassinations?
And this wasn’t an assassination, this is a message to Saudi nationals living abroad who feel comfortable enough to bad-mouth MBS and then have the audacity to ask for consulate services.
You know. One of those tribal-mafia things. No ambiguity like being gunned down in the streets by some Islamist or put on a terrorist list and Hellfired.
I would say it was Russian weakness for gentry and educated people from among whom many revolutionaries were recruited. Political prisoners were treated every well. No physical punishment, no torture, no threat of torture for people from gentry.
Police methods and organization came from France but France was a republic w/o a preferential treatment for people of good birth. Then many Russian police and Okhrana officers were obviously bribable.
And Russia was trying to present itself as a liberal and enlightened. In this it was more Catholic than the Pope. There was some desperation in it as mostly Jewish black anti Russian propaganda was being spread in the West. So instead of acting as painted in the propaganda they tried to prove they were much better. This perhaps was a mistake. Stop treating people who accuse you of brutalities in kid gloves.
There is a GRU training school in Saratov. They join with the FSB to hold an open day when they have a singing dancing show on the city square with side stalls and presentations. Anyone can attend.
I have done an O ring comparison between Russia and the UK. The MIT economic Observatory allows you to do them. It does not flatter Russia as might be expected. Japan seems to be #1 on the complexity measure. Very dense inner O rings and virtually no outer ones at all. The UK has oil.
I suspect that UK tool pushers are paid more than Russian ones.
Russia has a large untapped supply of natural honeypots. The type of woman who would be kryptonite to the Jewish males of Mossad.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NduWIgDX45U
“and that the Turks are using it as a cover story to avoid admitting that they were bugging the Saudi consulate.”
Makes you look very fucking retarded in both cases. If you can not find out that the consulate is bugged after how many years?
The most bizarre aspect of this story is that, after all of the people the Saudis have killed in Yemen, the Financial Times, Uber, and the rest of the blue check crowd had no problem going to MBS’s upcoming “Davos in the Desert”. But one journalist gets (presumably) murdered, and they bail. One journalist’s life is worth tens of thousands of Yemeni tribesmen to them.
He used to be Saudi intelligence with his journalism as a cover, his recent activities and places of work suggest CIA. Perhaps MBS traced a plot to overthrow him back to Jamal and he duly paid the price. The zionists like MBS, the CIA deep state don’t. Impressively the US has managed to alienate both Turkey and Saudi.
trumps loves saudi arabia.
How true is that?
Corruption has always been a problem in Hungary (at least since Ottoman times), but then I learned that Hungarian authorities until 1945 were way less corrupt than they are now. I’m sure it was similar in Russia: there must have been a lot of corruption before 1917, but we might be surprised how little corruption there was compared to post-1991 standards.
Communism really was a horrible school of all-round bad behavior. Though I’m sure there was a lot of corruption in, say, Romania, before communism, it must be a lot worse now.
It took the Americans several years and maybe a happy accident to find out that they had been bugged in their Moscow embassy in the early 1950s.
In the Trump Administration, Dina Powell (next U.S. UN amb.?), Steve Mnuchin, and Tom Barrack are downplaying this whole thing and saying it shouldn’t affect U.S. geopolitical and economic relations with KSA. The Democrats could’ve effectively used this politically against the Trump Administration and pealed off support for Trump/GOP, but they blew there wad on Russia collusion and interference and totally destroyed the narrative of foreign influence for a long time to come. And anti-Trump news media can never showcase it as a serious issue b/c with all the Russia collusion news over 2 years 24/7 it’ll get a yawn. Col. Pat Lang has a blog post about current and former USG/US military employees have sold out for Saudi money: http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/10/httpswwwwashingtonpostcomopinionsglobal-opinionsare-we-willing-to-sacrifice-our-moral-standing-for-this20181012ba.html
“Subversives” for predecessor agency, including men like Dostoevsky. Although fortunately for the history of literature, the regime was so “meek”, they only pretended to execute him.
Anytime a government has to use such organs on its own people who are considered “subversives” – it’s a symptom of negative, not positive, national situations.
To be clear, many commentators here, including the bloggers, have personality types which would rapidly become considered “subversives” in former times.
Trump loves Saudi Arabian Money – having gone bust several times he may well need funds
I was thinking of something else in terms of bribabililty. That’s why I did not use the word corruption. For instance it concerned relaxing the procedures and making life easier for a prisoner. Allowing him having food delivered from outside and all books he wanted and visits from wife. With some financial inducement a prison wardens actually could show a better side of his nature.
“When the Germans broke into various Soviet embassies throughout Europe in 1941 they found elaborate torture labyrinths along with specialist equipment for disposing of corpses.”
I remember reading, some forty-plus years ago, in a book about Igor Gouzenko, that there was a cremation-capable incinerator in the Ottawa Soviet Embassy’s GRU Rezident’s restricted area.
Can you point out anything more, in English, about this?
I’d also be interested, but maybe it’s too good to be true.
I tried to search, but the only sources seem to be Beevor and Irving, with Beevor apparently not giving further sources. I found this description:
https://www.counter-currents.com/2011/06/the-other-side-of-diplomacy/
Unfortunately it’s leading us back to Beevor and Irving. It’s also a politically motivated source, and thus not very reliable itself.
This is probably correct.
A Russian newspaper in Kazan in 1898 found a fraud case of 500 rubles (600,000 rubles in today’s money) notable enough to write about. This sum wouldn’t even be noticed in today’s Russia. I, who don’t exactly rotate in dodgy circles, have second-hand knowledge of a monetarily significantly bigger case that involved police and judicial officials that wasn’t discovered or prosecuted (outside of their clique).
The distance separating 1849 (Dostoevsky’s mock execution) from 1917 was almost as large as the entire existence of the USSR. Not relevant to late Tsarism.
But even speaking of that period, only 5 people were executed over the Decembrist Uprising. I suspect the majority of European countries would have been far harsher over such an overt challenge to state authority.
Interesting. Another example of how German propaganda was inept and ineffective. Every European in German sphere of influences should have come out from the war with a permeant imprint of Soviet crimes including what was going on in their embassies. Instead we pose the question to what extend it was politically motivated to report about it. Pretty pathetic picture and great win for Bolsheviks.
Germans were not able to carry out a decent false flag. Some accused in the Reichstag fire were acquitted. Unthinkable in Stalin Russia and unthinkable in 21 century the US of A. And what about the Gleiwitz incident. Did it even happen? Why was it not used in propaganda? Or was it made up by Americans after the WWII?
And what about Herschel Grynszpan? They had him, they kept him and nobody could figure out how to make a show trial and use it in propaganda purpose. And then it turns out the guy survived the war.
What was it that Germans were missing in their genotype? Asiatic genes for mendacity and cunning? How did the Anglo-Saxons get these genes?
Dmitri, how many in your family were the proud members of the organs because judging by your performance here I doubt they belonged to the category of the “subversives” after the Ancien Régime was deservedly destroyed for awful crimes like mock execution of Dostoyevsky and occasional pogrom here or there.
There was lots of effective propaganda from the Nazis. It has simply been memory holed because they lost. You can find archives of Signal for instance, a wartime German photo magazine. It’s excellent.
There were acquittals in Nazi Germany because until 1944 or so the rule of law was only circumscribed, not eliminated. The Nazis thought of themselves as morally superior to Bolsheviks and were initially somewhat averse to brutality.
Irving is known as a meticulous researcher who only works from primary sources. I don’t see any particular reason to doubt him.
Beevor is a different matter.
The question is not whether reporting it is politically motivated. The question is whether those torture chambers existed at all.
From the sources I infer that Beevor got the idea from Irving, but didn’t provide proper citations, either because Beevor is just not a rigorous enough historian, or just didn’t want to cite Irving.
So we are left with Irving, and unfortunately he was never above politically motivated distortion of the sources.
So maybe I’ll try to go through Hitler’s War to find his sources. Then we’ll be one step closer.
They did use the mass executions carried out by the NKVD during the retreat in summer 1941 for propaganda (which was surely more important than anything going on in Soviet embassies where only a limited number of people can have been killed, if at all).
The problem was that German occupation policies didn’t really offer the peoples in the occupied territories anything attractive (not even the Balts), so effectiveness of such propaganda was bound to be limited.
Irving did distort some sources, though. He did use for example an original German instruction what to disclose in propaganda as some kind of proof about the number of dead at Dresden.
If the Germans did find torture chambers, then they must have made some films and photos of them. But so far there’s nothing available.
So I’m skeptical.
Fair points.
Related:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/10/14/did-saudis-cia-fear-khashoggi-9-11-bombshell.html
Inside of Germany the propaganda was often of limited value, because the people understood that their own government was also committing mass murder, perhaps even on a larger scale than the Soviets. Ordinary Germans did ridicule the official propaganda on that basis. We know it because sometimes informers overheard it and so it got into the Gestapo or SD reports.
Germany never stopped being the Rechtsstaat while Bolsheviks would laugh in your face with incredulity that somebody even thought of such a silly thing like Rechtsstaat. The two animals Nazis and Bolsheviks do not belong to the same Zoo. They really can’t be compared. The mistake we make is that we look at Nazis how they treated foreigners with how Soviets treated their own people. One could argue that Nazis’ III Reich was less punitive and more legalistic than the US of the 21st century.
Yes, they were using it. My point was that they were ineffective. They were ineffective then and they are ineffective now. Otoh, your enemies can get away with almost anything.
The same picts of Soviet atrocities that Germans made during exhumations of Soviet mass graves were used in Wehrmacht crimes exhibition to illustrate German crimes. Fortunately it was pointed out by Polish and Hungarian researchers:
The issue was whitewashed, covered up and most people still think they saw the pictures of Wehrmacht officers standing over the mass graves of people they killed themselves.
Yes, we know where Irvings sympathies might be located, yet I would trust him.
I don’t know, the image of Stalin’s Soviet Union is pretty bad in the Western world, and especially in much of Eastern Europe.
And while I’m not a fan of Reemtsma and the Wehrmachtsausstellung, it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes (most notably the mass death of Soviet pows).
Perhaps you should prepare an exhibition about Soviet POW’s. A big reenactment with thousands of young Germans starving themselves to atone for the crime. Only this way you will be able to prove your sincerity.
Given how many of them vote for parties like the Greens, that would be a good idea, I wouldn’t miss them. Young people are usually pretty annoying anyway.
And I actually thought of something similar once when Germany’s president Joachim Gauck went to one of the usual apology and self-abasement tours to Oradour in France…imo he should have been left there as a permanent exhibit, playing an SS man.
Anyway, I really don’t see why you always need to be so black and white about those issues.
That’s a stretch.
The Nazis created their parallel totalitarian legal structures, which allowed the Gestapo to just arrest and murder anyone at whim. But it never was the main rule. The original legal system was still in place, oblivious to the totalitarian regime, and even some parts of the totalitarian system (the Volksgerichthof, for example) resembled a normal legal system more than in the USSR. Still you have many cases of the Gestapo waiting outside courtrooms to re-arrest defendants in case the court decided to acquit them, or waiting in front of prisons to re-arrest convicts who had served their time and put them in concentration camps. Oh and of course the normal court system was also distorted. You had cases of courts deciding based on no laws but pseudo-legal concepts like the “spirit of the Volk,” or based on centrally issued guidelines. It’s just that lawyers being lawyers, not all of them behaved like this.
It’s just a question of degree. In the USSR even the normal court system was more distorted and the importance of the parallel (purely) totalitarian structure was greater. The latter was more freely exercising its power, while the RSHA exercised its power more discreetly and sparingly.
Altogether the leftist propaganda is in agreement with you: they also claim that because there was no totalitarianism inside of Germany (false), Germans had greater freedom and so are responsible for the crimes of the system in ways that the Russians aren’t regarding their system’s respective crimes.
You seem to be pretty clueless if you think that it helps nationalist propaganda to (falsely, as it is) claim that the Nazis weren’t totalitarian inside Germany.
Irving is not objective enough to be trusted, he is known to have misrepresented evidence before. I wouldn’t believe anything he writes without checking his sources. Especially because there should be photographic evidence, but there isn’t.
Regarding the Counter Currents article. They mention that possibly the White Russian General Miller was murdered inside the embassy. This seems to be contradicted by the fact that apparently he was executed in the USSR only two years later, and there exists a collection of his letters written while in captivity in Moscow. But Counter Currents is right: why would anyone in their right mind smuggle a living person out of a country if they could interrogate and then murder him right there? So based on the fact that they did, indeed, smuggle General Miller to the USSR, we can conclude that they didn’t have the torture chamber at the Paris embassy.
You can check with Goebbels who is one of Irving sources:
I do not know how one would go about finding his other sources for Paris and Berlin embassies but you should do it. Perhaps you could check with Deborah Lipstadt legal team.
Everybody knew that he was not liked by the usual suspects since he wrote the book about Dresden. I am not sure if Hungarians complained about his book about Hungary though probably some Hungarians of Béla Kun ilk were not happy. No other historian proved him ‘misrepresenting evidence.’ No other historian of WWII was as thoroughly scrutinized by unfriendly critics as he was. During the Lipstadt trial supposedly few things were found but I am not familiar with it. I agree with Ron Unz’s assessment:
Are you by any chance Rastafarian or married to one?
From the point of view of lukewarm water everything is either too cold or too hot. But I have a solution for the irritating habit of a good German in you. Next time you feel a need to make an ass covering statements like this one: ” it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes ” think of me and instead of saying it make a check off mark here on the list:
I said the statement five times for you so you do not have to. When you use up these five I will extend the credit for ass covering statements that make ordinary Germans into good or very good Germans. It mean you will be able to be good German with our irritating shit form everybody else.
Indeed, the Nazi system is nowadays often portrayed as being completely consensus-based. And of course there was a significant amount of that. But there also were cases, at least a few of them, of Germans being executed for trivial offenses like telling jokes about Hitler or expressing doubts about the prospects for final victory. Given how conformist most people are even today (when the worst that can happen to you is social ostracism or losing your job, which is bad enough, but not on the same level), there’s too much self-righteous posturing by retroactive resistance fighters imo.
Yeah – well he ain’t gettin’ any unless he comes over and does the dance!
Dance for yo’ oil-dollars boy!!! Dance like you mean it white boy!
Peace.
Spurious correlation? Maybe the correlation is tied to the debasing of the indigenous population by increasing numbers of the replacement population.
https://russia-insider.com/en/skripals-are-mi6-hoax-not-worthy-ladies-detective-novels-israeli-expert-demolishes-uk-case/ri24912
The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax – ‘Not Worthy of Ladies’ Detective Novels’ – Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case
Some things can only make one wonder:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6276919/Sleeping-enemy-Fascinating-pictures-Women-Nazi-occupied-Europe.html
You want to talk about consensus? After the Anschluss of Austria Hitler’s approval 70%. After the Desert Storm Bush approval 90%.
Germans behaved not differently than other people. They believed they lived in a normal country that was in a war for good or bad reason. They were patriotic. They did not agree with everything. It is really tiresome of trying to either make special excuses or special accusations for Germans. No, Germans were normal. They do not need excuses nor accusations unless you are willing to extend them to every other nation which then makes them moot. We were all Germans and still are.
Not a few but very few if any. If you wrote the jokes down and start distributing leaflets then it was a different story.
Look at realities now:
French man sentenced to two years in prison for visiting pro-ISIS websites
https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/1/13805168/france-isis-website-browsing-history-prison-conviction
Mother who spread Isis propaganda on Facebook spared jail for terror offenses due to children’s ‘suffering’
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/woman-isis-propaganda-facebook-jail-terror-offences-children-farhana-begum-ahmed-old-bailey-a8042196.html
The numbers of Germans executed were low. I knew a person who got the death sentence by court in Berlin for sabotage (a very serious accusation) yet it was changed to KL and he even was not a first category German but some opportunistic Volksdeutsche from Silesia.
I can’t find a number of Germans executed in Germany. Wiki is ashamed to put it because it must be so low. Many more French were executed by France after the WWII or Poles by Poland after WWII than Germans during the Nazi regime. The whole point is that the III Reich was the state for Germans and it was good to be a German. This state was not set up to kill Germans and it did not kill Germans. And Germans behaved rationally and did not rebel or plot to overturn the state because the state was good for them.
He touched the glowing orb at the same time as the Saudi King. That has got to count for something.
Why should it make you wonder? Did you watch too many movies about the French, Poles and Russians that they were all heroic resistance fighters and they hated Germans so much. The reason you respond this way is because you are living in the matrix that was constructed during and after the war. And more time passes people are getting more heroic and more survivors are found who are deserving reparations from Germany. The resistance movements created by London and Moscow in Europe ostensively were to fight Germans and impeded German ability to conduct the war. On this front their accomplishments are pathetically irrelevant. All their effort did not shorten the war by one day. The main purpose of all those fabulous Maquis and Partisans was to conduct the war on their own populations by provoking German reprisals so the regular people had real reason to hate Germans because the propaganda from London and Moscow was not enough to make people hate Germans and prevent them from collaborating with them. So you had to turn Germans into a beast that burns villages and hangs hostages. The purpose was to unleash the worst kind of a warfare which is a civil war which is not ciivil at all because it is not guided by any rules or conventions on the side of guerrilla.
It was low in comparison with the Soviet Union. Very high with pre-1933 German history. iirc a commonly cited number is 30 000 death sentences by German courts against German citizens during the 3rd Reich (reiner tor probably can correct me if I’m wrong since he knows the literature about Nazi Germany better than I do).
To some extent that’s true, there was of course a distinct welfare state aspect to Nazism (including the destribution of the property of deported Jews among the Volksgemeinschaft). But you’re putting too much emphasis on the “positive” aspects imo. By 1942 at the latest the Nazi leadership had created a situation where there was really no turning back, given the enemy Germany was fighting in the East and knowledge about the large-scale German crimes committed there, which led to the reasonable calculation that Germany couldn’t afford to lose that war because the vengeance and punishment would be terrible (and that assumption proved more correct than is often acknowledged nowadays).
Anyway, I don’t really get your agenda tbh and I agree with reiner tor…in some ways you’re in strange agreement with the politically correct narrative one is expected to believe in nowadays.
I also have to state that I find the frequent lecturing by you and some other commenters about my views about the 3rd Reich (which you tend to mischaracterize) really irritating. You people tend to forget that this isn’t just some abstract issue for me, it’s part of my family history.
Women want to sleep with winners.
Germans were also at the time the world’s tallest people (tied with Americans of the time) and had the best looking uniforms.
Not so mysterious.
I’m sure even Rosie would agree.
I found this:
Where the ‘other courts’ are the non-military courts. The number for the pre WWII is moderate. High by 19 century and pre Hitler German standards but comparable to the US. The number of 12000 safely can be divided by two as 50% were foreigners who fell under the jurisdiction of Germany if we extrapolate from the data for Plötzensee Prison (where “about half of those executed were Germans”). The foreigners were mostly Polish, Czech, French involuntary and voluntary workers in Germany.
I would like to see the plot of execution vs. time. For the 6-7 years before the war the number is 664 and then it shoots up. I suspect that the last year 1944/1945 may account for the majority of executions when the regime was getting desperate and falling into the ultimate spasms of the pre-agonal madness.
Would the propagandists use the 6000 figure as the chief propaganda point for how awful the Nazi totalitarian regime was for Germans? No, they would not, that’s why they don’t. That’s why the pad it up with foreigners and military courts. The number is high but not striking. In the same time period in the US about 2000 people were executed.
I am always on the side of truth and common sense. Being normal is not an agenda. I am not guided by short sighted tactical calculations whether this or that point of view is good or bad for some cause. I leave it to our Great Tactician and Strategist Reiner Tor. It is him who tunes his opinions to the “correct narrative.”
I can’t help it. I operate in reactive mode and when I see falseness and pretense that irritate me I respond. It is corrective. I do not have an agenda or program to lecture you. Give me less opportunities and you will hear less from me. Perhaps we should call for a moratorium on invoking the III Reich here.
How many were executed for looting after or during the air raids? It supposedly was strictly enforced. In England there was also death penalty for looting but no one was executed.
It is all true what you are saying but it is just another litany of wrongs and even though each of them can be supported with evidence of few case here and few cases there this is a one sided way of looking at it. You need a comparative context. You need quantitative data. And this is not your strong point. When way back we had a discussion on the rate of incarceration in Germany and I was demonstrating it was 3-4 time lower than what it is now in the US you were throwing some silly objections until you said the Irish goodbye which is your MO when you have no argument left. Life was not bad for Germans. And yes, the system was totalitarian but it was the system in the state of total war. Yet, Germans on average were treated well by the regime under the given circumstances.
Unlike Bolsheviks Nazis did not replace all the cadres and the habits, rituals and procedures of the Rechtsstaat were preserved to some extent despite of changes of laws that went against some well established legal doctrines.
Nazis and Bolsheviks were two different animals which did not belong to the same Zoo. Before the war in 6-7 year period 647 death sentences were passed. NKVD could accomplish this result in one day before the lunch break. It is like comparing a street cat to a tiger.
When the war came things started getting progressively worse. It got worse in England too. But Germany was much more punitive. Many death sentences were issued for crimes like looting which in England you would ended up getting several years sentence though the death sentence was on the books. But as I showed in another comment here only circa 6000 death penalties were carried out on German citizens by civilian courts. In the same time period in the US 2000-3000 people were executed. And in the US if you did not follow the news you would not know you were at war. While Germany was at total war and destruction. The discipline and order had to be maintained when many people would want to give up and die when their cities were destroyed and burned out.
There is one more difference between the Nazis and the Soviets. The war destroyed the Nazis while it saved the Soviets’ ass. In this war the Soviet People, mostly Russian for the first time could find a cause that they could genuinely align themselves with the regime. In Germany it was the opposite. The divergence only became to show up towards the very end and that’s when the repressions really kicked in.
First of all I do not care what the leftist or rightist propaganda is doing at a given moment. They may change the direction tomorrow. I do not tune my convictions to who may or may not disagree with me.
But out of curiosity do you consider those who got sucked up in the Operation Goldhagen to squeeze more money from Germany for Israel to be leftist? It was just another Holocaust Industry schtick. There are useful idiots in Germany there is no question about it. But why should I be concerned with it? Germans’ response should have been in accordance with the truth:
We supported our troops and Wehrmacht because this is what it meant to be a patriotic German. And as far as atrocities we did not know. It was not shown in the news. And what we knew we understood that awful things happen during the war. It was outside of Germany and life in Germany was good under the given circumstance. And now you can buzz off.
But when you take the road of lies and start concocting untruthful excuses how terrible it was then you open yourself to be squeezed by unscrupulous operatives like Goldhagen and people who stood behind him. You have to tell them the truth into their face and that there will be no more apologies.
And what about you? Who do you think you are helping by creating one sided narrative of Germany that it was hell on earth. Because certainly you are not on the side of the truth so you must have an agenda.
I actually agree with your basic premise.
They often “converted” German communists instead of executing them. Jews in mixed marriages were pretty safe generally, which seems to be because they were worried about the reaction of the German relatives. Relatively few Germans were ever in contact with the Gestapo. Some of the people executed were pedophiles or other reprobates.
Of course, there couldn’t have been a worse thing for Germans than the war, but that could best be described as hubris. Omnipresent today, but taking modified forms within Europe. But who is to say what the cause of that is. It could be military hegemony, or nuclear peace.
One thing is for sure: Hitler would not have invaded the USSR or declared war on the US, if they had had nukes. Logically, should take the stuffing out of the demonology narrative, where he is conjured up to be compared to other people today, to avoid WW3 or Holocaust II, but it doesn’t because he is not used as an example but purely as a political weapon. Someone using one of the most famous names in history as a moral credential probably isn’t much of a philosopher.
Like everybody I was propagandized since childhood about the WWII and Germany and the image of Germans and Germany was created for me. I was however fortunate that my parents did talk of Germans form WWII as of normal people. This was a reflection of their experiences. They saw German power and hubris but they also saw German defeat, persecution and suffering. This was somewhat at odds with the image form films and literature but it was enough to recognize cracks in the propaganda constructed image. Sometimes I could put a wedge in a crack and see more what was in there. So when I read memoirs or diaries I would look for bits and pieces that did not confirm with the constructed image. I am writing this because of what you have stated made me think of Victor Klemperer diaries or The Journey by Ida Fink that show elements of real life through Jewish eyes. You find there many elements that do not fit the propaganda image of Germany. Then a better picture emerges and this is a picture that person like Reiner Thor would not create. All pieces of Reiner Thor’s lego set are true but they are of one kind only so any structure he builds is always false but he does not see it. Any Nazi related event you saw in a Hollywood is likely to be true or close to the truth but totality of these elements conjures totally false image.
For that, you get to pass “GO”, but you can’t collect your $200. Gotta dance…
Peace.
Do you play Rimworld?
An interesting juxtaposition.
But that’s a very useless statistic. Why were those people executed in the US, and why in Germany? Were there upstanding law-abiding citizens executed merely for political crimes, like General Schleicher, in the US? (Assuming he’s included in the statistic for people sentenced to death – he was not sentenced to death, after all. Just killed.) It’s possible that a more or less liberal and free country executes all murderers, even with relatively low standards of proof, like 19th century countries did. While it’s also possible that a totalitarian dictatorship spares the lives of most murderers and only executes people for the most heinous murders, like 1950s Hungary. Meanwhile, 1950s Hungary randomly executed hundreds of people for all kinds of political crimes, some real, some imagined. I haven’t looked into this, but it’s possible that Hungary in 1870 executed more people than in 1955. But it was undeniably freer in 1870 than in 1955 regardless of how many people were executed. And I’ve already assumed the same crime rates, which we know aren’t true of Germany vs. the US. Crime rates are different today, they were in all likelihood different back then. And yes, in all likelihood Germany had a much lower rate of any violent crimes. Violent criminals might not have been punished so heavily by the Nazis. They often put them to use in concentration camps, where ordinary criminals of Aryan blood were a privileged class over political prisoners and especially Jews. From a Nazi point of view, if a violent criminal could be locked up forever in a KZ, where he could beat up Jewish and political prisoners, then there’s no need to kill him.
Your statistical comparisons to the US and the USSR also assume a very curiously tendentious picture about human nature. How many illegal things have you done today, or this year, or in your life, utu? How many things theoretically punishable by five years in prison? How many things which, theoretically, might result in your execution, even if it’s rare? I can think of a few things (like smoking weed in Hungary before 2002, when smoking a joint together with friends meant that I committed the “give illicit drugs to others” felony as I was passing on the joint, punishable by a minimum of two years in prison), but not many.
Just a question, utu. Have you ever driven on the German Autobahn over 200 kph? I have. Have you driven over 200 kph in a country where it’s illegal, like in Hungary? I have. Have you heard of the less famous Swiss Autobahn? Have you ever driven there? I have. Have you been speeding there? I have. Did you drive over 200 kph there? No? I certainly haven’t. In Switzerland, if you drive over 200 kph and you’re caught, you’ll get to spend some mandatory time in jail. Even though most highways don’t have speeding cameras, not even in Switzerland. Especially if you drive only shorter distances, you can easily avoid paying fines. But if you drive enough, you will certainly get caught. This is why I’ve never driven over 150 kph in Switzerland (and usually below 140 kph), because even over 140 kph your license might get revoked for a few months, and you don’t want to risk that.
Is it cowardice? Especially considering that driving over 200 kph could result in death, so theoretically speaking, much more dangerous, than a small fine? Yet somehow, most people (even me) care more about the small fine, or about the driving license, or about jail time, than about death.
When you (and other people with a false theory of the mind, or outright falsifiers like Goldhagen) argue that Nazi Germany wasn’t really oppressive because “only” a few hundreds were executed. (They don’t mention the altogether perhaps half a million pure blooded Aryan Germans who had spent some time in the custody of the Nazi authorities for political reasons.) I bet you dollars to donuts that your numbers don’t include all the people killed by the Nazis in peacetime – the people killed by stormtroopers during the first few chaotic months of the regime, the people killed during the Night of the Long Knives, the people killed extrajudicially in concentration camps (death rates were very low in peacetime, but not exactly zero, even excluding natural causes of death). And of course, there were the Jews killed in the pogroms, mostly in 1938. (There were a few pogroms before the Reichskristallnacht.)
People didn’t care for Jews, mostly, but they had a theory of the mind. The Nazis were occasionally murdering Jews here and there, long before the holocaust started. You don’t need to be very smart to understand that those guys who are killing other people (even if it’s “only” Jews, who you don’t even like yourself) are not going to just give up power voluntarily. They are only killing Jews, for the moment, but if you turn on them, they will most probably kill you, too. Because they won’t just give up power to be later on prosecuted for their crimes against Jews.
Whatever you say, at least 50% of the population thought very badly of the Nazis even at the height of the Nazi successes. Were those anti-Nazi Germans cowardly for not standing up to the Nazis? Well, they’d have risked something. Even if what they did was very small (like talking to a Jewish person nicely), it could’ve resulted in very bad things, like arrest, even. Not very likely, but not impossible either. Would you take such risks? Would Goldhagen take such risks? Would the moralizers take those kinds of risks? No, very unlikely. Actually, some of them might take those risks. You don’t really know until you get tested.
And of course the risk was not only execution. Hundreds of thousands of pure-blooded Aryan Germans were arrested in 1933. Most of them were released within a few months (after having been beaten and cut off from their families for days or weeks or months on end), but they learned their lessons. As did their families. Yet tens of thousands were periodically re-arrested around important days, for example right before the famous Nazi plebiscites.
Yes, the USSR executed a great many more people, but how much more dangerous was it to be anti-regime in the USSR than in Nazi Germany? Most of the people killed by Stalin were killed merely for who they were. Kulaks were killed or starved to death regardless of whether they wrote love letters to Stalin or if they tried to organize armed uprisings. Many loyal Stalinist communists were killed in the Great Terror. The biggest parts of the Great Terror consisted of things like the “ethnic operations,” which meant basically executing all Polish males or random males with Polish names in the phone book. Or the destruction of the clergy: Stalin had a hundred thousand priests or former priests shot. It was horrible, but how could those hapless former priests avoided it? Often they were killed even if they (sincerely or not) declared their conversion to the new religion of atheism and Marxism-Leninism. The mass murder of the “former people” (also a big part of the Great Terror) often struck people who had already joined the new regime or declared their loyalty to it over and over again. I don’t really buy the theory that anti-Soviet activity was that much more dangerous in the USSR. It was more dangerous, probably, for most people, most of the people killed in the USSR were killed randomly. I remember having seen a documentary about people who started an anti-communist party in the USSR sometime in 1947. They were sent to the gulag, to a forced labor camp. Which is a similar fate to what would’ve happened in peacetime Germany for a similar crime. Now random Nazi leaders didn’t get executed in Nazi Germany for random reasons, unlike in the USSR. Random people didn’t get randomly shot, unlike in the USSR. But the function of random shootings in the USSR (if they had a function at all) was simply to scare people shitless. People well understood in the USSR the same thing that people understood in Nazi Germany: the bad guys in power, who are randomly murdering some people (some others, who you might not even like), are not going to give up power voluntarily. Best is to avoid getting their attention. Do everything they tell you.
I wanted to answer some other points of yours, but that other comment of mine got lost when I accidentally closed my browser, so I might rewrite it later, or I might not.
And this proves the existence of secret torture chambers… how, exactly?
“There is something about hot spicy foods and the decline of civilization. Similar to music tastes.”
Tolerance for spicy foods is correlated with psychopathic tendencies. The fact that spicy foods have become mainstream culture might subtly indicate a power-shift in the Ruling Class Elite – more psychopaths and fewer old school WASPs; they control what you see advertised on TV and in the movies, after all. Then again, it might just be are reflection of the nation’s declining demographics as a result of Hispanic immigration from Central America and South America, where spicy foods are also a mainstay (and, perhaps not coincidentally, where crime rates and prevalence of psychopathic tendencies are much higher).