Your reply was to Brandioch, but I followed your link.

The numbers he reports are indeed startling - about an order of magnitude larger than I had imagined / heard vague reports about over years.

This Canadian researcher appears to have spent about 2 years (and among the first English speakers there?) at the Central State Special Archive in Moscow. After reading his thesis I looked for some reviews from orgs. not necessarily dedicated to general nose-rubbing of the species into its dung. Found also this rebuttal to a book by Douglas Peifer, by James Bacque:

[link|http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~german/discuss/veday/bacque.txt|Corrections to another book with claimed errors]

Excerpt:
This and the many mistakes in the Ambrose-Bischof book raise questions about their scholarship. In future postings, I shall if anyone asks, describe some of these very distressing errors in their book. In the meantime, the more interesting question turns on the accuracy and extent of the Soviet archives.

Here are the chief points: the archives record a death total for the Japanese prisoners that is the same as the total determined by the Japanese government; the archives show that more Poles died in the Katyn-related massacres than the Poles themselves had thought; the archives record more deaths among captured German civilians (internyrovannye) than the Adenauer government had estimated in the 1950s. These facts are doubly significant, demonstrating not only the accuracy of the archives, but also providing a second test of the accuracy of the German death totals, since all these prisoners were kept in the same camp system, many of them in the same camps at the same time.

By every test, these are by far the most complete, coherent and
accurate archives on World War Two prisoners in the whole world.
And they record an appalling atrocity by the Soviets: to the
421,000 Germans must be added all the others to a total of well
over 600,000.


I'll have to read the book, as it passes (my) first degree test for plausibility (there are so many rants that do not). Enough time has elapsed for: Bacque to be disgraced (!?) had he Bowdlerized the archival data. That I also count as (+), aided by Google search for any such accusation.. Found none such.

I'd agree that it is a rather massive rebuttal to the idea that (the US, UK, France)'s "TREATMENT OF THE PRISONERS AFTER THE WAR" bore any resemblance to the Geneva or any other convention.

I can only observe FWIW: I am shocked at the magnitude; hardly surprised at the qualitative ugliness (that I have in fact asserted on occasion): OF *FUCKING COURSE!* Muricans are as hypocritical as the rest of the species - compounded by our egregious sanctimony which is incapable of imagining that WE ARE.

This likely will deserve a thread of its own, if any others plan to read the book. I plan to. "Those who deny history" must be in a special Dantean locale way below the ones who.. won't bother even to read it: Ah but, Whose Version? (No wonder jingoistic ignorance is popular -- it's so much easier.)

But to return to the original contretemps:

You surely wouldn't suggest the "Everybody Does It" rubric for, in 2002: out-Eisenhowering Ike, would you?

Yes, we're killers. We (can) try to restrain ourselves each day, for one more day. Should we try to debrief these collected suckers? Fucking-A. Should we torture them? (And would anyone answer that positively, beyond a whisper? / or report on it after doing it?) ...

Probably this entire thread is moot, except as an effort to get the folks with the whips to try and remember that their aim was to remain human - within The Great New War Against Evil\ufffd. A certain naivete is necessary to avert madness.

Y'know? We are not ever going to find out - well, maybe after some of Our Dungeonmasters reach retirement age and write memoirs: which the next generation will dismiss as Impossible*, as in

Bacque II ?

* Muricans don't do bad things\ufffd

Share your pain over our malevolence. (When on other worlds, I never admit I am from This species - and I join in with their ridicule of those crazy destructive homo-saps and their juvenile hubris..)


Ashton
just visiting

Kurt Vonnegut - ..and so it goes
(Hey at least everyone knows about Dresden - who wants to)