AHC: better behaved Red Army
- Thread starter Ryker of Terra
- Start date
That's absurd. Such reasoning was not widely used by Red Army soldiers to justify their atrocities.
A common man is driven to communism by the perspective to get something.
I don't think the Red Army's horrific track record was due to their communist ideology. Not in the way being suggested here.
The United States military is suspected of covering up massive campaigns of serxual assualt and rape in Okinawa. Some numbers put it up as high as 10,000 women. Many Jspanese women never came forward out of shame, and is believed those that did come forward were largely ignored by military police.
In war, women are always victims, to try chalk it to a single ideology is really stupid and dismisses the problem.
When extreme racism and dehumanization is part of propaganda, and it was for all the powers in WWII, such atrocities are the inevitable result. You can't fix the issue without fundamentally adjusting the nature and scope of the war itself and attitudes of governments and propaganda at the time.
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I'd be interested to know how many rapes the IJA committed against Okinawan women by contrast.
Minor point of order, but the dedovshchina as we know it today* developed in the late-60s/early-70s due to a mix of developments in Soviet society and manpower recruitment/management regulations. Prior to then, it seems that it wasn’t any worse than common military hazing in most countries and wasn’t the source of the brutalization of Red Army troops in WW2. That had more to do with a combination of the dehumanizing nature of the war against the Germans, the general trend of Soviet officer/soldier interactions (especially when it came to military discipline), and the general experience of life under Stalinist authoritarianism in the 30s and 40s.
*The term is older than that of course, but the nature and severity of the hazing it describes has changed over time.
That’s fucking nonsense. The Red Army’s behavior is consistent with the historical pattern of brutalized soldiers under a variety of historical ideologies. If anything, more thoroughly educated (and hence indoctrinated) Communists tended to express horror and outrage at what was being done when they addressed the issue.
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Kindly put, this is preposterous.
There were any number of reasons for the well document depredations by the Red Army, some of them quite obvious, others less so, but "everything for the people" doesn't even make it to a footnote of a footnote on the list.
The number of rapes committed by Japanese troops in WW II are so mind boggling that most commenters simply ignore the issue except for a sentence or two regarding "comfort women".
Given that virtually every Japanese soldier, and a good number of sailors/airmen that deployed out of the Home Islands made visits, many with regularity, if location made it possible (defenders on Tarawa or left to rot on smaller leapfrogged islands had a lot less possibility than troops stations in China of what is now Indonesia, although it should be noted that even Pacific outposts like Truk had "comfort houses"(where 70 of the women were killed by IJN personnel when it was believed that a U.S. amphibious assault was imminent)) and that between 100-200,000 women were forced into the "Comfort Houses" one barely begins to scrape at the figures.
The average victim was expected to service at least 10 men a day (with that number increase several times after periods of combat). Assuming that average figure and 25 days "work" per month for a year (the comfort women were generally so ill-treated* that after a year, sometimes less, they were so broken down that the IJA/IJN personnel in charge would simply toss them out to fend for themselves, with the inevitable results) simply math shows that the average woman was raped at least 2,500 times. No multiply that by 100,000, perhaps 200,000 women (roughly half of them Chinese, as might be expected given IJA deployments, but women from every place the Japanese occupied). That is , at a bare minimum 2,500,000,000 rapes, very likely double, if not triple that figure.
Arguably, every deployed man in the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces who visited a comfort woman was a "Class C", perhaps "Class B AND Class C" war criminal.
Sometimes folks ask me what the hardest part of writing AANW (among other T/L) was. It was research that leads to those sorts of numbers, day after day.
People can be right bastards.
*There were exceptions to this general scenario, where decent, even good overall treatment was afforded, but that was very much an exception.
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Americans were also pretty rapey in France and Germany. Marines raped whole villages of women in Okinawa. Not anywhere near the level of the Soviets, let alone the Germans, but much more than is often believed.
This is absurd, as others have said. The Germans themselves committed far more rapes than the Soviets did, and their ideology was the polar opposide of communism. The reason why this scenario is implausible is because of how awful the Germans were in the USSR. They were fighting a war of extermination where every Soviet was a subhuman who existed only to be used or killed by the Aryan race. Awful doesn't even begin to cover it. All things considered, Germany got off VERY lightly during and after the war for what it did.
My post wasn't about the motives of the german rapes, but specifically about the soviet ones. In this case, it was the mentality "We are the victims, so we deserve to do whatever we want". However, such mentality predates the atrocities commited by the Germans, and comes down to the general feeling of having been persecuted by " landlords and bourgeoise".
Are you sure about that? I don't recall anything comparable from before the war.
Maybe not necessarily rapes, but the pillages during the Russian Civil War.
It's not pillages, it's the top Soviet authority wanting to control everything and not minimally caring about human life. And that’s 20 years ago, not really meaningful.
I figure that a shorter and less devastating Barbarossa would lead to (comparatively) less war crimes against German citizens.
IDK maybe Hitler actually goes through with Sealion, it predictably fails horribly and leads to a myriad of logistical issues. Then one of the many assassination attempts against him succeeds and Hitler gets replaced with a significantly less competent successor who listens to all of his generals bad advice by the time they finally get around to invading the Soviet Union.
IDK maybe Hitler actually goes through with Sealion, it predictably fails horribly and leads to a myriad of logistical issues. Then one of the many assassination attempts against him succeeds and Hitler gets replaced with a significantly less competent successor who listens to all of his generals bad advice by the time they finally get around to invading the Soviet Union.
Rationalizations for rape come post-facto, not before the act. At the end of the day, they are almost invariably the result of primal lust and the assumption that perpetrators can get away with it. That is a product of a permissive environment, not carefully-considered ideology. Soldiers don't usually philosophize over whether they should commit rape. They simply guess on a very basic level, based on context, if it's permissible, and then, if so, act on their impulses. If authorities give soldiers the impression that such things are acceptable, norms against such, even if inculcated from an early age, easily break down under the stresses of warfare. Ideology played little to no role in the average soldier's decision-making.
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