Tom Cod: No dude, that's not a defense that is very helpful as it assumes that this happened and then makes excuses for it. Moreover, it is a slap in the face to the millions of soviet soldiers and partisans who didn't do things like that. I'm not sure what your experiences in war or military life are, but there are plenty of people who have fought in wars and been in extreme situations and not committed these crimes; ultimately it is an unavoidable individual moral decision that a person must make in that situation which the movie "Casualties of War" depicts very well. Finally, to glibly say that since war is about violence and rape are violence means that anything goes including rape is unacceptable.
Reply: I haven't made excuses for anything. What I've done rather is attempt to analyse what happened conscious of the role that the prism we are viewing the events in question through can play in said analysis. Neither do I defend what happened. But to assert, or allude, to the notion that thousands of Red Army soldiers were born or congenital rapists, without even attempting to look at the material conditions under which the atrocities in question were committed, is to lapse into a reactionary view of human nature. And to place the scale and utterly brutal nature of the war fought between the Soviet Union and the Nazis alongside other wars is to fail to give this titanic struggle its proper place in history. Yes, you're right, Casualties of War, Platoon, etc., are good examples of the ability of the individual to rebel against the commission of atrocities by the group. But in both movies, it's worth noting, it is the minority who refused to go along with the atrocities being committed not the majority. Group psychology, peer pressure, the formation of an alternate and distorted value system in the context of the rarefied conditions of combat, have to be factored into any analysis of a subject such as this. The key point is that the atrocities committed against German women by the Red Army reflect the nature of the war being waged by both sides. The atrocities committed by the Nazis - the mass executions, torture, the laying waste of entire villages and towns - I suggest made it pretty much inevitable that atrocities would be committed in return by the Red Army. Stalin had described the war as a war of annhiliation. Soviet propaganda against the Nazis was decidedly different during the war's infancy as opposed to its latter stages. Initially, it was internationalist in tone and message, separating the German state and ruling class from the German people. But as the Nazis approached Moscow it became nationalist in tone and message, focusing on the defece of the Soviet Fatherland, describing the Germans as locusts, etc. This propaganda, combined with the horrible atrocities the advancing Soviet troops witnessed against their fellow countrymen and women, was bound to have an effect on many of the troops. The atrocities committed by the Red Army reflect the brutality and cruelty of the Nazi invasion which presaged them. They are not defensible, nor even comprehensible. But then again neither was this war, which stands apart from any other in modern history in scale, brutality and cruelty. ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
