Jeff, quoting me: The notion that the Soviet troops would be shorn of the same human base >instincts when involved in such a brutal war as any other troops are >idealistic in the extreme.
Then writes: I won't even start on this one.... Reply: Well, let's see. If, as I do, you consider rape a form of violence, and the purpose of war to inflict more violence on your enemy than they inflict on you; and given that the war in question was one of the most brutal and cruel in human history, why would you think that rape would not be part and parcel of the violence involved? Further, to assert that under the kind of circumstances that no one on this list, without having experienced anything close to what the troops involved in this war experienced, could possibly come close to understanding, that somehow the Red Army was made up of barbarians as opposed to the nice, clean British or American troops, surely constitutes a case of unconscious chauvinism. Neither Britain nor the US suffered a scintilla of the brutality that was visited on the Soviet Union by the Nazi hordes. Revenge, whether we wish to admit it or not, is a very basic human instinct. Look, for example, at the US reaction to 9/11, when a mere 3000 were killed. Afghanistan was turned into a parking lot, Iraq was pounded into the ground and both nations will take probably a generation to recover. Now compare 9/11 to the Nazi invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union and maintain that the reaction of the Red Army in what was, again, a war of annihilation, was not in some way inevitable, given what we know of war and how it so distorts human behaviour and reasoning. In fact, to separate out the rape from the rest of the violence inflicted in the course of this war, and, further, to focus on the rape committed by one side, reveals nothing less and is motivated by ideological disdain for the Soviet Union as a whole. ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
