Posted on 11/01/2023 9:58:36 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
20,000 Boer Children Died in Concentration Camps, Boer War, 1899-1901. Very many victims of the February 1945 Dresden Firestorm were not German Citizens, They were Women and Children fleeing the Russians.
These issues bear on the current conflicts.
You can argue about "justification", but not about whether or not this happened. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts", asserted the late NY Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.)
The first modern instance of targeting civilians as pawns of war, came during the Boer War, when the families of the very tough guerilla fighters from among the Boer farmers who had gone north of the British controlled area in the southernmost part of South Africa--these really tough Boer fighters were very successful in asymmetric warfare against British forces.
The strategic importance was that Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Lord Milner and the very confidential, ("streng verboten"), banking interests that one can't mention even to this day, were determined to get control of newly discovered gold mines in the Boer area.
It turns out that "outlanders", uitlanders, including British people, were not being poorly treated in the Boer controlled area; but claims that they were, were manipulated in the British press.
The strategic issue in the deaths of 20,000 Boer children, and up to 32,000 people, Boer women and Africans included, overall in British concentration camps, is that wives of Boer fighters were punished by having their caloric intake reduced 50%, and the Netherlands ("Dutch") Red Cross was not allowed to give canned milk to the Boer children, though supplies were abundant.
An analogy is apt here: the policy of targeting civilians, which became formalized between UK & US policy makers in the early 1920s, was first, "experimentally" worked out during that, the Boer War.
A similar issue regarding war, was that during The Great War (WW1), all the combatants used very precise railroad time-tabling to get armies they had specially raised to a high number of soldiery, quickly transported to the anticipated combat fronts once war was declared, this after British war planners spent summers surveying, by bicycle, the lay of the land of planned, Belgian battlefields, for a decade preceding the outbreak of war.
The precedent for this planning was greater than 50 years earlier, when the novel use of railroads during the American Civil War 1861-1864 was extensively studied by European War planners.
The use of this pre-planned terror bombing as an instrument of war came to its first high climax, not during the Blitz, but when Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden were firebombed. (The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, after the Japanese had already sued for peace but the American capacity for use of Atomics had to be telegraphed to the Russians, had the additional terror element of radioactivity; but they were not essentially different in their lethality.)
Especially noteworthy is that German citizens were not heavily represented among the 500,000 victims of the Dresden firebombing, many of them were German speaking refugees from more easterly lands who were fleeing the Russians--women and children.
The calculated war crimes of these terror bombings--it was speculated that if Bomber Harris (Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris) was brought to trial over it, he would be executed by hanging--were first, much more extensively implemented by the British against the Germans, who held back from using retaliatory weapons, while the British public were not told of this criminal policy, then when the Germans could not refrain from retaliation, the V-1 and V-2 rockets were finally used in the Blitz. (The British leader wanted to use poison gas and anthrax, but the German leader would not allow it from his end.) The British public mistakenly thought the Blitz from the Germans was unprovoked.
Another form of concentration-camp crimes against humanity, was in Eisenhower's refusal to acknowledge that returning German Wehrmacht soldiers were legitimate Geneva Convention covered soldiery. Ike directed that they just be fenced off on the Rhine flood plains (Rheinwiesenlager, Rhine Meadow Concentration Camps), guarded, not given any food or care, until up to 1 million perished. Any civilians attempting to feed them would be summarily shot.
These issues bear on the current conflicts.
You can interpret them your own way. But these are the facts.
If what you have written are facts, can you cite your sources? I believe that much of what you have written are not facts at all.
You posted this, it’s up to you to prove your assertions.
If you want to know, you can try to find out.
The information is freely available on the internet.
For anyone who really wants to know.
Two people don’t care:
1) You don’t care.
2) I don’t care.
You can think what you want.
You’re going to anyway.
Wait after the war we killed over a million German soldiers who had surrendered by placing them in concentration camps and starving them. And the US also shot anyone who tried to feed them. And all this was done under Ike’s orders?
This is news to me.
CharlesOConnell wrote: “The New Orleans panel
After the publication of Bacque’s book, a panel of eight historians gathered for a symposium in the Eisenhower Center for American Studies[38] at the University of New Orleans from December 7–8, 1990 to review Bacque’s work.[39] In the introduction to a book later published containing each panellists’ papers, Steven E. Ambrose noted that Bacque is a Canadian novelist with no previous historical research or writing experience. His introduction concludes that “Other Losses is seriously—nay, spectacularly—flawed in its most fundamental aspects.”[39][40] Ambrose’s own work has also been criticized for longtime patterns of plagiarism and inaccuracies.[citation needed] The panel comments that, among its many problems, Other Losses:[39]
misuses documents
misreads documents
ignores contrary evidence
employs a statistical methodology that is hopelessly compromised
made no attempt to see the evidence he has gathered in relation to the broader situation
made no attempt to perform any comparative context
puts words into the mouths of the subjects of his oral history
ignores a readily available and absolutely critical source that decisively dealt with his central accusation
As a consequence of those and other shortcomings, the book “makes charges that are demonstrably absurd.”[39] Panel member Stephen Ambrose later wrote in the New York Times:
Mr Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about the “disarmed enemy forces” designation or about the column “other losses.” Mr Bacque’s “missing million” were old men and young boys in the Volkssturm (People’s Militia) released without formal discharge and transfers of POWs to other allies control areas. Maj. Ruediger Overmans of the German Office of Military History in Freiburg who wrote the final volume of the official German history of the war estimated that the total death by all causes of German prisoners in American hands could not have been greater than 56,000 approximately 1% of the over 5,000,000 German POWs in Allied hands exclusive of the Soviets. Eisenhower’s calculations as to how many people he would be required to feed in occupied Germany in 1945-46 were too low and he had been asking for more food shipments since February 1945. He had badly underestimated the number of German soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies; more than five million, instead of the anticipated three million as German soldiers crossed the Elbe River to escape the Russians. So too with German civilians—about 13 million altogether crossing the Elbe to escape the Russians, and the number of slave laborers and displaced persons liberated was almost 8 million instead of the 5 million expected. In short, Eisenhower faced shortages even before he learned that there were at least 17 million more people to feed in Germany than he had expected not to mention all of the other countries in war-ravaged Europe, the Philippines, Okinawa and Japan. All Europe went on rations for the next three years, including Britain, until the food crisis was over.[41]”
IOW, BS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses
harlesOConnell wrote: Prolonging the Agony : How the International Bankers and Their Political Partners Deliberately Extended WWI by Gerry Docherty (2018, Trade Paperback)
Nothing like a little anti-semitism. International Bankers is code word for jewish bankers.
“But these are the facts.” No, they are not.
“IOW, BS.” Exactly!
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/24/books/ike-and-the-disappearing-atrocities.html
By Lee Brown
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has warned that the website can no longer be trusted — insisting it is now just “propaganda” for the left-leaning “establishment.”
Sanger told UnHerd’s Lockdown TV Wednesday that he started the “encyclopedia of opinion” in 2001 purely on the basis it would offer true neutrality and offer “multiple points of view” on “hot button issues.”
Now, he insisted, conservative voices are “sternly warned if not kicked out” if they try to add a different take on establishment views — which Sanger deemed “propaganda.”
“You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues. It’s just banned now,” he insisted of the apparent clampdown on respected conservative voices.
“It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream centre-left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia,” he said.
Now you can only rely on the site to “to give an establishment point of view,” rather than the diverse range of opinions it was set up to give, he insisted.
“If only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power,” he said.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy WalesAlamy Stock Photo
“And they do that,” he continued. “There’s a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say.
Sanger said there are “all sorts of tricks people can play to win it,” including the use of dedicated PR companies to influence listings.
The Wikipedia co-founder cited the entry for President Biden, noting that it “has very little by way of the concerns that Republicans have had about him.”
“So if you want to have anything remotely resembling the Republican point of view about Biden, you’re not going to get it from the article,” he said.
Meanwhile - Union Troops burned farms and starved women, children and slaves throughout the South during the American Civil War. But Sherman got a statue instead of a Court Marshalling.
Because it never happened. We desperately needed those Germen POW solders to help rebuild Germany after the war so the USSR could not take it over.
I read that a rather large number of German POWs remained in the US after the war because there were few jobs for them in Germany. Additionally the remittance from the wages they earned was desperately needed in Germany.
How Anti-Semitic of 20,000 Boer children to be in the way of gold mining, and 500,000 civilians to be in the way of British and American firebombing.
Your entire post is BS.
All of it.
L
CharlesOConnell wrote: “Wikipedia co-founder says site is now ‘propaganda’ for left-leaning ‘establishment’
By Lee Brown”
Instead of addressing the real issues raised by Wikipedia about your post, you launch an ad hominem attack. How anyone can believe the allegations you’ve posted is beyond understanding.
The Japanese sued for peace when the Soviets attacked in Manchuria on 09AUG45.
And 500K dead at Dresden has been debunked as post war Soviet propaganda.
Dude, I have no idea what're are talking about. Perhaps a bunny with a pancake on its head would clarify your statement.
To DugwayDuke, a bibliography about American atrocities against the German people:
James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997)
James Bacque, Other Losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989)
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Postsdam (Lincoln, Neb.: 1990)
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994)
John Dietrich, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (New York: Algora, 2002)
Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992). Originally published in Chicago in 1947.
Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007)
John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust (2000)
Mark Weber, “New Book Details Mass Killings and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans at the End of World War Two” (Summer 2007)
Anyone who considers James Bacque a credible source should not be criticizing Wikipedia.
FWIW, my wife was born German. I’ve spent much time with her parents who used to rent to US soldiers and not a word of criticism.
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