I assume you were sleeping and then you woke up and checked the bot, because I have no idea when it’s night and day in Straya ;)
No I don’t think it’s a big deal that Danby in this thread mentioned Auschwitz. He’s clearly an emotional poster who wears his heart on his sleeve, and I doubt he has much influence with NATO high command.
I also don’t think it’s a big deal that the mayor of a city which is currently under siege mentioned Auschwitz. He’s doing what he has to do. He knows he very likely will be dead soon.
It’s the official Russian line that Ukraine and anything Ukrainian is to be eliminated. Not sure why you’re in here quibbling about mobile crematoriums when the Russians are out there telling us they are out to do the genociding, and they have mass civilian graves to back that up.
But it is a big deal that I posted that I think the story is wrong because…?
The irony is that you and I talked about exactly this groupthink dynamic in the COVID thread a while back (that is, that any and all negative speculation and doomposting was encouraged and any pushing back on any of it was treated as heresy) and now here you are driving exactly the same dynamic in this thread. That is, that trawling the internet for further evidence that the Russian army is composed entirely of demons in human skin is normal and ought to be what the thread consists of, while pushing back on the factual accuracy of any of it is suspicious and deviant behaviour.
I’m interested in keeping straight what is and isn’t true. Sorry if that seems odd to you.
Chris is right. I posted it but thinking for a bit longer a mobile crematorium doesn’t make sense. How many mobile crematoriums has anyone seen in their neighborhood? How many massacres have had crematoriums driving around with them? When has mobile crematoriums been the standard part of any offensive operwtion or siege versus how many are done with bullets and ditches?
I imagine burning a body takes a lot of fuel, which the Russians are in short supply of. So even if one exists, if I were a Russian soldier, I’d prefer do drive my tank 5 more miles than to burn a body.
I am definitely not interested in what the technical definition of “genocide” is, I’m using it in this thread to mean the deliberate mass killing of civilians on a large scale, hundreds of thousands of people, as a matter of policy or de facto policy. Obviously I can’t spell out in advance what the evidence might be that would convince me this was happening.
If you think that the Mariupol mayor’s claim that what is happening there now is “a new Auschwitz or Majdanek” is much closer to propaganda than fact, then we agree.
I am saying exactly two things here: that there are not mobile crematoria in Mariupol being used to dispose of civilians en masse and that - Bucha notwithstanding - there’s no evidence that Holocaust-style mass slaughter is the plan. Suzzer assures me that nobody ITT does think that’s the plan, so I guess there’s no actual disagreement here?
There were some 300 people found in a mass grave in Bucha, and over 100 more found executed on the streets or in houses or yards, and reportedly more dead than that found in nearby Borodyanka.
Kyiv has 100x more people than Bucha. Which would translate to 40k civilians executed after the fall of Kyiv. Not to mention several 100k civilians that might die in the siege.
I know you don’t think Putin would siege Kyiv like that. But I disagree. Based on everything I’ve seen so far in Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and every where else, I have very little doubt Putin would level Kyiv if he could. And once Kyiv finally fell, Russian commanders would let their soldiers take revenge out on the populace in the way they always historically have.
If you make a timeline of the Holocaust, I think we around 1940. After 8 years of struggle and half measures, the time for argument about whether Jews/Ukrainians should exist has passed, it is time to do something about it and that thing is murder. Putin even calls it the “Ukrainian question” ffs!
We are now at the point of intentional killing of civilians to wipe out a people, getting worse everyday and ramping up the the insane genocidal rhetoric to justify killing more civilians everyday.
And I think it’s plain as day and it’s not possible to overhype what they are doing.
Whether plan A was genocide or merely ethnic cleansing is immaterial (it was certainly at least the latter). Both are crimes against humanity. Splitting hairs about it is an awfully bad hill to die on imo.
I’m not really following mobilecrematoriumgate, but as an aside I also hate when people do this.
This was actually a go to technique of former 22 politics forum hero FlyWf, and not that many people seemed to mind it (in fact most liked it). But I always thought it was dumb and will continue to find it annoying AF.
No idea if that is what is happening or not as I’m not really following this particular discussion. So, carry on as if I said nothing.
I don’t know if, even years from now, it will be clear whether what we’re seeing meets the standard of genocide or not. But thinking back to the start of this, Putin threw everything but the kitchen sink at this invasion, even including threats of using nuclear weapons. If there are such things as Russian mobile crematoriums, they might well have been sent to Ukraine. Maybe they couldn’t play a significant role in a genocide, but that’s a different question.
Also the Holocaust was genocide. Not all genocides are Holocaust and not all war crimes are genocides. Next we are going to be digging up the Awvall equations.
It’s fucking wrong and justifies some additional help.
I think massive civilian killing is the plan, because Russia is saying it’s the plan. I also don’t think Bucha is isolated. Mariupol, at the very least, also qualifies, and we have only just begun to uncover Russian atrocities in the North of Ukraine.
what is holding people (some in this thread) back from calling this “genocide”?
The genocide expert quoted above thinks it’s genocide.
I have my own theory as to why so many people, including “experts”, are reluctant…and maybe it’s so obvious no one thinks it has to be said, but I’m gonna say it anyway.
It’s because the group being destroyed is not different enough from the group doing the destroying, at least as compared to all the other genocides we know about. And yes, I’m talking about race/religion/ethnicity here. We are seeing white Judeo-Christians trying to destroy other white judeo-christians and that is fucking terrifying. Terrifying to the point that we just don’t want to acknowledge that it could be that bad.
I think we tacitly understand that a fundamental part of war is the ability to “other” the enemy. It’s really hard to do that why the enemy is your buddy’s family, who looks like you and essentially goes to the same church and has at least one language in common.
We have Russian media posting their plans where it says RIGHT THERE that they are gonna genocide as hard as anyone has ever genocided before, and people still don’t want to believe that it’s genocide because it’s…not genocide-y enough?
Could you tell the difference between a Tutsi and a Hutu? I know they could, but I doubt many non-Africans could. Yet, everyone agreed it was genocide.