#war atrocities

[re-x]

“Lord Tyrion tells me a million people live in this city”

[science-criticaltheory]

Trump Admin. Covers Up Saudi War Crimes in Yemen, Exaggerates Iran's Role.  

Ben Norton tells Paul Jay that the U.S. and Saudis are overwhelmingly responsible for the atrocities committed in Yemen.

TheRealNews  

[smellslikegirlriot]

Asian comfort women are still awaiting justice as politicians wrangle over issues of culpability, and it's not just Japan that fails to fully acknowledge their pain.

[artpopatrocity-blog]

[endorphinique]

Crabwalk by Günter Grass

The story focuses on the Pokriefke family, whose son becomes interested in his grandmother's account of being on the Gustloff when it sank. This interest causes the son, Konrad, to create a neo-Nazi website about the ship's sinking and the ship's namesake. The website starts attracting a healthy following of fellow neo-Nazis. Konrad eventually meets one of the regulars of his site and kills him because of the devil's advocate role he took on. 

We discussed a particular paragraph within the book, the first one of the fifth chapter, in which a character says that the older German generation, as a whole, failed to tell the following generations of what exactly they suffered through during WWII. Because there were no neutral sources covering the atrocities against Germany due to, well, several factors, whether wanting to forget or German guilt or contempt against the Third Reich or whatever other reasons there are, the younger generation was more prone to a warped sense of history that really left them exposed to more dangerous, extremist views. Konrad's father was actually a left-wing journalist, but he never felt the inclination to give a neutral account of the sinking of the Gustloff. 

My TA said Grass got a lot of criticism for writing this book; she asked if it was fair to criticize the book given its importance. I asked what criticisms it got exactly. She said that there were many groups, many of them German, actually, that were offended by the book because of general German sentiment towards the war and how they approach their patriotism. Many Germans are still uncomfortable flying their flag because of their wartime guilt, for instance. They didn't like how Grass was trying to garner sympathy or give attention to atrocities perpetrated against Germany during the war. 

My TA and I generally seemed to agree that this critical view, while we understand it, is kind of stupid. Hell, we just read a book about its implications; we didn't want more neo-Nazis or other extremist views like that proliferating due to the silence of the people involved. It's really easy to go "yeah sure that's sad but look at what Hitler did," but that's not the point; it's important to expose all the atrocities orchestrated by every side of a war. We can't just demonize or sympathize with one side against the other. Human lives are all equal, and we need to expose the human suffering in our history to understand how to learn from it.