In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren't undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle's exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
One of the reasons for creating the system of death camps was that Nazi soldiers and policemen tasked with murdering Jewish people and other undesirables had elevated rates of PTSD. Also, during the Cultural Revolution, the People's liberation Army switched to a lower caliber sidearm because all the executions were giving them carpel tunnel.
You don't want to loose sight of humanity just because you're committing atrocity.
You would think it would be easy to find some poor conscript fuck who didn't run over civilians in a bulldozer struggling with the fact that they were coerced into being part of a genocide, but no, CNN goes with the guy who crushed human beings. Even as attempted hasbara, that's some high-level incompetence in CNN.
Poor guy. Did he also have to murder the little baby terrorists and their sobbing, horrified terrorist moms and terrorist sisters too? Poor fella. I hope he can muster the strength to do the right thing.
Fuck Israel and fuck conservatives (including neoliberals) who gleefully support this genocide. The wrong people are being erased.
ah Israelis and playing the victim, name a more iconic duo.
"IN THE HUNDREDS"
Good god someone please operation overlord these mother fuckers.
"cop needs therapy after shooting unarmed child"
Let me go get my Planck length sized violin.
Gee I fucking wonder why you have trauma and PTSD??? Fucking moronic fucks, zero sympathy
Child murderer.
Posted this in another thread, gonna post it here, too.
"Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form one of the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrences of war."
It's an unpopular take, but I recommend everyone read the book "On Killing" by Dave Grossman. It's obvious that what Israel is doing is very much a genocide, but I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims of the Israeli political machine.
Aww, poor war criminals
Article link and a mirror
Gil Hochberg described "shooting and crying" as a soldier being "sorry for things I had to do." This "non-apologetic apology" was the self-critique model advanced in Israel in many politically reflective works of literature and cinema as "a way of maintaining the nation's self-image as youthful and innocent. Along with its sense of vocation against the reality of war, growing military violence, occupation, invasion, [there was] [...] an overall sense that things were going wrong."
Oh, I can't wait for the sympathy piece on Auschwitz guards to drop any day now. They must have seen some very, very, very difficult things too, poor souls.
Just as Chris Hedges predicted.
Sympathy for the devil
This is misinformation. The text in the sharepic is altered. Link to the original article. Original text:
“It’s very long,” he said, and it is urban, which means soldiers fight among many people, “the vast majority of them are civilians.”
Bulldozer operators are among those who are most directly exposed to the war’s brutality, Bregman said. “What they see is dead people, and they clear them (along) with the debris,” he told CNN. “They go over them.”
So, I hate to be this guy for Israel. But there are legal ways for this to have happened. I know the first picture in all of our heads is them running over prisoners. But it is a valid tactic to collapse your enemies trenches or building on top of them. The US has been doing that since at least Vietnam. Armored bulldozers are, of course, uniquely pretty good at this tactic. Although it is usually a tank with a bulldozer blade attached to the front.
