Re: HD Online Player (Beastiality Rape Movie Pig Rapes A S)
Itaete Roberson
A blogpost from an ex-Socialist Workers Party (UK) member about the neglect of the topic of rapes that occured during World War II. TRIGGER WARNING: This content deals with accounts of sexual assault and may be distressing for some people
Partly, because anybody who can research the details of the life of Soviet workers in the 1940s, or how production was organised, or how political leaders behaved is capable of researching the experience of women. They chose not to.
Men and women from the working population say to us over and over again : We had so hoped that it would become better, we were so happy the Red Army was coming, and now they are behaving just like the SS and NSAPD always told us they would. We cannot understand this.
Much of the recordings of the memories of the women was done at a much later date. In fact for some, it was the stories of mass rapes by Serbian ethnic cleansers that encouraged German women to tell their story.
Secondly, in war, many many men, perhaps a majority, can become rapists, or at least pretend to look the other way and say nothing. What is our explanation for this and how does it affect our political practice?
Good piece, there've been lots of times when I've heard the Soviet war effort heroized by supposed socialists. I think the worst was when this Leninist that I know showed up at at a counter-demonstration against some neo-Nazi types wearing a giant Soviet pin and excitedly declaring that "the last time fascists attacked communists, we pushed them to the gates of Berlin!" Sincere guy, but absolute shit politics--I once got into an argument with him in which he very seriously claimed that the historical facts showed the Kronstadt uprising to be a White plot.
An excellent though harrowing post!
I recently came across one of the referenced books on a nazi website which emphasises the political capital they exploit via the actions of their co-nationalists in the shape of State "Communism"
This is a microcosm of the Lefts political atrophy and reactionary decline into the most extreme oppression!Its refusal to confront its degeneracy from the betrayal of its initial foundations and its craving for state power in the disguise of revolution and liberation opens an array of appalling vistas that culminate in the worst abuses and oppressions.
The bloody minded and obstinate refusal of the Left to condemn and confront the dystopia and monstrosity of State "communism"/Stalinism exemplifies its redundancy and the need to put forward a Libertarian alternative that is true to the origins of Communism and the aims of the International and the desires of St Imier in 1872.
there were exceptions, even among higher-ranking members of the stalinist KPD in May 1945 in Berlin according to Wolfgang Leonhard's account in Child of the revolution tried to raise the issue but were not successful ... another Soviet officer who got persecuted for protesting against rapes was Lev Kopelev (who had been in the late 1920ies a sympathizer of the Left Opposition and who became later an important figure in the dissident movement
The Stalinist concrete monstrosity built around the 'tomb of the unknown soldier' in Berlin, memorialising the dead of the Red Army, is sometimes known by those unsympathetic to Stalinism as the 'tomb of the unknown rapist'.
Part of the left or not, we're just as guilty of failing to talk about this stuff properly. Don't think the AF has anything on rape as a weapon of war for instance, despite talking pretty extensively about patriarchy in our Intro to Anarchist Communism.
I would assume it's part of the general tendency of presenting the Allied war effort as a heroic crusade against evildoers. Though Stalin is certainly treated as a brutal tyrant by mainstream American history (particularly during those times that he wasn't allied with the Western powers), I don't remember any mention of Soviet horrors during WWII being mentioned when I was in public school. University courses are presumably a bit better, but I didn't take any that touched on WWII in any detail. The invasion and occupation of Poland in cooperation with the Nazis is also something that I only learned about on my own.
James Heartfield in the comments for the original post points out that racializing by both the Nazis and West Germany can be a reason why someone left like the author might have ideas about "McCarthyism" plots. Susan Brownmiller, who the author mentions, points a similar anecdote about a movie where Moroccan troops rape Italian women:
" As I recall, Lawson felt that this amounted to overt racism, and that by right the movie rapists should have been Germans, since everybody knows that the Germans were the villains of the war. Lawson's commentary is a pristine example of the old left mentality as regards rape; when their side does it, it's exquisite proof of the bestiality of the enemy; when our side does it, it's bad politics to bring it up."
I don't see any "covering up" of mass rape though. It sounds to me the author relied too much on Beevors book, which the latter heavily marketed as revealing some hidden truths. There's been plenty written about the subject over the years and West Germany, in particular, used the subject for Cold War politics. Sure there's been more written on the subject since the 90's but that's like saying people ignored the Holocaust until the 80's (if not the 60's) because there wasn't a lot of popular media on it (and even afterwards Jews were depicted as middle class and secular Christian-like instead of the majority who were illiterate religious peasants). The author writes
Yet it was 12 million who were killed in the concentration camps. Does this reveal some left attitude about Roma? In of itself I don't think so. Both popular historians and leftists conform to what the current trends in the dominant culture are, which is very opportunistic.
As far as the Russian ambassador goes I think his remarks were based on Beevor being British and the growing imperialist tensions between the two countries, nothing more. Historians like Beevor depict the Soviets as not one of the three "Allies" but as a separate totalitarian body the white democracies just happened to ally with. This is considered dangerous to the nationalism of the Russian elite. I'm not aware that Svetlana Alexievich (also mentioned above) when she release her book was condemned in such a forceful manner, certainly not in such a uniform manner but maybe I'm wrong.
Finnaly if the author looked more into Susan Brownmiller's book instead dismissing her they could have discovered some errors in Brevors book. For instance she dismisses anti-communist Dijlas account of meeting with Stalin as "not altogether trustworthy." And in the case of Solzhenitsyn, far from being "arrested partly due to his critique of the treatment of civilians" when he landed in jail for criticizing Stalin in his mail he was outraged (!) to find three officers in jail with him for attempted rape, something he characterized "almost a combat distinction" And even Beevor himself in an interview with a Polish newspaper said German women were part of a "society" that "supported Hitler" so they are not on the "same level the same victims of the war as Jews, Poles or Russians."
btw.: the mass rapes and gang rapes committed by French and to a lesser extant by American (don't know about UK/Commonwealth soldiers) soldiers in Germany 1945 are an even less researched and discussed topics, there are very few scholarly publications and I can't remember any left-wing publication in German language dealing explicitly with the topic, especially the conduct of French soldiers in some German towns like Konstanz or Bruchsal was on the same scale than the conduct of Soviet soldiers in Berlin, cases of gang rapes by American soldiers led to a number of court martial trials but generally only when Black soldiers were involved ... but I think, that rape generally was a non-topic on the left (reflecting the attitudes of wider society) up to the late 1970ies
somewhere related is the topic of female members of the French resistance (among them a number of German and Austrian communist refugees) who worked as prostitutes targeting German soldiers to do defaitist propaganda, to steal weapons or to carry out attacks, many of them were after 1944/45 treated as collaborators, humiliated and persecuted, most of their comrades remained silent about it
The treatment of all Germans at the end of the war and during the occupation has always been a very secretive and sensitive issue. Research into the subject could easily get one branded as a NAZI-apologist, esp on the left. As an unfortunate result, it has often been an area of study left only to conservatives and neo-fascists.
My own family came out of occupation Germany, but primarily from the western zones. Rape, murder and assault was not uncommon there either (altho perhaps not on the scale of Berlin 45). Growing up I was bombarded with horror stories from my grandparents about this period, but the issue is still almost unspeakable in North America
it very much comes down to the concrete situation, I've heard many cases from people I know, even from the East where people have good recollections from the allied soldiers (not only because GIs handed out chocolate bars to children), e.g. my parents who were nine respectively five have no negative memories from that period, probably due to the fact that they were in rural/small town areas with few fighting ... a footnote on the rapes by Soviet soldiers is, that the Nazi propaganda often spoke of Asiatic, Tatar or Mongolian savages but according to an oral history studies (have to look if I can find the reference), the Soviet soldiers from Central Asia and the few hundreds of Mongolian volunteers were mostly perceived by the Germans who had contact with them as well-behaved and gentle people
Its not about guilt, its picking up on the tendency to take a view of the past whereby informal myth manufacturing takes place in order to shore up a certain view of history, and the implicit fear that people aren't able to separate out the bad from the good in history.
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