From AP:
Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.
The evidence is among about 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the United States National Archives is releasing Monday and putting online.
Well, thank God Wikileaks didn’t get a hold of these last year and release what were still secret documents at the time. I know Wikileaks stuff generally is much more problematic because it is more recent and sensitive (although amusingly enough because of my job I’m one of the few people in the world who hasn’t actually read any of the Wikileaks releases). But this sort of thing gives you a sense of the scope of the problem. We still have classified documents out there from our grandparents’ time.
In a system where so much is classified for so long, leaks and breaches become inevitable. There is just too much stuff — much of it routine — in the system making effective access and control procedures unworkable.
It is also a threat to democracy. How can we have accountability when the government has the right to keep information secret for generations?
Ben Franklin
in the system making effective access and control procedures unworkable.
I think that’s the very purpose of it; control the access.
Someguy
I still don’t get what the big deal about Katyn was. The Soviets wiped out the aristocracy and the upper class. Big deal. We starve thousands to death each year in this country because we don’t provide susbistence level social benefits, we wiped out the indians and we put a whole race in jail for the duration of WWII, then there’s how we oppressed a whole race and how a lot of us still do with Jim Crow and subtler forms of racism. And we’re worried about what some Soviets did to some aristocrats who were at war with them 75 years ago, and what Roosevelt wisely did to keep the Soviets on our side against the Nazis?
Okay, sure. I’m guessing that beam in our own eye is no barrier to moralizing…
Dave
@Someguy: I am guessing the Poles have a different view on this subject.
Brachiator
@Bernard Finel:
In a recent History Today interview, historian Antony Beevor makes the following claim:
Do you think that this information should have been released as soon as it was known? Was there some … virtue … in withholding information which might have enraged the public when the Allies were trying to rebuild Japan?
Villago Delenda Est
Well, given that people in key positions can unclassify shit in the wink of an eye without anyone so much as batting one (I’m thinking the Plame affair) purely for political gain without the slightest consideration for any national security implications, what the fuck are we going to do?
The system is broken in multiple ways that contradict each other.
The central problem is that good faith is not evident in the entire process. Intellectual honesty is disdained by the rigid bureaucratic mindset of the the classification system. CYA rules.
Ash Can
Who decides what to classify, and who decides what, and when, to declassify? That’s what we should have transparency on.
srv
Another reason to not vote for Obummer. Are you just playing Eastwood, or are you serious?
Jay C
@Someguy:
JFTR troll, the Polish victims at Katyn Forest probably weren’t the “aristocracy and upper class”, but more like the haute bourgeousie and professional class (a large proportion of them being reservists who, due to their higher levels of education, got officers’ commissions). And, not to mention, thousands of civilian officials and professionals as well.
Though it’s not as if the responsibility for the Katyn Forest Massacre is (nor has been for 60 years) some big secret….
Brachiator
@srv:
Right, because Romney “Taxes? Taxes? I don’t got to show you no stinking taxes” promises truth and light.
jon
I’d still like to know about the Kennedy assassination. Isn’t that stuff supposed to come out around now? Or are government documents getting copyrighted now, so each edit gives another 75 years of protection?
It’s almost that bad. The next President will have the option to withhold release of the last documents.
As if we needed another reason to make sure Romney doesn’t get elected.
Brachiator
@jon:
Everything you need to know can be found in the wacky conspiracy theories.
Amanda in the South Bay
So, you have to have a security clearance to teach at the National War College? Do you have random drug tests too?
That kind of invasive personal crap is why after I got out of the Army I never wanted another job involving a fucking security clearance.
Zifnab
@srv: There are bigger problems than “Who is President at the moment”. This post is addressing the need for systematic reform, not the two-step tango.
jon
@Ash Can: I remember a story about someone who was working for a White House on a press release and used information from some classified documents to write it. Being aware of his sources, he wrote “Secret” on his draft he submitted for editing, then waited for it to get approved. And he waited. And waited. Then he asked about it, but was informed that he couldn’t review the thing he wrote because he lacked the security clearance for secret documents.
Don’t have any idea if it’s true or not, but it sure sounds like government in action.
Amanda in the South Bay
@jon:
I wouldn’t be surprised. For a while, people in the Army with the MOS of 97E, (Interrogator, now “Human Intelligence Collector”) only needed Secret clearances, as opposed to TS/SCI like pretty much every other MI MOS. I heard of people down range writing reports that were classified as TS, but since they only had secret clearances, couldn’t even read their own reports.
celticdragonchick
@Brachiator:
If there was any truth to it, it should have been released and the offenders prosecuted.
Considering the sheer insanity of what the Japanese Army did in Nanking, China…(apparently, it is actually possible to literally rape a person to death, not to mention publicize a beheading contest between officers who went on a murder spree among POW’s with their swords), I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that did happen.
catclub
@Brachiator: Yes, Romney will bring in an open government breath of fresh air. Probably starting with tax returns of democrats.
But, Massachusetts governor’s records are sacrosanct, dontchaknow.
DecidedFenceSitter
@Ash Can: Under Executive Order 13526 – Original Classification Authority (note that while the Order # changes, it is fairly stock standard), the the President appoints “Original Classification Authorities”, generally the heads of agencies, who then will appoint other bureaucrat to creation Classification guides.
These classification marking guides are then distributed and folks who generate classified material then review the guide against the material and mark the material up as appropriate.
Then you get into derived classifications where because I pulled information from this classified document, this document I’ve created is classified. And of course, then there’s the fun bit where if I pull information from enough unclassified sources together and put it in a single document, I’ve created a classified document as per the classification guide.
Jim Pharo
Is funny! You think democracy is a goal of the USG? In my observation, I’d say that democracy is the enemy of the USG.
This government is not scared of us. Why should it be? We the people evidently have no upper limit on the amount of abuse we’ll accept…
jon
@Brachiator: Maybe it can, but after fifty years of the “wacky conspiracy theories” it would be nice to shut them up. I’d rather be able to tell cranks the truth than point to the government and say “They may not have released everything, but I trust it’s for a good reason.”
Nethead Jay
@srv: Uh, I’m fairly sure Bernard didn’t address voting for Obama or anyone else in this post. So what are you blathering about?
Southern Beale
Still waiting for them to release documents on fluoridated water and Area 51.
Seriously, this kind of stuff is going to be harder to keep secret for 70-80 years. Can’t wait for more horrors on Afghanistan and Iraq to come leaking out …
Argive
@Someguy:
What happened at Katyn wasn’t anything to do with any kind of justice, it was just another facet of Stalin killing tens of millions of people whose crime was Not Being Liked Or Trusted By Josef Stalin.
Ben Franklin
@celticdragonchick:
I agree. It’s similar to the quandary around due process. We recognize some guilty will escape justice, so that one innocent is not unjustly imprisoned. It’s a trade-off.
We should err on the side of transparency.
Raven
@Argive: Both sides did it.
Raven
@Argive: Both sides did it.
Brachiator
@celticdragonchick:
The offenders were already being prosecuted. The fear was that release of this information would enrage the public.
And then you have contemporary Japanese denials of wartime atrocities.
@jon:
JFK conspiracy nuts, like birthers, cannot be reasoned with.
And then you have people like podcaster Adam Curry, who denies that we landed on the moon, and asserts that the Curiosity landed in New Mexico.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Ben Franklin: Except we seem to have become a country that wants to err on the side of keeping the presumed guilty in jail. As for transparency, we live in a country where an attack on US soil is the worse thing that can happen when a Democrat is in office, even if it happens to be a Republican president.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Jim Pharo:
I think Bernard is employing one of them thar rhetorical questions that the feller already knows the answer to. This here blog is part of the reality-based community.
Chris
@Someguy:
I don’t especially support violent purges, but incidents like that always remind me of the conversation between the priest and the ex-revolutionary at the beginning of Les Mis (book not movie); the priest condemns the excesses of the Revolution, the other guy points out that the monarchy was nothing but that kind of excess, and that it’s absurd to condemn the French people for finally flipping a shit after grinning and bearing it for a thousand years.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
This is a seemingly endless source of discord in East Asian relations, what with everyone but Japan being pissed about Japan’s repeated attempts to deny that the Japanese were even involved in the late unpleasantness of the altercations of 1935-1945 in any way.
It pisses off the mainland Chinese, the ROC Chinese of Taiwan, the Koreans, both North and South, Filipinos, Indonesians, Vietnamese…well, I could go on all damn day with the various groups who are offended.
The Japanese had better get used to the idea that they’re never going to get anyone to forget about what they did in the first half of the 20th Century. The Germans have not tried to do this, and it’s paid off for them.
Mnemosyne
I’m guessing that these documents weren’t declassified before now because (A) nobody at the time wanted to deal with the Cold War shitstorm and accusations of Communist Infiltrators in the Government that would have inevitably resulted and (B) nobody particularly cared anymore once the Soviet Union broke up.
Chris
@celticdragonchick:
I remember hearing in middle school history class that Nanking had been so nasty that even Hitler got on the line to Tokyo to say “what the fuck are you people doing? Tone it down a little, could you? At least for now?”
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
Well, except for the part where the Terror actually killed far more peasants than aristocrats, but the French don’t like to talk about that:
The Moar You Know
@Brachiator: As it turns out there was. I recommend very highly “Embracing Defeat” by John W. Dower for an explanation as to why.
El Cid
Foreign policy is an area in which the reality of situations and US actors and actions is considered generally outside the range of things we need to know. Too much is at stake, and we just wouldn’t understand, we may not have quite a grasp on how important it is that we help the Guatemalan army slaughter a bunch of nuns and infants because the wrong government may tax Western agricultural production investors too much. I mean, uh, stop Communism.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Mnemosyne:
In baseball and revolutions, 3 out 10 is considered is a very good batting average.
Cermet
@Brachiator: I call bullshit – feeding (hey, we have extra food lets give it to people so we can eat them) humans to eat later? Not happening. Starving and about to die, so eat a prisoner, possible. But keeping and selecting people just to eat like cattle while you have food, no way.
The Moar You Know
@Villago Delenda Est: You won’t see a Japanese car in either Korea or China. I made the mistake of asking why, while I was in China. That was a history lesson!
Shawn in ShowMe
double post
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
The thing about The Terror was it turned into a means of personal revenge for everyday people. Denounce the guy who sold you an underweight pig as a Girondist agent, and settle the grudge.
Because the authorities were so paranoid, and Robespierre actually believed that The Terror itself was a virtue, something that should be institutionalized and perpetuated indefinitely, well, things got out of hand. To the point where Thermidor happened, and Robespierre found out, up close and personal, what The Terror was like if you were riding a tumbrel.
Cermet
@Brachiator: I call bullshit – feeding (hey, we have extra food lets give it to people so we can eat them) humans to eat later? Not happening. Starving and about to die, so eat a prisoner, possible. But keeping and selecting people just to eat like cattle while you have food, no way.
Brachiator
@Chris: The Wikipedia entry, though obviously not definitive, is chilling.
An extract:
On March 7, 1938, Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the American-administered University Hospital in the Safety Zone, wrote in a letter to his family, “a conservative estimate of people slaughtered in cold blood is somewhere about 100,000, including of course thousands of soldiers that had thrown down their arms”.[45]
Here are two excerpts from his letters of 15 and 18 December 1937 to his family:
The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital.
Let me recount some instances occurring in the last two days. Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied. They bayoneted one little boy of eight who have [sic] five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen. I think he will live.[46]
ETA: Even the Japanese general in charge realized the enormity of what took place:
On December 18, 1937, as General Iwane Matsui began to comprehend the full extent of the rape, murder, and looting in the city, he grew increasingly dismayed. He reportedly told one of his civilian aides: “I now realize that we have unknowingly wrought a most grievous effect on this city. When I think of the feelings and sentiments of many of my Chinese friends who have fled from Nanking and of the future of the two countries, I cannot but feel depressed. I am very lonely and can never get in a mood to rejoice about this victory.” He even let a tinge of regret flavor the statement he released to the press that morning:
“I personally feel sorry for the tragedies to the people, but the Army must continue unless China repents. Now, in the winter, the season gives time to reflect. I offer my sympathy, with deep emotion, to a million innocent people.” On New Year’s Day, Matsui was still upset about the behavior of the Japanese soldiers at Nanking. Over a toast he confided to a Japanese diplomat: “My men have done something very wrong and extremely regrettable.”
Dork
What did he do?
Culture of Truth
I’m guessing not as much fun
#Ishouldhaveseenthiscoming
Brachiator
@Cermet:
I got your bullshit, right here. Do a google search on “Japanese cannibalism.”
See the “Cannibalism” section on the Wikipedia entry on Japanese War Crimes.
You can follow the notes to the background sources.
The British historian’s contribution, backed up by some Japanese historians, was that the Japanese military high command told local authorities that because supply lines were disrupted, it was up to them to improvise food resources, by any means necessary, including killing locals and prisoners.
Commands issued from on high, not just occasional improvisation by troops on the ground.
Ash Can
@DecidedFenceSitter: I suspected this was more or less the case — many thanks for your detailed explanation!
LanceThruster
Pointing this out as an example of specious testimony at the Nuremberg trials (testimony blamed it on the Nazis) has gotten me banned from more than one site for supposed anti-Semitism.
Raven
I just read “Pacific Crucible” about the lead up to and first year of WWII. The author notes that in the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese conducted themselves in an exemplary manner in regard to prisoners and civilians.
Brachiator
@The Moar You Know:
RE: Was there some … virtue … in withholding information which might have enraged the public when the Allies were trying to rebuild Japan?
My question was mainly rhetorical, but I appreciate the reference.
Another book to add to my must read list.
Thank God for Evernote.
Villago Delenda Est
I’m not sure why the US government would help cover up Kaytn in 1940, other than FDR (possibly with the help of Barack Obama’s time machine) thought the USSR would eventually be allied with us against the Germans and therefore it was a good idea to not get too excited about Kaytn.
The Nazis certainly didn’t feel any restraint about making as much noise as possible when they liberated in 1941 that portion of Poland they so readily allowed the Soviets to seize in 1939. So it’s not like this was that much of a secret, except for the fact that the US government knew about it soon after it happened.
The Nazis probably knew about it too, but had their own reasons for saying absolutely nothing at the time, as Soviet raw materials were flowing into Reich controlled territory up to the day that Barbarossa launched.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
Sure (and actually, the French are pretty honest about it these days). Oppression replaced oppression. Fact is though that as incredibly nasty as the Terror was, it doesn’t strike me as being any less arbitrary or authoritarian than the way the king and noblemen had been running things previously. Those revolutions don’t occur in a vacuum and they usually come in countries where the previous regime was extremely nasty itself (see also Russia, China, Cuba, Southeast Asia…)
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I don’t think you guys are disagreeing as much as you think — I think Cermet thought you were saying it was a Holocaust-like situation where the Japanese kept prisoners essentially as livestock the way the Nazis kept their concentration camp inmates as forced labor. From the article, it sounds more like the troops on the ground were told, “Sorry, no more food coming, figure it out for yourselves” and decided that they could solve two problems at once by eating the prisoners.
The Pacific front was way more brutal and fucked up than a lot of people realize, because a lot of it was suppressed in the name of rehabilitating Japan.
celticdragonchick
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yep. Robespierre was bound and determined to have his “new man” that would be the foundation of his new, perfect society. Of course, that meant that the Terror could never be turned off (just like how you can never dial back on the security state or prison sentences today…you could not dial back on the Terror while there was any possibility that enemies of the Committee of Public Safety where plotting) even after the Vendee had been laid waste by the Infernal Columns and the Spanish, Austrians and English invaders had all been kicked out.
As it turns out, the Girondins were not particularly forgiving about the whole thing. I imagine a whole lot of Sans Cullottes conveniently forgot about their former associations after Robespierre went to the guillotine.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
And the exact same groups of people — peasants and workers — were the ones who suffered most under both regimes. Poor bastards thought that getting rid of the aristos would make their lives better, but it just rebounded right back on them again.
A lot of people still seem to be struck with the romance of revolution, but they don’t seem to realize that the downtrodden people they claim to want to help will suffer just as much — if not more — in a violent revolution than they did under the other regime.
Joel
@Someguy: Are you kidding me? I hope you are. Really.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
Read about what happened to the Comfort Women who were forcibly recruited from Formosa, mainland China, Korea and the Dutch colonies. Tens of thousands of women…European and Australian, Indonesian, Asian, Pacific Islander…were forced into utterly brutal sex slavery conditions.
Law suits have been proceeding in Japanese courts for decades, but no recompense or recognition of the war crimes has been forthcoming. It is likely that the last survivors of Japanese sex slavery will die without even an apology.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Inevitably, revolutionary attempts to purge the unworthy always gets out of hand and consumes everyone.
A high school friend told me that her grandparents had been killed by the Chinese Communists because they were middle class and ideologically tainted. I could never take the claims of the virtue of communism seriously after learning about this.
And although he is clumsy about it, Chris Nolan alludes to A Tale of Two Cities and Dickens’ take on the cruel excesses of The French Revolution in The Dark Knight Rises in the absurd trials of Gothamites, presided over by the obviously insane Scarecrow.
Mnemosyne
@Raven:
I haven’t read up on it, but it does seem that the eugenics “science” that was all the rage in Europe also influenced the Japanese since they also seemed to be very focused on getting rid of the “unworthy” people who surrounded them and touting themselves as clearly superior to the other nationalities in Asia. They had their own Dr. Mengeles who were doing “scientific” research on prisoners that’s often more stomach-turning than anything Mengele was able to come up with.
Raven
@Brachiator: And in Pol Pot’s Cambodia having eyeglasses was enough evidence to have you killed by the revolution.
Soonergrunt
One of the biggest problems is that there is nowhere near the scrutiny that there needs to be on the following issues:
Who should be a classification authority?
What are minimum standards for classification at various levels?
What are the minimum and maximum timeframes for classification and declassification?
Just as an example, leaving aside all the political issues that are important in their own right, just how fucked up this can make things–
I used to work as an IT contractor for an office of the USAF. One of our staffers prepared a report for her supervisors and senior management, and that report had information that was available in the open, but the source document from which she took that open information contained (unknown to her) Top Secret classified information on other pages. The document must have the classification level of the highest classification of information on it, therefore she used “Top Secret” information. Since this information was transmitted to her through unclassified means, and she subsequently transferred the new document to others in the office over the unclas network, we had a mess on our hands.
Efforts to convince the author of the original TS-classified document to unclassify the portion from which her information was taken were met with refusal for no discernible reason. Appeals to higher HQ were met with refusal, since they weren’t the original authority, even though they could have declassed the doc pretty easily. Of course, then you have to justify the declassification, and “convenience, because this is a bullshit classification” just doesn’t read that well.
Long story short, several GS-12 engineers and a couple of GS-15 managers, one Major (O-4), one Captain (O-3), two Lieutenant Colonels (O-5) and one Colonel (O-6) sat around for several days while their security clearances were reviewed because they accessed classified information through an unclassified medium (it was emailed to them), and their computers had to be scrubbed for CI. The standards to do this are very high and very tight (for good reason) and you can’t just re-image the computer and put the user back to work. It takes several hours per PC, by a tech with the appropriate clearance. A couple of hundred staff hours were wasted while people sat around waiting to have their network access restored so they could work, all because one person made an innocent mistake, some jerkass with classification authority decided to be an extra pain in the ass, and the other people who could fix it were afraid to put on their big-kid pants.
The Moar You Know
@Brachiator: The book is totally worth it, you won’t regret it. A rather large amount of the book is devoted to the huge amount of coverup that occurred regarding Japan’s actions in WWII, the reasons for it (mostly to save Hirohito’s ass) and the reasons why saving Hirohito was so important.
For a guy who later proved to have some serious lack of good judgment, MacArthur’s postwar work in Japan was astonishing. He did almost everything exactly right.
celticdragonchick
@Chris:
The Ancien Regime was predicated on stability and did not engage in mass murder that bordered on genocide. The Terror threw stability out the window and obliterated entire regions…especially in the Vendee where the populations of entire villages (over 700, last I recall) down to infants where executed (often by chaining the people onto boats rigged to sink and setting them out onto a body of water to drown. Sometimes, massed artillery loaded with grapeshot or cannister was used. Primary documentation of the period includes descriptions of infants being spitted on bayonets for amusement.)
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
To this day, the very likely possibility that the Japanese and the Koreans are ethnically very close is a sore spot in Japan, to the point where archaeological digs are suppressed because they might draw the “wrong” conclusions about the early history of Japan.
Dennis SGMM
IIRC, years ago (’71-’72) when I was serving in that other, other war, every POS After Action Report we wrote (“We shot at them, they shot at us,”) was Classified as soon as whoever was stuck with filling it out had submitted it. These documents went up the line through the paper mill and they were subject to a higher classification at points along that line.
Between the need to CYA and the need for promotion-hungry officers to appear diligent in protecting their immediate superiors, a lot of stuff must have went into the memory hole. I have serious doubts that it’s one bit better today and it doesn’t make a fuck who’s in the White House. The system is perfected and it acts in its own interests.
khead
Was there anything in the documents about “Aldo the Apache” carving up Nazi foreheads?
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Sounds a bit like Thomas Jefferson.
Raven
@Mnemosyne: They also had not fallen completely under the control of the lunatics in the Army.
celticdragonchick
@Villago Delenda Est:
I chatted with author Lee Brimmicombe-Wood over at lawyers, Guns and Money a few years back (he wrote the amazing Colonial Marines Tech Manual) and he described having visited the Yasukuni Shrine which has become something of a magnet for far right wing Japanese politicians. He said there was the “air of a jackboot about the place”.
Amir Khalid
I don’t find this stuff about the Japanese forces in WWII particularly hard to believe. My parents were kids during the Japanese Occupation of Malaya (in my mother’s case, of Singapore). The officers carried swords, which they’d often use to behead locals for looking at them funny. They were quite cavalier like that about the lives of occupied peoples, so eating POWs to eke out their rations doesn’t seem that much of a stretch.
Their German allies were pretty much like that in Europe, as I gather. Maybe the only reason the Wehrmacht didn’t resort to eating POWs is that their food situation wasn’t quite as dire.
Villago Delenda Est
@Soonergrunt:
This sort of problem is supposed to be addressed by notations by paragraph on the classification of the information in that paragraph.
For example, let’s say you’ve got an operations plan for defending the Fulda Gap. You state that company C of 3-35 Infantry will hold a position centered at grid ref xxxxxx. That’s clearly something that should be classified. However, it you state that company C will deploy in the general vicinity of Fulda, that’s so vague that you can’t really classify it. So a paragraph that doesn’t include the precise grid reference or a more precise generic geographic reference (to the north of Hammelburg, or whatever) shouldn’t be classified.
Why that nonclassified info wasn’t sequestered in this way, and the overall classification imposed on it, mystifies me, but who can say, because you err on the side of caution with classfied documents…it’s CYA all the way, baby!
celticdragonchick
@celticdragonchick:
Something went wrong there. I was responding to this comment.
@Villago Delenda Est:
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
Jefferson got into plenty of political trouble on this side of the pond for being a little too supportive of the French Revolution. Not to the extent of being a member of the Maxmillian Robespierre fan club, but just a bit too, um, understanding of some of the motivations for The Terror.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Villago Delenda Est:
Culturally (and linguistically) Korea is much closer to China.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yep. This came up as a tangent to one of my classes on human evolution.
For some Japanese, it is essential to preserve the mythology of their origins, even if it impedes the actual science.
And ethnic Koreans whose families have lived in Japan for decades are still considered to be non-citizens.
celticdragonchick
Good luck with that. Maybe they can scream loud enough to let everybody else know that the 2nd Soviet Shock Army has crossed the frontier…
I sure as hell never wanted to be in 11th ACR at Fulda. Fuck that.
quannlace
I was trying to wait for a new Open Thread but wanted to share this little bit of schauenfreude. The Romney campaign has sent out a ‘Don’t Panic’ kind of memo to it’s supporters. Basically saying the Obama poll numbers are just a ‘sugar-high’ from the convention, and soon R&R will reassert themselves to the American People. (Funny, I thought they were claiming the D convention was a failure.)
What’s funny is to read about the utter disgust with Romney over at Free Republic. And the cherry on the cake? Many there are calling for Romney to call in the Marines; i.e. Sarah Palin and The Tea Pary! To the rescue!
And yes, they’re serious.
celticdragonchick
@Amir Khalid:
I’m glad they made it through the occupation. That was some real, real bad stuff that happened in the “co prosperity sphere”.
hep kitty
@quannlace: The desperation is so bad it smells like the inside of a food-hoarder’s refrigerator.
Raven
@celticdragonchick: Better than the Hobo Woods.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid:
I think due to Nazi racial theories, they’d only consider Russian or other Slavic language speaking prisoners for that sort of treatment. In general they treated Brits, Americans, and French under the Geneva rules, although there were exceptions. With the Russians, all bets were off. No quarter was asked or given on the Eastern Front.
celticdragonchick
@hep kitty:
Gonzo has a mold garden in his refrigerator
giltay
@jon: In my limited understanding, that is security classifications working as designed. (Note: my understanding of how this works comes from reading Computer Security Basics from O’Reilly, 1991. Not sure how relevant it is today, or even back in 1991 in the Real World.)
In security apparatus, there’s a concept of flow of information, which is easy from low clearance to high clearance and hard from high clearance to low clearance. This makes intuitive sense: you don’t want people with only Classified clearance reading Top Secret or Secret documents, but you want people with Top Secret clearance to be able to read Classified documents.
What this also means (which is a little less intuitive) is that you want Classified clearance people to be able to write Secret/Top Secret docs, even though that means they themselves won’t get to read them. You also have to prevent people with Top Secret clearance being able to write Classified documents without them being approved as only containing Classified material (a process which is necessarily a bureaucratic nightmare).
So, by marking his press release Secret, he automatically made it so that it would take a lot of overview before the information could be released as Classified information.
Amir Khalid
@Dennis SGMM:
I’ve often wondered how much of the information classified in any such system is similarly made-up bullshit; how much effort goes into protecting the secrecy of such information; and how many (and serious) are the fusterclucks that arise because such information was acted upon.
Villago Delenda Est
@celticdragonchick:
If the balloon went up anywhere from 1980 to 1983, I would have been right in that general vicinity, per the GDP.
Fun times.
Well, at least the quarterly terrain walks were great fun. Stay at some tiny Gasthaus in the High Rohn and have a great time!
Violet
OT – Just happened to see MSNBC. Does that idiot S.C. Cupp have her own show now? WTF? She seems to be hosting some show called “Spin Cycle”.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
There’s usually a pretty high psychological barrier to cannibalism (unless you live in one of the uncommon cultures where it’s been part of the culture for thousands of years, like parts of New Guinea) so I think the Japanese would have been pretty desperate to engage in it to feed themselves. Like, Stalingrad levels of desperation.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if what they did was feed the remaining prisoners with human remains so they could keep the “real” food for themselves.
Chris
@celticdragonchick:
Depends on the period. During the wars of religion, the monarchy got pretty freaking nasty, and while that had mostly settled down by the time of the revolution, that was mostly because they’d moderated themselves and gone for the “convert or GTFO” model.
Soonergrunt
@Villago Delenda Est: “it’s CYA all the way, baby!”
That’s the biggest part of it right there.
Nobody ever got in trouble for over-classifying. People can get in trouble for under-classifying. And never, never, never, underestimate the likelihood of “ego-classification” which is to classify something just to show that one can do so.
I’ve attended a couple of briefings with classified information that stated x, y, and z happened this week, and we’re sitting there thinking “yeah, I just read about that on msnbc.com” or “why classify this? The enemy knows pretty well what they tried to do. They were there in the valley shooting at me.”
The big problem for somebody like me is that there are legitimate reasons to classify things and keep them close-hold, like intel sources and current operations and so forth, but this crap makes it a lot harder to justify things to the public, who should be casting a skeptical eye anyway.
Villago Delenda Est
@quannlace:
OK, so they don’t just want a can of whoopass opened up on their butts, they want the deluxe jumbo can of whoopass opened up on their butts.
They are soooo fucking smart at FreeRepublic.
Soonergrunt
@celticdragonchick: speed bumps with radios.
Just like the 2nd ID in Korea.
Snarki, child of Loki
Well, thank goodness that they still haven’t spilled the beans on who REALLY shot Archduke Ferdinand.
Because that would really flush our national security down the toilet. Sources and methods, people! Sources and methods.
Bernard Finel
@Amanda in the South Bay: Yup to both. I often blame my surly disposition on that that I can’t spark a doob after a hard day. ;-)
Raven
@Villago Delenda Est: Always felt that way about the Pueblo situation. The entire fucking North Korean Army about 5 miles north and we had a basic load for the 105’s and M-14’s. They would have never even slowed down.
Another Halocene Human
@Mnemosyne: Dunno, Japanese people had a taboo against eating meat (other than fish) well into the 19th century, and the “first adopters” after the Opening of Japan were looked upon by most Japanese as if they were cannibals. Even today in Japan there is a cultural association between meat-eating and cannibalism, perhaps because of their Buddhist beliefs, although wealthy Japanese can and do eat pork, beef, and horse meat.
I’m not sure how Japanese people feel about eating chickens.
Chris
@quannlace:
Try this on for schadenfreude – after months of the Obama campaign sending me “we’ve been outspent by Romney this past month again, could you please donate?” emails, I just got one that was “Yee Haw! We finally have him outspent!”
Oh, it’s a good day to be us.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
I both admire and detest Jefferson. He talked a good game about Revolutions, but never fought (and yes, he was often out of the way on diplomatic missions).
He also loved the luxuries of French and went into debt to maintain his lifestyle.
But most critically, he deliberately betrayed the Haitians because he feared that a successful revolution there might ignite a rebellion in the United States.
The Louisiana Purchase was indirectly related to Haiti, Napoleon going broke trying to subdue the island.
Yeah, Jefferson understood what could happen as a result of revolutions. The hypocrite.
mechwarrior online
There was some cannibalism and other such horrors on the Eastern front. The nastiest fighting was there, and also the winter hit the hardest. Sadly our educational system tends to treat WW2 in Europe as “America showed up, joined the brave Brits and the cowardly French and that was the end of Hitler”, but the nastiest fighting was the Nazi’s vs the Soviets.
The Eastern front in winter left a lot of soldiers cut off from their supply lines in the middle of a frozen wasteland, often without proper winter gear. Things got really ugly. Even roving gangs of civilians were eating people as any food was promptly confiscated by the soldiers.
Which is why it was a really dumbass idea to invade Russia of all places. It’s not just the army, you’ll freeze to death and run the fuck out of food. Don’t invade frozen wastelands unless you want your army reduced to a bunch of human canibalcicles in short fashion.
Soonergrunt
@Violet: Yes, she has her own show.
Yes, it is a waste of airtime.
Having noted that, she’s on in the middle of the day, when almost nobody is watching.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amanda in the South Bay:
That’s due to centuries of close association with China in the relatively recent past.
The evidence seems to indicate that Japan was colonized several millennia ago from Korea. Which is contrary, as Brachiator noted, to Japanese national origin mythology.
Another Halocene Human
@Amir Khalid:
The Germans let their own soldiers die during the first winter assault on the Eastern Front to preserve the propaganda lie that victory was right around the corner. But after that they wove glove liners from human hair cut from the heads of Jewish women in line for the gas chambers and sent them to the soldiers on the Eastern Front.
It was widely rumored during the war that they were also making soap from rendered human bodies.
ETA: and don’t forget the KZ guards who created and collected kitschy human skin art, lampshades, etc.
The Moar You Know
@quannlace: Try Red State. I read them last night and wanted to call 911, there’s a lot of potential suicides posting over there. They know the Evil Black Man will be sitting in their White House for four more years and there’s not a fucking thing they can do about it.
So far they are blaming the media. That won’t last. The Romney endorsement of Obamacare on MTP yesterday just about sent them where they’re going to go soon anyway – to a full on attack on Romney for being a traitor to the cause.
What’s delicious is that attack is going to come before the election.
Argive
@quannlace:
The other night I went to a baseball game with my wife and some of her friends from college. One of these friends grew up in Wyoming and is quite Republican. We started talking about the election and she said:
“Yeah, Romney lost my vote when he picked Ryan as his running mate.”
Turns out she supports gay marriage and the ability to get birth control. Who knew that appealing to the fringe types would drive the saner people away? I can smell the desperation from here.
Bernard Finel
@Soonergrunt: Yes. I’ll give you an even more absurd example. I was once in a situation (not in my current job) where we were doing a classroom simulation. We were using fictional countries and so on. Everything was made up. But one of the instructors got the idea it would be cute to stamp the material “top secret” just to make it look “more realistic.” This actually triggered an extended debate over how we had to handle this material, even though it was actually just gibberish we’d made up. Finally, we just rounded up all the copies and shredded them and pretended like it had never happened… but there were folks who argued that that we had actually somehow created classified material out of thin air.
LanceThruster
@mechwarrior online:
Yeah, don’t try to go toe-to-toe with “General Winter.”
Brachiator
@celticdragonchick:
Can you say St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre?
LanceThruster
@The Moar You Know:
I wandered in there myself the other night (know thine enemy), and I skedaddled out of there right quick.
The stupid…it burns.
Villago Delenda Est
@LanceThruster:
The not-so-secret weapon of the Russians. General Winter.
Hitler was convinced that all you had to do was “kick the door in” and the entire rotten cottage that was the Bolshevist menace would come collapsing down.
TK421
Especially when the current administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers than every other administration combined.
LanceThruster
@Villago Delenda Est:
That, and a defense in depth that was quite the force multiplier.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Soonergrunt: If by “in trouble” you mean “lose their job and never work again in their chosen profession” then yeah, you nailed it.
Argive
@mechwarrior online:
It got so bad that at certain points the only thing keeping the Wehrmacht going was methamphetamine. According to this book, a popular method of cooking meth at home these days was also the preferred method of the Nazis on the Eastern Front.
I’m not gonna say that we definitely would not have beaten Hitler without Stalin’s aid, but it certainly would have been many degrees of magnitude more difficult. No way could we have fought the Japanese at the same time.
Soonergrunt
@Bernard Finel: That just does not surprise me at all.
LanceThruster
@Another Halocene Human:
Check out this salt of the earth – Oskar Dirlewanger
He’s like the trifecta of evil.
LanceThruster
@Argive:
Yeah, I read it’s like the “Minute Rice” version of the stuff.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: @Dennis SGMM: You really want to piss off a Japanese person, mention the Ainu. It tends to throw off their national mythos quite a bit having a population older than them on Honshu. Not only have the Ainu been oppressed (and still are) archaeological research was forbidden on them until after WWII.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah, you know who else was convinced that all you had to do was “kick the door in” and that the Russians would then be easily defeated?
I think this qualifies as a double reverse Godwin.
priscianusjr
@@Someguy:
mechwarrior online
@Brachiator:
Napoleon, he got his army frozen solid as well.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
Damn East German judge obviously tanked the marks on that one!
Villago Delenda Est
@Argive:
Interestingly, even Stalin admitted that the Soviets would not have been nearly as successful without US aid, in particular in the form of the Studebaker truck, which kept the Red Army in motion towards Berlin.
WWII on the Allied side was a full fledged group effort.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@LanceThruster: Holy crap.
mechwarrior online
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes, we did provide the Soviets with the tools needed to fight. However the Soviets did the majority of the fighting and Russia aka General Winter really screwed them to hell and back. There is good reason that military adventures into Russia tend to go great, till the winter hits, and then everything goes to shit.
Natural defenses count for a lot, and when your natural defense is “nobody has any idea just how bad the winter is here, all those idiots will freeze to death” that counts for a lot.
Hitler should have known better as well. Napoleon was an amazing general and even he managed to turn his army into ice cubes. The winter comes, the Russian peasants and irregulars attack your supply lines, and then you freeze/starve to death. Finally the Russians curb stomp your now half froze and half starve mess of an army.
Brachiator
@mechwarrior online:
Obviously lots of historical material on Napoleon’s folly in Russia, including one of the most justly famous informational graphics on the campaign in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
The human cost is deftly shown in scenes in Ridley Scott’s film The Duellists.
Amanda in the South Bay
@mechwarrior online:
I think the difference of American help means the Soviets either push the Germans back to…well, someplace Belarus/Polish-ish, or penetrate deep into Central Europe.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Enough that the Soviets built a big memorial at Khatyn village. Now, Belarus did suffer horribly in the war, (mostly at the hands of Lithuanians fighting for the Axis).
But I’m sure it wasn’t just a coincidence that out of the hundreds of Belarussian villages that were destroyed during WW2, they decided to build a large memorial complex (I’ve been there) at a former village with a name that would be easily confused with Katyn.
LanceThruster
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
That’s what I thought when I opened the link. It was actually someone else in here (I think) that provided this in a much earlier thread. I have a co-worker whose origins are very old world Polish who gets sick to death of her entire nationality being tarred with every crime of the Nazis. They were being treated every bit as ruthlessly by the Third Reich. There were heroes and villians across the board, bar none.
Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enought To Be Andy K Again)
This should come as a surprise to no one. Why in the hell would the US want to open a can of worms that goes back at least as far as the Polish-Muscovite War (1605-1618), when both sides were US allies at the time of these POW’s revelations? It’s an ugly, ugly history I’m talking about.
Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enought To Be Andy K Again)
BTW, my guess is that these POW’s revelations were kept classified for so long not because of what they revealed about Katyn Forest, but what they might have revealed about the system for encoding and passing messages out of POW camps, a system that might likely have been in place for a long time after WWII.
Soonergrunt
@Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enought To Be Andy K Again):
@Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enought To Be Andy K Again):
To say nothing of the fact that the Russians and the Poles certainly knew about the incident.
There was nothing to be gained, and a potentially useful method for continuing to communicate with POWs to protect.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
You’re underestimating how close the Soviets came to defeat. Leningrad was under siege for 900 days, and there was barely a rat or cat or dog alive in that city by the end, and some citizens had resorted to cannibalism, and there were hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Similarly, the Germans came within shelling distance (8 km) of the Kremlin. You can see the tank traps marking the closest the Axis came to Moscow on the way from the international airport.
Stalin screwed up royally in his lack of preparations for the war, in purging half of his officer corps a few years before the war, in ignoring British and U.S. warnings, and in falling into depression and skulking in his dacha after the start of the invasion.
In my view, Leningrad and probably Moscow would have fallen if not for Allied support. Maybe the Soviet government would have survived, fallen back behind the Urals, and eventually fought back and won, but it would have meant a larger toll on the Soviets, and on the U.S., Britain, and other Allies.
celticdragonchick
@Brachiator:
Still doesn’t even come close to what happened in the Vendee with the Infernal Columns. I think the only example that might approximate that would be the retaliation after the Jacquerie uprising when the various knights went apeshit and starting slaughtering loyalists as well as the rebels…but even that was still limited geographically. The Vendee was a foreshadowing of the reprisals against the White Russians during the Russian Revolution. It was thorough, methodical and utterly deliberate as a tool of state policy.
Djur
@celticdragonchick: “Primary documentation” from a bunch of priest-loving, royalist counterrevolutionaries.
Are we to similarly take all of the revolutionaries’ claims about the conduct of priests at face value?
And my heart simply bleeds for those poor oppressed royalist Jew-haters in the White Army.
Never thought I’d read someone stumping for the Whites on a liberal blog.
alec
Leaving aside the fucking astonishing interpretation of the Jacquerie (oh, some knights got confused? Why, that could happen to anyone!) this especially stuck out to me, from literally the same paragraph:
So the systematic oppression and murder of thousands of loyal subjects for the crime of being Protestant is wholly unlike the systematic oppression and murder of thousands of rebels and citizens for the crime of aid and comfort for rebellion. And that’s an apples-and-oranges comparison because…
Well, because it makes your inane view that the French Revolution was the direct precursor to all atrocities and should be greeted with pure contempt unsustainable.
And if you think the Ancien Regime could have been sustained or restored without a far larger bloodbath (at the time of his execution Louis Dernier was busily bribing up an army of foreign mercenaries and ci-devants while pretending to be obedient to the long, peaceable process of constitutional reform) you’re more or less getting your history directly from The Scarlet Pimpernel. A ripping yarn, but you might be surprised to learn not an actual history book!
Porlock Junior
@Djur: Guess you ought to hang around liberal blogs more, and you might learn about not liking genocide even against groups in which people, some of them, even lots of them, have behaved terribly.
Genocide for all Jew-haters! Especially royalists!
(Or were you just disputing the account of the facts in terms of genocidal actions? *Of course* not favoring genocide of inferior groups, but just denying the claim that the attacks were all that bad?. Then hang around liberal blogs and observe people who can say what they mean.)
Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enought To Be Andy K Again)
@Soonergrunt:
It could be that there were people helping the US against the Nazis who later helped pass information back this way during the Cold War…And maybe after the Cold War ended. If you release the names of the American officers, someone in Moscow starts digging into the old WWII files, cross references names of the guards or others who worked in the camps…
At the risk of being tagged Captain Obvious here, if you are ever in need of rebuilding an intelligence gathering outfit, you had better not have a reputation of having in the past risked exposing the identities of your assets in the field. I know how betrayed you feel having found your name in the files leaked to WikiLeaks by (allegedly) Manning. Now imagine that you had to live in Afghanistan or Iraq as a citizen, with more than just a few people around you thinking that you committed treason. I think something like this is at the heart of the matter.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Mengele was Florence Nightengale compared to this guy. Who we gave immunity from prosecution after the war.