This segment by Lawrence O’Donnell is worth watching. to remind yourself that war is insane. Always.
After watching the series “The French Village” a few months ago (highly recommend, btw) I did some new reading on WWII and was shocked that I hadn’t realized how horrifying the end really was, especially for German women:
Stalin’s troops assaulted an uncounted number of women as they fought their way to the German capital, though this was rarely mentioned after the war in Germany – West or East – and is a taboo subject in Russia even today.
The Russian media regularly dismiss talk of the rapes as a Western myth, though one of many sources that tells the story of what happened is a diary kept by a young Soviet officer.
Vladimir Gelfand, a young Jewish lieutenant from central Ukraine, wrote with extraordinary frankness from 1941 through to the end of the war, despite the Soviet military’s ban on diaries, which were seen as a security risk.
The manuscript paints a picture of disarray in the regular battalions – miserable rations, lice, routine anti-Semitism and theft, with men even stealing their comrades’ boots.
In February 1945, Gelfand was stationed by the Oder River dam, preparing for the final push on Berlin, and he describes how his comrades surrounded and overpowered a battalion of women fighters.
“The captured German female cats declared they were avenging their dead husbands,” he writes. “They must be destroyed without mercy. Our soldiers suggest stabbing them through their genitals but I would just execute them.”
It gets worse.
There’s much more in that BBC article if you can bear to read it.
I’m not directly comparing this to the situation in Afghanistan but I bring it up to illustrate that there are no “good wars” even when the alleged “good guys” win. It’s a disgusting, horrific human impulse that should never be done unless absolutely necessary. And they never end well.