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Assassination as a Complex O-Ring Task
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Most things in life are strongly g loaded, from obvious things such as socio-economic success and chess ability to less obvious ones such as an appreciation for Indian cuisine or quality terrorism.

Assassinations are no different.

Assassination quality seems to be a function of national IQ, plus the levels of remuneration and prestige with the national intelligence services.

Mossad is really, really good at this game. Stands to reason. High IQ, incredible prestige, decent money.

The Soviets were also very good at it. Again, very high prestige – the KGB only recruited from the best universities. Incidentally, the post-Soviet penetration of the Russian state by former KGB men was not so much the result of a conspiracy as the natural effects of a high concentration reservoir of human capital gradually spilling out into society.

Modern Russia has rather less to write home about, with its current spies seemingly unfamiliar with the very concept of OPSEC. Not surprising, considering the sort of people it hires.

stupid-russian-spies

Phrenology doesn’t lie. Just look at that fellow above, parading after his graduation. Highfalutin espionage work?… cryptography? foreign languages?? fuggedaboutit! His level is that of a nightclub bouncer. At best.

This is because the quality of people who are attracted to work in Russia’s modern espionage agencies is much lower than in the USSR. Talented people have many more options.

But even Putin’s hapless spies have nothing on the Saudis.

Not only did they whack a harmless dissident who did happen to be very well connected in Blue Checkmark circles – you know, the people who run the West – in THEIR OWN CONSULATE, but apparently they even neglected to consider he might be wearing a smartwatch. Which, like, every second SWPL does these days (and a WaPo columnist is going to be culturally SWPL regardless of his skin color). They had a squad of 15 people – incidentally, involving a movement of people that the Turks must have noticed – and nobody thought of it.

I know there’s counter-arguments that the Apple watch can’t transmit data that far, and that the Turks are using it as a cover story to avoid admitting that they were bugging the Saudi consulate.

But it really wouldn’t surprise me if this story was true after all. Everything else hints at rock bottom incompetence, so why not this too.

mohammad-bin-salman

 
• Category: Humor • Tags: Assassinations, Saudi Arabia 
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  1. Not sure if it’s incompetence, the Saudis probably just think they can get away with anything anyway. They’re conducting a starvation campaign in Yemen after all, with support by the US, Britain and probably other western countries as well, so it’s not a completely unreasonable assumption. At least so far Trump doesn’t seem to be really inclined to punish them for the assassination of that journalist.

    • Replies: @Dave Pinsen
    , @gate666
  2. Mr. Hack says:

    The Soviets could apply all sorts of strong pressure on a desirable candidate to undergo their training, and to take part in their pernicious lifestyle. Russia is supposedly a ‘federated’ presidential republic. The free market supposedly reigns supreme. You aren’t advocating a return to a more authoritarian form of government now are you, where Putlereque men assign the citizenry to their future role in society?

    • Replies: @Anatoly Karlin
  3. @Mr. Hack

    The KGB had absolutely no need for people who didn’t want to be there. Why on Earth would they. They’d be a liability.

    I know plenty of people who were made offers (given my background) and who refused them with no consequences.

    No, I do not advocate that; you are merely projecting your own sovok-svidomy values onto me. The only thing I advocate is downsizing the intelligence agencies by an order of magnitude, to a per capita level comparable to that of the US, the UK, or for that matter Tsarist Russia (<10,000 Okhrana agents in an Empire of 150 million), while greatly increasing their salaries and demands on professionalism.

    • Replies: @Verymuchalive
    , @Mr. Hack
    , @utu
  4. 5371 says:

    [MORE]

    [strongly g loaded ... such as an appreciation for Indian cuisine]

    Actually, that’s strongly a loaded. If you like exotic spicy food, you probably enjoy getting fucked in the ass.

    • Replies: @Matra
    , @utu
  5. Beckow says:

    Well, technically the Saudi affair is not an assassination. It was a lost sheep coming home as far as they were concerned. Assassinations and spying are also not an essential skill for a state. It is what the surplus hanger-ons do to show some activity, they cannot all be bodyguards.

    Their incompetence can be embarrassing, but most states could do quite well without them. A botched assassination can have a salutary effect on other non-conformists. It re-establishes the animal pecking order and disabuses silly intellectuals from thinking that this is about words and ideas.

  6. The early CIA, which was staffed by high WASPs and lace curtain Irish, was also quite effective. The preceding OSS was less effective since it was thoroughly penetrated by British intelligence, something the FBI uncovered but was swept under the rug.

    KGB and Mossad success is probably also related to extreme levels of aggression, shamelessness, and cruelty in communists and Jews.

    When the Germans broke into various Soviet embassies throughout Europe in 1941 they found elaborate torture labyrinths along with specialist equipment for disposing of corpses.

  7. utu says:

    Mossad is really, really good at this game.

    Is it, really? They get away with a lot. When they screw up it is always covered up or at most it is just a local affair so you never hear about it. They are brazen. Dancing Israelis anybody? They know they will get away with anything. Perhaps there should be a website of Mossad fuck ups:

    Lillehammer affair

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair

    Lavon Affair

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair

    Khaled Mashal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Mashal

    2004 Israel–New Zealand passport scandal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Israel–New_Zealand_passport_scandal

    There are many cases like the one in NZ where they were caught on doing something but unlike in NZ it was always whitewashed or covered up.

    They have a great advantage because Israel and its Mossad operations have a backup of security companies that originated in Israel among Mossad operatives. This security industry became so big that they can afford resorting to a racket. If you do not buy their services something bad may happen at your airport, subway or olympics game or whatever. And if you are small and shitty country you are a goner unless you buy protection from other big guys.

  8. Matra says:
    @5371

    There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the decline in the American character began round the time they started loving Mexican food. (This seems to be what Americans in the UK miss most about home). Ditto the British with chicken tikka marsala.

    Under the social credit system in the future white ethno-state anything spicier than hot salami will result in a bad score.

    • Replies: @utu
  9. m___ says:

    There is such a thing as “Sopranos” style. The incident would have been worse outside of the embassy. A car carrying the unfortunate, would have a flat, no spare coincidentally. Or the tied up victim would have kicked the head of the trunk of the rented sedan, at crossroads, and a traffic cop would have arrested the meeky driver and his companion. The other dozen team members still being in a taxi or two coming in from the airport. It is not always incompetence, it can be coincidence, bad joss, the weather. It is all in the hands of the Almighty.

  10. @Anatoly Karlin

    In your original article, you wrote that the ” Okhrana secret police only numbered one thousand in 1900.”
    Shurely shome mishtake, there.

  11. Mr. Hack says:
    @Anatoly Karlin

    The KGB had absolutely no need for people who didn’t want to be there. Why on Earth would they. They’d be a liability.

    It’s well known that pressure was put on Bogdan Stashinsky to join the KGB. When the KGB wanted somebody to work under their supervision, for whatever reason, they knew how to ratchet up the pressure. So, why haven’t you or other of your friends not signed up, to ‘serve mother Russia’ yet (or perhaps you secretly do, I wont tell anybody)? :-)

  12. @Thorfinnsson

    When the Germans broke into various Soviet embassies throughout Europe in 1941 they found elaborate torture labyrinths along with specialist equipment for disposing of corpses.

    In the modern world, there is one country whose embassies visibly stand apart from all others.

    I wonder what we will find in your fortress-embassies around the world once your Empire of Evil crumbles.

  13. utu says:
    @5371

    [MORE]

    говно́ loaded

  14. utu says:
    @Anatoly Karlin

    10,000 Okhrana agents in an Empire of 150 million

    I would like to read something about how good Okhrana really was and how big budget it had compared to Germany, Austro-Hungary, France, UK. Let’s look at pre-WWI standards. Because by the current standards when democracy and its freedom and liberalism reign it was several orders of magnitude smaller. They did not know then what the police state was.

    I would like too see why Okhrana was so meek with respect to subversives and revolutionaries whom they apparently had all well penetrated but they could not strike at them. It might be no different than with various Muslim an not Muslim terrorist organization who while thoroughly penetrated yet they exist and they are from time to time released from the leash they are held on.

    The equation is who is penetrating whom. Was there a third party that penetrated Okhrana and made it useless when it was really needed? Was it just an ideology? A meme: let show the West how we Russians love liberty and human right? Is there similar meme at work in security apparatus when it comes to Muslim terrorists?

  15. utu says:
    @Matra

    There is something about hot spicy foods and the decline of civilization. Similar to music tastes. Like liking loud and busy rhythmic music. It overloads senses and gives you instant gratification by suppressing the side that is contemplative and reflective, i.e., the side where the actual rational thinking process occurs where you plan and anticipate.

    • Replies: @The Alarmist
  16. @Spisarevski

    Probably a lot of boring and/or embarrassing stuff. Dweeb State operatives are absolute embarrassments.

    AFAIK the US outsources most torture to client states.

    Not that anything unsavory or even unspeakable would surprise me.

  17. “They had a squad of 15 people … ”

    Okay, let’s assume that Khashoggi weighed 200 lbs. That equates to a 13.3 lbs Khashoggi cutlet in each of the conspirators carry-on bags during the return flight to Saudi. Also, 13.3 lbs is slightly more than the average weight of a human head, so one of them was able to transport whole the new wall trophy for MbS’s office. Khashoggi’s remaining parts wont go to waste since they can be mixed with dry kibble and fed to the royal pets. It seems to me that this whole operation was well thought out, supported with adequate resources, and executed flawlessly. What am I missing here?

  18. Anatoly,

    Have you studied much about the Stalinist penetration of the American government? It probably fits your framework.

    Some, like Harry Dexter White (really Weit), were Jews, but many were not. I can’t think of any who didn’t come from the Eternal Jew/Eternal Anglo axis, though. Whittaker Chambers (later repented, of course) and Aldrich Hiss coming from the latter. (Mind you, I’m quasi-Jacksonian when it comes to hating the American Protestant elites, so I have my biases).

    This might of be interest to you: https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Snow-Soviet-Triggered-Harbor/dp/1596983221

    Good old Stalin.

    Ron Unz has hinted at this in some of his American Pravda series

  19. @Spisarevski

    What’s your point, Spisarevski?

    I, for one, agree with you that the American CIA is basically a keystone part of the world’s Evil Empire. I am an American, and I agree.

    With that said, that doesn’t change the fact that the Soviet intelligence apparatuses were a bunch of scumbags under Stalin.

  20. @utu

    I would like too see why Okhrana was so meek with respect to subversives and revolutionaries whom they apparently had all well penetrated but they could not strike at them.

    Perhaps this can be explained in part by the attitude of Tsar Nicholas II in relation to the nature of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

    Via Wikipedia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#Stolypin’s_fraud_investigation,_1905

    A subsequent secret investigation ordered by Pyotr Stolypin, the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers, came to the conclusion that the Protocols first appeared in Paris in antisemitic circles around 1897–1898.[44] When Nicholas II learned of the results of this investigation, he requested, “The Protocols should be confiscated, a good cause cannot be defended by dirty means.”[45] Despite the order, or because of the “good cause”, numerous reprints proliferated.[42]

    • Replies: @utu
  21. Max Payne says:

    Mossad is good at assassinations?

    And this wasn’t an assassination, this is a message to Saudi nationals living abroad who feel comfortable enough to bad-mouth MBS and then have the audacity to ask for consulate services.

    You know. One of those tribal-mafia things. No ambiguity like being gunned down in the streets by some Islamist or put on a terrorist list and Hellfired.

  22. utu says:
    @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    I would say it was Russian weakness for gentry and educated people from among whom many revolutionaries were recruited. Political prisoners were treated every well. No physical punishment, no torture, no threat of torture for people from gentry.

    Police methods and organization came from France but France was a republic w/o a preferential treatment for people of good birth. Then many Russian police and Okhrana officers were obviously bribable.

    And Russia was trying to present itself as a liberal and enlightened. In this it was more Catholic than the Pope. There was some desperation in it as mostly Jewish black anti Russian propaganda was being spread in the West. So instead of acting as painted in the propaganda they tried to prove they were much better. This perhaps was a mistake. Stop treating people who accuse you of brutalities in kid gloves.

    • Replies: @reiner Tor
  23. There is a GRU training school in Saratov. They join with the FSB to hold an open day when they have a singing dancing show on the city square with side stalls and presentations. Anyone can attend.

    I have done an O ring comparison between Russia and the UK. The MIT economic Observatory allows you to do them. It does not flatter Russia as might be expected. Japan seems to be #1 on the complexity measure. Very dense inner O rings and virtually no outer ones at all. The UK has oil.

    I suspect that UK tool pushers are paid more than Russian ones.

  24. Anonymous[346] • Disclaimer says:

    Russia has a large untapped supply of natural honeypots. The type of woman who would be kryptonite to the Jewish males of Mossad.

  25. “and that the Turks are using it as a cover story to avoid admitting that they were bugging the Saudi consulate.”

    Makes you look very fucking retarded in both cases. If you can not find out that the consulate is bugged after how many years?

    • Replies: @reiner Tor
  26. Dave Pinsen says: • Website
    @German_reader

    The most bizarre aspect of this story is that, after all of the people the Saudis have killed in Yemen, the Financial Times, Uber, and the rest of the blue check crowd had no problem going to MBS’s upcoming “Davos in the Desert”. But one journalist gets (presumably) murdered, and they bail. One journalist’s life is worth tens of thousands of Yemeni tribesmen to them.

    • Agree: reiner Tor
    • Replies: @LondonBob
  27. LondonBob says:
    @Dave Pinsen

    He used to be Saudi intelligence with his journalism as a cover, his recent activities and places of work suggest CIA. Perhaps MBS traced a plot to overthrow him back to Jamal and he duly paid the price. The zionists like MBS, the CIA deep state don’t. Impressively the US has managed to alienate both Turkey and Saudi.

    • Replies: @Anonymous
    , @Mikhail
  28. gate666 says:
    @German_reader

    trumps loves saudi arabia.

    • Replies: @Aslangeo
  29. @utu

    many Russian police and Okhrana officers were obviously bribable.

    How true is that?

    Corruption has always been a problem in Hungary (at least since Ottoman times), but then I learned that Hungarian authorities until 1945 were way less corrupt than they are now. I’m sure it was similar in Russia: there must have been a lot of corruption before 1917, but we might be surprised how little corruption there was compared to post-1991 standards.

    Communism really was a horrible school of all-round bad behavior. Though I’m sure there was a lot of corruption in, say, Romania, before communism, it must be a lot worse now.

    • Replies: @utu
    , @Anatoly Karlin
  30. @Anarcho-Supremacist

    It took the Americans several years and maybe a happy accident to find out that they had been bugged in their Moscow embassy in the early 1950s.

  31. Anonymous[346] • Disclaimer says:
    @LondonBob

    He used to be Saudi intelligence with his journalism as a cover, his recent activities and places of work suggest CIA. Perhaps MBS traced a plot to overthrow him back to Jamal and he duly paid the price. The zionists like MBS, the CIA deep state don’t. Impressively the US has managed to alienate both Turkey and Saudi.

    In the Trump Administration, Dina Powell (next U.S. UN amb.?), Steve Mnuchin, and Tom Barrack are downplaying this whole thing and saying it shouldn’t affect U.S. geopolitical and economic relations with KSA. The Democrats could’ve effectively used this politically against the Trump Administration and pealed off support for Trump/GOP, but they blew there wad on Russia collusion and interference and totally destroyed the narrative of foreign influence for a long time to come. And anti-Trump news media can never showcase it as a serious issue b/c with all the Russia collusion news over 2 years 24/7 it’ll get a yawn. Col. Pat Lang has a blog post about current and former USG/US military employees have sold out for Saudi money: http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/10/httpswwwwashingtonpostcomopinionsglobal-opinionsare-we-willing-to-sacrifice-our-moral-standing-for-this20181012ba.html

  32. Dmitry says:
    @utu

    so meek with respect to subversives and revolutionaries

    “Subversives” for predecessor agency, including men like Dostoevsky. Although fortunately for the history of literature, the regime was so “meek”, they only pretended to execute him.

    Anytime a government has to use such organs on its own people who are considered “subversives” – it’s a symptom of negative, not positive, national situations.

    To be clear, many commentators here, including the bloggers, have personality types which would rapidly become considered “subversives” in former times.

    • Replies: @Anatoly Karlin
    , @utu
  33. Aslangeo says:
    @gate666

    Trump loves Saudi Arabian Money – having gone bust several times he may well need funds

    • Replies: @Talha
  34. utu says:
    @reiner Tor

    I was thinking of something else in terms of bribabililty. That’s why I did not use the word corruption. For instance it concerned relaxing the procedures and making life easier for a prisoner. Allowing him having food delivered from outside and all books he wanted and visits from wife. With some financial inducement a prison wardens actually could show a better side of his nature.

  35. @Thorfinnsson

    “When the Germans broke into various Soviet embassies throughout Europe in 1941 they found elaborate torture labyrinths along with specialist equipment for disposing of corpses.”

    I remember reading, some forty-plus years ago, in a book about Igor Gouzenko, that there was a cremation-capable incinerator in the Ottawa Soviet Embassy’s GRU Rezident’s restricted area.

    Can you point out anything more, in English, about this?

    • Replies: @reiner Tor
  36. @Robert Pinkerton

    I’d also be interested, but maybe it’s too good to be true.

    I tried to search, but the only sources seem to be Beevor and Irving, with Beevor apparently not giving further sources. I found this description:

    https://www.counter-currents.com/2011/06/the-other-side-of-diplomacy/

    Unfortunately it’s leading us back to Beevor and Irving. It’s also a politically motivated source, and thus not very reliable itself.

    • Replies: @utu
    , @Thorfinnsson
  37. @reiner Tor

    This is probably correct.

    A Russian newspaper in Kazan in 1898 found a fraud case of 500 rubles (600,000 rubles in today’s money) notable enough to write about. This sum wouldn’t even be noticed in today’s Russia. I, who don’t exactly rotate in dodgy circles, have second-hand knowledge of a monetarily significantly bigger case that involved police and judicial officials that wasn’t discovered or prosecuted (outside of their clique).

  38. @Dmitry

    The distance separating 1849 (Dostoevsky’s mock execution) from 1917 was almost as large as the entire existence of the USSR. Not relevant to late Tsarism.

    But even speaking of that period, only 5 people were executed over the Decembrist Uprising. I suspect the majority of European countries would have been far harsher over such an overt challenge to state authority.

  39. utu says:
    @reiner Tor

    Interesting. Another example of how German propaganda was inept and ineffective. Every European in German sphere of influences should have come out from the war with a permeant imprint of Soviet crimes including what was going on in their embassies. Instead we pose the question to what extend it was politically motivated to report about it. Pretty pathetic picture and great win for Bolsheviks.

    Germans were not able to carry out a decent false flag. Some accused in the Reichstag fire were acquitted. Unthinkable in Stalin Russia and unthinkable in 21 century the US of A. And what about the Gleiwitz incident. Did it even happen? Why was it not used in propaganda? Or was it made up by Americans after the WWII?

    And what about Herschel Grynszpan? They had him, they kept him and nobody could figure out how to make a show trial and use it in propaganda purpose. And then it turns out the guy survived the war.

    What was it that Germans were missing in their genotype? Asiatic genes for mendacity and cunning? How did the Anglo-Saxons get these genes?

  40. utu says:
    @Dmitry

    Dmitri, how many in your family were the proud members of the organs because judging by your performance here I doubt they belonged to the category of the “subversives” after the Ancien Régime was deservedly destroyed for awful crimes like mock execution of Dostoyevsky and occasional pogrom here or there.

  41. @utu

    There was lots of effective propaganda from the Nazis. It has simply been memory holed because they lost. You can find archives of Signal for instance, a wartime German photo magazine. It’s excellent.

    There were acquittals in Nazi Germany because until 1944 or so the rule of law was only circumscribed, not eliminated. The Nazis thought of themselves as morally superior to Bolsheviks and were initially somewhat averse to brutality.

    • Replies: @utu
  42. @reiner Tor

    Irving is known as a meticulous researcher who only works from primary sources. I don’t see any particular reason to doubt him.

    Beevor is a different matter.

    • Replies: @reiner Tor
  43. @utu

    The question is not whether reporting it is politically motivated. The question is whether those torture chambers existed at all.

    From the sources I infer that Beevor got the idea from Irving, but didn’t provide proper citations, either because Beevor is just not a rigorous enough historian, or just didn’t want to cite Irving.

    So we are left with Irving, and unfortunately he was never above politically motivated distortion of the sources.

    So maybe I’ll try to go through Hitler’s War to find his sources. Then we’ll be one step closer.

    • Replies: @utu
  44. @utu

    Every European in German sphere of influences should have come out from the war with a permeant imprint of Soviet crimes including what was going on in their embassies.

    They did use the mass executions carried out by the NKVD during the retreat in summer 1941 for propaganda (which was surely more important than anything going on in Soviet embassies where only a limited number of people can have been killed, if at all).
    The problem was that German occupation policies didn’t really offer the peoples in the occupied territories anything attractive (not even the Balts), so effectiveness of such propaganda was bound to be limited.

    • Replies: @reiner Tor
    , @utu
  45. @Thorfinnsson

    Irving did distort some sources, though. He did use for example an original German instruction what to disclose in propaganda as some kind of proof about the number of dead at Dresden.

    If the Germans did find torture chambers, then they must have made some films and photos of them. But so far there’s nothing available.

    So I’m skeptical.

    • Replies: @Thorfinnsson
  46. @German_reader

    Inside of Germany the propaganda was often of limited value, because the people understood that their own government was also committing mass murder, perhaps even on a larger scale than the Soviets. Ordinary Germans did ridicule the official propaganda on that basis. We know it because sometimes informers overheard it and so it got into the Gestapo or SD reports.

  47. utu says:
    @Thorfinnsson

    Germany never stopped being the Rechtsstaat while Bolsheviks would laugh in your face with incredulity that somebody even thought of such a silly thing like Rechtsstaat. The two animals Nazis and Bolsheviks do not belong to the same Zoo. They really can’t be compared. The mistake we make is that we look at Nazis how they treated foreigners with how Soviets treated their own people. One could argue that Nazis’ III Reich was less punitive and more legalistic than the US of the 21st century.

    The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law, Jens Meierhenrich

    http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/07/25/book-review-the-remnants-of-the-rechtsstaat-an-ethnography-of-nazi-law-by-jens-meierhenrich/

    Jens Meierhenrich’s The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law pushes back on precisely this characterisation of lawlessness. For Meierhenrich, Nazi law was an observable ‘fact of everyday life’, one complete with jurists and practitioners, with contested legal debates and codifications of new laws (3). To simply dismiss Nazi law as an oxymoron means foreclosing the possibility of understanding how National Socialism mobilised the key concepts of German law to support its actions and shift the standards of the profession.

    • Replies: @reiner Tor
  48. utu says:
    @German_reader

    Yes, they were using it. My point was that they were ineffective. They were ineffective then and they are ineffective now. Otoh, your enemies can get away with almost anything.

    The same picts of Soviet atrocities that Germans made during exhumations of Soviet mass graves were used in Wehrmacht crimes exhibition to illustrate German crimes. Fortunately it was pointed out by Polish and Hungarian researchers:

    After criticisms about incorrect attribution and captioning of some of the images in the exhibition, e.g. by Polish-born historian Bogdan Musial and Hungarian historian Krisztián Ungváry, the head and founder of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Jan Philipp Reemtsma suspended the display, pending review of its content by a committee of historians. (wiki)

    The issue was whitewashed, covered up and most people still think they saw the pictures of Wehrmacht officers standing over the mass graves of people they killed themselves.

    • Replies: @German_reader
  49. utu says:
    @reiner Tor

    Yes, we know where Irvings sympathies might be located, yet I would trust him.

    • Replies: @reiner Tor
  50. @utu

    Otoh, your enemies can get away with almost anything.

    I don’t know, the image of Stalin’s Soviet Union is pretty bad in the Western world, and especially in much of Eastern Europe.
    And while I’m not a fan of Reemtsma and the Wehrmachtsausstellung, it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes (most notably the mass death of Soviet pows).

    • Replies: @utu
  51. utu says:
    @German_reader

    it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes

    Perhaps you should prepare an exhibition about Soviet POW’s. A big reenactment with thousands of young Germans starving themselves to atone for the crime. Only this way you will be able to prove your sincerity.

    • Replies: @German_reader
  52. @utu

    A big reenactment with thousands of young Germans starving themselves to atone for the crime

    Given how many of them vote for parties like the Greens, that would be a good idea, I wouldn’t miss them. Young people are usually pretty annoying anyway.
    And I actually thought of something similar once when Germany’s president Joachim Gauck went to one of the usual apology and self-abasement tours to Oradour in France…imo he should have been left there as a permanent exhibit, playing an SS man.
    Anyway, I really don’t see why you always need to be so black and white about those issues.

    • Replies: @utu
  53. @utu

    Germany never stopped being the Rechtsstaat

    That’s a stretch.

    The Nazis created their parallel totalitarian legal structures, which allowed the Gestapo to just arrest and murder anyone at whim. But it never was the main rule. The original legal system was still in place, oblivious to the totalitarian regime, and even some parts of the totalitarian system (the Volksgerichthof, for example) resembled a normal legal system more than in the USSR. Still you have many cases of the Gestapo waiting outside courtrooms to re-arrest defendants in case the court decided to acquit them, or waiting in front of prisons to re-arrest convicts who had served their time and put them in concentration camps. Oh and of course the normal court system was also distorted. You had cases of courts deciding based on no laws but pseudo-legal concepts like the “spirit of the Volk,” or based on centrally issued guidelines. It’s just that lawyers being lawyers, not all of them behaved like this.

    It’s just a question of degree. In the USSR even the normal court system was more distorted and the importance of the parallel (purely) totalitarian structure was greater. The latter was more freely exercising its power, while the RSHA exercised its power more discreetly and sparingly.

    Altogether the leftist propaganda is in agreement with you: they also claim that because there was no totalitarianism inside of Germany (false), Germans had greater freedom and so are responsible for the crimes of the system in ways that the Russians aren’t regarding their system’s respective crimes.

    You seem to be pretty clueless if you think that it helps nationalist propaganda to (falsely, as it is) claim that the Nazis weren’t totalitarian inside Germany.

    • Replies: @German_reader
  54. @utu

    Irving is not objective enough to be trusted, he is known to have misrepresented evidence before. I wouldn’t believe anything he writes without checking his sources. Especially because there should be photographic evidence, but there isn’t.

    Regarding the Counter Currents article. They mention that possibly the White Russian General Miller was murdered inside the embassy. This seems to be contradicted by the fact that apparently he was executed in the USSR only two years later, and there exists a collection of his letters written while in captivity in Moscow. But Counter Currents is right: why would anyone in their right mind smuggle a living person out of a country if they could interrogate and then murder him right there? So based on the fact that they did, indeed, smuggle General Miller to the USSR, we can conclude that they didn’t have the torture chamber at the Paris embassy.

    • Replies: @utu
  55. utu says:
    @reiner Tor

    I wouldn’t believe anything he writes without checking his sources.

    You can check with Goebbels who is one of Irving sources:

    In a cynical entry in his unpublished diary of August 1941, Goebbels wrote : “A search of the Soviet embassies in Paris and Berlin has brought surprising terror weapons to light. These Soviet embassies are in fact the refuges of criminals. This is inevitable. If a criminal gang comes to power, then they will use criminal means to conduct their policies. It is a good thing that bolshevism is being got rid of once and for all in our eastern campaign. There was after all no room for the two of us in Europe, in the long run.”

    I do not know how one would go about finding his other sources for Paris and Berlin embassies but you should do it. Perhaps you could check with Deborah Lipstadt legal team.

    he is known to have misrepresented evidence before

    Everybody knew that he was not liked by the usual suspects since he wrote the book about Dresden. I am not sure if Hungarians complained about his book about Hungary though probably some Hungarians of Béla Kun ilk were not happy. No other historian proved him ‘misrepresenting evidence.’ No other historian of WWII was as thoroughly scrutinized by unfriendly critics as he was. During the Lipstadt trial supposedly few things were found but I am not familiar with it. I agree with Ron Unz’s assessment:

    http://www.unz.com/announcement/the-remarkable-historiography-of-david-irving/
    Irving is an individual of uncommonly strong scholarly integrity, and as such he is unable to see things in the record that do not exist, even if it were in his considerable interest to do so, nor to fabricate non-existent evidence. Therefore, his unwillingness to dissemble or pay lip-service to various widely-worshiped cultural totems eventually provoked an outpouring of vilification by a swarm of ideological fanatics drawn from a particular ethnic persuasion.

    During the 1980s and 1990s, these determined efforts, sometimes backed by considerable physical violence, increasingly bore fruit, and Irving’s career was severely impacted. He had once been feted by the world’s leading publishing houses and his books serialized and reviewed in Britain’s most august newspapers; now he gradually became a marginalized figure, almost a pariah, with enormous damage to his sources of income.

    Across four decades of research and writing, which had produced numerous controversial historical claims of the most astonishing nature, they only managed to find a couple of dozen rather minor alleged errors of fact or interpretation, most of these ambiguous or disputed. And the worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short “racially insensitive” ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a “racist.” Thus, they seemingly admitted that Irving’s enormous corpus of historical texts was perhaps 99.9% accurate.

    Are you by any chance Rastafarian or married to one?

    “I am a Baby Aryan,

    “Not Jewish or Sectarian.

    “I have no plans to marry-an

    “Ape or Rastafarian.”

  56. utu says:
    @German_reader

    why you always need to be so black and white about those issues

    From the point of view of lukewarm water everything is either too cold or too hot. But I have a solution for the irritating habit of a good German in you. Next time you feel a need to make an ass covering statements like this one: ” it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes ” think of me and instead of saying it make a check off mark here on the list:

    it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes
    it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes
    it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes
    it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes
    it can’t be denied that the Wehrmacht did play an active role in many Nazi crimes

    I said the statement five times for you so you do not have to. When you use up these five I will extend the credit for ass covering statements that make ordinary Germans into good or very good Germans. It mean you will be able to be good German with our irritating shit form everybody else.

    • Replies: @The Alarmist
  57. @reiner Tor

    Altogether the leftist propaganda is in agreement with you: they also claim that because there was no totalitarianism inside of Germany (false), Germans had greater freedom and so are responsible for the crimes of the system in ways that the Russians aren’t regarding their system’s respective crimes.

    Indeed, the Nazi system is nowadays often portrayed as being completely consensus-based. And of course there was a significant amount of that. But there also were cases, at least a few of them, of Germans being executed for trivial offenses like telling jokes about Hitler or expressing doubts about the prospects for final victory. Given how conformist most people are even today (when the worst that can happen to you is social ostracism or losing your job, which is bad enough, but not on the same level), there’s too much self-righteous posturing by retroactive resistance fighters imo.

    • Replies: @utu
  58. Talha says:
    @Aslangeo

    Yeah – well he ain’t gettin’ any unless he comes over and does the dance!

    Dance for yo’ oil-dollars boy!!! Dance like you mean it white boy!

    Peace.

    • Replies: @songbird
  59. @utu

    Spurious correlation? Maybe the correlation is tied to the debasing of the indigenous population by increasing numbers of the replacement population.

  60. republic says:

    https://russia-insider.com/en/skripals-are-mi6-hoax-not-worthy-ladies-detective-novels-israeli-expert-demolishes-uk-case/ri24912

    The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax – ‘Not Worthy of Ladies’ Detective Novels’ – Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

  61. utu says:
    @German_reader

    You want to talk about consensus? After the Anschluss of Austria Hitler’s approval 70%. After the Desert Storm Bush approval 90%.

    Germans behaved not differently than other people. They believed they lived in a normal country that was in a war for good or bad reason. They were patriotic. They did not agree with everything. It is really tiresome of trying to either make special excuses or special accusations for Germans. No, Germans were normal. They do not need excuses nor accusations unless you are willing to extend them to every other nation which then makes them moot. We were all Germans and still are.

    at least a few of them, of Germans being executed for trivial offenses like telling jokes about Hitler or expressing doubts about the prospects for final victory

    Not a few but very few if any. If you wrote the jokes down and start distributing leaflets then it was a different story.

    Look at realities now:

    French man sentenced to two years in prison for visiting pro-ISIS websites

    https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/1/13805168/france-isis-website-browsing-history-prison-conviction

    Mother who spread Isis propaganda on Facebook spared jail for terror offenses due to children’s ‘suffering’

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/woman-isis-propaganda-facebook-jail-terror-offences-children-farhana-begum-ahmed-old-bailey-a8042196.html

    The numbers of Germans executed were low. I knew a person who got the death sentence by court in Berlin for sabotage (a very serious accusation) yet it was changed to KL and he even was not a first category German but some opportunistic Volksdeutsche from Silesia.

    I can’t find a number of Germans executed in Germany. Wiki is ashamed to put it because it must be so low. Many more French were executed by France after the WWII or Poles by Poland after WWII than Germans during the Nazi regime. The whole point is that the III Reich was the state for Germans and it was good to be a German. This state was not set up to kill Germans and it did not kill Germans. And Germans behaved rationally and did not rebel or plot to overturn the state because the state was good for them.

    • Replies: @German_reader
  62. songbird says:
    @Talha

    He touched the glowing orb at the same time as the Saudi King. That has got to count for something.

  63. utu says:
    @The Alarmist

    Why should it make you wonder? Did you watch too many movies about the French, Poles and Russians that they were all heroic resistance fighters and they hated Germans so much. The reason you respond this way is because you are living in the matrix that was constructed during and after the war. And more time passes people are getting more heroic and more survivors are found who are deserving reparations from Germany. The resistance movements created by London and Moscow in Europe ostensively were to fight Germans and impeded German ability to conduct the war. On this front their accomplishments are pathetically irrelevant. All their effort did not shorten the war by one day. The main purpose of all those fabulous Maquis and Partisans was to conduct the war on their own populations by provoking German reprisals so the regular people had real reason to hate Germans because the propaganda from London and Moscow was not enough to make people hate Germans and prevent them from collaborating with them. So you had to turn Germans into a beast that burns villages and hangs hostages. The purpose was to unleash the worst kind of a warfare which is a civil war which is not ciivil at all because it is not guided by any rules or conventions on the side of guerrilla.

  64. @utu

    I can’t find a number of Germans executed in Germany. Wiki is ashamed to put it because it must be so low.

    It was low in comparison with the Soviet Union. Very high with pre-1933 German history. iirc a commonly cited number is 30 000 death sentences by German courts against German citizens during the 3rd Reich (reiner tor probably can correct me if I’m wrong since he knows the literature about Nazi Germany better than I do).

    And Germans behaved rationally and did not rebel or plot to overturn the state because the state was good for them.

    To some extent that’s true, there was of course a distinct welfare state aspect to Nazism (including the destribution of the property of deported Jews among the Volksgemeinschaft). But you’re putting too much emphasis on the “positive” aspects imo. By 1942 at the latest the Nazi leadership had created a situation where there was really no turning back, given the enemy Germany was fighting in the East and knowledge about the large-scale German crimes committed there, which led to the reasonable calculation that Germany couldn’t afford to lose that war because the vengeance and punishment would be terrible (and that assumption proved more correct than is often acknowledged nowadays).
    Anyway, I don’t really get your agenda tbh and I agree with reiner tor…in some ways you’re in strange agreement with the politically correct narrative one is expected to believe in nowadays.
    I also have to state that I find the frequent lecturing by you and some other commenters about my views about the 3rd Reich (which you tend to mischaracterize) really irritating. You people tend to forget that this isn’t just some abstract issue for me, it’s part of my family history.

    • Replies: @utu
  65. @The Alarmist

    Women want to sleep with winners.

    Germans were also at the time the world’s tallest people (tied with Americans of the time) and had the best looking uniforms.

    Not so mysterious.

    I’m sure even Rosie would agree.

  66. utu says:
    @German_reader

    I found this:

    According to official statistics, other courts had altogether issued 16560 death warrants (whereof 664 before the war), of which about 12000 were executed.

    Where the ‘other courts’ are the non-military courts. The number for the pre WWII is moderate. High by 19 century and pre Hitler German standards but comparable to the US. The number of 12000 safely can be divided by two as 50% were foreigners who fell under the jurisdiction of Germany if we extrapolate from the data for Plötzensee Prison (where “about half of those executed were Germans”). The foreigners were mostly Polish, Czech, French involuntary and voluntary workers in Germany.

    I would like to see the plot of execution vs. time. For the 6-7 years before the war the number is 664 and then it shoots up. I suspect that the last year 1944/1945 may account for the majority of executions when the regime was getting desperate and falling into the ultimate spasms of the pre-agonal madness.

    Would the propagandists use the 6000 figure as the chief propaganda point for how awful the Nazi totalitarian regime was for Germans? No, they would not, that’s why they don’t. That’s why the pad it up with foreigners and military courts. The number is high but not striking. In the same time period in the US about 2000 people were executed.

    I don’t really get your agenda tbh and I agree with reiner tor…in some ways you’re in strange agreement with the politically correct narrative one is expected to believe in nowadays.

    I am always on the side of truth and common sense. Being normal is not an agenda. I am not guided by short sighted tactical calculations whether this or that point of view is good or bad for some cause. I leave it to our Great Tactician and Strategist Reiner Tor. It is him who tunes his opinions to the “correct narrative.”

    I also have to state that I find the frequent lecturing by you and some other commenters about my views about the 3rd Reich (which you tend to mischaracterize) really irritating.

    I can’t help it. I operate in reactive mode and when I see falseness and pretense that irritate me I respond. It is corrective. I do not have an agenda or program to lecture you. Give me less opportunities and you will hear less from me. Perhaps we should call for a moratorium on invoking the III Reich here.

    • Replies: @utu
  67. utu says:
    @utu

    How many were executed for looting after or during the air raids? It supposedly was strictly enforced. In England there was also death penalty for looting but no one was executed.

    Breaking the law during World War Two

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-33566789

    The government was so concerned about looting it brought in the death penalty and life sentences as a deterrent. However, perhaps with a view to the importance of morale, no-one was actually executed for looting and most were given heavy fines or shorter sentences.

    https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/10-facts-about-crime-on-the-home-front-in-the-second-world-war/
    On one day in November 1940, 20 of the 56 cases listed for hearing at the Old Bailey concerned looting offences. The total number of cases for the four months of the Blitz to the end of December was 4,584. When the Café de Paris restaurant and nightclub in Piccadilly suffered a direct hit by the Luftwaffe in 1941, rescuers had to battle their way through looters that were fighting to tear rings and other jewellery from the dead revellers. There were many cases in which looters weren’t just criminals and members of the public: firemen, wardens and other members of the defence forces often joined in too.

    Capital offenses in Germany (wiki)

    looting (mandatorily even in cases of smallest amounts), arson which damages the power of defense of the people, crime during danger resulting from enemy aviation (in grave cases), taking advantage of the state of war whilst committing a crime (“if the sound feeling of the people so requires”)

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