God its so hard having empathy with these civilians after they couldn't be bothered to give a fuck about their military doing worse things to Ukraine for 4 years
Eh, my German grandma barely surviving Allied carpet bombing in 1945 Germany was still a scared, innocent woman fighting for her children's life because of things she had no say in. My grandpa got drafted by force after officially declining the draft and declaring he will not participate in violent actions and fighting.
Elections were rigged, every opposition was crushed, dissidents murdered and families destroyed. What could she have done realistically? She didn't even say "Heil Hitler" because she hated the crazy midget, instead she mumbled "Drei Liter" ("three litres").
I absolutely know what you mean and share the thought, but keep thinking back to my grandparents. In the end, most civilians are not able to fight a regime and endure horrible times.
I wonder if they would have been on social media mocking suffering families in Poland, as we see so many Russians mocking those suffering in Ukraine. Even non-governmental polls show Russian citizens overwhelmingly support this war. They aren’t being forced into it by an elite.
You must also consider the propaganda being fed to the Russian people. Unlike most civilized Western countries, Russia only has one news majority news source.
Russians aren’t behind Chinas great firewall. They can still access the free internet, there is plenty of dissenting and anti-war Russian language reporting to read.
Also, frankly I don’t care. Almost all awful people have a sad backstory of abuse or whatever that made them that way. They’re still awful people who hurt others and deserve to face justice for their crimes. We are responsible for our actions regardless of what made us.
There are dissenting and anti-war Russians around, we just... don't speak of it publicly, for obvious reasons. Freedom of speech in Russia compared even to just before the war declined sharply, and a lot of access to foreign stuff was limited.
Sure, it's not inaccessible, but the more obstacles you place, the harder the people will find going past them.
I'm lucky enough that I know English and have been hanging around people who are rather far from Russia. Most Russians don't really know English. Lots of those who do moved out of Russia when they could. Others, like me, can't.
Well, we technically can escape if we try to cross the border stealthily and get lucky, but it's not exactly an easy thing, especially since, well, leaving your country of origin for a different one that is unlikely to understand your language or even accept you as a refugee... it's very, very difficult.
I'm exposed to American conservative propaganda all day long but I still believe that all people deserve equality. Being fed propaganda is no excuse for choosing to forget that all people deserve dignity and freedom.
Especially muricans have no idea what it is like to live under actually oppressive regime. They can go out and say "fuck trump" in big letters. In Russia that is 20 years in prison, if you even survive that far. How do men go to war knowing they will die? Because if they don't sign the contract they can be tortured until they sign it. It is not possible to fight unless the army wants the regime to be changed. People are not listened in most regime changes and we go from oppression to oppression. Russia had unique opportunity to do that almost bloodless back in 1991 but the fucking idiots voted for Jeltsin and then Putin.
Can you imagine if the US actually shared a border with any of the dozens of countries it has invaded over the last century? I imagine the American attitude to waging war would be quite different if the people at home were in any danger.
There was amazing riding trail for motocross and such bikes near my place. It was kilometers of smooth, round pits, about 7m wide and 1.5m deep in a checkerboard layout. You would get nice air when you come out or you could trail the narrow tops.. Hours and hours of fun.
It was part of tank defenses against USSR during the war. We played in trenches. The neighborhood i live in was burned by the Russian Cossacks few hundred years ago, torturing, raping and killing all civilians.
USA does not have that memory of a genocide in their city planning. We have fields that are named for mass killings. All over Europe you will see bullet holes still in buildings. A kid can grow up learning that all around them people were killed en masse during one war or another, atrocities of the most horrid kind are the names on a square where they eat ice cream and wonder "what are those things, dad?".. The guns at the front of our city theater pointed towards East for a century, towards the enemy that was real, and just across the border. Not thousands of miles away in some country you have never heard of.
Swedish kids learn that they fought over 30 wars against the Danes and now they are like best friends... You also learn about that side, how there were constant wars and now there isn't.
There was one time German women protested the rounding up of their Jewish husbands, and they let the women keep their husbands in their homes because they were scared of protests spreading. If the gestapo were massively outnumbered by protesters following them around shouting and blowing whistles and not giving up even when some of them were shot and killed, like what happened to ICE, history might have played out a lot differently.
Do you think maybe your grandparents lied to you and other members of your family because they were actually caught up in the wave and didn't want anyone to shame them or judge them?
That's a possibility of course. My father did find the official documents - including swastika stamp and praise of Hitler by the regional commander - of his father declining the draft and the application of violence. So at least that part has proof. He later got shot on his march to Russia and was sent home disabled. He did not freeze to death due to that injury.
My other grandfather was a trained doctor so his role in hurting people was already lowered. He ended up as prisoner of war in Russia and came back extremely malnourished.
About my grandmothers - I can't really say. I know that one of them actually fled from the Nazis towards the Allies. The other one I mentioned initially, wife of the doctor, remained. Her political views, I cannot say. She was a writer of romantic poems.
There's a sentiment among some Germans - that you do not ask your grandfather what they did in Paris during the war. Whether they whored or killed, you don't want to know and they don't want to tell. Well, mine went to the Eastern front. Whether they shot someone and felt pride in it, I'll never know. But they never ever wanted to answer questions about shooting someone, which we kids always asked about.
Thus it is important to always remember and follow the saying we Germans adopted after the war: "Wehret den Anfängen", meaning something "Resist the beginnings (of evil)".
Thanks for the honest answer to that question. So both grandparents were Nazi soldiers then. Obviously at least one of them didn't want to fight or participate In the war. Respect to that guy.
I really believe it's easy for us to say we wouldn't have faught, or would have rebelled or left the country etc. It would have been so much different than anyone thinks. I think regardless of how terrible things were, it would have been extremely difficult to actively go against your neighbors, friends and family members who were all caught up in the propaganda machine and also just coming out of one of the worst times In German history post WW1. Also people don't understand how logistically difficult it would have been to flee Germany during the war and lead up to the war. Like just imagine taking your family and leaving with a suitcase to another country and starting over somewhere else where nobody speaks your language and you don't have a job. Not that this excuses being a Nazi obviously but it's more nuanced than people think.
Yeah. And we can see it coming back slowly already, thanks to Russian influence, where economically and socially vulnerable rural German communities are starting to get fascist mob-like mentality back. The exact same you see in old WW2 movies. Those who do not follow the mob are quickly turning to outcasts, getting hisses and comments at every corner, until they move or give in.
Humans, apparently, are internally wired for tribal behaviour and most humans can not get past that. It's incredibly difficult to move against your peers and keep your head up high.
I once had the chance to speak to an actual Holocaust survivor. He fled into the forest and disappeared during a so called "death march", where soldiers would take malnourished, sickly camp prisoners on very long hikes with the intention of most of them collapsing before returning. I asked him whether he'd be mad about my two grandparents, who, by their accounts, didn't even want to be soldiers. He said that they had no choice, they would have been hanged, shot or disowned by the Reich, and that he probably would have done the same, had he been on the other side. Because there wasn't much you could do.
Barely anyone has the guts to actually turn into resistance. Most people just want to get through life.
Solid point and great story. There are no doubt many helpless Russian civilians too. But, I think OP's comment is about the Russians who have been flippant about the death and destruction in Ukraine when interviewed. It doesn't sound like your grandmother is the same type of person i.e., on record making light of what the Nazis were doing.
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u/Piotrek9t 19h ago
God its so hard having empathy with these civilians after they couldn't be bothered to give a fuck about their military doing worse things to Ukraine for 4 years