Remember the Incubators.

I just want to send out a reminder to WATCH the propaganda, even from our side... as I'm sitting here watching Fox news and Greta van Cistern.

It was proven, after Gulf War I, that the Kuwaiti's (at our behest) provided false stories of babys being removed from incubators by Iraqis. War is not about buying emotion, but direct security threats. The propaganda used to justify Gulf War I - is the same type of propaganda used against the Nazi's during WW II - calling them baby killers, etc to stir up resentment.

Propaganda is a serious tool, that is in reality used by ALL Governments, including ours in war time.

We should not fall subject to false propaganda, but rather the direct facts authorizing (or denying) war.

The way I remember, it was all the Kuwaitis' idea. Anyhow, remember, just because it's propaganda doesn't mean it's not true. Some of the best photos of German death camps were taken in Canada.

Just in case you or any other viewers of this thread are under the impression that all stories of Iraqi atrocities are fabricated, here's something that's not propaganda. I can tell you with a good degree of certainty that the story is legit. I've posted it without attributions to preserve the privacy of the author, but will provide some more info to anyone who asks.

FYI, I played an active role in the action known as "The Highway of Death." The filthy b*stards got what was coming to them and my only regret about this specific action is that some of them managed to get away.

Most folks do not know that just prior to leaving the Kuwait City area, the Iraqis went on a huge looting/pillaging/raping spree. They simply stopped their vehicles in front of Kuwaiti homes, mostly in the more affluent areas, kicked the door in and ransacked the houses. Not content with simply stealing, they also vandalized the places, sh*t on the floors, etc. If any of the occupants of these homes were present, they were typically beaten, robbed, raped and often, shot in the head by the same Iraqis who are now the recipients of the pity of liberals who claimed the U.S. slaughtered them needlessly on the Highway of Death.

As I walked among many hundreds of destroyed vehicles, many of which were still full of cooked Iraqis, I could see on almost every one of them the loot they had taken during their final raping of Kuwait. You name it and it was on trucks, strapped to tanks, etc. I'm talking about bicycles, refrigerators, TV's, garden statues, lawn chairs, kitchen tables and sinks, cooking pots and ....I sh*t you not.....one truck actually had a stolen toilet on it!!! It was like these *ssholes had stopped off at a Home Depot and were heading home to do some projects for the wife!

Many folks say the average Iraqi soldier was simply a victim of circumstances and could not disobey or even desert in such a repressive regime. Any consideration I had for the average Iraqi snuffy vanished when I saw a young Filipino maid after the Iraqis had had their way with her. She was a tiny thing, maybe 90lbs soaking wet. She was unfortunate to be in one of the homes the Iraqis invaded.

She was beaten to a pulp, eyes so swollen that she could not see. Her skull was fractured. One ear had been torn from her head. Her front teeth had been knocked backward at a hideous angle from a punch or a rifle butt. Much of her long black hair had been pulled out of her head. Her nose had been bitten and the tip of it was missing. Both of her nipples had been bitten off and her breasts had hideous human bite marks on them...I mean it looked as if a rabid dog had attacked her...the bites were deep and it was clear that those doing the biting were trying to tear flesh and impart maximum pain on this poor girl.

Of course, it goes without saying that she had been raped and sodomized repeatedly. When I saw her she was bleeding profusely from both ends and the Doc suspected that the Iraqis had penetrated her with foreign objects. I saw a seasoned SF medic reduced to tears as he treated this woman. He later told me that he had never imagined that one human could act so murderously toward another. He had seen many wounds and dead men before this, but never the result of barbaric acts such as this.

I don't know what happened to that Filipino girl, but I hope she was spared by God and is living a good life. I also hope and pray that the criminals who ruined her suffered a painful burning death on that stretch of highway that day. All the better if it was by bombs dropped by aircraft that my guys were directing.

You tell your liberal Iraqi loving friends to read this story and think about it for a while. They have the luxury of not knowing what they do not know, and most likely have never been out of the state they live in, much less traveled to other countries and mid-east sh*tholes. Myself, I know the reality of these filthy b*stards and I hope we wipe them out to a man.

There you go. That's the kind of evil we face. A regime that inculcates such a laconic sadism and hatred within its soliders that those who are killed outright may be counted among the fortunate. Cruel abuse of serving women is endemic in the Gulf states, but Saddam has taken this social disease and elevated it to a military tactic. Mercy is alien to his Ba'athist regime, and the infliction of suffering is just another tool of foreign policy. We have all the evidence we need. It's time to remove this blight from humanity.

"There's no telling how many German soldiers died from "propaganda induced" reprisal killings"

German sappers and miners had been issued a serrated tool called a Faschinen-Messer since the mid-nineteenth century. Its purpose was to cut brush, originally for binding into the "fascines" used to fill ditches or build earthworks. When attaced to a rifle, it could be conveniently used to raise enemy barbed wire while remaining prone.

Well, once the English propaganda mills got going, it was alleged that the Germans were purposely issuing these as saw-bladed bayonets in order to cause more ghastly wounds. Of course, any old-school military man could have contradicted this lie, but none did. The result is that German combat engineers were routinely killed outright whenever caught.

Ah, English fair play! Ya gotta love it!

The problems arising from such propaganda become even worse after the last shot is fired. Versailles is a perfect case in point. In order to whip up the rubes into a war frenzy, it had been necessary to paint the enemy as the apotheosis of evil.

Once the war was over, any attempt to treat the defeated fairly would have been a tacit repudiation of the wartime slanders. So, in order to justify the bloodbath, the western allies were almost forced to act as if Germany had not only been solely guilty for the war but that the Imperial army had been guilty of all the atrocities dreamed up by the Anglo-Franco-American yellow journalists.

Retractions, when finally issued, came about fifty years after the fact, long after the initial damage had been done and compounded with interest.

I think we will see the same thing with Iraq. Even exiled opponents of Saddam Hussein claim that prior to 1990 Iraq had been a prosperous and comparatively liberal country. Since Saddam has been in power since 1975, this means that for fifteen years he cannot be classified as the Hitler of the Week. His portrayal as a bloodthirsty and insane maniac started coincidentally (imagine that!) with George I's sudden decision to become a champion of monarchical legitimacy in Kuwait.

Now that Saddam has been defined as Hitler of the Week, however, anything that George II decides to do to him and his evil warmongering followers will be justified, including murdering hundreds of thousands of his civilians. Collateral damage. Besides, them Islamofascists wuz askin' fer it, cuz they supported him all those years!

I found this by Phillip Knightley, MoJoWork_n's recommended author:

(snip)...But if we want to examine the false atrocity story at its insidious worst, then we need to look at the Bryce Commission in the First World War. If as you read, the parallels with Kosovo and the Serbs appear striking, it is because they are so.

A committee of lawyers and historians chaired by Lord Bryce, a former ambassador to the US, produced a report which stated that the Germans had systematically murdered, beaten, raped and violated innocent men, women and children in Belgium. "Murder, lust and pillage," the report said, "prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries." The report gave titillating details of how German officers and men had raped 20 Belgian girls in the market place at Liege, how eight German soldiers had bayoneted a two-year-old child, and how another had sliced off a peasant girl's breasts in Malines.

Bryce's signature added considerable weight to the report and when its main findings were published around the world they were widely believed. In fact, the Germans had committed atrocities in Belgium, but not on the scale described by Bryce. It was not until after the war - when it no longer mattered - that the truth began to emerge. Bryce had not spoken to a single witness. The report was based on 1,200 depositions, mostly from Belgian refugees in Britain, taken down by barristers. None of the witnesses had been placed on oath and their hearsay evidence was accepted at face value. And although the depositions should have been filed at the Home Office, by the end of the war they had mysteriously disappeared.

Finally, in 1922, with the Bryce report under attack as British propaganda, the Belgian government appointed a Commission of Enquiry. It was unable to corroborate a single major atrocity mentioned in the report.

The Bryce report is admired by professional propagandists because it achieved its aim. In order for the war to continue, for Britain to win, the British people had to be made to hate the Germans as they had never hated anyone before...(snip)

Source

I don't know if this account has gained mainstream acceptance amongst historians.

From the end of the linked article: " . . . remember that even the Bryce Commission was eventually exposed."

There is small hope in that fact because, as I mentioned earlier, the damage had already been done. The victims -- Germany and Austria -- were lying in a bloody heap. And the perpetrators -- England and France, primarily -- got to walk away Scot-free with the loot.

By the time our great-grandchildren learn about the lies surrounding Gulf Wars I, II, etc., it will be nothing but an historical curiosity.

As far as whether mainstream authors are aware of, and point out, the deceptions of 1914-18, most straight military historians do. I think the general historians of the period, Tuchman for example, still parrot the party line for the most part. And most of the stuff for popular consumption (e.g., The History Channel) tends to be Wilsonian party line.

Historical revisionism, which is now associated almost exclusively with "Holocaust Denial", had its origins in debunking the various atrocity and war-guilt slanders surrounding the First World War. Unfortunately, the stigma of Nazism has so infected the debate that it is impossible to suggest that the Germans were anything other than the spawn of Satan in 1914-18, unless you want to be labelled a neo-Nazi. If you don't subscribe to the dogma, then a plausible argument can be made that virtually all of Hitler's land grabs, up through the invasion of Poland, were justified as he attempted to redress the injustice of Versailles.

And because of this, it is still in the best interests of the Anglo-American ruling class to assign war-guilt, and every other imaginable crime, to Imperial Germany. That way, Hitler, who has taken on almost mythic aspects in our current state religion, will continue to be a completely irrational aggressor. The post-war settlement depends very heavily on this article of faith.

On the other hand:

German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial. By John Horne and Alan Kramer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, 608 pp. $40.00.

This colossal study delves into the facts and myths surrounding the reports of German war atrocities in Belgium and France in 1914. The authors argue that the contradictory reports of Germans and Allies on what happened resulted from divergent views of the Germans' collective reprisals against civilians. These acts were war crimes under international law, but "the German army considered the real atrocity to be mass civilian resistance."

The Belgian and French accounts of atrocities tended to be more accurate than the German charges about collective civilian resistance. On the other hand, the occupiers were disoriented and fearful, fed by memories of the Franco-Prussian War, by harsh German policy toward irregular warfare, and by militant nationalism. As a result, "violence could be started by almost anything," and it provoked reprisals that "appeared to be anything but accidental."

Tragically, this issue survived in the "war culture" of the belligerent countries in the 1920s and 1930s. Allies were divided over how to handle German war crimes (a skeptical United States resisted the idea of an international court), and Weimar Germany refused to accept responsibility. Meanwhile, growing numbers of pacifists, especially in the United States, believed that the reports of German atrocities were simply an "Allied invention."

Few history books can claim to be definitive -- but this one should be accepted as such.

(Reviewed by Stanley Hoffmann, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002)

Source

Yes, but . . .

What this article classifies as an atrocity is an almost inevitable part of anti-partisan warfare. The Germans were extremely narrow in their interpretation of the rules of war, and any non-uniformed combatant was to be executed on the spot. And those harboring said partisans were also deemed guilty. But every other nation has done this also, including the U.S.

Contrast this with the English treatment of captured soldiers from the Irish Republican Army, who had been fighting in fixed formations with recognisable uniforms. They were tried and executed as traitors and partisans.

But the atrocities that were used to incite the allied -- predominantly American -- public were of the wierd, sadistic, and sexually perverse type. It is these that were a total fabrication.

Then there was the Lusitania issue. Germany got ALL of the blame for sinking it. England got NONE of the blame for using Americans as human shields for the transportation of munitions.

"It was one of the young members of the Royal Family who started that story..."

Not quite. She was the star performer but the acting coach, the director of the production and the scriptwriters were all came courtesy of Hill and Knowlton, the American company serving as the Royal Public Relations firm of the Emirate of Kuwait.

The U.S. Congress provided the set and Major Print and Broadcast Media were gracious enough to supply lights, sound, appropriately "shocked" editorial commentary and re-broadcast after re-broadcast. The authenticity of the story was "challenged" many months later but even though it was a complete fabrication, it continues to be believed and repeated today.

That was the point of the Knightley essay cited by SecretAgent, that:

" ...It is interesting to note the complete reversal of the relationship between the media and the military since Vietnam. In Vietnam the media were reluctant to believe anything the military told them. In Kosovo the media tend to believe everything the military tells them because the military has stolen the moral high ground by claiming it is anti-war. It bombs in the name of peace, to save or liberate, so those who object are the war- mongers, appeasers, Nazis.

It was fascinating to watch the British Army's spokesman being interviewed about the deaths of the two Gurkhas. He tried to avoid admitting that the men had died working on a Nato cluster bomb, so as not to embarrass his Prime Minister who had blamed the deaths on Serbs. Meanwhile, Albanian war crimes against the Serbs appear to have begun. How will they be reported? Dogmatic journalism with no room for honest doubt, no chance for the public to make up its own mind, has brought us to the point where even to express the slightest reservation about the latest atrocity story, or to show the tiniest disagreement with Britain's policy in Kosovo, is regarded as little short of treason, not just unpatriotic but immoral.

Sad days, but if you feel as I do that truth, the most abused and displaced refugee, has had a rough deal, remember that even the Bryce Commission was eventually exposed. So take heart.

To which I would only add, take heart but don't believe everything you read in the news papers -- or the history books, for that matter.

It's not as if exposure of the Bryce Commission should serve to completely restore the reputations of the Germans or Austrians in World War I. The second source cited by Secret Agent really looked interesting. I'd like to know if it has any information on the internment camps for civilians deemed to be "potential threats to order", that were set up by the Austrians throughout Austria and Hungary. The conditions were about what they were in Andersonville prison during the Civil War, and the survival rate was about the same. My grandfather (who passed away many, many years before I was born) managed to live through his experience there but many others didn't...

One of those interment camps happened to be situated just outside Breslau, Austria, the birthplace of an Austrian serving in the German Army, a corporal Adolph Schickelgruber...

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