Why do we live in a world where people sympathize and side with rapists?

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I try to be pretty up to date in feminist circles, and I am unfamiliar with what you're talking about. Who are these feminists who support people who rape in wartime?

[Beastro]

The big issue with the Eastern Front is how it runs against the clear cut perceptions of the Western Allies and how they made a deal with a devil working with the Soviets.

The other sad fact is that to many, they don't want to acknowledge it because of fanboyism around the Soviet Union, especially during back when the USSR existed. It's for that reason that it took until the 60s for knowledge of what the Soviet system was really like to destroy support for them in the West, but even then, knowledge of how nasty the Soviets were was hardly a secret from the Russian Revolution onward, it was just that it could no longer be ignored and that their idealized vision of the state and the system it was under finally collapsed.

Sadly, it seems some of that structure has survived as the actions of the Soviets have still led to a soft reaction from most since then and how Communism is looked on as an evil, but a lesser one than Nazism.

The position Finland found itself in at the end of the war is a good example of that given Soviet aggression in the WInter War and a feeling that it was just a matter of time until they attacked again and their best chance was working with Germany to get rid of their existential threat. And yet, at wars end, their leaders were put on trial in a mockery of Nuremburg by the Soviets. Fortunately their actions backfired and led to even stronger resistance from the Finns, but actions like that do lend a sense of victors justice that spoils the entire point of the war crimes trials taking place.

I've actually met misguided Germans who will say earnestly how, "We started it, provoked a reaction, and they answered back. That's what war is." That really upsets me. My feeling is that this really doesn't happen in war unless the participants are particularly nasty,

Then I'm sorry, you don't have an inkling of what war is like, as I'm a fellow civvie speaking, hardly someone that served and fought in one.

War is a nasty circumstance to be in and it doesn't require the two sides to the Nazi's and Communists to have it bring out the worst in people. That, however, doesn't absolve those who do terrible things of what they do, it sadly reveals just how thinly covered evil is in the soul of Man, just below the surface ready to come out lest we do what we can to keep it in check.

The title is exactly what you get. This always confuses me. You hear plenty of stories about how some guy or some girl has raped someone, they thought it wasn't really rape (I blame poor parenting and problems at home) and then the family and friends and community will shield the attacker. Pressure the victim to stay quiet, to settle, to bribe them off. That "he's such a promising young boy with a future, don't mess that up over one mistake!" Is it just because they are family and friends and love the attacker so much that they just don't want to believe the worst in him or her?

I don't know given the visceral response I've gotten when it's happened close to my life, but I was raised in a family that never understood the logic behind blindly defending blood, like those who view it as a terrible thing to turn in a family member who has committed murder. To me and my family whenever the topics come up, it makes no sense to not to turn them in and our love for them doesn't change the that a crime has been committed.

With that sad, things have happened in my families history that were before I was born, and the lack of action came not from any excuse making but the fact that the concept of sexual abuse was so alien to people's lives that the magnitude of what happens wasn't dawned upon until many years later.

[Yukaphile]

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[Karha of Honor]

I don't believe war can turn you into a rapist unless that potential already existed in you. And for WWII, I don't blame the "traumas" or the "horrors" of war. I would blame other social problems like patriarchy, or economics, first before blaming the conflict. That being said, it is scary how sick some are, that civilized society only barely conceals it. In war, it just comes bursting out. The thing I see here is people trying to equate the victims of the Soviet hordes, who bred hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of rape babies, as if they had a completely morally equivalent victimhood to their attackers and as if the victims were equally "guilty." I do see that. Those men left behind so much suffering and life conceived in hellish pain that... no, I don't care about sympathizing with them. Especially when you consider how many of them lived full lives and got away with their crimes. The most we can do is honor the women and children they abused. They are nothing alike in terms of victhimhood. But we've spent 70 years demonizing Germans (not just the Nazi Party), so that might make it hard for some to see them as not Nazis, but just people... especially the women and children, who had the least control over all that the men were doing...

How do you define patriarchy and why is it a problem in the USA?

[Yukaphile]

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[Beastro]

I don't believe war can turn you into a rapist unless that potential already existed in you.

Exactly, only we all have the potential to do nasty things, it's just up in the air what they are, what pressures would be required to tempt us and how capable we are to fight those temptations.

I see that in my own family and how justice oriented they are. I don't know how many debates I've had with my mom over the decades about how her righteousness could easily swing her into cruel, terrible things, all she needs to have is a sense that someone has done something cruel and terrible enough for her to go down that path herself.

I would blame other social problems like patriarchy, or economics, first before blaming the conflict.

.....

The most we can do is honor the women and children they abused.

You don't think they also abused men as well? Scheisse, I hate this damn categorizing of victimhood tripe.

But we've spent 70 years demonizing Germans (not just the Nazi Party), so that might make it hard for some to see them as not Nazis, but just people... especially the women and children, who had the least control over all that the men were doing...

What it comes down to me is what were they doing/thinking during the good old times under the Nazi Party? Were the Heiling Hitler and loving every minute of it so long as things were riding high, or did they hate it, but couldn't act feeling alone in a society dominated by demonic temper tantrum Germany was enraptured in?

One picture sums it up for, which is one of a line of German POWs being marched off with their hands up in an old book of mine. The Old Girl, mom, could talk about how much she hates the Germans for what they did, but then would see pictures like that and melt, sad that poor "boys" are going to be marched off to Siberia where almost all of them will die.

For me, I have no pity for them as I wonder what they were doing during Barbarossa and the other good times: were they just being soldiers, or were they among the many horde that were itching to volunteer to help the Einsatzgruppen and were the soldiers German generals had in mind when they issues noticed demanding soldiers hold their fire because so many were wasting too many bullets shooting civilians after capturing villages that it was placing an unnecessary burden on their logistic supply trains to keep them at normal ammunition levels.

It's so clumsy and archaic, and yet it influences people's thoughts, especially young children.

I'd rather it develop naturally then be at the mercy of any ideologue no matter what their bent.

Like how a man is supposed to be so strong and if he's not, he's a "pussy." We see men as big, strong, and meant to lead the way, and women as smaller, more nurturing, and meant to support. It really still feels like such a sad fact of society that gender stereotypes still inform our thoughts and slip into our mainstream consciousness.

The first bit is a mystery to me given my stoic British family background. Strength was expected of all no matter what their sex, but that didn't mean the expression of emotion by any was a sign of weakness despite the proclivity of many members to hate to cry. Hell, the most fondly remember "manly" thing about my maternal grandfather was how he'd walk my mom and her sister to bed every night, their feet on his. Something wonderfully fatherly and more of what a man is than any sort of machismo that screams more insecurity than anything else to my Anglo-Saxon sensibilities.

Because most men are on average big and strong, it is how we are built to play our part in society going back to hunter-gatherer days. Another part of that is our disposableness, whoever much people like MRAs gnash their teeth over it when we in the West most of all, are caught very far away from the realities of life that shaped us for hundreds of thousands of years. That doesn't mean women can't be, you're speaking to someone who's maternal grandmother beat most men in the old competitions they had when she was a kid, and when it came to things like the hammering contests, could beat anyone with her left hand as well given her ambidextrousness.

Because women are on average smaller, so much so it has an effect on male/female attraction where men prefer shorter women and women prefer taller men for reasons that also gave rise to the age gap
that exists in most relationships.

The nurturing aspect comes from childbearing for much the same reason that women on average have higher negative emotion and fall prey to depression and anxiety - it's hard enough taking care of oneself, it's worse when you have a child, or children, especially when pregnant and all the more so given the harsh conditions placed upon pregnant women that stayed awful until very recently, as in less than a century.

As for the support angle, that depends on how you look on support and I'd give that more to men having to work around the realities of women and childbearing/raising and what was required of them to aid women to keep both them and the children alive that touches again on our disposability.

If you are taking support as something along the lines of the nurturing, that goes along with expressing female nature for much the same reason my friend takes it upon herself to trim her fathers eyebrows because she hates how unkempt he keeps them.

But in the end here you're talking to someone who has come from a family where things were handled pragmatically given each spouses affinities, which resulted in the women almost always handling the finances.

It really still feels like such a sad fact of society that gender stereotypes still inform our thoughts and slip into our mainstream consciousness.

Yeah, sad that God knows how long of evolution has made an impression upon on species and the sexes and that we simply can't be happy living in societies that allow everyone the freedom to express their nature, however gratingly stereotypical it may be to ideologues.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Beastro, are you really making an appeal to EvoPsych?

Yukaphile, I, personally, consider rape worse than murder, because I can see situations where murder would be justified, but none for rape. I am all for rapists getting decapitated at least.

[Yukaphile]

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[Yukaphile]

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[Fuzzy Necromancer]

You gotta understand that there were legitimate reasons to support Hitler, ways he improved their economy, that had people cheering for him.

aaaaaaaand this is where you and I have a sharp divide.

My thesis is that, even if there were women complicit in HItler's evil, that doesn't justify raping them, because nothing does. I wouldn't allow Hitler himself to be raped. I wouldn't let somebody who raped me be raped. Because rape is always evil and wrong.

...there weren't legitimate reasons to support Hitler.