Tag: Poland

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No One Trusts Russia (Putin)

Source: Poland and Baltic nations plan to withdraw from landmine convention | Reuters

Withdrawing from the international land mine treaty is no small commitment. Land mines are considered counterproductive because they cause massive costs in civilian casualties and removal costs for decades after the conflict for which they were deployed. It is an emphatic statement of distrust in Vladimir Putin that the Baltic states and Poland are electing to leave the international land mine treaty. The Baltics and Poland are declaring that they anticipate a Russian invasion and that they will go to any length to thwart the Russian invasion. They are clearly under no illusion that Putin is a trustworthy leader who will conform to international laws and treaties that he signs.

NATO members Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia plan to withdraw from the Ottawa convention banning anti-personnel landmines due to the military threat from their neighbour Russia, the four countries said on Tuesday.

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A Critical Reminder of How Far Humans Can Go

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen provides a great summary of the means by which Jews and minorities were executed by Nazi squads in his tour de force book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Although concentration camps receive the lion’s share of shrift and attention in popular accounts of the Holocaust, Goldhagen reminds the reader repeatedly that the method of choice during the holocaust was the bullet. Execution at gunpoint was the fastest, cheapest and, consequently, the most prevalent means by which victims were executed by Nazi murder squads. The practice was so prevalent and enormous that archeological discoveries serve as reminders and documentation of the practice. Mass graves were, of course, a deliberate strategy employed to prevent discovery and the erection of any memorial. The responsibility has thus fallen on the shoulders of physical anthropologists (i.e., archeologists) to uncover the details of history’s greatest crime. At a time when hate groups are organized, armed and dedicated to this outcome, it is important to remember the price of silence.

The Polish team who discovered the Nazi era mass grave in Poland.

Bullets, wedding rings pinpoint World War II execution grounds

Source: Archaeologists unearth Nazi-era massacre in Poland’s ‘Death Valley’