War re Ukraine: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Sun Mar 20 00:59:24 PDT 2022


A Caution On "War Crime" Screamers

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=245413
2022-03-15 07:00 by Karl Denninger in Editorial

We've heard the screaming about "bombing hospitals" over in Ukraine.

Be careful taking that at face value folks.  It might be -- but it
might also not be.

As I pointed out when this started the first casualty of war is truth.
The corollary to that is when there's a war on, regular war or not
both sides "arrange things" to make it appear that something
beneficial to them happened when it really didn't, especially if there
is no cost to the side doing the arranging.

Notice something about the alleged "bombed" hospital(s) we've seen:
There's nobody in there -- dead or otherwise.

Yes, the building was a hospital.  And clearly, it was bombed.

Was it actually a functional hospital with patients in it at the time
it was bombed?

Or were Ukrainian forces in (or taking shelter using) a building that
was a hospital but had been abandoned for some reason?

Why would it have been abandoned for its original purpose?

Well, perhaps because there was no electricity or supply of the things
a hospital needs.  Like compressed (or liquid) oxygen, for instance,
which has to be brought in by truck, never mind medicines and other
similar items.  In the middle of a war zone when the power is cut off
and the trucks can't get there to make deliveries you move the
patients when it looks like that will happen or starts to happen to
safer quarters, since an operating room with someone in it when the
power goes off is bad news, and if the generator (assuming there is
one) has no fuel you're screwed and people die.

So again: Was it a hospital at the time it was hit with actual
patients in it or was it somewhere that actual combatants were
operating out of and/or hiding in that got blown up?

I don't know, but what I do know is that if it was a hospital and got
blown up with a bunch of pregnant women and babies in it there would
be dead pregnant women, children and pieces of both, along with the
evidence that this had happened all over the damaged building.  Which
I've seen no evidence of.

Part of war includes manipulating public opinion so as to try to cause
uninvolved people to hate your enemy.  All sides in an armed conflict
do this.  Provoking a strike on an abandoned building carries no cost
for the warring parties but has tremendous propaganda value to the
side that does it.  It is of especially significant propaganda value
if the claim includes the merciless and wanton slaughter of
non-combatant women and children.

I'm not saying that is or isn't what happened.  I'm simply pointing
out that there are wild incentives to commit such acts in that there
is no price for doing so, and the benefits are significant.

Cast a slant-eye on all such claims no matter who makes them.  They
may well be true but before you take them up as true you probably want
to see the actual evidence that you're not being played.


More information about the cypherpunks mailing list