Death before dishonour

[Patrick Degan]

Seems the ETA organisation are nothing more than the Basque Separatists; terrorists who've been operating in Spain since 1973. Their role in Franco's downfall was non-existent. All Franco did after his heir presumptive was killed in a car bombing was to name Prince Juan Carlos, of the same royal family deposed in the Spanish Civil War, as his successor. Carlos became king in 1978 upon Franco's death and he shepherded the country's transition to a democratic monarchy, and ETA tried later unsuccessfully to assasinate Juan Carlos. Since then, the only thing that pathetic band of murderers have managed to accomplish is the deaths of 800 people, and the Basques are no closer to their goal of an independent state than they were under Franco.

Tip for the future, Tharkûn: it might help your arguments if they were based upon assertions which can't be so easily destroyed with just a little basic research.

[MKSheppard]

a lot of German officers picked death before dishonor as the Kessel
closed at Stalingrad in the final days.

They walked up in full view of all the russians for a mile and
started popping off rounds with a MP-40 in full sight and just
kept on doing it until they got wasted.

Lets not get started about the suicide pacts that occured in the
Kessel during it's liquidation, or how Captain Langsdorff of the
Graf Spee, after he had scuttled his ship, he unrolled an
Imperial German Navy Flag, and lay down on it and
committed suicide.

[Patrick Degan]

a lot of German officers picked death before dishonor as the Kessel closed at Stalingrad in the final days.

They walked up in full view of all the russians for a mile and
started popping off rounds with a MP-40 in full sight and just
kept on doing it until they got wasted.

Yep. And most of the surviving Sixth Panzer Army, including their commanding general, Field Marshall Von Paulus, chose dishonour before death and surrendered to the Red Army.

BTW, Fredrich Von Paulus was promoted to the rank of Field Marshall by Hitler as a signal that he should kill himself rather than surrender, as no German field marshall had ever been taken alive up to that point. Not a subtle man was Mr. Hitler.

Von Paulus surrendered the next day.

[AdmiralKanos]

Just something I must point out here:

I started this thread by talking about the stupidity of the notion that an entire species would choose death before dishonour, ie- "fighting to the last man". The most common rebuttal is that a small percentage of a species might "fight to the last man".

THAT IS NOT A VALID REBUTTAL. If someone says that an entire species will not "fight to the last man" by way of criticizing stupid Trekkie remarks like "The Klingons will likely fight to the last man" and you retort that 1% of the population might be willing to do that, you have ignored the point. 100% of 1% is still just 1%!

Holy fuck, I can't believe I have to explain this.

[MKSheppard]

Lets not forget the Battle of BERLIN, either.

300,000 Soviet KIA, and 1+ million Soviet WIA,
and this was when the Reich was completely fucking
destroyed.

Berlin’s fate was sealed, but the resistance continued. Fighting was heavy, with house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat. The Soviets sustained 305,000 dead; the Germans sustained as many as 325,000, including civilians.

There are also speculations that the casualty rate may have been as
high as 600,000 Soviet KIA and overall 2.5 million casualties.

Konev complained at one point that he was losing 1,000 men a day because Zhukov's artillery failed to shift fire when asked. Zhukov denied that allegation, stating that Konev was not using his troops intelligently.

.......

At the end of the Battle of Berlin when the men of the four Soviet Armies had footholds in the Citadel sector. Chuikov's Eighth Guards and the first Guards Tank, Kuznetsov's Third Shock, and Berzaarin's Fifth Shock battered away at SS defenders. Mohnke, Krukenberg and Colonel Seifert and their men, the majority of them Waffen SS foreigners, were stubbornly defending every room in every building. There was savage hand-to-hand fighting! The men of the Krukenberg's SS Nordland Division , some of the toughest warriors of the war fought vey well despite the hopeless of the situation... Losses on both sides had been high, many of them caused not only by enemy guns but also by damaged buildings collapsing on to the men inside them.

...........

The French SS divisoin Charlemagne marched into Berlin SINGING, and ended
up defending Hitler's Reichschancellery........

The official Soviet and Polish casualty figures for the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation (that is for battles in East-Germany between 16th April and 8th May 1945) are: 81 116 KIA or MIA; 280 251 WIA. Also 1997 tanks, 2108 artillery pieces/mortars and 917 planes were lost.

Source: "Rossiya i SSSR v voinah XX veka." Moscow, 2001.

Anyway, quite an impressive "death before dishonor" feat when everyone
considered the fact that the war was virtually finished by then....

[Patrick Degan]

I started this thread by talking about the stupidity of the notion that an entire species would choose death before dishonour, ie- "fighting to the last man". The most common rebuttal is that a small percentage of a species might "fight to the last man".

THAT IS NOT A VALID REBUTTAL. If someone says that an entire species will not "fight to the last man" by way of criticizing stupid Trekkie remarks like "The Klingons will likely fight to the last man" and you retort that 1% of the population might be willing to do that, you have ignored the point. 100% of 1% is still just 1%!

Yes, this thread has wandered a little far afield of the original point.

However, as the discussion has devolved from whole species' not wanting to face annihilation to entire planetary populations not willing to do so, the whole "death before dishonour" notion still doesn't withstand close examination; particularly considering that not even whole armies can be convinced to toss their lives away for no object whatsoever.

The resort down to arguing the case of ever smaller numbers of dedicated fanatics, I think, is the retort of a mind which cannot wrap itself around a central if not particularly noble fact of existence: that most people, given the choice, actually want to live.

[Patrick Degan]

Lets not forget the Battle of BERLIN, either.

300,000 Soviet KIA, and 1+ million Soviet WIA,
and this was when the Reich was completely fucking
destroyed.

So what? In the end, Germany surrendered. All the remaining Nazi fanatics accomplished was to eliminate themselves from the evolution lottery.

Berlin’s fate was sealed, but the resistance continued. Fighting was heavy, with house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat. The Soviets sustained 305,000 dead; the Germans sustained as many as 325,000, including civilians.

There are also speculations that the casualty rate may have been as
high as 600,000 Soviet KIA and overall 2.5 million casualties.

So what? In the end, Germany surrendered. All the remaining Nazi fanatics accomplished was to eliminate themselves from the evolution lottery.

Konev complained at one point that he was losing 1,000 men a day because Zhukov's artillery failed to shift fire when asked. Zhukov denied that allegation, stating that Konev was not using his troops intelligently.

Immaterial in terms of the subject at hand, which is that in the end, the German people chose dishonour before death and surrendered; the resistance of a few thousand fanatics notwithstanding.

At the end of the Battle of Berlin when the men of the four Soviet Armies had footholds in the Citadel sector. Chuikov's Eighth Guards and the first Guards Tank, Kuznetsov's Third Shock, and Berzaarin's Fifth Shock battered away at SS defenders. Mohnke, Krukenberg and Colonel Seifert and their men, the majority of them Waffen SS foreigners, were stubbornly defending every room in every building. There was savage hand-to-hand fighting! The men of the Krukenberg's SS Nordland Division , some of the toughest warriors of the war fought vey well despite the hopeless of the situation... Losses on both sides had been high, many of them caused not only by enemy guns but also by damaged buildings collapsing on to the men inside them.

So what? In the end, Germany surrendered. All the remaining Nazi fanatics accomplished was to eliminate themselves from the evolution lottery.

The French SS divisoin Charlemagne marched into Berlin SINGING, and ended up defending Hitler's Reichschancellery

So what? In the end, Germany surrendered. All the remaining Nazi fanatics accomplished was to eliminate themselves from the evolution lottery.

The official Soviet and Polish casualty figures for the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation (that is for battles in East-Germany between 16th April and 8th May 1945) are: 81 116 KIA or MIA; 280 251 WIA. Also 1997 tanks, 2108 artillery pieces/mortars and 917 planes were lost.

Source: "Rossiya i SSSR v voinah XX veka." Moscow, 2001.

So what? In the end, Germany surrendered. All the remaining Nazi fanatics accomplished was to eliminate themselves from the evolution lottery.

Anyway, quite an impressive "death before dishonor" feat when everyone considered the fact that the war was virtually finished by then....

So what? In the end, Germany surrendered. All the remaining Nazi fanatics accomplished was to eliminate themselves from the evolution lottery.

The central point remains: most people will choose dishonour before death because they want to live. The pointless sacrifice for a cause already lost does not alter that equation.

[AdmiralKanos]

A lot of the people who believe in this "death before dishonour" nonsense tend to be young and unattached. That is also the group which is by far most likely to commit suicide; I think that there is a stage in life when you do not yet appreciate your own worth or the importance of life itself, particularly if you do not yet have relationships and/or dependents.

[Stuart Mackey]

Personally, I don't think that anyone who says that the Federation would fight to the last man has a very firm grip on reality.Human nature just doesn't work that way.

I think its interesting to wonder, though : just exactly how stiff would the Klingon resistance be? Is their talk of valuing an honorable death in battle above all things just talk?

It's just talk. They negotiated peace with the Federation in ST6. No, check that: they came crawling on their hands and knees to the Federation to ask for mercy while they rebuilt their homeworld economy.

Dishonour before economic ruin: the secret Klingon creed.

Its quite interesting to see just how far belligrance goes when empires/nations etc have to reach into their pockets to finance said belligrance.

[MKSheppard]

Its quite interesting to see just how far belligrance goes when empires/nations etc have to reach into their pockets to finance said belligrance.

Nah, they'll just do WAR LOANS on the populace.....works every time.....

[Stuart Mackey]

Its quite interesting to see just how far belligrance goes when empires/nations etc have to reach into their pockets to finance said belligrance.

Nah, they'll just do WAR LOANS on the populace.....works every time.....

Not when the people end up starving it doesnt.

[Setesh]

Incidentally, combat against the Empire in terms of what happens to losers is most analogous to combat with the Roman Empire just after they stopped guaranteeing conquered peoples citizenship. If you continue to fight, they will destroy your planet (or city), but if you surrender, they will allow you to remain alive. They may even teach you new things and introduce to you their way of life. Look at what happened after the Romans conquered almost all of England: most of the Celts surrendered, and were allowed to remain alive. Their lifestyle actually improved due to their Romanization, as they moved from being a stone-age society to an early iron-age society in just a few generations. They also dramatically improved the English way of life, introducing a new agricultural existence. This is almost certainly the kind of thing that would occur once the Empire conquered some ST races. Clearly most people would rather live under the Empire than die to it. And some people might even want to live in the Empire more than in the UFP!

A better analog is Gengis Khan, he conquers, kills your leaders, replaces them with a group of people loyal to him. If you revolt he comes back and kills half of you. Repeat until peace, one way or anouther.

[Patrick Degan]

During the course of this thread, one point of contention that has come up as proof of the Empire's evil was the charge that Darth Vader had indiscriminantly killed officers; specifically referring to his executions of Admiral Ozzel and Capt. Needa for incompetence in command. A historical perspective is in order.

At the height of the Slave Revolt led by Spartacus (c. 70 BCE), when Sen. Marcus Licinius Crassus took the commission to command the Legions, Crassus reorganised his forces and reimposed discipline to weld them into a fighting force again in the wake of a humiliating defeat of one legion which had been caught off-guard and had not established a stockade and moat or even perimetre guard posts and patrols to protect itself. The standard Roman penalty for such a battlefield failure was decimation. This involved selecting out, at random, every tenth man in the legion for execution. No tribunal, no court-martial. Not even a drumhead trial. Death was immediate. This had the effect of "inspiring" the survivors to greater discipline. It was considered fair in the Roman system because the selections were carried out at random without favouritism one way or the other, and the executed men were taking on the punishment for the entire legion and redeeming its disgrace.

By contrast, Darth Vader executed only two command officers for failure to carry out combat orders to specification. He did not decimate whole starship crews, as a Roman general would have done without a second thought.

We now return to the discussion about the whole "death before dishonour" theory and its general inapplicability to the real world.