WikiLeaks: Bradley Manning's motives are no defence, judge rules

[JDPriestly]

172. You should watch the film.

As I said earlier, it is all in German and may be a difficult thing to listen to if you don't understand it. Toward the end, the people who did the research to prepare the exhibition stated that they found no records indicating that the soldiers (ordinary Army enlistees, not SS) who refused orders to kill prisoners or others in violation of international law, were even tried.

The interesting thing is to see how the ordinary Germans -- so many years after WWII still were in denial about the role that the ordinary soldiers had in the Holocaust. They show the regimented, lock-step conduct of the neo-NAZIs in Germany.

My experience living in Germany and Austria was that the German youth of the time in general acknowledged and knew the facts about the Holocaust and the guilt of the German people -- but many of the Austrians did not and had not come to terms with what happened.

Like those Germans who denied the role of the ordinary German soldier in the crimes of WWII, many Americans deny their own complacency in the face of the crimes of our government and some troops in certain other countries like Iraq. Manning protested the crimes he saw to his commanding officer. It is my guess that he released the information to Wikileaks because he wanted the American people to know about those crimes.

I sympathize with any soldier who sees war crimes, is not assisted by his superior officer in bringing those crimes to light and manages to bring those crimes into the public view somehow. Had the German soldiers who were commanded to kill innocent, unarmed, submissive civilians been able to release the photos that this exhibition showed more widely, then at least the German people could not have denied their knowledge of those crimes. And now, thanks to the information we have from Wikileaks, neither can we.