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Wire of Death
- cm127 11y agoMore graphic: http://imgur.com/gallery/zzSmB http://imgur.com/gallery/zzSmB (NSFW)
- johnm1019 11y agoA striking caption from one of the images in this gallery > This monastery was occupied by the Germans, most monks escaped to the Netherlands. The wire was build right through the monastery's yard, all 2.5 km of it. The monastery had to pay for the expenses. The parallels to someone yelling about building a wall and having Mexico pay for it is chilling.
- bruceb 11y agoNo it doesn't Comparing a wall and a wire that electrocutes you is ridiculous.
- csours 11y agoIt really isn't so ridiculous. Walls are often topped with razor wire or electrified wire. Even if "Trump's Wall" isn't planned to have that now, it may have it after a few escalations.
- pessimizer 11y agoIf there were a catalog, they'd be on facing pages. edit: Why am I trying to be pithy here? If you need to think a wall is so different from a fence is so different from an electric fence, you're rationalizing something.
- miracle_code 11y agoDamn right.
- MichaelApproved 11y agoI'd imagine you'd need to relentlessly patrol the wire for it to be effective. The barrel method, as seen in the pictures you linked to, seems to be an easy way to defeat the wire.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- stinos 11y agoIn 1914 one million Belgian refugees were already in the Netherlands This is often forgotten. And instead Belgians I know are now complaining about, what, some tens of thousands?, Syrian (and other) refugees entering the country. And yes, some of these Belgians even want to build fences to keep them out. Hmm, where did I hear this story before..
- venomsnake 11y agoBecause it is different to help a cousin and a stranger. If the refugees were culturally similar - the attitude in Europe would be different.
- mbrock 11y agoYeah, it's very important to have the right culture fit...
- louwrentius 11y agoIf they don't share basic cultural values our society is built upon, I think that matters a ton. People who 'mistreat' or even just disapprove of how women in our society live their lives, how we treat gays, non-believers, have nothing to add to our society or this world.
- abalone 11y agoDisapproval of modern women, gays and non-believers... Sorry I stepped out for a minute, are we talking about fundamentalist Christians? Orthodox Jews?
- venomsnake 11y agoThese populations are not common in Europe. And I would love to stay that way. People that take their religion too seriously should stay out of EU.
- salverofl 11y ago|In 1918 only 10% of Dutch and Belgian households had electricity. Most people didn't know the dangers of electricity at all which meant for a lot of people their first contact with electricity was also their last." - I wonder to ask how many volts are they using during that time?
- fredsted 11y agoFrom the article, 2000 volts.
- plierhead 11y agoArticle says 2000 Volts. Very lethal.
- dredmorbius 11y agoIt's the amps that kill.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- function_seven 11y agoThat phrase is a lot like, "It's not the gun that kills you, it's the bullet". Yeah, technically true but it really is the volts that drive current through you.
- jessaustin 11y agoIt's not the fall; it's the landing!
- dredmorbius 11y agoHigh voltage doesn't kill. It does provide the electromotive force to move current. Death by electricity is largely a function of the current that flows through the body, though in some cases the frequency also matters. Case of a researcher who was working with millivolt and/or milliamp currents (I forget the specifics) but at frequencies which disrupted his heart rythms. Was working alone late at night in the lab until he wasn't. Died from stopping his heart. A Van de Graaff generator will kick out 100,000 - 5,000,000 volts, but can be contacted directly. Holding a conductive rod (so that current flows through a large skin area on the hand) allows sparks to be discharged through the body without harm. It's a common science lab trick for children.
- philbo 11y agoWithin 100–500 meters of the wire anyone who was not able to officially explain their presence was summarily executed. The youngest person to be executed was a four year old.
- duncan_bayne 11y agoNot true. The four year old died accidentally by touching the wire while playing. Still tragic but not as depraved as made out.
- jobigoud 11y agoOK thanks. It was almost sounding like they executed a four-year old because he was not able to officially explain his presence…
- phyzome 11y agoYeah, the article makes it sound like a sapient fence or something.
- aab0 11y agoYou should fix that, then. 'Executed' is very different from 'accidentally electrocuted'.
- duncan_bayne 11y ago... ? I'm neither the author nor the submitter.
- Artistry121 11y agoIt really hits home how much effort and ingenuity can go into a terrible thing.
- krylon 11y agoA few years back I watched a lot of videos on nuclear tests (one can find them at archive.org - the video and audio quality is terrible, and the resolution is tiny, but it is well worth the time), and I was struck by the same thought - if only we could spend that much effort, money, time and creativity into building a better society, ending hunger and disease, what would the world look like today? It is really depressing to think about this for too long.
- MichaelApproved 11y agoDon't be too down on society. Humans are doing a lot of horrible things but we're also doing some wonderful things too. Just look at the many billionaires who are doing amazing things with their wealth http://givingpledge.org/ http://givingpledge.org/
- Artistry121 11y agoYes. And we are still on a massive, unprecedented progress run that has created abundance. I just hope we stay on that path.
- mrottenkolber 11y agoThis must surely be a joke.
- refurb 11y agoWell, if your stance is that war is a part of human nature and nuclear weapons prevent it (MAD), then nuclear weapons actually make human existence better.
- krylon 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- woodpanel 11y agoNever heard of this before! Thank you for posting this link. OT: Historians deem it unprofessionial to ask this question, which always comes to mind: what's the moral of this story? Should it remind us about the contradiction of "what is right" and "what is necessary"? Should we take lessons from it at all? For me it's exactly this what makes history interesting. We may never get rid of atrocities but we'll get to know a lot about human nature, about what our actions will lead to over the long term and what delusions we can entangle ourselves in. For Germans this fence made a lot of sense. And who is to say that if Germany didn't erect it, the Netherlands wouldn't have done so at some point. Like a financial bubble that inevitably will pop, we will repeatedly live in these scenarios that seem to be outrageously unsustainable afterwards.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago"All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again." Maybe the question of moral is unprofessional for the historians, but I think it is crucial to consider it. Humans have very short memory as a civilization - we lose the collective memory of things that happened before oldest of us were born. II World War is hitting this border right now, and you can notice all kinds of things happening that two decades ago would be unthinkable - like rising popularity of neo-nazi movements, or regular people suggesting methods to deal with immigrant crisis in Europe that would make the continent look pretty much like 1938 Germany. This is a big problem, because we've wasted thousands of years of collective experience this way. Knowing what king ruled where at what year (which is what we're being taught in schools) is of very little value for most people. But the moral coming from their mistakes and successes is actually helpful. It's funny that people do study the Bible this way, but not history. It's also sad. That said, the problem nowadays is that any attempt on trying to preserve collective memory of lessons coming from past events will be criticized as propaganda and brainwashing.
- woodpanel 11y ago"we've wasted thousands of years of collective experience" - nicely put. It's exactly this what good education of history should counter - the waste of collective experiences. It is very inefficient to go through the same cycles over and over again.
- _ak 11y ago"To the German authorities it was officially known as the Grenzhochspannungshindernis ("High Voltage Frontier Barrier")." How German. And by that I don't just mean that it's a long word per se, but also the bureaucratic, almost euphemistic, but also overly precise wording. Informally, people would simply call this an "Elektrozaun" (electric fence).
- JensRex 11y agoThis is why I love the German language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_words#German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_words#German
- coldtea 11y agoFor its associations with bureaucracy and death?
- krylon 11y agoBureaucratic German is very ... special. In cases like this one, it is cynical in covering up or disregarding human suffering and death. As Thomas Pynchon says, "a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it". In some cases, Bureaucratese can be quite funny (but never intentionally), and mocking it can be very enjoyable. At work, we call our trouble ticket system the "Störungsmeldevorrichtung". ;-)
- jabiko 11y agoIf you want to do the proper way, call it "StöMeVo". And only use the abbreviation, never call it "Störungsmeldevorrichtung" so people will forget what it stands for.
- elcapitan 11y agoThere's a general tendency to treat large-scale violence and force in bureaucratic language. Nobody would call a bunch of thugs who ride into a village and murder all the people they don't like something other than a bunch of murderers. But once they claim authority and do it in large numbers or in a somewhat legitimized ("legitimization by procedure") way, those murders are being called 'executions' like in the area under control of the IS.
- tech-no-logical 11y agopart of the 'doodendraad' was reconstructed in 2015 near Zundert. along it, people planted 24000 crocus bulbs as part of an art project called 'de dodendraad leeft!' (the wire of death lives!). this march, they bloomed for the first time. a short video here : http://nos.nl/artikel/2095442-video-dodendraad-zundert-komt-tot-bloei-met-24-000-krokussen.html http://nos.nl/artikel/2095442-video-dodendraad-zundert-komt-...
- scotty79 11y agoWhy not just break it with rope and a hook? Were the wires to thick to break by pulling? At 200km of length you could break it faster than they repair it. Also repair would cause downtime that could allow for people to slip through.
- amelius 11y agoOr how about short-circuiting it?
- elcapitan 11y agoI think one of the other linked articles said that only 10% of the Dutch population at the time had an understanding of electricity (I would guess the people close to the fence were rural population, because most of the cities are in the west at the sea). Which makes the whole thing so dangerous.
- kybernetyk 11y ago>The youngest person to be executed was a four year old. German efficiency eh?
- Overtonwindow 11y agoWhat made you want to post this? Something in the news or current events reminded you? Interesting. Didn't know this existed.
- OliverJones 11y agoI had the privilege in 1979 of traveling in Eastern Europe and crossing the border in a rural area between DDR (East Germany) and BRD (West Germany) with my US passport. The East's border was two 3m (10ft) fences topped with razor wire, with a 10m (30ft) gap of ploughed land between them. I assume the ploughed land was a minefield, but I didn't ask. There were towers with fixed machine guns and searchlights positioned closely enough together to allow the soldiers in them to monitor everything. Inside the border was a 5km exclusion zone. The West German boder? A small guard post, with a passport control officer dressed in blue jeans, and a sign saying Wilkommen in BRD. (Welcome to the German Federal Republic). 5k inside the western border was a sign in English saying "no US military personnel beyond this point." (At that time the post-WWII Allied occupation forces were still in place.) What does a border look like that prevents the passage of determined people? It looks like that, or like the Wire of Death. It's doggone ugly.