7 ms·

The bodies can't be found because all that was left of the dead was used & sold. Even bones where crushed to make fertilizer. You fight for your country and thi

The bodies can't be found because all that was left of the dead was used & sold. Even bones where crushed to make fertilizer. You fight for your country and this is how it ends for you. Truly wicked, not much different than today.

throwaway894345 4y ago
1. The article talks about the "used for fertilizer" hypothesis (including why it may not be a closed case). 2. "not much different than today"? Is this just some wild rhetoric or do you actually postulate that armies today are using the bodies of their dead for fertilizer/etc?
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Not much different than today, if the news about Russia mobile crematoriums are eventually verified
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Seems at least implausible. Cremation is a fairly slow and energy intense process. If you wanted to dispose of bodies, there are easier ways. Also sure sounds a lot like the rumors back during Covid about secret mass cremations to hide how many were dying.
    - Veen 4y ago
      The Russians have an obvious motivation to hide how many soldiers are dying. That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        > That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation. It's improbable for the same reasons it was improbable the last time it wasn't true. Secret mass cremations just aren't practical from a logistical standpoint.
        varjag 4y ago
        Mobile military crematories do exist in Russian military, there are public pre-war videos of them. Apparently the command seen enough need for them to manufacture the hardware. With a prior like that, it's entirely probable.
        paisawalla 4y ago
        Anyone who has had a relative cremated knows that it takes 2+ hours for the body to be fully reduced to ashes and bone fragments. Two hours, for a single body, in a facility the size of a large garage. Just do some napkin math for what that means for the prospect of cremating a single body in something the size of a cement mixer. Running non-stop with no breaks, bodies ready to go, matching the efficiency of the most optimal stationary crematories, working around the clock, a single truck could burn 12 bodies using 336 gallons of fuel (per https://www.lng2019.com/how-much-natural-gas-is-used-to-cremate-a-body/ https://www.lng2019.com/how-much-natural-gas-is-used-to-crem...) and generating 6.6 metric tons of CO2. For this to even make sense politically, there would have to be a number of bodies so large that burning it made more sense than anything else, even with how costly and obvious it would be to observers. I'm open to your guesses, but I'm going to say one thousand innocents in a single place would be sufficiently atrocious. I say this because numbers like 100-200 are thrown around fairly casually when reporting on Ukraine and other locations, so I'm going up one magnitude from that. So 84 trucks working as described could finish this job in one day, releasing 5,500 metric tons of CO2 and consuming 2300+ gallons of fuel to do so. I leave it to the reader to determine whether it's plausible for a military in the midst of a very difficult war to dedicate the human and supply resources necessary to conduct such an operation (at peak efficiency, as described). At the very least, the movement and fueling of 84 such trucks (or even 30 if we're spending a week doing this) should be observable. We shouldn't have to rely on video from 2013 to make these claims. The video most often shown as proof of Russia's mobile crematories is one of a mobile incinerator, e.g. for trash which can fully combust in minutes.
        varjag 4y ago
        The manufacturer's YouTube videos describe that as crematorium, not incinerator. Also not sure if you have a command of Russian, but the video with burning the trash still has the narrator explaining its use for cremation of 'biological waste'. They obviously didn't want showing said waste in demonstration video. Regarding the waste of resources, these are likely to use lower grade/bunker fuel. And as to priorities, remember Russia is the only country in the world that introduced a national standard for mass graves. In effect since February 1st this year: https://www.mchs.gov.ru/dokumenty/5693 https://www.mchs.gov.ru/dokumenty/5693 Scroll down to page 13 for pictures if you don't read Russian.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        The accusation isn’t that the Russians are hiding their dead, it’s that they are covering up their treatment of civilians. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/russia-accused-mobile-crematoriums-incinerate-civilians-mariupol/story?id=83932376 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/russia-accused-mobi...
  - paisawalla 4y ago
    I was told that the age of multimedia would deliver radical transparency, where rumors would be dispelled before they had a chance to propagate, and superstitious beliefs would become untenable.
    - joebob42 4y ago
      By who? And so what if someone told you that?
      - paisawalla 4y ago
        Hi joebob, This is a rhetorical or satirical commentary on the fact that media technology, while having the superficial capacity for increasing access to and quality of information, often has the opposite effect of what one might expect despite that capacity. That is, it just as frequently and even more adeptly appears to embed and reinforce deeply pre-existing biases towards false -- even obviously so -- narratives which are comforting or reaffirm the believer's sense that they see through the confusion of world events. The answers to "by whom", and "so what" questions are not going to be literal answers, just like "at what precise moment did you stop sleeping and become awake this morning" has no true answer, but would only invite a debate over the definitions of sleeping and waking. It's not meant to literally be a story about a time I was told something. I was told many things, by many people, in various forms, over a long period of time. The comment is meant to provoke the reader to consider that technology -- far from giving man the ability to conquer his nature -- emanates from man's nature, is a servant to it, and can easily serve to reinforce and entrench it. Therefore, one ought to treat technological progress carefully, and not assume that it is equivalent to human progress.
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        I guess the "so what" is the implication that we have not reached the promises or potential of civilian digital communication systems. I agree, and think what we have has instead made many areas of information worse, fragmented and unreliable. As for "who?", if you grew up the 80s of 90s you will remember the daily, breathless grandiose proclamations of various government digital literacy programmes. Selling the World Wide Web, the Information Superhighway, Ubiquity and Universal Access was a decade-long propaganda drive that laid the foundations for what it now the "tech industry". Of course there is much in the world that is over-promised, and over-reaches. At some point people usually reconcile the reality with the hype. With "tech" I think that has still not happened, and many remain in a dream world, high on the fantasies they grew up with.
  - trhway 4y ago
    The crematoriums have been brought for civilians after Bucha. The sheer number of the civilians killed in Mariupol though forced to use traditional approaches - the ruined buildings are demolished without pulling the bodies out, and for the rest - there are huge swaths of fields near Mariupol covered with fresh graves marked only with numbers. The crematoriums are used in other places where FSB and Russian SS "Russian Guard" need to disappear the bodies of killed political activists/etc without leaving evidence like the mass grave in Bucha and there no mass casualties like in Mariupol. The soldiers have been either abandoned (a lot in Kiev fighting) or put into number-only graves in Belarus and near Rostov. A few are sent home to have those public funerals.
  - nomel 4y ago
    > mobile crematoriums The existence of a portable system to "respectfully" dispose of the bodies is very different from profiting from the crushed bones of the deceased.
    - pvaldes 4y ago
      There is a strong component of looting and ravaging in all the entire "special operation", so they are profiting of the properties of the murdered, for sure.
      - nomel 4y ago
        Sorry, I don't follow how that's related to the comment I replied to.
jeffwask 4y ago
One's last sacrifice to capitalism/colonialism
chrisseaton 4y ago
> not much different than today I think western militaries go to pretty extraordinary lengths to recover and repatriate bodies these days. In the Falklands in the 1980s there were still some battlefield burials, as that was still the accepted practice, but most of these were dug up after public outcry and I don't think we'd do that anymore, short of a full-scale war of national survival.
- jcadam 4y ago
  Modern communications I would bet has something to do with this. Families often didn't find out that their relative was killed whilst campaigning until weeks/months after the event. No doubt this would have started to change during the mid-late 19th century.
lapetitejort 4y ago
I hope that my body is used to its fullest when I'm gone. Ideally they'll harvest anything useful, donate the rest to science, then dispose of what's left using the least amount of energy possible. My body is not to be revered or preserved past what is useful.

throwaway894345 4y ago

1. The article talks about the "used for fertilizer" hypothesis (including why it may not be a closed case). 2. "not much different than today"? Is this just some wild rhetoric or do you actually postulate that armies today are using the bodies of their dead for fertilizer/etc?

pvaldes 4y ago
Not much different than today, if the news about Russia mobile crematoriums are eventually verified
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Seems at least implausible. Cremation is a fairly slow and energy intense process. If you wanted to dispose of bodies, there are easier ways. Also sure sounds a lot like the rumors back during Covid about secret mass cremations to hide how many were dying.
  - Veen 4y ago
    The Russians have an obvious motivation to hide how many soldiers are dying. That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      > That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation. It's improbable for the same reasons it was improbable the last time it wasn't true. Secret mass cremations just aren't practical from a logistical standpoint.
      - varjag 4y ago
        Mobile military crematories do exist in Russian military, there are public pre-war videos of them. Apparently the command seen enough need for them to manufacture the hardware. With a prior like that, it's entirely probable.
        paisawalla 4y ago
        Anyone who has had a relative cremated knows that it takes 2+ hours for the body to be fully reduced to ashes and bone fragments. Two hours, for a single body, in a facility the size of a large garage. Just do some napkin math for what that means for the prospect of cremating a single body in something the size of a cement mixer. Running non-stop with no breaks, bodies ready to go, matching the efficiency of the most optimal stationary crematories, working around the clock, a single truck could burn 12 bodies using 336 gallons of fuel (per https://www.lng2019.com/how-much-natural-gas-is-used-to-cremate-a-body/ https://www.lng2019.com/how-much-natural-gas-is-used-to-crem...) and generating 6.6 metric tons of CO2. For this to even make sense politically, there would have to be a number of bodies so large that burning it made more sense than anything else, even with how costly and obvious it would be to observers. I'm open to your guesses, but I'm going to say one thousand innocents in a single place would be sufficiently atrocious. I say this because numbers like 100-200 are thrown around fairly casually when reporting on Ukraine and other locations, so I'm going up one magnitude from that. So 84 trucks working as described could finish this job in one day, releasing 5,500 metric tons of CO2 and consuming 2300+ gallons of fuel to do so. I leave it to the reader to determine whether it's plausible for a military in the midst of a very difficult war to dedicate the human and supply resources necessary to conduct such an operation (at peak efficiency, as described). At the very least, the movement and fueling of 84 such trucks (or even 30 if we're spending a week doing this) should be observable. We shouldn't have to rely on video from 2013 to make these claims. The video most often shown as proof of Russia's mobile crematories is one of a mobile incinerator, e.g. for trash which can fully combust in minutes.
        varjag 4y ago
        The manufacturer's YouTube videos describe that as crematorium, not incinerator. Also not sure if you have a command of Russian, but the video with burning the trash still has the narrator explaining its use for cremation of 'biological waste'. They obviously didn't want showing said waste in demonstration video. Regarding the waste of resources, these are likely to use lower grade/bunker fuel. And as to priorities, remember Russia is the only country in the world that introduced a national standard for mass graves. In effect since February 1st this year: https://www.mchs.gov.ru/dokumenty/5693 https://www.mchs.gov.ru/dokumenty/5693 Scroll down to page 13 for pictures if you don't read Russian.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      The accusation isn’t that the Russians are hiding their dead, it’s that they are covering up their treatment of civilians. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/russia-accused-mobile-crematoriums-incinerate-civilians-mariupol/story?id=83932376 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/russia-accused-mobi...
- paisawalla 4y ago
  I was told that the age of multimedia would deliver radical transparency, where rumors would be dispelled before they had a chance to propagate, and superstitious beliefs would become untenable.
  - joebob42 4y ago
    By who? And so what if someone told you that?
    - paisawalla 4y ago
      Hi joebob, This is a rhetorical or satirical commentary on the fact that media technology, while having the superficial capacity for increasing access to and quality of information, often has the opposite effect of what one might expect despite that capacity. That is, it just as frequently and even more adeptly appears to embed and reinforce deeply pre-existing biases towards false -- even obviously so -- narratives which are comforting or reaffirm the believer's sense that they see through the confusion of world events. The answers to "by whom", and "so what" questions are not going to be literal answers, just like "at what precise moment did you stop sleeping and become awake this morning" has no true answer, but would only invite a debate over the definitions of sleeping and waking. It's not meant to literally be a story about a time I was told something. I was told many things, by many people, in various forms, over a long period of time. The comment is meant to provoke the reader to consider that technology -- far from giving man the ability to conquer his nature -- emanates from man's nature, is a servant to it, and can easily serve to reinforce and entrench it. Therefore, one ought to treat technological progress carefully, and not assume that it is equivalent to human progress.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      I guess the "so what" is the implication that we have not reached the promises or potential of civilian digital communication systems. I agree, and think what we have has instead made many areas of information worse, fragmented and unreliable. As for "who?", if you grew up the 80s of 90s you will remember the daily, breathless grandiose proclamations of various government digital literacy programmes. Selling the World Wide Web, the Information Superhighway, Ubiquity and Universal Access was a decade-long propaganda drive that laid the foundations for what it now the "tech industry". Of course there is much in the world that is over-promised, and over-reaches. At some point people usually reconcile the reality with the hype. With "tech" I think that has still not happened, and many remain in a dream world, high on the fantasies they grew up with.
- trhway 4y ago
  The crematoriums have been brought for civilians after Bucha. The sheer number of the civilians killed in Mariupol though forced to use traditional approaches - the ruined buildings are demolished without pulling the bodies out, and for the rest - there are huge swaths of fields near Mariupol covered with fresh graves marked only with numbers. The crematoriums are used in other places where FSB and Russian SS "Russian Guard" need to disappear the bodies of killed political activists/etc without leaving evidence like the mass grave in Bucha and there no mass casualties like in Mariupol. The soldiers have been either abandoned (a lot in Kiev fighting) or put into number-only graves in Belarus and near Rostov. A few are sent home to have those public funerals.
- nomel 4y ago
  > mobile crematoriums The existence of a portable system to "respectfully" dispose of the bodies is very different from profiting from the crushed bones of the deceased.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    There is a strong component of looting and ravaging in all the entire "special operation", so they are profiting of the properties of the murdered, for sure.
    - nomel 4y ago
      Sorry, I don't follow how that's related to the comment I replied to.

jeffwask 4y ago

One's last sacrifice to capitalism/colonialism

chrisseaton 4y ago

> not much different than today I think western militaries go to pretty extraordinary lengths to recover and repatriate bodies these days. In the Falklands in the 1980s there were still some battlefield burials, as that was still the accepted practice, but most of these were dug up after public outcry and I don't think we'd do that anymore, short of a full-scale war of national survival.

jcadam 4y ago
Modern communications I would bet has something to do with this. Families often didn't find out that their relative was killed whilst campaigning until weeks/months after the event. No doubt this would have started to change during the mid-late 19th century.

lapetitejort 4y ago

I hope that my body is used to its fullest when I'm gone. Ideally they'll harvest anything useful, donate the rest to science, then dispose of what's left using the least amount of energy possible. My body is not to be revered or preserved past what is useful.