DrJohn Whitesell

“prevent the crowding of spectators during the mass executions’.[126] At Himmler’s insistence, the perpetrators were supplied with generous measures of alcohol, often available before and during the killing. Ukrainian auxiliaries were notorious for their drunken cruelty, allegedly throwing children in the air to be shot at like birds. After killing sprees, the men were encouraged to spend evenings together carousing and drinking. Following the mass execution of 33,000 Jews and Soviet prisoners in the ravines at Babi Yar near Kiev, the killers enjoyed a banquet to mark the occasion.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“Addiction is a complex psychological, emotional, physiological, neurobiological, social, and spiritual process. It manifests through any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but that in the long term causes them or others negative consequences, and yet the person refuses or is unable to give it up. Accordingly, the three main hallmarks of addiction are short-term relief or pleasure and therefore craving; long-term suffering for oneself or others; and an inability to stop.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“The United States army, wrote another disillusioned recruit, is ‘about as Nazi-like as Hitler’s’.[105] In 1944 the Office of War Information issued a confidential manual to white officers on ‘Certain Characteristics of the Negro’, which included the following: ‘gregarious, extrovertive [sic] . . . hot tempered . . . mentally lazy, not retentive, forgetful . . . ruled by instinct and emotion rather than by reason . . . keen sense of rhythm . . . evasive . . . lies easily, frequently, naturally’.[106] One black soldier writing back from the European theatre at news of racial violence in the New York district of Harlem claimed that black fighters were asking themselves, ‘what are we fighting for?’[107”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The Soviet propaganda effort in the West played on this sentimental view of Russia and the image of Stalin as a man committed to peace and democracy, a view swallowed uncritically by the Western public whose knowledge of Soviet realities was gleaned entirely from the propaganda image. When the bishop of Chelmsford, president of the National Council for British–Soviet Unity, opened a congress in London in November 1944, he talked of the Allies as the ‘three great democracies’. A second churchman at the congress spoke of the ‘truly religious achievements of the Soviet Government’ and the great contribution the Soviet regime had made ‘to the ethical side of life’.[78]”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945