Oliver Stone: Holocaust Blown Way Out of Proportion by Jewish Dominated Media

[Tellos Athenaios]

@Brennus & Fragony: Gas is used as weapon as far back as Antiquity, in sieges. And it is trivial to get (lethal) gas down the shafts: simply burn carbon-based compounds and you will probably get carbon-mono-oxide, which is highly dangerous. However, if the attacker did intend to attack with gas the usual approach was to burn sulphur or sulphur-compounds: sulphur (and compounds) are readily available and when it burns the gasses it produces are quite toxic: people would die of a combination of asphyxiation and burns (in the lungs for instance) resulting from contact with sulphuric acid.

[Fragony]

Got more on that? They understood oxygen then.

[Brenus]

Oh, I guess they use some kind of chemical war in specific case.
However, it needs confine space, so I do understand and even imagine for tunnel (in case of siege). But it was not as main weapons but as countermeasures to specific threats. There is no Ypres before Industrial mass production was available.
Sulphur burns oxygen. It used when you open a keg of vine to stop the oxidation when you finished to take a limited quantity and close the plug of it.

The problem faced by not industrial nations would be the production, collection and storage.

[Don Corleone]

Earlier in the thread, there was a sub-current raging over whether lack of proper attention to Soviet heroism (well, the Russian people) and losses they incurred, as well as the atrocities committed on the Russian people were signs of anti-communism or great positioning by a Jewish-dominated media cabal.

May I remind everyone that Operation Barbarossa commenced on June 22, 1941 and prior to that, the Soviets (i.e. the Russians) were German ALLIES, and were participating in the massacre of Poles and other smaller Slavic peoples (Ukraine, Belorus, etc) right up until the point they couldn't anymore, because Hitler turned on them?

Basically, I don't think the West ever forgot or forgave Stalin for this oft-overlooked wrinkle (can't seem to embed links into text anymore with the new system... help please?)

EDIT BY CA - Fixed it for you. There shouldn't be any difference between this system and any older ones.

[lars573]

Calling the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact an alliance between the Soviets and the Germans is a BIIIIIIIG stretch. At most the agreed to stay out of each others way for 5 years. And both were planing to attack the other at some point.

[Don Corleone]

It allowed the Germans to focus on a one-front war. It enabled things like the Blitz, and the 30 days of bombings of London, of the overrun of France and the Netherlands. Whether the Soviets sent troops planes or armor is irrelevant. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a betrayal. All so that Stalin could run some mass-extermination and land-grabs of his own.

The Russian people fought valiantly, and should be honored for their countless sacrafices, their bravado and their heroism. But they were fighting their way out of a hell that their own leader put them in. I think most folks in the West take that into account and thereby limit their sympathies for Russian sufferings and their reverence for Russian military contributions. It's usually easier to feel better for a guy who gets mugged on his way home from work than it is for the guy who got mugged when he was selling dime-bags out on the corner.

[Brenus]

“The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a betrayal” Who Stalin did betray? Poland who had the same agreement with Hitler few years before? The French and the English who refuse any Alliance, as they were “officially” anti-communist?

The post war anti-communism was as well a factor in ignoring the Red Army victory and the real suffering of the Russian.
The political gain in doing this was as well for the western Allies to take credit of the victory, and somehow, to clean German Eastern Allies of their involvement within the nazi War Machine.
So, naturally, the extermination of the Jews became a central point of our history, as we hadn’t much to say in the Western Front.

I know it is a bit over simplify and should be developed, but I have to go to work…

[Tellos Athenaios]

Got more on that? They understood oxygen then.

They did, but they also understood very well that the primary danger in those shafts (apart from collapsing support beams and the like) was that you got in so far from the exit point that there was too little oxygen. Thus something as simple as a torch could lead to lethal amounts of carbon monoxide.

Anyway a specific, targeted attack with sulphur for you here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dura-Europos Now, I have inferred that this would be the “usual” approach from the fact that sulphur and sulphur compounds are readily available (heck, even setting fire to rotting animals would do the trick: perhaps not lethal but quite nasty all the same). Similarly to that among the things you could do would be to burn various plants (e.g. taxus) to get other unhealthy fumes.

In January 2009, researchers claimed they had found evidence that the Persian Empire used poisonous gases on Dura against the Roman defenders during the siege. Excavations at Dura have discovered the remains of 20 Roman soldiers at the base of the city walls. An archaeologist at the University of Leicester suggested that bitumen and sulphur crystals were ignited to create poisonous gas, which was then funnelled through the tunnel with the use of underground chimneys and bellows.[16] The Roman soldiers had been constructing a countermine, and Sassanian forces are believed to have released the gas when their mine was breached by the Roman countermine. A lone Sassanian soldier was also discovered among the bodies and is believed to be the individual responsible for releasing the gas before the fumes overcame him as well.