Reply #21: I just read the transcript [View All]

[sofa king]

First of all, I'd like to say that General Clark is as usual a paragon of decency and clarity in the face of... idiocy.

Not only is O'Reilly a moron, I think he's getting worse. The statement he made is this:

"General, you need to look at the Malmedy massacre in World War II and the 82nd Airborne."

Clark rightly didn't want to discuss that matter, which has little application to the present, so he shut O'Reilly down.

If one were to give O'Reilly more credit than he is due, one might conjecture that he was attempting to make the following argument: after the massacre at Malmedy, an order came from Eisenhower's headquarters which stated that German SS and fallschirmjaeger troops were to be shot on sight.

But again, even if one were to give O'Reilly the credit of knowing that much, he's still a dumbass. That order also takes into account the abortive "Operation Greif," in which fallschirmjaeger (paratrooper) troops were dropped behind American lines to disrupt the rear and, supposedly, to assassinate high-level allied commanders. The brainchild of special operations expert Otto Skorzeny, Operation Grief included English-speaking soldiers dressed in captured American uniforms. Both sides in the war considered uniform-stealing to be tantamount to spying, a capital offense.

World War II was a rotten, shitty war, and the Malmedy repercussions did little more than add a legalistic cast to what was already pretty well established by the Allies on the Atlantic side (ask the Canadians about the Hitler Youth Division sometime), and practically codified by the Americans in the Pacific. The reason why Clark didn't want to discuss Malmedy is because the Americans learned from World War II (and specifically Malmedy) that being decent to prisoners was an excellent way of getting otherwise dangerous enemy troops to surrender. We do it because it works, and General Clark rightly told Dild O'Reilly just as much.


{Edit: a crucially misplaced "not")