← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Sertorius
Thread ID: 9526 | Posts: 11 | Started: 2003-09-04
2003-09-04 12:26 | User Profile
Rumsfeld and the buffoons of Fox News and Neo-con radio have been spreading the latest installment of the ââ¬Åbig lieââ¬Â in the form that there were all sorts of resistance in Japan and post war Germany. They figure they can fool the lemmings because they have done a fine job rewriting history for their own purposes. In all the years that I have studied WW II I havenââ¬â¢t seen even a footnote about this so-called resistance. In the case of Japan I donââ¬â¢t believe there was one incident because of Hirohitoââ¬â¢s order to stand down and cooperate with the allies. If there was any post war resistance in Germany it couldnââ¬â¢t have been at the most a dozen incidents of a minor manner. The Germans had the threat of Soviet occupation (at least in the western allied zone) to be concerned about and werenââ¬â¢t about to do anything like Rumsfeld and company claim. To compare the mess in Iraq with the post war occupation of Germany and Japan is not just a lie, but a stupid lie.
Below are two articles about this latest lie. The second one predates this one by a couple of weeks. -S
history lesson Condi's Phony History Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq. By Daniel Benjamin Posted Friday, August 29, 2003, at 4:04 PM PT
As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number, the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will," President Bush told an American Legion convention.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officersââ¬âcalled 'werewolves'ââ¬âengaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with themââ¬âmuch like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants." Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted,
One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?
Well, no, it doesn't. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts. Werwolf tales have been a favorite of schlock novels, but the reality bore no resemblance to Iraq today. As Antony Beevor observes in The Fall of Berlin 1945, the Nazis began creating Werwolf as a resistance organization in September 1944. "In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured British time pencils," Beevor writes. "ââ¬Â¦ Werwolf recruits were taught to kill sentries with a slip-knotted garrotte about a metre long or a Walther pistol with silencer. ââ¬Â¦"
In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen was assassinated on March 25, 1945, on Himmler's orders. This was not a nice thing to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. It's hardly surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the war was over. And as the U.S. Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was "probably the Werwolf's most sensational achievement."
Indeed, the organization merits but two passing mentions in Occupation of Germany, which dwells far more on how docile the Germans were once the Americans rolled inââ¬âand fraternization between former enemies was a bigger problem for the military than confrontation. Although Gen. Eisenhower had been worrying about guerrilla warfare as early as August 1944, little materialized. There was no major campaign of sabotage. There was no destruction of water mains or energy plants worth noting. In fact, the far greater problem for the occupying forces was the misbehavior of desperate displaced persons, who accounted for much of the crime in the American zone.
The Army history records that while there were the occasional anti-occupation leaflets and graffiti, the GIs had reason to feel safe. When an officer in Hesse was asked to investigate rumors that troops were being attacked and castrated, he reported back that there had not been a single attack against an American soldier in four months of occupation. As the distinguished German historian Golo Mann summed it up in The History of Germany Since 1789, "The [Germans'] readiness to work with the victors, to carry out their orders, to accept their advice and their help was genuine; of the resistance which the Allies had expected in the way of 'werewolf' units and nocturnal guerrilla activities, there was no sign. ââ¬Â¦" Werwolf itself was filled not so much by fearsome SS officers but teenagers too young for the front. Beevor writes:
In the west, the Allies found that Werwolf was a fiasco. Bunkers prepared for Werwolf operations had supplies "for 10-15 days only" and the fanaticism of the Hitler Youth members they captured had entirely disappeared. They were "no more than frightened, unhappy youths." Few resorted to the suicide pills which they had been given "to escape the strain of interrogation and, above all, the inducement to commit treason." Many, when sent off by their controllers to prepare terrorist acts, had sneaked home.
That's not quite the same as the Rumsfeld version, which claimed that "Today the Nazi dead-enders are largely forgotten, cast to the sidelines of history because they comprised a failed resistance and managed to kill our Allied forces in a war that saw millions fight and die."
It's hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news. According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germanyââ¬âand Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan casesââ¬âwas zero.
So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford's Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going around.
Daniel Benjamin was a Germany correspondent for Time and the Wall Street Journal from 1990-1994 and served on the National Security Council staff from 1994-1999. He is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror.
Article URL: [url=http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/]http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/[/url] .
2003-09-04 12:28 | User Profile
[url=http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-werewolves27aug27,1,2434380.story?coll=la-headlines-world]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...headlines-world[/url]
Postwar Iraq Is No Germany, Historians Say U.S. officials have compared the current insurgency to that of the WWII-era 'Werewolves.' By Maura Reynolds Times Staff Writer
August 27, 2003 WASHINGTON ââ¬â As violence continues in Iraq, Bush administration officials have increasingly compared the postwar situation there to that of Germany after World War II. In particular, they have likened the guerrilla-type attacks on U.S. forces to actions by the die-hard Nazis known as Werewolves.
"SS officers ââ¬â called Werewolves ââ¬â engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants," national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said in a speech Monday. But historians and military analysts take issue with that comparison.
"The Werewolves existed more in the idea or the fantasy stage than ever as a real phenomenon," said Lt. Col. Kevin Farrell, a historian at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.
The Werewolves were founded in September 1944 by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who saw them as a special force that would work behind U.S. lines to sabotage equipment and kill U.S. troops. About 5,000 SS officers were trained as Werewolves.
But according to Perry Biddiscombe, a historian of postwar Germany who wrote a 1998 book on the Werewolves, the force was designed only to assist the German army in winning the war. It was not created to be an underground movement after a German defeat.
As a result, Biddiscombe said, Rice is correct that the Werewolves attacked U.S. troops ââ¬â but the only documented assaults took place before the Nazis capitulated on May 7, 1945.
"After the end of the war there's a lot more ambiguity," said Biddiscombe, who teaches European history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
One reason for that ambiguity is that a few days before the Nazi surrender, the SS officially disbanded the Werewolves. But in the last month of the war, as Germany collapsed, Nazi radio propaganda called on Germans to take up arms to resist the occupying forces. Members of the Hitler Youth vowed to join the Werewolves in attacking Allied troops, and some other Germans who resisted after the surrender adopted the term "Werewolves" to describe themselves.
In addition, the U.S. Army warned American GIs about the danger posed by the Werewolves, contributing to their mythology, said Volker Berghahn, a professor of German history at Columbia University. This was enhanced by the fear that Nazi units would retreat to the Alps, build a redoubt and refuse to surrender.
"There was a lot of talk before the end of the war, especially within the Army, about underground units, fanatical Nazis who would hold out and commit sabotage and snipe at U.S. soldiers. But when it actually came to the point, there was some resistance ââ¬â but it was not Werewolf resistance," Berghahn said.
The most notorious documented Werewolf attack was the assassination of the mayor of the town of Aachen before the end of the war ââ¬â on March 25, 1945. The perpetrators were tried by U.S. authorities for the crime, Biddiscombe said.
But there was never an attack on the scale of last week's bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, in which 23 people died, including the head of the U.N. mission.
Tom Schlesinger, a retired Army major and professor at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire who served in Army intelligence in occupied Germany, described the Werewolves as "almost a deliberate urban myth."
"I was in Germany all through the surrender and, although at lower rank, had access to all classified intelligence distribution as part of the occupation security force," Schlesinger said. "The Werewolf story turned out to be mostly a hoax, perhaps some wishful thinking of a few SS officers, though it caused us a few inconveniences due to the phony alerts."
It's possible, Biddiscombe said, that some isolated Werewolf cells or officers may have continued to operate for a few months after the war. Guerrilla-style attacks did take place against U.S. soldiers ââ¬â wires strung across roads to decapitate soldiers or sand poured in gas tanks, for example ââ¬â and there were several suspicious deaths of U.S.-appointed mayors. In some towns, leaflets and posters threatened Germans who cooperated with the U.S. occupiers. But none of that activity can be directly attributed to the Werewolves, historians say.
"The Army put bars on jeeps to prevent decapitation by wires, but that was the only action taken by the Army," said Farrell. "There's very little evidence of the Werewolves offering effective resistance."
Moreover, historians say, the comparison between postwar Germany and postwar Iraq is questionable because of the scale of events taking place now in Iraq. In particular, the rate of attacks against U.S. occupation forces in Germany was lower than is the case in Iraq.
There were about 1 million U.S. troops in occupied Germany ââ¬â a territory slightly smaller than Iraq ââ¬â compared with nearly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. For the first month or two after the Nazis' surrender, there were about the same number of sabotage and sniper attacks in Germany as in postwar Iraq. But in Germany, such attacks dropped off after June 1945, a month after the surrender, and for the rest of that year deaths of U.S. troops subsided to "tens," historians said.
"Certainly, there weren't American troops dying at the rate that they are in Iraq," Biddiscombe said.
Another difference is the alleged involvement by foreign fighters and international terrorists in the violence against U.S. forces in Iraq.
"You can't compare the Werewolves to the Baathists in Iraq, because the Werewolves would not have had any outside support," said Geoffrey Megargee, a historian with the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
In the end, historians say, the Werewolves had far more bark than bite. "The movement was a dismal failure," Farrell said.
"The fear of them was much greater than the actions that actually took place."
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
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English historian Charles Whitling wrote a book about this and while I question certain things he has written I believe that his account is accurate. He too, wrote that this activity with the "werewolfs" ended with the war and their main claim to fame was assassinating that turncoat mayor. In the above article I don't even believe that it went that far. The Germans didn't have 5000 SS officers floating around at this stage of the war with nothing to do, in my opinion.
The idea that what is going on in Iraq, accepting the above as true, is the same thing shows just how far our enemies count on our ignorance of history to cover their lies.
It is good to see some people in the media challenge this nonsense instead of taking it at face value. -S
2003-09-04 14:09 | User Profile
From the Army's official history of the occupation, below. Seems like even Army historians shared Patton's view of the "DP's".
THE U.S. ARMY IN THE OCCUPATION OF GERMANY 1944-1946
by Earl F. Ziemke [url=http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch19.htm]http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch19.htm[/url]
*Except for black marketeering, some thefts of food and firewood, and petty violations of military government ordinances, the German civilian crime rate was low, sometimes almost disconcertingly low for the Army agencies charged with ferreting out and suppressing resistance. In October, after five months of occupation, Seventh Army G-2 believed Germany to be a "simmering cauldron of unrest and discontent" and claimed to have detected a "mounting audaciousness in the German population"; but as concrete evidence G-2 could only cite some illicit traffic in interzonal mail (then still prohibited), a "strongly worded"
Werwolf threat to one military government officer in the Western Military District, and a protest against denazification from the Evangelical Church of Wuerttemberg.38 Patrols occasionally found decapitation wires stretched across roads, ineptly it would seem, since no deaths or injuries resulted from them. Military government public safety officers from scattered locations reported various anti-occupation leaflets and posters, some threats against German girls who associated with US soldiers, and isolated attacks on soldiers. Although not a single case was confirmed, possibly the most talked about crimes against the occupation were the alleged castrations of US soldiers by German civilians. When the commanding officer of Detachment E3B2, in Erbach, Hesse, was asked to investigate one such rumor, he reported that not only had there been no castration but that there had not been a single attack on US military personnel in over four months of occupation.39 The most pressing concern of public safety officers was often with getting the German police out of their traditional nineteenth century Prussian drill sergeant uniforms and into American styles, usually modeled on the uniforms of the New York City police. Wherever troops were stationed, especially in towns and smaller cities, prostitutes and camp followers were a moral problem, placed added strain on food supplies, housing, and medical facilities (frequently also on jails), and raised mixed feelings of disgust and jealousy among the other civilians. In quarrels with other civilians and with the police, the prostitutes did not hesitate to call on their soldier friends.40
The Germans attributed all violent crimes to the DPs; and military government reluctantly came close to agreeing with them. Of 2.5 million DPs originally in the US zone, all but 600,000 had been sent home by the end of September, and General Wood reported the repatriation problem "substantially solved." 41 But those who stayed were becoming a special problem, being a hard core of largely nonrepatriable stateless persons. About half were Poles, for years the most mistreated of the Nazi forced laborers and now torn between their desire to go home and their apprehension about the future awaiting them in Communist Poland. The rest were Balts, non-German Jews, eastern Europeans other than Poles, and -although many fewer than there had been- Soviet citizens, most of whom tried to claim special status as Ukrainians. USFET policy made repatriation entirely voluntary for all DPs except those who came from within the pre-1939 boundaries of the Soviet Union; many had legitimate reasons for not wanting to return, principally fear of political or religious persecution. As the total number of these displaced persons de-
clined, however, the percentage of doubtful types among those who remained, such as criminals and Nazi collaborators, constantly increased, as did their influence on the others. A questionnaire, similar to the Fragebogen used for the Germans, tried on 240 DPs in a camp at Regensburg, Bavaria, revealed that 40 percent, if they had been Germans, would have been in the mandatory removal category, that is, unemployable in responsible positions and possibly subject to arrest.42
Among all categories of DPs, uncertainty about the future, free rations and lodging without having to work for them, privileged status under the occupation, and virtual immunity from the German police bred indolence, irresponsibility, and organized criminality. Their access to Army, UNRRA, and Red Cross supplies made them potent operators in the black market; the camps provided havens for black market goods and bases for criminal gangs; and the Army-issue clothing that most of them wore was excellent camouflage for the criminal elements and an effective
means of intimidating the Germans.43 The 100,000 or more DPs who did not live in camps or who drifted in and out of them at will constituted the nucleus of a kind of Army-sponsored underworld. Even the former concentration camp inmates were becoming an annoyance. Many persisted in wearing their convict uniforms and were willing to regale any newspaper reporter who would listen with supposed new atrocities being inflicted upon them by the Army. Some were trying to make their privileged status permanent by having official-looking documents drawn up and badges made.
At the same time, stories about the DPs in US newspapers were making them objects of particular public and official sympathy. In the summer the US representative on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, Earl G. Harrison, visited the camps as President Truman's special emissary and recommended setting up separate camps for Jews. Later, after Saul S. Elgart of the American Joint Distribution Committee surveyed the Jewish camps, UNRRA undertook to distribute Red Cross packages to the Jews, thereby raising their ration to over 3,000 calories a day. In September, Eisenhower personally inspected several DP camps and announced that general officers would inspect all camps. Although the inspections showed the camps in general to be adequate and the larger ones often excellent with kindergartens, chapels, medical facilities, electric lights, flush toilets, and average food rations above 2,100 calories a day, the press and public concern did not abate. In late September, Eisenhower ordered the military government and military authorities to requisition housing for DPs from the Germans without any hesitancy, prohibited any restrictions on the DPs' freedom of movement, and made food and sanitation in the camps a concern of all responsible officers.44 As a consequence, the Office of Military Government for Bavaria reported later, "there were so many inspections by generals, public health officers, correspondents, and other privileged emissaries of interested organizations that the objects of scrutiny themselves cried for a respite." 45*
2003-09-04 23:46 | User Profile
I remember one article that tried to compare Hitler to Saddam, in order to make the case for war. One argument was that Jews were persecuted in Iraq during the 1950's just like Germany in the 1930's. I found that odd, considering that Saddam wasn't in power in the 1950's, so why are blame him for something he didn't do? Pre-war logic I guess.
2003-09-07 06:29 | User Profile
Do any of our Russian specialists have any insight on Condi's credentials as an expert on the Soviet military?
I seem to have read somewhere that she hardly speaks a word of Russian.
Her knowledge of early post-war Germany is clearly almost non-existent, what can we divine about her expertise in Russian affairs?
2003-09-07 15:18 | User Profile
*Originally posted by Dan Dare@Sep 7 2003, 06:29 * ** Do any of our Russian specialists have any insight on Condi's credentials as an expert on the Soviet military?
I seem to have read somewhere that she hardly speaks a word of Russian.
Her knowledge of early post-war Germany is clearly almost non-existent, what can we divine about her expertise in Russian affairs? **
If memory serves, Condi Rice speaks some Russian, but I think not very well. I vaguely recall an interview Russian Channel One did with her back when Shrub first stole the Presidency. I recall that she had some Russian, but really couldn't keep conversation and they reverted into English.
Maddy Albright spoke Russian pretty well - I recall an interview Russian t.v. did with her over the Kosovo bombing. Not great, but passably well. I wonder if she spoke Czech at home?
Most of the journalists you see on t.v. who cover Russia don't have much Russian. I was shocked to learn this. I knew a couple of these journalists from my time in Moscow, and they have to depend on interpretors (often hired by the state!) for their information. One exception is Jill Doherty of CNN, whose Russian is really quite good. She appears regularly on Russian news talk shows, and has no problem keeping up with difficult conversation. She has a definite accent, but the Russians are very forgiving of that.
Walter
2003-09-07 15:54 | User Profile
*Originally posted by Walter Yannis@Sep 7 2003, 09:18 * ** Dan Dare,Sep 7 2003, 06:29ÃÂ Do any of our Russian specialists have any insight on Condi's credentials as an expert on the Soviet military?
**
I've only been able to read one of her reports about the development of the Red Army during the early 20's and 30's, particularly the rivalry between the military policies of Mikhail Frunze versus Leon Trotsky. It was long and looked well-written. Sadly I can't entirely say if it was all that good, since I have not been able to find out much about Frunze or any of the other topics in full detail elsewhere. If you want to read this report, its a chapter in the book [url=http://drs.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=%22makers+of+modern+strategy%22/v=2/SID=e/l=WS1/R=2/H=0/*-http://www.historyofmilitary.com/Makers_of_Modern_Strategy_from_Machiavelli_to_the_Nuclear_Age_0691027641.html]Makers of Modern Strategy: from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age[/url].
However strangely, other than that report I read, I have not seen much intelligence on her part on Russian issues. This makes me wonder whether or not she actually wrote the paper or just put her name on it.
** Most of the journalists you see on t.v. who cover Russia don't have much Russian. I was shocked to learn this. I knew a couple of these journalists from my time in Moscow, and they have to depend on interpretors (often hired by the state!) for their information. One exception is Jill Doherty of CNN, whose Russian is really quite good. She appears regularly on Russian news talk shows, and has no problem keeping up with difficult conversation. She has a definite accent, but the Russians are very forgiving of that.**
I'm not suprised nor am I shocked. Russian is not exactly the most popular foreign language to study in America, and Russian language programs are being cut in many schools and universities nationwide. I find this quite odd, since Russia is still a major player on the world stage(maybe not like the Soviet superpower, but still somewhat). But I guess the PC lobby wants us learning Spainish and Ebonics just so we can get around with day-to-day tasks. Especially in affluent suburbs, where the whiggers refuse to speak English. I wouldn't be suprised that 10 years or so from now Ebonics will become the official(since its already the unofficial) language of America! So back that ass up bruther!
2003-09-13 19:07 | User Profile
*Originally posted by perun1201@Sep 7 2003, 15:54 * ** I'm not suprised nor am I shocked. Russian is not exactly the most popular foreign language to study in America, and Russian language programs are being cut in many schools and universities nationwide. I find this quite odd, since Russia is still a major player on the world stage(maybe not like the Soviet superpower, but still somewhat). **
Oh, believe me I know how hard it is to learn Russian!
My point is that the networks don't even try to get bureau chiefs who can speak the language of a MAJOR country like Russia, and I struggled with how could these people do their jobs competently and not understand the language? Obviously, they can't.
It took me a while to realize that the problem was that I didn't understand what their real job was. I assumed that they were journalists and actually gathered information and reported it. Silly me!!
I finally figures out that they're faces on the television and names on the by-line, and that's about it. The broad outlines of news stories are set in New York and London mostly, and they just flesh them out. You know, sell the product a little bit. Make them "info-tainment" for the advertisers, who are the real parties in interest.
In short, they're in showbusiness, not "journalism" as we're lead to understand the term. As show people, they only need to know the language of their audience. That's English (at least for now!), and so there's no need to learn Russian.
It's like Professional Wrestling, really. Both require the audience to suspend their disbelief, at least for a while.
Walter
2003-09-13 21:02 | User Profile
** Oh, believe me I know how hard it is to learn Russian!**
Tell me about it, even I'm having difficulty learning it. The problem is that theres so little oppurtunities to learn thje language, especially at an age when one can learn it quicker.
** My point is that the networks don't even try to get bureau chiefs who can speak the language of a MAJOR country like Russia, and I struggled with how could these people do their jobs competently and not understand the language? Obviously, they can't.
It took me a while to realize that the problem was that I didn't understand what their real job was. I assumed that they were journalists and actually gathered information and reported it. Silly me!!
I finally figures out that they're faces on the television and names on the by-line, and that's about it. The broad outlines of news stories are set in New York and London mostly, and they just flesh them out. You know, sell the product a little bit. Make them "info-tainment" for the advertisers, who are the real parties in interest.
In short, they're in showbusiness, not "journalism" as we're lead to understand the term. As show people, they only need to know the language of their audience. That's English (at least for now!), and so there's no need to learn Russian.**
I agree with you. Most coorespondents to Russia for news shows know nothing about Russia(at least have that if you don't know the language).
2003-09-13 21:13 | User Profile
Originally posted by perun1201@Sep 13 2003, 14:02 * *Tell me about it, even I'm having difficulty learning it. The problem is that theres so little oppurtunities to learn thje language, especially at an age when one can learn it quicker. **
Don't learn it from the zhids, or you'll speak with an Odessa accent and idioms :lol:
Even I have to sometime pause to remember the exact word in Russian, because I spend more and more time thinking in English, as I get used to it more and more, at work.
What I find funny now, when I hear Russian TV, or speak with other Russians, is how intonations are different between American English and Russian: AE is much more assertive and is delivered in a more monotonous manner with a giggly giddy attitude (and a requisite grin on your face), while Russian is more tentative, with the volume varying more. It's closer to how the British speak.
2003-09-14 14:27 | User Profile
*Originally posted by madrussian@Sep 13 2003, 15:13 * ** Don't learn it from the zhids, or you'll speak with an Odessa accent and idiomsÃÂ :lol:
**
Don't worry MR. Whenever I spoke Russian to people when I visited Russia, people often mistook me for a native. Same is true when speaking to people from Russia(Slavs that is). So I don't think I have to worry about my accent. :lol:
** AE is much more assertive and is delivered in a more monotonous manner with a giggly giddy attitude (and a requisite grin on your face), **
If there's one thing that annoys me about Americans is that! I hate it how you have to smile every damn minute. I'm too Russian I guess, I smile only when there's something legitmate to smile about. I don't smile just for the hell of it. The way Americans always seem to be smiling and happy about something, you honestly thing they're always high on some drug.