Comment on YSK about Project 100,000, when the US conscripted people with mental disabilities to be used as cannon fodder in Vietnam, suffering triple the casualties of other soldiers

drolex@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Objection@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Maybe the real problem was that there weren’t enough civilian jobs that could make use of the valuable skills they were taught, like, “how to get shoved into the line of fire while the rest of us run away.”

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• khepri@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Yeah this is the kind of shit you literally couldn’t put into a fictional movie because viewers would not buy that a first-world democracy would do that to their citizens. You’d need an intentionally over-the-top cartoonishly evil fictional entity like Vault-Tec to even approach a “Moron Corps” scenario in fiction…

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• Zoomboingding@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It’s a modest proposal

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• DagwoodIII@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  [off topic?]

  I’ll take this opportunity to tout a favorite graphic novel.

  Big Man Plans.’ A slightly off kilter officer recruits a 4-F little person to be a tunnel rat in Vietnam. Then it gets kinda weird…

  https://globalcomix.com/c/big-man-plans

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  • Machinist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Didn’t they recruit little people to be aircraft mechanics in WWII? They could fit inside fuselages and wings?

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    • DagwoodIII@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I never heard that. They’d have had normal sized women and it’s more likely that they’d plan around the building than to rely on little people. Remember that the US was building thousands of planes and ships and needing extra small folks would have created a massive bottleneck.

      I did a quick search and nothing came up.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovitz_family

      Family of ‘dwarves’ who survived the concentration camps.

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      • drolex@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Once in the concentration camp Auschwitz, the Ovitzes attracted the attention of the German camp physician Josef Mengele

        Fucking hell.

        But they all survived. Let’s not forget what happened despite all the ambient bullshit about holocaust denial.

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      • Machinist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Very possible it’s some crazy shit I was told as a kid. I’ll have to do some digging.

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• yermaw@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  You had me in the first half

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• Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Just like the good old days and the coal mines.

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