[baldr333]

The bodies can't be found because all that was left of the dead was used & sold. Even bones where crushed to make fertilizer. You fight for your country and this is how it ends for you. Truly wicked, not much different than today.

[throwaway894345]

1. The article talks about the "used for fertilizer" hypothesis (including why it may not be a closed case).

2. "not much different than today"? Is this just some wild rhetoric or do you actually postulate that armies today are using the bodies of their dead for fertilizer/etc?

[pvaldes]

Not much different than today, if the news about Russia mobile crematoriums are eventually verified

[trhway]

The crematoriums have been brought for civilians after Bucha. The sheer number of the civilians killed in Mariupol though forced to use traditional approaches - the ruined buildings are demolished without pulling the bodies out, and for the rest - there are huge swaths of fields near Mariupol covered with fresh graves marked only with numbers. The crematoriums are used in other places where FSB and Russian SS "Russian Guard" need to disappear the bodies of killed political activists/etc without leaving evidence like the mass grave in Bucha and there no mass casualties like in Mariupol.

The soldiers have been either abandoned (a lot in Kiev fighting) or put into number-only graves in Belarus and near Rostov. A few are sent home to have those public funerals.

[marginalia_nu]

Seems at least implausible. Cremation is a fairly slow and energy intense process. If you wanted to dispose of bodies, there are easier ways.

Also sure sounds a lot like the rumors back during Covid about secret mass cremations to hide how many were dying.

[Veen]

The Russians have an obvious motivation to hide how many soldiers are dying. That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation.

[marginalia_nu]

> That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation.

It's improbable for the same reasons it was improbable the last time it wasn't true. Secret mass cremations just aren't practical from a logistical standpoint.

[varjag]

Mobile military crematories do exist in Russian military, there are public pre-war videos of them. Apparently the command seen enough need for them to manufacture the hardware. With a prior like that, it's entirely probable.

[arinlen]

> It's improbable for the same reasons it was improbable the last time it wasn't true. Secret mass cremations just aren't practical from a logistical standpoint.

Your personal assertion doesn't really hold any water. Mobile crematoriums, or hiding evidence of crimes in general, are not used because they are practical. They are used because it's a possible solution for a pressing problem.

And the "mass" blurb is a misrepresentation of their mission. The purpose of mass crematoriums is not to hide the mass of battlefield casualties, but relative low volume of politically damaging killings, such as quietly disappearing civil and military leadership without trace in a post-invasion/occupation scenario.

In the case of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, it just so happened that the planned 3-day war followed by occupation never materialized, and somehow that is evidence that Russia's usage of mobile crematoriums is improbable?

[lostlogin]

The accusation isn’t that the Russians are hiding their dead, it’s that they are covering up their treatment of civilians.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/russia-accused-mobi...

[nomel]

> mobile crematoriums

The existence of a portable system to "respectfully" dispose of the bodies is very different from profiting from the crushed bones of the deceased.

[pvaldes]

There is a strong component of looting and ravaging in all the entire "special operation", so they are profiting of the properties of the murdered, for sure.

[nomel]

Sorry, I don't follow how that's related to the comment I replied to.

[paisawalla]

I was told that the age of multimedia would deliver radical transparency, where rumors would be dispelled before they had a chance to propagate, and superstitious beliefs would become untenable.

[joebob42]

By who? And so what if someone told you that?

[nonrandomstring]

I guess the "so what" is the implication that we have not reached the promises or potential of civilian digital communication systems. I agree, and think what we have has instead made many areas of information worse, fragmented and unreliable.

As for "who?", if you grew up the 80s of 90s you will remember the daily, breathless grandiose proclamations of various government digital literacy programmes. Selling the World Wide Web, the Information Superhighway, Ubiquity and Universal Access was a decade-long propaganda drive that laid the foundations for what it now the "tech industry".

Of course there is much in the world that is over-promised, and over-reaches. At some point people usually reconcile the reality with the hype. With "tech" I think that has still not happened, and many remain in a dream world, high on the fantasies they grew up with.

[paisawalla]

Hi joebob,

This is a rhetorical or satirical commentary on the fact that media technology, while having the superficial capacity for increasing access to and quality of information, often has the opposite effect of what one might expect despite that capacity. That is, it just as frequently and even more adeptly appears to embed and reinforce deeply pre-existing biases towards false -- even obviously so -- narratives which are comforting or reaffirm the believer's sense that they see through the confusion of world events.

The answers to "by whom", and "so what" questions are not going to be literal answers, just like "at what precise moment did you stop sleeping and become awake this morning" has no true answer, but would only invite a debate over the definitions of sleeping and waking. It's not meant to literally be a story about a time I was told something. I was told many things, by many people, in various forms, over a long period of time.

The comment is meant to provoke the reader to consider that technology -- far from giving man the ability to conquer his nature -- emanates from man's nature, is a servant to it, and can easily serve to reinforce and entrench it. Therefore, one ought to treat technological progress carefully, and not assume that it is equivalent to human progress.

[chrisseaton]

> not much different than today

I think western militaries go to pretty extraordinary lengths to recover and repatriate bodies these days.

In the Falklands in the 1980s there were still some battlefield burials, as that was still the accepted practice, but most of these were dug up after public outcry and I don't think we'd do that anymore, short of a full-scale war of national survival.

[jcadam]

Modern communications I would bet has something to do with this. Families often didn't find out that their relative was killed whilst campaigning until weeks/months after the event. No doubt this would have started to change during the mid-late 19th century.

[lapetitejort]

I hope that my body is used to its fullest when I'm gone. Ideally they'll harvest anything useful, donate the rest to science, then dispose of what's left using the least amount of energy possible. My body is not to be revered or preserved past what is useful.

[jeffwask]

One's last sacrifice to capitalism/colonialism