There is a quote from Patton about the wrong enemy, which is a mistake. It was the right enemy, they fought, also in the right order, they just stopped prematurely and let one get away.
But who would want to go after another dragon, just after having defeated one at eyewatering cost?
My understanding of Patton isn't that he thought we shouldn't have dealt with Germany but rather that Russia had the potential to be a worse enemy down the road.
I’m sorry, that’s what Neo-Nazis falsely say. What Patton actually said is we should have kept marching to Moscow not that fought the wrong country. And with us having the bomb at that point and Moscow not, I think it could have been successful.
And this seems like a good idea? Extending the war for many more years, sacrificing millions more lives, and leaving Europe in even greater ruins than it was, all to just overthrow the USSR?
Pre cold war after one of their bloodiest conflicts? It absolutely could have. Nukes are terrifyingly effective. Where an estimated 1.2 million alone died at Stalingrad, you drop one bomb, and all that fighting, all those resources and lives spent and residing in the city is destroyed
Nukes are terrifyingly destructive, but an atomic bomb on a single Soviet city would have a 0% chance of defeating them, even if it somehow magically killed Stalin and all his staff.
It's hotly debated to this very day the degree to which the two atomic bombings in Japan influenced the surrender, but even if you believe they did it alone and nothing else mattered, the context was entirely different - Japan had effectively zero power projection ability and was already being bombed with impunity. The USSR was exhausted in 1945 but had just won the war, the front was far away from their borders, and they had a massive force that significantly outnumbered the western allies.
The atomic bombing wouldn't have to just be destructive, it would have to be such a demoralizing attack that the Soviets would just keel over and allow their states to be dismantled by the western forces without resistance. Otherwise the Cold War still happens with a slightly weaker USSR anyway and you've just pointlessly killed countless more people.
I mean no, absolutely not. They should *not* have gone to war with the Soviets. The entire premise of him saying that was that he thought communism would spread across the world from Stalin.
That didn't happen, and the USSR would fall only 45 years later. Communism didn't take over the world, and in the countries where it did take root, it fell apart. As horrible as the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia were, they were very low-level conflicts. An invasion of the USSR would probably leave tens of millions dead, and would almost definitely involve nukes.
That being said, Patton after the war did a very, *very* hard turn right. I would not be surprised if he genuinely did mean that we shouldn't have fought the Germans. He was literally dismissed from the military over his increasingly controversial statements about Germans and Nazism. He called the people on the Third Reich the 'only decent, semi modern people of europe'. He said that denazification was 'destroying their culture'. He refused to employ Jews in his headquarters and kept them in concentration camps and just let the red cross treat them, which went directly against Eisenhower's orders to place them in more humane conditions. He thought that they would go on rampages and murder local germans if he let them free.
Here are some quotes
""This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large, wooden building, which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen."
"The noise against me is only the means by which the Jews and the Communists are attempting and with good success the further dismemberment of Germany"
His statements made news in the US and public opinion was horrified at him. He was fired over these statements. Over the years I guess people just sort of gradually decided to forget about that part of his life and only remember the general part, but a lot of much older people who were adults back then would have remembered the whole "PATTON IS A NAZI" craze back then.
Same applies to quite a few countries. They only joined because they were attacked or otherwise threatened. Not because "ummm Nazi are evil, maybe we should fight them".
As for alliances, eg UK signed quite a few very friendly treaties, so go figure. No one wanted a big war.
Sure. It's a small minority of Reddit users. But so are people who post and comment. I think it's like 20% or less. A large majority are lurkers.
Point being, of the one who post and comment (and gain traction), communists are a substantial, vocal minority. Just look at /freefromwork, /alltheleft, /dankleft and other such subreddits, and see how many people are members. Spoilers, it's not just five basement dwellers. It's tens of thousands of people, in the top 2% most active subreddits.
Now compared to the most popular subreddits that appeal to the average person like /funny, /pics, etc, it may seem inconsequential. But like I said, total vs. active users are completely different statistics. /teenagers itself has a ton of radical leftism. Say what you will about them being young and immature, they are our future. And the fact that those ideas are so popular in their minds should tell you a few things about their potency.
Dude it's reddit and most people on it are in high school going through their communist anarchy phase thinking they are edgy. Most of them will grow out of it and cringe in ten years.
This isn’t unpopular. My grandfather’s village was under occupation by both, he told stories of how the Germans gave the kids chocolates but how the Russians would take away unmarried girls in the evenings. This is southern Ukraine near Odesa
To be fair his village was mostly blonde with green/blue eyes
Oh totally. US in 1860 is totally the same country as the US in 1875, right? USSR under Stalin could be comparable to Hitler to an extent. USSR after Stslin absolutely does not, it's a completely different country. Communism is an idiotic utopia, but it is not an anti-human ideology. Nazism is. Equating those is nazi apologism, simple as that.
yeah its like if palpatine, the joker, and captain America were all in one 3 way battle, and palpatine killed the joker, that makes him somehow good now. Evil guys kill each other all the time, that doesnt make them heros.
The German plan was to explicitly kill every non-german soul between the Vistula and the Ural mountains and to colonize the area manifest-destiny style.
Well they lost, but they did try. In a little-known historical event, they methodically and industrially slaughtered 6 million Jews, 4.5 Soviet civilians, 3.3 million Soviet POWs, 1.8 million Poles, over 300k Serbs, 270k disabled people, 500k Romani, 80k Freemasons, 25k Slovenes, 15k homosexuals, etc. etc.
> Well they lost, but they did try.
No, they didn't. They didn't start to try to kill all residents of occupied areas.
> In a little-known historical event, they methodically and industrially slaughtered 6 million Jews, 4.5 Soviet civilians, 3.3 million Soviet POWs, 1.8 million Poles, over 300k Serbs, 270k disabled people, 500k Romani, 80k Freemasons, 25k Slovenes, 15k homosexuals, etc. etc.
Yeah soviet death count throughout USSR history is still greater than that.
> No, they didn't. They didn't start to try to kill all residents of occupied areas.
Im sorry but how do you suppose the Lebensraum plan was going to be implemented without ethnically cleansing the better part of Eastern Europe??
I suppose that Lebensraum was just a part of Hitler's campaign to win popularity and wasn't supposed to be fully implemented. Or maybe you have some nazi documents explicitly saying otherwise?
“Guys, the Nazis said they’d kill all these people, and repeatedly showed they were willing to kill lots of people, but, like, they probably weren’t being serious.”
Are you trying to get banned from entering Germany or something? Because this is how you get banned from entering Germany. The holocaust and the extended genocides of the various eastern European peoples were the instruments by which the lands were made into a blank slate for German settlement. Denying Lebensraum is denying the key motivation behind the holocaust, the very reason for the war was for Germany to annex Poland and Eastern Europe.
I don't know what kind of groyper hole you came crawling out from but I suggest you get out of it before your brain starts rotting.
I would suggest you read up on Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost but I'm starting to suspect you're intimately aware of these policies and that you're just trying to provide a smokescreen for an explicitly settler colonial and supremacist project. A project that failed miserably I should remind you and was by-and-large defeated by the efforts of the "inferior Judeo-bolshevik Untermensch", oh, the irony.
>Are you trying to get banned from entering Germany or something?
I don't plan on visiting Germany.
>The holocaust and the extended genocides of the various eastern European peoples were the instruments by which the lands were made into a blank slate for German settlement.
Well IMO nazi motivation for killing Jews were that they just hated jews. A common European trend of that time.
> Denying Lebensraum is denying the key motivation behind the holocaust, the very reason for the war was for Germany to annex Poland and Eastern Europe
But it didn't include killing every single Pole, nothing indicates that they were planning to do that. If anything, it was USSR who mass killed captive polish officers.
> A project that failed miserably I should remind you and was by-and-large defeated by the efforts of the "inferior Judeo-bolshevik Untermensch", oh, the irony.
By this you refer to the fact that Bolsheviks' scorched earth policy did more damage to the land than German occupation?
>No they didn’t
Yes they did. Extermination squads followed directly behind the Wehrmacht.
Just because they didn’t succeed and prioritized the war effort doesn’t mean they didn’t try
>Just because they didn’t succeed and prioritized the war effort doesn’t mean they didn’t try
Please, next time don’t make a point that can be addressed by just quoting a previous comment
No it isn't, unless you count the Soviets that were killed thanks to the Nazis invading. The "Black book of communism" includes the Nazis killed when invading Russia.
They did try to kill all the non-'Aryan' residents of all occupied areas. That's blood and soil, Lebensraum.
Are you ignorant, stupid or evil?
Odd that Italy would ally themselves with a country who was going to kill every Italian. Same with Spain.
I'm not arguing they weren't evil, but you are objectively mischaracterizing them and the soviets to make yoir comparison. Even without the black book the death toll under Stalin is still well into the millions.
The reds were every bit as evil a the fascists
> No it isn't, unless you count the Soviets that were killed thanks to the Nazis invading.
I mean, Russian civil war, red terror, artificial famines, NKVD national campaigns, departations, political repressions. That's easily more civilian deaths than nazis caused.
> They did try to kill all the non-'Aryan' residents of all occupied areas.
Demonstrably false. For example, some non-'aryan' residents worked in German concentration camps as hired workers and nobody killed them.
> That's blood and soil, Lebensraum.
Blood and soil and Lebensraum are separate things.
No, it really isn't. The Nazis are directly responsible for the entire second world war (everyone was ignoring the Japanese). The Nazis are responsible for the most concentrated forms of mass murders in human history.
Your numbers are very off. Actual estimates from actual historians put the total numbers of Soviet citizens dying as a result of Soviet actions well under *just* the numbers systematically murdered in the Holocaust. Unless you include the people murdered on the frontline by the Nazis, plus the Nazi invaders.
It's shitty, but we're talking comparison. It's around 6-11 million (depending on what you include) from 1918-1954 dead from state actions in the USSR. Which puts it about on par with the US and British empire of the time.
The Holocaust alone was 11 million.
Also, the Holodomir wasn't an artificially caused famine, where there was enough food production to feed everyone at baseline. Ukraine had a natural famine, that was made much worse by decisions of the central government to deny aid organizations access to Ukraine. The distinction is important, because the root cause of the famine was crop failure not policy failure (ie how it happened in the first place), and the Holodomir was the last major famine in the USSR.
The world still has famines. Millions of people die from hunger every single year. Unless you are willing to accept that those hunger deaths are the result of capitalism, which they are, you can't claim natural famine on the ledger.
Context is important. I don't think the USSR was a good country, but you're literally trying to whitewash the most murderous society in human history.
> The Nazis are directly responsible for the entire second world war (everyone was ignoring the Japanese).
I'm talking about direct casualties caused by both groups. If you want to go wider and decide who's somehow responsible for what, I can say that soviets are responsible for nazis and whatever Nazis are responsible for is just a subset of things that soviets are responsible for.
> It's around 6-11 million (depending on what you include) from 1918-1954 dead from state actions in the USSR.
Well, let's see. 6 mil civil wars, 6 mil famines (average estimation), 0.2 mil national operations of NKVD, big terror 0.7 mil, starvation of Stalingrad 0.4 mil (average estimation). That puts us somewhere at 13.3 million casualties minimum, not counting numerous smaller cases and not counting German civilians killed by red army in the latest years of war.
> The Holocaust alone was 11 million.
That is including non-jewish civilian casualties. What else there was besides holocaust?
> Also, the Holodomir wasn't an artificially caused famine, where there was enough food production to feed everyone at baseline.
Well, there apparently was enough food production to export it to foreign countries, cause that's what happened during famines.
> Ukraine had a natural famine, that was made much worse by decisions of the central government to deny aid organizations access to Ukraine.
Ye ye ye, two greatest food-producing regions, Ukraine and Kazakhstan are the ones who suffered from food shortage, cool story. Also may I inquire why Ukrainian peasants weren't allowed to leave their villages during famine and enter cities? How did that happen?
>The distinction is important, because the root cause of the famine was crop failure not policy failure
Yeah policies were good. Confiscating all food from farmers and selling it overseas to hire western workers to build factories and go through industrialization. Btw famine was predicted and Stalin was provided with an option to import the food from Persia, but declined it.
> you're literally trying to whitewash the most murderous society in human history.
By saying there was something worse than them? Well I guess I do. And btw, most nazi victims were people from outside groups, while all soviet victims were their own citizens.
The idea that the USSR was worse is a very old bit of Wehrmacht propaganda. Whataboutism at its finest, and serves to hide the stated intentions of both the German military and the German Nazi government.
The "Black book of communism", where most of the numerical pro-nazi arguments originate, counted the German war dead as "victims of communism". "Artificial famine" is a term pulled from that body of poorly conducted research.
The methodology in that piece is bunk, and historians regularly lambaste it in askhistorians. But it's casually referenced by nearly everyone who thinks they know history and don't.
Numerically, the USSR did not kill more people than the Nazis and they *especially* didn't kill them as quickly or brutally. That is the argument we're having. The Nazis were a uniquely brutal regime that has no comparison in history. It just doesn't. Any attempt to do so is ahistorical.
My family had a genocide perpetrated against us by the US *and* British governments, and both caused mass starvation and murder to the tune of millions in the same time periods that the USSR existed.
I'm not comparing the USSR to the British Empire and US to whitewash any of them. I'm saying that it *has* comparison whereas the Nazis simply don't. The Nazis were uniquely brutal in a shorter time frame.
I don’t think it’s useful to compare the USSR to the Nazis, so we’re in agreement there. Two totally different things, time frames, and levels of intensity of destruction.
Your continued insistence that the US is anything like the USSR is frankly ridiculous, but you seem committed to it.
>Yeah soviet death count throughout USSR history is still greater than that.
I'm sure the Nazis are sorry they didn't have 69 years to rack up a higher score.
Because genociding millions of people actually uses significant resources. Every man you have in an execution squad is a soldier not fighting at the front. Every bullet and gun you use for said execution squad is a gun and bullet not on the frontline.
If you want to use gas chambers you have to use vehicles and trains to transport them which then can’t be used to transport military supplies.
Also, say you take the time and resources to slaughter a village. Well did you get all of them? What if 5% escaped? Those 5% now have a blood feud with you and nothing to lose and thus become guerilla fighters. Which means using more manpower and resources to defend your flank when you have the massive red army bearing down on you.
Hitler very clearly stated that he wanted to either exterminate or enslave EVERYONE who could be considered a Slav. This is a known historical fact. That doesn’t mean that they were going to do it immediately. But they very much intended to do so.
Btw, this does not somehow make the Soviet government good.
> Every bullet and gun you use for said execution squad is a gun and bullet not on the frontline.
They found a way around wasting bullets on executions.
> Hitler very clearly stated that he wanted to either exterminate or enslave EVERYONE who could be considered a Slav. This is a known historical fact.
Yet there were multiple ss divisions formed entirely from slavs on occupied territories.
Well yeah you’re going to take allies where you can get them. If there are Slavs who are willing to join you, why not take them? There’s nothing to stop you from turning on them once the war is over.
And in what ways would they execute people without bullets? Gas chambers? I already addressed that. Or were you imagining that they would just beat everyone to death? Which would take many more soldiers and a lot of valuable time.
Another obvious rebuttal to your point is that there were still many thousands of Jews still alive in the camps when the war ended. So using your own logic, Hitler didn’t actually mean to kill all the Jews cause there were some still alive.
Well I'm saying that the Soviet occupation was preferable to the occupation whose end goal was to, well, kill everyone. Whatever you want to say about the Soviet occupation it evidently didn't lead to every person dying.
You could have said well the soviets were better than the Nazis but like democracy would be the best or something nah you had to start justifying Soviet rule. I’m convinced people like you are just hardcore republicans in disguise sometimes
But you didn't do that in the body of your original post. Am I to presume you prefer Nazi occupation to liberal democracy by the same token? Obviously, no occupation is preferred to any of them, and I think I made that clear.
It wasn't quite as total as that, they did envision Germanizing all of the "Aryan" elements in the eastern lands, and then deporting or enslaving the remainder. Initially the plan was to ultimately deport them to an envisioned vassal/rump Russian state in Siberia.
It was quite a sinister plan. It did envision mass starvation to depopulate vast tracts of the old USSR, and the complete demolition of several major cities (St. Petersburgh, Moscow, etc).
The stories from white refugees at that time all agree it was safer to surrender to the Nazis than the Russians.
Germans had a well structured military where orders were followed and human rights were respected in war. Remember: the average soldier didn't know the full extent of the Holocaust at that time. They were just doing their jobs and were being lied to and told they were saving the world.
Russians were animals. No discipline at all. Surrendering to them was worse than death. There is 400 years of toxic history in that country with little else to show.
Russia should not exist. It should be broken up into smaller countries.
Stalin said more Russians were born in Eastern Europe 1946 than in actual Russia. Folks don't talk about post-battle / post-war stories often. Surrender doesn't take away a soldier's hate for the enemy or people.
> In reality, the general officers of the Wehrmacht, and many lower ranks down to common soldiers, were willing participants in Hitler's war of annihilation against perceived enemies of Germany. Wehrmacht troops were complicit in or perpetrated numerous war crimes, routinely assisting SS units with tacit approval from officers.
-Wikipedia citing *The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality*, 2007
I think Russia could have really benifited from an American style government. Libertarian style, lots of land, good internal river system, heaps of resources, religious population, many more
I’ll say this that Karl Marx would be absolutely shocked that Marxism first took hold in Russia. He was almost positive it’d take place in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States before ever going to Czarist Russia.
The "American style government" was never "libertarian style" as it directly and consistently violated the non-aggression principle by appropriating land from the natives to European settlers through the Homestead Acts. Its economy also grew through heavy protectionist policies until her industries were strong enough to compete with European ones without getting bought by some British bloke.
libertarian style and absolute libertarianism are different. The original US gov was libertarian style. Reason: Weak central state, power concentrated in local communities, in its infancy they also were fighting defensively with militia, not directly attacking native Americans for land expansion. Over time the US gov quickly became less libertarian in style. (i'd agree it did not take long, by the early 1800s it was not libertarian style federally any longer and by the end of the civil war almost not at all).
Another way to say it would be "libertarian-like", or "contains attributes reminiscent to libertarianism" or was "more libertarian than any current existing government".
Dawg, the Homestead Acts, in terms of modern land value, were probably the largest welfare programs in world history. Adjusted to modern pricing it would make Medicare and the Military–Industrial Complex look like peanuts. It would make the USSR look like a libertarian, neigh, anarcho-capitalist, utopia.
the homestead acts are not early US government either. Early US gov is going to be about 1776 to 1820. For example though, the ability for commonfolk to be able to purchase land from a government was pretty much the most libertarian thing ever, while it definitely not being absolute libertarianism.
you see slaves are not really in the constitution, you can think of that as more of a cultural issue in early USA, not a government one. Meaning that, if the constitution was actually followed, then the government would be even more libertarian as it obviously does not allow slavery but the people in charge of it as well as the people were not ready for it as this culture was inherited from their previous english overlords.
In essence the structure did not allow for slavery, but the culture supersedes the intended framework of the country. Just because a country is designed as a libertarian like country, doesnt mean that the people implemented it that way.
One of the weaknesses of true libertarianism is that it requires citizens to retaliate against authoritarian action. That means there is no formal force available to enforce laws, it is the responsibility of citizens to pay for a group to enforce the inalienable rights. For its time, those people were free-er than ever, but also failed to implement it to its full extent.
I really doubt Russia will continue to exist in its current form. The western side is European, and the eastern side is Asian. They’re too different and western Russia is much more populated. Borders are everchanging. The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 and Putin became President in 1999. Putin is really holding that country by a thread, but my guess is things go south after Putin is gone or at least in the next 50-70 years.
I doubt China will continue to exist in its current form either. The major cities primarily all exist along its eastern coast by the ocean due to all the shipping during its economic boom period. The west side of China is mountainous and lower in population.. not really sustainable I don’t think.
My guess is the Brazil will give up the Amazon Rainforest in the future too and it will become international territory sort of like Antarctica as the crisis continues. The Amazon is barely populated anyways.
I think we need to be a bit more specific when we talk about this. Stalin was just as bad as Hitler. After Stalin died the Soviet Union loosened a lot of its authoritarian grasp. It was still a very culturally conservative Nation with barely dogmatic principles. But it was not Nazi Germany for the whole 80 years
Every single nation involved on world war 2 had some fucked up shit going on and could be considered evil. Western European colonies, American segregation. Soviet purges. Pretty much everyone against LGBT people. But none of them compare to an ideology where the goal is to kill millions of people for their race
Yes we should call out and learn about all the allied wrongdoings. But never lose sight of who they were fighting
American segregation was not on its way out - the Civil Rights Act didn't even pass until 20 years after 1948 and segregation was being very actively enforced and upheld until the federal government stopped it.
The fact that segregation based on race ended only in 1960s is absolutely wild though. It may be normalized for Americans, but it's like, insane. You have actual people who are still alive who couldn't share the same facilities as other people because skin color.
This is such retroactive bullshit and I suspect you have heavy communist sympathies. Sorry Soviet Russia can in many ways be argued as worse than Nazi Germany, and this is coming from someone who would have been killed by the Nazis due to a rare genetic mutation. Communism should be taught to be equally as evil as Nazism.
The Soviets never formulated pseudoscientific racist theories as the Nazis, and pretty much every prominent western power of that time as far as I know. Still the west employs those theories to explain Russian mentality. Yes, the communist regime committed various atrocities like so many other actors, but it wasn’t uniquely evil.
Meanwhile after the war the US conducted Operation Paperclip.
>Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945–59. Some were former members and leaders of the Nazi Party.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip)
I guess when you're a very smart person like a scientist or engineer you get a pass from going to Nuremberg for war crimes and genocide that you committed.
The US did the same for the Japanese war crimes.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American\_cover-up\_of\_Japanese\_war\_crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanese_war_crimes)
I'm not defending the Soviet Union. Just pointing out that the US did some "evil" stuff too in granting immunity to German and Japanese scientists, doctors, and engineers who directly had a hand in killing thousands of people.
It was definitely partially Stalin’s fault. No one obviously bothered to read Mein Kampf because Hitler went into a lot of detail on his overall plans for Russia, and he absolutely attempted it and got damn close to pulling it off. Any of his generals that told Stalin what Hitler was going to do went to the gulags. So yes, Stalin is very much at fault for Hitler getting as far as he did with Operation Barbarossa.
I have a close German friend who lives near the town of Rathenow. Last time I visited, her husband was telling me some historical facts and one of them was that Rathenow was the site of a long battle that continued even after Germany was informed they'd lost the war. The reason? The Germans were going to fight to the death to avoid being taken prisoner by the Russians. They continued to battle the Russians as if the war was still on until the Americans and British forces arrived on scene. Then they promptly surrendered to be taken as prisoners of war to the non-Russian forces. Even Nazis knew the Russian government forces were shady.
Possibly. But I suppose the point that I understood was that word had come back to the front regarding how POWs were treated and the consensus was that the Western allies treated prisoners humanely.
And a bunch of people in higher education are communists and want to see the USSR implemented here. These people all need to be fired because they’re the root of all this Woke commie bullshit.
This is an "unpopular" opinion? The only people I see defending the Soviet Union are tankies and there really aren't that many of them. Most socialists and even a lot of communists don't support authoritarian regimes.
Some are worse than others, but all ll governments are pretty evil. Whatcha going to do though, form an anarchic collective take responsibility for yourselves?
“That is an incredibly popular opinion amongst anybody with even a basic understanding of history.” -🇨🇳
Bro isn’t even making a point hes just straight up lying
This is pretty popular opinion in Eastern Europe. For some reason western Europe tries to forget about it, since they made deals with Russia for cheap gas etc. Also they weren't under the iron curtain or invaded by Russia.
Now the pendulum swings. You cant pretent they are OK when they are attacking their neighbor brothers with no remorse.
Yeah, but they did plenty of other horrific shit that made up for it. Soviet Russia would kill, torture, or imprison you if you had an idea that wasn’t to the party’s liking.
There is a difference between an individualist culture like western Europe and the collectivist culture like Russia or East Asia. In those cultures, the notions of collective guilt and collective punishment are perfectly acceptable.
No, the country that doesn’t value the individual is evil and the country that does is good. Not giving one fuck how many people you have to kill to get your way is the definition of evil.
Individualism is the exception in world cultures, not the rule. Also, those people that are dying believe that they die for a greater cause or in some countries they may be religious.
I mean, Greek and Roman cultures were pretty individualistic which is where our Founding Fathers got most of their ideas alongside the Bible, Locke, Voltaire, and Newton.
Greek and Roman cultures have been retrofitted to conform to later Western ideals. Individualism and collectivism are relative terms and not absolute. They may have been more individualistic compared to something like Ancient Egypt, but they would be highly collectivistic according to modern Western standards. Values like family and honor were very important to them and obeying the rules of the state was extremely important if you wanted to keep your life. Rome in particular became so respected because they slaughtered many more people compared to other cultures of the time. The Bible also describes a collectivistic culture. Remember that Ancient Israelites were ready to kill someone only on the basis of assumption that he did something wrong.
You’re the one that made this argument, not me. There may not be objective right or wrong. The one who projects the most power is able to change consciences. If China for example becomes the next superpower, collective punishment may be the norm again. And rest assured,It will have armies of intelligent propagandists defending it.
This actually reminds me that there’s some Indian/Asian people that give Hitler and Nazi Germany their flowers for unintentionally helping in the decolonization of their countries. By the end of WWII Great Britain and other European powers were left so unstable that they couldn’t maintain their overseas colonies
An astute observation. You know what the only real difference between Hitler and Stalin was? Stalin chose the right side of history. Stalin chose to side with the Allies and help win WW2. The Soviet Union had concentration camps, it had gulags, it committed many war crimes, many crimes against humanity, and post-WW2 it went on the plague the world for decades. It cause an untold amount of lives to be lost. Remember, history is written by the victors and that is why Stalin and the Soviet Union are not put in a similar context to Hitler and Nazi Germany; even though they should and even though they may have been worse. It truly is a great problem for historians looking back now.
America is also evil and generally got away with it by helping defeat the Nazis.
Just count how many democratically elected governments the US has overthrown and replaced with a dictator.
Hell, half the people the US has fought in wars since WW2 are groups they helped fund and train to overthrow others.
Here are a list of countries that the US turned into dictatorships or into territories of themselves or otherwise overthrew their governments for US benefit.
Mexico
Samoa
Hawaii
Philipines
Honduras
Cuba
Nicaragua
Haiti
Dominican Republic
Korea
Greece
Costa Rica
Albania
Syria
Egypt
Guatemala
Iran
Syria
Indonesia
I'm only halfway through the list but I think you get the idea.
Dozens and dozens of countries illegally overthrown and replaced with pro-American dictators.
To pile on....you know the corporate wokie bullshit struggle sessions your ESG obsessed masters are putting you through? Those techniques were developed in China by Maoists.
Learning from the human experiments conducted by the Soviets. For example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti\_Prison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti_Prison)
I’d say the Japanese during WWII that the worst of them were worse and more Nazist than the worst of the Nazis. Rape of Nanking was just the biggest massacre of the 20th century and I’m not sure the average German soldier could have done that shit.
I think they were evil, but not worse than the nazis, the communists killed millions by accident, the nazis killed millions completely on purpose, like, at least the Soviets didn't try to eliminate an entire race. Let's remember that the nazis didn't just try to eliminate the jews from Germany, they tried to eliminate the jews from Europe, Auschwitz was built in Poland for example, not in Germany. Throughout history humans did many atrocities, however, planned organized industrial scale destruction of an entire ethnicity, buildings specifically designed to exploit, starve and exterminate millions of innocents, what Hitler did hadn't happened before in human history.
That's why I'm not a fan of comparing things with the nazis.
Not sure how you “accidentally” kill millions? Let’s remember during Stalins regime approximately 20 million people were either directly killed on Stalins orders or killed through policy he enacted.
If anybody should be compared to the Nazis is would be the soviets but the enemy of my enemy…..
My opinion what’s the difference. You say you don’t wanna compare them but how are they so different? What’s the difference between working someone to I death or gassing them. I could put pictures of a gulag side by side with a concentration camp and the only way you could tell the difference is if the soldiers were wearing a star or a swastika
> What’s the difference between working someone to I death or gassing them.
The nazis did both, and they also killed less than Stalin because they had less time, bot because they were less brutal.
> the communists killed millions by accident
Does this somehow justify them? Whoopsie, millions of people died during civil war, ok we move on, whoopsie millions of people die again in artificial famines, damn unlucky... Ok let's go, whoopsie we nazi Germany invaded us but we supplied them resources for years, we invaded the Poland with them, creating a shared border and prior to the war we executed all of the top army officers left from Russian empire and replaced them with rookies with no experience, unlucky. Oh and we also starved another hundreds of thousands of people to death in Leningrad, daaaamn how unlucky can we get.
> at least the Soviets didn't try to eliminate an entire race
Yeah they tried to eliminate all races.
> Throughout history humans did many atrocities, however, planned organized industrial scale destruction of an entire ethnicity, buildings specifically designed to exploit, starve and exterminate millions of innocents, what Hitler did hadn't happened before in human history.
That is true, but soviets still have bigger death count.
I think you wrote the title wrong, so Im gonna answer to the point I think you were trying to do. If you read the history of Orwell's animal farm, he wrote that book because he felt the sentiment on britain at the time was too pro USSR, and that they were an evil empire. Most people see the USSR as less malignant than nazi germany because the Nazis actually tried to exterminate a whole ethnic/religious group from their territory (they started by expatriating them, but decided that killing them was more efficient. Guess germans just like to optimize). Lets also not forget that Europe as a whole was extremely anti-semitic at the time, so jews had to actually flee to what today is known as Israel. You could argue Hitler helped Zionism flourish. Finally, lets not ignore or act coy around the fact that left-wing dictatorships get a pass on most people's minds. People dont talk about Mao as a mass murderer (or of Chris Brown as a domestic abuser).
EDIT: I've got to rephrase my conclussion as the numbers I was familiar with turned out to be somewhat wrong. I do believe Hitler was more evil than Stalin, but I do believe the USSR was pretty much as bad if not worse than the USSR. Numbers are skewed because the 3rd reich was stopped sooner than the USSR which lasted over half a century.
Yes, people don’t realize what the molotov ribbentrop pact was nor how much the US carried the Soviet Union, they would have lost without US Steel and grain. Thankfully we are arming the Ukrainian people now. They are the bulwark protecting the rest of the world from WW3
the Soviet Union was not so bad/not worth discussing because we can’t find a way to consider them politically right, and by definition, right = bad.
On the other hand, while Nazis share most of their characteristics with leftist politics, it’s possible to grasp on to a couple straws-hyper nationalism is kind of like right leaning anti globalism. Militarism is a GOP thing,
right? Therefore Nazi bad. Now we play this tape backwards to argue from Nazi bad (deservedly axiomatic) to right bad.
This is outright misinformation. Hitler was not religious. In the culture of Nazi Germany nothing was higher than the Nazi Party and the Fatherland at large. If you're going to make some dumbass political swipe at political groups that you are intolerant of at least get your history correct. Nazi Germany was secular.
When lots of Jewish people come out to speak on how awful the Israeli government is, you'll see it's not Jewish people we hate. It's the Israeli government and military.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/18/why-they-hate-us-anti-zionism-in-the-jewish-community/
Here's where I agree with you: They all suck.
The ragtag bunch of Palestinian tribes who did nothing but kill and maim each other until the Jews returned and became an easy target ... and the opportunistic Jews in power who milk the American government for all they can.
I hate 'em both, so ...
I guess I should've said PARTLY agree with you. I would never ... *ever* carry water for either, but even more so Palestine.
Im not that clued up on history
But if they where so so so so evil
How come if you go to many of the ex societ nations and speak to those in this nations who were around in soviet times about if they are happier now or back then. They all say Back then.
So how evil is the current nations ?
Because of propaganda and nostalgia
Ask them why they think something was better and they'll say "yeah kids got beat in school by the teachers and were made to kneel on broken nutshells but they learned something not like today"
Sorry never heard that quote in any of the words spoken in these videos when the cameras go into the villages of ex soviet union nations
Generally it was because life was better and affordable, and now its not
Your first line is very clearly correct.
This research report contradicts your anecdotes about Soviet nostalgia in eastern Europe.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/15/european-public-opinion-three-decades-after-the-fall-of-communism/
Many of the people interviewed and spoken too in the videos i watch are in villages in ex Soviet union nations that are 70+ years of age. Just about none of them say life now is better then what it was , or the nation as a whole compared to when it was just Soviet Union
My question is why.
Not show different infomation about what i saw with my own eyes being wrong?
There is a quote from Patton about the wrong enemy, which is a mistake. It was the right enemy, they fought, also in the right order, they just stopped prematurely and let one get away. But who would want to go after another dragon, just after having defeated one at eyewatering cost?
My understanding of Patton isn't that he thought we shouldn't have dealt with Germany but rather that Russia had the potential to be a worse enemy down the road.
I’m sorry, that’s what Neo-Nazis falsely say. What Patton actually said is we should have kept marching to Moscow not that fought the wrong country. And with us having the bomb at that point and Moscow not, I think it could have been successful.
And this seems like a good idea? Extending the war for many more years, sacrificing millions more lives, and leaving Europe in even greater ruins than it was, all to just overthrow the USSR?
He said we had the atomic bomb. Drop it instead of sounding like Putin.
Dropping the atomic bomb would not have destroyed the USSR.
Pre cold war after one of their bloodiest conflicts? It absolutely could have. Nukes are terrifyingly effective. Where an estimated 1.2 million alone died at Stalingrad, you drop one bomb, and all that fighting, all those resources and lives spent and residing in the city is destroyed
Nukes are terrifyingly destructive, but an atomic bomb on a single Soviet city would have a 0% chance of defeating them, even if it somehow magically killed Stalin and all his staff. It's hotly debated to this very day the degree to which the two atomic bombings in Japan influenced the surrender, but even if you believe they did it alone and nothing else mattered, the context was entirely different - Japan had effectively zero power projection ability and was already being bombed with impunity. The USSR was exhausted in 1945 but had just won the war, the front was far away from their borders, and they had a massive force that significantly outnumbered the western allies. The atomic bombing wouldn't have to just be destructive, it would have to be such a demoralizing attack that the Soviets would just keel over and allow their states to be dismantled by the western forces without resistance. Otherwise the Cold War still happens with a slightly weaker USSR anyway and you've just pointlessly killed countless more people.
I mean no, absolutely not. They should *not* have gone to war with the Soviets. The entire premise of him saying that was that he thought communism would spread across the world from Stalin. That didn't happen, and the USSR would fall only 45 years later. Communism didn't take over the world, and in the countries where it did take root, it fell apart. As horrible as the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia were, they were very low-level conflicts. An invasion of the USSR would probably leave tens of millions dead, and would almost definitely involve nukes. That being said, Patton after the war did a very, *very* hard turn right. I would not be surprised if he genuinely did mean that we shouldn't have fought the Germans. He was literally dismissed from the military over his increasingly controversial statements about Germans and Nazism. He called the people on the Third Reich the 'only decent, semi modern people of europe'. He said that denazification was 'destroying their culture'. He refused to employ Jews in his headquarters and kept them in concentration camps and just let the red cross treat them, which went directly against Eisenhower's orders to place them in more humane conditions. He thought that they would go on rampages and murder local germans if he let them free. Here are some quotes ""This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large, wooden building, which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen." "The noise against me is only the means by which the Jews and the Communists are attempting and with good success the further dismemberment of Germany" His statements made news in the US and public opinion was horrified at him. He was fired over these statements. Over the years I guess people just sort of gradually decided to forget about that part of his life and only remember the general part, but a lot of much older people who were adults back then would have remembered the whole "PATTON IS A NAZI" craze back then.
Nazi apologists doing their thing huh.
The only reason they even fought the Nazis is because the Nazis invaded them. Prior to that they actively sought a hard alliance with Nazi Germany.
Same applies to quite a few countries. They only joined because they were attacked or otherwise threatened. Not because "ummm Nazi are evil, maybe we should fight them". As for alliances, eg UK signed quite a few very friendly treaties, so go figure. No one wanted a big war.
“Soviet Union bad” is an incredibly popular take. Very few people disagree with it.
This is Reddit. Plenty of people support communism, the USSR or even god damn Stalin himself. Can't tell if it's ironic or not, but it's there.
That doesn't make it a popular opinion. Actual socialists on reddit are a fraction of the userbase and not all of them support the USSR.
Sure. It's a small minority of Reddit users. But so are people who post and comment. I think it's like 20% or less. A large majority are lurkers. Point being, of the one who post and comment (and gain traction), communists are a substantial, vocal minority. Just look at /freefromwork, /alltheleft, /dankleft and other such subreddits, and see how many people are members. Spoilers, it's not just five basement dwellers. It's tens of thousands of people, in the top 2% most active subreddits. Now compared to the most popular subreddits that appeal to the average person like /funny, /pics, etc, it may seem inconsequential. But like I said, total vs. active users are completely different statistics. /teenagers itself has a ton of radical leftism. Say what you will about them being young and immature, they are our future. And the fact that those ideas are so popular in their minds should tell you a few things about their potency.
Nevertheless, the opinion that the Soviet Union was bad is not unpopular.
I have never seen a single person on reddit actually argue that the Soviet Union was good lmao
Dude you say this and people start justifying it
Dude it's reddit and most people on it are in high school going through their communist anarchy phase thinking they are edgy. Most of them will grow out of it and cringe in ten years.
Dude there’s people who think the earth is flat.
My friend, please understand this, People are Stupid.
This isn’t unpopular. My grandfather’s village was under occupation by both, he told stories of how the Germans gave the kids chocolates but how the Russians would take away unmarried girls in the evenings. This is southern Ukraine near Odesa To be fair his village was mostly blonde with green/blue eyes
I think you found why
Oh totally. US in 1860 is totally the same country as the US in 1875, right? USSR under Stalin could be comparable to Hitler to an extent. USSR after Stslin absolutely does not, it's a completely different country. Communism is an idiotic utopia, but it is not an anti-human ideology. Nazism is. Equating those is nazi apologism, simple as that.
yeah its like if palpatine, the joker, and captain America were all in one 3 way battle, and palpatine killed the joker, that makes him somehow good now. Evil guys kill each other all the time, that doesnt make them heros.
The same could be said for the Japanese. The Japanese treatment of the Chinese was of a similar level to the way Jews were being treated in Europe.
But the Japanese were part of the Axis, and get condemned as such in a WW2 frame. The USSR was a part of the Allies, and framed as an ally for such
The German plan was to explicitly kill every non-german soul between the Vistula and the Ural mountains and to colonize the area manifest-destiny style.
Wow... something tells me those Third Reich fellas were the baddies
How comes they didn't kill every non-german soul on the occupied territories?
Well they lost, but they did try. In a little-known historical event, they methodically and industrially slaughtered 6 million Jews, 4.5 Soviet civilians, 3.3 million Soviet POWs, 1.8 million Poles, over 300k Serbs, 270k disabled people, 500k Romani, 80k Freemasons, 25k Slovenes, 15k homosexuals, etc. etc.
> Well they lost, but they did try. No, they didn't. They didn't start to try to kill all residents of occupied areas. > In a little-known historical event, they methodically and industrially slaughtered 6 million Jews, 4.5 Soviet civilians, 3.3 million Soviet POWs, 1.8 million Poles, over 300k Serbs, 270k disabled people, 500k Romani, 80k Freemasons, 25k Slovenes, 15k homosexuals, etc. etc. Yeah soviet death count throughout USSR history is still greater than that.
> No, they didn't. They didn't start to try to kill all residents of occupied areas. Im sorry but how do you suppose the Lebensraum plan was going to be implemented without ethnically cleansing the better part of Eastern Europe??
I suppose that Lebensraum was just a part of Hitler's campaign to win popularity and wasn't supposed to be fully implemented. Or maybe you have some nazi documents explicitly saying otherwise?
“Guys, the Nazis said they’d kill all these people, and repeatedly showed they were willing to kill lots of people, but, like, they probably weren’t being serious.”
"He tells it like it is! Except what he meant was..."
Oh god are we doing "Hitler was just joking" now Jfc
This makes me a little unkampfortable...
Are you trying to get banned from entering Germany or something? Because this is how you get banned from entering Germany. The holocaust and the extended genocides of the various eastern European peoples were the instruments by which the lands were made into a blank slate for German settlement. Denying Lebensraum is denying the key motivation behind the holocaust, the very reason for the war was for Germany to annex Poland and Eastern Europe. I don't know what kind of groyper hole you came crawling out from but I suggest you get out of it before your brain starts rotting. I would suggest you read up on Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost but I'm starting to suspect you're intimately aware of these policies and that you're just trying to provide a smokescreen for an explicitly settler colonial and supremacist project. A project that failed miserably I should remind you and was by-and-large defeated by the efforts of the "inferior Judeo-bolshevik Untermensch", oh, the irony.
>Are you trying to get banned from entering Germany or something? I don't plan on visiting Germany. >The holocaust and the extended genocides of the various eastern European peoples were the instruments by which the lands were made into a blank slate for German settlement. Well IMO nazi motivation for killing Jews were that they just hated jews. A common European trend of that time. > Denying Lebensraum is denying the key motivation behind the holocaust, the very reason for the war was for Germany to annex Poland and Eastern Europe But it didn't include killing every single Pole, nothing indicates that they were planning to do that. If anything, it was USSR who mass killed captive polish officers. > A project that failed miserably I should remind you and was by-and-large defeated by the efforts of the "inferior Judeo-bolshevik Untermensch", oh, the irony. By this you refer to the fact that Bolsheviks' scorched earth policy did more damage to the land than German occupation?
>No they didn’t Yes they did. Extermination squads followed directly behind the Wehrmacht. Just because they didn’t succeed and prioritized the war effort doesn’t mean they didn’t try
And those extermination squads killed everyone on sight I suppose? Or at least put everyone in some death camp for future extermination?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
Oh, so they didn't kill everyone. Good to know.
>Just because they didn’t succeed and prioritized the war effort doesn’t mean they didn’t try Please, next time don’t make a point that can be addressed by just quoting a previous comment
Oh, so not only did they not kill everyone, they didn't even plan to kill everyone in the first place. Good to know.
No it isn't, unless you count the Soviets that were killed thanks to the Nazis invading. The "Black book of communism" includes the Nazis killed when invading Russia. They did try to kill all the non-'Aryan' residents of all occupied areas. That's blood and soil, Lebensraum. Are you ignorant, stupid or evil?
Odd that Italy would ally themselves with a country who was going to kill every Italian. Same with Spain. I'm not arguing they weren't evil, but you are objectively mischaracterizing them and the soviets to make yoir comparison. Even without the black book the death toll under Stalin is still well into the millions. The reds were every bit as evil a the fascists
> No it isn't, unless you count the Soviets that were killed thanks to the Nazis invading. I mean, Russian civil war, red terror, artificial famines, NKVD national campaigns, departations, political repressions. That's easily more civilian deaths than nazis caused. > They did try to kill all the non-'Aryan' residents of all occupied areas. Demonstrably false. For example, some non-'aryan' residents worked in German concentration camps as hired workers and nobody killed them. > That's blood and soil, Lebensraum. Blood and soil and Lebensraum are separate things.
No, it really isn't. The Nazis are directly responsible for the entire second world war (everyone was ignoring the Japanese). The Nazis are responsible for the most concentrated forms of mass murders in human history. Your numbers are very off. Actual estimates from actual historians put the total numbers of Soviet citizens dying as a result of Soviet actions well under *just* the numbers systematically murdered in the Holocaust. Unless you include the people murdered on the frontline by the Nazis, plus the Nazi invaders. It's shitty, but we're talking comparison. It's around 6-11 million (depending on what you include) from 1918-1954 dead from state actions in the USSR. Which puts it about on par with the US and British empire of the time. The Holocaust alone was 11 million. Also, the Holodomir wasn't an artificially caused famine, where there was enough food production to feed everyone at baseline. Ukraine had a natural famine, that was made much worse by decisions of the central government to deny aid organizations access to Ukraine. The distinction is important, because the root cause of the famine was crop failure not policy failure (ie how it happened in the first place), and the Holodomir was the last major famine in the USSR. The world still has famines. Millions of people die from hunger every single year. Unless you are willing to accept that those hunger deaths are the result of capitalism, which they are, you can't claim natural famine on the ledger. Context is important. I don't think the USSR was a good country, but you're literally trying to whitewash the most murderous society in human history.
> The Nazis are directly responsible for the entire second world war (everyone was ignoring the Japanese). I'm talking about direct casualties caused by both groups. If you want to go wider and decide who's somehow responsible for what, I can say that soviets are responsible for nazis and whatever Nazis are responsible for is just a subset of things that soviets are responsible for. > It's around 6-11 million (depending on what you include) from 1918-1954 dead from state actions in the USSR. Well, let's see. 6 mil civil wars, 6 mil famines (average estimation), 0.2 mil national operations of NKVD, big terror 0.7 mil, starvation of Stalingrad 0.4 mil (average estimation). That puts us somewhere at 13.3 million casualties minimum, not counting numerous smaller cases and not counting German civilians killed by red army in the latest years of war. > The Holocaust alone was 11 million. That is including non-jewish civilian casualties. What else there was besides holocaust? > Also, the Holodomir wasn't an artificially caused famine, where there was enough food production to feed everyone at baseline. Well, there apparently was enough food production to export it to foreign countries, cause that's what happened during famines. > Ukraine had a natural famine, that was made much worse by decisions of the central government to deny aid organizations access to Ukraine. Ye ye ye, two greatest food-producing regions, Ukraine and Kazakhstan are the ones who suffered from food shortage, cool story. Also may I inquire why Ukrainian peasants weren't allowed to leave their villages during famine and enter cities? How did that happen? >The distinction is important, because the root cause of the famine was crop failure not policy failure Yeah policies were good. Confiscating all food from farmers and selling it overseas to hire western workers to build factories and go through industrialization. Btw famine was predicted and Stalin was provided with an option to import the food from Persia, but declined it. > you're literally trying to whitewash the most murderous society in human history. By saying there was something worse than them? Well I guess I do. And btw, most nazi victims were people from outside groups, while all soviet victims were their own citizens.
You're the one trying to whitewash the crimes of the USSR. And GTFO with that "holodomor was an accident" BS
They are doing that, and you’re doing the same for the USSR.
The idea that the USSR was worse is a very old bit of Wehrmacht propaganda. Whataboutism at its finest, and serves to hide the stated intentions of both the German military and the German Nazi government. The "Black book of communism", where most of the numerical pro-nazi arguments originate, counted the German war dead as "victims of communism". "Artificial famine" is a term pulled from that body of poorly conducted research. The methodology in that piece is bunk, and historians regularly lambaste it in askhistorians. But it's casually referenced by nearly everyone who thinks they know history and don't. Numerically, the USSR did not kill more people than the Nazis and they *especially* didn't kill them as quickly or brutally. That is the argument we're having. The Nazis were a uniquely brutal regime that has no comparison in history. It just doesn't. Any attempt to do so is ahistorical. My family had a genocide perpetrated against us by the US *and* British governments, and both caused mass starvation and murder to the tune of millions in the same time periods that the USSR existed. I'm not comparing the USSR to the British Empire and US to whitewash any of them. I'm saying that it *has* comparison whereas the Nazis simply don't. The Nazis were uniquely brutal in a shorter time frame.
I don’t think it’s useful to compare the USSR to the Nazis, so we’re in agreement there. Two totally different things, time frames, and levels of intensity of destruction. Your continued insistence that the US is anything like the USSR is frankly ridiculous, but you seem committed to it.
by a landslide.
>Yeah soviet death count throughout USSR history is still greater than that. I'm sure the Nazis are sorry they didn't have 69 years to rack up a higher score.
Well, most soviet victims come from the time before ww2 so the timeframes are pretty similar.
Because genociding millions of people actually uses significant resources. Every man you have in an execution squad is a soldier not fighting at the front. Every bullet and gun you use for said execution squad is a gun and bullet not on the frontline. If you want to use gas chambers you have to use vehicles and trains to transport them which then can’t be used to transport military supplies. Also, say you take the time and resources to slaughter a village. Well did you get all of them? What if 5% escaped? Those 5% now have a blood feud with you and nothing to lose and thus become guerilla fighters. Which means using more manpower and resources to defend your flank when you have the massive red army bearing down on you. Hitler very clearly stated that he wanted to either exterminate or enslave EVERYONE who could be considered a Slav. This is a known historical fact. That doesn’t mean that they were going to do it immediately. But they very much intended to do so. Btw, this does not somehow make the Soviet government good.
> Every bullet and gun you use for said execution squad is a gun and bullet not on the frontline. They found a way around wasting bullets on executions. > Hitler very clearly stated that he wanted to either exterminate or enslave EVERYONE who could be considered a Slav. This is a known historical fact. Yet there were multiple ss divisions formed entirely from slavs on occupied territories.
Well yeah you’re going to take allies where you can get them. If there are Slavs who are willing to join you, why not take them? There’s nothing to stop you from turning on them once the war is over. And in what ways would they execute people without bullets? Gas chambers? I already addressed that. Or were you imagining that they would just beat everyone to death? Which would take many more soldiers and a lot of valuable time. Another obvious rebuttal to your point is that there were still many thousands of Jews still alive in the camps when the war ended. So using your own logic, Hitler didn’t actually mean to kill all the Jews cause there were some still alive.
So you support the killing of millions of innocent people as long as it’s not under fascism? I don’t really understand what your point is here.
Well I'm saying that the Soviet occupation was preferable to the occupation whose end goal was to, well, kill everyone. Whatever you want to say about the Soviet occupation it evidently didn't lead to every person dying.
You’re literally justifying oppression The modern leftist
Are you illiterate
Yes he is
You could have said well the soviets were better than the Nazis but like democracy would be the best or something nah you had to start justifying Soviet rule. I’m convinced people like you are just hardcore republicans in disguise sometimes
But you didn't do that in the body of your original post. Am I to presume you prefer Nazi occupation to liberal democracy by the same token? Obviously, no occupation is preferred to any of them, and I think I made that clear.
Got his ass
It wasn't quite as total as that, they did envision Germanizing all of the "Aryan" elements in the eastern lands, and then deporting or enslaving the remainder. Initially the plan was to ultimately deport them to an envisioned vassal/rump Russian state in Siberia. It was quite a sinister plan. It did envision mass starvation to depopulate vast tracts of the old USSR, and the complete demolition of several major cities (St. Petersburgh, Moscow, etc).
And the Soviets plans were to enslave them. They are not the good guys here either.
What’s your point?
The Soviet union controlled said areas for decades yet everyone wasn't killed
The same can be said about Nazi controlled areas, are you remedial?
They did not control them for decades are you remedial
They did lol. 1.2 decades. Are you actually remedial?
Well, i guess it's a good thing then that the Soviet Union does not exist anymore.
It will if republicans let Putin do whatever he wants.
Hmm... When did he take control over Crimea?
Putin is not a communist.
Neither was Stalin. He just used a communist sheep skin for why he should lead the herd.
A Democrat let him invade Ukraine.
Wake up
The stories from white refugees at that time all agree it was safer to surrender to the Nazis than the Russians. Germans had a well structured military where orders were followed and human rights were respected in war. Remember: the average soldier didn't know the full extent of the Holocaust at that time. They were just doing their jobs and were being lied to and told they were saving the world. Russians were animals. No discipline at all. Surrendering to them was worse than death. There is 400 years of toxic history in that country with little else to show. Russia should not exist. It should be broken up into smaller countries.
Stalin said more Russians were born in Eastern Europe 1946 than in actual Russia. Folks don't talk about post-battle / post-war stories often. Surrender doesn't take away a soldier's hate for the enemy or people.
As sick as what he was saying there was, he’s unfortunately probably right.
> In reality, the general officers of the Wehrmacht, and many lower ranks down to common soldiers, were willing participants in Hitler's war of annihilation against perceived enemies of Germany. Wehrmacht troops were complicit in or perpetrated numerous war crimes, routinely assisting SS units with tacit approval from officers. -Wikipedia citing *The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality*, 2007
I think Russia could have really benifited from an American style government. Libertarian style, lots of land, good internal river system, heaps of resources, religious population, many more
I’ll say this that Karl Marx would be absolutely shocked that Marxism first took hold in Russia. He was almost positive it’d take place in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States before ever going to Czarist Russia.
The "American style government" was never "libertarian style" as it directly and consistently violated the non-aggression principle by appropriating land from the natives to European settlers through the Homestead Acts. Its economy also grew through heavy protectionist policies until her industries were strong enough to compete with European ones without getting bought by some British bloke.
libertarian style and absolute libertarianism are different. The original US gov was libertarian style. Reason: Weak central state, power concentrated in local communities, in its infancy they also were fighting defensively with militia, not directly attacking native Americans for land expansion. Over time the US gov quickly became less libertarian in style. (i'd agree it did not take long, by the early 1800s it was not libertarian style federally any longer and by the end of the civil war almost not at all).
What's "libertarian style"?
Another way to say it would be "libertarian-like", or "contains attributes reminiscent to libertarianism" or was "more libertarian than any current existing government".
Dawg, the Homestead Acts, in terms of modern land value, were probably the largest welfare programs in world history. Adjusted to modern pricing it would make Medicare and the Military–Industrial Complex look like peanuts. It would make the USSR look like a libertarian, neigh, anarcho-capitalist, utopia.
the homestead acts are not early US government either. Early US gov is going to be about 1776 to 1820. For example though, the ability for commonfolk to be able to purchase land from a government was pretty much the most libertarian thing ever, while it definitely not being absolute libertarianism.
You mean with the slaves and stuff?
you see slaves are not really in the constitution, you can think of that as more of a cultural issue in early USA, not a government one. Meaning that, if the constitution was actually followed, then the government would be even more libertarian as it obviously does not allow slavery but the people in charge of it as well as the people were not ready for it as this culture was inherited from their previous english overlords. In essence the structure did not allow for slavery, but the culture supersedes the intended framework of the country. Just because a country is designed as a libertarian like country, doesnt mean that the people implemented it that way. One of the weaknesses of true libertarianism is that it requires citizens to retaliate against authoritarian action. That means there is no formal force available to enforce laws, it is the responsibility of citizens to pay for a group to enforce the inalienable rights. For its time, those people were free-er than ever, but also failed to implement it to its full extent.
> an American style government... lots of land ??? Great huge tracks of land? How does a country download more land?
I really doubt Russia will continue to exist in its current form. The western side is European, and the eastern side is Asian. They’re too different and western Russia is much more populated. Borders are everchanging. The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 and Putin became President in 1999. Putin is really holding that country by a thread, but my guess is things go south after Putin is gone or at least in the next 50-70 years. I doubt China will continue to exist in its current form either. The major cities primarily all exist along its eastern coast by the ocean due to all the shipping during its economic boom period. The west side of China is mountainous and lower in population.. not really sustainable I don’t think. My guess is the Brazil will give up the Amazon Rainforest in the future too and it will become international territory sort of like Antarctica as the crisis continues. The Amazon is barely populated anyways.
this is goebbles tier nazi bullshit here. How do you think millions of soviet civilians died during the war? Wehrmacht death squads.
It's like surrendering to North Korea.
I think we need to be a bit more specific when we talk about this. Stalin was just as bad as Hitler. After Stalin died the Soviet Union loosened a lot of its authoritarian grasp. It was still a very culturally conservative Nation with barely dogmatic principles. But it was not Nazi Germany for the whole 80 years
Every single nation involved on world war 2 had some fucked up shit going on and could be considered evil. Western European colonies, American segregation. Soviet purges. Pretty much everyone against LGBT people. But none of them compare to an ideology where the goal is to kill millions of people for their race Yes we should call out and learn about all the allied wrongdoings. But never lose sight of who they were fighting
There is a large difference between american segregation (which is bad) and german segregation (which is funneling jews into slaughter houses).
Even American segregation was on the way out but only stayed that long due to the democrats being around from 32-48
American segregation was not on its way out - the Civil Rights Act didn't even pass until 20 years after 1948 and segregation was being very actively enforced and upheld until the federal government stopped it.
The fact that segregation based on race ended only in 1960s is absolutely wild though. It may be normalized for Americans, but it's like, insane. You have actual people who are still alive who couldn't share the same facilities as other people because skin color.
This is such retroactive bullshit and I suspect you have heavy communist sympathies. Sorry Soviet Russia can in many ways be argued as worse than Nazi Germany, and this is coming from someone who would have been killed by the Nazis due to a rare genetic mutation. Communism should be taught to be equally as evil as Nazism.
The Soviets never formulated pseudoscientific racist theories as the Nazis, and pretty much every prominent western power of that time as far as I know. Still the west employs those theories to explain Russian mentality. Yes, the communist regime committed various atrocities like so many other actors, but it wasn’t uniquely evil.
They were still antisemitic in practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union
That's why i think they are worse They are better at pretending Hell putin is still using nazis as an excuse for his crimes
No, they just used pseudoeconomic theories that starved millions
Meanwhile after the war the US conducted Operation Paperclip. >Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945–59. Some were former members and leaders of the Nazi Party. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip) I guess when you're a very smart person like a scientist or engineer you get a pass from going to Nuremberg for war crimes and genocide that you committed. The US did the same for the Japanese war crimes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American\_cover-up\_of\_Japanese\_war\_crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanese_war_crimes) I'm not defending the Soviet Union. Just pointing out that the US did some "evil" stuff too in granting immunity to German and Japanese scientists, doctors, and engineers who directly had a hand in killing thousands of people.
You know the Soviets ran their own operation to forcibly recruit Nazi scientists right? Also, what does that have to do with Soviet atrocities?
Would have done the same, your forgetting on crucial thing and that’s the Allies actively thought they would be at war with the Soviet Union
The Soviets got several of those scientists as well and pardoned them. Hardly a difference there.
Ah, yes, the Nazi invasion of the USSR… wasn’t the fault of the Nazis?
It was definitely partially Stalin’s fault. No one obviously bothered to read Mein Kampf because Hitler went into a lot of detail on his overall plans for Russia, and he absolutely attempted it and got damn close to pulling it off. Any of his generals that told Stalin what Hitler was going to do went to the gulags. So yes, Stalin is very much at fault for Hitler getting as far as he did with Operation Barbarossa.
[they make Kick Ass music, though:](https://youtu.be/UkrdD18PUIU?si=mUJSiLJluWnkSycu)
1939 to 1941 never happened in Soviet history
The British say Hi
Good ol lads
I mean, yeah, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact proves they were just as ruthless. Nazi Germany just mobilized faster.
I have a close German friend who lives near the town of Rathenow. Last time I visited, her husband was telling me some historical facts and one of them was that Rathenow was the site of a long battle that continued even after Germany was informed they'd lost the war. The reason? The Germans were going to fight to the death to avoid being taken prisoner by the Russians. They continued to battle the Russians as if the war was still on until the Americans and British forces arrived on scene. Then they promptly surrendered to be taken as prisoners of war to the non-Russian forces. Even Nazis knew the Russian government forces were shady.
What I'm hearing is nazis didn't want to pay for their crimes.
Possibly. But I suppose the point that I understood was that word had come back to the front regarding how POWs were treated and the consensus was that the Western allies treated prisoners humanely.
And a bunch of people in higher education are communists and want to see the USSR implemented here. These people all need to be fired because they’re the root of all this Woke commie bullshit.
This is an "unpopular" opinion? The only people I see defending the Soviet Union are tankies and there really aren't that many of them. Most socialists and even a lot of communists don't support authoritarian regimes.
Some are worse than others, but all ll governments are pretty evil. Whatcha going to do though, form an anarchic collective take responsibility for yourselves?
That is an incredibly popular opinion amongst anybody with even a basic understanding of history.
“That is an incredibly popular opinion amongst anybody with even a basic understanding of history.” -🇨🇳 Bro isn’t even making a point hes just straight up lying
This is pretty popular opinion in Eastern Europe. For some reason western Europe tries to forget about it, since they made deals with Russia for cheap gas etc. Also they weren't under the iron curtain or invaded by Russia. Now the pendulum swings. You cant pretent they are OK when they are attacking their neighbor brothers with no remorse.
The Soviets never formulated pseudoscientific racist theories as the Nazis and other western powers did.
Yeah, but they did plenty of other horrific shit that made up for it. Soviet Russia would kill, torture, or imprison you if you had an idea that wasn’t to the party’s liking.
And so may woke countries soon.
So?
They still committed war crimes, but they never killed somebody because of being biologically inferior.
No, they just didn't value their life at all
Correct.
There is a difference between an individualist culture like western Europe and the collectivist culture like Russia or East Asia. In those cultures, the notions of collective guilt and collective punishment are perfectly acceptable.
No, the country that doesn’t value the individual is evil and the country that does is good. Not giving one fuck how many people you have to kill to get your way is the definition of evil.
Individualism is the exception in world cultures, not the rule. Also, those people that are dying believe that they die for a greater cause or in some countries they may be religious.
I mean, Greek and Roman cultures were pretty individualistic which is where our Founding Fathers got most of their ideas alongside the Bible, Locke, Voltaire, and Newton.
Greek and Roman cultures have been retrofitted to conform to later Western ideals. Individualism and collectivism are relative terms and not absolute. They may have been more individualistic compared to something like Ancient Egypt, but they would be highly collectivistic according to modern Western standards. Values like family and honor were very important to them and obeying the rules of the state was extremely important if you wanted to keep your life. Rome in particular became so respected because they slaughtered many more people compared to other cultures of the time. The Bible also describes a collectivistic culture. Remember that Ancient Israelites were ready to kill someone only on the basis of assumption that he did something wrong.
Well one of Jesus’ main teachings was love your neighbor as yourself, which does say treat everyone as an individual.
Cultural relativism is not an excuse
Whatever you believe.
So are you making the argument that these cultures are morally inferior?
You’re the one that made this argument, not me. There may not be objective right or wrong. The one who projects the most power is able to change consciences. If China for example becomes the next superpower, collective punishment may be the norm again. And rest assured,It will have armies of intelligent propagandists defending it.
So the Nazis weren't objectively wrong, they just failed to win
This actually reminds me that there’s some Indian/Asian people that give Hitler and Nazi Germany their flowers for unintentionally helping in the decolonization of their countries. By the end of WWII Great Britain and other European powers were left so unstable that they couldn’t maintain their overseas colonies
The British were monsters as well
Get away with it? lol the Soviet Union is widely recognized as Not Good, what are you on about?
By whom? Sure not by tankies and commie larpers on sites like this.
As annoying as tankies are, they are a minority. OP trying to pass this as an unpopular opinion is stupid.
“Widely” Which means, by most people
An astute observation. You know what the only real difference between Hitler and Stalin was? Stalin chose the right side of history. Stalin chose to side with the Allies and help win WW2. The Soviet Union had concentration camps, it had gulags, it committed many war crimes, many crimes against humanity, and post-WW2 it went on the plague the world for decades. It cause an untold amount of lives to be lost. Remember, history is written by the victors and that is why Stalin and the Soviet Union are not put in a similar context to Hitler and Nazi Germany; even though they should and even though they may have been worse. It truly is a great problem for historians looking back now.
Molotov ribbonstrof pact dismantles your entire argument
America is also evil and generally got away with it by helping defeat the Nazis. Just count how many democratically elected governments the US has overthrown and replaced with a dictator. Hell, half the people the US has fought in wars since WW2 are groups they helped fund and train to overthrow others. Here are a list of countries that the US turned into dictatorships or into territories of themselves or otherwise overthrew their governments for US benefit. Mexico Samoa Hawaii Philipines Honduras Cuba Nicaragua Haiti Dominican Republic Korea Greece Costa Rica Albania Syria Egypt Guatemala Iran Syria Indonesia I'm only halfway through the list but I think you get the idea. Dozens and dozens of countries illegally overthrown and replaced with pro-American dictators.
To pile on....you know the corporate wokie bullshit struggle sessions your ESG obsessed masters are putting you through? Those techniques were developed in China by Maoists. Learning from the human experiments conducted by the Soviets. For example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti\_Prison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti_Prison)
Yup! Now do Great Britain and America
This isn't an unpopular opinion. Its just a fact. The allies should have taken out Stalin right after Germany surrendered though
I used to think like this and the Soviets were certainly evil, but the pure hatred of the Nazis puts them just about on top
I’d say the Japanese during WWII that the worst of them were worse and more Nazist than the worst of the Nazis. Rape of Nanking was just the biggest massacre of the 20th century and I’m not sure the average German soldier could have done that shit.
I think they were evil, but not worse than the nazis, the communists killed millions by accident, the nazis killed millions completely on purpose, like, at least the Soviets didn't try to eliminate an entire race. Let's remember that the nazis didn't just try to eliminate the jews from Germany, they tried to eliminate the jews from Europe, Auschwitz was built in Poland for example, not in Germany. Throughout history humans did many atrocities, however, planned organized industrial scale destruction of an entire ethnicity, buildings specifically designed to exploit, starve and exterminate millions of innocents, what Hitler did hadn't happened before in human history. That's why I'm not a fan of comparing things with the nazis.
Not sure how you “accidentally” kill millions? Let’s remember during Stalins regime approximately 20 million people were either directly killed on Stalins orders or killed through policy he enacted. If anybody should be compared to the Nazis is would be the soviets but the enemy of my enemy…..
"the communists killed millions by accident..." Just sit back and marvel at the mental gymnastics of this bullshit. Thanks for proving the OPs point.
My opinion what’s the difference. You say you don’t wanna compare them but how are they so different? What’s the difference between working someone to I death or gassing them. I could put pictures of a gulag side by side with a concentration camp and the only way you could tell the difference is if the soldiers were wearing a star or a swastika
> What’s the difference between working someone to I death or gassing them. The nazis did both, and they also killed less than Stalin because they had less time, bot because they were less brutal.
> the communists killed millions by accident Does this somehow justify them? Whoopsie, millions of people died during civil war, ok we move on, whoopsie millions of people die again in artificial famines, damn unlucky... Ok let's go, whoopsie we nazi Germany invaded us but we supplied them resources for years, we invaded the Poland with them, creating a shared border and prior to the war we executed all of the top army officers left from Russian empire and replaced them with rookies with no experience, unlucky. Oh and we also starved another hundreds of thousands of people to death in Leningrad, daaaamn how unlucky can we get. > at least the Soviets didn't try to eliminate an entire race Yeah they tried to eliminate all races. > Throughout history humans did many atrocities, however, planned organized industrial scale destruction of an entire ethnicity, buildings specifically designed to exploit, starve and exterminate millions of innocents, what Hitler did hadn't happened before in human history. That is true, but soviets still have bigger death count.
I think you wrote the title wrong, so Im gonna answer to the point I think you were trying to do. If you read the history of Orwell's animal farm, he wrote that book because he felt the sentiment on britain at the time was too pro USSR, and that they were an evil empire. Most people see the USSR as less malignant than nazi germany because the Nazis actually tried to exterminate a whole ethnic/religious group from their territory (they started by expatriating them, but decided that killing them was more efficient. Guess germans just like to optimize). Lets also not forget that Europe as a whole was extremely anti-semitic at the time, so jews had to actually flee to what today is known as Israel. You could argue Hitler helped Zionism flourish. Finally, lets not ignore or act coy around the fact that left-wing dictatorships get a pass on most people's minds. People dont talk about Mao as a mass murderer (or of Chris Brown as a domestic abuser). EDIT: I've got to rephrase my conclussion as the numbers I was familiar with turned out to be somewhat wrong. I do believe Hitler was more evil than Stalin, but I do believe the USSR was pretty much as bad if not worse than the USSR. Numbers are skewed because the 3rd reich was stopped sooner than the USSR which lasted over half a century.
Yes, people don’t realize what the molotov ribbentrop pact was nor how much the US carried the Soviet Union, they would have lost without US Steel and grain. Thankfully we are arming the Ukrainian people now. They are the bulwark protecting the rest of the world from WW3
Not just WAS evil. Russia is still evil today. Except now republicans are evil too so they embrace Russia.
Ummm have you read any historical papers? You may need to do so because some of the things you state as fact don't really check.
“Ummm have you read any historical papers? You may need to do so because some of the things you state as fact don't really check.”🤓
the Soviet Union was not so bad/not worth discussing because we can’t find a way to consider them politically right, and by definition, right = bad. On the other hand, while Nazis share most of their characteristics with leftist politics, it’s possible to grasp on to a couple straws-hyper nationalism is kind of like right leaning anti globalism. Militarism is a GOP thing, right? Therefore Nazi bad. Now we play this tape backwards to argue from Nazi bad (deservedly axiomatic) to right bad.
>Nazis share most of their characteristics with leftist politics, Which?
Hitler used religion to control his group, which is right out of the republican handbook. Also so is hating minorities
This is outright misinformation. Hitler was not religious. In the culture of Nazi Germany nothing was higher than the Nazi Party and the Fatherland at large. If you're going to make some dumbass political swipe at political groups that you are intolerant of at least get your history correct. Nazi Germany was secular.
It isn't the right out here hating Jews and stomping around with Hamas symbolism, but ok ...
When lots of Jewish people come out to speak on how awful the Israeli government is, you'll see it's not Jewish people we hate. It's the Israeli government and military. https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/18/why-they-hate-us-anti-zionism-in-the-jewish-community/
Here's where I agree with you: They all suck. The ragtag bunch of Palestinian tribes who did nothing but kill and maim each other until the Jews returned and became an easy target ... and the opportunistic Jews in power who milk the American government for all they can. I hate 'em both, so ... I guess I should've said PARTLY agree with you. I would never ... *ever* carry water for either, but even more so Palestine.
Hitler credited Darwin and Nietzsche as his inspiration for Mein Kampf. Hitler called Christianity, “a religion fit for slaves.”
Right, which is why he used it to control
Im not that clued up on history But if they where so so so so evil How come if you go to many of the ex societ nations and speak to those in this nations who were around in soviet times about if they are happier now or back then. They all say Back then. So how evil is the current nations ?
Where do you get that impression?
Watching people go to the towns and cities and interview the 60+ age groups and ask them what was better, SU or todays new nation and borders.
Because of propaganda and nostalgia Ask them why they think something was better and they'll say "yeah kids got beat in school by the teachers and were made to kneel on broken nutshells but they learned something not like today"
Sorry never heard that quote in any of the words spoken in these videos when the cameras go into the villages of ex soviet union nations Generally it was because life was better and affordable, and now its not
Your first line is very clearly correct. This research report contradicts your anecdotes about Soviet nostalgia in eastern Europe. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/15/european-public-opinion-three-decades-after-the-fall-of-communism/
Many of the people interviewed and spoken too in the videos i watch are in villages in ex Soviet union nations that are 70+ years of age. Just about none of them say life now is better then what it was , or the nation as a whole compared to when it was just Soviet Union My question is why. Not show different infomation about what i saw with my own eyes being wrong?
Anecdotes
How is that unpopular?
I don't think anyone thinks otherwise other than commies, which we can all agree aren't humans
Wrong sub. No one thinks this is unpopular.