Sand wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
war [and warmaking prowess] is not something to be proud of.
One of the reasons I am alive is that the U.S. fought the Nazis. If that had not happened I might very well have ended up as a cake of soap on some Nazi's bathroom sink. The men who fought and sometimes died on the Normandy beaches did more for me than I ever did for them. My Dad (U.S. Navy) and men of his generation wrecked the fascists and ground their faces into the mud and rubble.
ruveyn
There are more economic ways to make soap and I doubt the Nazis were that interested in cleanliness. The Russians too the brunt of the Nazi war effort and it was the Russian defeat of them that knocked them off.
Though forget not that the Soviets were allied to the Nazis, helped train the military they used to invade various stretches of Europe, mirrored Nazi aggression to take large stretches of Poland and provided all manner of goods and supplies to Germany up until the very last moment (and trains were still rolling in one direction when the Panzers were rolling in the other.) Until the Germans alienated them by unwarranted and counter-productive aggression, many of the citizens of Russia openly welcomed German "liberators" from Communist oppression. (The Germans even found areas where the local populace were unknown to the Soviet government who still thought that the Tzars were running things. These people were clearly not Bolsheviks.).
The Russians
did take a substantial part of the German war-effort, but they subsequently took cynical advantage of their role as "liberators" on return to take and hold vast swathes of Europe that were not theirs, and to administer those areas for much longer than the Nazis did, and often with a similarly harsh regime. Some nations subject to Nazi rule were treated more freely than similar states under the Soviets. Likewise the Russian military responded to (admittedly incredibly harsh) German occupation in kind with mass rape and murder of German citizens.
They also kept German POWS far longer than allowed by any convention, simply to utilize the skills the Russians lacked, and treated their own freed POWs as "enemies of the state" often with more disregard for human life than they used against the German ones.
Perhaps most cynically, the early alliance was created despite the very clear and unambiguous evidence that the Nazis fully intended to subjugate and destroy Bolshevism and Slavic peoples in general. This was no secret. Stalin and Molotov were totally aware of it. Yet they created an alliance, even when Germany was no threat to them militarily. They assisted Germany in becoming a threat to them. They even tried to play both sides, by offering to support Poland AGAINST Germany, on the provisio that they could move across Poland to do so. It would be naieve to believe, in the light of later activities, that the Poles would have got any land "moved across" back.
Basically the Russians were playing games with fire for their own ends, got burnt, and responded.
_________________
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,
that you can't take part" [Mario Savo, 1964]
08 Jun 2010, 10:42 pm
