Sochi

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Guess so...

Oh Yeah!

Apparently he got stuck in an elevator today:

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/sports/Johnny-Quinn-Breaks-Through-Yet-Another-Door-244724931.html

Why would you pry open elevator doors if you are stuck in one?

Sochi Olympics: Sparkling venues filled with empty seats

The aforementioned gentleman has all the finesse of a bull in a China shop...

My personal opinion is that this is mainly due to the US wanting to undermine Russia.

You have to love this ad.Eye candy for all.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/81937 ... i-gay-laws

What can possibly be wrong with two hot babes in love?

The more I read about Soichi the more depressing it gets.Its on the sight of a genocide.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/81887 ... e-in-sochi

The Circassian genocide - yet another ghost of the Cold War the Russian government doubtlessly wish would go away. Many tribes in that part of the old Soviet Union - Russian Germans, Crimean Tatars, Circassians, and others - are living reminders of the brutality of the Soviet dictators.

To be historically accurate;
- the Circassians were enslaved en masse by the Ottoman turks which largely contributed to their cultural genocide.
- The Russian Germans were not native to the east so can't be considered an indigenous tribe to the region
- The Germans managed to kill more people in the old Soviet Union in the space of 6 years than all of the Russian dictators combined...
Hitler was right, the Germans were superior to the Slavs, they were better at killing people than any other society in history.

The Volga Germans had been in Russia since Catherine the Great, while the Black Sea Germans had been there since fleeing the Napoleonic wars. That's a very long time. And it's hardly fair to blame Russian Germans for the Nazi genocide, since Stalin had deported them early on with the war with Germany, and replaced them with Russians. I have relatives among the Black Sea Germans who died of starvation in Siberia, where they had been exiled to. And yet, there were many Russian Germans who had fought for the Red army against Hitler, despite this.

The Germans who settled during Catherine the Great's reign were mostly assimilated into Russian society carrying surnames like Volkov which derives from the German "Volk"... those who claim Volga German ancestry number around 1.5 million in Russia today but only a fraction of these people actually speak German and most are ethnically mixed with other groups. Sad to say there never was any mythical German homeland in the Volga.


Those Russian Germans who were among the local populace exposed to the Nazi incursion were avid supporters of the Nazi regime whom they unanimously described as "liberators. This was no different to Germans in Austria, Czechoslovakia (Sudeten), Poland (Danzig) and Ukraine. Many of these were enthusiastically recruited into the SS. There is no sugar coating the collaboration and it's quite understandable for the Russians to intern Germans in the same way as the US and Australia interned Japanese civilians during WWII.


I can't comment on your family but here in Australia were many war refugees from Russia, Poland and Ukraine who the Simon Wiesenthal centre identified as war criminals. I grew up with German neighbors who were from Poland where the husband fought for the Germans and among his friends in the local German club all had been collaborators with the incoming Nazis because (as they saw it) they were seen as liberators. The gentleman's wife told me her favorite time was when she holidayed to Berlin and saw all the "beautiful" swastikas lining the boardwalk leading to the Brandenburg gate.

The Russian Germans in fact had been largely deported by Stalin even before German forces had arrived in the Volga and Black Sea region, so there wasn't much of a chance for any of them to collaborate. And as I stated earlier, there were Russian Germans who in fact had served loyally in the Red Army. And sure, there had been Anti-Russian sentiment among the Russian Germans - as an official policy of Russification had threatened their ethnic identity, often achieved by brutal means even prior to either World Wars. That had been why my Dad's people had chosen to become Americans with a great many other Russian Germans in the later half of the 18th century.

I should add, there was in fact a Volga German homeland, just as there had been a Black Sea German homeland. The Volga region had been a frontier region where the first settlers were the new German immigrants - the ethnic Russians in fact followed later. In the same way, the Black Sea region had been sized from the Ottoman Turks, after which the first settlers were again German immigrants, later followed by native Russians. The German Russians had kept their culture and language for over a century, as they and the native Russians viewed each other with ethnic contempt. These German settlements eventually gave into Russification as their numbers became depleted with immigration to America and Canada. Their loss of ethnic and linguistic identity in fact only really occurred after deportation by the Soviet government.
As for any thought of collaboration with the Nazis - it should be remembered that the Germans who had immigrated to Russia had had little love for their former homeland, which is why they left Pre-Bismarkian Germany in the first place, and had chose to leave for North America rather than to return to Germany in the 19th century. So no, while Germans in Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland and elsewhere might have been riding high on German nationalism, they were not in the wilds of Russia.

Cyberdad-

I am big enough to admit when I'm wrong. I just Googled Black Sea German collaboration with the Nazis, and sure enough, I found there had indeed been a certain degree of their remaining population who had. These monsters had gleefully worked for the SS murdering Jews and others. But it should also be remembered that many other Black Sea Germans had themselves been the victims of the Nazis, mostly for trying to shield their Jewish and Russian neighbors and relatives from the Nazis. I recall my Dad telling me how a possible relative in the Black Sea region had been executed by the SS. So in other words, those Russian Germans who were decent human beings were getting it up the ass from both the Soviets and the Nazis.

I think we can establish that humans are all capable of atrocities. The red army did some pretty horrible things to German civilians as well. The reason I singled out the Germans is that Stalin's purges were largely motivated by politics rather than ethnicity. Where ethnic groups were targeted by the communists it was because they perceived surging regional nationalism threatened the fabric of the Soviet state rather than their race.

In stark contrast the German Nazis (and their collaborators) exterminated millions of people on the basis of their ethnicity alone. That's pretty horrible to know that you were on a death list because of your background. The German obsession with the purity of their race is not unique. The upper classes in America and England (and even here in Australia) are obsessed with their lineage and family tree. It's this type of thinking that gave rise to eugenics and the forced sterilization of autistic people in the early 20th century.

Many thousands of disabled folks (Germans) who could not help their disability were either sterilised or gassed to death because the Nazis percieved them to be lives not worth living. If my autistic daughter as born in communist Russia she could at least been allowed to live, if she was born in German in the 1930s or 1940s then I'm not so sure.