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The junta in Kiev attacked a group of people who happen to disagree with them, to "restore order" .
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Armed Russian agents taking over Ukrainian government buildings in the east, taking over TV towers and broadcasting nonstop war propaganda egging Ukrainians to rise up to a fake "Nazi threat from the west", attacking anyone who waves a Ukrainian flag in Ukraine, are, to Russians "people who happen to disagree with" the government of Ukraine. How dare Ukraine desire to "restore order" in a territory taken over by Russian warlords.
Calling Russian agents terrorists just because they literally attacked people in the city square who were not "pro Russian" enough. How dare they send troops after Russian backed forces who setup military checkpoints inside of Ukraine. They should have instead handed Putin keys to Kyiv. Instead of booting them out of the cities NW of Gorlivka, they should have just said okay Russia, take over territory like you did to countries who happen to disagree with Russia.
Banning the Jehovah Witnesses will make them even more determined in their beliefs. Their religion thrives on persecution and they believe it is end times now. Banning them will not end them, but make the people more justified in their beliefs.
Actually I happen to believe that it's end times now too.
But when it comes to J.W. - it's first of all an AMERICAN church.
And with American church American politics are encroaching onto Russia - they find their venues through churches just fine.
Everything is a distraction to keep the Russian masses from seeing a benefit in accountable government. From Syria to Ukraine to blaming Russia's own problems on external made up enemies...
Pointing out corruption in Russia gets you either killed, forced to flee or at best, brought up on contrived criminal charges. When an external state points it out, they get labeled the enemy and the corrupt activity brought up is dismissed as an attack on Russia. Or more perversely, an equivalence is attempted pretending that the US government also does things like kill journalists and bribe oligarchs. From Magnitsky, to Sochi to Putin's friends becoming oligarchs through fleecing the state.
Russia should be very wealthy with its resources and educated people and instead it survives somewhere in the range of a upper middle African standard of living. How to handle this gap? Don't let people travel to the west, put on TV shows about how bad life is in democracies, convince people that the 90's is what would happen if democracy occurred and make up fake accomplishments on TV (yay victory over America in Syria!) sounds like now and sounds like 50 years ago.
If Russians want to see their government accountable to them, they need first of all to see Western banking system being accountable to them.
When you'll figure out how to do that, then we can get back to a subject of accountability of Russian government in front of its people.
Not so in the Northern Caucasus. It been occurring from the 18th century to the 21st century. Yet even when the Atheistic Soviet Union had problems in that region, and even Stalin deported all of them. Just as he deported the Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, plus numerous Estonians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukranians, Hungarians, Romanians, Finns, German civilians and Poles, and much of them died as a result in it.
Here is a clip on the 1.4 million Poles deported to Siberia in 1940, Just after Soviet Union invaded Eastern Poland, just as the Nazis invaded Western Poland. At least 1/3rd Poles deported survived:
Yet of course I admit in my country committed atrocities on its Indigenous people in the past. It is a dark side to my country past.
This was actually the ONLY time in history, when Russians were involved in genocide for real. I don't think they were even making a secret out of it. And the reason?
"For her own part, Russia was eager to get rid of "unquiet" peoples and settle the area with Cossacks and other Christians. General Nikolai Yevdokimov advocated expelling the natives of the Western Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire.[42] He wrote that "resettlement of intractable mountaineers" to Turkey would be the easiest way to bring the prolonged Caucasian War to an end, while giving freedom to those who "prefer death to allegiance to the Russian government".
So there you have it. Russians simply found these people INCOMPATIBLE with their own culture, and thus marked them for expulsion/extermination.
Those they found COMPATIBLE - for the most part they tried to assimilate, and the reshuffling (i.e. mass exiles) of these people were often a result of it.
Now when it comes to Poles in particular - number one it was a political problem ALWAYS, not only because Poland was plotting against Russia before, but THROUGH Polish government OTHER political forces were usually getting involved, plotting against the Russian state. ( For example during the WWII it was Britain, and Stalin didn't want any complications on that end, not to mention that strong Polish state was not in his interests at all.) But other than that, it's just my personal opinion, that Polish people are not much different from Russians. It's just that this particular part of Slavs got under the different church- i.e. Catholic Church, and from that point on they were used for different political schemes against Russia.)t
The question I always wonder though, is that while Poles were under the Russian thumb ( during Soviet times) their numbers were steadily growing. Once they were liberated and the benevolent West took over, their numbers are really dwindling.
Yeh breaking a few eggs like when Stalin ordered the 1.4 million Poles to be deported to Siberia in 1940, that was before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Or the killing of over 10 000 Polish troops in Ukraine at the same time as the deportations, and the Soviet Media and Stalin blaming the Nazis for the massacre. Yet many years later the Russians admitted the killings were result of Stalin orders.
Stalin was as evil as Hitler, but the difference was Stalin won the war in the End.
Ukraine has problems with corruption and the conflict with Russian separatists will take a long time to solve. Outside of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, the Russian speakers in Ukraine have no major conflicts with Ukraine. Even if there was a uprising of Russian speakers in other parts of Ukraine, as there been attempts to, it was never popular among the Russian speakers living there. Kiev and Odessa are Russian majority speaking cities and there is no popular movement separation from Ukraine.
In addition in Crimea the Tatars there are generally opposed to Russian presence. After all they were only allowed to move to Crimea after the fall of the Soviet Union. They were all forcefully deported from that region in WW2. A massive number of them died as a result in that. There are still survivors of these deportations and these days the ones that were not born in exile gets the stories from their families. Now the Crimean Tatars are large minority in Crimea, however the election in Crimea was flawed. The Tatars and Ukrainians in Crimea largely abstained from voting due to the election being rigged. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.4eb1d9bd8e28
No he was not, as ruthless and brutal as he was.
His end goal was the survival and security of his state, where Hitler had some dubious ideas of racial remaking of nations and redesigning of the world according to these ideas.
No he was not, as ruthless and brutal as he was.
His end goal was the survival and security of his state, where Hitler had some dubious ideas of racial remaking of nations and redesigning of the world according to these ideas.
That's debatable. Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler did, they were just lucky to be on the winning side. I'll be the first to admit that I don't believe death toll is the only criteria to consider, but a lot of people view that as a driving force.
Hitler was terrible and I'm glad he was defeated but the Allies were pretty horrible in their own way.
Britain and France still had their colonial empires.
The US had racial segregation in place.
China had the Chiang Kai Shek and the warlords running around
Hitler was primarily interested in unifying German speakers under a single banner. The allies let him have his way with Austria and Czechoslovakia, but decided to interfere when he attacked Poland. I'm not sure how things would have played out had he been allowed to take over Poland. Some even say that out of the Axis powers, Japan was even worse than Germany.
That's debatable. Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler did, they were just lucky to be on the winning side. I'll be the first to admit that I don't believe death toll is the only criteria to consider, but a lot of people view that as a driving force.
I don't know much about Mao, but to say that Stalin "killed more people than Hitler" is to disregard the whole notion of the WWII.
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Hitler was terrible and I'm glad he was defeated but the Allies were pretty horrible in their own way.
Britain and France still had their colonial empires.
The US had racial segregation in place.
China had the Chiang Kai Shek and the warlords running around
Hitler was primarily interested in unifying German speakers under a single banner. The allies let him have his way with Austria and Czechoslovakia, but decided to interfere when he attacked Poland. I'm not sure how things would have played out had he been allowed to take over Poland. Some even say that out of the Axis powers, Japan was even worse than Germany.
If it were REALLY his end goal, it wouldn't be too bad.
But that's NOT what it was all about.
I don't know much about Mao, but to say that Stalin "killed more people than Hitler" is to disregard the whole notion of the WWII.
Stalin's purges were going on since the late 20's early 30's when he started getting rid of political opponents from the Politburo like Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Then the Great Terror happened which claimed at least 20 million lives (and that's the lower estimate). Stalin has Hitler beat domestically. By including WW2, Hitler may take the lead though it remains to be seen how many of the deaths are attributed to Japan and Mussolini's Italy.
A better question would be where would you be better off. Obviously Jews were persecuted in Germany, but that was the case in the USSR as well under Stalin even if the motivating factor was different. From what I've gathered, Hitler's purges were racially motivated whereas Stalin's were left, right and center. Obviously, both wanted to crush opposition to project power.
Mao wasn't in power during WWII as he took over in 1949. Most of the deaths attributed to his regime took place during the Cultural Revolution in the 60's. Estimates place it at between 60-80 million which puts it above the total of WWII. Being that he was isolated from the rest, his impact wasn't as poignant as that of Hitler or Stalin.
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If that was REALLY his end goal, it wouldn't be too bad.
But that's NOT what it was all about.
Where I agree that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not comparable, the atomic bombs could have ended the war without killing a single human being. As it was proposed even by some scientists working on the Manhattan Project, all it took was to invite some Japanese authorities to a test......they would have got religion.
Like you said yourself, "it would have given a clear signal to the Japanese that the US can now inflict terrible damage on Japan without taking any casualties themselves".
The final result would have been the same....the argument that it "saved many more lives than it took" is bogus.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atrocities. Probably the worst thing the US did. The problem comes from how the event is interpreted in modern discourse. At the time, very few people had any issues with it, as it marked the end of the war.
Russians turning around and "fake sympathizing" with the Japanese makes no sense as they benefited from it back then. the Soviets were about to engage the Japanese in conflict.
It's similar with how many of them use colonization to portray the US as a nation that committed genocide against natives, while ignoring the fact that it applies to the whole continent. If you're going to mention that, then you need to consider the fact that it took place all the way from Canada to Argentina.
It is very hard to swallow saying that Stalin we less evil than Hitler, they were both horrible individuals but you can actually make a point that Hitler went a bit further with the racial theories, the infamous medical experiments, etc...
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Some even say that out of the Axis powers, Japan was even worse than Germany.
Good point.....we should keep alive the memories of the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Forces in China (something too many people still ignore)....the infamous Unit 731...shame on the US for letting the main architect of that horrible tragedy, Shirō Ishii, a real evil butcher, off the hook in exchange for the results of his research on biological and chemical weapons...this is the kind of American hypocrisy that people around the world find hard to stomach.
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........but the Allies were pretty horrible in their own way.
Britain and France still had their colonial empires.
The US had racial segregation in place.
China had the Chiang Kai Shek and the warlords running around
Well said
In history, any country in position of power and at the head of an empire committed atrocities and acts of brutality...it is easy for European countries nowadays to jump on the pedestal accusing others, now that they have no power and no influence on the world stage....let's not forget, for example, the King of highly civilized Belgium chopping off the hands of African children in the Congo when it was a colony of that country......
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