"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

I disagree that Stalin was as bad as Hitler. It can both be true that Hitler was worse yet that Stalin's crimes were not all of the "plausible deniability" kind. There's more to say but I'm on my phone now so perhaps later.

 

At least 2 million people were killed by his orders. That's not including the 5+ million people he starved to death. Not to mention all the people who died because Stalin was just fine with helping Hitler until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Then there's the people that he killed because Soviet military strategy was basically to throw as many bodies at the enemy as possible. Not to mention the various nations that the Soviet Union invaded while he was in charge.

But we don't assign remotely the kind of scorn to Stalin that we do to Hitler, and we should. For fuck's sake, man, the US is painted (rightly or wrongly) as a monster for nuking a couple of cities in Japan. You want to say that the total body count for that is two million? Not just those who died immediately, but those who died later from cancer, etc. Okay, what's the Stalin's total? Again, at a bare minimum, we're looking at ~6 million people. Many of whom didn't die in a flash where they didn't even have time to realize that they were dead. Even if you allow that Stalin doesn't have the kind of body count that's high enough to meet Hitler's, the fact that he was a genocidal maniac means he should be as cursed as Hitler. We don't. We don't put the kind of emphasis on his genocidal nature that we do on Hitler. We sorta treat him as we do folks like Andrew Jackson. You know, not a great guy, did some awful stuff, killed a lot of people, but he did a couple of things we like, so we're going to treat him like the slaveowners who founded the US.

 

Not disputing that Stalin was a monster or necessarily that that fact shouldn't be reckoned with a lot more.

The reasons that it isn't probably wouldn't be all that comfortable for us were we to dig into them.

 

On the fear aspect, I mostly agree, but I'm not the one you need to take that up with, ping Sullivan...

On the nuclear aspect, a tactical nuke isn't anything like a strategic one - they're orders of magnitude less powerful than what the US used in WW2 and designed as battlefield armaments. They're also explicitly part of Russian doctrine to escalate weaponry in order to force an overall de-escalation (courtesy of one V Putin.) Nobody knows if they'll go through with it, but the fear is proliferation - the kind of situations you'd use them for the US now has conventional precision weaponry to achieve the same outcome, other nations don't, and upon seeing that a small scale nuke doesn't mean another Hiroshima or Nagasaki, is likely to drag them into the 'acceptable' list.

Now that's the fear aspect I can appreciate.

Now, as for Stalin, part of it is that we have a anglo-, then euro-centric view of the world. And in terms of culture, the US is much more European than Russia despite geography, so Russia tends to get shoved out in to it's own category.

Look at when we define the end of WW2 compared to Russia, and how we don't give the Japanese death camps, experimentation and Chinese genocide the same level of interest that we do Germany's, much to the annoyance of the Chinese.

We also have a bit of a chip on our shoulders, a religious hangover no doubt, we expect Russia and China and Africa and so on to do savage things, duh, they're savages whispers our subconscious. Hitler was a European, civilisation incarnate, and Germany betrayed that.

It doesn't speak well of us, but for me, that's where it comes from.

 

Stalin was on our side. And it wasn't his death camps our troops walked into. And he's off to the side of Europe in unpleasant climate. Also I would say he has a less totally unhinged perception than Hitler.

 

Personally I put Stalin in the just as bad as Hitler camp. He was just as responsible for the start of WWII as Hitler, and for the same reasons - land, resources and power. The Werhmacht surged in power because the Soviet Union was fueling it's resource needs - you can likely put the Fall of France and the blitzkreig in the West partially at Stalin's hands too, just like Hitler blamed the US for sending huge amounts of resources to the UK. The Wehrmacht couldn't have rearmed as it did without Soviet exports. And all this was part of a scheme between the two dictators to carve up their respective spheres of influence, with the Soviets invading Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, part of Romania, and of course Poland.

Hell, Stalin officially had talks to join the Axis powers in 1940. Imagine a world where Hitler agreed to that. They would have fought eventually, but that fight would have been if anything worse than WWII.

Stalin had longer to practice his form of evil, but there's no doubt his direct victims number in the millions. This includes somewhere around 1 million executions, 2 million dying in various fore labor camps, 5-7 million dying in forced starvation, and numerous more dying from the many millions he forced from their homes in massive depopulation programs. Historians aren't sure, but estimates range from 7 to 20 million.

 

Even the soundtrack thinks this is the worst hype video ever.

https://x.com/defmon3/status/1700996350429868067

To tie this into the current convo 35k of these tanks had been produced before Stalin died.

 

Yep. All out nuclear war is the end of us all, but there's a very real chance that tactical nukes become just another weapon.

Also:

That is in no way the messaging the US conveys.

 

This week Fareed sat down for an exclusive interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at his presidential offices in Kyiv. They talk about the state of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, Western support in the fight against Russia, and how Zelensky is fighting corruption in his country. Zelensky also tells Fareed why he believes compromise with Putin is not possible. Then, Fareed speaks with the mastermind behind Ukraine's drone program, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister for Innovation, Education, Science, and Technology Mykhailo Fedorov, about how drones have shaped this war. Plus, Fareed sits down with a group of schoolchildren in Ukraine to hear how they are coping during wartime.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fareed-zakaria-gps/id377785090?i=1000627386309

 

Good.

Wanna bet? Shit like this:

Is no different than what passes for political discourse in this country. As for me? Well, how's about this?



This is just an easy way for me to explain to those folks who ask me for an explanation and then complain when I can't answer with something that can fit on a bumper sticker. I know victims of genocidal regimes. I know people who've had to flee from tyrannical governments that were propped up by the US. You want to go dark? Brother, I've been to the darkness and not only can I describe the horrific impacts that it can inflict on survivors, but I can also manage to wrap my mind around the impulses of those who are responsible for that darkness. You wanna dance?

 

You're forgetting the media as a whole. Someone uses a tactical nuke and what do you think the media is going to say? Do you think that they're going to give a sober description of everything? Or are they going to hype that as something that's going to kill millions of people?

Without attempting to justify the use of nukes in WWII, it needs to be stated that things like the actual death tolls and damage that have been done have been vastly misrepresented by folks on all sides of the issue. This is not an advocacy for their use at any point in time, this is just a statement that for various reasons, any claims of facts relating to those bombings have to be taken with a bit of salt, regardless of who is offering the facts. Most people do not have an understanding of things like radiation, other than that they're "bad." This is despite the fact that all of us happily bathe in all kinds of radiation every second of the day. Light, radio waves, and a shit ton of other things are radiation. I don't know about Yurp, but I know in the US if you said that the sun was spewing radiation towards Earth, lots of people would absolutely lose their shit, and telling them that light is radiation would in no way ease their fears.

Yurp does the same thing. What's your point?

Yeah. One of the reasons why we, at least in the US, don't do that is because the camps we stuffed the Japanese-Americans in during the war tend to uncomfortably resemble some of the same camps we liberated in Europe around 1945. Oh, and if you poke around, you'll find that there's documentation from the Allies that the Japanese did some really nasty shit during WWII and that the Allies decided that even in the cases where they prosecuted folks for war crimes they weren't going to make as large of an issue about it as they did with the Germans because they didn't want innocent Asians to suffer because of it. I can't say if they made the right call, but I can certainly understand why they made it.

Save for the fact that he cribbed a lot of his ideas from the United States.

Lots of things about modern society don't speak well of us, yet here we are.

 

Try asking anyone liquidated in the Purges, what their perceptions of Stalin were. Wait, you can't. Anyone that greenlights Vasilii Blokhins mass murders in the "Marxist/Leninist Room" for wet work, is an unhinged psychopath.

 

In WE’RE WASTING SO MUCH MONEY IN UKRAINE news it seems like those 42 HIMARS we gave them have paid for themselves.

A couple times over.



https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1701184339197767690

 

https://x.com/ajenglish/status/1701485348943974818?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

 

Ever wonder what an Airbus 320 in a potato field looks like?

https://x.com/tendar/status/1701484754095263776

 

The Russians are sourcing their parts through third parties. I'm sure they will have some issues, but overall their fleet is in the air and functional.

The big issue is that these parties are no doubt charging significant markups. Over the last few months a Reuters analysis showed Russian airlines spending $1.2 on western made parts despite the sanctions. However, I bet you that $1.2 doesn't go nearly as far as it used to. Just another strain on a nation just barely keeping things working.

 

https://x.com/cossackgundi/status/1701516047830950271?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

 

Opened link to see potato plants, was disappointed.

 

https://x.com/euromaidanpr/status/1701817360917663750?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

 

Ukraine war: Romanians told to shelter from Russian drones

 

The Minsk is 40 years old and while could have been useful for resupplying Crimea if/when it gets cut off from the mainland the Rostov-on-Don is a fucking coup if it was completely destroyed. One of the newest Kilo class subs it was only launched in 2014 and at a cost of an estimated €300m.

Ouch.

Respect to our limys and frogs (only Async at this point?) for the Storm Shadows and SCALP-EGs used on this mission. Wish we had been able to contribute more than the dummy missiles that distracted the Orc Air Defense Systems.

 

https://x.com/mhmck/status/1701928224249303105?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

 

https://x.com/skynews/status/1702046675215221188?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

 

Starlink Earns $1.4 Billion After Elon Musk Projected $12 Billion

 

https://x.com/madame_ennui/status/1702139419547873313?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

 

You know how much I love this, right?

 

The part of that article where it talks about the prediction being from 2015 is a big flag in that article, means it could be Starlink underperforming, or it could just be a little behind an 8 year old schedule

 

An 8 year old schedule with years of COVID economy in there.

 

So, apparently last September a Russian jet fired on an RAF jet. Can't remember if it made the news at the time or was hushed up, but anyhoo the UK Ministry of Defence has revealed it has intercepted comm traffic showing the Russian pilot believed he had permission to fire from his ground control, since they were using loose language. Shows again the poor quality of the Russian forces and their equipment (the RAF jet was unharmed as the first missile missed and the second... well... see below):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66798508

 

https://x.com/ryankakiuchan/status/1702463740661363072?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ