Remarkable consistency.
I will be traveling to London as of tomorrow, so poasting will be light for the next 7-10 days.
If my flight takes off – a whole bunch of them have been canceled because the Brits don’t know what to do about snow. Meanwhile, the North Pole is positively balmy, at above freezing, and Arctic sea ice is setting new minimums. I will be happy to endure minor inconveniences for the sake of accelerated Tropical Hyperborea.
Forthcoming articles: A comprehensive survey of Russian science, technology, robotization [pending since late last year]; an analysis of whether Putin and Navalny are nationalists, commissioned long ago by Sputnik & Pogrom, which I really hope I can finish before the Russian elections [spoiler: No, they’re not]; the existential risk from limited computational space to run our simulation [done, but needs to be tidied up].
I also hope that I’ll be able to focus on my Russia book in earnest from early April.
Featured News
- Mike Johnson: The problems of consciousness: a taxonomy (roadmap to qualia research)
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David Becker: THE NIQ-DATASET V1.3 – A Summary (Part – I)
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spandrell: China doesn’t care about your opinion (informed take on Emperor Xi, from a person who knows China)
* Michael Hippke, John G. Learned – 2018 – Interstellar communication. IX. Message decontamination is impossible
- Glenn Greenwald: A Consensus Emerges: Russia Committed an “Act of War” on Par With Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Should the U.S. Response Be Similar?
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RT: ‘Polocaust museum’: Polish minister calls for commemoration of non-Jewish victims of WWII. Envious. ROGPR has long argued that a Russian national state needs its own genocide museum. Russians were the victims of three genocides in the past century.
Russia
- Jing Zhang: How Russia’s ‘red tourism’ is luring wealthy Chinese visitors bored with Paris and Milan
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Leonid Bershidsky: A Russian Business Icon Sells Out to the State
Sergey Galitsky and Magnit were one of the rare genuine entrepreneurial success stories of modern Russia, and now it too has been swallowed up by Leviathan.
The buyer is state-owned VTB, a politically well-connected bank that recently financed the “privatization” of 19.5% of Rosneft. Galitsky did not seem happy with the sale, and the price he got for it was surprisingly low relative to the revenue and profits it was making.
I have pointed out Putin’s success at improving ease of business in Russia. But to what extent is this even relevant now that the state controls 70% of the economy and is expanding its reach into the grocery aisles?
- Depressing Novaya Gazeta account of Russian failure to organize post-sanctions domestic manufacturing of military thermal imagers thanks to nepotism and corruption.
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Moscow has built 70 metro stations in the past 5 years.
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Why does Russia have zero soft power?
Head of Paris division of Rossotrudnichestvo [first problem: impossible for non-Slavs to pronounce] happened to be headed by the former wife of Peskov (Putin’s spokesman), Ekaterina Solotsinskaya, who had been appointed to the position in 2017 when Putin visited France in May 2017.
She refused Zakhar Prilepin, a hugely popular Russian writer and vatnik, access to its hotel on the basis that he was a “Donbass terrorist.”
Russia is not so nepotistic to let that stand, and she had to write step down, albeit for another reason – having two undeclared companies, through which she had been acquiring Paris properties (presumably at the expense of promoting Russian culture). Best part, though? She strongly resisted signing the resignation letter, on the basis that she… had good ties with Ksenia Sobchak and Ramzan Kadyrov (!). So, apart from all that, terminally stupid as well.
On the other hand, she’s much richer than me, so what do I know, really.
- Russia might withdraw from the ECHR, which will automatically eject it from the Council of Europe. Given its anti-Russian bias, that’s the correct thing to do.
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Fred Weir: Why the Kremlin publishes uncensored translations of Western news (on Insomi)
World
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Audacious Epigone: Fake Russia collusion calumny delivers body blow to FBI’s credibility
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South Africa legalizes expropriation of land from white farmers without compensation. Looks like we’re approaching the Mugabe scenario there.
Advice for Visegrad, Russia: Easen immigration for South African whites. You’ll be:
- doing a good, humanitarian/Christian thing;
- Trigger the SJWs;
- Be better able to deflect German/Brussels lectures about refugees;
- Reinforce your own demographics;
- John Derbyshire: WHAT’S WRONG WITH CHINA–A Study Of Unchanged National Character.
Also, you are never going to be so this hardcore:
- Pony Ma (Tencent) becomes richest Chinese person with $47 billion. This is pretty interesting, since there was previously an unofficial rule that Chinese billionaires were not supposed to exceed $10 billion in wealth.(any more, and they got in trouble… corruption investigations, etc.). Have the CPC finally dropped this policy?
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Sinotriumph Chronicles:
- China will fortify islands with railguns, drones, missiles and stealthy planes
- The USA is no longer guaranteed future military technology dominance
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The US is so zogged that it is telling Poland that it shouldn’t count on a meeting with Trump or Pence because of their anti-Polish holocaust law.
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Poles have started asking Ukrainian immigrants about their attitudes to Stepan Bandera. Ambiguous responses = deportation.
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Bryan MacDonald: America’s elite thinks it has a divine right to rule the world
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New Statesman: The polite extremist: Jacob Rees-Mogg’s seemingly unstoppable rise
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Niccolo Soldo: The Visegrad Group’s Exit from Liberal Democracy
* Turkey’s Erdogan in row over ‘girl martyr’ comment on TV. This is very normal and not creepy at all.
Science & Culture
- National Geographic: These People Believe Death Is Only Temporary (photo essay about Russian transhumanists)
Powerful Takes
This entire thread, pretty much: http://www.unz.com/tsaker/russian-presidential-elections-boring-useless-and-necessary/
Hey look!
The friendly octopus is saving the Balkans and Caucuses from Ottomans!
I wish my country could get out of the ECHR (and we’re largely to blame for the damn thing!) What exactly is the point of a supposed constitutional safeguard that pretends to guarantee a “right to free expression”, but provides that it: “may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”
Contrast that bloviating verbiage, that utterly vitiates the whole point of the thing, with the simplicity of the US’s First Amendment:
Along with NATO and the EU, of course. Mind you, I seriously doubt we will even meaningfully exit the EU, and supposedly our government is already committed to doing that.
Did they credit The Saker? This looks like it was inspired by his article, with a pro-western spin put on it.
I’ve been wondering about that idea of yours for some time. The only item on your list where the charge of “genocide” has any plausibility at all is the Nazi German invasion, with the siege of Leningrad and the like, and one can at least construct a somewhat plausible case that Nazi intentions towards Russia were genocidal (even if one assumes that the most radical plans might not have been fully realized, the Nazis certainly wanted to permanently destroy Russia as a nation/state). I assume there already are museums in Russia about German WW2 atrocities. But how do you want to spin Bolshevism and the “reforms” of the 1990s as anti-Russian “genocide”? They certainly don’t fit the standard definition of genocide (unless you just use the term in the sense of mass death…which empties it of all specific meaning) and catastrophic as they may have been for millions of Russians, they also included lots of Russians behaving horribly towards other Russians. Unless you want to push all responsibility onto non-Russian minorities (Jewish Bolsheviks and oligarchs, Latvian riflemen, Stalin’s Georgian clique) or external actors (imperial Germany sending Lenin to Russia, the US pushing privatization), how can it be denied that Russians to a large extent did colossal harm to themselves in those two eras?
Wow if true.
This Polish Holocaust thing sounds like something deliberately designed to make people hate Jews. But probably I’m just overestimating people’s capacity for independent thinking and their general knowledge levels.
The South African developments should also be a strong redpill. But they aren’t and will never be. It will be spinned out of existence or at least will be made a “complex issue” (all genocides are complex to an extent, dumbfucks), all sides will be painted black.
They might be if there’s real violence, with blacks hacking up whites in front of tv cameras or something of the sort.
I have to admit I’m almost hoping for that (yes, I know, pretty cynical)…given the most important graph in the world, this false perception of Africans as non-threatening victims needs to end.
I like the China article, but I don’t like things like that:
“Mao was not a dictator until 1966.”
His power was limited after 1962 and the seven thousand cadres conference, but he was a dictator before that, able to get any of his opponents marginalized and killed. And of course most national leaders are not capable of unleashing something like the cultural revolution.
They are probably more interested in immigrating to Australia or Canada. Visegrád country is good to the extent it would give you rights to live without a job pre-secured, in other parts of the EU.
Really if someone told you can immigrate to Visegrád countries, what are supposed to do for a job when you get there? It’s a good option, but to the extent it would give you possibility to live in Ireland/Sweden/UK/Netherlands, etc. without having to apply for a job in those countries first. But the capable people who want to emigrate from South Africa, already can by applying for jobs in those countries.
I am a stockholder in Magnit and am very disappointed by this.
What is going on in Russia exactly? Is this just intended to reward the regime?
The number of violence has fallen a lot since the 1990s and early 2000s, even if it is still very high. Reading a little into the subject – there is still a a high emigration rate, to Australia and UK. But in recent years it seems mostly to correlate to economic growth and recession, similar to emigration patterns from Russia.
I would like to go on holiday to South Africa. I wonder how dangerous it really is today.
You may laugh at Skolkovo, but it’s no laughing matter in the United States of Hysteria.
InoSMI is actually a very innovative and great propaganda tool. I often think that the heavy handed approach of the communist regimes never really worked, and allowing multiple points of view and critical opinions to be read by the more sophisticated classes actually strengthens the propaganda. This is why western propaganda is so effective, because it creates the illusion of being well informed and a “critical thinker.” It also creates the possibility of being a regime supporter while simultaneously keeping your distance and independence.
The communists always demanded total compliance with their ideology in the public sphere, which meant even slightly sympathetic people (famous writers and the like) had to pretend to be fully communist. But it was always contrived and fake, and no one believed it at all. So it wasn’t so effective because you couldn’t tell if someone really had something good to say about communism or was just forced to do so.
I guess I am far more cynical than you, then. If that were to happen, I fully expect the MSM to go into a frenzy trying to justify the murders. It won’t be an open “they deserved it”. It will be “whites created a systematic oppression of blacks through loot and plunder for centuries. You may now condemn these base instincts, but what are they if not the spasms of retribution from a much weaker party trampled upon with your silent approval?” In other words: they deserved it, but with more rhetorical flourish.
At this stage, it is impossible to be in any major Western MSM position and be openly pro-white interests. The best reporter on South Africa in the West is a Chinese reporter at Sydney Morning Herald, who Steve Sailer is also quoting in his blogpost about it. There used to be a few voices in the UK press in particular(Telegraph was a notable example), but that is fading now. My guess is that it was reporters who had South African family members (either who lived there or those who married in). Something like 800K white South Africans left for the UK from the late 80s up until the early 2000s IIRC.
Given the extreme hatred shown towards Western whites in your own countries from your own media, I would be astonished if white South Africans were shown any different courtesy.
[state controls 70% of the economy]
Yuge if true, I’m afraid.
[Russia might withdraw from the ECHR, which will automatically eject it from the Council of Europe. Given its anti-Russian bias, that’s the correct thing to do]
Indeed. And the death penalty should be immediately restored, else what’s the point?
Why do you think there hasn’t been a movement on it? Do you think it is mainly elite objections? If so, what would they be (in your view)? Are there grassroots movements among ordinary Russians for one?
I’m not surprised. I’ve been following the complete and utter degeneration of the Trump presidency quite closely. Hunter Wallace at Occidental Dissent has been great, even if he has been attacked viciously by the Trumptards. Really since Bannon was fired it was all downhill, and even Bannon had severe problems. He tried to fundraise among Jewish GOP donors to unseat “the establishment”. Why would the establishment fundraise to unseat themselves? The idiot Bannon never knew what hit him and he got purged from Breitbart within six months. FYI:
https://i.imgur.com/aKQ2G6v.png
When Mike Enoch talks about the ‘kosher sandwich’ of public “debate” in America, this is what he means. That’s why this news is the least surprising news ever.
As for Poland’s chances to win this fight, I am skeptical in the long term. Poles are quite liberal and very obsessed to be liked by the West. I don’t view Russia as hostile, but as things stand, it is not actively our friend either.
I was impressed by Germany’s actions during the entire affair and it once again re-affirmed the flank of those, tiny in the public sphere, who call for closer relations with Germany over that of America. Germany will never be as important as the US in military terms – for obvious reasons – but I am now at the point where I believe we can only rely on an independent nuclear deterrent and nothing else.
Still, there are limits to ZOG’s actions as well. They are absolutely obsessed with destroying Russia at any price. A more pro-Russian Poland would be a disaster in their eyes, which is why Poland’s hand is strangely better than it would have been otherwise. This is why I fully expect a concerted campaign to re-elect PO and the previous ZOG lapdogs(PiS are too, but not even to the same extreme extent. Sikorski openly talks of appeasing the Jewish diaspora in his latest speech). If internal change does not come about, we will be at a deadlock, I think, for years to come.
If nothing else, the whole affair is slowly redpilling a lot of Poles, who have been indoctrinated with one-sided Judeophilia in their schools since the fall of the wall. Turns out that those who we are told are our “brotherly peoples” like to spit in our face and for the longest time we have done nothing about it. This long running controversy is filling forcing people to deal with this fantasy, but the process will be long and I don’t expect any immediate returns on investment in terms of changed (and lasting) attitudes until years into the future.
I largely agree with you, but I still think AK’s point stands. Naturally the white South Africans would prefer to live in Ireland or the Netherlands or the UK over, say, Poland. They already know English, and Afrikaans is very close linguistically to Dutch IIRC. On top of that, those countries are wealthier, too.
But there would still be a propaganda victory, because these people do deserve to be given refugee status for genuine persecution. I am personally skeptical over just how many would take the offer. A lot of Boers are religiously fundamentalist and many of them have roots going back many centuries. They will quite literally rather be dead than moving out. Most of the people who had more tenuous feelings towards the nation already left in the 90s and early 2000s. Chain migration works for whites, too, you know. It wouldn’t be that hard for the numerous white South Africans in Australia or the UK to bring along their extended family if they really put their minds to it.
One of the most redplling but also blackpilling things about South Africa is how it underscores that there is no Magic Threshold below which whites will suddenly “wake up”. You can be 5%-10% of the population, brutalised, and still be largely bluepilled on race, which is what the Boers in SA are. This only underlines the importance of metapolitics and to never, ever take anything for granted. A lot of US WN made the same mistake with Trump. Just elect him and watch him fight for you. Then he completely sold out to ZOG. Now some of the retards are refusing to admit it, and attack those who see it.
There are simply no short cuts. One has to build an ethnocentric cultural foundation and it will be arduous work, spanning decades. White flight, magically hoping for a “sudden collapse” or for there to be some kind of “magic threshold” when the white population reaches a certain percentage and “wakes up”, none of those things will save you. As South Africa shows very clearly.
The final lesson on South Africa is that the architects of Apartheid failed not because they were too cruel, but because they weren’t radical enough. They should have gone for complete separation, in different countries. Instead they floundered and went for partial separation (read: segregation) in the same country. That failure to do final closure is now coming back to haunt them. It is also why civic nationalism, even when laced with racial realism, will always fail.
Well, if Stalin collectivization in the West is officially called genocide, the reforms of the 90s with a much greater reason can be considered genocide (organized by America)
Probably over time it would be like this (except Stalin). This propaganda is quite consistent with the standards of the modern “Politics of memory”
Agrees on ECHR. Besides the political bias, it does nothing to actually safeguard free speech rights.
I suppose you’d have to do a textual analysis to see how “inspired” (if at all) Fred Weir was by the Shaker, but two renarks:
Imosmi and the role it plays in Russia is hardly a secret. I was making many of the same points several years ago (I even tried to set up an Imosmi in reverse in 2013), and I wasn’t the only one doing it, either. My perception is that the relative reach and importance of Imosmi has declined relative to its heyday 5 years to a decade ago, hence people began to write less about it, and why The Saker’s (very good) article came like a blast of fresh air on this topic for many in 2017.
Fred Weir is one of the better western hacks in Moscow.
Well, there are East Europeans who say “Soviets” perpetrated genocide against them – including some nationalities who themselves were overrepresented in soviet power structures and security organs – so why can’t Russians use the same formulation? The joint Nazi-Soviet genocide against the Russian people.
It will be lavishly equipped, have sad music, 4D media presentations, databases of victims on the wall, it will occupy a central space in Moscow.
I agree to an extent, but there’s still the possibility of a lot of videos of violence reaching a large audience through social media. And heavy handed censorship might slowly make people ever more suspicious of official propaganda.
But as I wrote, I don’t have high hopes of whites waking up.
https://insideevs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/333-4.png
So it seems the EV transition is continuing apace. The new Nissan Leaf was just introduced in February in many markets, such as Norway and as the year goes on, the new Hyundai Kona (EV version) as well as wider availability of the Tesla Model 3 will drive more sales. Volvo recently announced that they are stopping new development of ICE cars.
In 2-3 years, we should have new MBTs from the major German automakers as well, specifically designed for EVs. From the early 2020s onwards, I expect there to be major choice for the mainstream (<$35,000) market. There is also great progress in the self-driving space, though Tesla appears to have fallen behind somewhat in this area. They are now building their own chip with the help of the legendary Jim Keller (who designed the recent Ryzen CPU which is key for AMD, and who worked on early iPhone CPUs).
I was thinking of buying a new car, I am only using my bike so far in Warsaw, but there will be more change in the mainstream vehicle market in the next five years than there were in the last fifty, so I am holding out for now. In the winter, public transport is fine. But I'm now thinking maybe I'll just rent a car if TaaS really does take off, and dramatically reduces costs for car ownership in a way which isn't true right now with leasing, especially with the efficiency of level 4 or level 5 autonomy. Exciting times for potential car buyers, at least those of us who want both A) EV cars and B) significant autonomy.
Regarding the here no longer mentioned downing of the Israeli jet. Apparently the Israelis lied in some things. Their planes supposedly attacked from Lebanese and Jordanian airspace, but the targets were I think 350 kilometers from the border while their longest range weapons have a range of 250 kilometers. So they must have entered Syrian airspace. Their videos of the retaliatory attacks show some warehouses destroyed, but obviously not air defense assets. The death of the Syrian major general and the pro-Iranian militia leader are something I only read about in the War Is Boring article but not elsewhere. Are these things even confirmed? If they are, were they killed by the Israelis? How do we know it? I’d think the Israelis simply took credit for it.
And after all, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s “true” anyway – just make a law against questioning it.
I looked at the War is Boring article when it was linked the other day, but it mostly read as Israeli damage limitation propaganda. With such effective liars on all sides it’s hard to be sure of anything much.
In the end we will only get a clear idea of what actually happened, broadly, when we see to what extent if at all, and in what ways, Israeli behaviour (in terms of their heretofore regular air aggressions in Syria) is modified over the coming months.
Bad idea. South African whites are some of the most pozzed people on Earth. (And this despite being literally subjected to “white genocide” every day!)
There’s an esoteric point to be made here: for various complex reasons, all Lutheran and Calvinist are suicidally pozzed. I doubt they can be saved.
i don’t know their financials, maybe you could have more info, but a lot of retailers are indebted af, not only in Russia. this might have been a pre-emptive bailout. it is also possible that it is a hostile, covered takeover by alfa group, the main competitor, to whom vtb will sell. it is also possible (wild speculation) that Russian banks need to capitalize before some kind of coming storm … ‘dollar-decoupling’ or some kind of currency reform (whats the deal with all the gold hoarding and petro-rmb connection?) regardless, it seems there will be a lot of privatization in Russia in the coming years, coupled with declining interest rates.
That’s when Western propagandists interpret collectivization as an ethnic Russian scheme to mass murder minorities – Ukrainians, Tatars, Finno-Ugrians. Mainly Ukrainians since they’re the only group with lobbies in the West and since Ukraine is a key country that the Americans can use to contain Russia.
I would advice not getting into the game of interpreting increased death rates as genocides that Western leftists have created since by Western standards Russia is easily guilty of hundreds of genocides. The “collectivization genocide” blame will be easy to paint on Russians by statistical fiat since many areas that were hit by famines also experienced an influx of Russians and a decline in the local minority language at the same time.
It’s now considered a “genocide” in Western social justice movements that the children of natives with tiny languages spoken by one tribe of a few thousand people were forced to go into schools where they learned the main language of the country, leading to a bunch of minority languages going extinct. That’s pretty much what communist education did so by current Western standards Russia genocided over a hundred minority ethnic groups in the 20th century.
Once the social justice people get going it will be no defense that it was done in the name of “progress” – building these schools was a leftist progressive project in the West, too, yet modern progressives expect us all to feel shame over past progressive projects.
I would bet it was a win for the Syrians. I wouldn’t bet my house on it, but I’d be willing to bet some money here.
The War Is Boring article admits that the Israeli retaliatory strikes only hit Damascus, i.e. close to the border. And that only for a few hours. Does it sound like someone undeterred? Granted, maybe they’ll find some better tactics next time.
It’s possible that the hit on the Israeli plane was due to errors, but errors are bound to happen.
A Hungarian guy (a distant acquaintance) on Facebook wrote that the Israeli videos were showing essentially some warehouses hit, but no Syrian air defense assets. I’m dumb as a rock in these matters, but maybe someone could look into the claims.
In any event, this is what my acquaintance claims an S-200 air defense battery looks like. The Israeli videos can, I believe, be found on the internet. Although what I found were unclear if they showed the attack on the supposed drone center or on the air defense assets. But a lack of too many videos as well as the shortness of the attack points to the claims of “destroying half of the Syrian air defenses” being dumb lies.
So my money is on the second Israeli attack being ineffectual, and the deterrence working for now. In other words, a Syrian (and Russian and Iranian) victory.
Whites have been murdered in South Africa for years, with genocide watch warning that they are very close to being genocided and you know what? No one cares. If you would say that in some circles, they would call you racist instead, beacuse why do you care about whites in SA, when blacks also murder blacks?
I agree – I mean, I don’t have high hopes of POLES waking up. We are doomed. Doomed as nations, doomed as a race, doomed as a culture.
There are no good videos. We’re rooting for videos of whites being murdered (preferably brutally). I’d be willing to pay some money to a fund to increase smartphone penetration of South African black land redistribution activists.
One can still hope against hope, though.
I tend to agree with you, so I won’t be taking your bet. Maybe someone like Art Deco or iffen, but I’m not sure you’d have much chance of getting the money out of them even if you were ultimately proved right. They’d just point blank refuse to admit the truth.
If so, in a few weeks we’ll have reasonably reliable info about reduced Israeli air attacks as a result (though they’ll probably take other measures in response, such as stepping up their support for the head choppers in southern Syria).
Because confiscating food and starving people to death literally, is the same as collapse in birth rate and people doing stuff like choosing to drink themselves to death because they feel nihilistic and bad. Perhaps you will also compare Russia in the 90s to the Holocaust?
There is clearly a question of whether Ukrainians, or Kazakhs, were targeted for their ethnicity (no direct evidence that they were) but it’s widely accepted that government policies resulted in starvation. No Russian government agency was forcibly aborting Russian kids or force-feeding birth control to Russian women or forcing alcohol down Russians’ throats, but Soviet government workers were confiscating grain from farmers, were shooting those who resisted, etc.
You need to read the articles in Hebrew (or those Hebrew articles translated on the Russia-Israeli sites). The American articles always misreport all the substance of stories as they cannot read Hebrew. Places like War is Boring are just taking a few ideas from some other English sites. The information on the Hebrew sites and on the television reports tells a lot more details about these stories as you would expect.
Although they did a job in terms of putting a lot of effort into the site every day, it is clearly a failure because hardly anyone reads it. (It gets around 30,000 clicks a day from within Russia itself. The whole website is clicked less than the typical (single – i.e. one video) popular youtuber video).
Reason people are not reading it is that all stories are about Russia – so it’s kind of a niche interest (reading foreign opinion articles about Russia), which is ‘getting boring’ fast (foreign views of country can only be interesting for so long).
Also people who are so curious to read foreign media, can usually read a foreign language enough to go to the originating sites where those articles are arising.
Lenin is still in Red Square and everyone goes crazy if anyone suggests reburying him. Such a museum, with the concept of equivalence with Nazis and Soviets, would not be considered politically acceptable.
parallel universe I see this as possible is a world where Ksenia Sobchak is president, and in that case we would have far more significant problems to worry about.
They already can live abroad if they want to, and they are coming into Australia and the UK every year.
South Africa is not the USSR – nobody is stopping people from emigrating. The idea might make sense from convenience perspective – since a EU passport is more convenient in allowing you to live in EU countries like Ireland/UK. But it’s not difficult to move there if they wish anyway, you just need to apply for job.
I think it’s actually a lot easier for South Africans to leave than for Ukrainians, as the South Africans have economic resources. The reason South Africans are staying behind, is probably because they don’t want to leave, they have good jobs, good assets, or a good standard of living in South Africa. If South Africa economy totally collapses in Venezuela style, only this could change.
300,000 daily visitors, not 30,000 clicks. Though true, it’s not the most popular website ever, at least not for a country the size of Russia. But probably a lot of people read them at least occasionally, and it’s important that it’s there. A large part of propaganda is to convince its subjects that they are well informed and not cut off from any significant piece of information. So they won’t get suspicious of the government.
It’s more popular, than most opposition media in Russia. I definitely wouldn’t call it a failure.
So what did they tell now? Don’t they have official military censors censoring these news stories? Didn’t they really announce how their air force destroyed half of the Syrian air defense assets? Would it be legal to doubt it, if they indeed announced it? I mean, wouldn’t the censor censor all the doubting articles from the press? Or if reality was A, but it’s censored and the official story was instead B, then it’s illegal to outright publish A, but it’s fully legal (and practiced) to just speculate about how B must be garbage and instead reality is A?
Otherwise, I’d need to be pretty extremely interested in Middle Eastern news stories to learn Hebrew only for that…
Around 70,000 visitors a day – 43% of those from Russia.
I don’t know anyone who reads the site – I heard it first mentioned on here. And now it’s reported in the Western media (this week). On their social media accounts, they have followers – but not a large number, under ten thousand.
A lot of South African whites have less money than Ukrainians. There are really bad slums of white South Africans. Even the better off among them often have surprisingly little money. Yes, some are rich, but on average they are pretty poor by Western European standards.
Sorry I haven’t personally read anything about the story as I was not so interested in it.
But I saw there were endless stories and articles about the investigations into it on all the Hebrew sites (and Russian-Israel websites often also translate those articles) and the television.
(Interestingly I was in Israel when it happened – and the television there was talking about it for hours non-stop interviewing people endlessly.)
I might go and try to read something about the story later if I have time (I need to practice reading Hebrew). There will be surely a lot of details about the case. I think they actually like publishing lots of details in the open about this kind of mistake or blunder.
Where did you get your data? I got it from the CSM article linked by Anatoly.
I guess you speak English well, you are not really the target audience for this site.
Reiner I found this new report within this week (Sunday).
It is reporting what the military say:
Apparently it’s normal for the missiles to be fired on them in Syria and the pilots expect that they will be targeted and risk to their lives.
The pilots failed to take an immediate evasive action after they were locked onto by missiles, but at first tried to continue their mission. The other planes discontinued the mission and took some kind of evasive action.
In this incident the number of total missiles fired, was more than usual (27 missiles), but the pilots had been briefed and should expect the danger of the missiles.
They say that the decision to eject was the right and saved the lives of the pilots. Backup planes had to complete the mission of the plane that was shot down and had to take evasive action to avoid the missiles threat.
https://news.walla.co.il/item/3138337
I was just looking at the traffic information for the page.
I made a serious mistake in my above comment when I said that not many people follow their account on social media though (I wish I could edit posts here). Actually it’s kind of popular on VK, with around 80,000 followers and some lively discussions.
https://vk.com/inosmi
And I guess the richer ones have better security as well compared to the proletarians, but also a giant target since according to the house size some of these guys obviously have things worth stealing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4f9mM4I900
And the poorer living standards in South Africa is here as well, as you said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj84Sw1x2po
Certainly seems like interesting country to visit for a – short holiday.
I think it’s a fair idea from the victims’ position. But the perspective is not the official one, but more of a liberal/opposition one. It wouldn’t serve official interests or to build the official viewpoint. The historical museums usually have some patriotic-building function.
Certainly seems like interesting country to visit for a – short holiday.
Everybody I know who has been there recently has had very good things to say, although they are obviously aware of the high crime rate. Where I live (a Portuguese island) everyone has relatives who have migrated to South Africa and/or Venezuela (not exactly certain why it is precisely these two countries). While thousands have come back in the last few years from Venezuela because of the deteriorating conditions there, virtually no one has come back from South Africa.
The best way to describe the situation in South Africa for whites is to use the saying: “Things are not as good and not as bad as they seem”. The pop culture that whites consume in other places in the world is the same for South Africa, that means there are plenty of SJW type whites, to insulate themselves from the realities race and success most whites simply do not engage in politics other than cuckservatism lite (and even that is becoming risque).
As for the poor whites, who would want them, they are white and poor, which means for the establishment they lower than the untouchables of India.
You’re probably mostly right; but on the other hand, even on Germany’s notoriously pc public broadcasting services I’ve seen reports in the past about poor South African whites who live in shantytowns and are basically trapped in South Africa (horrifying situation if you think about it) which weren’t completely without sympathy for the whites. The whole murders of white farmers business has also gained at least some attention even in mainstream media. So I’m not sure if it could really all be covered up if militant black nationalists engage in major anti-white violence.
Just like every PRC leader.
http://en.people.cn/constitution/constitution.html
My impression is most serious Western academics don’t regard the collectivization famines of the early 1930s as intentional genocide like some Ukrainian nationalists claim, so I don’t see where that “officially called genocide” comes from…have there been any resolutions by Western legislatures to that effect (like there have been about the Armenian genocide)?
Well yes, but they’re kind of dumb, and they don’t get that much sympathy outside of their own countries, few people buy their narrative.
I can see where you’re coming from, since collective victimhood is a powerful tool in today’s identity debates…but still, can Russians really commit genocide against other Russians? And is that something Russian nationalists should dwell on? Seems doubtful to me.
Well yes, but you could always say about those crimes that it’s just “normal” murders, without any racial motivation. It might be different if it were undeniably linked to an anti-white political movement.
This seems likely to be a source of trouble in the near future:
Gazprom seeks to halt Ukraine gas contracts as dispute escalates
Iirc there has been a recent step up in the US and US crony attempts to block Nord Stream 2, and some political strife over gas supplies in Ukraine will undoubtedly be used by the usual suspects to try to make trouble for Russia. On the other hand, it can cut both ways depending on how the dispute plays out.
If that is genocide – and it might be – then all of European history is one long genocide. The way it worked in the Middle Ages and all the way through 19th century was that landlords ‘confiscated’ the food, and if the peasants starved, well, too bad, their own problem. Look it up, it used to happen regularly especially during bad harvest years all over Europe. Starvation was ever-present for hundreds of years. We don’t like to recall it because it makes the ‘horrible’ 20th century not that ‘horrible’ by comparison.
Poland and Ukraine were among the most suffering areas. If an economic system is based on what is in effect a ‘genocide’, should we build museums about it? Would anyone take it seriously? The population in Ukraine and Kazakhstan went up between 1918 and 1941, so if there was a ‘genocide’ it was not very genociadial.
In contrast the Irish famine in 1840’s cut population by more than half and even today Ireland has fewer people than before the famine. Genocide? It would be impolite to accuse the British of something like that, it was, of course, ‘more complex’. As we know, ‘complexity’ only exists in the West. Elsewhere it is all very straight-forward and no complexity is ever allowed to muddy up the narrative…
Accepting a Swedish court was a mistake.
Sweden and Poland are architects of the EU Eastern neighborhood policy.
Of course, Swedes would supprt UKR.
From the transhumanist article:
“In a small, white warehouse two hours north of Moscow are 56 dead people who hope to live again. Their bodies are upside down, their blood fully drained from their arteries, as they wait, immersed in negative 196-degree Celsius liquid nitrogen for the next 100 years.”
Amazing what things various people have come up with to deal with their dead. The Fore people in Paupa New Gineau invite relatives over and eat their dead – they save the brains for the womenfolk and children.
Well, all I can say is good luck fellows – hope they can find a way to bring you back otherwise that will have been money not well spent. Not holding my breath though, because there’s no cure for that either.
Also, what happens if the 100 years runs out? Do they pull the plug? Cause that would seriously suck for these guys if it’s discovered like three months after.
But there are people who claim the 1840s famine was a genocide:
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/was-the-famine-genocide-by-the-british-28954929.html
https://www.irishcentral.com/news/proving-the-irish-famine-was-genocide-by-the-british-tim-pat-coogan-moves-famine-history-unto-a-new-plane-181984471-238161151
And it isn’t generally claimed in the West that the collectivization famines were genocide in the sense that Russians deliberately targeted other ethnicities for extermination by starvation…it seems to me the common interpretation is rather that the Soviets (of all ethnic backgrounds) in their quest for modernization waged war against the traditional countryside and didn’t care if their policies killed lots of people (so more of a class issue – privileged urban industrial workers versus peasants regarded as backwards and standing in the way of progress – than an ethnic issue).
It should also be noted that labeling of those famines as genocide is often criticized, at times quite vehemently so, because it supposedly relativizes the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
I missed the detail in the article talking about how the contract can be extended after the first century. I guess they should make sure their legal guardians/heirs pony up the extra bucks.
Also, I guess the article couldn’t help the octopus analogy for Russia either:
“Twenty-first-century transhumanism tends to be rooted in Russia, but it has tentacles all over the world.“
Probably. Not sure what would really be beyond the reach of Washington and its cronies, though.
Ouch! That’s harsh.
But, on reflection, probably fair….
I don’t know what you’re smoking, growing up on American media I learned that there were multiple genocidal campaigns against the Irish from Cromwell to the famine. I was surprised to read more “complex”, “nuanced” ie non-pop-culture accounts were the Irish famine wasn’t presented as a literal genocide and an intentional imperial plan.
The evil white supremacist British empire that genocided the Irish who weren’t considered white is a standard Western pop Marxist culture “truth” that has found a perfect home in America – Americans love to believe bad things about the British aristocracy, Hollywood Jews are all Marxists who hate European empires and Irishmen are well represented in American media and leftist movements.
By the way, there was a famine just after the Irish ones in Finland that killed a higher proportion of the population…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_of_1866%E2%80%9368
…but you’ve never heard of it. There was no one to politicize it. Commies and Finnish ethnonationalists (almost the same thing) tried to turn it into a narrative of Germanic aristocrats and Russian imperial schemers intentionally wanting to limit ethnic Finnish population growth but they lost the Civil War so in our first history writing aristocrats, landowners and the empire were the good guys. If our Reds had won they’d have teamed up with Red Russia and perhaps their narrative of famine-genocide in Finland would have made it to Soviet tropes the way “Irish genocide” has made it to American tropes.
To have a “genocide” you need not only dead people, you need some interested party with financial and cultural influence to craft it into a narrative. (Actually the dead people are optional.)
I don’t know what you’re smoking, . . . By the way, there was a famine just after the Irish ones in Finland that killed a higher proportion of the population
It seems to me that you’re the one who should be careful what he is smoking.
In Ireland the death toll is estimated at 1,000,000 to 1.5 million, out of a pre-famine population of 8 million, which taking the minimum figure represents 12.5% of the pre-famine population.
Still, I will admit that you are absolutely correct that few people know about the Finnish famine, it is certainly news for me. The reason so many Americans know about the Irish famine, of course, is not so much the deaths (by themselves), as that a million Irish emigrated because of the famine, nearly all of them going to the US. And today the Irish-American population is around 35 million (while the Finnish-American population is less than a million, I believe).
Quite perceptive, I agree.
Now for the Irish famine-genocide. In spite of what you claim about the massive Irish influence in Hollywood (?), it is always presented in more gentle, balanced terms than a ‘British genocide of Irish‘. Yes, some Irish nationalists will say it, and of course Marxists are always on a look-out for another genocide, but the general view is more ‘complex’. There are no museums (as far as I know), one doesn’t see chapters in textbooks ‘British genocide of Irish’, etc… There is simply no comparison with Stalin’s genocide of the Ukrainians that is generally stated as an indisputable fact. I have once calculated that the British Empire caused around 200 million additional deaths around the world if one uses the Stalin-like methodology (count the sick, the hungry and the unborn). If Stalin was a bastard (he was), were British leaders of that time also irredeemable bastards? And why don’t we say it?
I didn’t know about the Finnish famine, interesting. I had a friend who was a Finn from Sweden and he claimed that as recently as his parents’ generation in the 50-60’s, Finns in Sweden very heavily persecuted, couldn’t use Finnish language in schools, etc… Is that true?
Magnit’s financials are quite good for a retailer. Net margins of 5% and about as good of a moat as can be got in grocery retailing.
Growth is quite strong even in recent years.
Information here: http://ir.magnit.com/en/
I don’t approve of touting EBITDA (a criminally irresponsible “accounting” metric), but the data are all there.
Retail is a brutal sector but I’m comfortable in investing in it. I had a large Kroger position in 2017 and am a current stockholder in Costco and Sephora (Danish jeweler).
If Russia wants to converge with the advanced countries, it should be touting people like Sergei Galitsky as heroes and role models for Russia’s future.
I realize we’re all alt right here (or almost all of us–Unz Review unfortunately still has some libertarians whose brains seemingly never got the alt right dissident patch) and thus have a critical view of the bourgeoisie, but markets and entrepreneurs matter no matter how much Martyanov and The Faker disagree (who both live in the United States–a country which hero worships entrepreneurs and has very, very little public ownership of capital).
I think we get into distinctions between academic research and the way popular culture presents it. You are right that in academia it is ‘not generally claimed’. But what matters is that politicians, Hollywood and the media have never bothered with being nuanced. On the other hand, at least in the last few years, the Irish famine (or the Bengali famine of 1940’s) are not ever referred to as ‘genocide by the British’.
I find a lot of this talk about ‘genocide’ very politicised and it does relativise it. For example the Bosnia situation – clearly a civil war with atrocities on all sides – has been painted as a one-sided genocide for political reasons, there is even a section on it in the Holocaust museum in Washington. That was done for political reasons, and it has been out of control. Today we have the ‘Rohingya genocide’, etc… This hyper-ventilating devalues true understanding of history. For example, it is hard to argue that armed combatants getting killed (even as POWs) is genocide. But people do for political reasons.
The real problem is the cuck take that genocide is necessarily bad.
The United States owes much of its superiority over Latin America to the successful genocide of the red Indians.
While Karlin for obvious reasons can do nothing but loathe Adolf Hitler and the Nazis for Generalplan Ost, I’m sure he would agree that a successful Generalplan Ost would’ve been very positive for Germans (the world would be impoverished by the loss of Russians of course, but all the other ethnic groups between Germany and Russia strike me as irrelevant).
And this exists in lesser forms as well. Quite clearly the ethnocide of the Ukraine (not physical annihilation, just elimination of the Ukrainian dialect and the absurd idea that an independent Ukrainian culture and nation exist or should exist) would be beneficial for everyone–even Ukrainians.
Such ethnocides were successfully implemented in most Western European nations (ever heard of Low German or Occitan?), and presently China is currently conducting many such ethnocides with useless regional languages and identities.
Nazi racial violence was hugely counter-productive for the German war effort…probably the only way Germany could have defeated the Soviet Union or forced a favorable negotiated settlement – at least after the failure to take Moscow in 1941 – would have been mass enlistment of Soviet peoples on the German side. Kind of hard to do that though when you deliberately starve to death millions of pows and make it more than clear that you intend to enslave or just murder the native population. This was a huge wasted opportunity. Even as it was, despite Hitler’s opposition and German refusal to make any credible promises regarding some sort of future statehood or autonomy for Soviet peoples, an estimated 800 000 Russians (that is ethnic Russians, not members of peripheral peoples like Balts, Chechens, Crimean Tartars etc. who were even more enthusiastic) served in some form in German forces, and the Germans even found a suitable figurehead for a national Russian anti-Bolshevik movement in General Vlasov. Who knows what might have been possible if the goal hadn’t been racially motivated mass killings to make room for Germanic settlers, but merely ending the communist system, some sort of economic influence and German hegemony over Eastern Europe? For the latter objective it might even have been useful to cultivate Jewish communities as allies since they often had some affinity for German culture and were in conflict with native nationalists. So Nazi racial policies were rather self-defeating.
Genocide can “work” of course if you get away with it, like the Turks did, but if you fail it’s probably going to make things much worse for you (and regarding Amerindians in North America, apart from some cases like California, can this really be described as “genocide”? My understanding is Amerindian populations in North America had probably always been smaller than in South America, and in any case were decimated on an almost unimaginable scale by European diseases already in the 16th/17th century, before they came into much contact with English settlers).
I don’t know, are Stalinist crimes a big topic in Western popular culture, and presented as genocide? If so, I must have missed it, can’t think of any Hollywood blockbusters about the “Holodomor” (iirc there was some movie about that a few years ago…but who watched that?). Most Westerners don’t care about those issues and are more likely to regard Ukrainians, Balts etc. as Nazi collaborators in the context of WW2 than as victims of Stalinist repression.
Agree with you about genocide…the term is often used nowadays in such a way that it’s meaningless.
So it was normal in Europe up to the 19th century for armed police to steal all the grain from starving peasants, the streets of London or Berlin had mothers and chldren dying of starvation, etc. etc.?
About 3 million Ukrainians were starved to death in this manner.
In Ukraine, Volga etc. the harvest was not so bad that the people would have starved, if the government hadn’t taken all their food. That is the difference.
You have surpassed your usual level of being disgusting, congratulations.
What difference does it make it if it is ‘armed police’, or landlord with his posse? And, yes they used to take the grain from starving peasants.
It was bad enough for a shortage. In the 1,000 years of history I was talking about it was the same – there was usually just enough food for the peasants, but the landlords took it. So after that, there wasn’t enough food and many peasants starved. Genocide? You tell us…
(I reach higher levels all the time, thank you for noticing…)
You don’t understand the details and so have a false picture both of earlier famines and of the Bolshevik manufactured famines.
Do you have evidence of Lord’s posses taking food from starving peasants?
I looked at some European famines and this stuff wasn’t mentioned. For example:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_famine_de_1693-1694
Government stopped wheat exports to try to relieve it.
No mention of peasants starving to death because Lords took all the food during the Finnish famine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695%E2%80%931697
It was caused by catastrophic harvest.
Czech famines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famines_in_Czech_lands
Caused by grain disease.
The Soviet famine was not caused by grain disease or catastrophic harvest. It was purely mad-made – caused by confiscating grain and food, and exporting enough grain that had been stolen from the starving peasants, to feed 5 million people.
Some of the brighter German generals like Canaris said as much. More than that, the hypocrisy of the Third Reich was also sometimes outright hilarious. I remember reading a book focusing on the German invasion of Poland where Himmler expressed his astonishment that he saw more blonds in Poland than he had in Germany.
Of course, the Germans also snatched hundreds of thousands of Polish children – selected for their supposedly “Aryan” features – and gave them to German foster parents. Some of those are now advancing law suits against the German state in old age. I wish them well, though I think the odds of winning are abysmal since the current German governments can’t really be held responsible.
On top of that, they were not united as a block as it is often portrayed. Many of them genocided each other and sided with various European powers. The French had their own set of alliances vs the English and so on.
That said, there were certainly elements of genocide in the wars against the native Americans, but the debate is whether this was consciously done to them or if this was a byproduct of other policies which were allowed to proceed.
This strikes me as shockingly naïve if not ahistorical. Jews in Eastern Europe were absolutely at the center of the support for communism. Just as they were in the US at the same time. (Largely due to the huge influx of – you guessed it – Eastern European Jews).
It is true that Jews were often hostile to native nationalists – as they are today as well. But cultivating them as a shield against the native population would have turbocharged the notion that Germans are out to exploit you and are willing to buddy up with Jews to do so. It would have been idiotic on so many levels and essentially guaranteed eternal hostility and a very easy way for Stalin, who was no great friend of Jews, to win back a lot of local loyalty.
Well, in a legal sense the federal republic is the successor state to Nazi Germany, but probably the reaction will be to play for time and hope the plaintiffs die before any settlement, like happened with the issues of forced labourers (yes, the German establishment can be quite cynical…which makes the suicidal “humanitarianism” in regards to Afghans, Syrians and Somalis all the more bizarre).
It’s interesting how diverse the Amerindians were linguistically…apparently there were dozens of language families (!) and hundreds of different languages…so ethnically it was much more fragmented than in the old world (iirc the likely explanation is the lack of horses before the arrival of Europeans, and other ecological and technological limitations which hindered formation of larger ethnocultural blocs).
Sure, I don’t doubt that Eastern European communists were vastly disproportionately Jewish…but still, most Eastern European Jews weren’t communists; in any case German exterminationist policy towards Jews wasn’t really rational, even if one has a negative view of Jews.
Regarding Stalin, my impression is that he turned really anti-Jewish only in the late 1940s, getting somewhat paranoid about potential Jewish dual loyalties after the creation of Israel (not much different how he had earlier viewed other ethnic groups like Poles, Finns – or even Koreans – which had ethnic connections to other states). I read an interesting study about Latvia during WW2 a few years ago, and there it was claimed that during the Soviet occupation of 1940/41 the Soviets made a big show of combating antisemitism (unsurprisingly Latvian communist party members were mostly of Jewish or ethnic Russian background…facts the Germans used for their propaganda), with the situation probably being similar in the other Baltic states and former Eastern Poland (don’t know about specific studies for those). This obviously contradicts the view of Stalin’s supposedly persistent antisemitism that is often presented nowadays.
It it is well known that there have been Germans migrating eastwards through history, so there is nothing hypocritical or hilarious of finding Aryans in Poland and beyond.
Aryans belong in Iran or somewhere else in Asia…it’s a meaningless, made up term in a European context.
Every sane country should be developing its own nuclear deterrent as fast as possible.
If you don’t have your own nukes your only option is to choose whose vassal you’re going to be. And you probably won’t even get that choice.
Agreed.
Let us turn this around.
The disappearance of Germans and Swedes such as yourself would a positive for eastern europe and the world in general.
Unless you really feel that herd animal conformity and autism are the wealth of mankind.
The Irish famine is more well known in the west than the holodomor, that is clear to everyone except, I guess, Russians playing the usual whataboutism.
The argument we were given in school was that England exported food while the Irish were starving therefore Deliberate Genocide by the racist captitalist English against the poor colonised Irish. The problem is that The England government had no food supply. It was exported by merchants in Cork and Dublin who were middle class Irish wih no interest in their supposed fellow countrymen in the interior. But a lot of English are Cucks like Tony Blair. They will foist blame for the Irish potato blight, black incarceration rates (Russians love that one too), impoverished third gen Bangladeshis or hurt gay feelings on the country as a whole then weaponise them. The truth is irrelevant to our rulers.
Russians joining in with the usual victm groups to smear western nations is interesting because it shows that a lot of Russians (most?) see the west as The Other, not something Russia is itself part of. In this respect they are like the others (Chinese, Africans, Jews and Muslims) cynically taking advantage of current western weakness.
Not necessarily. There are divisions within white South Africa. The farmers being murdered appear to have a different mentality from the more coastal whites, often Anglos, not Boers. It is hard to know from thousands of km away.
Only the denizens of the Pedoph Isles would invent a whole new gibberish word to bitch about being called hypocrites (they are and you are).
Most people know what the term implies, it implies white with Nordic type physical features. It also pertains to the Indo European people that migrated into places like India and Iran, these people were white but ended up race mixing with the other people living there, so it is not correct to call Iranians Aryans because of all the miscegenation that occurred through the centuries.
The term is not meaningless, the jews really don’t what such things discussed openly, so they attack in every way possible.
I was waiting for an OT thread to ask these questions. These questions are for the whole board but I’m particularly interested in Anatoly’s response so I hope he answers.
Question: In exchange for 10 billion USD tax free would you be willing to:
A) Become a vegan
B) Exchange faces with the ugliest guy in your high school graduating class
C) Give up 6 inches off your height (I don’t know what that is in metric units. This is America, speak English.)
D) Give up alcohol (this is an easy one for Talha).
E) Give up one of your pinky toes (keep in mind this would prevent you from walking normally)
F) Become gay
G) Give up the internet
Here are my answers:
A) No.
B) This is a really tough one. That dude was hideous. I’m gonna say no but not sure that I would actually be able to turn down all that money.
C) Yes. Hell yes.
D) I don’t drink, but I do have two cans of lemonade a day. I would give that up.
E) Yes. Fuck, I would give up an entire foot.
F) No.
G) No.
So when Iranians go out of their way to describe themselves as Aryans at every chance they get, that is also part of the Jewish conspiracy? Are the Iranians working for the Jews or have they just been brainwashed by them?
The government in London was the government of Ireland.
If they wanted to, they could have stopped it.
That is how Russians are treated. As the Other. What did you expect?
Iranians calling themselves Aryan has nothing to do with racial identity, which jews thus don’t really care about. Whatever they describe themselves as, the fact is that Iranians of today are a product of lots of race mixing with non Aryans and thus are not real Aryans.
No to everything except D) (I don’t drink alcohol anyway). You should stop drinking lemonade, it’s goint to rot your teeth.
There are much more important things in life than whoring (because that is what all of those things are in the end) oneself out for money. There is no money in all the universe that one should degrade oneself for, no matter how trivial it is.
Here’s a typical racial classification map by 19th century German ethnographers:
http://images.zeno.org/Meyers-1905/I/big/Wm13610a.jpg
Iranians are considered Aryans, as always, and so are Kurds and Armenians.
“Aryan” was never some word meaning blonde, Nordic or Germanic looks. Not even those Nazi theorists at SS Ahnenerbe tended to use it in that sense, their racial world history theories were about claiming that the original Aryans looked Nordic, not that “Aryan” was some physical description itself. You should probably just stop getting your information from Jewish Hollywood movies.
That’s still kind of dumb since it implies only blond and blue-eyed Nordics are true Europeans/whites with everyone else being some sort of “racial degenerate”. Not a programme most Europeans will get behind (and no, that isn’t just due to “Jewish influence”).
Just because that map was created by some German does not mean that this common mistake of labeling North Africans and Middle Easterners belonging to the same group as Europeans is correct. If you are trying to imply that Iranians would happily have been accepted into Germany as fellow Aryans, that is just nonsense. What Aryan meant was not just some “cultural” identity, it was a very real biological identity.
I never said that only Aryans are European, but I very explicitly do claim that Jews, Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Armenians, etc are not European and not white. A lot of Europeans did support the Third Reich, Hungary, Romania and Italy attacked the USSR with Germany. A lot of other territories such as France, Greece, Belgium were better off being than they are now with regards to the survival of their nations.
A counter-example are those Irish that were already discussed – their language died but it did not turn them into loyal Englishmen. Teaching your language to your declared enemies isn’t necessarily a smart move.
If the Germans had succeeded at killing off languages like Polish, Czech, Ukrainian etc it might have left a big part of Europe German speaking but it’s no guarantee that those newly German speaking people would have identified with Germany. If it had failed at that then you would have resentful anti-German peoples with German language skills to ally with opponents of the German regime in Germany and to ally with whatever foreign enemies Germany still had.
Ironically, if the English had simply left the Irish language alone, they would have eventually learned English anyway in the American age. Arriving at it through that route might have ended up with an English speaking Ireland that doesn’t have an antagonistic attitude with England. Likewise, if Russia had become a world leading capitalist economy in 1917 it might have killed some neighbors like Baltic languages by now even if the hypothetical bourgeois liberal regime had tried to support local identities. Liberal capitalism has turned out to be a stronger force of cultural destruction than any totalitarianism.
Seems unduly harsh.
Personally I didn’t interpret Beckow’s comment as making the usual simplistic leftist argument (for ulterior political and cultural reasons) that there was a British “genocide” of the Irish. I read it as criticising the prevalent hypocrisy of recognising genuine complexities in our own case (or cases where for whatever ulterior purpose sympathy for the authorities is considered appropriate), but ignoring them in other cases.
And based on that interpretation I really can’t do other than accept the criticism as valid, both for British commentators and for the American ones mostly derived from our culture.
It’s a cultural tic that no doubt exists to some extent in all cultures, but is particularly noticeable in the case of British and American cultures because those countries have been so globally dominant for so long (consecutively speaking). It is only partially and situationally counteracted by the Marxist inspired anti-imperialism and ethnomasochism that often reverses the take.
Not in Hitler’s time, but if the Nazis hadn’t lost the war then National Socialism would have eventually evolved into Eurasianism. It was already headed that way by the end.
It’s kind of hard to emigrate and take a few hundred acres of farmland with you, even if it is some of the best in the world.
RE: Changed attitudes toward eradication of whites in SA.
If the extremely slow motion process that has been in place for some years now, coupled with the example of Zimbabwe didn’t register, why exactly would anyone expect a change in attitudes?
We can look at any racial classification map and they’ll all say Iranians are Aryans. I have read a lot of old linguistic and racial books and they all say Iranians are Aryans. I even have even read SS Ahnenerbe documents, literal Nazi racial science, and Iranians are Aryans.
None of the racial science sources say that “Aryan” means blonde, Nordic or whatever. It never meant that. There was a debate over whether the original Aryans – the proto-Indo-Europeans – were northern European looking or something else – and there actually was no consensus on it even by German scientists during the Nazi era but of course the German nationalist movement liked to claim that the original Aryans looked like Germanic people. (We actually now have some genetic data, by the way.)
I can tell what’s going on here – you’re some zogbot “white nationalist” who has watched Nazis in Hollywood movies and decided that you want to be one of those cool Hollywood Nazis. No wonder your pathetic movement is going nowhere. You don’t even have any idea what the Nazis that you idolize believed, all that you know about them comes from Jewish propaganda.
beacuse why do you care about whites in SA, when blacks also murder blacks?
And the answer to this is?
A truly bizarre logic you are using here, exactly what Hollywood movie has “cool Nazis”, they are portrayed as demons – and nothing else.
As for all your supposed documents you have read, trying to claim that Germans and Iranians were both Aryans and thus both the same is rubbish, you are confusing the study of the migration of the Indo Eurpean people into some of the lands they ended up in as being the same as the people that live there today. Do you seriously believe that the likes of Goebbels or Himmler would have happily accepted their daughters marrying some swarthy looking modern day Iranian (take Ahmadinejad for example) and would have certified them as being of Aryan blood? Obviously they would never have tolerated this, nor would anyone else who supported the ideals the Third Reich accept this, the reason being that Iranians are simply not Aryan for those that supported the Third Reich.
Ok, you’re right, I got the death % confused with this other famine in my memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695%E2%80%931697
There was a political attempt to capitalize on this one, too, as the Russians spread the word of how (supposedly) shocked Tsar Peter had been while traveling through Estonia during the famine and the Great Northern War was preceded by Russian propaganda efforts painting Swedish aristocracy as negligent and hostile to peasants.
The war didn’t make Russia very popular, though…
“Saskatchewan became the first jurisdiction in North America and the first province in Canada to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide.[144] The Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor) Memorial Day Act was introduced in the Saskatchewan Legislature on May 6, 2008[145] and received royal assent on May 14, 2008.”
According to this, Russia has every reason to declare Yeltsin’s “reforms” genocide, organized by the United States and the European Union. Accordingly, a law should be introduced punishing the denial of genocide, after which any Pro-Western political forces will go to prison forever (or even immediately to the gallows).
The current authorities will not take such a step (they are too much connected with Yeltsin and still hope to cooperate with the West), but the next generation of politicians will probably take such steps (if of course we will avoid a thermonuclear war).
Completely irrelevant. German racial theorists even recognized gypsies as Aryans, yet they were persecuted.
Again, you don’t even know anything about Nazis besides what you’ve seen in Hollywood movies and Allied propaganda.
Sure, the views of all the people that lived during those times are completely irrelevant… Perhaps you should ask why Gypsies were persecuted if they were considered Aryans, it probably has to do with the fact that they were NOT actually considered to be Aryans. And you should simply stop bothering insulting my intelligence by trying to argue that Gypsies were seen as Aryan by anyone , you are in the same league of people arguing that ancient Egyptians looked like West Africans.
Oh, and don’t forget the jews, no doubt you are now going to claim to know of some writing by a German who claims they are Aryan as well.
Duh. That’s because the Nazis were not obsessed with “Aryans” the way you imagine them to be. One proof of this is that groups that were considered Aryans by their racial scientists could still be outside of the acceptable races.
For example, here are the infamous Nuremberg racial citizenship laws of 1935:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Blutschutzgesetz_v.15.9.1935_-_RGBl_I_1146gesamt.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws#/media/File:Blutschutzgesetz_v.15.9.1935_-_RGBl_I_1147.jpg
They talk all about protecting the purity of German blood and they never even mention Aryans. Here’s a visualization of the classifications:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Nuremberg_laws.jpg
Deutschblütiger = German-blooded. Mischling = “mixed”. They were German nationalists who were mainly concerned with the question of who was sufficiently German by blood and “Aryan” was not even an important enough concept to get a mention in the most infamous racial purity law of all time.
Again, all you know about Nazis is from Allied propaganda where the Nazi regime was presented as a caricature where everyone was constantly obsessed with “Aryan this Aryan that Aryan Aryan Aryan”. Sure, Heinrich Himmler was personally obsessed with ancient Aryans and trying to prove that they were some kind of ancient Germans racially, but his personal bizarre obsessions weren’t German policies even if Allied propaganda wants to equate them.
A, D, E, G
A. Vegetarian would be no sacrifice, vegan would be quite a bit harder but probably doable.
D. A bunch of teetotalers here (you, G_R, Trump for that matter). A sacrifice, but doable.
E. It seems you’ve considerably exaggerated the sacrifice involved:
G. Give up the Internet? It’s great to be in contact with all you guys, of course, but not at that price.
Didn’t Himmler send exepeditions into Tibet to look for the original Aryans and their presumed origin? He took this quite seriously.
The problem is it’s totally unrealistic. No one is going to pay you that much to cut off your pinky toe or make you gay. Besides, how would it be controlled? We tend to think about things in terms of whether we’d be able to cheat. So I cannot fully answer, but maybe I’d accept all except F.
Regarding F. Would it be possible to become celibate? How would it be controlled? Would some heterosexual contacts be accepted, like blowjobs? Would it be okay if I only had blowjobs from supermodels while not having any homosexual sex at all? Again, it’s unrealistic.
Maybe I’d accept F if it meant I only was permitted to penetrate guys only and not women, but wouldn’t have to penetrate guys or allow them to penetrate me and some workarounds would be permissible. While maybe having children with artificial insemination.
I could start a nationalist Facebook or Twitter or something with that money. It’s about saving our civilization, for which I’d need to sacrifice.
I think the April 1933 laws used Aryan for what was acceptable.
Göring told a joke: “What is it that everyone wants to be with an i, but no one without? – Aryan.” (Arisch in German, without i it’s Arsch, meaning arse/ass.)
Actually the only people who have consistently and continuously used the word Aryan (Arya in Sanskrit) and the symbol swastika (also a Sanskrit word) for thousands of years are the Brahmins of India.
You are right that it is foreign and meaningless in Europe.
Aryan = Nordic is a classic example of fake history and pseudo-science that was concocted by crackpot nordicists (Gobineau et al) in the 19th century.
Would you rape and then murder your four year old daughter or niece or nephew if it saved civilization?
This is totally unrealistic. Only a schizophrenic or other mentally ill person could believe such a situation could even exist. It’s impossible even to think about it properly. We’re not evolved to think about such situations. In that it’s reminiscent of the trolley problem, which is also totally unrealistic and so we cannot think about the situation thus presented at all.
No disagreement here. Obviously the Germans would’ve been well served to work with anti-Russian nationalities in the USSR (and anti-communists as well) while the war was on. The Germans were overconfident and were too cocksure of mopping things up in the summer of 1941. I assume overrunning France got their heads.
My only point here is simple. Imagine if today Germany’s eastern border was the Ural Mountains or even the Pacific Ocean. And imagine further that there were 300 million Germans today. That was Hitler’s dream, and I find it hard to fault him for daring to dream.
Karlin has his own alternate history in which a thoroughly modernized and united Russian superpower with 400 million East Slavs exists today. That too is a great dream.
I want to make it clear that I am not anti-Russian, but there is obviously some fundamental antagonism between Germany and Russia simply owing to proximity. And being Germanic rather than Slavic obviously I tend to identify more with the Germans, though I do have a great deal of admiration for Russians.
I didn’t realize that the Finnish population was so small in those days — only 300,000 or so after the famine.
The world in general? Certainly not. I doubt the commenters on this site need me to explain this.
But Eastern Europe? Of course.
The English, for all their merits, never attempted true ethnocides on the celtic fringe. The closest they came was the suppression of various Scottish cultural tropes after the Battle of Culloden, and that lasted only a few decades.
Irish Papists had various legal restrictions until the middle of the 19th century, but Irish Gaelic was never banned. And Britain was relatively late to establishing compulsory public schools (prisons for children), so Irish children weren’t forced to learn English at all for most of history.
Britain’s failure to properly ethnocide the celts still causes Britain issues today. Look at Scottish nationalism for instance. Objectively it’s as ridiculous as Ukrainian or Canadian nationalism, and yet it’s a thing.
Beyond that we’re simply talking tactics.
You are Finnish and have some interesting things to say about Finland’s history–I read all your comments. If Sweden hadn’t succumbed to Russia then Finland would still be Swedish today. And ultimately Finland would have been ethnocided which would be to the advantage of both Sweden and Finland (note: not recommending such a policy today–Finland has proven itself and now English is what you should learn).
No.
Then we shall agree to differ. I find it overwhelmingly likely that everybody here will at some time in their life be presented with the offer for $10 billion in exchange for giving up their pinky toe or being gay.
That’s absolutely the deal. If you don’t want to get with dudes, you don’t have to. It’s just that from now on you will only be attracted to men, not to women and you will have a much better fashion sense and will become obsessed with working out. You will also lose interest in sports if you have any to begin with.
Hell, you can even keep sleeping with women if you want to, it just won’t do anything for you anymore.
You can’t cheat, no. If you try to eat an animal product you will be physically unable to do so. Same with alcohol. You also don’t have to cut off your toe, it will just disappear and there will be no pain.
The reason that I picked 10 billion is because it is enough to have whatever luxury you want plus never having to work again. I don’t care about the cars, the mansions, the women (if it wasn’t the gay one) or any of that stuff but I would love to just know that I never had to work. Working blows.
I’m surprised nobody is interested in switching faces with the ugliest guy from their high school. For me it’s a hard one cause that guy made Quasimodo look like David Beckham, but if it was just a typical fug guy it really isn’t a big deal. With 10 billion women will be flocking to you know matter what you look like so you guys must be really vain.
Proximity? They have not been neighbors since the late 1910s.
Enjoy your trip to Britain Anatoly. Meanwhile in Poland……….60 deaths from a couple of days of cold weather……..a catastrophic failure of the authorities to protect their people. 10? Acceptable. 20?-not great…but 60? Lays bare the myth of “subjugated” durinmg the Soviet times…..this thing NEVER happened to their population during the Soviet era when similar cold-snaps occured…pathetic. Instead of the pseudo-catholic pricks in their insitutions demolishing monuments to those brave ,courageous men from Russia who liberated and saved them from destruction 73 years….these idiots should do more planning to protect their population
Part of the problem is that you are talking about an amount that brings real power, so the issue is rather complicated by questions of duty and sacrifice (maybe that’s intentional), as rT pointed out.
Perhaps it would be interesting to compare answers to the same question with the amount set at, say, $10m. At that figure it brings personal comfort and security that is presently unavailable to the vast majority, but isn’t enough to really change society. [Median household wealth is around £104,000 per adult in the UK, but even for someone who already has much higher wealth than that it’s probably largely tied up in their house value and an extra $10m is still likely to make a huge difference in lifestyle, quality of life and financial security. At the 99th percentile wealth per adult is about £1.4 million. ]
Money isn’t a big issue for me at my stage in life – I’m not desperately short of it and the main concern is how much to leave to various offspring and how best to achieve that while legally avoiding as much as possibly of the inevitable government theft. But I certainly would find ways to spend or give away $10m if it appeared in my bank account, and very much enjoy doing so. So if that were the amount I might say yes to all except F, mostly because none of them seem like things I’d desperately miss once they were gone. (A – pretty miserable admittedly but probably bearable with some stoicism, B&C – mostly vanity issues which are less of a concern once you’re mature, D – not a problem as I’m solely a social drinker, E – not a pleasant prospect but I suspect as noted above it wouldn’t really have much long term impact, G – I can always find another hobby….I can stop any time.)
But if you are talking about $10b I’d have to consider the issue of duty and sacrifice as well. The devil might well be in the details. It would be a serious dilemma.
And then there’s always the old joke to worry about:
Now We’re Just Haggling Over the Price
They were neighbors as well from 1939-1945.
Or perhaps 1994, which is when the Russians finally left Germany. And note–not BLAMING Russia here. Obviously the Soviet triumph over Germany was the greatest victory in Russian history, greater than even Yuri Gagarin or expelling Napoleon (and, ofc, my boy Karl XII).
And prior to that, as you hint at, they were long neighbors–or rather the Kingdom of Prussia was.
Germany and Russia historically have both expanded into the territories of lesser slavs (Russians being by far the greatest slavs) and frequently encountered and fought each other as a result.
Today such a scenario is ridiculous (birth rates too low, returns to violence too small, Germans too cucked) but for the past millennium it has been a fact of life.
They do emigrate, though. A country that actively welcomed them with first world standards would probably get a lot of them.
D) I don’t really drink(2 beers a year do not count). Giving it up would be easy.
I think I found his answers here.
Because Nazis insisted on owning Poland.
Hardly, their primary enemies were their neighbors or themselves, not each other.
Just compare how many wars Russians fought against Swedes or Turks and how many wars they fought against German states.
For most of the past millennium the area between Germany and Russia was dominated by Poles.
That was a fact of life and Poland is still the most important nation in that area.
Well if that’s all you mean by it then it’s not a particularly big deal anyway. More an issue for my wife than for me, I’d say.
Part of being married is regularly seeing people you are sexually attracted to and not shagging them even if the opportunity arises. I’ve managed that for most of my life already. What’s the big deal?
You would know that you were gay and hence not a real man. I couldn’t live with it.
You’re right that Sephardic Jews are not white or European genetically.
Ashkenazi “Jews”, however, are heavily Italian on a widespread basis. This study found that on the maternal side, so-called Ashkenazi Jews are on average EIGHTY PERCENT Italian. That means an average 40% italian overall.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/10/08/ashkenazi-jewish-women-descended-mostly-from-italian-converts-new-study-asserts
Only Ashkenazi jews’ paternal lineage was found to be mostly middle eastern / near eastern.
Finally, it appears that most Ashkenazi Jews also have Germanic or Slavic genes. (I will look for some recent genetic study on this). They didn’t merely adopt fake German, Polish, Ukrainians, and Russian names during those centuries living among white European Gentiles outside Italy.
So the Ashkenazi “Jew” is typically half or a bit more than half white european, i.e. about half or a bit less than half Middle/Near Eastern genetically.
This means that any alleged or implied innate superiority of Ashkenazi “Jews” — or less drastically, the genetic component of the persistent Jewish pattern of achievement and advantage — is attributable in substantial part to their white European genes.
First, Ashkenazi “Jews”, you’re welcome 😉
Second, whassup my bruthas and sistas (wish more of you thought of us white European people in light of our kinship).
Ok. I think maybe you are a little insecure.
For me that wouldn’t be a concern because the problem with “being gay” (in the sexual attraction sense rather than the generally derogatory sense) is doing homosexual stuff, not some kind of identity related theoretical issue.
And Stalin agreed with them.
And that’s fine honestly, I don’t really see what the point of Poland is.
What has Poland ever given the world?
Germany and Russia are clearly more important than Poland so if they want to destroy it I am totally okay with that.
A Russian should answer this question, but that said what about the film about Alexander Nevsky?
Or take a look at this music video from the Russian hard rock band Alisa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFIe68R8-tQ
It certainly seems like Russians are very proud that they defeated Germany in what was frankly the greatest contest of all time.
Poland is a joke. The Swedes crushed them in the 17th century (the Deluge) and then the hapless Poles went on to suffer four partitions by their more powerful neighbors.
IN 2000’S ROBERT MUGABE OF ZIMBABWE HAS CONFISCATED LANDS OF WHITE FARMERS AND WHEN HE WAS REMOVED FROM PRESIDENCY LAST YEAR .ONE OF THE FIRST ACTS OF NEW GOVERNENT IS TO RESTORE THOSE LANDS TO WHITE FARMERS.IN BETWEEN THEESE EVENTS ,ZIMBABWE SUFFERRED HUGE INFLATION AND OTHER ECONOMIC EFFECTS.I THINK WHITE PEOPLE HAVE LOT OF POWER
Out of curiosity – what do you think of the Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic cultures or nations? Should they all be combined into Swedish? Or should Norwegian and Icelalandic be eliminated and assimilated with Danish? Historically, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark spent more time within one state than did Ukraine and Russia. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are more closely related to each other than Ukrainian is to Russian.
Letting a far smaller nation occupy much of your territory and losing 20+ million people to this small nation is not really a “greatest victory.” It’s certainly a victory, and it’s understandable why Russians would build it up and glorify themselves (the truth of all those lives needlessly wasted due to the leadership’s and system’s incompetence is not easy), but objectively speaking it represents barely recovering from some major bungling, surviving due to the suicidal opponent making some mistakes.
They’d be brought back most as zombies with no personality. The high-level brain structures have already deteriorated by the point when death is officially pronounced. Freezing a person whose “self” is still intact is legally considered murder, and no one wants to go to jail, so (unlikely) zombies-to-be is all we get. I wonder if countries where euthanasia is legal could make freezing alive one of the accepted methods along with the usual poisoning. Now that would be at least a little promising for those who hope to be brought back as the same continuous person.
I support a Nordic federation with each Nordic nation preserving its identity and language within the federation.
We only spent a bit more than one century in the same state, don’t b.s. And other than Iceland (too small) every Nordic country has produced something of significance.
The Ukraine on the other hand is a complete joke. I cannot take people seriously who advocate for its existence.
Why would you want to be some mediocre loser country instead of part of a great power?
the post-modern religion of genocidianity needs to be dismatled, not forked, or it’s 1066 all over again. (the bronze age stuff needs to be dismantled, for that matter, too.)
That’s not so. 90 million Germans, compared to 90 million Russians. Of course in the Soviet Union living not only Russian, but the population of “great” Germany and its satellites and colonies surpassed the population of the USSR.
However ruled not the population but economy:industry of Germany (only Germany) by volume was superior to the Soviet industry in 1.5 times. Realistically (given technical level) superiority was much more
surprisingly idiotic statement
You seem to get all your information from Wikipedia. That’s not a good source. One example I can give you is 1830’s famine in eastern Hungary/Slovakia/Sub-Carpathian Ukraine. Heavy rains and poor harvests caused grain shortage, prices sky-rocketed, landlords with gendarmes roamed villages taking all food they could get their hands on. People starved, landlords sold to intermediaries (mostly Jewish) and made a killing. Some peasants retaliated by burning down a few manors – and again gendarmes suppressed it. This was one of the triggers for the 1848 abolishing of feudal responsibilities in Hungary.
Similar acts are well documented in the late 18th century France, 30-year war in Germany, in the Balkans by Ottomans etc… Wikipedia is not in the business of describing the feudal era too critically (it lasted legally until late 19th century in most of Europe). The focus of Wiki is on the 20th century atrocities, they seldom ask why were most people so pissed off that they went bloody mad about any landlords, intermediaries, etc…
There is also the silly modern Western mentality of pretending that somehow we are all descendants of knights and lords, that it was all about chivalry and sword fights. It wasn’t, the atrocities and the revenge in the 2oth century didn’t happen in a vacuum.
in some form – as slaves. it’s a little known fact, but Soviet troops (against orders of the military command) in similar way use the German prisoners, who as a result served in the red army as Jivi.
That is one of the more vacuous responses I have seen here.
Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,N,Y
Honestly hilarious, but you should have made the amount lower to make the decision more difficult. Maybe like 5 million or something.
Peace.
So in this thread you have:
The more you post, the more mentally unstable you come across.
Don’t you live in the US? These autist LARPers are hilarious.
Are the schools in your country that bad?
Norway was united to Denmark from around 1300 until 1814, when it was handed over to Sweden. That’s longer than any part of Ukraine was united to Russia.
And Iceland was part of Denmark or Norway from 1260 until 1944.
So when will Sweden apply to become part of Russia, or the USA?
Interesting, I didn’t know about Saskatchewan, thanks. I don’t think some Canadian province is that important though, obviously due to Ukrainian lobbyism in multiculti Canada, not to any widespread interest in the issue.
So you admit that this famine wasn’t caused by the government taking grain from peasants, but by a grain shortage caused not by the government but by poor harvest, flooding, etc. And about 40,000 died at that time.
You are comparing this to government setting too-high grain quotas, taking grain from the peasants themselves during a naturally non-famine year, on a scale that resulted in about 3 million deaths in Ukraine and a similar number elsewhere in the USSR..
USSR had a population of 170 million in 1939 (I am not including the Balts and western Ukrainians, who were newly occupied and resistant).
Germany (including Austria and Sudetenland) had a population of 79 million in 1939.
There was active and bloody resistance to German rule so these regions can be considered a minus rather than plus. And also Germany was in a fight with Britain and later the USA.
So in addition to having to conquer and occupy all of Europe, and still fighting the Brits, Germany invaded the USSR who had over twice the population, and managed to capture much of the country and bled 20+ million Soviets.
Epic poor performance by the Soviet regime. Really pathetic.
German Empire with satelit had 250 million in 1941 (of which 90 million Germans with Volksdeutsche)
These regions gave Germany in abundance soldiers (including many volunteers), resources and equipment. The resistance compared to this was negligible
Rather Europe (with its huge population and gigantic industrial power) invaded the Soviet Union
Of course it was an important factor, but it was fully manifested only after Stalingrad. Before Stalin fought with the enemy who had a very large superiority
Not likely. Sweden did not have the means to do that without Finns just swapping loyalty to Russia.
Sweden’s hold in Finland was always based on cultivating a Finnish loyalist class. Finns were never subjugated in the sense of having the native Finnish landowning class dismantled. To have the kind of power to attack the Finnish language in the inland Sweden would have needed to conquer Finland in a way that would transfer control of the inland from Finnish landowners to Swedes and starting a war against Finns in the East would have just given Russia a perfect opportunity to step in.
Finland was always the kind of a colony where a significant fraction of the native population benefited and was given various privileges. Of course that means Finns were a bitterly divided people and could never have effective unified nationalism. It’s a very effective strategy to hold a territory and those Finns with privileges were extremely loyal to the Swedish King, generally more loyal than ethnic Swedes in Finland were.
By the way, during the Russian period knowledge of Russian was spreading and welcomed by ethnic Finns since it was a great opportunity to get past Swedish attempts at control… until one day the Russians decided to make studying Russian obligatory. Then it became a matter of pride to refuse to speak Russian. If Russia hadn’t tried to force russification, Finland might never have even become rebellious, might still be a part of Russia and, ironically enough, might be Russian speaking today.
You seem to have this idea that it’s easy for a state to just kill a language but most of the successful examples have been really tiny minority languages or changing a very closely related language so that it’s effectively just standardizing a dialect. Most attempts to force a language change have been failures that led to loss of control in long quiet territories, ethnic minorities siding with enemies of the dominant ethnicity and so on.
White South Africans will only leave if the economy collapses ala Venezuela however I suspect the Boers ( a majority at least ) will not leave nor do I think they’ll meekly lay down, There is already in S Africa the Suitlander ( excuse the spelling ) movement which numbers 800,000 members and is preparing for just such a scenario ( National collapse ) they are prepared motivated and committed to defending themselves. Perhaps we’ll see a Boer State emerge along the Bosnia model.
I am not strictly in favor of the abolition of Poland and the Baltic states. I am simply stating that they are irrelevant, and if Germany or Russia want to abolish them I have no problem with that. They don’t offer anything to the world.
The existence of Canada and Austria on the other hand is outright offensive and they should be eliminated immediately.
And yes, I not only live in America but was born here, which is irrelevant to this discussion. Anyone in any country can see that Canada is a fake country that does not merit indpendence for instance.
BTW, you screwed this up:
79 million in Germany, 108 million in the Russian part of the USSR. But if you add central Asia, Ukrainian SSR (not hostile Galicia), etc. you get 170 million.
You mean newly-occupied territories such as Poland or France that required occupation forces and that had some sort of resistance movements.
Again, this makes the Soviet effort look even worse. Not only did the invading Germans have half the population of the Soviets whom they invaded, but this smaller-nation was also busy occupying Europe when it invaded.
Although I will admit a mistake: I didn’t mention the Hungarian and Romanian allies. Still, altogether it was about 2:1 population advantage to the Soviets.
So you claim. I don’t blame you. The waste of life must be excused somehow. There were how many German troops occupying France? 100,000? 200,000? And how many French volunteers. There was a “Charlemagne” SS division with up to 11,000 troops. And then you have Poland…
Vlasov had about 120,000 Russians fighting for Germany. You will claim that this shows even more German numeric superiority. The reality is that a large number of its own citizens willing to fight for the enemy demonstrates how pathetic the Soviet regime was.
Now you are goalpost shifting. Denmark-Norway is not the same thing as the Kalmar Union, nor is Sweden-Norway. The three Scandinavian countries (or four if you include Iceland) were only united from 1397 to 1523.
And citing schools, really?
What kind of cuck are you?
Schools are prisons for children and teachers are disgusting parasites who picked child abuse as a career.
I cannot believe you would introduce schools in an an argument, and not only should you be ashamed of yourseld but you must apologize to us all immediately.
I am familiar with the Suitlanders and yes they are preparing to protect themselves against the coming chaos, And no they won’t leave nor will they roll over and give up. There is an English language website alk about them just Google Suidlanders
Eh, what exactly does Sweden offer to the world? Being a “humanitarian superpower” and spreading her legs for every Somali that comes along?
Not trying to be offensive, but it’s kind of odd that you’re dissing even a major country of almost 40 million like Poland that has 1000 years of national history and has potential to be a mid-sized European power…it’s hard to see how Sweden is supposed to be superior…
@Jaakko Raipala
A well thought out and interesting response, but I’m not sure it addresses my actual point. It’s mainly a comment on Finnish history.
And I didn’t say ethnocide is easy, just that it can be beneficial. Obviously ethnocide is quite difficult, hence why it has so often failed.
I gave you one example. You can find literally dozens more around Europe in the last few hundred years. Your distinction between a ‘government‘ and landlords is artificial – power is power, and the gendarmes who assisted the landlords were working for the government.
You argue disingenuously, as if the reality didn’t matter, only the way you cherry-pick facts and frame them. One more time: the so called genocide-famine in Soviet Union in the 1930’s was similar to what European peasants had to live with for 1,000 years of feudal lords. The details were different, the weapons and tools more evolved, but the basic principle of people with power taking food from peasants was the same. If we call one a ‘genocide‘ then a lot of European history is also a rolling genocide. I can show you villages that were wiped out by famine and the local lords did just fine. It was ugly, and so was 1930’s in the Soviet Union. But to demonise one and mindlessly ignore – or even celebrate – the other one is dishonest. You seem quite dishonest in your posts here, a man with an agenda not seeking the truth.
I am not offended, these are exactly the types of discussions we should be having.
Sweden has given the world Alfred Nobel, Gustav Dalen, Ivar Kreuger, Axel Wenner-Gren, Count Folke Bernadott, LM Ericsson, Volvo, IKEA, SKF, and much more.
The Swedes have produced extraordinary things far exceeding their numbers.
What has Poland done? I can’t even think of a single notable Polish achievement.
It’s too easy for we “nationalists” to get caught up in thinking every country has some inherent right to exist.
Correct. And not only Boers. A friend visited some (Polish) relatives in South Africa (they had settled there in the 70s IIRC) and was impressed by the stockpile of weapons this and other families kept.
Unlike English, or others, Boers are natives – settled hundreds of years ago, only a few decades after the Zulus came down.
You seem to have this idea that it’s easy for a state to just kill a language but most of the successful examples have been really tiny minority languages or changing a very closely related language so that it’s effectively just standardizing a dialect.
I agree with you on this, to me it’s quite impressive how historically repressed languages (Catalan, Czech, etc.) managed to survive and then revive.
I don’t know, is IKEA really supposed to be a sign of national excellence? That’s a bit like saying the US is great because of Walmart.
Sure, the Swedes do have some achievements to be proud of like their aviation industry. But frankly, it does seem to me that they suffer from a seriously inflated sense of their own importance (either in the leftie do-gooder sense of “We’re a humanitarian superpower and lecturing everyone else!”, or in a racialist-nationalist sense of Nordic superiority). In reality Sweden is a country of fairly limited importance where not much interesting has happened for the last 200 years. It’s hard to see how European civilization would have been much poorer if Sweden had never existed.
They [Poland, Baltic States] don’t offer anything to the world.
Sorry, but this is total and utter rubbish. The justification of a people is not what they offer to the world but what they offer to themselves. Poles and Balts have every bit as much right to be part of the world as Germans, Russians and Swedes, and anybody else for that matter.
And the example was a failure.
Again – cause was natural event, not human action. Completely different from the Soviet artificial famine.
How many dozens? And why “few hundred years?” Technology should prevent mass deaths in the middle of the 20th century in a way that it could not in 1700.
Do not confuse me for yourself. In various discussions your dishonesty and arguing in bad faith have been revealed. It’s a well-established pattern.
Example of your dishonesty. How often during a non-famine year did government (or noble) forces take all the food from the peasants on such a scale that millions of them died? We aren’t talking about a catastrophic harvest during which it was every man for himself, and ones with the guns or swords survived while those without perished. A normal harvest, but someone decided to take all the grain and by this action to starve the peasants. Examples? Try to be honest for once, it is hard for you, I know.
Irish has some elements of it. The potatoes died, which is why the Irish peasants starved. But there were other grains around them that could easily have been given to them and they weren’t. For this situation to have been analogous to the Soviet one, it would have been normal potato harvest, but the Brits went around taking all the potatoes from Irish people’s houses, forcing them to starve.
There was a proposed idea that the ancient Aryans could have evolved into a super intelligent and strong race in the harshest region in the world and then spread around the world to become shadows of their former selves by mixing with all sorts of people. I don’t think they found evidence…
Himmler sponsored a lot of expeditions that mixed competent botanists, linguists and the like with crazy occultists who were just making stuff up. For example, Himmler hired this guy to do work expeditions in the Soviet Union:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yrj%C3%B6_von_Gr%C3%B6nhagen
I read his book (which unfortunately only exists in Finnish) which details his life as a living /pol/ meme in Nazi Germany creating blonde hair prevalence charts and trying to prove that Finns are related to Aryans (and not Mongols). “Aryan” indeed did not mean “blonde” or “Nordic” in SS Ahnenerbe as blonde and Nordic looking Finns were not considered Aryans but swarthy Iranians and gypsies were.
That book has some weird shit. Himmler wanted his scientists to work with characters like Karl Maria Wiligut who believed the pagan magic being uncovered could be actually used to win wars and von Grönhagen got stuck having to either perform naked pagan rites for his mystic circle or risk getting fired from the lucrative position for offending Himmler’s spiritual adviser.
Schools are prisons for children and teachers are disgusting parasites who picked child abuse as a career. I cannot believe you would introduce schools in an an argument, and not only should you be ashamed of yourself but you must apologize to us all immediately.
You really do have serious problems. Modern schools may be disastrous in many cases, I don’t disagree with this. But schools can be a very positive thing, they certainly were in my day. I have great respect for (most) of my teachers, calling them “disgusting parasites” is truly sick.
Obviously in your case schools must have had a very negative influence, but I think I can safely assert that this wasn’t the case for most people here.
Were Norway and Denmark united from c.1300 to c.1800 or not? That’s 500 years. The eastern parts of Ukraine were united to Russia from c. 1650 until 1990 – 390 years.
If you are going to play a game about the type of union, until c. 1770 Ukraine was an autonomous Hetmanate and after 1917 it was briefly independent and then the Ukrainian SSR, so full union with Russia only lasted 147 years.
I can’t even think of a single notable Polish achievement.
Pierogis
it’s quite impressive how historically repressed languages (Catalan, Czech, etc.) managed to survive and then revive.
And that’s not even mentioning Hebrew.
And as I remember 9 million Volksdeutsche
of which 80% are Russians. But if from this number, remove the peasants who had no national consciousness (in contrast to the Germans whose brains have been washed for a long time)….
But if you add Finland, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia…
I can’t say anything bad about the poles, but the economic power of occupied Poland worked for Germany. And since 1944, the Wehrmacht began to mobilize poles from the Western regions of Poland.. The occupied European countries worked willingly or unwillingly for Germany (with the exception of the Balkans).
The red army captured 22,000 French. But the main thing was of course the economic potential of France
No. Unlike European volunteers (who fought very well), the Vlasov army was formed from prisoners of war, seeking to avoid death in concentration camps. This “army” could not fight and did not fight, and was in fact a waste of resources. The number of this army you are as it seems greatly overstated
If you’re talking about Russians, it’s a myth. People who want to fight for Germany was negligible. But if you are about such as the Crimean Tatars? Well, Stalin dealt with them (an event that Europe mourn to this day)
Yes, Wal-Mart is great. Only a great people could create Wal-Mart.
Your other comments on Swedes aren’t wrong, but do bear in mind the country is quite small. On a per capita level the country’s achievements are highly impressive, though as usual probably outdone by the Swiss.
You are getting things completely backwards.
Yes, obviously Poles and Balts have an interest in remaining Polish and Baltic. You’d have to be an idiot (or a liberal) to think otherwise.
But do those of us who are not Polish or Baltic have an interest in those countries existing?
Cool dude, doubling down on your goal post shifting. This is leading to a really productive conversation.
There is more to it than formal political association.
There is no independent Ukrainian culture of note, and the Ukrainian “language” is only a dialect.
I could spend quite a lot of time insulting Norway and Denmark, but they’re genuinely distinct from Sweden.
Not so with the Ukraine–it’s a 100% fake country and people who defend its existence are almost always wrongists. The country was fucking invented by WW1 German generals ffs.
If you’re new to the concept of wrongism, it means you genuinely prefer being incorrect–generally for emotional reasons.
And you’re treading into the dangerous terrain of wrongism.
Don’t you want to be right?
Stockholm syndrome is a condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity.[1] These feelings, resulting from a bond formed between captor and captives during intimate time spent together, are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims. Generally speaking, Stockholm syndrome consists of “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.”[2]
I read somewhere that Sweden has the largest military industrial complex in the world, per capita.
That and being instrumental in stopping the Turks at Vienna – that’s gotta count for something…
Peace.
“Savings could be achieved by directly reducing wages ….(such as) a reduction in the average weekly salary of hand weavers in Bolton from 33 shillings and 14 pennies in 1795 and 14 shillings in 1815 to 5 shillings and b pennies in 1829-1834.“* In fact, in the post-Napoleonic period there was a steady decline in the level of wages. But there is a physiological limit to such reduction, otherwise the workers had to die of hunger, what happened — 500 000 of the weavers died of starvation.”
E. J. Hobsbawn’s “the Age of revolutions”
Translation from Russian-I unfortunately have not seen
English original. Because of this, I’m not sure about weavers, but there is no doubt that the industrial revolution in Western Europe was carried out monstrous methods, and cost orders of magnitude more lives than Stalin’s industrialization.
Saab Bofors definitely produces quality military equipment for export.
Peace.
So says a guy who apparently doesn’t know much about Scandinavian history despite being a Scandinavian, who has never heard of Copernicus, etc.
Ukrainian language is further from Russian than Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish are from each other, so if it is a dialect, so are each of those.
So says a guy who apparently doesn’t know much about Scandinavian history despite being a Scandinavian, who has never heard of Copernicus, etc.
The main political party in western Ukraine was called a Ukrainian party and was around since the 1890s. World War I started after 1890s. Prior to that, there were Little Russian organizations and a movement, with a similar ideology, that was around since the late 1700s which is about when all the other modern nationalisms started. The Little Russians were very clear in stating they were not Great Russians (modern Russians) and were as much of a separate nation as Great Russians.
Claims of a Marxist.
I haven’t seen corroboration of mass deaths from starvation in England at that time.
The reality about living conditions was different:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/
From 1870 there was malnutrition, but not actual mass starvation.
So tens of millions died of starvation in England, France, Germany during industrialization? How has this secret been kept for so long?
1054, I meant.
What???!?!?!
Why are you sticking up for the USSR?
So your argument in favor of the Ukraine is that some Ukrainians themselves are wrong and have wrong views?
Powerful take.
Official Poland tally so far:
*Winged Hussars at the Battle of Vienna
*Copernicus
Good stuff, keep it up Poland fans.
Can anyone justify the lesser countries I also attacked? What has Slovakia ever given the world?
Is that some sort of plea that Russia and the West should cooperate (not to repeat the split between Byzantium and Latin Europe), and that religion needs to go?
Almost like esoteric writing…
*Polonium
stopping the Turks at Vienna
A lot of good that did us, considering the current “invasions.”
Then you can also count Russians outside Russia.
Since the context here is view of self as part of the Russian political entity, many of the rest (Tatars, etc.) would also count. Chechens probably wouldn’t, but that’s a small percentage.
If you want to add allies, then UK and USA more than compensate for these countries.
So you are back to a nation of 79 million slaughtering and almost defeating one of 170 million.
Even better. So Germany was wasting resources on Vlasov, occupying all of Europe, fighting the British and the Americans, and still managed to kill 20+ million Soviets and nearly defeat the massive Soviet Union. Terrible Soviet performance.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Multiple Bugs Bunny cartoons over many Saturdays drilled this principle into my head.
But hey, you gotta give them credit, at least they aren’t trying to exacerbate the problem.
Peace.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
That’s not funny, Talha, some things are not meant to be joked about.
“A cruel tax and trade-usurious exploitation of the peasantry (in India) had caused widespread hunger . If 1825-1850. the famine twice struck the country and kill 0.4 million human lives, in 1850-1875 famine killed 5 million, in 1875-1900. — 26 million.”
(ИСТОРИЯ ВОСТОКА IV Восток в новое время (конец XVIII — начало XX в.) Книга 2)
This is just one episode. Modern industrial civilization is built on bones, and it was built by methods more monstrous than those that Stalin used.
I wouldn’t go quite that far but complsory public education was a seriously bad idea.
If inside the borders of the Soviet Union – no doubt. If the Russians outside the Soviet Union, then these “non-Soviet” Russian pointless to consider, since Stalin could not use these people. While Hitler could use and used the European volksdeutche.
However, all these manipulations will not change anything fundamentally. Well, let’s count 100 million Russians (against 90 million Germans) – what will it change? Even if you add the Kazan Tatars, Mordva, Karel, etc it will not change anything. At least a quarter of these “Russians” consisted of peasants deprived of the national identity.
Troops of the US and UK fought on the Eastern front in 1942?
In 1944-45
Powerful take.
The industrial revolution began 100 years earlier. After 1870 there was no famine in Europe, but in the colonies hunger killed tens of millions.
How English common people were exploited in the era of the first steam engines, it’s no secret – see for example the trilogy of Fernand Brodel about the Genesis of Capitalism. There is no doubt that the number of victims amounts to millions. But the main horror was” transferred ” to colonies. 100 million people is a realistic estimate of the victims of European industrialization.
You can add Kazaks, eastern Ukrainians, and others who were not disloyal and you get back to 170 millions.
Where they fought is irrelevant. So Germany was fighting on two fronts, had half the population of USSR, was occupying Europe and dealing with resistance movements, and still managed to kill 20+ million Soviets, grab huge territories, and almost win the wear. Pathetic Soviet performance.
So did tens of millions die in Europe of famine 100 years earlier? Yes or no?
Colonialism is different from industrialization. America had no such colonies. Did tens of millions of Americans die of famine during industrialization? How about Germans? Tens of millions dead Germans? Sweden industrialized. How many millions Swedes died?
You are saying that in the 20th century Soviets treated their own people like 19th century British or Belgians treated Africans or Bengali peasants. I guess they were colonizers then, and some pathetic modern Russians celebrate their own “colonizers” – something Indians don’t do.
So did tens of millions of Englishmen die of famine during the era of the first steam engine?
You can add 170 million non-German population of the Reich to 90 million Germans
Well, in the words of Churchill, the British 1942 fought against 2 German divisions, the Soviets against the 200. Two fronts Yes
Propaganda slogan contest? Come on
So a United Europe was defeated by the Soviet Union which had one and a half times less the population, and 4 times less industrial capacity. And all thanks to the fact that Stalin took away grain from the village scum, and thereby built factories to create tanks
The real question is what resources did the Soviets have after the first 4 months of Barbarossa? By December they had lost half their food supply, more than half of their industry and 1/3 of their manpower. So really it was ~90 million Germans versus ~120 million Soviets.
It wasn’t an even fight because the Germans had to deal with a blockade and a second front plus the US/UK keeping to Soviets alive with food and material for the first two years, but the manpower difference between the two was not nearly as lopsided as it appeared on paper.
oh absolutely. even if ones toolset is limited to considerations of an impeding invasion and full scale mobilization, good managers matter a lot. maybe they just don’t trust their loyalties.
Didn’t care for Magnit in particular so far, retail is a weird sector in general imo but I got interested bc. of the VTB purchase. VTB is also a stakeholder in the developing drama around another big retailer/producer in the Balkans facing bankrupcy – Agrokor. Magnit was also in talks to buy the retail units of Agrokor in Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia during last year. Maybe VTB has the cash and ambitions to conquer the whole region and the board didn’t share Galitskys vision for smaller but more robust market positions in Russia, where it is being chased by Alfa
On the managerial bright side, it seems VTB has some expertise in retail – VTB Capital’s Alexei Makhnev has been an independent director on Magnit’s board for several years.
I am sure there is an interesting story behind it that will unravel in the coming weeks.
Of course not, for Hebrew was neither repressed, nor did it survive. It was “revived” as a dead language by the early Zionists.
What exactly does this refer to? Only things I can think about is the claim that capital accrued from the slave trade and West Indian sugar plantations and the like was necessary to kickstart industrialization (which is a very controversial claim and not generally accepted), or maybe the decline of the native textiles industry in India and several major famines which are blamed on British policies.
Colonial atrocities in the later 19th/early 20th century would seem to be irrelevant for industrialization (which already had largely happened in Western Europe), indeed it is often claimed that the colonies acquired then weren’t economically useful for colonial powers.
The number of deaths from hunger in the British Isles between 1770-1870 was several million. In the entire British Empire – tens of millions. How many people died of starvation in the whole of Europe, 1770-1870? This will obviously be a seven-digit number.
Very funny. But it is an undeniable fact that Europe’s industrialization (which began in Britain) has claimed tens of millions of victims. Maybe a hundred million or more.
One episode (one of many) which I cited above:
“A cruel tax and trade-usurious exploitation of the peasantry (in India) had caused widespread hunger . If 1825-1850. the famine twice struck the country and kill 0.4 million human lives, in 1850-1875 famine killed 5 million, in 1875-1900. — 26 million.”
Meanwhile, opium wars are likely to have even worse consequences (in terms of the number of victims). These methods produced funds for the industrialization of European economy. But Stalin (who was not in possession of India) took the funds for the industrialization from the peasants. Stalin was a monster, but Queen Victoria was still the worst monster.
In this case, tens of millions of people died in vain (due to the fault of European governments). You’ll make me love Stalin.
No, but the streets of Dublin did.
Looks like Russians are still buying shortwave radios:
https://swling.com/blog/2018/03/rob-notes-that-shortwave-radios-are-still-on-the-shelf-in-st-petersburg/
Maybe Anatoly should move outside Russia and broadcast Russian nationalism and HBD awareness to the homeland.
That’s something you’d have to demonstrate. I doubt it could be shown that capital from colonial ventures was important for Germany’s industrialization…proponents of such views always come up with claims like “But they learned from Britain’s example on the continent, so indirectly they profited from colonialism as well”…but that doesn’t seem very plausible to me.
Anyway, without detailed data (which I don’t have) this debate is a bit pointless.
The Indian famines attributed by some historians to British policy happened in the second half of the 19th century– after British industrialization.
That 1930s Soviet policies produced famines is hard to challenge because they immediately produced the same effects in Spain where as everyone knows the availability of food on their side was the most successful Nationalist propaganda point.
Nah, iirc there already were severe famines in Bengal in the 1770s which supposedly were caused by policies of the East India Company that squeezed peasants for taxes (and also had detrimental effects on the textiles industry). Anyway, I’m not convinced that Britain’s industrialization was possible only due to colonialism or the slave trade, as far as I know such a link hasn’t been conclusively proven. But I’m no economic historian, so my opinions on the matter aren’t worth much.
Mysteriously my great-great-grandfather was able to start a brick factory and electrify the sawmill my family already owned without killing anyone and while living in a colonized nation as a subject people so he had to resort to self-taught German to even know that these things existed. Nobody was killed until a bunch of envious workers egged on by Lenin decided that they’d try to take it all over by force.
You’re just typing rationalizations of a loser that not only made the wrong bet in 1917 and committed itself to an inferior model of industrialization but also killed millions of people and destroyed much of its heritage in vain for it. Russia is always going to be a loser nation unless you get out of that mental pit of whataboutism and the eternal conviction that anyone that’s successful must have done something really bad.
The biggest industrialization success story after the initial one is Japan which managed to import industrialization without mass deaths, without African colonies and without smashing its cultural heritage. Curiously commies never want to talk about that because it doesn’t fit the narrative of Western development depending on owning dumb negroes or whatever.
Oh, that’s news to me. Something to do with the Hastings affair?
What policies are we talking about here anyway? Something to do with jute processing? English cloth being exported to India at scale ante 1800 would also be news to me.
Conclusively, hell– hasn’t been proven at all so far as I’m aware (which may not be all that much, but still).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
Can’t really tell you more about that, my knowledge about those issues is limited to having read relevant chapters in the New Oxford history of the British empire years ago. I don’t have much of an opinion on it myself, just know that there are people who are making claims that Britain’s industrialization was only possible due to capital extracted from the slave trade, sugar plantations and exploitation of India. Personally I suspect this to be at least a major exaggeration, but I haven’t looked into the issue enough for informed judgement.
Why? Here is my original statement
“the industrial revolution in Western Europe was carried out by monstrous methods, and cost orders of magnitude more lives than Stalin’s industrialization.”
This is an undeniable fact. Tens of millions of people were killed by bullets, hunger and drugs during the industrialization of Europe. Whether it was necessary for industrialization (or not), whether it was useful for industrialization (or not) – all this is completely irrelevant to my original statement . If all these hecatombs were actually useless and did not benefit the killers, it does not change the fact of the death of tens of millions of people during the formation of industrial civilization..
So what? I am quite sure that there are some examples (within the same village) of successful collectivization without casualties.
But this does not change the fact that Stalin’s industrialization/collectivization led to the death of a huge number of people.
Similarly, it is an undeniable fact that the idustrialization of Europe was accompanied by an enormous number of victims. It’s just a historical fact
There was no mass murder involved in building any of the factories factories, electric power lines and paved roads. It’s not that we “some examples of factories being built without mass murder”, it’s that all of them were. There is no dark god of industry that requires you to make a mass blood sacrifice before it lets you build an electric power line. All the Red terror in Russia, China and elsewhere was not only unnecessary, it did not even lead to the best industrial development.
We had no colonies, we were in fact colonized for much of the industrialization process. At best the leftists could claim that the early factories had poor work safety – but worker safety improved much more over time in the capitalist, democratic West than under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The only mass murder we had was when the Reds attempted to take over the existing factories and destroy the old order’s remaining rural power base in landowners, kulaks and the like. They lost but landowners soon disappeared as a major class anyway as the growth of the industrial economy overtook the agricultural part of the economy. My family still owns a lot of land, yet we are not the powerful people we once were as our land is irrelevant to the industrial economy, and all the claims that the old social classes would need to be destroyed to allow industrialization have proven totally false.
No it’s not. Funnily enough, not even the original commies claimed that, and Lenin just used to tell Western critics who asked whether industrialization could be achieved without mass murder like in Western European countries that Russians are a special kind who need the brutal treatment…
Red terror and Stalin’s industrialization/collectivization are completely different things. I am absolutely not a fan of revolutionaries and would prefer to see them on the gallows. But to the issue of discussion it is irrelevant
.
Oh really? Then refute the quote above about the famine in India. Argue that there was no famine in Ireland in 1845-49, that there were no opium wars, etc. etc.
edit: reply to melanf #215
Why don’t you refute the claim that Stalin made communists rape nuns in Spain to to further Russia’s industrialization?
You’ve provided no detailed link between this Indian famine and the development of industry in Britain. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that evil British authorities intentionally starved Indians to death. Tell me, what is the exact mechanics of how this helped Britain build power plants, railroads and steam ships in Britain? Provide the numbers of how good flowed etc.
Seems like two totally unconnected events. The British empire was without a doubt ruthless in its aims (though I’m very skeptical of the claims regarding this famine since we had our own 19th century famine together with nearly identical claims that it was intentional starvation by the Russian empire and I know that’s all completely made up commie and nationalist propaganda) but there’s no evidence at all that anything that happened in India was relevant for the industrial transformation of Britain. All those electric power lines were getting built regardless of what happened in India.
Plenty of countries industrialized without mass deaths or colonies and plenty of countries have robbed and looted other countries without industrializing or gaining much anything out of it besides enriching a small set of elites. The claim that colonialism created industrialization sounds completely ridiculous – Europe wouldn’t have been capable of taking over the world if it wasn’t ahead technologically so the technological advantage has to come first, not as a result of colonialism.
The Israelis had to spin the stunning ambush and shoot down of their most advanced jet in their own airspace.
https://ejmagnier.com/2018/02/11/syria-does-not-fear-war-with-israel-the-rules-of-engagement-have-changed/
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/american-fury-the-truth-about-the-russian-deaths-in-syria-a-1196074.html
The truth about the Russian mercs killed in Syria.
BS cover up.
Someone who’s nephew flies jets from the airbase they were shot down from says it was completely unexpected and the pilots weren’t even briefed properly about Syrian and Russian air defence systems.
The IAF got complacent and failed to acknowledge the rules of the game have changed.
Ireland was always antagonistic, they had to be conquered to stop them allowing their island to be used as base for other powers to invade Britain. The Irish lost, and should be gracious losers and not whine because we did to them what they wished to do to us.
No you can’t. 3 million Ukrainians fought in the Soviet Army against the Germans. Millions of French did not fight for the Germans. You are comparing occupied territory with Soviet territory (I am not including the Baltics and Galicia as Soviet for the same reason I do not include France or Poland or Czechoslovakia as German, as those were occupied).
On land…
Wrong right there. There was a Soviet Union but not a United Europe. If a Franco-German-British alliance had invaded the USSR you would have been correct. But instead, a Germany that was busy occupying and fighting against these countries invaded the USSR. And almost won -a monument to Soviet incompetence.
OK, will read more, but as per AP’s replies this leaps out:
Not in the Ukraine!
Agree.
Counting this and Ireland: colonial exploitation worsens famines, collectivization creates them out of whole cloth. At least that seems to be the moral here.
I think a case could be made that without Czech munitions works the German war effort would really have suffered. What benefits did the Germans obtain from occupying France would be a good question (it has probably already been answered by historians).
Seems to be a vigorous discussion here, which is always great.
I’ll try to catch up tomorrow. Flight to London was canceled because Belgians can’t deal with 2 cm of snow – had to spend the night and following day in Brussels.
I can’t refute anything in this case because I’m not familiar with the subject of raping Spanish nuns. But as far as India and other colonies, the British authorities during the relevant period believed that the possession of colonies (and the plunder of the colonies) a prerequisite for the economic superiority of Britain. And Britain’s colonial policy was dictated by the interests of the British economy (in the form in which these interests were understood (correctly or falsely) by the ruling circles of Britain). So the industrialization of Britain (and accordingly the industrialization of Western Europe) was accompanied by the death of tens of millions of people. If these hecatombe did not really benefit Britain/Europe, then this does not change the fact of the death of tens of millions of people.
Looks like the left has suffered badly in the Italian elections, with PD only slightly above 20% (with some smaller leftie party they’re apparently about 24%).
Those M5S populists are strongest party with about 30%, apparently very strong in Southern Italy. The right has won in Northern Italy; Lega seems to be stronger than Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (nice…at least they seem to be honest extremists).
Pretty good, I hope this will make things harder for Merkel and help shut down the invasion routes across the Mediterranean.
Just get a Honda civic & add open pilot।।
The French sabotaged the economy. (The Czechs didn’t, but the Germans had a much more complete control over small Czechia and could afford to be significantly more ruthless towards them.) With their enormous pre-war military industry the French managed to produce a few dozen tanks for Germany. The Germans took the food, but as a consequence coal production collapsed. When the Germans tried to feed the coal miners, they couldn’t prevent them from giving their food to their undernourished extended family or selling it on the black market. They simply didn’t have enough control over France. It was further exacerbated by the lack of oil when the French economy was already substantially motorized. So, lacking food, coal and oil, the French economy collapsed. (40-60% lower GDP than before the war.)
Counting France as an extended part of Germany or as a member of a coalition against the USSR is seriously retarded.
Hungarian military and military industry were seriously restricted as a result of the Treaty of Trianon, the peace treaty in 1920. Unlike Germany, we were in no position to openly defy it until 1938 because our potential enemies (a.k.a. “neighbors”) were roughly double the size of Hungary and wouldn’t tolerate it. So the Hungarian armed forces weren’t well equipped during the war, even though we made serious efforts and managed to produce some cutting edge technologies like radars. We sent one lightly equipped mobile corps in 1941 and withdrew it by November. In 1942 under serious German pressure we sent 200,000 troops, but while they were well equipped by Hungarian standards, their equipment was much less and worse than that of a similarly sized German force. When it was destroyed in the wake of Stalingrad, Hungary only sent occupation troops to the east (or anywhere else), which amounted for a third of our army, but despite the cruelty of these occupation forces (except in Poland, where they supported the Polish Home Army and had to be withdrawn by the Germans), it was not a big contribution, and finally in March 1944 Hitler was forced to occupy Hungary and replace its government. (We couldn’t resist because our troops were stationed on the Romanian border – see below.) Still the new pro-German government kept a third of the army on the Romanian border. Finally, after the abortive separate peace attempt by the Regent Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian armed forces disintegrated.
A more serious problem was that both Hungary and Romania thought the war’s end would be similar to 1918, when the smaller countries like Romania or Turkey had to fight it out with each other. So they kept a substantial portion of their armed forces at home (not caring so much for the result of the Russo-German war). For Romania, this meant a third of its military constantly stationed on the Hungarian border, while half of the Hungarian military was kept on the Romanian border. (The Hungarian military was smaller.) A further point is that until 1944 food rations were higher in agricultural Hungary than in Germany. We didn’t devote all we had to the German war effort, even putting the lower enthusiasm of the troops aside.
I don’t think Hungary or Romania could be counted as fully under German control, though both were obviously a substantial net plus. I think Czechia was more useful than either.
In 1941 two thirds of the German air force was fighting against the USSR. One third had to be used against the British. Don’t you think the Germans could have used a 50% stronger air force in 1941?
Then in 1942 two thirds of their air force was used against the British. Don’t you think the Germans could have used a three times stronger air force in 1942?
Not to mention the air defense, which consumed a lot of ammunition, and of course the thousands and tens of thousands of huge guns could have been used on the eastern front, both against the Red Air Force and against the Red Army. (Depending on ammunition, those guns could be used against both.) Don’t you think the Germans would have been happy to use them against the USSR?
That said, defeating Nazi Germany was still a feat, and required truly heroic effort and a lot of skills for the Russians. I can certainly understand why Russians are so immensely proud of it.
By the way even the two British divisions were armored divisions. The German Afrikakorps, which was tied up in Africa, was an elite armored corps, which could well have been used in Russia. At Stalingrad it would have made a difference, with the Afrikakorps Manstein could easily have reached the encircled forces. The biggest problem for the Germans was the lack of an operational reserve, it would have been solved in a stroke if they had those small (but elite and well equipped) forces from Africa at hand in Russia.
General Richard O’Connor rolled up 200k Italians forcing Hitler to send the Afika Corps in 41, a similar number were captured in 42 when the Allies captured the whole of North Africa.
Anyway the Red Army relied on supplies from the West. Not to mention the effect the naval blockade had on German supplies. Naval blockade was the key weapon in WWI and it was important in WWII, although the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact fatally undermined it in the first two years of the war.
The Luftwaffe was a busted flush after the Battle of Britain, never replaced their losses. Germany never had near enough strength to invade Britain, they should have left a few fighter squadrons in northern France and concentrated on the Mediterranean. As Victor Davis Hanson points out in his new book Germany was never that strong, the fall of France have a false impression.
I believe that’s an exaggeration. But they could have replaced those losses if they didn’t have to keep fighting.
After early 1944 the allied bombing campaign destroyed the Luftwaffe, which until then was still a formidable force. Of course, it was mostly fighting the western allies at that point, as it had done since spring 1942.
It was strong enough to destroy France (granted, luck was an element), and seriously threaten Russia with destruction. One on one it would almost certainly have destroyed the USSR.
Properly speaking, this was not a real response at all. Only an observation.
For example the medieval and early modern famines were always caused by bad weather. The Soviet famines were not always caused by bad weather, for example in 1933 there was no drought.
Another difference is that in the 1930s (but I think not in the 1920s) the Soviets actively prevented the population from fleeing the famine areas. This was never the case in the earlier famines, because you only do that if your goal is basically to kill them. The Soviet authorities locked up begging children and either transported them back to the countryside to die or starved them to death themselves.
The Soviet leadership in the 1920s openly talked about how beneficial the famine was, because it ended the guerrilla uprising of the peasants, so they actively started removing the food from the villages. As opposed to the landlords who at worst only demanded what was owed to them. The Soviet leadership also raised the grain requisitioning quota in 1932.
The previous big famine killed only 0.5 million people, which is an order of magnitude less than either of the two big Soviet famines. The landlords often forgave what was owed them by the tenants (they had an interest in keeping them alive… but also some noblesse oblige), though not all of them. (One landlord who didn’t forgive the debts and demanded the full fee from the tenants was a certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.) There is no reason to suppose it was otherwise in earlier times, like in the Middle Ages. But of course landlords wouldn’t starve themselves, nor would they starve members of their households. It’s simply that even landlords weren’t that rich and had little reserves by modern standards before the onset of industrialization.
But in 1932-33 most starvation deaths could have been avoided if they just accepted somewhat lower state grain reserves for a while. They wouldn’t have had to stop grain exports, or only for a short time. But the reason was political, they wanted to break the backbone of the peasantry. And there might have been even less sensible motivation, Snyder points out that the most ruthless Politburo resolution in November 1932 came just one day after the suicide of Stalin’s wife.
Do you have to take all of them A-G, and does it really mean you would just become an Indian (dot)?
Afrika Korps had only 2 divisions?
Well, Europe minus Great Britain which Germany was at war with and which was receiving supplies from the USA which had a population of 132 million.
The heroism and self-sacrifice of the Soviet people are not an issue – they were incredible. This does not mean that the poor performance (so much territory lost, tens of millions killed, by a nation half its size and fraction of its territory), including the fact of the massive scale of that self-sacrifice – reflects poorly on the Soviet leadership.
I think three divisions, two of them Panzer divisions. This was a more or less standard Panzer corps. Roughly one third of a Panzergruppe or Panzer army. By the way I misunderstood the original statement, I understood it as the British only fighting against Germany with two divisions, not Germany fighting the British with only two divisions. But anyway, one Panzer corps was roughly 10% of the Panzer forces on the Eastern Front, so it was something. Coupled with a third or (by 1942) two thirds of the air force, and the air defense forces, and almost the whole German navy, that was a significant force. It also tied up almost all Italian units of that fictional United Europe.
I actually think that the Soviet command economy and political system and even the mentality of the leadership (and even the people) were especially well-suited for a war. So I think that their performance between June 22, 1941 and May 9, 1945 (or even until September 1, 1945) was actually not bad, given what they had on June 22, 1941. Which was a totally inexperienced and poorly trained and poorly led (though enormous in size) military force, and an already largely militarized economy (which was, however, much weaker than Germany), and a large(r than Germany), but on average poorly educated population. The French didn’t fight better than the Soviets in 1941 (one can even argue that they fought worse), and the enormous human cost was to a large extent a reflection of the fact that the Germans were especially cruel in the USSR. Of course, unlike the USSR, the French didn’t have a large enough country to regroup and recover from their initial losses. The original Soviet armed forces of 1941 were largely destroyed by the end of the year, with most of the remnants gone by 1943. What the Soviets had in 1943 was almost exclusively built during the war, and it was not bad for that. (Worse than the Wehrmacht, but who wasn’t worse than them? Maybe the Finnish armed forces, but other than the Finns, I think everyone was worse than the Germans. So they shouldn’t be the benchmark. Or else everyone performed poorly.)
They were, of course, fully responsible for what they had on June 22, 1941, but I think it was inevitable that Russia would be weaker than Germany at that point in time. Simply it started to industrialize later.
Yes they did. The Soviets suffered a 5-1 casualty ratio in 41/winter 42. The French actually didn’t fight that bad. They just gave up. If France had fought with the same tenacity as the Soviets, I doubt the Germans conquer all of France until the fall of 41 at the earliest and perhaps not at all.
Soviet performance at different stages of the war:
June 41 through March 42: Horrendous
March 42 through December 42: Really bad
Jan 43 through July 44: Mediocre
July 44 through end of the war: Decent
Bagration was pretty impressive, but the Germans had been bled really badly by that time and their fuel shortage plus the destruction of the Luftwaffe kept them from effectively counterattacking. The 1942 Wehrmacht easily repels Bagration.
It’s a loaded topic because criticism of the Soviet military performance is often taken by Russians and Russian partisans as a dig at the Soviet soldiers who really did show incredible heroism and saved the world from Nazism. But they showed incredible heroism in 1914 too, it’s just that in WWI they had much better leadership.
Just like Hitler gets unjustly blamed for all of the German military’s mistakes, Stalin gets blamed for all of the Red Army’s mistakes. But aside from Zhukov’s exhortation to evacuate Kiev in the summer of 41, all of STAVKA was fully on board with Stalin’s idiotic strategy in the first part of the war.
Now to STAVKA’s credit, once they realized the limitations of their army in early 42 they started working within their limitations while building up their capabilities, and that would lead the groundwork for the massive victories in 44 and 45. But the Red Army never matched the combat effectiveness of Germany and the Western armies. Even at the end.
The amount of divisions deployed is irrelevant. What matters is how many divisions were being chewed up. The Germans didn’t start suffering serious manpower (as opposed to aircraft) losses in NA until late 42.
I never understood why Germany started showing manpower shortages as early as mid 1942 whereas the Soviets never really had any manpower problems until the very end of the war. The Soviets had 180 million to begin with, but they were losing guys at a 5 to 1 rate and after the initial German territorial gains in Barbarossa, the Soviets only had a population of 120 million to work with. I’ve researched this question extensively and have never found a satisfactory answer.
Given that what they had in June 22, 1941 was a product of the Soviet system and caused by the Soviet system (mass execution of experienced officers, for example) – not good.
The French were caught by surprise by German methods, and as you noted they didn’t have the luxury of depth.
I’m not a military historian, so I’ll go by the easiest to find source: wiki. Wiki claims the fall of France had 163,000 Germans killed or wounded vs. 360,000 Allies killed or wounded. So 2.2 Allied soldiers killed or wounded for every German.
Operation Barbarossa (June – December 1941) had 891,000 killed, missing or wounded Germans and 114,000 Romanian casualties so 1.05 million. Soviets had 2.13 million killed, dead and wounded (I am not including missing in action as this is mixed up with captured). About the same ratio as the French, whose performance is often the subject of ridicule.
I agree. My point was that the performance overall was a debacle for the Soviets, who allowed a much-smaller country, busy occupying Europe and still fighting with a second-tier but great power, to capture a huge amount of territory and to kill 20+ million people in the process.
Yes, but the average French soldier (or officer, or citizen, for that matter) was better trained than the average Russian. They had better material to begin with.
Yes, what they had then was to a large extent their own fault, but I meant their performance during the war, not before. And that was actually not that bad.
Mind you, the Soviet system was bad for nearly everything else.
Your observations point out that there were different methods, tools, details between Soviet famine and the previous 1,000-years of frequent famines that peasants in Europe suffered. I agreed with that previously. My dispute is with a black-and-white description where one is a ‘state organised genocide’ and the other just some weather-related sh..t that happens.
I am familiar with the peasant past in Central and eastern Europe, it wasn’t pretty. Noblesse oblige was spotty, food extractions were brutal and almost always violent, millions and millions died, or were not born at all. Restrictions on movement always existed – until 19th century a pass was required to move away from a village, starving or not starving. We can argue to what extent people bypassed it, but same as true about Soviet famine – there are those who beat the system in any situation.
Your argument boils down to arguing different motivations. I think motivations are extremely hard to establish (survival, greed, malice, ideology?), even documents only tell you what people wanted to say, not what was their ‘motivation’.
I will take a single – extreme – example of Ottomans and Crimean Tatars. They raided and took food and kidnapped peasants, all the way until 18th-19th century. They had zero interest in whether the peasants survived. They had zero noblesse anything. They caused deaths of tens of millions – was that a planned, state genocide?
Or the traditional Germanic warfare method of invading before a harvest and burning the crops. Then repeat next year. By year three the locals are so weak from famine that they are easily defeated. This was an actual method that Germanic ‘knights’ happily described and were proud of. It worked.
We had a rolling 1,000 year long ‘genocide’, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Bolsheviks were murderous bastards, but they came from this long history. Maybe they were meaner, better organised, more ideological, but the dying peasants had gone through this before.
I think it is a good rule of thumb to not try to interpret the news in real time. What I mean is, after an event happens, wait 3 months before you gauge it’s significance because it can be easy to overestimate the importance of events right after they have happened.
That said, things are not looking good for Merkel and the EU. The establishment had huge victories in the German and French elections but the screws have been turning on them since then. It isn’t clear if Merkel is going to be able to form a government and the triumph of the right in Italy could eventually pave the way for Italy to leave the EU altogether.
It’s great to see the momentum on our side again after how difficult most of 2017 was for us.
Oh yeah and by the way, on the Left wing boards I read they are saying that the Italian opposition parties that just won are working for Putin.
err….. Germany + Italy+ Romania = 140 -150 million you amazingly dumb retarded cun*
Italy and Romania both had considerable armies and lost more in Russia, than the British lost in the North African campaign you fuck*ard.
Whats most retarded about this nonsense is that’s it’s dumber than saying India beating Germany at football would not be a surprise result because India has a 15 times larger population…….or China should beat the USA at Basketball because of it’s bigger population…..a completely retarded line of commentary by a spamtroll moron who knows fuckall about military matters ( of history).
hahahaha!….Germany was only in a serious land fight with the British in North Africa, where the British lost a lot less and had operating there less than Romanians and Italians did on the Eastern Front you idiot………the Americans weren’t much of a factor in North Africa….and North African campaign involved civilians as spectators ( or not even that) because it was fighting over the oil in the desert you prick….completely different to the eastern Front. Other than the North African campaign there was no engagement of the British and the cowardly Americans with the Nazis on land until after the Soviets gloriously and miraculously started annihilating Nazi scum and forcing the back across Europe…so only after the period when Soviet Union had already lost 80% of their casualties and the Bbritish and Americans wanted to stop this…and not the Nazi’s you idiot. The British were involved in a full-on naval battle with the Germans for the whole 6 years, and both Germany and Britain were bombing each others industries……….both added together aren’t remotely close in size to the scale of fighting in the Eastern Front you cretin or to the myth of “fighting Britain and America at the same time”
French “resistance” an Oxymoron you idiot….a few incidents here and there. Polish “resistance” a joke. The deaths and casualties on the Polish side from the non-suprising invasion of Poland were amazing huge you dickhead……15 times more Polish casualties ( and they and well equipped army at the time) than German and Soviet ones……….this despite the fact that on the significant part of the country held by the Soviet Union……it was pretty much like a DisneyWorld park for the Polish considering what the Germans were doing to them. Compare this to the casualties from the Barbarossa invasion you prick…….bigger scale of everything but a much lesser ratio in favour of the Germans. The Poles it should be noted, lost a considerable higher percentage of their people in WW2 than the high percentage ofthe Soviet Union……..even though the Poles got annihilated and capitulated within a very short space of time……and not the severe cold weather/loss of ‘breadbasket” that the Soviets had to endure
errr…. 140 million germans,Italians and Romanians vs 110 million Russians is somehow “double” in your fantasist scumbag mind? Bizarre…..again …the size of the army, not population is important, the 50-60 year advantage of industrialisation the Germans had incredibly important, sophistication of their weapons….but for the Soviet people, Stalin and the gernerals to pull this around was truly remarkable.
German scum failing to adhere to the Geneva conventions ( which they impeccably observed in North Africa and Italy) and commiting war crimes on civilians ,thus accounting for a huge % of the deaths of the Soviet people …..is a failure of the Germans, not the Soviets you disgusting cun*.
It’s great because the reason a freak moron like you makes this idiotic comment is because whereas me and Melanf our proud of our grandfathers in WW2……a POS freak with obvious extreme mental problems like you is obviously related to the lowest of the law war criminal, failure scum with absolute nothing brave, successful or positive to say about in WW2..hence why war crimes, and weak military performance excites you dumb retarded pricks
I think German uniforms were a lot better than WW2 Soviet ones.
http://europeanpost.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/hugo-800×420.jpg
vs
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/1f/96/22/1f9622b507c0b8c973064567fd6fadee–ww-uniforms-military-uniforms.jpg
Oh, she will, and things will undoubtedly get a lot worse in Germany (she’ll also continue with her attempts at bullying other European countries into taking “refugees”). But in a way it might be good if she stays in power for a few more years. The end result will be so catastrophic that hopefully it will destroy the Christian Democrats forever as a political force.
Those uniforms aren’t exactly comparable though, you’d have to compare regular Wehrmacht uniforms or at least Waffen-SS combat uniforms with those of regular Soviet troops, those SS uniforms in the picture above maybe with NKVD troops.
Isn’t the Left party in the coalition going to have a members referendum on joining the coalition or not? And aren’t they expected to vote “no”?
They already had that, 66% in favour of joining a coalition. I didn’t expect anything different, they’ll do anything to prevent new elections.
Remains to be seen though if the coalition will last a full four years; there are state elections in Bavaria this fall, and in 2019 there will be state elections in three East German states (Saxony, Brandenburg, Thuringia)…if AfD does really well there, it will hopefully lead to increased destabilization of the political system. People in the east are quite militant, they haven’t gone through decades of boiling the frog multiculti indoctrination and wealth-induced decadence as in the West, and for them recent changes are all the more shocking. In Cottbus in Brandenburg there have been demonstrations against “refugees” after several incidents with Syrians (e.g. in late 2016 a Syrian robbed an elderly pensioner in her apartment and suffocated her with a plastic bag, a few months ago a Syrian stabbed a 16-year old German, narrowly missing the jugular…just what you’d expect from poor innocents in need of protection…), and AfD is now at 29% in polls there (still too low, but encouraging). Interestingly enough there have now also been demonstrations in a small town in West Germany, Kandel in Rheinland-Pfalz where an Afghan “refugee” (who claimed to be 15 years old, but is apparently in his early 20s) butchered his 15-year old German ex-girlfriend last year. I hope the discontent spreads and will have severe results in the Bavarian elections.
Excellent point – social media has made everyone quick on the trigger finger though – it’s just part and parcel of the new medium. Patience and reflection is rarely practiced.
Peace.
In 1941, Red Army was one of the most incompetent in the world and a total disaster zone.
By summer 1944 and Operation Bagration, it was surely most competent and best led land-army in the world.
The red army uniform was quite simple and iconic.
And good on girls as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5TiaYQWbF0
The same missiles are fired on them most times that they fly over there (which is documented), so it is expected that they would have the S-200s fired on them. Also after this plane was shot down, the rest of the planes continued with their mission and bombed the targets this plane was supposed to. I don’t see inconsistencies there.
I understand you have a strong Russophobia, but this attempt to re-write military history is pathetic.
I think we can distinguish rational Russophobia from irrational Russophobia.
When you try to modify military history to accord with pre-set likes and dislikes, and to avoid basic facts – this has reached the stage of lack of basic honesty and has converted into playground childishness. Whether or not one likes or dislikes the Soviet leadership (I believe most of us are in latter category and certainly believe there should be no excuses for them), is a different topic altogether.
“Most competent”? “Best led”?
There is little basis for comparison. Man for man it would seem to be at that point still worse than German, worse than Finnish, on par with British or American, definitely better than Italian of course.
My understanding was that Merkel is doing a good job economically and was considered on the centre-right of the political spectrums. The problem is that she lost her mind on the migration question – a little like Putin – and instead of correcting mistakes and thinking that maybe the Japanese are a better example than France and UK, is trying to double down on the migration policy.
‘Man for man’ – it’s a totally meaningless comparison, as if you talk about boxing or football.
What other armies were capable something like Operation Bagration in 1944. Only the UK/US and they were rather less successful – failing to close the Falaise Gap out of pure leadership incompetence.
lol, no, she hasn’t done a good job at all, her chancellorship is a disaster on every level, the “refugee” invasion is just the most visible aspect of her many failures. Her handling of the Euro/debt crisis and the so-called Energiewende (massive subsidies for renewable energies, giving up nuclear power) will have really severe repercussions and have the potential to cripple Germany economically and erode the remaining prosperity (which isn’t what many people outside of Germany imagine anyway – there are millions of Germans living in precarious economic conditions, but those Christian Democrat swine can’t come up with anything more than “You’ve never had it so good, all thanks to our glorious leader Angela!”). Despite record revenues nothing constructive is done to ensure Germany’s future – infrastructure is decaying, nothing is done to counteract demographic decline (except importing foreign illiterates). Tax burden on the middle class never gets lower. Bundeswehr is rotting away. And so on.
Merkel is massively overrated, apart from low cunning and an instinct for power (which unfortunately has served her well so far) she doesn’t have any political qualities at all. She’s easily the worst chancellor post-war Germany ever had. I just hope she and her pathetic party of lickspittles will be punished for their misgovernment when it all comes crashing down in 5-10 years.
Agree.
It was much-improved, but pound-for-pound was still worse than the Germans. There was an interesting discussion here, before you came here. Good jumping in point as any for reading the back-and-forth:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/top-10-militaries-2015/#comment-1205938
Essentially, Kharkiv battle suggested that Germans still could have won the war in 1943, had Hitler not interfered with what his Generals wanted to do.
I dislike Soviets but am a Russophile.
At any rate, the facts are facts, regardless of the messenger. I don’t modify.
So “most competent” and “best led” are meaningless metrics, as I surmised. You might say “capable of carrying out largest-scale land operations” and have something meaningful and true, probably what you meant to say anyway.
Really, I just read Turkey is using German tanks in its offensive in Syria. I thought Germany still had a very sensible and capable military, no?
Also – is this in the works for Germany?
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/793701/norway-jegertroppen-world-first-all-female-special-forces-unit-military
Peace.
Sex discrimination!!
Unacceptable!!
Agreed. Beating the French was not much of an achievement. The First World War ended France’s run as a Great Power. France bled to death at Verdun and in the Nivelle Offensive.
No, it’s under-equipped and hardly capable of operations anymore; even many of the existing tanks, vehicles and aircraft aren’t operational (e.g. there are reports that out of 244 Leopard II battle tanks only 99 are operational, out of 27 Tiger helicopters only 12 are operational etc.).
Don’t know if they’re planning something as ridiculous as that, but the current minister of defense von der Leyen is a woman (and stunningly incompetent), and one of the main foci of her work is gender equality and making the army more attractive for women and homos.
LOL.
IIRC at least as of 2000, German equipment had the best specifications in the world – then the Leopard II was considered the best tank in the world and there’s something to be said for the “overengineering” of German manufacturing that made them supremely impressive. Unfortunately, it does sound like combat elan in the Bundeswehr leaves something to be desired.
Definitely. But Soviet uniforms were better than British or American uniforms.
It’s odd but the better the uniform the better the army.
Maybe, but what’s the use if you don’t have any of them in working condition? I’m not a militarist, but 100 operational battle tanks for a country the size of Germany is just pathetic.
And I wouldn’t say it’s a matter of combat elan…I don’t think the Bundeswehr soldiers who served in Afghanistan should be dissed, they did what they could, with little support from the politicians and the general population back home. It’s a political failure.
What’s this? No confidence in the Chelsea Manning brigades as defenders of the “free” world?
To be honest, I was mostly being flippant, but was making vague attempt to compare officer uniforms under the apprehension that those would be the most fashionable ones.
The end of History comes when transhuman brigades destroy the last bastions of deplorables. And by transhuman, I mean transsexual.
The German economy is doing excellently though according to the indicators.
I guess this is a case of success despite, rather than because, of its current political leadership.
I wonder who was the Chancellor who was most responsible for building Germany’s success – Helmut Kohl?
I know, but I couldn’t pass up the chance for pointless nitpicking 🙂
Those SS uniforms in your post (which aren’t even the Waffen-SS combat uniforms, those were field grey or in camouflage patterns) are just bizarrely over the top though imo…all in black, death’s head, runes, those boots, like a conscious attempt to produce the most evil-looking outfit imaginable…I suppose that’s a big reason why people find them fascinating today.
It’s just not quantitative though. By Operation Bagration, the army had transformed qualitatively, and was executing subtle tactics, and complex maneuvers that military historians are still studying today.
Well, I think that there was a definitely strain of occultism that was running within some of the SS, but beyond that, the lack of practicality in the uniforms was “propaganda” in a way to message strength and power. I imagine a similar thought process went into equipping the Stuka divebombers with wailing sirens, which didn’t seem to serve any specific purpose beyond to increase the terror of their hapless targets even though it actually decreased the flight capabilities of the bomber.
Helmut Kohl was responsible for this whole Euro idiocy (ok, maybe he had to do it as a price for reunification), and also made Merkel’s rise in politics possible, so I’m not a fan.
General consensus seems to be Germany’s current economic situation is mostly due to Gerhard Schröder’s reforms (which were problematic in a lot of ways as well, creating a large low-wage sector and changing unemployment insurance in ways which many people regard as unjust…the decline of the Social Democrats started with that; also questionable how sustainable this export-driven economic model is).
The fact that the Germans are at this point is saddening. I don’t mean that as an insult, I actually mean that it makes me sad for the Germans to be in this state. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I don’t want them marauding around Europe, but this is not becoming of them.
I think part of this is a result of going soft by depending on the US for defense. This was also the case with the Arabs; one of the reasons the Israelis had an easy time kicking Arab butt was that their nascent local armies were not used to
fighting since the Ottomans had provided the garrisons and defense for those areas.
Well, here’s hoping things get better – though not sure under a female defense minister, just sayin’ …
Peace.
The Mahdi will not seek permission to set things back in order.
I think part of this is a result of going soft by depending on the US for defense.
Please, as smart as you are and you can’t think of anything other than “Blame America First”?
I’m not blaming America, I’m saying Germany made a mistake in not taking its obligations to its own people seriously and relying on someone else to do the heavy lifting. Now she is out of shape.
I don’t blame McDonald’s for making people obese; they should know better to make decisions in their own interests.
Peace.
I don’t blame McDonald’s for making people obese; they should know better to make decisions in their own interests.
How about you make up your mind about exactly how you value individualism, then get back to me.
Since when did I ever say people are not responsible for their own delimas/predicaments?
Especially down to the individual; each stands before God alone for judgement…
I’m not seeing the contradiction you are, sorry.
Peace.
I’m not seeing the contradiction you are, sorry.
When you insist that “we” need to leave people in Muslim countries alone and let the tend their goats or whatever.
We, as in US, certainly should leave them alone, do you feel we should do otherwise?
A government is, by nature, not individualistic, but a representation of the voice of a collective.
Still not seeing the contradiction.
What does this have to do with Germany not making the right policies for preparedness for its own defense? It seems we have gone off the path…
Peace.
Will somebody please think about the Jews!
Will Kim truly denuclearize? How long will his regime survive if he does that? Its sole legitimacy seems to be that it’s the only independent Korean state, the other being a US puppet. By denuclearization, it will lose even that.
On the other hand, the sanctions might truly bite him and his regime.
You also appear to often be a Ukrainophile, and at times a Polonophile too. How are you able to square these seemingly contradictory views? Also, you don’t seem to put much stock in Russian ‘triunism’, that seems to be de rigueur for orthodox Russophiles (like Karlin)?…
It appears that your Ukrainophile views are dominant though. Haven’t you stated previously that you’ve placed your children in North American Ukrainian schools?
That’s like saying that the horse has no speed and quits. But you really like the horse.
The reason the discussion today is so disjointed (and pointless) is the excessive nuance by the more rational side. The neo-con army has a single goal, no doubts, they don’t give an inch, they will go down happily lying. Or up. The point is that they don’t care, and those of us who care are in a disadvantage.
We, as in US, certainly should leave them alone, do you feel we should do otherwise?
No, I agree that we should leave them to their own devices. I think that it is interesting that you reject individualism for your compatriots back in the old country(ies) while taking advantage of and enjoying, (I assume), near maximal individualism here in the U. S. Alternatively, “Stay home and tend the goats while I climb the economic ladder in America and maximize the personal benefits of success.”
Germans, as individuals, have put themselves into the position in which they find themselves, just like we have here in the U. S. If you try to have hyper individualism for the highly capable and paternalistic oversight for the less capable, sooner or later you end up with elites that abdicate their responsibilities. Alternatively, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
In our case it seems to me that not only have they abdicated, they are willfully hostile to a big chunk of the populace.
Outsourcing the defense was a huge advantage for Germany, as it allowed them to spend the money on other things (what they chose to spend the money on – wisely or unwisely – is another topic).
Countries like Russia and Israel (the latter had the highest defense spending ratio in the world until the 1990s, it was over 25% of their GDP during the 1980s), suffer a lot from wasting so much money on defense, which impoverishes the country in most other ways. Likewise in many other ways – they have a lot of spare money left over from not having had 25% of their GDP spent on defense.
Have you compared things like public transportation infrastructure in Germany or Japan, compared to in Israel? It is a vastly better in Germany and Japan.
The immigration issue is where Germany has recently gone crazy, but this was not related to outsourcing defense. Japan also outsources its defense, but its immigration policy is the strictest in the world. On the immigration issue, really Germany should taken simply Japan or Switzerland as role model, instead of copying the UK/France role model.
Not really, I avoid doing anything outside the bounds of shariah whether I’m in the US or Pakistan or Jordan (literally, I could move to Jordan tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a difference in the freedoms I have lost – maybe in the political arena a bit, but what’re you gonna do). I’m in no hurry to take advantage of gender-reassignment surgery or go clubbing or…
So I don’t expect myself to act differently (just because I legally can) than what I expect from them. I’ve passed by the liquor aisle thousands of times in my life, I can easily purchase some and take advantage of that versus, again, Jordan, but I don’t. God doesn’t give Muslims in the West special-snowflake status; though the Left would like us to believe otherwise.
So again, I don’t see the contradiction.
Agreed.
Peace.
I like all three nations and wish that they live in harmony. I oppose annexation of one by another, mass murder of one people by another, etc. So I condemn UPA crimes against Poles, Russian attempts to annex Ukraine (I don’t count Sovokstan-Donbas as Ukraine), past Polish occupation of western Ukraine between the wars, mass slaughter of Khmlnytsky’s forces, etc.
I also provide them with Russian-language tutors and send them to Russia often. My oldest spent pretty much entire summers on a dacha in a pine forest outside Moscow. I suspect my kids speak and read better Russian than do the children of all the western-dwelling pro-Sovok “Russian nationalists” here.
It’s like saying the horse was horribly disfigured and infected, I hate the infection but like the horse.
Or a better metaphor – Bolsheviks “killed” Russia and built a grotesque Frankenstein’s monster out of the corpse. I do not celebrate the monster, because in some ways it resembled what was killed, or had retained some features of it.
But rebirth is possible and we are seeing it, in parts.
To equate “Soviet” with “Russia” is to slur Russia.
I’ve passed by the liquor aisle thousands of times in my life,
If it’s good enough for you, why aren’t your peeps in the old countries allowed to walk down a liquor aisle each day?
Surely you can see the contradiction.
I’m really not trying to grind on you, Talha, I have many of the same conflicts and I am coming to a fuller understanding of those almost every day.
Is that actually true? Japan maintains quite considerable and well-equipped “self defense forces”, iirc their navy is supposed to be one of the best in the world. Granted, they’d probably have to spend more without American security guarantees, but it seems like an exaggeration to me that they’re “outsourcing their defense”.
And during the Cold War both German states maintained significant conscription-based armed forces, the decline to the current level has only happened in the last 25 years or so.
In any case, you can’t have true sovereignty without strong armed forces of your own.
People cannot walk away from their history. The 70 years of Soviet rule is a part of Russian (and Ukrainian, Latvian,…) history. All of it. Some of it was very bad, some of it was not, some of it was actually quite glorious (beating German-led attack in WWII), or the space program. Or the fact that all-in-all probably more people lived better than at any point in the 1,000-year history of that region.
British people don’t dwell on their own bloody past (around 200 million victims of British Empire). French actually for some weird reason celebrate the mass murdering Napoleon. Germans are a sad case today. Poles had bloody history. So did Turks, Hungarians, Spaniards, etc… Denouncing retroactively one’s history is the end of you, that’s why almost nobody does it. Except, of course, the beaten down Germans…
Nietzsche observed that when you regret something, you suffer twice. Why do it?
Because they (often) live in a Muslim majority country which prohibits public sale and consumption of such for Muslims (non-Muslims are usually exempted). The Shariah, naturally, is taken into account when setting these rules in Muslim lands. Of course, we have our elite too that live by their own rules; like the ones in Pakistan who hire Christian middlemen to do all the alcohol purchasing and delivery on their behalf to skirt the law.
Muslims don’t form the majority in this country so we don’t set the rules, so the question really needs to be asked of others. If your question is why are Muslim countries run differently than non-Muslim countries, well the answer is in the question itself.
I do know that I’ve taken my children to plenty of parks where it states clearly that liquor is prohibited anywhere near the park; so everyone understands the dangers associated with alcohol consumption – we just disagree on the details of how and where to prohibit it.
Balancing the rights of the individual and that of the society is no simple question; even Muslim scholars differ on where things lie. It’s way above my pay grade; I can only quote them. As for me, I don’t hold other Muslims to a different standard than I hold myself. Non-Muslims can decide what standard they want to hold themselves to.
Peace.
And slavery was part of African American history. Should African-Americans celebrate the slave owners? Even the slave descendants got something “good” out of the tragedy – they at least live better, than would have had their ancestors stayed behind in Africa. But the Soviet tragedy doesn’t even have such a silver lining for the Russian people – it pushed them behind.
Sovok apologists would like to say that this is Russia’s “own” history. But a multinational criminal gang who took over the Russian country is not the same thing for Russia, as the British monarchy is for England. Yes, Russian people sometimes managed to do some great things when under the control of this gang, and it is good to celebrate these people and their achievements. But to equate the gang with Russia is to slur Russia.
Interesting article about the motives of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooter:
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/05/as-the-trial-of-omar-mateens-wife-begins-new-evidence-undermines-beliefs-about-the-pulse-massacre-including-motive/
Apparently he didn’t even know or care that he was killing homos.
I wonder if there would have been more or less outrage if he had shot up a non-homo nightclub.
Russia refused to be a party to the Geneva convention, unlike UK and USA who did.
Russia allowing outsiders to come in and inspect their country, for obvious reasons, would be unacceptable. Also unacceptable would be having their own citizens having contact with inspectors bearing tales of life on the outside.
It wouldn’t have fit the agenda – so it needs to be spun this way. Expect this evidence to be buried since it posits inconvenient facts; it had to do with foreign policy and not hatred towards gays.
Peace.
Will Kim truly denuclearize?
There’s no way he agrees to denuclearize without obtaining a similar (extreme) concession from the US, presumably withdrawal of US forces from South Korea (and hence the end to the annual military exercises directed against North Korea).
Why would China or Japan want a re-unified Korea?
Should African-Americans celebrate the slave owners?
I think I would have mixed emotions, especially if the owner was my 3rd or 4th Great-Grandfather.
Good correction.
Japan has a far larger GDP than Germany. But their defense expenditure as a proportion of GDP is equivalently tiny to Germany’s, even as total expenditure is far higher (as expected of a larger economy).
I am sceptical to put it mildly. It appears more like otherwise reasonable and intelligent poster, whose views are modified by the irrational level of Russophobia, even to the extent of disparaging the wartime situation.
Continuities between regimes before and after 1917 are more similar than differences, and in both cases the negatives (which of course there were still very very great) are exaggerated in the West by people who hardly have best interests at heart.
However, the tragedy is when you picture the counter-factual, of ‘third way’, of more moderate and responsible governance having occured in the 20th century, instead of the unfortunate and incompetent regimes that were the historical reality.
Germans only denounce Hitler, which is rational even aside from the moral aspects of celebrating serial killers – as Hitler brought Germany to ruin as much as he did his enemy countries, and sent millions of young Germans into an early grave for end goals which now seem unfathomable even to people on the far-right of spectrum politically.
I don’t think Germans denounce leaders like Bismarck, or other aspects of their success (which is still very great). They are still highly patriotic, and many glow with pride about the achievements of Audi, Porsche and BMW. The fact they recently went crazy and suicidal on the immigration issue aside – Germany is far from beaten down, but more and more the master of Western Europe. Isn’t this one of the often mentioned ironies – that the losers of WW2 (Germany and Japan), look in much better shape than the winners of it.
Yes it seems not just in bad taste, but like admission of guilt and criminal intent. Most serial killers would not paint a giant skull and bones on their house for fear of discovery and prefer to keep this secret.
But if Jeffrey Dahmer becomes supreme leader of country, to extent of power that he know longer has to hide his nature, something like this is the result.
Is the decoration of the new Reich chancellory, not so different to how these people decorate their house
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5300843/inside-the-home-of-twisted-brit-killer-who-slaughtered-autistic-teen-18-so-she-could-tick-murder-off-her-bucket-list/
You grew up with the sacred myth that victory in the Great Patriotic War was an unbelievable achievement made possible by the Soviet system, without which there was no way the Germans could have ever been defeated. Thus, all of those tens of millions of dead was an inevitability.
The reality is probably the opposite – the system’s failures raised the cost of that victory needlessly – millions of lives were wasted, that should not have been. Germany led by its madman should not have been able to nearly defeat a country with the size, population, etc. of the USSR. That he came so close, enabling him to wreak such havoc, is shameful. But it’s a hard truth to admit, that lives were wasted due to one’s country’s incompetence.
If you rearrange the body parts of the corpse you killed and reanimate them there will be plenty of similarities between the lumbering monster and the victim.
An example of “continuity” – the old regime had a secret police and exiled people to Siberia, as did the replacement. Of course, the Soviet secret police and gulag systems killed millions, while the old regime killed no more than hundreds, perhaps low single-digit thousands. So although the features were similar, I am not sure how meaningful such “continuity” was.
In the West one could come across fantastic figures such as Stalin killing 60 million people. But the real number, about 9 million, is horrific enough.
Best modern military outfits bar-none; German aviators WW1.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/57ab44d32994cadd0f3c895d/57ac972f46c3c4d37f361990/587787bd15d5dbddbdb30c55/1484751874213/Manfred+von+Richthofen-red+baron.jpg
Class – absolute class!
Peace.
The Reich chancellery had no resemblance whatsoever to the house of the serial killer.
The only Nazi German symbol which might be characterized as “evil” is the SS skull and bones, but it’s a traditional German military symbol of the Prussian light cavalry (houssars), and for example a form of it was used by the 1848 German Legion in Hungary, consisting of both ethnic Germans in Hungary and of German volunteers from Germany – they were fighting for liberalism and Hungarian freedom and democracy and against the ethnically German troops of the ethnically German Habsburg emperor. A version of the symbol was also on the uniform of Prussian cavalry up until 1918 (see pictures of General Mackensen), and the German cavalry also used it during the Weimar years. After the cavalry units were modernized to become Panzer units in the 1930s, they kept using the skull on their shirts.
The skull is a great symbol of “badass” soldiers, and for this reason very popular among people wanting to look badass. Besides bikers and similar, some kind of skull and bones symbols are popular among soldiers of the militaries of democratic countries.
Just search for images of skull and bones us military and you’ll find images of US Navy Seals wearing skull masks or skull or skull and bones symbols of military units like the Army Rangers or some airborne units or sniper patches etc.
Such skull and bones symbols look cool and “badass,” so they were used by the SS, too.
I fail to see how such symbols of elite units should be signs of inherent evil or whatnot. Is the logo of the US Army Rangers (with a skull at it’s center) a sign of the inherent evil of the US? I guess you don’t like heavy metal or Guns N’ Roses either.
Тhis is true, but it is a question of industrial power (air force and Navy have very little direct effect on the number of German cannon fodder on the Eastern front). And the industrial power of the German Empire far surpassed the capabilities of the USSR. Let’s say England/America distracted by 1/3 the economic power of the German Empire in 1942. But the remaining 2/3 still surpassed the capabilities of the USSR.
That is, in any case, propaganda slogans of AP – complete crap
http://polit.ru/article/2007/12/11/repressii/
“…In fact, the number of prisoners for political reasons (for “counterrevolutionary crimes”) in the USSR in the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. after 33 years was about 3.8 million people… during this period ( 1921 to 1954 ) has been convicted 3 777 380 people, including to capital punishment – 642 980, to the contents in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and below – 2 369 220, into exile and expulsion – 765 180 people“.
And crying about the dead peasants is pure hypocrisy. Stalin needed to create a powerful military industry in a very short period of time. Absolutely no alternative except violent (very violent) alteration of the village did not exist. If Stalin did not take grain from the peasants – the chances of the USSR in the war would be equal to 0, and now there would be neither Russian nor Ukrainians.
Chemically pure evil is not Stalin, but Lenin and his gang (70% originating from the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). The peasants supported Lenin, participated in the seizure of the lands of the landlords (the most infamous crime in Russian history) and the extermination of the landlords themselves. Due to these crimes Stalin causes me some sympathy – he effectively carried out the punishment of peasants
Stalin sent some of the best officers in the Red Army to the gulag, which didn’t help with military readiness.
101 Squadron Israeli AF
and many others
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_crossbones_(military)
This is definitely a myth (by the way it is Soviet myth invented by Khrushchov). The number of officers repressed during the great terror was relatively small (a few percent), and the competence of these people (who made a career during the civil war) is extremely doubtful.
However, in any case – what does this have to do with collectivization/industrialization?
The German method of conquest was in line with medieval military practices, like starving out big cities. It was also not fundamentally different from starving to death people who were already German subjects. Which is what happened under Stalin. He treated his subjects the same way as medieval German warlords treated enemy populations. Actually, worse, because the Slavic populations had the option of surrender. Stalin’s subjects had no such options.
In any event, I don’t know if Stalin’s mass murder against the peasants qualifies as genocide, but in the colloquial meaning (roughly “very bad mass murder of millions”) it definitely does.
At the very best case, you can posit that Stalinist policies towards the Ukrainian peasants were as bad as the policies of a slaveholding colonial empire towards its colonial subjects. But probably worse: the Bengali famine was caused by bad weather, unlike the 1930s Soviet famine.
Dude, please understand that the problem is not necessarily taking grain from the peasants, but taking all grain from them and thus deliberately killing them. Ironically enough, it lowered the harvest in the following years (because there were less peasants who could toil the land), and also decreased labor supply for the industry and the availability of soldiers in the war.
The peasants were stupid enough to support Lenin, but I think gloating over their tragedy is perhaps a little bit tasteless.
Thanks, that’s a good find!
It’s obvious that Nazi symbols only look evil in retrospect, after having been influenced by Hollywood movies. Otherwise they were just normal for a somewhat militaristic movement.
“we are talking about the fiscal policy of the state in conditions of a natural disaster (drought). Then in the regions affected by drought (Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus, part of the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan), the state did not consider it necessary to reduce the volume of mandatory deliveries and seized the peasants meager harvest to the last grain.”
http://www.politpros.com/journal/read/?ID=783
And it has a photo of Field Marshal August von Mackensen.
There was no serious drought according to most sources, but the harvest was lower than expected due to the collectivization.
In any event, you can perhaps argue that Stalin was as bad as the British East India Company during the Bengali famine. Oh and of course, the Bengali famine had nothing to do with subsequent British industrialization.
Paging Ron Unz: the link was changed after I sent the comment, and couldn’t modify it.
Another issue on iPhone (always the latest iOS) is the following: below comments next to the agree button there is a “more” button containing other functionalities (like “this commenter only” etc.), and it’s no longer working since the site crash several months ago, it just disappears when I tap on it. I’m not sure you’re aware of it.
Perhaps you’d be more accurate in describing yourself as a ‘Slavophile’ then? But then of course, you limit your appreciation of Slavic culture to more of a true nationalist approach, by limiting your scope along genetic litmus tests (not cultural ones) when describing true Slavic membership. Karlin too posits himself as a ‘Russophile’, although I see great differences in both of your adherences to this nomenclature. He appears willing to perform all manner of mental gymnastics in order to justify Russian involvement in internal Ukrainian affairs, by insisting that Ukrainians do not constitute a separate nationality, and you don’t.
This part however is questionable. Many of them stole land from landlords but were not as supportive of Bolsheviks as were urban workers. Whites had considerable support in rural areas and the Sovoks had to use poison gas to subdue Russian peasants during the Russian Civil War.
The areas hardest hit by Stalin’s USSR-wide famine were those who had been most resistant to Bolshevism during the Revolution: Ukraine (no significant Bolshevik support), Kuban and Don regions (White support), Volga region (IIRC where peasants were gassed into submission by Lenin’s forces). So the purpose seems to have been submission and mass murder, not industrialization.
Yes, and its amazing that Stalin treated his own subjects as 19th century British treated a colony of non-English non-European people. Sovok propaganda claimed it was necessary of Stalin to do so, and as we see here, people who grew up with such an idea take it for granted.
I guess I am a Slavophile, but one who doesn’t mislabel Russian nationalism as Slavophilia.
It seems crap to you because you take for granted the myths you were raised with. Many Americans take for granted that that the USA was the country that won World War II. It’s a myth that is just taken for granted, because it has been drilled into people forever. Yours about the Soviet regime and victory is of the same type.
Your cited author’s specialty has nothing to do with Stalin’s period.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/
“It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive. Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. The total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million. The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit less. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people starved.”
“The highest Soviet authorities ordered 386,798 people shot in the “Kulak Operation” of 1937–1938. The other major “enemies” during these years were people belonging to national minorities who could be associated with states bordering the Soviet Union: some 247,157 Soviet citizens were killed by the NKVD in ethnic shooting actions.”
“In the largest of these, the “Polish Operation” that began in August 1937, 111,091 people accused of espionage for Poland were shot. In all, 682,691 people were killed during the Great Terror, to which might be added a few hundred thousand more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions. ”
Your source pretends that killings of Soviet citizens in small-scale actions didn’t happen.
Conclusion: ” All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million”
Somehow Germany, England, USA industrialized very rapidly without mass murder of peasants and farmers.
This excuse is rabid Russophobia – Russians can only be industrialized quickly by killing millions of them.
Even if Stalin-style industrialization picked up the pace of industrialization by 10% or 20% – it is questionable if the cost in terms of millions of fewer people and soldiers, and lukewarm loyalty to the regime (resulting in mass surrender early on) – was worth the benefit for military purposes.
The areas hardest hit by Stalin’s USSR-wide famine were those who had been most resistant to Bolshevism during the Revolution: Ukraine (no significant Bolshevik support, peasants here supported either Ukrainian SRs such as Petliura or anarchists such as Makhno), Kuban and Don regions (White support), Volga region (IIRC where peasants were gassed into submission by Lenin’s forces). So the purpose seems to have been submission and mass murder, not industrialization.
Also, many of regions hardest hit by the famine were those where Stolypin’s reforms were most successful – regions where peasants had their own lands and thus were less likely to steal from landlords than in other territories (though theft occurred in those lands also). There were no large landlords and mass theft in the village where my peasant grandparent was from, for example.
This is the Sovok propaganda you grew up with. I understand it is powerful and important – people ought to think that the mass sacrifice wasn’t for nothing (even though it was).
And what of Karlin’s Russophilia vs your own, especially as regards Ukraine? You’ve been communicating with him about these matters much longer than I, and lately he seems reticent to explain his positions…
I can’t answer for him. My impression is that we have different ideas of what Triune Russian Nation means. His Russian nationalism may tell him that Ukrainians are a subset of Russians (Great Russians); reality is that Russians, Ukrainians emerged out of Rus as Romanians, Italians, French, Spaniards emerged out of Rome.
Sure nice excuses to avoid what a normal person can perceive.
I am sure there is not an evidence of criminal intent when people are dressing like this, perhaps it is common fashion in America which you guys are wearing at college.
I am sure such people are perfectly harmless and have no sadomasochist leaning. Keep telling Stalin has nothing to worry about from the German comrades.
http://78.media.tumblr.com/96947f54dbc20bc9d3a697589e8a8ae6/tumblr_mw20gvGNTI1swhjg2o1_500.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/01/2d/71/012d71f61718113a8eb0ebcd485c1047.jpg
A normal way to decorate your house – no-one would suspect interest in homoeroticism world-conquest.
If I have a child who decorates there room like this I have nothing to worry about their future.
http://www.comgun.ru/uploads/posts/2013-11/1385440724_1.jpg
Yes a nice medieval re-enactment entertainment. If I was a tourist enjoying myself in Berlin, I would find nothing threatening here. Who could have imagined such folk would in a few years take such a ‘road trip’ round Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBbGoWOy-eI
Nothing creepy there – just the normal way for decorating the city to make it look pretty for the tourists.
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/udmvoice/20075245/171247/171247_900.jpg
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/udmvoice/20075245/174143/174143_900.jpg
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/udmvoice/20075245/175237/175237_900.jpg
Not a ‘sacred myth’. And of course the Germans could have been defeated without the overly large casualties which were accrued from incompetence in the first year to two years of the war.
It doesn’t change the fact that by 1943-1944, the army was becoming highly competent, and by Operation Bagration, most effective land-army in the world, which is the part you were trying to revise originally.
The latter is something to begrudge an otherwise awful regime.
I agree with this part of your comment and I think that many people do – in fact it is usually a view included in military documentaries broadcast the federal television channels.
Correct, improvement had been massive, but probably not until the Germans had been bled and were down to using old reservists and such (1945), were the Soviets better than the Germans in terms of overall quality. Even during Bagration Soviets suffered 771,000 casualties vs. German 450,000 (per Glantz).
I don’t think I disputed that by the time Germany was bled dry the Soviets were the most effective land army in the world.
Torchlight parades, saluting, uniforms, flags… you find all these disturbing and problematic? You have got to find a large portion of the human race psychotic in that case, not just Nazis.
Yes it is obvious. Decorating ‘you’re fucked’ on the gun is just ‘traditional’ decoration style. Yes it is only in retrospect that this man looks creepy, due to our brainwashing of too many Hollywood movies – it has nothing to do with our natural instincts (just Hollywood brainwashing). Who could imagine such a friend looking man on right photo, would ever go on to hurt someone.
http://2yrwuo3kbyxz20xx02a4011i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/03202017-b3.jpg
http://wat-if.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/police-body-cam-vid-shows-execution-of-daniel-shaver-officer-found-not-guilty.jpg
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5177981/Wife-man-shot-dead-cop-knees-speaks-out.html
LOL, definitely true of modern impressions. Maybe it was true in the 1930s also, but without the context of mass extermination that came later, these images might not have been as disturbing in the 1930s.
Here s a rally for Evita in Buenos Aires:
https://1951club.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/800px-funeral_de_evita.jpg
No military commanders or historians, consider causality ratio as the deciding factor in determining military achievement. This is something introduced much later – introduced I believe during the Vietnam war (a type of counter-insurgency), when the Americans had no other measure of achievement than their (often invented) body count statistics.
I recommend you go on some of reading of military historians on this campaign, which it seems you have not.
I wouldn’t discount so much our ‘modern impressions’, or attribute them as something ‘modern’. They are closer to ‘natural instincts’.
And your (a lot less sinister) image furnishes some support for this – as Eva Peron was influenced fascism, although in a very moderate form of fascism, which accurately matches her far less sinister appearing, but still somewhat fascist-influenced, iconography.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/review96/fevita.htm
They don’t celebrate him either though…he’s more like some half-forgotten figure in the very distant past, totally irrelevant to the present. Historical consciousness in Germany is very restricted…it’s totally dominated by 1933-1945 (ok, maybe with some colonial atrocities and WW1 war crimes as a prologue…but even those don’t play a prominent role).
“Patriotism” that is limited to pride about economic achievements is fake and pathetic imo, it leads people to believe that their highest goal in life should be to function as an obedient worker drone.
And I’m too lazy to google for surveys now, but no, Germans aren’t “highly patriotic” (certainly not compared to Americans or Russians).
I think the skulls and bones thing mostly dates back to post-WW1 Freikorps (though there is an earlier history, as reiner tor indicated), but yes, I do think it’s quite morbid, hard to fathom for most modern people why one would want to wear something like this.
Thanks for the link to the disturbing crime story!
Nazi aesthetics somewhat recall the Black Brunswickers, as I’m sure they were intended to. Eagle-related bird-of-prey stuff goes back to Rome at least, probably further. Don’t tell Dmitry about the Lions of Mycenae.
Honestly the Nazi uniform fashion is one of the less disturbing things about the party, even if it does have a Queer Eye sort of camp to it.
The Bengal famine happened in the 1940’s (10 years after Ukraine). So you are wrong.
The German ‘knights’ treated their own peasants almost the same as they treated outsiders – check out the history of the 30-year war. Millions died, millions were ‘unborn’.
You also omit the one true genocide in Ukraine by the Crimean Tatars (and similar one by the Ottomans in the Balkans.) Finally, there was a drought (as was pointed out to you above) in the 1930’s Ukraine.
It is always ‘complex’. I guess the complexity disappears once we discuss Russia or anything remotely related to Russia. Then simple-minded narratives based on ‘well, it could have happened’ take over. This is not helping to save Europe, to keep it European.
In which statement?
30-year war: relevant point
?
Economics impacts us more than most other indicators that people obsess about, so I would see a country that values the success of its industries. is a culture which is prioritizing its citizens and their future means of income.
Obviously in Germany’s case, we also have some contrary indicators that might be more disturbing to citizen, such as their open border welcome to immigration which is storing up future problems in exchange for present-day virtue signals.
But success of German brands – it’s something not to write off. You would dream about from perspective of country’s which are not so lucky. If would be great if Russia could have even a small fraction of such successes.
Often talked about are Russia’s arms exports – usually around $15 billion a year in revenue. So in other words, about 1/7 of a single company – BMW’s revenue each year.
–
As for difficulty of maintaining other kinds of patriotism in light of 20th century political history in the country. Germany was in memory living taken over by a murderer, resulting in unimaginable deaths in Germany and as well as all other Europe, and the Soviet Union (some relatives of my ancestors among them).
In Germany’s case, there is a sense that the country can afford to admit that they were taken over by a murderer, because it is like some illustrious noble family that had produced one shameful murderer, but also a counter-balancing gallery of great men.
If another people had produced Hitler, they would be forever associated only with that. But even if you try to make yourself hate Germany for what did the Nazis and their destruction of Europe – there is always another voice in your head saying – Beethoven, Nietzsche, etc.
To me, even without learning German – first thought of Germany is not of Nazis, but of noble cultural heritage displayed in (I guess aimed at tourists) sculpture like:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Printing3_Walk_of_Ideas_Berlin.JPG
There is not much private capital in the country. Since Crimea it has been steadily leaving.
I have talked to Afrikaner farmers thinking of Russia. They can’t sell their land for realistic prices. Russian Far East does not appeal.
Steelworks shed labour everywhere. Steel and coal towns are hard to revive. Whites used to have priority for jobs.
Magnit was caught by sanctions on fresh food. After the counter sanctions against the EU, they switched to Turkey. 100%. Then Russia sanctioned Turkey. I speak from direct experience that after that no one in reach wanted a Russian firm as a major customer. There are costs involved in customer acquisition. I have found some Mexicans who are worried about Trump but language skills aren’t great and exporting experience outside NAFTA is zero.
Any insights on the nerve gas poisoning of the ex-Russian spy Skripal and his daughter in UK?
Without Trotsky looting the granaries of Saratov, Moscow would have starved instead and the Bolsheviks would likely have been defeated.
They can’t sell their land for realistic prices.
They can always wait on the government compensation program.
40 acres…and a mule.
Peace.
Problem is, it wasn’t just one murderer…hundreds of thousands of Germans were involved in Nazi crimes, and the majority supported the regime at least at some point. That reality makes any positive identification with the past or any sense of continuity very difficult.
And the postwar-identity Germans adopted (at least in the West) as compensation for that (postnationalism with the end goal of Germany being submerged in the European community; in recent decades an incrasingly bizarre “antiracist” mania and forced cosmopolitanism) is probably going to turn out to be rather maladaptive…
With a naval blockade that starved it of raw materials once Russia stopped supplying them and an Airforce that never recovered from the Battle of Britain.
In 1941, a third of the tanks outside Moscow were Valentine’s from Canada and the UK. Russia received 3000 Hurricanes (not popular, true) from the UK before the US took over.
Big wars are won in the air and you forget the Italians.
And yet food supplies, wages and wealth climbed to levels never known before. Too much Marx I think.
India was about trade, not plunder. The Mongols, Spanish and Russians exacted tribute not the North West Europeans.
Radar. Interesting. Decades later Hungary developed an original and briefly much demanded floppy disk drive.
Tank=$3m or more
Anti-tank missile or drone = $100k
There were famines in India before Britain arrived. There were famines after Britain left. The potato famine killed Germans and Russians too. 200 million is a huge exaggeration.
It looks like you are getting hysterical. Not sure why.
There were also famines in Ukraine before 1930’s. There was 200-300 years of slave raids by Crimean Tatars that Russia put an end to by defeating them. There is a lot of history we can quote to each other.
Possibly. But if one uses the ‘Ukrainian’ methodology (or the general Soviet one) and you count all people who died during that period, no matter what the cause, count the unborn who would have been born, and count the kids the unborn would have, well, you can easily come up with 200 million. These are silly numbers and ‘huge exaggerations’ all around. But if you are consistent, and insist on applying that method to Soviet Russia, then you should also use it at home. For example, one can easily argue that British ‘genocide’ of the Irish has caused 2-3 million dead.
Oh, the sources. There was drought according sources. Sources and propaganda are two different things.
http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/8/4/2/26013origi_5579330_29582842.jpg
http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/8/4/6/26250origi_1486073_29582846.jpg
Calculations Zemskov independently confirmed several times, including studies extreme anti-Stalinists like Arseny Roginsky. On this for you there is no sense spend time on copying propaganda.
We are lagging behind the advanced countries in 50-100 years.
We must overcome this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we will be destroyed.
I. V. Stalin 1931
1931+10=1941
British East India company (or Churchill) have similar excuses?
To argue that British colonial policy was not related to British economic interests (as the British oligarchy understood these interests) it is denialism of the 70th level.
In this form it was the excesses, but not a deliberate policy of Moscow. Undoubtedly political of Moscow towards the peasants was very cruel, but deliberate destruction of peasants – it’s definitely a propaganda fake. This is like the rape of German women in 1945 – the real fact is distorted by propaganda so that it turns into propaganda fiction.
The peasants in the years of revolution, 1917-1920 (as well as in the years of revolution 1905-1907) by own initiative, committed the most heinous robbery and murder. I can’t feel any pity for these people. But really sad that the hunger was killing innocent people (e.g. children).
Is that a joke? I’ll copy one more time.
“A cruel tax and trade-usurious exploitation of the peasantry (in India) had caused widespread hunger . If 1825-1850. the famine twice struck the country and claimed 0.4 million human lives, in 1850-1875 famine killed 5 million, in 1875-1900. — 26 million”
Of course to blame for this are the Mongols, and especially evil Spanish and Russians – these eternal enemies of India
I suspect not, and if so none came even close to that number and percentage of dead. There were famines in other parts of the Russian Empire before the 1930s and those were not nearly as bad.
Your figures omitted those who were shot in small-scale operations, whose deaths were not recorded, and also did not include people who died in custody (from beatings, or untreated illness).
It is dishonest to pretend that the only deaths were those officially recorded executions on paper. There were nearly 700,000 recorded executions. Historian consensus is about a million total.
Historians are better sources than such documents, whose authors’ motivations maybe suspect (a historian’s motivations may also be suspect, but I wouldn’t the claims of a Stalin-era worker, whose life may be on the line depending on what he says, more).
Urban proles weren’t better.
Perhaps you shouldn’t feel pity for the people of Leningrad during the German siege, in that case?
The USSR at the time had millions of tons of grain in state reserves. What use is it to have state reserves if you don’t use them while millions are starving to death? By using the reserves they could’ve saved most of the dead.
There are documents showing that by early November 1932 the Politburo knew fully well that the peasants were starving and that people had already started to die. Both Molotov and Kaganovich recommended that the requisitioning quotas be reduced for a while, and they explicitly mentioned famine.
Then they instead decided to keep requisitioning, and even raised the quotas. If it’s not deliberate murder, I don’t know what is.
Each one of them? The number of their victims was at worst in the tens of thousands. Millions of them died in the famines already in the early 1920s.
I think the majority of the victims were children and the elderly. (Granted, the latter might have participated in the events fifteen years previously.)
The East India Company was mostly in it for its own profits. They relied to a large extent on British taxpayer support (like they needed a British fleet to protect their shipping lanes and lines of communication etc.), and eventually the UK (as a whole) probably roughly spent as much on colonization as it made on it. The East India Company shareholders (I think this included the king) of course made a lot of money. The taxpayers… not so much. It had nothing to do with subsequent industrialization, except that it had the same root cause: the UK was a rapidly developing and industrializing country, and this led to both the conquest of the empire and to industrialization.
Churchill was a little different, in that it was in wartime. Still the policy was wrong, but that is at least an excuse. The percentage of people who died was also lower. But yeah, Stalin treated his subjects like some colonial peoples.
Let’s just mention that industrialization probably wasn’t faster, because the famine created disruptions in the economy (loss of workforce, loss of agricultural production in later years, etc.), so probably there was no net benefit at all.
The argument was that Britain industrialized due to the Bengali famine. I suppose it was about the 1780s famine. The 1940s famine happened in wartime.
The Thirty Year War was a war. As in, German states and statelets were fighting each other, and while doing that, in line with the customs of the age, they were killing enemy civilians, too. It’s like strategic bombing of German or Japanese cities: civilians died, but the moment they came under occupation, they were no longer killed at all.
I know some things about them, since they raided Hungary, too.
This is again killing peoples who are not their own subjects. Slave harvesting is usually not considered genocide (at least not a deliberate one; in the colloquial meaning they might be considered one, though it usually killed “only” a few thousands or tens of thousands at a time, and the large number of killed was only a result of it happening over a very long time, so it’s a bit stretching even the colloquial meaning of the word), but it was certainly not better than an actual genocide.
Not always. Nazis committed genocide. Hutus committed genocide. Turks committed genocide. Germans against the Herero, too.
Some actions might not be technically genocides, but are no less horrendous. Like King Leopold in Congo.
Actually, it’s questionable if the holodomor could even be considered a genocide. It just might, but usually historians debate it. So it’s “complex.”
Also, I wholeheartedly apologize for slandering that greatest of all Russians, Stalin.
I find is funny that Beckow defends the Soviet regime by creating a context in which the behavior of the Soviet state towards its own subjects is compared to that of foreign slave raiders 200+ years earlier.
I’d say the last case actually is more complex, because the genuinely genocidal actions against the Herero were mostly due to the decisions of the local military commander whose orders were eventually rescinded by Berlin (just too late for most Herero). That’s rather different from multi-year campaigns of extermination ordered by the highest levels of government and carried out with all resources of the state as in the case of the genocides of the Nazis and Young Turks, also different from the Rwandan genocide which was planned in advance and involved large parts of the population. Titles like “The Kaiser’s Holocaust” are seriously misleading imo about what happened in German Southwest Africa (even if it isn’t in doubt that the Herero were victims of massive violence).
I stand corrected.
But then again, the holodomor was also more complex itself. It was a deliberate campaign of mass murder, ordered by the highest levels of government, but I’d argue it was not really a genocide in the sense that it didn’t aim at the destruction of the Ukrainian people. “Only” the peasantry, and even Russian peasants were targeted (though I think not uniformly across the country).
But it definitely was a deliberate campaign of mass murder.
I agree…but who’s even claiming that apart from some Ukrainian nationalists? As I wrote above, the consensus view among Western academics seems to be that it was a ruthless campaign against the traditional peasantry in a quest for modernization, and that any possible ethnic aspects weren’t decisive.
Rummel, who coined the modern idea of genocide.
Also Timothy Snyder, Yale historian, whom Ukrainian nationalists are angry with because he discusses UPA mass crimes.
This is the consensus, but to be clear, the idea that it was genocide is a minority view, not a fringe view exclusively limited to Ukrainian nationalists.
And to point out – Germany acted in East Africa better towards the natives than did any of the other colonial powers in Africa. Simplistically, they were trying to create mini-Prussians and were making a lot of investments into education, infrastructure, etc.
I would have thought that was Rafael Lemkin.
Haven’t read Rummel’s work (and probably won’t), my superficial impression (which may of course be unfair) isn’t positive.
Anyway, I agree with reiner tor that in any case the Soviet authorities were responsible and that it was mass murder. Whether it was genocide in the strict sense or not, only matters if one regards genocide as especially evil and worse than all other mass crimes (which tbh I don’t).
You’re right, it was Lemkin. I was thinking of him. And he considered holodomor to be genocide.
I agree. It’s a PR term. Mass killing based on ethnicity doesn’t sem t be objectively worse than killing people based on their class.
Well, tbh they also crushed the Maji-Maji uprising there with rather brutal methods (iirc it’s claimed a few hundred thousand starved to death because German colonial troops deliberately devastated crops and the like).
I guess some of the natives profited from German rule though, the Askaris who served in WW1 seemed to like it.
Anyway, I didn’t want to dispute that German colonial rule in Africa was often fairly brutal. I just regard Western claims of special German depravity in this regard as hypocritical (it’s part of the “Germans = most evil people ever” narrative that is rather convenient for many). Some time ago I read in the Cambridge history of the First World war about Africa in WW1…apparently there were some uprisings in West Africa during WW1, and the French crushed those mercilessly, with thousands of dead. But who has ever heard of that (I hadn’t)? And they did similar stuff even later on (iirc in Madagascar in the 1940s they threw opponents of their rule out of aircraft, and similar things). So I don’t buy those claims that German colonialism was categorically worse than that of other colonial powers, even if in some cases it may have been towards the more brutal end of the spectrum.
I agree.
You suspect wrong. Ukraine’s was depopulated a few times in the last 1,000 years, famine, plunder, wars, it was too open for steppe raiders. Crimean Tatars literally killed and enslaved millions of Ukrainians – a very brutal story that lasted until Russia finally defeated the Crimean Tatar slave state in the late 18th century.
It is weird that today Kiev celebrates Tatardom and worships their singer. But they are getting close to the same self-abasement in front of Germans. And boy, did anyone kill more Ukrainians than the Germans? What do you think? Pretty close call between the Tatars and the Germans…
We started debating whether the holodomor was deliberate mass murder and somehow we slipped into the question of whether Tatar slave raiders committed genocide.
Well, it’s an open thread, so I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I just find the whole discussion pretty strange…imo some of the Russian commenters and Russophiles like Beckow are creating a bit of a straw man here with their claims that in the West the Ukrainian famine is generally regarded as genocide. That’s not true…it is however regarded as a famine that was created mostly artificially and made worse at every stage by the Soviet authorities, who clearly had little regard for the lives of the affected peasants (or even thought they deserved it anyway). If one thinks that’s an acceptable price to pay for modernization and industrialization (because Stalin foresaw the attack by the Nazis…who weren’t even in power in Germany when the famine began in 1932), ok, but pretending this was nothing out of the ordinary seems a bit much.
The competence of Rokossovsky is “extremely doubtful”?
There should also be some explanation of how using up the millions of tons of grain in the state granaries in 1932-33 and thus saving millions of people would have slowed down industrialization. Or how losing millions of people from the workforce helped the Soviet economy.
Many of them could have served in the military 1941-45. They have to show how it made the USSR stronger.
Something just as mythical.
Exaggeration. Hundreds of thousands, probably. Perhaps over a million. This would have been over centuries. Soviet death toll was accomplished in mere decades.
Keep in mind historical estimates are often exaggerations. Khmelytsky was said t0 have killed over 100,000-500,000 Jews based on chronicle accounts, but modern historians estimate 18,000-20,000.
Again, it is amusing that you try to “normalize” the Soviet treatment of it own citizens by comparing it to slave raids by foreigners 200+ years ago.
Is that more weird than supporting Moscow whose rulers killed millions of Ukrainians in some peoples’ living memory?
Soviets killed about 3 million Ukrainians in the famine in the 1930s, probably an additional million in repression plus 1918-1921.
If you add military casualties the Germans killed more total, but in terms of civilian deaths the Soviets killed more ethnic Ukrainians than did the Germans. Germans starved to death about 1-1.5 million Ukrainians in central and eastern Ukraine, taking advantage of the Soviet collective farms they took over to repeat a mini-Holodomor. But in Galicia, under a different administration than the rest of Ukraine, Ukrainians were treated fairly well.
Of course the Soviet killings occurred in the early to mid 1930s so the Germans were worse than the Soviets had been immediately prior to the war (and afterwards).
Mass killing based on ethnicity doesn’t sem t be objectively worse than killing people based on their class.
One can’t change one’s race or ethnicity, but you can renounce your class, get sent for “re-education,” etc., so there appears to be some choice or free will involved. Of course little Alexei, and who knows how many others, didn’t get a chance at reforming himself.
Why is wearing skulls so morbid? The heavy metal scene used skull imagery very often, and fans often wore T-shirts with skulls, monsters, or similar. Black Sabbath at some point was a best selling artist, similarly Iron Maiden and Guns N‘ Roses. Or Metallica. They all used skulls on their T-shirts, and it was customary for fans to wear those T-shirts regularly.
Of course, rock concerts often resembled Nazi rallies, and fans’ reaction to their favorite bands often resembled Nazis’ reaction to the sight of the Führer, a similarity remarked on by many people, including David Bowie.
Metal fans don’t seem to be abnormal psychopaths, after all. I don’t think there’s anything bizarre about Nazi uniforms, especially in light of such imagery being used all over the world.
The Ukrainian peasants were sentenced to mass death regardless of their personal behavior or beliefs. Stalinist peasants starved to death, too.
A funny thing you forgot to mention. Under Catherine II the Crimean state ended and Tatar slave raids ceased. But at the same time serfdom was massively expanded and made worse in Ukraine itself. Being kidnapped into slavery is worse than being made into a quasi-slave at home, but the latter affected far more people, so overall the situation for peasants became worse.
Who are you apologising to? I think you are getting the context wrong.
A famine is a famine. When people die from hunger, it matters little if there is supposedly a war going on, civil war, revolution, or if it just because some a..holes decided to take their food. There is often also a nature component – usually a drought.
You rather gently downplay the Tatar slave raiding. I am not sure why, maybe you have a soft spot for Jamila’s whining. Then again, historically, Germans (and all Western Europeans) had a very soft spot for the Islamic raiders of eastern Europe. Somehow, they seldom call them ‘occupiers’, are obsessed with preserving their ‘cultures’ (unlike let’s say in South Africa), and in all conflicts they proudly stand on the side of the Islamic invaders against the local population. That one I put down to some misguided strategic thinking, although there are certainly some who simply prefer a Turk to a Slav or a Hungarian. Nazis did, so does British Foreign Service.
We do agree on the general point that ‘genocide’ might not be well defined and that it is used subjectively. There has also been a lot in all of our histories that could be called genocide. When I point out the subjectivity and different metrics, you don’t have to apologise to me. I will do it anyway.
On the other hand the ethnically Ukrainian areas expanded greatly during the Russian conquests. So while psychologically and subjectively it might have felt worse, it was probably better, at least in the long run, and if you care for genetic interests.
Exaggeration? Really? The estimates are 3 million, plus you have to add the unborn (as everyone does in the Ukraine’s holodomor). They were Ukrainians, Moldovans, Poles,… There were additional millions in the Balkans and among non-Moslems in the Caucasus. Why do you constantly try to downplay it?
To say that the kidnapped peasants were ‘better off’ than the ones left behind who were serfs (mostly to Polish lords by the way), is beyond bizarre. What can one say to that? You are truly deranged on that one.
I am glad to hear that the Galicians were ‘treated relatively well’ by the Germans. So then it is ok, who cares about the other tens of millions of Ukrainians, Belorussians and Poles. The Galicians were ok, so why should we bring up the whole unpleasant German thing? Let’s forget the Tatars and the Germans and the Poles and the Turks, and focus razor-sharp only on the Russians. Because, as you told us before, you are actually a ‘Russophile’…
I’m not a fan of heavy metal, it seems pretty silly to me.
And wearing skulls…well, it reminds me of some weird pre-Columbian sculptures, or that horrible Santa Muerte cult in Mexico. Death worship. And since I dislike the very idea of death, I find that rather repellent.
Umm, when did that supposedly happen? Maybe in the 10th century or so, when Saxons supposedly sold captive pagan Slavs as slaves to Islamic Spain, but how exactly did Germans take the side of Muslims once Eastern Europe had been Christianized?
You do know that Vienna (that city twice besieged by the Ottomans) was the capital of the Holy Roman empire of the German nation?
The 3 million killed by holodomor does not include unborn. When you include unborn you get estimates of 7 million or whatever.
So by your own numbers, over centuries Crimean Tatars killed as many people as Soviets did in 2 years (1932-1933) , and fewer than they did overall.
Stalin was a Russian? Kaganovich was a Russian?
So in your pro-Sovok frenzy you lost the ability to read.
I wrote:
“Under Catherine II the Crimean state ended and Tatar slave raids ceased. But at the same time serfdom was massively expanded and made worse in Ukraine itself. Being kidnapped into slavery is worse than being made into a quasi-slave at home, but the latter affected far more people, so overall the situation for peasants became worse.”
Your pattern is that when you lose an argument you are reduced to simply lying. Of course I never claimed that the German murder of central and eastern Ukrainians was okay.
It had nothing to do with subsequent industrialization, except that it had the same root cause: the UK was a rapidly developing and industrializing country, and this led to both the conquest of the empire and to industrialization.
Where should I start? WWI, Germany allied with the Turks against Balkan Slavs. Same in the late 19th century when Germans couldn’t find enough reasons to prevent the Balkan Orthodox countries from liberating themselves from the Ottoman occupation. Arming and funding the Turk, Berlin Congress, Crimean War where West (maybe not Germans that time, but West in general) went to war to keep the Moslem-Turks from being finally defeated and pushed out of the Christian lands that they had conquered. WWII – Germans form SS divisions from Moslems in the balkans and Crimean Tatars to terrorise the majority Slavic population.
It actually would be hard to find a single case when Germans (or the West in general) sided with Slavs against their Moslem oppressors. As I said, hundreds of years of misguided geo-politics. That will come back to byte them. Habsburgs are a partial exception, and I think Austrians in general have been more supportive.
Then we have the 1990’s: Germany led the effort to bomb Serb Christians and to give Moslems everything the wanted – from Bosnia to Kosovo, the German elite was there bombing, lying, arming. You forgot? We didn’t.
And they did similar stuff even later on (iirc in Madagascar in the 1940s they threw opponents of their rule out of aircraft, and similar things)
Wow, busy bees those Ukrainians. I am assuming that is pre-Femen…
Worse? Doesn’t that mean ‘worse’, or is worse now better for you? I also like your passive non-commital verb ‘ceased’. Right. It just ‘ceased’.
You didn’t, you just said that Germans treated Galicians relatively well (actually they didn’t, but that is another story). You said nothing about the rest of Ukrainians. Thanks for clarifying, but your omissions are telling.
No, they allied with them against the British empire. Turkey had already been mostly thrown out of the Balkans by 1914 and didn’t really play a role in the European theatre of war.
Obviously alliance with Turkey wasn’t something to be proud of, given what they did to the Armenians and other Christian minorities in Asia. But it had nothing to do with being against Balkan Slavs (and frankly, after what the Serbs had done with their world war-provoking terrorism, I have zero sympathy for them and their stupid Panslavist friends in Russia anyway).
It seems to me you’re confusing Germany with Britain here. Regarding the Crimean war, Prussia was genuinely neutral iirc. Austria was hostile towards Russia, but didn’t participate in the fighting.
You can’t come up with any example of German states directly supporting the Turks either though, all you’ve got is Muslim SS divisions in WW2. This doesn’t translate into “have always supported Muslims against Slavs” as you claimed.
And what exactly do you understand by “the West”? Britain and France? Bit selective I’d think.
As far as I know, Germany only played a leading role in recognizing the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, both Christian Slavic nations. I can’t discern any more pronounced pro-Muslim bias than was the case with other NATO countries.
I’ll be blunt since I’m in a bad mood anyway: this panslavist crap that keeps popping up on this blog which has Russia as the protector of all Slavs that can never ever do wrong (Russia must have been the most benevolent empire in all of history apparently), and all Slavs, at all times, everywhere as completely innocent victims (at least as long as they’re aligned with Russia…I guess Poles, Croats and Ukrainians are dubious cases) is starting to get on my nerves. Not all of history consists of Nazi Germany or Crimean Tatars or similar forces of evil, and this entire “West will always hate and threaten us” line is starting to remind me of Muslims with their endless complaints and barely existent capability for self-criticism.
My full statement, liar:
“If you add military casualties the Germans killed more total, but in terms of civilian deaths the Soviets killed more ethnic Ukrainians than did the Germans. Germans starved to death about 1-1.5 million Ukrainians in central and eastern Ukraine, taking advantage of the Soviet collective farms they took over to repeat a mini-Holodomor. But in Galicia, under a different administration than the rest of Ukraine, Ukrainians were treated fairly well.”
You referenced the last part of the paragraph I wrote, so clearly you read the first part, and dishonestly pretended I didn’t write it.
But, having lost, you are in the lying phase of your discussion.
And yes, Germans treated ethnic Ukrainians in Galicia relatively well – better than did the Soviets. That’s why the Galicians, having experienced 1939-1941, weren’t rushing to help the Soviets, and were volunteerering to help the Germans.
…errr the famine of 1922 massively affected “Ukraine” you imbecilic retard….this huge-scale famine in 1922 is in the modern day notable for being the main source of the photos of the fictitious Golodomor in the 1930’s…. propagated by the American press to try and discredit the Communists.
Yes, as I understand from what I have read the Ukrainians were targeted, but there was an element of politics involved in the intial targeting.
A second question concerning genocide is whether the killing is meant to be a complete eradication. It seems to me that Stalin wasn’t necessarily trying to kill “all” of the Ukrainians. He was likely indifferent to the exact % to be starved.
OTOH it is clear what was intended by the Nazis.
The Armenians? I don’t know very much about it but my impression is that the Ottomans were, like Stalin, indifferent to how many were killed and again the intial targeting was political.
A dirty lie of a spambot cunt.
because being ,twice, a traitor, to the two opposing sides is too much of an embarassing position to take even for the lowest of the low scumbags like these UPA scoundrels you attention-whore retard, added with the fact that any polish state after the Soviet breakthrough would not exactly be german-friendly, further volunteering with the Germans would have been the only option you cretinious POS
It wasn’t political at all (in the sense that it mattered much or at all what an individual Armenian had done), they just wanted to get rid of all Armenians and turn Asia minor into an ethnic homeland for Turks only. The only way it was “better” in any way than the Nazi genocide against the Jews was that it wasn’t completely descent-based, that some Armenians could survive if they accepted complete Turkicization/Islamicization. Not that this mattered to the majority of Armenians who were expelled, raped, left to die in the desert or just killed.
But not surprising that you take this stance, obviously it’s once again about how the Jewish Holocaust is the most unique crime ever, and everything else mere trivia.
Germany was the key country in the attack on Yugoslavia. Yes, their bias was within the Western general pro-Moslem bias, but Germany is big, it has certain gravitas in Central-East, so German position was quite important. As so often before, they chose to side with Islam (and Anglos and their global interests) against their own eastern neighbours.
I can see that it irritates you, and so it should. The catastrophic situation the the Western European Christians are finding themselves in today, is a cumulative consequence of their bad behaviour, bad choices, and also the German genocidial attack in WWII on their eastern neighbours. Nowhere do I say that one side is ‘innocent’ or benevolent – those are you projections.
This is not about Russia and I could care less about pan-anything. I want Europe to stay European, I don’t distinguish among the different old European nations. As so often in the past, when Germans (or today Anglos) are confronted with consequences of their actions, they scream pan-Slavism, Russia, whatever. It has nothing to do with it. You seem unable to explain why Germany bombed Serbia to create a mini-Moslem state in Kosovo, to please Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Until Germany comes to terms with what they did, it is hard to take them seriously. You hide behind irritated exterior that hides guilt.
And this is the way Europe is going, we will argue minutia as we go down.
I don’t want to defend bastards like Schröder and Fischer, but what’s your evidence for this? Do you even realize how bizarre the idea is that Germany – which at the time had zero history of any post-WW2 military interventions, and where any change to this was hugely controversial – was the driving force behind the bombing of Serbia? Yes, they went along with it and did some pretty dubious stuff (lying about Serbian plans for mass expulsions which probably never existed), but unless you give me concrete reason for changing my opinion, I’ll continue in my belief that the ones who really pushed for it and wanted to do it were in the Clinton adminstration (plus maybe Blair’s government in Britain).
Germany hasn’t often chosen the side of Islam in its history, you won’t be able to come up with much apart from the WW1 alliance with Turkey. Before that relations with the Islamic world were mostly either non-existent or hostile.
As for Anglos, you do understand that no other country was longer at war with Germany in the 20th century than Britain (and yes, this has left a lasting mark, relations are rather frosty)? It’s of course true that Germany has been deeply Atlanticist in its orientation for decades, but these things are a lot more ambivalent than you claim. And Germany isn’t special in this regard, all of Europe up to Poland’s eastern border is similar.
What’s there to explain, Germany is run by Atlanticist cretins who believe all the postnational human rights, open society whatever nonsense they’re spouting? They just go along with the general Western Zeitgeist. I regard these people as cancer and want them removed from power…if it were up to me someone like Joschka Fischer would be extradited to Belgrade, tried and his execution shown live on German tv.
Yes, it’s like those stupid theological discussions or endless arguments about who did what to whom Byzantines and Latins had while the Turks steadily advanced. I agree with you, these anachronistic squabbles are rather pointless given what we’re facing.
It’s (generally) obvious propaganda fiction.
http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/6/3/0/Bezpng_9406745_29591630.png
Better read the entire article, it is quite informative
https://www.newcoldwar.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Tauger-The-1932-Harvest-and-the-Famine-of-1933-Slavic-REview-1991.pdf?50d5a1&50d5a1
The peasants massively participated in the partition of lands of landowners (and in the killings of the landlords themselves). And landlords played the same role in the economy as white farmers in Zimbabwe. They owned about 15% of the land ( peasants owned 80% of the land), but landlords provided marketable grain for cities and exports. The destruction of the farms of the landlords was a disaster (which caused millions of victims). And Stalin’s collectivization is a cruel but necessary action to partially correct this catastrophe.
Of course, but the company was an instrument of British policy, and its policy was dictated by the economic interests of Britain (as these interests were understood by the ruling circles of Britain). Argue that this is not so-70 level denialism
Yes, but another famine in India occurred at a time when the war was actually won. It is claimed that England had the resources to help the dying, but the British (in accordance with the old English tradition), decided to save. Industrialization for the USSR was really a matter of life and death (in the conditions of approaching WWII). England and Churchill have no such justification.
I agree with most of what you wrote. My point was not that Germany was the ‘driving force‘ behind the attack on Yugoslavia, my point was that ‘Germany is big, it has gravitas in Central-East, so German position was important‘. That was obviously true, especially if you add Austria. The media demonisation of Yugoslavia in German media was among the worst, and as neighbours, their decision to support the bombing was a key requirement. Clinton, the neo-cons, Blair, and I think above all Saudi and Turkish interests and money, were the driving force.
Having said that, Joshka Fisher stands out as a particularly evil character – a ‘peacenik’ green who rushed to bomb a small, neighbouring country on what he knew were largely invented media stories. And the recognition of Croatia/Slovenia by Germany was the initial trigger for the civil war. It was an act of war; if Russia or Britain recognise Catalonia independence, with no negotiation, one would call that an act of war on Spain.
The reason this matters is that many of our problems can be directly traced to the late 90’s collapse in Western rationality that was exemplified by the bloody bombing of Serbia. Let’s list them:
– use of force at will (ignoring UN)
– separatism when it suits the West (Kosovo), but not when it doesn’t (Catalonia, Crimea)
– massive media campaigns – lying without limits about the ‘enemy’
– telling the Islamic world that they can ask and get anything – that they are special
– setting up the massive confrontation with Russia – all informed observers understand that it was the bombing of Beograde that changed Russia and brought people around Putin to power.
Today we are living with the consequences. So it does matter. Germany is not the helpless ‘Atlanticist’ poodle that had no say in any of this. The German elite made a choice, and they made it again with Ukraine, that reflects at least some of their thinking. Unless that changes, the division in Europe will persist and we will be taken apart. (One small point: talk to Polish nationalists about Serbia bombing and you will find that was one of the triggers for many of them to become more nationalistic; and they might hate Russia. The bombing of Beograde was the original sin. Time to do the penance.)
…errr the famine of 1922 massively affected “Ukraine” you imbecilic retard….this huge-scale famine in 1922 is in the modern day notable for being the main source of the photos of the fictitious Golodomor in the 1930′s
I won’t comment on the second part of your statement, but I can confirm from family history that there was indeed a major famine in 1921-23, although it was not limited to Ukraine but included other areas of what was to become the USSR (Dec. 1922). Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA) provided significant aid, in fact there was a program on PBS in 2011 recounting this:
The personal element is that my grandfather (who had remained in what is now Ukraine when his daughter, my grandmother, emigrated to the US in 1895) received a relief package from the ARA, and was murdered by someone else in order to get hold of it.
photo of American Relief Administration operations in Russia in 1922
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Relief_Administration#/media/File:American_Relief_Administration_in_Russia_in_1922.jpg
Edit correction to previous post: it was my great-grandfather who was murdered, not my grandfather.
It wasn’t political at all (in the sense that it mattered much or at all what an individual Armenian had done),
While you are of course right that there was no individual political element involved, I don’t think it’s correct to assert that there was not an overall political element, specifically that a not insignificant element of the Armenian population was actively aiding the Russians — this is not of course to justify what occurred, but it does provide another example of the difficult position minorities face in time of war.
It wasn’t political at all (in the sense that it mattered much or at all what an individual Armenian had done),
It was political in the sense that some Armenians were up for and at the ready every time that there was a chance for rebellion or a chance for collaboration with any Ottoman enemy, foreign or domestic. Also, there was the religious divide which is definitely political.
But not surprising that you take this stance, obviously it’s once again about how the Jewish Holocaust is the most unique crime ever, and everything else mere trivia.
Not really, but for the modern era it was unique. Of course it doesn’t mean that Harvey Weinstein has the right with impunity to coerce women into watching him jerk off, if that’s what you are trying to get at.
Tauger ‘s view do not represent consensus among historians or demographers. Here is a rebuttal of Tauger’s claims:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20451398?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
BTW, Tauger blames the Bengal famine (mentioned on this discussion) on natural causes:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0306615031000169125
The often absentee landlords who owned vast estates did not the play the same role in the economy as did white farmers in Zimbabwe. The productive ones were the wealthier peasants, not these landlords. The wealthiest and most productive peasants were, of course, the ones destroyed by the Soviet system. So the Soviet system employed the Mugabe approach towards the countryside: destroy the wealthiest and most productive farmers and steal their lands.
Here is agricultural production:
https://www.climate-policy-watcher.org/grain-production/table-54-estimates-for-grain-production-in-the-ussr-between-1928-and-1940-millions-of-tons.html
Collapsed in 1921 due to disruptions during the Revolution and Civil War, but consistently high in 1928-1930. Severe decline in 1931 with dekulakization in grain and livestock.
“A reliable indication of the poor performance of Soviet agriculture is that livestock numbers had not recovered by the end of the 1930s. From 1934 onwards the livestock sector began to recover, but only in the case of pigs, and the levels of 1928 had only been reached by 1940 (although in 1937 a decline in numbers occurred due to the drought of 1936). In fact, the number of Soviet livestock would only recover fully by 1958. Even by 1940 the average live weight was still significantly lower than before collectivization. According to Soviet official statistics, the meat and dairy consumption of an average Soviet citizen fell by between 25 and 30 percent between 1930 and 1940 (Kiselev and Shagin, 1996). “
Everything is political to some extent…but what can’t be really doubted, is that the Young Turks deliberately wanted to destroy Armenian communities to create an ethnic tabula rasa and prepare the ground for a homogenous Turkish state. And frankly I don’t buy the stories of Turkish victimhood (“We were the true victims! We only had to react to Armenian terrorism!”) the Turks are pushing. The destruction of the Armenians and other Christian minorities from 1915 onwards didn’t come out of nowhere, there had already been large-scale massacres of Armenians in the 1890s; and in spring 1914 (!) the Turks already began a drive to expel Greeks from western Asia minor (that was actually halted in part due to German pressure once the world war had started, because the Germans feared it might drive Greece into the arms of the Entente). Yes, Turkish nationalists may have felt beleaguered given the decrepit state of the empire, but in a sense the world war was a golden opportunity for them to start a project of “ethnic restructuring” of Asia Minor they wanted to do anyway.
As for some Armenians being disloyal, well, yes, probably true, but 1) one can hardly blame them imo given previous Turkish behaviour, 2) this logic is somewhat akin imo to claims that Chaim Weizmann exhorted Jews to support the British war effort against Germany, and many communists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had a Jewish background, so Germany could legitimately regard all Jews as enemies. The Turks only get away with this crap imo, because most people in the West don’t know or care much about those issues.
As for Rogan’s book, I haven’t yet read it, but I do know that it was severely criticized for supposedly being too soft on the Turks regarding the destruction of the Armenians, so a certain bias can’t be excluded.
By that definition, anything is “political”. What is not in doubt, is that the Armenians were targeted as an ethnoreligious collective and that the intent of the Young Turks was to destroy them as a distinct community, largely through physical extermination/expulsion, in a few cases through forced assimilation. This fits the textbook definition of genocide and is clearly different from the Ukrainian famines.
As for the Holocaust, yes, of course it was unique in the sense that I can’t think of any comparable multi-year campaign of mass murder that was on a similar scale (both geographical and in intent). I still find the reasoning that other mass murders weren’t that bad because “hey, the Nazis were even worse!” pretty strange though.
I still find the reasoning that other mass murders weren’t that bad because “hey, the Nazis were even worse!” pretty strange though.
As do I, so you will have to find someone else to hang that on. I think genocides and genocide type massacres are a nasty business. At the core, my only contribution is my opinion that killing people for race or ethnicity has been unacceptable for some time now. Killing people of a different religion likely comes next in the unacceptable order. Killing for political reasons is still pretty much accepted.
What is not in doubt, is that the Armenians were targeted as an ethnoreligious collective and that the intent of the Young Turks was to destroy them as a distinct community
I’ll keep this in mind. I intend to read more on the subject.
As for Rogan’s book, I haven’t yet read it, but I do know that it was severely criticized for supposedly being too soft on the Turks regarding the destruction of the Armenians, so a certain bias can’t be excluded.
I haven’t read the book yet either (only some of the parts on the Armenians via Google), although I have read a number of reviews, all of them very favourable. Rogan is very critical of the Turks, he is not excusing them at all, but one cannot maintain the fiction that the Armenians were 100% loyal and posed no risk. I am sure that pointing this out must have attracted criticism from some quarters.
It all comes down to the fact that wartime provides the ideal opportunity for getting rid of an “unwanted” minority (and convincing the “masses” that this is a necessary thing to do).
You are hopeless, a combination of a Nazi sympathiser and a Russia hater. I am guessing the usual bitter ethnic emigre background…
That’s probably true, and it’s also true that the ethnic conflicts during the dissolution of the Ottoman empire weren’t a one-way affair; iirc many of the leaders of the Young Turks, and many of the perpetrators of anti-Armenian massacres, had roots in the Balkans and the Caucasus from where they had been expelled…that is in a sense those people had been victims of ethnic cleansing themselves. Their idea that they needed to create an ethnically and religiously “pure” Asia Minor as a safe haven for Turks wasn’t completely irrational (though their methods can hardly be condoned).
But such issues are usually presented as very black-white in today’s discourse, with little nuance. Turkish nationalists who are downright deranged and just deny everything aren’t very constructive in this regard either though.
The problem with your lies is that they are simply disproven on the same thread, Beckow.
Here:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-37/#comment-2235614
I wrote:
“If you add military casualties the Germans killed more total, but in terms of civilian deaths the Soviets killed more ethnic Ukrainians than did the Germans. Germans starved to death about 1-1.5 million Ukrainians in central and eastern Ukraine, taking advantage of the Soviet collective farms they took over to repeat a mini-Holodomor. ”
Yeah, that is something a Nazi sympathizer would write. In some other comments a few months ago I wrote that there was some justice in the German loss of East Prussia and other territories because those regions were the ones who voted for Nazis, and thus deserved to be lost (I would not go so far as to say that those people living there deserved to be killed or raped or whatever).
As for your lie about me being some sort of Russia hater – Stalin killed millions of Russians, too, you know.
Fischer has made a career out of playing the “good German” who supposedly has learned the real lessons from Germany’s Nazi past…and one of them apparently is “humanitarian bombing” to prevent “Auschwitz” happening again, as he claimed during the Kosovo war. I don’t even think it’s an act, he probably really believes it all.
The recognition of Croatian/Slovenian independence…well, I understand that it was a questionable decision, also one that hadn’t been coordinated with other Western powers. Not sure about its significance for the break-up of Yugoslavia though (could that state really have been salvaged?). Also doesn’t fit your general thesis of Western powers favoring Muslims that well…one important reason was sympathy for Catholic Croatia, especially in Bavaria.
And I wouldn’t even claim that Germany is just a US “poodle” without any responsibility of her own. I don’t get the impression though that German foreign policy elites have some master plan…frankly, they seem like pretty incompetent people to me, in thrall to delusions and drifting along.
Many thanks for the information.
With this fictitious golodomor, next to zero fuss was made of it in “Ukraine” from 1945-1991, only fantasist fucktard son of Nazi morons in the US/Canada and those in Ukraine from the regions that had nothing to do with the affected areas ( because they were not even part of the USSR until after 1945) propagated this nonsense, increasing the “victim” number by a million every 3 years.
What drove this propaganda was that the US, which lost more people to hunger during the same period as the USSR, recognised the USSR as a legal state only in 1932/33, the exact time as the Golodomor was said to have happened ( according to the Nazi rapist scum) this is what drove the fictitious Golodomor nonsense- the right-wing press in America (and Tsarist emigrees) , because a Democrat government was in power and the fear over the rise and possible success of Communism ( at the time) so not for the first time….the state of the world was dictated to by nonsensical internal American disputes.
possible success of Communism ( at the time)
I’m glad that you clarified that. I, for one, was expecting the utopia any day now, still, after these many long decades.
The more things change, the more …