Open Thread 88

Actually, Stalin-era Sovoks did partially reverse some of the actions of the traitorous early Soviets which later caused some butthurt among Balts.

https://cdn1.img.sputnik-news.ee/images/1625/86/16258641.png

The orange areas were controlled by the inter-war Estonian state.

The news is not only low in signal and high in repetition, large doses of it are hazardous to one’s mental health. I can’t remember the last time (it is way over one year) the New York Times or the Washington Post informed me I had exceeded my free access limit of 3 articles a month or whatever the number was at the time.

In the immortal words of Carl Bernstein, it’s like all fake.

(that is paraphrase not direct quotation)

No, the path to increased fertility is to stimulate it first through tax reduction to BOTH parents (family remaining together pre-requisite, miniscule for 1 kid, solid for 2 kids, very high for 3) until 0% tax for 4+ kids.

No lump sums, no other benefits. This would benefit people with higher income (often smarter, better educated) in high tax countries and would not fund Gypsy and other minority multiplication.

It would literally make it cost effective to have more kids, appealing to current materialist mindset.

This would only be a stopgap, as the true path to high fertility is through ideological and cultural reshaping. Women are too precious to be spending their fertile, healthy potential motherhood years pursuing useless degrees, crappy meme careers, pushing papers and saturating job market.

More people, especially more people of same ethnicity in the same country is always a good thing. It is in the long-term interest of the state to promote as high as possible fertility rates.

One of the greatest hypocrisies in international relations is the fact that even though the former USSR and Yugoslavia are considered archaic and their collapse is celebrated as a good thing, their internal borders are still treated as legitimate international borders which are holy, sacred and inviolable …

Very true, but much of this is just that border disputes give Europeans the jitters since they have a history of leading to war.

I can’t be bothered to look for numbers, but a lot of Balts got deported to Gulag labor camps (somewhere in the range of a few hundred thousands iirc).

I bothered to do some brief browsing on the deportations, and yes, it is around a few hundred thousand, no more than 300,000 from all the Baltic countries. The deportations were aimed at political dissidents. Even then, deportations for the Balts were still better than being mass murdered into the millions like ethnic Russians were.

Still though, what are Russians supposed to do when faced with Svidomy Balts screeching about “muh deportations”, even though all those deportations were done by an ethnic Georgian (Stalin), Jewish and Sovok Communist leadership? Why should Russians from Russia even care about these deportations when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians are at the “mercy” of Svidomy Balts? Would you have Russia pay reparations or something for the 300 gorillion deportations?

Well, those are extremely minimal reversals. Without Narva, it’s really just a bunch of scraps.

Why this obsession with Narva? The place is a total hellhole.

Narva river is the traditional border between Russia and the Baltics.
It is fine.

Even when the Baltics were part of the part of the Russian Empire, they were separated from the Russian heartland and autonomous until the last decades.

even though all those deportations were done by an ethnic Georgian (Stalin), Jewish and Sovok Communist leadership?

NKVD was majority ethnic Russian by 1940/41 iirc, Jewish overrepresentation was more of a feature of the earlier period (though Beria was of course Caucasian).

Would you have Russia pay reparations or something for the 300 gorillion deportations?

No, certainly not. My intention was merely to point out the problems with claiming the actions of Britain and France and the Soviet Union were somehow morally equivalent. Anyway, it’s mostly a historical matter imo.

AP has changed its style for the capital of Ukraine to Kyiv. Glorious accomplishment!

I think that it’s high time that our very own AP follow suit. How about it AP, isn’t it high time for you too, to make the switch and come out and endorse the approved spelling of KYIV? 🙂
(I know that you’re out there reading this).

Try it, you’ll like it!

Why this obsession with Narva? The place is a total hellhole.

Narva is only the most valuable thing on the Russian-Estonian border in that area. I personally don’t really care about Narva. Honestly, I’m starting to think that border and territory disputes are pointless to aggressively pursue for any ethno-national/religious group unless their demographic performance is good. That is, if a given group happens to have a birth rate above 2.1 children per women, the replacement rate, of course, only then can they securely push for retaking rightful land or stealing territory from others as only then would they truly have the vital energy needed for such ventures.

Pardon my ignorance, but could you write down the damage inflicted on German armed forces, German industry from September 1st 1939 to April 1st 1940 by UK and France?

And how exactly do Poland and Grossdeutschland, Drang nach Osten/Lebensraum compute?

Don’t say “The Netherlands” you’re legitimizing Spanish Imperialism, it’s just Netherlands now

I read it somewhere in the last couple of months but I read a lot of books one after the other so I can’t remember exactly where. Maybe David Stahel’s book on Operation Barbarossa?

Also, calling Belarus and Ukraine “eastern Poland” is the same as calling Poland – western Russia.

I didn’t call it Eastern Poland, but in any case hundreds of thousands of Poles had lived there for hundreds of years and were responsible for what advanced culture existed there, so it’s not.

And how exactly do Poland and Grossdeutschland, Drang nach Osten/Lebensraum compute?

As far as I know, there’s general agreement among most historians that Hitler’s original intent was to turn Poland into a satellite and enlist it as a junior partner in his war against the Soviet Union (maybe like a bigger version of Slovakia). How that would have played out in the longer term and how it could have been reconciled with the anti-Polish traditions of German nationalism, who knows? But it’s not like Hitler was incapable of at least tactical concessions regarding German minorities abroad, as is shown by South Tyrol.
Main reason why it didn’t happen was because Poland refused to become a German satellite and wasn’t interested in joining a German war on the Soviet Union (contrary to what Stalin in his paranoia may have believed).

I did read it, which is why I posted about it
I remember hearing about such plans but never thought they were actually intending to do it (operation unthinkable style)

The plans existance would mean there was no real grand strategy for the British, they were just exploiting whatever opportunity arose with a vague central goal in mind, that ended up getting unfullfilled since their Empire disintegrated and they became a satrap to their former colony
Fucking hell, India sided against them and partnered up with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in a way fullfilling their fears all the way back from the Great Game days, and today India remains a Russian partner even as Russia is getting increasingly friendly with China

Winter War certainly did not go along Uncle Joes plan. The original goal was to occupy the whole country in a couple of weeks and install a communist puppet regime headed by Otto V. Kuusinen, one of the few Finnish communists who survived Stalins purges. After that Finland would either have “voluntarily” joined the Soviet Union as a Soviet republic or it would have become a nominally independent communist vassal state like Mongolia.

Soviets did not only suffer heavy military losses but also the diplomatic humiliation of getting kicked out of the League of Nations. There was even the risk of war against France and Great Britain. Soviet Unions public image also got tarnished. What is more, Leningrads security actually got worse. Without Winter War, Finland would not have got involved in Operation Barbarossa.

Utter failure? I would call surviving as an independent non-communist country as some kind of success. Compared to Estonia, we have been doing pretty well.

I find that claim very suspect because Germans shredded Polish Army and bombed cities, established a military occupation, while Soviets moved in with only light resistance. It would take many Katyn-level atrocities to catch up with German-inflected casualties.

Rus’ towns and cities had a culture and civilization before Poles and Lithuanians exploited Mongol-Tatar aftermath. The nobility was the first to align with invaders, followed by burghers, while peasants resisted.

Article by Vladimir Perekrest about alleged migrant conquest of Russia.
“From January to July, the population of Russia decreased by 209.7 thousand….”

It’s just fake information. Here are the stats https://zemfort1983.livejournal.com/1233033.html

https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/zemfort1983/32334102/1010738/1010738_original.jpg

I am against it for both ethical and practical reasons (which are actually linked).

If the causes of the WWII (referred by Karlin) are discussed

Yes, but as I wrote in my original comment, Western criticism of Molotov-Ribbentropp isn’t because of the mere fact of the pact itself, but because of what the Soviet Union did as a consequence of it, that is invading the territory of other states and bringing communist terror there. Karlin referred to the recent commemorations in Poland, and the Soviet record wasn’t attacked there simply because the Soviet Union signed an agreement with Hitler’s Germany (it’s technically correct that other states, including Poland, had done so before as well), but because of Soviet policies in the annexed territories during 1939-1941.
It would certainly be extremely inappropriate to cast Russians as a perpetrator nation because of Molotov-Ribbentropp or to forget the Russian role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, but I don’t see why that should mean one has to defend everything Stalin’s regime did, as some of the commenters here seem to believe.

You can’t build an Orion nuclear propulsion spaceship to settle Alpha Centauri on the back of Australia’s population.

increased fertility is to stimulate it first through tax reduction to BOTH parents (family

It’s like “increasing dose of Vitamin C will result in higher life expectancy”.

It seems sensible in the mind. But when we look at evidence in the real whether it actually has an effect in the real population – it is lacking that it changes the rates. (Or usually only changes the timing, but with no effect on eventual rates).

of the state to promote as high as possible fertility rates.

Most governments of the lowest fertility countries believe this idea. And pro-natalist policies are mainstream in many countries. But state incentives do not seem to have much effect.

I know people say France, Norway or Sweden are an example of successful government increase of birthrates. But I have read mixed things about this claim (some people say a lot of their higher birthrates in those countries are from recent immigrants).

true path to high fertility is through ideological and cultural reshaping.

It will happen with artificial wombs.

But problem in Europe is not low fertility.

Problem is an issue with unfiltered immigration, together with various other problems. Two topics can be related to some extent, but they shouldn’t be.

Problem is an issue with unfiltered immigration, together with various other problems. Two topics can be related to some extent, but they shouldn’t be.

It’s actually being used as an excuse to have a more unfiltered immigration policy.

And Perekrest’s article above symptomatic of the idea the two topics are necessarily connect. .

Yes exactly.

And Orban – although very good economically as a leader – is symptomatic of the other side of this horseshoe

Orban discourse: “We can avoid unfiltered immigration if we can somehow boost our fertility rate” (In reality, Hungary has one of the lowest in the world, and it won’t change much).

^
No, you can avoid unfiltered immigration even unrelated to what is your country’s fertility rate.

Germany was below replacement fertility already (if I recall) before the 1920s or something like that.
And West Germany had static population for decades, after a massive fall. And yet everything was working well in Germany (and I’m sure without importation of Turkish gastarbeiters the country wouldn’t collapse or something, but just have even higher wages for the local people).

And pro-natalist policies are mainstream in many countries. But state incentives do not seem to have much effect.

There’s a lot of dumb hay made about this (including attempts to pull in just-so-story explanations with genetics and DNA), but as far as I can tell, fertility is a simple function of living space.

Give a family an apartment half again as large, and they’ll have another kid.

The war showed poor quality of the red Army, but by the results of the war, this war was definitely successful

You need to get into some pretty ridiculous revisionism over the war goals if you want to pretend that the end result of making Finland a German ally wasn’t a strategic own goal. Nothing was gained by Russia in the war for the purposes of the greater conflict as during Operation Barbarossa Finland quickly recaptured the land lost in the Winter War and used all of it in further operations against Russia as an ally of Germany.

Obviously the only realistic fear Russia has from Finland is whether the territory of Finland is used by some greater power and an alliance with Germany was the least likely of all outcomes considering the pre-war situation where Finland had attempted to gain security guarantees from the West (with no success), attempted to negotiate with Russia and attempted to remain neutral. The alternative outcomes in the case of no Winter War would be

a) Finland tries to remain neutral. This would be a problem for Germany in the siege of Leningrad and might lead to a German invasion of Finland. How much resistance Finland would produce is a big what if but the potential is there as Germany would have to either stage a landing on the coast or come through roadless Lapland, both of which would be massive defender advantages.

The military elites of Finland were overwhelmingly Germanic and German-trained and the Finnish civilian government was actually rather worried about their potential pro-German sympathies (that’s why they had taken Mannerheim out of retirement – he was the one plausible military leader who wasn’t German trained and who would definitely oppose a pro-German military coup). But then, the Reds (and Stalin) were once popular with ethnic Finns so at least communist resistance would be plentiful and highly motivated (and capable) which would massively empower them after a German loss and withdrawal, giving the communists a very high chance of capturing Finland with a coup after the war.

b) Finland finds an ally in the West. If Finland has security guarantees and Russia invades anyway, that’s hard to say and this is the most questionable scenario, but then that is the whole reason why it’s extremely unlikely that Britain or France would have given any security guarantees that weren’t aimed against Germany. If Russia then decides to skip the invasion, this probably plays out like (a) but with an added chance of Finland in pro-Western hands in the end. Western Allies would at least contribute to anti-German war efforts with air support etc. So this ends up being better for Russia in WWII but not after.

c) Finnish-Russian negotiations are successful and a land trade is made where Russia gets more land near Leningrad and Finland gets some of the already Finnic-populated land further north in exchange. The willingness was clearly there and Stalin had already proposed this around the time of the revolution (“you can have as much swamp as you like”) but the deal should have been made back then as the pre-WWII demands from Russia were too much and Russia did not even gain the unacceptable demands that it had made in the peace that ended the Winter War (no base near Helsinki etc).

If that deal had been made in 1920, Finland might have almost entirely avoided World War II and ended up genuinely neutral or even pro-Russian during the Cold War (as opposed to swearing “Soviet friendship” while constantly looking for a chance to defect to the Western bloc as happened in the real history).

There used to be a lot of talk about who screwed up the negotiations with Russia and eg. it used to be a common commie conspiracy theory that the German-sympathizing Swedes and Germans who owned this country intentionally sabotaged the talks so that Russia would attack and then they could then take Finland to the war on the German side and sell the whole thing to the people as recapturing lost territory. However the left has decided that Swedes and Germans are not evil Nazis after all but glorious heroes of multiculturalism so now our academia and media have completely erased all doubt of eternal pure Russian guilt for everything bad that has ever happened.

The scenario where the Winter War would have been a positive for Russia would be if Finland doesn’t resist enough and Russia gets control of the cities before the spring thaw. (There’s a bad Western trope of how stupid it is to invade during the winter but it’s not – the mud seasons and the swampy roadless terrain mean that winter is the time to move around and whatever gear you commit to an invasion is easily stuck there until the next winter.) Then a communist puppet government could have ensured that Finland doesn’t ally with Germany, though if Germany then attacked it would have been the same as in the Baltic states with a lot of people signing up to fight against the communist puppet government and Russia.

But the actual war is a case of self-fulfilling prophecy – an attempt to make sure that Finland’s territories aren’t used in an invasion against Russia led to all of those territories being used in a Finnish-German joint invasion of Russia.

You’re nuts. The goal of the Finnish campaign was to move the international border away from St. Petersburg on the eve of the coming WWII.

And this goal failed utterly as Finland allied with Germany to take back all of that territory. Every inch of territory that had been taken by Russia in the Winter War was used by Finland to passively support the siege of Leningrad by blocking Russian movements to that direction, something that would have been easily avoidable if Russia had offered better terms to Finland before the war (land exchange to move the border would have been fine, military bases next to Helsinki when Russia was training Otto-Wille Kuusinen’s communist cabinet to be Finland’s future leaders? hell no).

I don’t know what kind of mental gymnastics it requires to claim successful war aims while simultaneously claiming that the war aim was the opposite of what actually happened – if the aim was to gain protection for Leningrad, that failed pretty badly as the territories were used to siege Leningrad instead of protecting it.

Ehrlich responded to these criticisms in 2009. In response to that prediction he points out:

But, of course, there were famines, essentially continuously in parts of Africa. Perhaps 300 million people overall have died of hunger and hunger-related diseases since 1968.

So while he wasn’t entirely incorrect, he did exaggerate about famines, many of his other predictions were though completely accurate (e.g. the world population rapidly increased from 3.5 billion in late 1960s to over 7 billion in 2010s). However, the main goal of The Population Bomb has been partially achieved:

Birthrates [and fertility rates] have dropped in most of the world, partly in response to government-sponsored programs in education (especially of women), giving women job opportunities, making contraceptive information and materials accessible – and to economic factors… Thus the central goal of The Population Bomb, to encourage the adoption of policies that would gradually reduce birthrates and eventually start a global decline toward a human population size that is sustainable in the long run, has been partially achieved.

(Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2009)

The goal of The Population Bomb (1968) was to reduce population fertility rates across the world to 1.0 (Ehrlich supports a global one-child policy and after having one child, he had a vasectomy). This hasn’t been achieved yet, but obviously progress has been made if you compare the world total fertility rate in 1960s to 2010s; it has halved from around 5 to 2.5:

TFR
1965–1970: 4.92
2010–2015: 2.52

And of course in a few countries (Singapore, Spain, Portugal etc.) fertility rates are as low as 1.3.

People who are ‘red-pilled’ on overpopulation, start with The Population Bomb. I read it around 12 years back. Most people however who understand its main goal and the ecological issues the world faces, become more radical than Ehrlich because even if there was a global one-child policy, the world population would still increase until 2050s (or even 2100) and not drop to under 1 billion until 2200s. See the following paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/46/16610

Even one-child policies imposed worldwide and catastrophic mortality events would still likely result in 5–10 billion people by 2100.

The more draconian fertility reduction to a global one child per woman by 2100 (Scenario 3) resulted in a peak population size of 8.9 billion in 2056, followed by a decline to ∼7 billion by 2100 (i.e., a return to the 2013 population size) (Fig. 1A). Enforcing a one child per female policy worldwide by 2045 and without improving survival (Scenario 4) resulted in a peak population size of 7.95 billion in 2037, 7.59 billion by 2050, and a rapid reduction to 3.45 billion by 2100… Projecting Scenario 3 (worldwide one-child policy by 2100, assuming no further reduction in total fertility thereafter) to 2300, the world population would fall to half of its 2013 size by 2130, and one-quarter by 2158.

This is why environmentalists of today tend to be voluntarily childfree, rather than supporting small families which Ehrlich popularised in 1960s. Article:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/give-up-having-children-couples-save-planet-climate-crisis

Moreover, it’s the exact opposite of a policy to ensure a German-Soviet war. Actually, it would have pushed them closer to each other.

This is a conspiracy theory which is pretty much believed by many (most?) normies. I very often meet Hungarian liberals who believe that. It’s also often promoted by major online media sites.

There must be an age factor here though, I doubt it’s that well known among those of up to 30 years of age who have no real personal memories of politics 20 years ago.
I agree though that it’s an interesting issue, since it’s very hard for those of us without intimate knowledge of Russia to evaluate it.

I don’t care much about the issue and the way it’s used by the current Polish government and American hegemonists like Pence to bash contemporary Russia is certainly dubious, but insinuating that a negative view of what Stalin’s regime did in 1939-1941 is somehow merely due to Russophobia isn’t convincing imo.

Russophobia certainly motivates some, but the key rationale is annexophobia or conquestophobia.

For some strange reason, around a century ago people developed the incorrect idea that conquest was somehow morally wrong. By the 1930s this false doctrine had taken root in Britain, France, and America. The Axis powers and the Soviet Union held the older, and correct, understanding of the Doctrine of Conquest.

The idea that the Soviet Union did anything wrong at all in gobbling up the Baltic states, Karelia, Bessarabia, etc. is typical liberal Western religious fanaticism. No different than Greta Thunberg.

The issue is of course that in our little conversation all people agree that conquest (or even foreign influence) of their own land was morally wrong. So those commenters who think Stalin did nothing wrong will tell you how wrong it was that the US managed to get Estonia into NATO, and might even be bitching about Narva being part of Estonia.

Anything that harms me is deeply immoral, that much is true.

But if you’re looking at things from a purely Machiavellian perspective America is doing the perfectly logical thing by promoting the idea that conquest is unethical. Once you’ve reached the top of the food chain through conquest and become a superpower with a wide gap to your rivals, there are big diminishing returns to conquest and increasing your power through territorial acquisition becomes less of a priority than preventing the emergence of any rival by preventing anyone else from acquiring land, population and resources through conquest.

Similarly, communists glorified rebellion and revolution until they were in power and then rebellion immediately became an unacceptable form of “counter-revolution”. Once you’re on top the first priority always is to ensure that no one else can use the same method of climbing to the top.

Despite all of your idolization of pure rational Machiavellian calculus without moral qualms, it seems like the American elites that you deride are actually simply better than you at it, Mr Thorfinnson.

Something can be simultaneously useful and untrue. This was understood at the time and featured heavily in Axis rhetoric against the British.

I find the ability of most people, elite or not, to sincerely believe in falsehoods to be extremely irritating.

And it’s even more irritating when those falsehoods are against their own self-interest (in this case not, of course, Americans).

As for my own nation’s elites, they’ve done well at securing their own positions. They’re not particularly good at handling the affairs of state.

There is no doubt that Finland had quite clear plans for conquest (and ethnic cleansing) of northwestern Russia.

Highly doubtful in light of the fact that they even stopped their troops despite Hitler’s repeated requests to resume the offensive.

real disaster will happen in a few years when the baby boomers retire.

Why should it be a disaster? Falling population does not imply the economy has to collapse – potentially it can imply higher quality of life.

Labour supply will fall (if unfiltered immigration can be prevented), so it will be upward pressure on wages. This is motivate businesses to increase capital intensity of their production.

Think about agriculture. It used to require large supplies of labour. And yet today, it requires very little.

You can already see Germany automobile industry – workers only required for final assembly:

Whereas in the past, such a factory would need to be full of workers at all stages.

after WW2 they rose to 2,5 in West Germany until the mid-1960s.

Although this was among a smaller cohort, as a result of war losses. So we can already assume below replacement of the previous generation?

German_reader probably has communal laundry based on what he’s said of himself.

Communal laundry is nightmarish when one isn’t used to it. Just like any other reduction in convenience–and social status.

The Soviet Union isn’t criticized so much for the pact itself, but because it proceeded to annex the Baltic states and Eastern Poland (plus the unsuccesful war against Finland) and brought the full range of Bolshevik terror there, with tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands deported to labor camps.

Would there have been less criticism of the Soviet Union had it still conquered these territories but did not subsequently bring brutality to these territories?

Why should it be a disaster?

Do you understand how the German pensions system works? It’s based on the working population paying for pensioners. Looked sustainable in the 1950s, with above replacement birth rates (Adenauer is alleged to have said Kinder kriegen die Leute immer – “People will always have children”, it was apparently inconceivable for him that birth rates could drop like they eventually did), when pensioners died a few years after entering retirement. Nowadays, given very low birth rates and high life expectancies, not so much.
The younger generations of productive Germans will be crushed by the financial burden of having to provide for the boomers. On top of that, our completely irresponsible government is importing millions of parasitic foreigners who immediately enter the welfare system and destroy all the potential benefits of an ageing society like increased availability of housing, less crime etc. The likely result is clear: tax burden will increase, if anything, it will be harder for productive younger Germans to have children, and an increasing number will flee the country for greener pastures.

The borders “rigged against Russians” meant huge Russian population in the other republics, which was supposed to make separatism more difficult for them.

Exactly. If the Soviets hadn’t loaded Crimea and Donbas into Ukraine, Ukraine would have followed Poland’s geopolitical path from 1991. If the Soviets had added, say, Stavropol, Kursk, and some other regions to Ukraine, it would have been another Belarus. If “Ukraine” stretched to the Volga, it would never have become independent.

The Soviet strategy of adding Russian areas was not anti-Russian. They merely blundered by underestimating the strength of the local nationalists, so they added too few Russians into the mix.

Still, Europeans do not care about resolving border disputes in good faith through peaceful diplomatic negotiations. This is why it’s peak hypocrisy for Europeans to whine how it’s “so terrible” that there’s war in, say, the Ukraine, when with the USA in the 1990’s they were very eager to dissolve the USSR on those same Sovok borders which are a large part of the cause for conflict now and in the future.

This is the crux of the matter, I think. And part of why that good faith isn’t there is that the EU is itself an empire — just an especially self-deluded one, which makes it sometimes hard to tell the rhetoric from the reality. Michael Anton:

While traditional empires may have gone out of fashion, globalization has taken its place as the imperialism of our time. Globalization represents an attempt to do through peaceful means—the creation of transnational institutions, the erosion of borders, and the homogenization of intellectual, cultural, and economic products—what the Romans (and Cyrus and others) achieved through arms.

No surprise, then, that globalization and imperialism suffer from the same flaws. Like the latter, the former is also hubristic and prone to overreach. It also erodes and even subverts and attacks liberty. It requires centralization.

Globalization also has the same stifling impact on ideas, and for the same reasons, that Machiavelli diagnosed as a problem with imperialism 500 years ago. Globalization reduces differences in thought in any number of ways: through media consolidation, for example, or through the homogenization of the elite—who these days all seem to come from the same background, attend the same schools, and go to the same conferences. The champions of globalization also aren’t above stooping to outright censorship and coercion when threatened. Indeed, this impulse is perhaps the most important root of political correctness.

Defenders of globalization will respond that whereas imperialism—globalization by conquest—amounts to theft and enslavement and is inherently violent, today’s globalization is voluntary.

But is it really? It certainly doesn’t feel that way to the people all over the world who have seen their culture, traditions, communities, and economies disappear before their eyes. And this transformation has been voluntary only in the sense that it has been undertaken with the full approval of the elite. As for the common folk, not so much.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/20/the-trump-doctrine-big-think-america-first-nationalism/

Narva is only the most valuable thing on the Russian-Estonian border in that area. I personally don’t really care about Narva.

Yes, but its only value I can see is its people (some 50,000 ethnic Russians — cashiers greet you in Russian there even though you are technically in the EU state of Estonia). Soviet artillery basically leveled the old Narva with the ground, so the whole town is one gigantic commieblock.

…why did they issue a unilateral guarantee to Poland, and why did they declare war on Germany after it attacked Poland?

UK-France declared a ‘war’ and didn’t fight it, they sat on their hands. If France-UK invaded into Rhineland in September 1939 – as Poles thought they would – the war would be very different. They didn’t for a reason: West wanted to facilitate Germany’s war towards the east, if it meant sacrificing Poland, Czechoslovakia, so be it.

The guarantee to Poland was a piece of paper, issued in April 1939 by UK (France less so, they had contingencies attached). It deceived Poland into thinking they were a part of ‘Western world’, it amounted to nothing. One can suspect that in a cynical way giving fake guarantees to the hapless Poles was a way to stir it up and make sure that Germany and Poland ended up in a war, Germany ends victorious on Russia’s borders and the desired war to death in the east takes place. Except they thought Germany would be all the way deep into Belarus-Ukraine or ‘eastern Poland’ at that time. So they would a few hundred kilometres from Moscow. That part didn’t work because Stalin outplayed them on the last minute.

Molotov-Ribbentrop was a great chess move, it changed the situation dramatically and it literally saved millions of eastern Europeans (Poles!) from eventual extinction.

I read that Moldbugman thread. Is it rue that there are fights over there in communal laundries?

You do realize he is wrong about 99% of the time?

I know people say France, Norway or Sweden are an example of successful government increase of birthrates. But I have read mixed things about this claim (some people say a lot of their higher birthrates in those countries are from recent immigrants).

Swedish birthrates are way overhyped. For one thing, our TFR has only exceeded 2.1 twice since 1967 (in 1990 and 1991), and for another, it’s still unclear, as you point out, how far our somewhat higher TFR than the Western average can be put down to ethnic Swedish birthrates. Most figures I have seen would suggest an ethnic Swedish TFR of 0.2-0.3 lower than the total Swedish TFR, which is not very impressive.

They didn’t for a reason

Or they were just bluffing and expected Hitler to be put off, just as Hitler expected them not to follow through

I’m not sure the graph you’ve provided (thanks btw, very interesting!) actually shows that, the drops below replacement rate look more like temporary reactions to shocks

Total period fertility rate is not very clear. But if look at cohort fertility rate.

Women born in Germany from 1900-1920s, were already below replacement rate.

Biological “fertility window” for a woman born around in 1900-1910, was from around 1915-1940.

So there was a generation of women who were just below replacement fertility in Germany whose “fertile window” was the 1920s-1930s

Young women of 1920s and 1930s Germany, were slightly below replacement fertility.

https://i.imgur.com/e7JHMIS.jpg

how long it will remain strong, energy supply/costs will become problematic

I’m not an economist. But it is believed that some indicators like economic complexity can predict how resilient and diversified an economy is.

So if we look at economic complexity – Germany is supposedly the third highest country in terms of economic complexity, after Japan and Switzerland.

https://i.imgur.com/NqLyULj.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_complexity

because of the insane decision to give up both atomic and coal power, and the established parties,

To stop coal is sensible IMO – it will improve public health and also of electricity produced by gas is now below cost for coal a lot of the time.

If Europe were isolated, that might be true, but we’re next to demographically expanding regions.
I just read this:
https://www.hoover.org/research/european-demographics-and-migration
There won’t be a happy ending to this.

But look at Germany’s geography, for example.

It is not next to any third-world or asylum needing population.

In order to reach Germany, every immigrant has to cross other countries, in which they were already safe.

Yet according to 1951 Refugee Convention, the refugee has to apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach.

So in theory, Germany has no legal obligation to accept immigrants on that basis. It’s a question of voluntarily how many immigrants the government wants to accept.

The carbon footprint of one American today is equivalent to that of 150 people in Niger (World Bank, 2014) and a person in the UK produces 70 times the CO2 of someone living in Niger.

Of course, I support drastically reducing fertility rates in Niger as any other country (including my own, UK), however, it’s clear that a person living in Niger is far less ecologically destructive than someone in the Western world i.e. fewer people being born in US/UK has the most immediate and positive impact on our environment —> so priority should obviously be to focus on reducing birth/fertility rates in the West (but also China, India and Brazil that also have high carbon emissions) rather than Niger.

Concerning Niger, although it still has a high TFR, note it has fallen from a peak of 7.89 (1983) to 7.24 (2016) and continues to decline. Fertility rates are lower in every single Sub-Saharan African country compared to decades ago (same for globe); there has been a world-wide decrease in TFRs. The problem is these have not decreased as much as in SSA than most other parts of the globe, this is explained by several factors, although I won’t bother getting into them.

Atomic power, while highly desirable, isn’t strictly necessary for a coal phaseout because natural gas can be imported from Russia. Of course that reduces energy security.

The ideal energy mix for Germany is atomic power for baseload with hydro for peak demand. Solar really doesn’t make sense anywhere in Germany, and wind mills appear to be a bust. That said solar could perhaps be imported cheaply from the Mediterranean, depending on availability and transmission costs. Germany already imports hydro from Scandinavia.

If environmentalists were serious they’d demand we look into atomic energy for industrial process heat. For instance a lot of carbon is emitted in the production of cement, refine fuels, and chemicals.

The high-temperature gas-cooled reactor design is supposed to be able to reach outlet temperatures of 1000 C, which would be useful for those industries.

England seems to be successfully transitioning to a lot of offshore wind electricity generation, which is already 1/4 of their mix.

They are building them larger and larger every year. Perhaps Germany does not have areas with a sufficiency powerful supply of wind, however.

It is also not explained if it is steady enough to be suitable for baseload (I assume not).

Exactly. If the Soviets hadn’t loaded Crimea and Donbas into Ukraine, Ukraine would have followed Poland’s geopolitical path from 1991.

Perhaps much more corruption and stealing than in Poland, though. That would have probably meant a longer EU path for Ukraine in comparison to Poland–though I completely agree that pro-Russian forces had no chance to actually come to power in Ukraine without Crimea and the Donbass–especially in the 21st century.

If the Soviets had added, say, Stavropol, Kursk, and some other regions to Ukraine, it would have been another Belarus.

Yep.

If “Ukraine” stretched to the Volga, it would never have become independent.

I’m not so sure about that. After all, Sovoks do whatever they’re told to, no? Plus, Ukraine’s elite would have still wanted to loot the country, would it not have?

I do agree that another Belarus is likely here as well, though.

The Soviet strategy of adding Russian areas was not anti-Russian. They merely blundered by underestimating the strength of the local nationalists, so they added too few Russians into the mix.

They should have also aimed to encourage more Russian migration into the other SSRs.

IMHO, Gaza should be allowed to expand into the northeastern part of the Sinai Peninsula. After all, it’s not like Egypt is actually making good use of this territory right now.

In the US, we say “California Dreaming!”; in Gaza, they should say “Sinai Dreaming!”

Russia needs a much bigger population, because population is power – especially in the absence of any carrying capacity constraints (totally inapplicable in this case, of course).

Agreed, and Russia’s goal should be to encourage its best and brightest to have much more children. If costs of living are a problem, Russia can encourage some of its smart people to move to other parts of Russia–assuming, of course, that this will actually succeed in raising their fertility.

Interestingly enough, I previously read that ex-USSR Jews who moved to Israel subsequently saw a significant increase in their total fertility rate. The better life in Israel (excluding the terrorism, of course) probably helped in regards to this–as did Israel’s pro-natal culture. In other words, having more children was no longer viewed as a “Gypsy thing” by many ex-USSR Jews after they moved to Israel.

“Exactly. If the Soviets hadn’t loaded Crimea and Donbas into Ukraine, Ukraine would have followed Poland’s geopolitical path from 1991.”

Perhaps much more corruption and stealing than in Poland, though. That would have probably meant a longer EU path for Ukraine in comparison to Poland

It would have followed the path more slowly but probably would not have joined the EU later than did Bulgaria or Romania. Also Donbas was the one of the most corrupt parts of Ukraine.

If “Ukraine” stretched to the Volga, it would never have become independent.

I’m not so sure about that. After all, Sovoks do whatever they’re told to, no?

I don’t think they would have gone that far, however.

Europe is next to Africa and the Mideast though, and for various reasons, there is no political will to stop immigration, instead the political establishment does everything in its power to expand it. It will be very difficult to change this dynamic without a change of political elites.

Immigration restrictionist policies are now adopted by mainstream parties though, or at least are being spoken about.

Labour (UK):

Speaking to Sky News, he added: “There’s got to be tough controls on immigration, and you’ve got to know the people who come here contribute before they get any benefits.

“It’s a pledge from us, it’s on the mug and I’m hoping after the general election I can do a toast in that mug as we get on and change Britain for the better.”

The mugs have been branded with the party’s five election pledges, including tighter controls on immigration.

https://www.channel4.com/news/labour-mug-immigration-controls

Conservative Party (UK):

Theresa May has indicated that the Conservatives will again promise to cut net migration to the “tens of thousands” in their election manifesto.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39840503

This was quite the opposite as recent as the 2000s when both Labour and Conservative Party didn’t talk openly about reducing the number of immigrants and tried to brush under the carpet the issue of immigration altogether. What changed? Well, since the mainstream parties ignored this issue, it led to the electoral rise of the far-right British National Party-

It is not for nothing that the BNP received 800,000 votes in the recent [2oo4] elections and the UK Independence Party — which also has a strong policy on immigration — did remarkably well. Unless the major parties get a grip on this problem and do so soon, the extremists of the BNP will make hay and the tranquillity of our society will be placed at serious risk. The time for decisive action has arrived.

https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/press-article/54/let-everyone-in-is-a-dangerous-immigration-policy

Similarly, in Denmark since the mainstream parties ignored immigration, the 2000s and early 2010s saw the rise of the far-right Danish People’s Party.

But as soon as the mainstream parties in UK and Denmark adopted immigration restrictionist policies and started to openly talk about immigration (as if it was no longer a taboo and acceptable), the BNP and Danish People’s Party – collapsed electorally. The latter in the fairly recent 2019 Danish general election did almost as poorly as they first started out in 1998. We will most likely see the same thing happen in the next decade in Sweden, Germany etc.

The “political elites” really are no longer ignoring ordinary people’s concerns about immigration and there seems to be no need for the far-right anymore.

If there was any sympathy in Britain for one side to win in 1939-41 it was definitely on the side of Germany.

German bombing killed about 40 000 British civilians in 1940…it’s pretty deranged to claim that the British public wanted Germany to win under such circumstances. Whether rightly or wrongly, the war against Germany after the fall of France was seen as a struggle for national existence by the British.
People here often complain about irrational Western hostility towards Russia, but imo your comments show that the reverse also still exists among people whose formative experiences were in Eastern Bloc educational systems.

The English are reducing the price of offshore wind electricity through increasing the size of the project. So the price is rapidly becoming competitive.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-auction-offshore-wind-cheaper-than-new-gas

They are matching what China succeeded with PV.

–

If you look at Hornsea Project One.

Each wind turbine is 190 metres tall (the famous Gherkin skyscraper of London is only 180 metres tall).

Each wind turbine is 40% taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Or 500% taller than Colossus of Rhodes.

And they have installed 100 of these turbines on the single project already this year. (There’s only about 50 skyscrapers as tall as these in Europe).

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/2342/production/_105662090_gerkinrgb.jpg

https://i2.wp.com/i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/04/25/23/4B8E606000000578-0-image-a-42_1524694404819.jpg?zoom=2

There is almost a larger war in the Sinai, between Egypt and rebels, than there is between Israel and Palestinians.

Look at the casualties on both sides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinai_insurgency

• It’s strange how Western liberals are not interested about all the deaths in the Sinai, and there are not articles about the “oppression” there.

atomic power has been demonized by decades

One practical problem of establishing nuclear power plants, is lack of nimbleness.

From planning process to placing the power plant online, will often be around 15 years.

If Germany decides to build nuclear power stations at the political level now, they will be going online maybe in the mid-2030s.

And obviously, there will probably be many delays from local politicians and NIMBY, which will slow it down.

So is likely planning to produce for electricity demand of the second half of the 2030s, in the case of nuclear plant decisions now. And by then, there might be cheaper possibilities.

• By comparison, converting a coal power station to gas, can be in 1-2 years. However, securing supply of gas might have less nimbleness.

Ok, change it to 1939-40, the British elite (not the public) were more sympathetic to Germany than to Russia. In Munich in 1938, and then with the phoney war in 1939, the British elite wanted a German-Russian war. And if they had a preference for who should win, it was more for Germany.

That is not ‘irrational hostility’, it is simply describing it as it was. I also don’t see anything irrational about British elite anti-Russian attitudes. It is something that fits quite well into their worldview and self-interest. British elite understands that when Russia does well, Britain will do less well. It is a bit of either-or, the wealth, assets, influence, historical narratives and national myths are at cross-purposes between the Anglo and the Russian world. When one does better, the other loses ground and Anglo world elites understand this very well. It is quite rational to want to protect one’s standing.

I, by the way, don’t apply any of this to the British public. They are in just for a ride, too often they are willing to swallow their elites’ attitudes toward Russia (and the east in general) without much objection. But that’s true in most societies so one can’t really object too much.

I never wrote it should, and certainly some of the anti-Russian sentiment in the Baltic states and Poland isn’t very constructive…but so isn’t the “Stalin did nothing wrong” revisionism seen in this thread.

Lol. Besides Beckow, I haven’t seen a single example of “Stalin did nothing wrong” revisionism here in this thread. That sentiment only exists among Sovoks or tribal Russians/Slavs who feel threatened and confused. It’s also something that Anatoly Karlin has written about before. Of course, Russians/Slavs who truly understand what Stalin did and his purpose, do not hero worship him.

I personally think that Ivan the Terrible really did nothing wrong and that Russians should endorse historical revision about him instead, since really, the mainstream western historical narrative is complete with lies, falsehoods and half truths about Ivan the Terrible. That bias is even shown by the incorrect translation of Иван Грозни – Ivan Grozni – which means Ivan the Fearsome, to Ivan the Terrible.

The plans existance would mean there was no real grand strategy for the British, they were just exploiting whatever opportunity arose with a vague central goal in mind, that ended up getting unfullfilled since their Empire disintegrated and they became a satrap to their former colony

I would disagree about the British Empire having no grand strategy before and during WW2. I’m sure Epigon would most certainly disagree.

Fucking hell, India sided against them and partnered up with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in a way fullfilling their fears all the way back from the Great Game days, and today India remains a Russian partner even as Russia is getting increasingly friendly with China

Yeah lol. Cuckoldry is probably the best word to describe that.

Still, this doesn’t really matter for the Brits. Britain has been basically irrelevant in the world post-1945 as most of their power was transferred to the USA to which they have a Belarus-Russia style relationship. The biggest problem for Brits/Anglos is being demographically pulverized out of existence by the Third World. This demographic replacement actually began around the 1960’s time period when it was deliberately enabled by Jews/Liberals. The only person who had the wisdom among them to foresee the disaster that was coming was Enoch Powell. He was completely correct with his “Rivers of Blood” speech about multiculturalism/immigration and his predictions about the EU.

I think that a part of the elevated criticism towards Israel might be that it claims to be a democratic country to a greater extent than Egypt does.

As for the Sinai rebels, Hamas can go in and crush them for all I care.

When Soviet Union invaded Finland on November 30 1939, Red Army was ordered to occupy the whole country, march to the Bothnic Gulf and Swedish border. It was not just some small border skirmish. Do you really think that after installing Kuusinen`s puppet government in Helsinki and making some border adjustments the Red Army would just have gone home? Without a massive Red Army presence, Kuusinen regime would have fallen in a matter of months. It was like Afganistan 1979. Stalin intended to take the whole country under control either directly or through a puppet government.

Since 1937, Finland was governed by Cajanders Center-Left government with a strong majority in Finnish parliament. Cajanders government was committed to neutrality. The idea of conspiring with Nazi Germany to launch a joint invasion against the Soviet Union was very alien to those people. Probably they would have made concessions to Germany like Sweden did (selling iron ore, allowing troop transports etc), but they wouldnt have actively participated in Barbarossa. Winter War changed Finnish foreign policy dramatically as Finland looked for support against the Soviets wherever it could be found. Stalin pushed Finland into Hitlers arms.

Oy vey! Those evil anti-semites!

How dare the goyim conspire against the chosen people!?!?

On a more serious note, even in your link utu, it explains that it was the Germans who were the ones that wanted Litvinov to be dismissed. Stalin and the Soviets merely accepted the subtle offers that were coming from the Germans.

Even English academic, Richard Overy, in his book about these events, Russia’s War, explains that the Germans were the ones who approached the Soviets first for a deal on partitioning East Europe, not the other way around.

https://www.amazon.com/Russias-War-History-Soviet-1941-1945/dp/0140271694

Remind me please, was it the German or Red Army which invaded Poland first in 1939?

Also, if it was the Soviets who were so desperate to initiate the negotiations for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, then why did the Germans let the Soviets take the larger share of land in East Europe? After all, if the Soviets were so desperate for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, why was the German Army the one which did the heavy lifting during the double invasions of Poland?

When the Danish People’s Party cooperated with the Conservative-Liberal coalition government (2001-2011) which gave them control over immigration policy, they actually did very little to decrease immigration, in fact, there was an increase in net-migration for most years; based on the following graph, net-migration increased from around 50,000 in 2004, 80,000 by 2006, to 100,000 by 2010. https://www.ceicdata.com/en/denmark/population-and-urbanization-statistics/dk-net-migration

The same happened with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), i.e. during the OVP-FPO government (200o-2005), net-migration increased. Something similar happened with the True Finn Party.

I’m familiar with the BNP in UK a decade back. They were nowhere in terms of support like the Danish People’s Party or FPO, but did well in local council elections in the 2000s, including taking 12 seats on a London borough council and forming the opposition (Barking and Dagenham). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Barking_and_Dagenham_London_Borough_Council_election They achieved though absolutely nothing when elected despite having some control.

So far-right & right-wing populists appear to achieve nothing when elected, same for Trump. They’re as incompetent as the mainstream parties on immigration. I think though it’s futile to try to lower immigration without looking at its causes and taking direct action. The far-right & Trump though don’t want to discuss or tackle issues such as anthropogenic climate change and unsustainable population growth/overpopulation.

Climate Change Is Already Driving Mass Migration Around the Globe
https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/climate-change-already-driving-mass-migration-around-globe

Climate change is the overlooked driver of Central American migration
https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-02-06/climate-change-overlooked-driver-central-american-migration

Five Ways Immigration-Driven Population Growth Impacts Our Environment
https://cis.org/Sussis/Five-Ways-ImmigrationDriven-Population-Growth-Impacts-Our-Environment

The shift to wind is not driven by economic considerations, but by atomophobia and the gaia religion. It was (re)invented in Denmark after local voters hysterically rejected atom.

Wind power has improved its economics, but they generally remain poor. Good data on this is confusing, but the latest best case I’ve seen for offshore wind is 16c/kwh. That’s terrible.

Then, as AK noted, there is the EROEI issue. Financial cost does not necessarily translate to energy cost.

That said unlike onshore wind, offshore megawind is at least pretty cool.

Germany lost the war after they devoured rump Czechoslovakia and created a global Anglo-American war machine determined to destroy it. To even have a shot at winning, it had to do everything right and make no mistakes.

Its initial efforts were focused on creating an alliance with Italy and Japan in order to face the Western powers with global war and dilute their naval assets. But neither were willing to bite. Next up was Germany’s effort to form an alliance with Poland, allowing an immediate strike to the West. The Poles, either unable to read a map or willing to wait 60 years for things to get better, refused.

That left the Soviet Union, which allowed Germany to quickly liquidate the Polish stooges with facing simultaneous war against Russia and France.

The strategic depth gained by the USSR must be offset by the fact that it also resulted in Finland and Rumania joining the German invasion two years later.

True enough that Japan was very unhappy with the M-R Pact, but as it was proving itself inferior to the Soviet army in any case and its strategic needs dictated expansion to the south.

Ignored in my previous post, and yours, is also the economic benefits of the M-R Pact to Germany. The German-Soviet commercial agreements that arose out of the Pact provided vast resources to Germany and were very helpful in light of the Entente blockade. In fact the Entente’s entire strategy for defeating Germany was short circuited by German-Soviet trade.

Of course, who’s to say that negotiating economic agreements required the Pact, especially after the German Army demonstrated its power?

Immigration hasn’t been successfully tackled by anyone in almost a century as far as I can tell. America did successfully clamp down on immigration in the 1920s, and although I’m less clear on the date Australia decisively shut down Chinese coolie migration as well.

As far as purely illegal immigration goes there have been recent successes in Italy, Israel, Australia, and Japan.

The basic problem with immigration is that once immigrants establish an anchor, they act as a magnet drawing in more from their homelands. It requires determined and competent governance to put a stop to it. Both are seriously lacking today, and not just in the Trump administration.

And yes, in principle environmentalists should be joining us in leading the fight against immigration. From an environmentalist point of view there should be zero immigration from areas with low material standards of living to high ones. In turn I don’t mind joining with environmentalists in fighting AGW, though if they’re going to be atomophobic it makes my stomach turn.

Climate change may be driving migration, but it strikes me as irrelevant. Irrelevant because shutting down immigration by enforcement is easier than stopping AGW. Doubly irrelevant because the fundamental driver of immigration is obviously the vast chasm in living standards, which is unlikely to change and in any case would be undesirable to change (as it would increase the political power of these countries).

Good luck with that political program.

Lol. Thank you. It is something that could be easily executed in a non-Democracy.

Still, even in a Democracy, women mentally and physiologically crave to be dominated by a superior life form, which is men, even though they are not fully conscious of this. Patriarchy and giving birth to many children is what women need, as their condition and nature is to be 110% irrational and mentally disturbed otherwise. Feminism is just women shit testing (deliberately causing trouble to test a man’s masculinity) men seeing if those men are worthy of controlling them. Of course, the Globohomo dynamic of Feminism being sponsored by George Soros, and so on, is another matter

Non-Anglosphere countries should also ban the learning of English except after extensive vetting

LOL, you are quite the catch. You admitted to being poor, a Balkan immigrant in the West. What woman could resist someone like you?

Overpopulation was a fashionable topic in the 1970s, but then disappeared.

Not entirely sure why. Perhaps a combination of “neoliberalism” and “racism”.

That bias is even shown by the incorrect translation of Иван Грозни – Ivan Grozni – which means Ivan the Fearsome, to Ivan the Terrible.

From Wikipedia:

Sobriquet

The English word terrible is usually used to translate the Russian word grozny in Ivan’s nickname, but this is a somewhat archaic translation. The Russian word grozny reflects the older English usage of terrible as in “inspiring fear or terror; dangerous; powerful; formidable”. It does not convey the more modern connotations of English terrible, such as “defective” or “evil”. Vladimir Dal defines grozny specifically in archaic usage and as an epithet for tsars: “courageous, magnificent, magisterial and keeping enemies in fear, but people in obedience”. Other translations have also been suggested by modern scholars.

It is true that England doesn’t suffer from German level atomophobia, but they certainly suffer from atomic mismanagement. This is reflected in their abandonment of their indigenous nuclear-industrial base and the comically poor management of Sizewell C.

The time and cost to construct atomic powerstations in some countries is the result of atomophobia. The generation II nuclear reactors which constitute most of the global nuclear power fleet were largely constructed in a few years. Atomophobes demanded a massive escalation of unnecessary “safety” features. That wasn’t the worst of it however, as the industry has now dealt with this, but rather mucking up the planning and construction costs.

In Asia, nuclear powerplants are constructed quickly, as you can see here: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-second-fastest-nuclear-plant-building-country

Unit 6 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant was built in just 39 months, and with first world safety standards.

There was once no issue with fast construction in Western countries. Atomophobes are to blame for the glacial pace today.

Nuclear waste is not an expensive problem to deal with. It can be stored at the plants themselves in dry concrete casks. It’s also not strictly speaking “waste” in that it contains a lot of energy, but mining more uranium is for now cheaper than reprocessing the waste.

The only subsidy actually required for the industry is insurance. Other than that all that is necessary is to crush atomophobic cowards by sending them to concentration camps, ideally ones containing nuclear waste.

EROEI should not be ignored because the purpose of energy production is to produce energy. If EROEI is not positive than one is simply transforming energy with no net energetic benefit. If it’s negative one is actually losing energy.

I can recommend reading this essay; can be found on Google Books: https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199378111.001.0001/acprof-9780199378111-chapter-2

This chapter advances a misanthropic moral argument for anti-natalism. According to this argument, we have a presumptive duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of species that cause vast amounts of harm. Extensive evidence is provided to show that human nature has a dark side that leads humans to cause vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death to other humans and to non-human animals. Some of this harm is mediated by destruction of the environment.

This essay only raises evidence-based ecological (what you would consider ‘practical’) arguments against childbirth, not religious or philosophical. Many people are too selfish or ignorant to accept the reality childbirth has a negative environmental impact.

There is no doubt that Finland had quite clear plans for conquest (and ethnic cleansing) of northwestern Russia.

By these standards there is also “no doubt” that the Soviet war aim was full ethnic cleansing of Finland. People were shown supposed leaks of Soviet government plans to deport the whole Finnish ethnic group to Siberia, many ethnic Russian dissidents who had formerly worked for Stalin and had defected to the West showed up in Finland to testify about Russia’s genocidal plans, Finnish leftists who had returned from the Soviet Union were testifying about (actually real) mass executions of Finns etc.

People mock Finns who believe Finland to have won the war but a big part of that is that rather many Finns believe the worst about Russia’s aims. If you believe that the Russian aim was the elimination of Finns as a national group and you note that Finns still exist after the war, well, then you’re going to believe that Finns won and that Russians lost.

You may think it’s ridiculous but it’s no more ridiculous than your beliefs of nefarious Finnish grand plans which are very likely based on claims that something published by some random fringe nationalist somewhere were “government policy” or even just the word of Finnish communist exiles who of course made all sorts of made up claims.

In any case, we have an extremely likely comparison with the Baltic states. Baltic nations weren’t wiped out but there was communist mass terror and I think there’s approximately zero chance that my landowning ancestors wouldn’t have been shot or put in some cattle wagon if Finland had accepted the communist puppet government. Most Finns would have faced less persecution, though Finland would have been turned into a backwards shithole.

We don’t have a similar comparison for what would have happened if Finland won and it’s actually tough to say precisely because Finland didn’t have any grand plan and offensive war aims had never been widely discussed since most people considered invading Russia a ridiculous idea. Finland’s behavior was inconsistent and ineffective in offense due to lack of clear and consistent war aims beyond recapturing lost territories.

One pretty good bit of evidence that Finland had not expected the war was that the government had made very little investment in military and Finland had essentially no offensive capabilities. This was another reason why the Winter War pushed Finland into German arms – the popular feeling was that since we had done so well when fighting with hunting rifles and no real military, imagine what we could do if we had proper fighters, tanks, artillery?

The Winter War had everyone convinced that with German gear it would be a quick victory. Russia would surrender and we’d be at a negotiation table and that’s when we’d talk about which lands to claim and what is to be done with the populations.

The situation when the German offensive in 1941 would have started from the outskirts of Leningrad (where are placed the border with Finland before the Winter war) is probably meant the complete defeat of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Finland did not allow the Germans to use the territory even in real history so what would be different in this scenario? Finland’s deal with the Germans was to take the positions that it had had before the Winter War, sit there and do nothing else. No German offensive was allowed to start from that position towards Leningrad so why would it be allowed in some alternative scenario When the siege didn’t go as planned the Germans asked for more but Finland refused.

Finland reached the old border well in time to wait for Germany to show up so Russia gaining the Karelian isthmus in Winter War did not delay the siege of Leningrad.

Of course, if Germany had some regime that was trusted more than Hitler’s, Finland might have allowed them more use of its territory, but then we’d need to have a hypothetical nicer German regime that still wants to start Operation Barbarossa.

Personally I think it was a foolish decision not to push further on Leningrad and if we had actively co-operated with the Germans we would have properly closed the siege. Since Russia is eternally going to use “defense of St Petersburg” as a supposed reason, we really should have taken the one chance to get rid of that reason. But with hindsight I doubt it would have made the difference to the war – I don’t see how Germany would have won even if a meteorite had destroyed Leningrad in early 1941.

EROEI is not arbitrary at all. It is true that it is a recent concept, but it’s inherently simple to understand. One simply compares the input of energy invested to the energy return on said investment.

In that sense it is quite similar to financial ROI. If you borrow money at 5% to get a return of 3%, you will not be long for this world.

You are correct that all human energy production activities are actually a form of energy transformation. But in EROEI one looks at already usable forms of energy in order to get new energy. If the new energy obtained is less than the energy that was used to harvest it, then energy has been lost.

This is sometimes useful of course. Classic examples are batteries and pumped hydro, as both store energy for future needs. But when used for electricity generation it is pathological.

Japan had the world’s best managed nuclear industry until its irrational, hysterical reaction to Fukushima. It may never properly recover, which is very sad. Even worse, this inspired neighboring South Korea to embrace atomophobia as well. The future of the nuclear industry now lies in China and Russia.

And no, I did not mean the reopening of some units at that plant, but the construction of unit 6 there.

The nuclear industry simply requires economies of scale and standardization to succeed. In this it’s not very different from other industrial activities, but it is unfortunately subjected to far more political interference. Imagine if the American fracking industry faced similar interference. There would not be a fracking industry at all. Likewise the achievements of modern combined cycle natural gas powerplants are the result of sixty years of refinement and experience, without dramatic political interference (there has been pressure to reduce emissions, but done in a rational way).

I have often maintained that if one scratches the surface, they see that Steve Sailer is ultimately a 100 IQ blogger catering to an 80 IQ audience.

He seems to catch your interest.

Thomm is a really weird commenter.

He is for sure.

…Western criticism of Molotov-Ribbentropp isn’t because of the mere fact of the pact itself, but because of what the Soviet Union did as a consequence of it, that is invading the territory of other states and bringing communist terror there.

You make that distinction, but not everybody in the West does it. There is an attempt to say that M-R pact made it ‘possible’ for Germany to attack Poland. Or even that it was a joint attack. That is simply historically not true.

Regarding consequences, as I wrote above, Soviets were brutal and the way they did things at that time was very brutal. The consequences were built into the agreement. By the way a number of other countries at that time were also habitually brutal in their own way, e.g. Japanese, French or British in their colonies, Turks, and of course the highly cultured Germans anywhere in the east, it was a different era, brutality came with it automatically.

To expect that after Germany quickly executed their part of M-R Pact, Soviets would sit on their hands and not take over the exposed buffer area between them and larger Germany is unrealistic. Why would they do it? At any point after defeating Poland, Germany could sweep through eastern ‘Poland’, Baltic states, or place its artillery a few kilometres from St. Petersburg. No military strategist would allow that, so Soviets had to move in.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact happened for two reasons:
– Poland refused to even discuss any alliance against Germany that included Russia
– Moscow was skeptical whether UK-France would fight and suspected that at that time Britain’s policy was to trigger a Germany-Russia war and watch from the sidelines.

All else were natural consequences. You can call that ‘paranoid‘, but that is the way all countries think – they have to plan for the worse possibilities, not hope for the best.

He doesn’t do any long-form writing anymore

Sailer comes across as pretty disillusioned, like he’s resigned himself to not doing more than chronicling the insanities of the present age which will inevitably end in disaster. But tbh that’s probably just being realistic. It’s also probably hard not to get cynical when one has to read the NYT and similar publications.

I mostly agree with that summary, a few quibbles:

• It was not fully determined in March 1939 when Germany swallowed Czechoslovakia that it would eventually lose, they had a few better moves after that. But it was largely sealed after M-R Pact and attacking Poland later that year.
• Finland, and especially Romania, were going to join Germany in fighting Russia no matter what. Finland reluctantly and locally, Romania with an overarching ambition.
• True, Japan lost to Soviets in August 1939. But at the right time, in late 1941, if Japan attacked Soviets in the east it could had been very different. At the minimum, Soviets would had to keep a much larger force there to defend. The defeat of Germans in front of Moscow was partly achieved by a risky transfer of Siberian troops to the West – there was no way they could had done it if Japan attacked at the same time.

Japan not attacking Russia was among the decisive factors in defeating Barbarossa. It was caused by Japan not trusting Germans after the M-R Pact. Everybody expected Japan to attack and they didn’t – it is the dog that didn’t bark and it decided the war.

You can see the economic benefits to Germany as a payoff by Russia to buy time. Incidentally, at that time Germany openly paid profits to US-British investors in German companies through Switzerland. I would not be too harsh on any of it, but let’s not cherry pick who helped Nazis when and more. Sweden also helped a lot. History is always messy.

btw I just saw this:
https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1170033001864028166

It’s really remarkable how crazy the left on both sides of the Atlantic has become in recent years with their open borders enthusiasm.

It’s crazy, but it makes perfect sense from their first principles.

If your first principle is equality (or perhaps hatred of the white race under the guise of equality), then denying people rights based on their place of birth and citizenship is evil.

From Elizabeth Warren it’s especially absurd since she’s made her political career on fighting economic inequality and exploitation. But then she’s also a hysterical female.

The vast majority of scientists are cucked faggots whose careers would end or at the very least stall if they were to state the obvious. The scientists can reject the obvious all they want, and I’ll continue not taking them seriously.

The recent defenestration of Noah Carl is a useful example which serves pour encourager les autres.

Of course you’re an amateur witch burner so you delight in this.

One of many reasons I counsel young dissidents to make some money and not grow dependent on institutions for their livelihoods. These institutions are either outright controlled by the enemy or afraid of them, with few exceptions (Nivea has notably ignored them recently, unless something changed).

EROEI is not arbitrary at all.

It is arbitrary in many different ways.

Because it’s now the season of year for harvesting sunflowers – we can use that for an example.

Maybe you assume that sun is “not your energy”. So to produce sunflower oil, you need some land (0 energy investment), and energy investment (what you eat for breakfast) of planting sunflower seeds.

We can also employ laborers to collect the sunflower seeds and squeeze them for oil. So the energy investment is what they eat for breakfast.

In the end we can produce arbitrary amount of sunflower oil (perhaps hundreds of litres, perhaps millions of litres), depending on the size of the land and its location relative to the sun, which is produced for almost no energy investment (except what the labour who plant and harvest the seeds eat).

• Is the “energy invested” relevant cost for production of the energy? Is sunflower oil costing the breakfast the labour eats? (Perhaps recycling a spoon of last year’s sunflower oil to feed them?)

No, the important things are:
1. Value of land used. (Opportunity cost of land)
2. Time.
3. Cost of the labourer’s souls themselves (not their breakfast)

To continue example – think about a rowing ship.

Power is supplied by the slaves under the ship. Energy invested is the chemical energy in food you feed to slaves. And usable energy is the kinetic energy of the oars.

In this case, you might think there is very negative return on energy invested (as most of the chemical energy in food is not transferred to the oars).

But to illustrate how arbitrary this is, just add another stage – that the person who invests in the slave ship is the same one who invests in the sunflower farm, and that we consider this as a total energy generation and transfer system.

By changing definition of the size of the system (to expand its size to include the farm), then you will have a positive return on investment.

I did not mean the reopening of some units at that plant, but the construction of unit 6 there.

It was constructed in the 1970s? But then restarted in 2009 after upgrad, and they closed it after Fukushima incident?

nuclear industry simply requires economies of scale and standardization to succeed.

There’s very large hidden costs. Who is subsidizing geological disposal – or even current research into this – of high-level waste? It is taxpayers, and primarily future taxpayers.

And yet levelized cost of energy of nuclear energy is already higher than gas (without accounting for hidden costs of nuclear waste disposal).

It is arbitrary in many different ways.

Lol I edited this to be more polite writing style, but when I re-read it looks like I am condoning it. But I should say – it is an arbitrary nonsense.

By changing definition of the size of the system (to expand its size to include the farm), then you will have a positive return on investment.

Because everything will have a positive return on investment, when you look at the larger system. This is the tautology of the concept. I can only think it might be useful if you want a way to distinguish between things which you can apply a concept of “transfer stations” and “capture stations” – but that would just be a way to invent more imprecise new terminology.

I’m going to try to state this as clearly as possible, as the waters are being muddied.

The basic issue with negative EROEI energy production projects is that they are net consumers of energy. Thus scaling up their energy production drains energy from the rest of the system, even if a financial profit is ostensibly produced (in the case of so-called renewables, this financial profit is usually because of specific subsidies).

So if we’re talking about negative EROEI windmills, and I’m not stating the offshore project you linked is negative EROEI (first I’ve heard of it, and I certainly haven’t seen an energy analysis on it), more primary energy must be produced elsewhere. Generally in the form of other fossil fuels (coal for the steel, refined fuels for transport and heavy equipment, etc.).

This is not comparable to the energy lost in transforming slave muscle power to marine propulsive power via oars. In that case, to propel the ship one must first transform the slave muscle power into oar power and accept the efficiency losses (mostly from drag).

That situation is comparable to thermal fossil fuel power stations, in which there are efficiency losses transforming heat energy into electrical energy. Since heat energy cannot be used for power, one must accept those losses.

But in looking at the energy analysis of the whole system, even after the efficiency losses are taken into account all the energy that is invested into this system (extracting the fossil fuel, refining it, transporting it, building the powerplant, transmitting the electric energy, etc.) more energy is obtained than was invested into the system. Thus there is an energy profit, allowing the expansion of techno-industrial activity. Most of the industrial revolution is simply the expansion of humanity’s aggregate energy surplus.

It was constructed in the 1970s? But then restarted in 2009 after upgrad, and they closed it after Fukushima incident?

New reactor units were added over the years. Unit 6 took 39 months to build and went online in 1996. But all seven units were built in five years or less.

Costs were also low. Unit 7, the cheapest, was built at a cost of around $4bn.

There’s very large hidden costs. Who is subsidizing geological disposal – or even current research into this – of high-level waste? It is taxpayers, and primarily future taxpayers.

And yet levelized cost of energy of nuclear energy is already higher than gas (without accounting for hidden costs of nuclear waste disposal).

First of all, there is no requirement for geological disposal. That is driven by atomophobia. In any case I’m not sure what’s so expensive about stuffing crap in an abandoned mine.

“Levelized” (?) cost of nuclear energy is higher than gas owing to atomophobia.

In reality, the cost of nuclear energy is lower, especially with today’s rock-bottom interest rates. With non-atomophobic management, you can build a gigawatt reactor for $4 billion which will operate for a century. 30 year bonds with a coupon of 3% can finance the project. Most of the world’s reactor fleet was built with interest rates far higher than that, yet provide extremely affordable electricity. Operating costs obviously aren’t zero, but they’re lower than any other form of electricity generation except hydroelectric power (the cheapest and best of all, but cannot be built everywhere).

Wikipedia is considered sufficiently SJW by some that the following alternatives, off the top of my head, have been launched:

• Conservapedia
• Metapedia
• InfoGalactic

There are no doubt more I don’t know about.

We live in an era in which ostensibly leftist values dominate the discourse in the Western world, and figures who challenge the narrative (Sailer’s term) face threats to their reputations and livelihoods. In many cases actual imprisonment, as is the case with Holocaust deniers.

I have little patience and even less respect for people who adhere to and enforce these values. They’re fundamentally weak people who are unable to stand on their own two feet and require the comfort of dogma.

As an example you refer to the reputation of OpenPsych as compared to the reputation of RationalWiki. What other people think of OpenPsych does not concern me, unless I know those people and have grounds to trust their judgment. I trust Anatoly Karlin’s judgment as an example because I’ve known him for a long time and consider him reliable.

And I’ll amend that by stating that what other people think can be useful in the reverse. If, for instance, The Guardian were to condemn the OpenPsych conference (and maybe it did), I would in fact consider that a positive endorsement.

Finally, it’s very easy for me to dismiss your content. You appear to be a religious fanatic who seeks to persecute people for heresy. That’s exactly the sort of person I dismiss immediately.

comparable to thermal fossil fuel power stations, in which there are efficiency losses transforming heat energy into electrical energy.

These (fossil fuel power stations) are “negative EROEI” . More energy is expended than is returned in the new form. The important thing is that it is – currently – quite cheap to buy the chemical energy which they convert.

On the other hand, a wind turbine will have very “positive EROEI” – as for conceptual reasons, the kinetic energy in the wind is not counted as part of your own energy investment.

(Here we can laugh about the arbitrariness of this nonsense – activity of mining the coal has very “positive EROEI”.)

Problem of the wind energy, however, is that land is extremely expensive, and it is wind famr over a large area of space (so the main expenditure will often be the land value).

Also the design of the turbine is might be new technology, so might requires hiring innovative engineers (i.e. expensive labour cost) and precision engineering, as well as potentially expensive materials (and later you have to hire qualified /expensive workers to repair them).

invested into this system (extracting the fossil fuel, refining it, transporting it, building the powerplant, transmitting the electric energy, etc.) more energy is obtained than was invested

Sunflower oil has “more energy was obtained than invested”. And the amount of chemical energy can be arbitrarily increased (to that contained in millions of litres if you want), for very little expenditure of chemical energy (food given to workers).

The relevant cost is not “energy expended” – but the value of the land and the time of workers.

I’ll quote again from the sentence to say something else.

invested into this system (extracting the fossil fuel, refining it, transporting it, building the powerplant,

The energy constitutes a small minority of the cost of those activities. Much more expensive is the time of the people doing the work, and the value of the capital itself (not it’s energy value, but it’s actual value).

energy analysis of the whole system, even after the efficiency losses are taken into account all the energy that is invested into this system (extracting the fossil fuel, refining it, transporting it, building the powerplant, transmitting the electric energy, etc.) more energy is obtained than was invested into the system. Thus there is an energy profit, .

There is transfer of energy from one place to another, or from one form to another. There is not “energy obtained”.

If you build the Pyramid of Giza, it required people to transfer energy from wheat, to kinetic energy. And for the skyscraper, building with power tools – then the chemical energy in oil, to the energy in the movement tools and cranes, etc.

Now it might be fun for sociologists imagine humanity as a giant “energy transfer system”, and industrial revolution as “expansion of humanity’s aggregate energy surplus.”

But this is just what happens when you smoke too much cannabis. It’s an artistic or aesthetic claim – however, the concepts do not exist in real world.

reactor units were added over the years. Unit 6 took 39 months to build and went online in 1996. But all seven units were built in five years or less.

So they could add new units quite fast in 1990s Japan. But what is the time from deciding to build the nuclear power station, to the first ones going online ?

In any case I’m not sure what’s so expensive about stuffing crap in an abandoned mine

Well we need to ask one of the people who works in this area. But it extremely expensive, and it seems to be the same across countries. I can look up at the costs in Russia and you just see hint of amazing costs .

And then you can look at similar proposals in UK.
Here they say £12 billion to build the disposal site. (It is public money).
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/new-bid-to-find-uk-site-for-nuclear-waste-disposal-36529309.html

“Levelized” (?) cost of nuclear energy is higher than gas owing to atomophobia.

In reality, the cost of nuclear energy is lower, especially with today’s rock-bottom interest rates.

For whichever reasons you attribute, it will be quite expensive.
https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf

The advantage of nuclear is that it is steady for the baseload, and can provide energy security (as uranium import can last a long time).

But for countries like Russia and America (which have indigenous natural gas supply), there is little rationale.

It’s only mid cycle cost which is really low. For the footnote for that – “Represents the midpoint of the marginal cost of operating fully depreciated coal and nuclear facilities, inclusive of decommissioning costs for nuclear facilities.”

Commissioning new ones is quite expensive. But continuing operate existing ones, is sensible.

shows how efficiently you produce and distribute useful energy, later to be used

It doesn’t show any useful concept of efficiency.

Again, a primitive sunflower oil farm can incredibly efficient in terms of “energy return on energy invested” measure (because we arbitrarily only need to account for energy of the workers), if you combined it with a electricity generator.

However, the production of the sunflower oil could be extremely inefficient from any relevant sense – main cost will be opportunity cost of the land and the workers’ time.

use energy equivalent of 3 barrels of oil to extract 2 barrels of oil from the ground, you are in negative EROEI.

On the other hand, if you use energy equivalent of 3 barrels of oil, to extract equivalent energy equivalent of 2 barrels of electricity – you have the world’s most efficient power station.

Again, energy expended is not the relevant concept. (It’s really nonsense invented by a professor who has smoked too much cannabis).

But efficiency of the transfer of the energy from one form to another, can be very relevant to how economically efficient this form of energy is (along with many other factors you have to look at).

Those are true:

1. Substituting nuclear energy for coal/gas/fuel oil, would reduce carbon dioxide emissions, if you believe this should be a priority.

2. Nuclear energy for electricity production, has not killed many people by comparison to many other forms of energy, particularly coal.

There’s not much of a religious right in Western Europe, but overpopulation discussion disappeared there as well.

The religious right in America mostly accepts the moral values of the enemy–except when it comes to contraception, or these days really just abortion.

We live in an era in which ostensibly leftist values dominate the discourse in the Western world, and figures who challenge the narrative (Sailer’s term) face threats to their reputations and livelihoods. In many cases actual imprisonment, as is the case with Holocaust deniers.

I have little patience and even less respect for people who adhere to and enforce these values. They’re fundamentally weak people who are unable to stand on their own two feet and require the comfort of dogma.

In comments above you preach that might makes right and celebrate right of conquest, and now you cry you are being “oppressed”? LOL.

There are several reasons there is no true high speed rail in the US. These include:

• Mismanagement of existing passenger rail network (once one of the world’s best)
• Geography
• Disappearance of domestic industrial passenger rail base
• Lobbying by airlines and conservatives
• NIMBYism and cost disease in US infrastructure

I regard mismanagement as the fundamental reason. Regulation (and myopic management) prevented the railroads from adjusting and competing properly with the rise of other modes of transport (cars, trucks, and planes), and eventually passenger rail service was assumed by the federal government (Amtrak) which has done a poor job for a variety of reasons (including not owning the tracks it operates on).

There are always projects on the drawing board, but one of them are very serious. You can read about the sad story of the attempt to bring high speed California in the past decade to see more. The US Federal Rail Administration has also “improved” the safety standards for HSR over those prevailing in Europe and Asia, so at this stage high speed rail is likely never to happen.

The impact of any Japan attack in Siberia in 1941 would be psychologically devastating for the Soviets. It doesn’t matter if it only blocked Vladivostok and took Irkutsk, having to defend Siberia hinterland would change the balance of power. Japan was also quite capable and within 6 months of Barbarossa defeated Americans in the Philippines, occupied most of east Asia, had air force, etc…

… hordes of newly arrived Siberian

I take historians who feel comfortable describing soldiers from Siberia as ‘hordes‘ with a grain of salt. Imagine ‘hordes of newly arrived British soldiers in Normandy‘. Right.

…moral evolution that Britain had undergone since Gladstone’s time

You mean from lying occasionally to basically lying all the time? Britain has no morals and no honour code. The main reason Brits invented the concept of fair play is because they naturally lack any sense of fairness or honour. So they play-act. I don’t think British elite had any moral awakening about Nazis after Czechoslovakia, they simply adjusted their behaviour to reflect the fact that Germany was suddenly on the roll. I find all this posturing about ‘British values‘ and morality bizarre beyond belief, are we talking about people like Chamberlain, Churchill, Halifax?

Germany could had won WWII if they didn’t attack Soviet Union. It is that simple: as Napoleon, Swedes, Turks and Poles before, they broke their teeth attacking Russia. If Germany in 1941 simply sat on its hands and kept what they had, they were unbeatable. Poles would disappear, French would adjust to pleasing their German overlords, Sweden would over time become a dependency. Germany attacked Russia in 1941 because they were on a victory high and judged Red Army by the ease with which they disposed of Poles and French. Hitler even sent Rudolf Hess in May 1941 to negotiate a 3-year pause on the Western front to have time to defeat Russia – and Britain agreed to the dot, they waited exactly 3 years before Normandy invasion.

Finland was definitely a fiasco and there is no way to know what they would had done in the absence of the Winter War. My point is that countries act based on existing threats and that made attacking Finland almost inevitable. It is interesting that Westerners who act in a similar paranoid fashion at home all the time not allowing even a semblance of threat on the own borders don’t see the other side as having a right to similar concerns. We see it again today with Nato in Ukraine, etc… Being willfuly self-righteous is no way to run the world.

Cattle are not slaughtered by Aryans though.

“On the other hand, if you use energy equivalent of 3 barrels of oil, to extract equivalent energy equivalent of 2 barrels of electricity – you have the world’s most efficient power station.”

WTH?

I will try again, step by step:

1. To extract crude from the ground, you consume energy (electricity, diesel fuel, gasoline, natural gas etc). This energy is used to operate pumps, rigs and drills, ferry water, sand and chemicals – in case of shale oil – or produce steam – in case of Alberta tars, etc.
2. For every 2 extracted barrels of crude oil, you consume energy equivalent to the energy stored in 3 barrels of crude oil;
3. You have managed to replenish only 2/3 of your energy input;
4. Since you are an energy producer – crude oil is above all an energy source – you have created a net energy loss. You are not a very successful energy producer.

PS. I am aware of the law of energy conservation so terms like “produce energy” and “consume energy” should not be taken literally.

“It was in this context that they invaded the USSR–a desperate gamble to acquire the resources they needed to fight the Anglo-Saxon powers.”

This theory is feeble.
Germany could not possibly dream of defeating combined Anglo-Saxons (USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and NZ) without the Soviet Union on its side.
So in reality Germany never had such illusions, not to speak of intentions. Their real goal was expand and “drive east” (as the man with mustache stated himself).

I don’t know if anyone in Europe is dumb enough to make the same argument that is made of Hispanics in the US about them being “natural conservatives”, when it comes to Muslims and blacks. But if they are, here is one thing I’d say: in colonial times, homosexuals went the continent of Africa for sex tourism and pederasty. That is why Roger Casement was in the Congo.

That is why Roger Casement was in the Congo.

I thought he went there to uncover colonial atrocities.
But actually yes, there is something similar in Europe, at least in Germany, though the values are of course somewhat different (not much emphasis on free enterprise, immigrants as entrepeneurs like in the US). You definitely have “conservative” Christians who get all sentimental about Muslims and their “family values” and say they’ve got more in common with them than with native atheists.

bogged down in China

When they devoted resources to making gains in China, like with operation Ichi-Go, they could manage it. I do not think that the stop in progress in China was a matter of incompetence by the army, but rather a strategic realisation that there was little to be gained by making further progress when it would be extremely hard to win a final victory, the enemy did not pose much of a threat and there was little to be gained.

I thought he went there to uncover colonial atrocities

Casement got his commission from the British government to investigate the Congo in 1903. But he was in the Congo beginning in 1884, in a commercial capacity working for King Leopold II, or at least a front for him. But he was there for many years, I believe. His diary even included gay rendezvouses with Africans in 1903, in exchange for money.

I’m not sure he was a terribly reliable source. Not that I don’t think bad things happened there – just probably not his crazy numbers.

It is indisputable fact that German industry (+ that of occupied/aligned European countries) was impressive and very potent.

Yet, combined potential of Anglo-Saxons + dominions (South Africa, India, Middle East, South America etc) dwarfed anything Germany/Japan could throw at them.

German-Soviet axis was never, in my mind, a real possibility, taking into account the obvious disdain the man with mustache and his entourage felt towards the “untermench”.

I understand some of land is used for suburbs (with large,luxurious houses) – and this adds to a large part of the cost – , but the majority of the land needed will be farm land. In addition, space requirement for the rail line, is less than for multi-lane road. And yet there was not opposition to building the highway system all over America.

This aspect of the project is a lot easier in America, than in Japan, where Shinkansen lines travel directly next to houses in the most density populated areas of the country.

In addition, if you look at a route like New York to Miami, most of the land is flat and has no obstacles. On the other, for Shinkansen they have to build thousands of tunnels and aqueducts, as the flat of the land constantly varies.

Typical Shinkansen line is aqueducts and tunnels, and the center of cities (also in tunnels under the sea between different islands).

Another problem is that a lot of the people who might use such trains are living in the suburbs, not the city. They would have to commute into and out of the city to use such lines and this makes them less attractive. A lot of people will actually drive from NY to Florida, in preference to flying.

But you also have to commute to an airport.

Compared to driving, it is twice the speed, you can sleep (or complete your work on the notebook) and you don’t need to buy a car.

This is the fastest train in America, apparently – Acela Express. I don’t know if you guys have used it?

He pays $150 for the journey from Washington DC to Boston. The time for the journey is 7 hours.

But the speed he says is only “average of 49mpg” on the second part of the journey, although he says average 80mpg on the first part. Seems a bit unimpressive for the fastest train in the world’s only superpower.

You get free softdrinks though in the station which is pretty cool, and also the small number of other passengers makes it seem civilized.

I’ve used it. It’s a pleasant way to get around the BosWash corridor compared to air travel.

A lot of American East Coast elites use it, so there’s a fair amount of people watching on the Acela.

What’s truly embarrassing is that there were 100mph passenger trains on the New York Central railroad in 1900. By the 1930s there were passenger trains in America exceeding 120mph.

Today, however, our passenger rail is a global laughingstock.

One nice thing about Amtrak is the old transcontinental rail lines remain in operation as excellent tourist trains: https://www.amtrak.com/empire-builder-train

Wasn’t his half Serb mother poisoned as well? But one thing he did do wrong was beat his daughter in law causing her to miscarrige and then killed his son in rage when he confronted him about it leaving his second weakly son to succeed him who had no heirs which subsequently led to civil war upon his death.

Believe it or not I’m a fan of the old Mankind Quarterly when they used to publish interesting content (under Robert Gayre’s editorial), such as articles about cryptids like Bigfoot and Yeti. The journal used to publish a lot more diverse articles on unusual topics in the 1960-1970s. MQ turned garbage when Roger Pearson took it over exclusively focusing the journal on race and IQ and it now just regurgitates boring Richard Lynn type racist pseudoscience, worse than toilet paper.

I wrote a fairly detailed history of MQ on RationalWiki, covering it’s more interesting early history:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly#History

MQ‘s founding “honorary” associate editors such as Corrado Gini were cryptozoologists. Gini founded the International Committee for the Study of Hairy Humanoids in 1962. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29787494

Porshnev, Sanderson, and Heuvelmans were good friends and members of The International Committee for the Study of Hairy Humanoids (the name owes its origin to Heuvelmans), an organization created in Rome in 1962, by Dr. Corrado Gini, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Rome University. Opening the committee, Dr. Gini said, in full agreement with Boris Porshnev, “The Snowman and other hairy bipeds present a subject worthy of a profound scientific study. (…) This is a subject of the greatest importance for understanding the origin of man and the initial stages of human society.” (Genus, 1962). The committee included some 30 persons from different countries, among them Dr. George Agogino, Dr. Raymond A. Dart, Dr. John Napier, Dr. W.C. Osman Hill, Dr. P.R. Rinchen, Prof. Philip. V. Tobias, as well as yeti investigator Ralph Izzard, yeti and Bigfoot investigators Tom Slick and Peter Byrne, sasquatch investigators John Green,
Bob Titmus, Rene Dahinden

https://www.isu.edu/media/libraries/rhi/essays/Bayanov_rev.pdf

Gayre also joined the “International Committee for the Study of Hairy Humanoids” (Comitato internazionale per lo studio degli umanoidi pelosi), promoted by Gini within the International Institute of Sociology. On this, see “Comitato Internazionale per lo Studio degli Umanoidi Pelosi,” Genus 18, no. 1–4 (1962): 1–4. On Gini’s interests on the Abominable Snowman, see John P. Jackson Jr., “‘In Ways Unacademical’: The Reception of Carleton Coon’s The Origin of Races,” Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001): 247–85. On this topic, see also: Brian Regal, “Amateur versus Professional: the Search for Bigfoot,” Endeavour 32, no. 2 (June 2008): 53–57.

https://books.openedition.org/ceup/729?lang=en

Wasn’t his half Serb mother poisoned as well?

Yes, the boyars poisoned Ivan IV’s mother as well and she was also half-Serb which means Ivan was 1/4 Serb.

But one thing he did do wrong was beat his daughter in law causing her to miscarrige and then killed his son in rage when he confronted him about it leaving his second weakly son to succeed him who had no heirs which subsequently led to civil war upon his death.

There’s no proof or evidence for this. Also, just like Ivan’s mother and wife died from being poisoned by boyar scum, Ivan himself also died from immense amounts of Arsenic and Mercury poisoning just like his extended family even including his own son. It’s no surprise that anti-Ivan boyars and others would doctor the historical record with stories about Ivan’s supposed “abuse” towards his own family.

Civil wars and the Time of Troubles would have most likely happened regardless, even if Ivan’s heirs did survive. The boyars were an extremely powerful oligarchic class in 16th century Russia that undermined the state from within and often co-operated with external enemies. Only Ivan IV was capable of reigning in their destructive power, but since he did not kill enough boyars, he clearly failed. Russia under Ivan the Terrible was surrounded by enemies on all sides with the exceptions of Siberia and the North Sea. The treacherous boyar class collaborated with all of these enemies which included, Sweden, Denmark, Poland-Lithuania, Crimean Tatars and Ottomans.

The Crimean Tatar raid and sack of Moscow in 1571 led by Devlet Giray was only possible because the boyars bribed the Russian governors responsible for the defense of Southern Russia to do nothing. The boyars also directly communicated with the Crimean Tatars to stage this attack. Ivan’s Oprichnina barely succeeded in fighting off the Tatars. Russia’s defeat in the Livonian War was also due to boyar treachery. Of course, there are also the infamous letters from the boyar scum Andrei Kurbsky, who defected to Poland-Lithuania (not because of Ivan’s “terror”, but because he was offered large amounts of land by Sigismund III of Poland in order to overthrow Ivan), and his lengthy correspondence with Ivan the Terrible where it is clearly revealed what kind of scum Kurbsky and his boyar class are while Ivan is forever vindicated.

Unfortunately, almost none of this evidence is available in English language sources but is mostly restricted to Russian language sources.

German defenders were Class C Bohemian Czech-German amateurs who were not particularly motivated to fight.

You’re talking about 1st SS LSSAH, 2nd SS Das Reich, 9th, 10th, 12th SS, each among the better SS divisions (the first two actually elite), or Wehrmacht divisions like the Panzer Lehr (again, an elite division). I’m unaware of any of these consisting of Sudeten Germans or Bohemian Germans or Czechs or whatever. (At least certainly not above their average proportion of the German population.)

People mock Finns

People mock Finns for their lack of social skills, not because of the Winter War XD
Shitty jokes aside, the Winter War is best classified as a stalemate IMO

No one should deride Finns for celebrating the fact that they prevented the complete annexation of Finland, here’s hoping you manage to dodge the Globo Homo aswell

No, you are wrong. 80% of fighting took place on the eastern front and the main German objectives were to take over the lands in the east – lebensraum. All else was a side show, Hitler thought of Brits as ‘cousins’ and would had preferred that they saw Germany the same way. Germany had no global ambitions for Canada, US, New Zealand – they wanted a European empire. Their primary enemy was always in the east, Czechs, Poles, Russians. You have it upside down and that is at the core of Western misrepresentation of WWII.

Four-fifths of German combat deaths were in the East, which is not the same thing as four-fifths of all fighting taking place in the East. Half of the air combat, nearly all of the naval combat, and all of the heavy air defense took place in the West. The largest single consumer of industrial resources during the war was the Luftwaffe.

“Global war” was perhaps a confusing way for me to state things. It’s not that Germany sought a global empire, she did not, but that she faced a war against a worldwide Anglo-American coalition of unprecedented scope.

It’s true that Hitler’s ambitions had always been to build a Eurasian empire, but his efforts to reach an understanding with the British failed. Even worse, the second Roosevelt administration demonstrated an implacable hostility to Nazi Germany.

Hess was #2 to Hitler and flew in May 1941 to meet with high ranking British contacts. It was no accident and he was not crazy – it was an obvious German attempt to make separate arrangement with Britain one month before attacking Soviet Union. There is no way to see the reason for that trip as a ‘conspiracy’. He flew there, he was there. He was largely rejected publicly because of the optics – but Britain stayed out of Europe land war for 3 years.

It’s entirely plausible that Hess was sent by Hitler on a peace mission.

It’s not plausible that a secret understanding was reached to stay out of France (obviously not Europe, since Italy was invaded in 1943) for three years. While not fighting in France, the Anglo-Americans were fighting in the Atlantic, North Africa, Italy, and in the skies over Europe.

Maybe it was a coincidence, and you are right that Brits would be slaughtered. But they were slaughtered in 1944 in Normandy – it was one of the most inept attacks that resulted in completely unnecessary casualties with naval and air support failing, etc… German defenders were Class C Bohemian Czech-German amateurs who were not particularly motivated to fight. And yet the landing was still a catastrophe by any military standard. It was a military disaster and Brits-Americans got stuck in a small area until Germans tactically decided that it was in their interest to give up in the West – since Soviets were steam-rolling over them in the east. German leadership (not Hitler and his fanatics) preferred to lose to the Anglos. It was less painful that way.

West has creates a comfortable myth about WWII, Normandy and all, because geo-politically what actually happened is at cross-purposes with their goals. I expect it to get worse.

“Class C” was a Cold War Soviet Army designation, not one used by the Wehrmacht or Waffen SS. And in any case the Magyar Miracle already pointed out that many excellent German formations were in the West.

As for these German troops allegedly being Bohemians, that’s a new one to me. To take one example, Hauptsturmführer Michael Wittman’s Tiger company was transferred to the West in April, 1944. Wittman was a Bavarian and went on to destroy over a dozen tanks in fifteen minutes at Villers-Bocage. He died in combat two months later.

Operation Overlord had many errors, but expecting the Anglo-Americans to pull off the largest amphibious invasion in history without a hitch is too much.

That’s one of the most impressive internet posts I’ve seen to date. This is the first time in my life that I’ve come across a Sovok justification for Feminism or “women’s rights”.

better life in Israel (excluding the terrorism, of course)

Israel has a worse life in this perspective – although salaries are higher, housing costs are impossible for most immigrants from former Soviet Union countries, who do not inherit apartments from their parents. They rent small apartments which are not suitable for more than 1-2 child.

other words, having more children was no longer viewed as a “Gypsy thing” by many ex-USSR Jews

It is not common at all, as most of them are completely secular.

But there is the case of infamous Israeli politician Anastasia Michaeli, who attacked Arab politicians in the parliament. She had 8 children while working as a politician in the parliament.

There were also hifis, Italians (until Stalingrad), Hungarians, Romanians, etc. in the East.

Here’s the German OOB from June, 1944: http://www.ww2f.com/threads/complete-order-of-battle-for-german-forces-in-the-west-6-6-1944.8913/

As you can see there were many Panzer divisions, though of course also low quality formations like Luftwaffe field divisions.

Here’s number of German divisions by front throughout the war: https://www.axishistory.com/axis-nations/134-campaigns-a-operations/campaigns-a-operations/2085-number-of-german-divisions-by-front-in-world-war-ii

All divisions in the West (West, Norway, Italy) constituted two-thirds of the divisions in the East (East, Finland) in June, 1944. I’ve ignored divisions in Germany and Balkans as they were arrayed against both.

…Four-fifths of German combat deaths were in the East, which is not the same thing as four-fifths of all fighting taking place in the East.

Yes, it is, that’s the way math usually works, how else would you decide it? By the number of Hollywood movies?

You are right about Navy and Air force, but that is already to some extent accounted for in the 20%. But the real bulk of WWII was in the east. Because that’s what Germans wanted – they were trying to conquer the area, remove most of the population and settle it. The rest was just about who gets to be genuflect to whom, almost trivial in comparison.

…Hess’s peace mission to Britain…It’s not plausible that a secret understanding was reached to stay out of France

Why not? We don’t know what happened because Brits are obsessively protecting any information about it. That speaks for itself, what are they hiding? In similar circumstances with any other country, the facts would be evaluated based on what happened afterwards: Hess flies in, is detained and hidden from public, one month later Germany attacks Russia, and conveniently Britain refrains for 3 years from a land invasion of western Europe.

Whether there was an ‘understanding‘ depends on what that would mean and who were the parties. That’s a matter of interpreting categories and terms, and Anglos are very good at twisting and lying in those circumstances. Suffice to say the whole affair was awfully suspicious and if another country had done it, it would be assumed that some sort of a deal took place.

…“Class C” was a Cold War Soviet Army designation, not one used by the Wehrmacht

The front line in Normandy was staffed by very mediocre second tier guards mostly originally from among Volk Deutsche German ethnics from eastern Europe – many were not really German, or only ‘temporarily‘ German, and they were not deemed good enough to actually fight. Many were older guys drafted because they in 1939 declared ‘German’ nationality as opportunists. My relatives knew some of them after WWII, and they were generally referred to as ‘C-ari’, in other words third rate troops. It is possible they were there as cannon fodder and behind them were better troops. But it shows you the level of priority German general staff put on the Western front.

Normandy landing was a military fiasco with thousands of unnecessary casualties, running against machine guns, with minimal or non-existent air or artillery support. It was done for a show. If any other army would execute similarly inept manuever it would be openly discussed, but myth is a myth. The reality is that by the time of Normandy a large part of German military and elite was looking for the easiest way to lose – preferably as much as possible to the Anglo side. They were scared sh.tless of the Soviets.

Yes, it is, that’s the way math usually works, how else would you decide it? By the number of Hollywood movies?

You are right about Navy and Air force, but that is already to some extent accounted for in the 20%. But the real bulk of WWII was in the east. Because that’s what Germans wanted – they were trying to conquer the area, remove most of the population and settle it. The rest was just about who gets to be genuflect to whom, almost trivial in comparison.

We’ve now moved on from German strategic goals to where the fighting took place.

Obviously, most of the land combat took place in the East. No one disputes that except perhaps the late Stephen Ambrose who seemed to believe the Normandy campaign was the greatest land battle in history.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it leads people to believe that there was little fighting of significance in the West, which is not true.

Why not? We don’t know what happened because Brits are obsessively protecting any information about it. That speaks for itself, what are they hiding? In similar circumstances with any other country, the facts would be evaluated based on what happened afterwards: Hess flies in, is detained and hidden from public, one month later Germany attacks Russia, and conveniently Britain refrains for 3 years from a land invasion of western Europe.

Whether there was an ‘understanding‘ depends on what that would mean and who were the parties. That’s a matter of interpreting categories and terms, and Anglos are very good at twisting and lying in those circumstances. Suffice to say the whole affair was awfully suspicious and if another country had done it, it would be assumed that some sort of a deal took place.

It’s ridiculous to me that the British made such a pledge, or that the Germans sought such a pledge, because there was tremendous fighting between the Germans and the West between May 1941 and June 1944. The fighting just didn’t take the shape of land combat in France, other than the disastrous Dieppe Raid.

What good does it do the Germans exactly to get a promise of no landing in France while suffering endless disasters like Tunisgrad and the Combined Bombing Offensive? Had the British not let up on bombing the Ruhr in 1943 in favor of vainly going after Berlin they could’ve caused a catastrophe.

That said, certainly something was discussed, as why else would the British seal all the files until 2040?

The front line in Normandy was staffed by very mediocre second tier guards mostly originally from among Volk Deutsche German ethnics from eastern Europe – many were not really German, or only ‘temporarily‘ German, and they were not deemed good enough to actually fight. Many were older guys drafted because they declared ‘German’ nationality. My relatives knew some of them after WWII, and they were generally referred to as ‘C-ari’, in other words third rate troops. It is likely that they were put there as cannon fodder and behind them were better troops. But it shows you the level of priority German general staff put on the Western front.

I posted the complete Normandy German OOB previously. If you didn’t read it, these high quality formations were present:

3.fallschirmjäger-Division
5.fallschirmjäger-Division
1.SS-Panzer-Division
17.SS-Panzergrenadier-Division
Panzer-Lehr-Division
2.SS-Panzer-Division
9.Panzer-Division
2.Panzer-Division
21.Panzer-Division
116.Panzer-Division
11.Panzer-Division

There were other good divisions as well, but off the top of my head I can’t recognize whether a numbered German infantry division is any good or not so I’ve ignored those.

Normandy landing was a military fiasco with thousands of unnecessary casualties, running against machine guns, with minimal or non-existent air or artillery support. It was done for a show. If any other army would execute similarly inept manuever it would be openly discussed, but myth is a myth. The reality is that by the time of Normandy a large part of German military and elite was looking for the easiest way to lose – preferably as much as possible to the Anglo side. They were scared sh.tless of the Soviets.

Well it’s a shame that General Beckow wasn’t in command of Operation Overlord instead of General Eisenhower.

The American landings, especially on Omaha Beach, were a bloodbath. The British landings went better in part because they produced specialized equipment for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart's_Funnies

As for no air support, the Allies spent the entire month of May distintegrating the French rail network, with disastrous effects for the Germans. On the day of the invasion the Allies flew 7,000 air support sorties!

It’s surprising even the wealthy Mormons of Utah, do not build high-speed rail connections from their isolated region to the Pacific Ocean.

From Salt Lake City to San Francisco/Silicon Valley, is only 1000 kilometers.

This is around a 3,5 hour train journey, with the latest high-speed rail. In order words, with adequate infrastructure (and if you don’t dislike 7 hours a day in a train), you could commute every day from your house in Salt Lake City to work in Silicon Valley. And similarly, a lot of offices in Silicon Valley could build branches in Salt Lake City.

The closest proposal I can see is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XpressWest

Aside from Utah, this would require planning approval from the Federal government (EPA and BLM at the very least), the State of California, the State of Nevada (which would grant it quickly), and every political entity en route. These entities would include every county and municipality along the way, along with odd ones you’ve never heard of.

All of the private land owners on the way would need to be bought out, and many would refuse. Their land would need to be seized by eminent domain proceedings, which could take years. So-called environmentalists would file numerous lawsuits to stop the project, which would also take years.

The planning and legal costs alone would run into the billions of Dollars, and there is no guarantee it would be successful.

During this entire process, numerous entities would also lobby politicians against the project and run advertising campaigns to convince the public to stop the project. Lobbying forces would include wealthy home-owners on the route, major airlines on the route (Delta, Southwest, American, and Alaska are all prominent in Salt Lake), political conservatives, libertarians, and environmentalists.

Once construction actually got started, if it ever did, then in California and possibly also Nevada labor unions would demand their due. In addition to high pay scales, American construction labor unions on public projects also demand staffing levels three to four times that which is required.

So now you can see why America has no high speed rail, and also why simple projects like subway extension in Manhattan have costs ten times that in Paris and London.

…We’ve now moved on from German strategic goals to where the fighting took place.

No we didn’t, those two are related.

it leads people to believe that there was little fighting of significance in the West, which is not true.

All fighting in WWII was significant by historical standards, but most of it (roughly 80%) took place on the eastern front.

…British made such a pledge, or that the Germans sought such a pledge

I said understanding, not a ‘pledge’, you are playing with my words. The facts on the ground – what actually happened as I described it above – suggest some kind of a tacit understanding. Hess flew to Britain because his message couldn’t be trusted to anyone else and it had to be delivered in person. (Hess was roughly #2 in the Nazi hierarchy.) He wouldn’t do it without some assurances or previous contacts. It is also quite likely that British leaders were not of one mind, thus the ambivalence.

But the fact remains that Britain stayed out of land war in Western Europe for 3 years until Normandy, watching Germany trying to conquer the east. That was not what anyone in Europe expected in 1941 – so there had to be a reason. Being lousy at land war and fearing WWI casualties probably played a role. But to think that Britain would be above develish self-serving betrayals like giving Nazis some time to finish off the Soviets is naive.

shame that General Beckow wasn’t in command

That is silly and content free. Are you trying some verbal nihilism? That usually signals that you are running out of arguments.

I am aware of the good German divisions in the West, but they were not on the frontline in Normandy. I would also count most division in Germany and Balkans by summer 1944 as being primarily fighting the Soviets – check out the maps, Red Army was about to storm Eastern Prussia.

General Beckow in Slovak Operation Overlord:

A few new Russian submarines are incapable of longer term missions, because they have no longer access to American batteries, and while American batteries were good for five days, the Russian ones are only good for two.

http://avia.pro/news/rossiya-poteryala-u-beregov-sirii-srazu-tri-podvodnyh-lodki

The Dyatlov Pass incident is a pretty interesting thing. A popular Hungarian blogger wrote about it a few years ago, I’ve since read a short book on it. It didn’t convince me, though.

At this point I am not sure what your point is.

• 80% of WWII was fought between Germany and its allies against Russia in the east. Yes, there was substantial activity in the West, smaller and later than common sense would expect.
• Normandy invasion was a relatively small operation very late in the war that went fairly badly – charging machine guns like in WWI with poor support against second rate German troops is not an example of glory.
• Hess flew to Britain a month before Germany attacked Soviet Union – if you have a better explanation of what he was sent there for, tell us. Maybe, he went for tea and scones, or he was truly mad. But to outsiders it looked and still looks very suspicious.

If you have an issue with any of that, address it. But bringing Norway, Sicily or Balkans into it is pointless and seems like an attempt to distract. That and silly personal attacks are an example of verbal nihilism – something that losing side in an argument engages in to confuse the perceptions. It is generally pointless to argue with verbal nihilists. People over certain IQ see it without me responding, people below that IQ cutoff will never see, so they will clown around with their goat fantasies. How clever, and useless.

The idea of a cryptid being responsible always seemed odd to me, because there’s no evidence of any mundane creature being involved (i.e. no foot prints). It would hence need to be a much more exotic theoretical monster than the yeti. Perhaps Mothman, which could cause them to behave irrationally (out of terror, or maybe mind control?) while also leaving no tracks behind. But if you’re going that far, why not just blame a demon or evil spectre from the beyond?

Skimming the article it seems like there are some inconsistencies, were their belongings emptied from the tent or not (“their tent was empty… belongings and shoes left behind”)? If so then I would be interested if their was a toxicology report (again not mentioned) and how accurate it would be, because most of the other theories seem insufficient to explain leaving their cold weather gear behind after removing it from the tent, unless their were mind-altering drugs involved. But that still leaves the “pressure” wounds which killed three (which were far beyond the pressure of 4 meters of snow? Again unclear from the article). A strange case to be sure.

But I may be softening on your position that unz is a terrible website for morons now that the regular commentariat has degraded from mentally ill shut ins and neo nazis to editors of rational wiki.

I’ve since read a short book on it. It didn’t convince me, though.

What was its theory?

I think that the very heavy wind created a sound frequency which could cause in humans a total temporary disorientation and loss of judgment with a very strong desire to get away from it. According to the book the tent was exactly at a location where the sound would have been worst. They left the tent in panic (as, according to the author, all humans would do when exposed to such a sound for an extended period), cutting it out from the inside, and went to the nearest tree without their warm clothes (only in pullovers), where they suddenly realized what they had done. It was basically impossible in the middle of the night in a snowstorm to find the tent again, and they couldn’t survive the night in such cold. A few of them tried to get back to the tent and died without finding it. A few tried to make fire but froze to death anyway. A few tried to go deeper into the forest to get some firewood and died there.

Apparently the most mysterious things, like the injuries on some corpses (a missing tongue etc.), could be explained easily (animals ate from the corpses after thawing in the spring), and basically everything fits into the very simple explanation of them leaving the tent very quickly in panic (cutting out the tent from inside), going to the tree, their panicking even more, splitting into three or four small groups trying to get firewood or back to the tent or finding the others who have gone and then each dying, because, whatever they tried, they were doomed after leaving the tent. (E.g. one of them had serious bone injuries next to the tree, and a few branches of the tree were broken or damaged. No, they weren’t fleeing to the tree from some mysterious monsters, simply tried to get firewood from up the tree, but in the extreme cold couldn’t climb up the tree and fell, breaking bones.)

Now I can accept much of the thesis (that they only needed to leave the tent in panic for everything else to follow), but I’m not sure I believe the mysterious sound frequency of the wind. Another proposal could be an unfounded fear of an avalanche, which this book dismissed.

In general, the theory sounds convincing, but it also sounds like a pet theory which ultimately cannot be proven or falsified.

Anyway, the idea that the only mystery is why they left the tent (and everything following from them leaving the tent and then realizing they were doomed) is pretty convincing in itself.

Japanese urbanism, but there are some very different features there.

Another thing about Japan, is I believe land path for Tokaido main line was bought in the 1930ies – when land would have been cheaper.

However, even in 1930s, Kanto Plain would surely be vastly more expensive than e.g. Nevada desert.

Most of the infrastructure you see in the USA was constructed between the Civil War and the election of Ronald Reagan.

I guess this explains Elon Musk’s interest in tunnel projects.

Cannot there be a legal change, for example in the Supreme Court, to favour acquisition of land for high-speed rail, however?

In India, for example, is fighting to forcibly acquire land for its rail lines, which will use modern Japanese trains.

“Mumbai (Urban Transport News): The Farmers from Maharashtra are all set to oppose Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s one of biggest dream project. The State Government is planning to use an obscure section of the land acquisition act to forcibly takeover land in the tribal district of Palghar for the bullet train project.”

https://urbantransportnews.com/indias-first-bullet-train-project-fights-battle-for-land-acquisition

Are you trying some verbal nihilism? That usually signals that you are running out of arguments.

Accusing someone of verbal nihilism means Beckow is losing the argument.

Dunning-Kruger in action.

I posted the complete Normandy German OOB previously. If you didn’t read it, these high quality formations were present:

3.fallschirmjäger-Division
5.fallschirmjäger-Division
1.SS-Panzer-Division
17.SS-Panzergrenadier-Division
Panzer-Lehr-Division
2.SS-Panzer-Division
9.Panzer-Division
2.Panzer-Division
21.Panzer-Division
116.Panzer-Division
11.Panzer-Division

On paper strength is irrelevant. Divisions which suffered high losses in the East would be rotated to recoup, retrain and reequip in the West.
What you need is the total German AFV breakdown by type in 1944 Normandy and France.
This would demonstrate how understrength and rag-tag those divisions were compared to nominal OOB.

There is another distinction – a Panther in the East was not manned by novice, green crew. In the West, Germans were forced to utilise green Panzerbrigaden with nowhere near enough supporting elements to terrible results.

Look at it this way – how much Luftwaffe strength was diverted from Ostfront from 1943 to 1945, allowing Soviets to deny Axis the previously enjoyed air supremacy, and evolving over time into Soviet air supremacy?
Air recon, close support, tactical bombing are incredible force multipliers and require skies clear of enemy fighters.

What would you consider a bigger loss for the war effort – a loss of a wing worth of fighters and pilots in combat, or a loss of an infantry battalion?

Now compare the casualty count in both cases.

There is another distinction – a Panther in the East was not manned by novice, green crew. In the West, Germans were forced to utilise green Panzerbrigaden with nowhere near enough supporting elements to terrible results.

I don’t think that was true in June 1944, when the Germans had several months to train their crews, but it was to a large extent true in December during the Battle of the Bulge. Most German conscripts by that time were coming from the urban working class not drafted previously due to their importance to the war economy. There was nowhere enough time to give them proper training.

By the way German crews were getting increasingly inexperienced by that time in the East, too.

The Panzer Lehr was at full strength already in March of that year when it participated in Operation Margarethe. I’m pretty sure that most of these divisions were close to full strength at the time, having been sent to the West months earlier.

I am pretty sure they weren’t at full strength, not quality-wise (AFV type) and not quantity wise.
But I have to check actual numbers before posting.

Anyway, the issue at hand is whether these were manned by unmotivated conscripts (?) or volunteers (?) from Bohemia or other Volksdeutsch groups. They were not.

I was not taking part in that discussion, just clarifying that simply looking at listed divisions doesn’t tell the full story. The same way a 1941 and 1940 Panzer division are world apart.

Were Eastern Front divisions truly at full strength? I’m pretty sure that divisions which had spent several months in France were closer to full strength than divisions which had spent months fighting on the Eastern Front.

Lets take a look at 21st Panzer Division in France.

At the start of battle, it was equipped with:
Command Company – 3 x Panzer III long 50 mm, 5 x Panzer IV long 75 mm (F2/G/H), 1 x Befl.Pz. III

I/Pz.Rgt. 22
Command Company 1 x Panzer III long 50 mm, 5 x Panzer IV long 75 mm, 1 x 1 x Befl.Pz. III
1. Company 17 x Panzer IV long 75 mm
2. Company 17 x Panzer IV long 75 mm
3. Company 17 x Panzer IV long 75 mm
4. Company 17 x Panzer IV long 75 mm

II/Pz.Rgt 22
Command Company 5 x Pz. IV long , 3 x Befhl.Pz.-S35 (f) (Somua)
5. Company. 5 x Pz.-IV (l), 9 x Pz.-S35 (f)
6. Company 5 x Pz.-IV (l), 13 x Pz.-S35 (f)
7. Company 5 x Pz.-IV (l), 13 x Pz.-S35 (f)
8. Company 6 x Pz.-IV short 75 mm

Additionally, it had two companies of Hotchkiss H-38 (Pz.-H38 (f)) and one company of Pz. Char B-2 740 (f) Flamm assigned to division HQ.
Naturally, the Germans didn’t utilise French tanks and short 75 mm Panzer IVs in combat against Allies.
At the time, a Panzer Division was supposed to have an a battalion of Panthers and a battalion of Panzer IV with L43/48 guns.

how much were the SS troops blown up by propaganda

SS troops (at least the earlier formed German SS troops, including all the troops fighting in Normandy) were highly motivated and selected from the most valuable conscript/volunteer material.

I didn’t mention the 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend” because I thought they were some kind of supersoldiers (they weren’t), but they were definitely highly motivated, contained lots of former LSSAH soldiers (who were, in addition to being highly motivated, also well trained and highly experienced). Anyway, even the very best elite Waffen-SS formations had issues with their officer corps (which was usually worse than in the better Heer divisions), but you cannot say that the German high command sent units like the “Hitlerjugend” to Normandy because it thought these were 3rd rate units. I’m pretty sure the Wehrmacht had many units which were significantly worse than the “Hitlerjugend,” indeed, if I had to bet, I’d bet that the majority of Wehrmacht divisions were worse than the “Hitlerjugend,” mostly because they didn’t have full personnel strength.

I only searched the net for data, so couldn’t find anything about the vehicle strength of “Hitlerjugend,” but it was formed using 2000 former “LSSAH” soldiers as a core, and they had 16,000 barely 18 year old recruits from the Hitlerjugend (the organization). This makes for a personnel strength of 18,000, which is that of a full strength Panzer division (I think elite divisions had something like 23,000, but it’s been at least a decade I was reading about these things).

I wouldn’t make much of your anecdote (the Firefly Sherman was a very good battle tank, the Canadians were in general considered better than average British troops, etc.), but it’s well-known that many Waffen-SS troops didn’t live up to the Waffen-SS’ reputation. Many British, Canadian, American soldiers often mistakenly believed to be fighting the Waffen-SS whenever they were fighting Panzer troops (due to their use of the same Totenkopf symbol and black shirts), which led to the reputation of the Waffen-SS being better than they actually were. (The “Hitlerjugend” in particular probably took credit for what the “Panzer Lehr” holding the adjacent portion of the frontline did.)

Anyway, I don’t think it’s these details are that important. What is important is that the Western Allies wiped out the German Air Force in the early months of 1944, largely destroyed the communications lines to Normandy, and then, utilizing these, executed the by far the largest amphibious invasion ever launched in human history. They were fighting against the best troops the Germany could throw at them in the summer of 1944 – which, admittedly, included barely useful troops, like the Tibetan soldiers allegedly captured there, but such troops fought on the Eastern Front as well. The British and Americans had already destroyed large German formations in Africa (in Tunis in the spring of 1943 German and Axis losses were actually higher than at Stalingrad a few months earlier), and they were fighting a bloody (if to an extent ineptly led) land war against them in Italy. Beckow’s claims are untenable in light of the available evidence.

Italian losses in North Africa were inconsequential, so no need to group them together with German ones. Afrika Army was crappy to the same extent its Panzer divisions were understrength throughout the campaign.
Total losses until surrender in Tunisia demonstrate this – it was a maneuver campaign decided by Axis inability to conquer Malta – only a matter of time until Allies built up their strength, a sideshow.

The motivation of German(ic) SS was not the problem. In SS Panzer case, they often picked best Heer crews, too. What was lacking were sensible decisions and tactical skills, which were overruled through unfounded sense of superiority. Common history knowledge praises Wittman for Villers-Bocage. A closer inspection of events demonstrates he foolishly charged into combat and achieved nothing, knocking out (several Tigers attacked) at most 4 RHQ Cromwells, 1 Firefly, Cromwell OP, Sherman OP and 2 Stuart Recce tanks, wildly inflating his claim (standard German practice – claimed 15 heavy tanks destroyed and 6 knocked out) and losing precious 6 Tigers which could not be replenished, along with several Pz IV in pointless counterattacks. Going into close combat with a Tiger is foolish and against all German instructions and manuals. Some lowly StuG and PzJg units actually scored better k:d ratios than even Tiger battalions because they were aware of their vulnerability and the importance of camouflage and situational awareness. A deployed unit of StuGs or ATGs would ambush the armoured column, repel the advance and redeploy elsewhere, without foolishly trying to take on the entrenched enemy in urban combat.
The British were badly mauled by such a combination during Operation Goodwood, suffering huge tank losses to concealed towed guns, assault and self-propelled guns.

Soviet documents reveal that it wasn’t the Panzers they feared the most, but ATG.

At no point was I substantiating Beckow’s claims – I was clarifying that just listing divisions present in the theatre doesn’t tell the whole story. I didn’t even mention the fact that there is a huge difference between a formed, concentrated Pz. division and one arriving piecemeal, over detours, element by element (Allied bombing and air threat).

Not really. Belarus is a very homogeneous country, there are hardly any East-West or North-South differences.

It is not as homogeneous as you think. Western Belarus has its nationalists and a not-insignificant Polish population. It is not like Galicia, not like Kiev/Central Ukraine. However they are perhaps only 10%-20% of the population, have no chance of doing anything, and thus don’t try. If the Ukrainian SSR included enough places like Stavropol, Kursk, Bryansk it would be a similar situation. At most, there would be Galician separatism from the rest of Ukraine.

I have never met any Belarusian who expressed much sympathy for their leader Lukashenko but none of them seemed to hate him too much either and some even declared that he’s done some good things.

Sure. He is not a comprador elite but a local ethnic Belarussian Sovok farm manager. I guess a Ukrainian analogue might be someone like Kuchma, not Yanukovuch.

So, basically, a day-and-night comparison with Ukraine.

Correct. As I said, if Ukraine had more Eastern territories it would have been about the same.

Belarusians have enjoyed a much more peaceful transition to post-Communism while achieving more than twice the Ukrainian per-capita GDP without joining the EU and all that comes with it.

Belarus, Poland and Ukraine had about the same GDP per capita PPP in 1991:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=PL-BY-UA

Poland chose to move Westward and integrate with EU.

Belarus chose to stick with Russia.

Ukraine was torn between both sides, did neither, and remained a private fiefdom of the local Russian-speaking Sovok elites.

Clearly Ukraine’s approach was the worst one. Poland’s approach was better than that of Belarus. Poland is now further from Belarus than Belarus is from Ukraine.

You will say that Ukraine would not have been another Poland because it was further form Western markets or something. But look at Romania:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=PL-BY-UA-RO

It was even poorer than the other three in 1991, and further from the West, and with worse human capital. But it has surpassed Belarus also.

So yes, Lukashenko was better than post-Sovok Ukrainian-Russian thieves. But he wasn’t all that great. Ukraine would have done better to emulate Poland than to emulate Belarus. And it would have done so, if it wasn’t stuck with Crimea and Donbas in 1991.

Since losing these territories and focusing on Westward integration, Ukraine has seen solid 3% growth for 4 years (around 3-4% per capita), which is now accelerating. Ukraine has now caught up to where it had been in 2013, but without 2013’s wealthiest regions (Donbas), so the remaining territory is now significantly wealthier than it had been in 2013. This is particularly true in the west and center.

My cousins in an oblast capital in the middle of the country have taken a holiday at a resort in Turkey for the first time in their lives. This isn’t a big deal for Russians or other eastern Europeans, but Ukrainians couldn’t afford to do that before. My aunt from the USA recently visited them, they told her that for the first time in their lives they felt financially secure.

Hopefully serious reforms are now coming, which bring further improvement. This should have started 25 years ago.

The second rate divisions at Normandy were largely static divisions in prepared coastal fortifications.

Not very different from the French Army practice of having fortress divisions in the Maginot line, or the general practice of using second rate and foreign divisions for occupation duty. I doubt the German divisions fighting partisans in Belarus were particularly good for instance.

I think it’s reasonable to say that there were strong German formations on all fronts with high combat intensity, with weaker divisions elsewhere.

To some of your earlier points I’m not sure you will be able to find at a Panzer division at its authorized strength on any front for the entire war, and 1941 Panzer divisions were in fact more powerful formations than 1940 divisions despite fewer tanks overall. See here: http://www.operationbarbarossa.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/1940PzDiv-vs-1941PzDiv.pdf

ATGs were generally more feared than enemy tanks by tankers for good reasons. ATGs were generally concealed and dug-in in prepared positions, and they usually had excellent sight lines and fields of fire. An 8.8cm flak crew will have a much easier job acquiring targets and firing at them than a Tiger. A lot of hay is made of the anti-tank capabilities of the German big cats, but the main objective of tanks was certainly not simply to duel with enemy tanks.

The issue with Beckow, aside from his ignorance and overconfidence, is one typical to people with his worldview. Pro-Russian/Soviet, anti-American/Western (note: nothing wrong with this worldview per se). A lot of these people seem to dismiss the German conflict with the Anglo-Americans as a minor sideshow, which is simply not the case.

Best single metric for land combat effort distribution is probably the expenditure of munitions.

You can’t do better? Like in a kindergarden: ‘you are stupid!’ ‘no, you are!’…

And just as I was going to give you credit for actually being thoughtful about Belarus.

I doubt the German divisions fighting partisans in Belarus were particularly good for instance.

From what I’ve read, the Wehrmacht’s occupation and anti-partisan forces were usually quite old on average (sometimes including quite a few WW1 veterans) and severely under-strength for controlling the territories assigned to them. They were also under-equipped in terms of trucks and heavy weaponry, often not enjoying any clear material superiority over the partisans they were facing.
Those deficits were also a factor in the cruelty and escalation of the anti-partisan war, because early on in 1941 it was decided to compensate for this weakness with terror measures. It also meant Wehrmacht occupation forces were glad about any help from SS and police units they got which introduced an additional ideological dimension (something that actually wasn’t to be expected just from the social and age structure of the occupation forces, since many of them had been socialized well before 1933 or even 1914).

they had no ethnic goals – a huge, an almost catastrophic error.

Why was it an error?

You create strawman arguments that misrepresents what I wrote and then proceed to argue with it. Answer what I say and don’t interpret what you think I might be saying.

My point about Normandy was that it was done incompetently based on resources UK-US had – they had cruisers, battleships and planes and they used them poorly. Thus the high casualties. It was also a relatively small operation by WWII standards and very late in the war. The mythology in the West is way overblown. If you look at Normandy with the same critical standard that West applies elsewhere, you have to agree with that assessment. But if it is an emotional, feel-good myth, I can see how it rubs you the wrong way.

…Which amphibious invasions against defenders in prepared defensive positions do you think went better than Operation Overlord? Iwo Jima? Okinawa? Tarawa? All blood baths.

All done by Anglos, they seem to like bleeding in the sand and shallow waters.

Engaging in personal attacks without knowing that person is a fool’s errand. But I am puzzled by your objection to my ‘confidence’. Do you expect people who disagree with you to doubt their own side? I think you do, and that seems like a bizarre late-in-the-game development in the Western thinking – angry that others disagree or have different views of history, West lashes out and demands that even critics accept the basic Western-liberal narrative.

Why would we? We, unlike you, probably have a few more years of European civilization to enjoy. A big part of that civilization is curiosity and seeking the truth. People who are obsessively concerned with preserving myths – like Normandy landing won WWII – are displaying mostly fear of the future.

WWII was the ultimate ethnic conflict – all sides were fighting for their national interest. Except Soviets fought the war and its aftermath mostly as an uber-national ideological contest. I said mostly, because there were a few exceptions that almost all benefitted smaller ethnic groups like Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs,…

So in effect Russians gave away most of their biggest national victory to help others who are today superbly ungrateful, look at Poles, French, even Jews. From Russian point of view it was an error (f..ck ideology and take care of your own). We are ending up in a situation that a nation that lost millions to defeat Nazism – let’s agree that was overall a good thing – is regularly described as an aggressor in WWII, denied its role in that victory, and watching as the same assembly as in 1941 is again marching up and down its borders. They had to something wrong to end up again in the same predicament.

The intelligence provided by the French Resistance was useful. This didn’t include just partisans, but also for instance Frenchmen employed in the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs and the French National Railway Company. As soon as the Anglo-American armies crossed into Germany for instance their information on German forces dropped drastically, for the obvious reason that German civilians didn’t betray the movements of German troops to their enemies.

The same sort of thing is of course true in the East as well, but communications between the Red Army and Eastern European partisans were at a lower level. Conditions of occupation in the East were also much harsher, which increased the risk level.

but communications between the Red Army and Eastern European partisans were at a lower level.

I’m not sure that’s actually true for Soviet partisans, Stalin and other top Soviet leaders made intense efforts to organize and control the partisan movement (whose original nuclei often were communist party functionaries and Red army soldiers who had been overrun by the German advance, it’s not like some civilians just decided spontaneously to take up weapons). I’d have to look into the issue in more detail though, and I don’t have time for that right now.

Didn’t Yugoslav partisans liberate areas of Yugoslavia on their own?

2/3 of East Prussia went to Poland, +Silesia, Pomerania. Poland won nothing in WWII, they collapsed in 3 weeks. Strategically, a smaller Poland would be of benefit to Russia, why not keep those German ethnic areas in Germany? Letting Poland keep Galicia would also be much better for Russia and make Ukraine into a more homogeneous country. And why give Vilnius to Lithuania? By helping those small nations to get their maximalist land demands, Russia antagonised others and got nothing except trouble in the long run.

I am not into comparing anything to Barbarossa, I think most historical analogies are faulty, today’s situation is unique to today. My point is not that West or Poland will invade, my point is that by foregoing strategic depth Russia has invited this stalemate on its borders. And as I have said before, that stalemate is not good for anybody, not for EU, not for Russia and definitely in the long run not good for the smaller nations in that area. It benefits only one group: globalist elites who want to distract from what is going on and enjoy having some perks that come with having an ‘enemy’ in Russia. It is also slightly risky, it could possibly blow up.

…The same Soviets who displayed inferior combat efficiency in land operations.

They won the war. I guess others displayed even more inferiority.

…the idea that Germany was primarily fought and defeated in the East

That is the idea. The key word is ‘primarily’. It is supported by data, including German casualties, big battles, Soviets in Berlin, etc… If you dispute it, who is your candidate? Would you say that UK, US or France ‘primarily’ defeated Germany in WWII? Or would you argue that no-one was primary?

I am ok with personal attacks, it is entertaining. But can we elevate it a bit? Sweeping generalisations seldom hit a mark, they almost seem lazy. Try something that one can actually relate to, something more 2019.

North Africa is a cool theatre in 1941 and 1942 because it is a sort of land sea combat. No value in holding the territory, very low troop counts and force density across the theatre, ridiculous motorisation (33 000 Germans and 11 330 German vehicles – contrast to Ostfront numbers) and mobility, supply points and ports have the same value as naval bases in naval warfare.
It is also a gentleman’s war compared to conduct elsewhere.

In hindsight, Malta should have been conquered before any forces landed.

Mr. Mustache just got the boot.

It is not as homogeneous as you think.

I know Belarus and Poland quite well. I actually lived in Poland for a short period in the 90s.

I’ve explicitly asked several Belarusians about regional language differences in their country (something of interest to me as a Basque speaker) and most of them would not be able to say if there are any or would be puzzled by the question. Some others said what I think I later observed: people in rural areas of all parts of the country will use some Belarusian words heavily mixed with Russian, which is the lingua franca everywhere.

So it’s an opposite situation to Ukraine, where there is a very marked East-West linguistic cline, with Ukrainian being actually predominant in the West. That wouldn’t change with more territories added to the East of the SSR.

Belarus, Poland and Ukraine had about the same GDP per capita PPP in 1991

I am very skeptical of the real value of those figures when it comes to former republics of the USSR. These were countries of very recent creation whose economy was intimately linked to a structure that was about to disappear. That was the relevant economic path at the time, much more than their population being more or less “Western oriented”.

Poles in the 90s would regard anything East of them as “Russia”, even the Baltics, and feel threatened by them, which was not surprising, with all the criminals that came from those areas to rob passenger trains and engage in gangster activities.

When I decided to visit Kiev everybody warned me against it. Nothing bad happened to me but I did see a much poorer country. In fact, and without going into details, it was the most run down place I have ever been to outside Africa. Comparable to Cuba perhaps.

By contrast, in the late 90s I drove from Poland to Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and back to Poland. Belarus was possibly the best looking country of the lot. The roads were quite good, the villages I passed through looked nice and Minsk was a pleasant-enough city.

Ukraine would have done better to emulate Poland than to emulate Belarus.

Possibly yes but there is a reason why it didn’t do it and that train left the station a very long time ago.

I don’t believe that things in Eastern Europe are any different from what I observe in Western Europe. With some peaks and troughs, countries essentially maintain their relative wealth over time and nothing much has changed since the early 20th Century (this even applies to regions within countries). Perhaps affluent Ireland is the only only remarkable exception, for the time being.

In the coming decades I essentially expect to continue seeing the same differences that I saw in the 90s in Eastern Europe.

People often forget that the real advantage of the EU is being part of a huge common market and, since the ECC became the EU, also the possibility of offloading your unemployed and underemployed to more prosperous countries in the EU (with Britain being the primary destination for everybody but now they’re leaving the Union).

However, the path to becoming part of the EU has never been an easy one at all. I perfectly remember seeing whole parts of the Spanish economy disappear in the 80s in order to meet the free-competition demands of the association. People in their 50s or late 40s would lose their lifelong jobs never to find stable work again. They would survive on benefits and side jobs until their early retirement.

At the end of the process the winners are the efficient companies that don’t need captive markets to compete (most of them from Northern European countries) plus the parts of the local economy that managed to survive the cull. They both now have a much larger market to sell their products in.

Compared to the advantages of the single market and the need to meet EU-wide financial discipline rules, the “convergence” transfers for infrastructure projects are a just side show, both in absolute figures and in real effects. Portugal and Southern Spain have been receiving those funds for decades but their relative poverty has remained unchanged.

Eastern European countries that joined the EU (some of them, like the Romania you cite, through a forced fast-track that Brussels is very unlikely to repeat) had already seen their economies dismantled with the end of Communism so the impression might be that the specific efforts that they had to make to join the EU were not that tough but they would have been if more of their economy had survived.

So what is Ukraine going to do now? Go through a further 90s-like dismantling of its existing economy? The EU is not a charity organization. It will demand convergence efforts, open markets for its products, end of subsidies,…

And is Ukraine planning to send millions of workers to the EU at a time when immigration is the central electoral issue in all EU countries, from Denmark and Britain to Italy and Hungary?

My eldest son lives in Poland and has recently finished his engineering studies. He told me that Ukrainian engineers are already straining the labor market and accepting jobs for 2.5k-3k zlotys that are hardly enough for a Pole to live on. Incidentally, he also said that there are so many Ukrainian laborers that knowledge of Russian is advantageous to get a managerial job.

That is the idea. The key word is ‘primarily’. It is supported by data, including German casualties, big battles, Soviets in Berlin, etc… If you dispute it, who is your candidate? Would you say that UK, US or France ‘primarily’ defeated Germany in WWII? Or would you argue that no-one was primary?

It’s not supported by data, unless you only focus on land combat. And even when you only focus on land combat one must bear in mind how the efforts of the allies influenced land combat on the Eastern Front.

I would argue that no-one was primary.

To put it into perspective, this is coming alongside
30 T72 b3s
14 MiG 29s with more coming next year alongside some Mi-17s
10 BRDM-2s with more to go
(These are from Russia and Belarus)
Combined with a restarted arms industry which just unveiled new APCs, ARs, mobile artillery and other goodies

Not bad at all

…no-one was primary.

Does that mean an equal share of 1/3 for Russia, Britain and UK? Seriously? So how did Russians kill over 80% of Germans and only get 33% of credit? Weird rules.

Or do you give Russia some extra credit, but it is not on the level of ‘primary’? What percentage of the overall victory against Germany would you assign to each ally?

Here are my:
Russia 60-75%
Britain 20-25%
US 15-20%
France -5% (yes, a minus, more French died fighting for Germans than against them)
Poland 1% (a touching example of self-sacrifice that motivated others)

Does that mean an equal share of 1/3 for Russia, Britain and UK? Seriously? So how did Russians kill over 80% of Germans and only get 33% of credit? Weird rules.

How did Russia kill 80% of Germans and only get 33% of credit (I didn’t say 33% ftr)?

As I said previously:

It’s not supported by data, unless you only focus on land combat. And even when you only focus on land combat one must bear in mind how the efforts of the allies influenced land combat on the Eastern Front.

As an example the 1943 British bombing of the Ruhr resulted in a complete interruption of the increase of German armaments production from July, 1943 to March, 1944. This had substantial impacts on the German war effort in general and also impacted the Eastern Front in particular. However, direct German casualties (mainly civilians) were only 21,000. Does that mean the Battle of the Ruhr was 10% as consequential as Stalingrad or Tunisgrad? No.

The following year of course the USAAF 8th Air Force went on to destroy the Luftwaffe (prior to both Bagration and Overlord) and German’s oil industry, with catastrophic effects.

Also noted earlier, allied operations (or the possibility of allied operations) meant that during most of the Soviet-German War only half the Luftwaffe and three-fifths of the German Army were actually in the East.

We can also take the issue of Lend-Lease. In Boris Sokolov’s 1998 work (which corrected Soviet propaganda), he found that Lend-Lease supplied:

58% of the USSR’s high octane aviation fuel
33% of their motor vehicles
53% of USSR domestic production of expended ordnance (artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives)
30% of fighters and bombers
93% of railway equipment (locomotives, freight cars, wide gauge rails, etc.)
50–80% of rolled steel, cable, lead, and aluminium
43% of garage facilities (building materials & blueprints)
12% of tanks and SPGs
50% of TNT (1942–1944) and 33% of ammunition powder (in 1944)
16% of all explosives (from 1941–1945, the USSR produced 505,000 tons of explosives and received 105,000 tons of Lend-Lease imports)

Specifics here in an English-language book that makes use of Sokolov’s work: https://books.google.com/books?id=-BN64vwKSkQC&pg=PA8#v=onepage&q&f=false

Assigning a percentage value to any of the major belligerents is difficult. Stalin’s own formulation was that Britain provided the time, the USSR the blood, and the USA the money.

Guillaume Tell also pointed out to me that France may have helped secure Germany’s defeat in an underappreciated way. The German decision to setup Vichy France meant that the Germans did not fully exploit French resources and also set the stage for the American landings in Algeria.

more French died fighting for Germans than against them

I believe that’s factually incorrect, and by at least an order of magnitude. (Possibly two orders of magnitude.) France lost something like 200,000 soldiers in the war, and the vast majority of them on the side of the Allies. Something like 10-15,000 French served in the Waffen-SS altogether, even if each of them died, that would be something like 20 times more dying against than for Hitler.

If I may, I think Beckow and you are discussing two different aspects of this war: human “capital” and industrial/technological/ capacity and resource.
Both of them were equally important for winning the war.

While combined Anglo-Saxons (I use this term intentionally) had resources, technology, manufacturing and logistics capacity that dwarfed anything that Germnay(+Japan, Italy) could muster, they had one major weakness: unwillingness or inability to suffer casualties at least not on scale Soviets or Germans and Japanese were willing to.
For that, they needed the Soviet Union.

Please note that I am not, in any way, implying that Soviets were used just as a “cannon fodder”.

The distinction you are making is a big part of it, but not all. My basic argument is that Anglo-Saxons were incapable of winning against Germany on their own, and didn’t even try too hard. Soviets just might had won on their own.

The supply chain-material resources are important, but trucks don’t fight by themselves – there is no war without human “capital”. And the WWII was basically a massive fight to death between Germany (and its allies, really most of Europe) and Soviets in the east. That dwarfed anything else that was happening.

The western psyche has a hard time with this reality, so they ignore it, lie about it, mythologize Normandy, talk Land-Lease. There is an ugliness about this evasive attitude that is hard to digest. It is one thing to say that Germans should had won – there will always be those who think that – but it is an another level of conflicted thinking to reframe WWII as a Churchill led victory by ‘liberal democracies’ with Holocaust as the central event. When stories we tell each other get so far from reality, they no longer make sense. And when stories don’t make sense, people die. Lying about WWII prepares ground for a potential catastrophe.

If you put a gun to my head I’ll say:

USA: 40%
USSR: 35%
Britain & Dominions: 25%

Well, we disagree, except on Britain+.

Claiming that Soviets had less than 50% overall role in defeating Germany is – to be polite – just silly.
If you are serious, it almost seems like two parallel universes and that usually doesn’t end well.

When I decided to visit Kiev everybody warned me against it. Nothing bad happened to me but I did see a much poorer country. In fact, and without going into details, it was the most run down place I have ever been to outside Africa. Comparable to Cuba perhaps.

I was also in Kiev in the 90s. It is like night and day.

I don’t believe that things in Eastern Europe are any different from what I observe in Western Europe. With some peaks and troughs, countries essentially maintain their relative wealth over time and nothing much has changed since the early 20th Century (this even applies to regions within countries).

Recovering from Sovok malaise changes this trend, however, and Ukraine had not recovered due to its particular position. So it has room to improve.

For example in 1991 Poland had half of Portugal’s per capita GDP. It has now just about caught up to Portugal and will surpass it in a year or two:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=PT-PL

(Poland is already ahead in terms of GDP per capita PPP)

So what is Ukraine going to do now? Go through a further 90s-like dismantling of its existing economy?

It’s economy was dismantled over 25 years. Since reorienting, from the end of 2015 Ukraine has had 3% solid growth as it reorients towards the West (it posted 4.6% growth last quarter but this was a fluke). Plants are opening, wages are rising. The dismantling has been done, rebuilding is already under way.

My eldest son lives in Poland and has recently finished his engineering studies. He told me that Ukrainian engineers are already straining the labor market and accepting jobs for 2.5k-3k zlotys that are hardly enough for a Pole to live on.

My best friend rents out his Warsaw apartment. The real estate agent is a Ukrainian from Lviv. There are now Ukrainian cops in Poland, too.

Incidentally, he also said that there are so many Ukrainian laborers that knowledge of Russian is advantageous to get a managerial job.

Western Ukraine’s economy has been improving a lot, but not so much the East. Wages in Poland are a lot higher than in Russia, so now a lot of Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians are working in Poland (one reason for all the new air routes from places like Kharkiv or Zaporizhia to Poland). It’s helpful for the workers, the money they bring back goes a long way in Ukraine and it eases economic pressure during the transition. My relatives in central Ukraine are happy that they don’t feel the need to work abroad anymore, there is plenty of work at decent wages (by local standards) now. But a cousin from east of the Dnipro went to Poland for 6 months when his new bride got pregnant, to build up some savings (he did some skilled work). Ironically he visited the village in Poland that our ancestors had once owned. His Russophile great-grandparents should have stayed in Galicia!

Western Ukraine’s economy has been improving a lot, but not so much the East. Wages in Poland are a lot higher than in Russia, so now a lot of Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians are working in Poland (one reason for all the new air routes from places like Kharkiv or Zaporizhia to Poland). It’s helpful for the workers, the money they bring back goes a long way in Ukraine and it eases economic pressure during the transition. My relatives in central Ukraine are happy that they don’t feel the need to work abroad anymore, there is plenty of work at decent wages (by local standards) now. But a cousin from the East went to Poland for 6 months when his new bride got pregnant, to build up some savings (he did some skilled work). Ironically he visited the village in Poland that our ancestors had once owned. His Russophile great-grandparents should have stayed in Galicia!

How many of those Ukrainians plan to permanently stay in Poland?

Also, how many Ukrainians do you think would permanently move to other parts of Europe if they were actually given the chance to do so?

And I suspect that this would have had a chilling effect on the others: Belarus would not have left if “Ukraine” hadn’t. Only the Baltics and Georgia. And there would have been Galician separatism from “Ukraine.”

What about Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Central Asia?

(I’m fixing this part because I meant to put the part at the top here in quotes but forgot.)

My impression from what I skimmed through here is that Thor et al. vs. Beckow are talking past each other.

Thor knows more history, and is arguing with statistics. Beckow perceives this as an ideological debate, hence talking points like “USSR could have beaten Germany by itself.”

In reality, unlikely in the extreme – but that’s the majority (60-70%) viewpoint in Russia. https://www.levada.ru/2017/06/22/velikaya-otechestvennaya-vojna-2/

Interesting you say you are from Pais Vasco. I was going to ask about this to you before when I saw your name is – Mikel, which is obviously a Basque name. I was thinking if I should learn some more euskera soon, beyond some simple words and phrases I know.

Which part of Pais Vasco are you from? (I have visited the main cities there).

So basically an order of magnitude less than what the monument there claims (150,000).

http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/bryansk-157.jpg

Claiming that Soviets had less than 50% overall role in defeating Germany is – to be polite – just silly.

The reaction is because we recoil at at the idea that GPD, munitions, trucks, etc. are interchangeable with human lives, and the fact that the meatgrinder was by far the most intense on the Eastern Front, and overwhelmingly affected our ethnoracial group, makes that even harder to accept.

But it’s a pretty accurate assessment. I’d probably give the USSR 40%-45% but would otherwise concur with Thorfinnsson’s breakdown.

But it’s a pretty accurate assessment. I’d probably give the USSR 40%-45% but would otherwise concur with Thorfinnsson’s breakdown.

What would you give the US and (Britain + the British Empire)?

I was going to post that. Is there a lot of Sovok love in Slovakia, as demonstrated by Beckow?

I believe that’s factually incorrect, and by at least an order of magnitude. (Possibly two orders of magnitude.) France lost something like 200,000 soldiers in the war, and the vast majority of them on the side of the Allies. Something like 10-15,000 French served in the Waffen-SS altogether, even if each of them died, that would be something like 20 times more dying against than for Hitler.

According to official statistics the Soviet troops on the Eastern front was captured 22 thousand French this “10-15, 000 French served in the Waffen-SS” seem an understatement

Hi Dmitry, I was born in a small industrial town in the middle of Gipuzkoa (capital city Donostia / San Sebastian), although all my known ancestors come from the neighboring province of Navarre.

Good luck with your efforts learning euskera 🙂 When I was a kid only native Basques (roughly 50% in my town and a small minority in big towns like Bilbao or Vitoria) were able to speak it but nowadays all children learn it at school, at the cost of many people speaking a degraded version of our ancient language.

And where did they serve? Are you aware that Alsatians (who were speakers of a German dialect very similar to dialects on the other side of the border) were forcibly (or not so forcibly) conscripted into the German armed forces (I believe mostly into the Waffen-SS)? (For example some members of the Waffen-SS division “Das Reich” were Alsatians, they participated in the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre.) Why would you count these (basically, Germans) among “French” soldiers fighting for Hitler? (It’s like saying that hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks served in the Wehrmacht. Well, technically speaking, it’s true of hundreds of thousands of pre-1938 Czechoslovak citizens, but still…)

Anyway, even if true, I pretty much doubt these numbers would come even close to the roughly 200,000 French soldiers killed while fighting against Hitler.

Are you aware that Alsatians…

These figures (22 000 prisoners) include Alsatians and Bretons.

Why would you count these (basically, Germans) among “French” soldiers fighting for Hitler?

Well, here’s an example: Soviet war hero major Alexander Herman.

http://www.warheroes.ru/content/images/photodocs/2454/original/0139ea1de0b9a444615a0b8be6e30889.jpg

He commanded a partisan detachment operating in the woods near Pskov and died in battle with German troops in 1943. As far as I know his death is accounted in the losses of Soviet troops, and is not counted in the losses of the Wehrmacht, although Alexander Herman was (in its origins) Russian German.
As far as I know this is a universal principle of counting losses – not by “ethnic group”, but by citizenship.

Economies tend to grow after hitting a hard rock bottom, like Ukraine did in 2015,

Sure, but for those regions under Kiev’s authority the economy has recovered past the losses of 2014-2015 and continues to expand, and is growing at a faster rate than before the crisis, so the current growth cannot be attributed simply to a bounceback from the crisis.

If Ukraine is to follow the Polish path, the hard part has not even begun yet….As I told you from first-hand experience, a Polish-like integration in the EU will mean that, just like everybody else, Ukraine will have to dismantle a considerable part of its current economic fabric.

As I wrote before, Ukraine’s economy was largely dismantled in the last 25 years. Current growth consists of agriculture (which will only increase after the necessary land reforms), IT (which is exploding with EU links), and building and expansion of new Western-owned plants. Which of these will have to be dismantled, in your opinion? Will the Germans have to tear down the factory they built two years ago? You seem to think Ukraine is now where Poland was in 1991 (when Poland’s economy shrank over 7%). But it’s more like 1992 (when Poland’s economy grew 2.2%, and never turned back). To be sure I doubt Ukraine will grow as fast or as much as did Poland. But it is in the same spot where Poland was after the collapse ended.

The only potential problem will be if there is a global economic crisis. Hopefully Trump will keep this at bay until after the 2020 election, so Ukraine builds up more of a cushion..

I find Ukraine’s continuous appeal to the “West” to help her with its territorial problems particularly irritating

I wonder if it’s envy, that you cannot admit to yourself. Ukraine got its independence, your people did not.

I visited over a lot of Pais Vasco (also all over Spain) 4 years ago through Vitoria, Donostia and Biarritz. I guess I travelled beside your hometown.

I haven’t been to Navarre and Pamplona, sadly.

One funny thing about Vitoria, you can find Russian beer sold very cheaply in the centre of the city. I wrote about it here.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-57/#comment-2546932

^Well it makes me sound like a philistine to focus on – obviously it’s a very beautiful city, in addition to the drunk Russian man selling beer cheaply there.

Pais Vasco has a kind of distinct atmosphere in my opinion, compared to Spain.

nowadays all children learn it at school, at the cost of many people speaking a degraded version of our ancient language.

Even in all the supermarkets, audio announcement is Euskera as well as Spanish. Probably because of Spanish accent, Euskera sounds almost like Spanish for my ears.

Good luck with your efforts learning euskera

I have a colleague from the area and so will just learn some more phrases from him.

Yes it seems like everyone you meet from there speaks Euskera – but also people from Navarre also speak it or something almost as the same.

Great(ish) news!! Russian demographic of 0-9 year olds is 18 million. This is very positive for the government policy because by comparison the 10-19 year old demographic (i.e people born from parents of the demographic who suffered the most, after the elderly, during the 90’s) …is 14.5 million.

Did not see 40-49 year stat ( the generation you could say suffered the most in the 90’s/early 2000 and giving birth to the low number 10-19 year age group)…
but the 50-59 year age bracket is a steady 20 million people in Russia.

So for me, 18 million is very promising, or at least signals improvement, because you could say that a healthy age group number should be 25-30 million

18 million is also very good because counter-logically, increasing westernisation, urbanisation and improved living standards that go with it are also a big driver of small population growth as the terrible conditions in the 90’s were.

Which of these will have to be dismantled, in your opinion? Will the Germans have to tear down the factory they built two years ago?

You got that right. German investors will not lose a cent with the further integration of Ukraine in the EU markets. That’s not what the EU is about.

As for which parts of the Ukrainian economy will suffer with that integration, every single part that is unable to compete with EU companies, every company or household that is receiving subsidies incompatible with Brussels directives, every sector that will be unable to sell to Russia or other 3rd parties when the Customs Union comes into force,… I’ll let you do the math but why do you think that countries are granted very long transition periods before they can join the EU?? And Ukraine is still not there yet.

I wonder if it’s envy, that you cannot admit to yourself. Ukraine got its independence, your people did not.

No, there’s nothing of the like at all. For reasons that should be self-evident, I have children and I very much prefer the Basque Country continuing to be under the heel of the Spaniards rather than risking a global confrontation between superpowers.

In fact, I never supported armed struggle for independence for moral reasons. But I’m not sure that you can understand this point, we’ve discussed war civilian casualties before and your views were rather troubling for my taste. This may in fact be related to what I said before. The long-term development of different countries is determined by the human fabric of the underlying society. How far a country can go that did what Ukraine did to Donbas civilians remains to be seen.

…hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks serving in those forces. Alsatians were not really French.

Some were, some were not – I know Alsatian families who struggle with it to this day. In any case, French citizens (previously) who fought for Germans. In Czechoslovakia there were 2 groups: Sudeten Germans and a much smaller group of mixed-opportunistic Czech-Germans who switched nationality and volunteered for Germany. The first group was expelled after the war (that didn’t happen with Alsatians), the second was prosecuted. A messy and ugly affair all around.

I don’t want to cherry-pick, but it is to some extent inevitable. Categories here are quite fluid and we all cherrypick to highlight a point. E.g. if you exclude foreigners, French Resistance was very small.

My point is that French have little in WWII to boast about – individuals behaved admirably, but as a whole it is hard to determine whose side ‘France‘ was really on, and who they helped more. That applies in different degrees to most of continental Europe – whose side were they really on? And, yes, I fully apply that to my own people too, I am trying to understand it.

I will stick with my 60-75% based on the German casualties, timing – US was not involved until quite late, and on the ground not till ’43-44

No matter how many times the point is made, you refuse to focus on anything other than casualties and land combat.

Timing is another problem in WW2 discussions. People tend to treat the war as if it were comparable to the phases of the moon. Germany waxed, then waned. In reality there was nothing inevitable about German defeat after Stalingrad (or El Alamein, Tunisgrad, Hamburg, whatever “turning point” you want to use).

How would you analyze the Pacific War?

I would keep Britain+ slightly higher than US based on the overall optics – they were on the front-line, US was not.

Two problems here.

First, the US was on the frontline.

Second, the myopic focus on the frontline.

and the fact that Soviets took Berlin (extra points for 1st place)

The Battle of Berlin was fierce, and the Soviet victory a great credit to the Red Army.

But as I’m sure you’ll agree, Germany was already beaten by then and taking Berlin was a (bloody) formality.

In line with your previous thinking about Anglo-American intentions, allied forces could’ve beaten the Soviets to Berlin. Churchill, Montgomery, and Patton all wanted to march to Berlin. This was flatly rejected by Eisenhower.

…you refuse to focus on anything other than casualties and land combat.

For us traditional simpletons from hinterlands, eating is about the actual food, women about having children and &%, and war is about shooting at each other. We leave supply chains to others, that’s just fluff.

How would you analyze the Pacific War?

I left it out completely. For what it’s worth I would give US almost full credit there, but Japan was a much weaker overall opponent than Germany. Nuking Japan was awkward and I am convinced that Anglos wouldn’t had done it to Germany. That makes defeating Germany without Russia highly problematic. If Yanks had nuked anything in continental Europe, we would have a different world today and no amount of Hollywood could fix it.

…Berlin was a (bloody) formality.

It was still symbolically the end of the war and Russians took Berlin – extra credit by any standard. If Churchill had his way and marched on Berlin – with what was at that point minimal German resistance – it was gong to be quite ugly with the Soviets and large part of European population. Even mendacity should have some limits. Eisenhower was a grown-up.

Soviets withstood and reversed the Axis onslaught on their own in 1941, no Lend Lease and assistance whatsoever. Axis logistics were failing at their maximum advance line, so additional troops couldn’t be diverted to Ostfront to make a difference.
One of the common myths is the supposed German foolishness of not preparing for winter in Russia – the uniforms and equipment were there, but the means of getting them to the front line weren’t – food, fodder, fuel, ammunition required more than available logistic capacity.

American involvement saved a lot of Soviet lives by delivering steel of various types, aluminum,
fuel, boots, locomotives and trucks. In addition to allowing better aircraft (aluminum, look up plywood designs of Soviets) to be produced and used (Soviets received high octane US fuel), it also allowed Soviets to focus their manufacturing efforts on artillery, AFV, small arms and ammunition.
That is the key of Soviet AFV productivity – do a comparison of steel and AFV production for Reich and USSR.

USA is on another level, even compared to rest of the world combined in terms of industry. In a hypothetical scenario, USA could take on Europe+Commonwealth+Japan in 1939 and win eventually.

…HK protestors all myopic, scrawny, short insectoids?
I would gladly trade away 10 IQ points from PISA math tests

Maybe is is something about PISA. I recall AP telling us about the incredibly high PISA math scores for ‘US Latinas’. They are also mostly ‘scrawny, short insectoids‘. Coincidence?

For us traditional simpletons from hinterlands, eating is about the actual food, women about having children and &%, and war is about shooting at each other. We leave supply chains to others, that’s just fluff.

Simpleton is certainly a good way to put it.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Q6qiHbAuwSU/maxresdefault.jpg

Half the munitions the Soviets expended came from offshore supply chains as far as “shooting at each other” goes.

I left it out completely. For what it’s worth I would give US almost full credit there, but Japan was a much weaker overall opponent than Germany. Nuking Japan was awkward and I am convinced that Anglos wouldn’t had done it to Germany. That makes defeating Germany without Russia highly problematic. If Yanks had nuked anything in continental Europe, we would have a different world today and no amount of Hollywood could fix it.

I am surprised you don’t credit the Chinese with the lion’s share of defeating Japan.

It was still symbolically the end of the war and Russians took Berlin – extra credit by any standard. If Churchill had his way and marched on Berlin – with what was at that point minimal German resistance – it was gong to be quite ugly with the Soviets and large part of European population. Even mendacity should have some limits. Eisenhower was a grown-up.

This much is true, though German resistance in Berlin was fierce.

Simple truths are good, try it. I couldn’t tell Japanese, Chinese, Koreans apart when they fight, so assigning credits would be random.

Where did you get my picture?

Soviets withstood and reversed the Axis onslaught on their own in 1941, no Lend Lease and assistance whatsoever.

This is true, though British deliveries started very early and constituted a surprising fraction of medium and heavy tank strength at the Battle of Moscow.

This is an interesting article from the Journal of Slavic Military Studies on early British efforts to aid the USSR: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13518046.2013.844538

Soviet armies on the Caucasus front were largely supplied by the allies, including I believe during Case Blue.

Most significantly is that from 1941-1944 Soviet attrition exceeded German attrition, even as a fraction of mobilized manpower. Thus in the hypothetical absence of the allies, the Soviets would’ve run out of soldiers before the Germans. Of course in such a hypothetical scenario the Soviets would’ve fought differently to begin with.

One of the common myths is the supposed German foolishness of not preparing for winter in Russia – the uniforms and equipment were there, but the means of getting them to the front line weren’t – food, fodder, fuel, ammunition required more than available logistic capacity.

I’ve also heard that one reason the Germans didn’t make preparations for winter was to avoid tipping off Soviet intelligence. Never looked into it however.

The Germans expected to capture a lot of Soviet rolling stock in tact, but during Operation Barbarossa only 15% of Soviet rolling stock was lost vs. 40% of the rail net.

American involvement saved a lot of Soviet lives by delivering steel of various types, aluminum,
fuel, boots, locomotives and trucks. In addition to allowing better aircraft (aluminum, look up plywood designs of Soviets) to be produced and used (Soviets received high octane US fuel), it also allowed Soviets to focus their manufacturing efforts on artillery, AFV, small arms and ammunition.

American food shipments also staved off famine.

That is the key of Soviet AFV productivity – do a comparison of steel and AFV production for Reich and USSR.

German AFV productivity was also reduced by low production priority until 1943 (Adolf Hitler panzer program), the production of other tracked vehicles besides tanks (half-tracks–Soviets built none but did receive American M3 Whites), and the production of too many different types (which speaks well of Soviet rationalization efforts).

USA is on another level, even compared to rest of the world combined in terms of industry. In a hypothetical scenario, USA could take on Europe+Commonwealth+Japan in 1939 and win eventually.

1939 Europe working in concert would probably produce an atomic bomb before America simply owing to Europe still being the world center of science at that time.

Based, redpilled and extremely powerful.

Maybe is is something about PISA. I recall AP telling us about the incredibly high PISA math scores for ‘US Latinas’. They are also mostly ‘scrawny, short insectoids‘. Coincidence?

Steve Sailer showed that US Latinos outscore Slovaks on reading:

https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/overall-pisa-rankings-include-america.html

This may explain your stupid arguments about World War II.

Which of these will have to be dismantled, in your opinion? Will the Germans have to tear down the factory they built two years ago?

You got that right.

So in your world all of those factories that Europeans have built in Ukriane in the last 3 years will be torn down by as a result of regulations created by the Europeans themselves. Good to know.

Fortunately, the world moves on despite crazy dreams by deluded people.

Fitch just upgraded Ukraine’s Long-Term Foreign- and Local-Currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDR) to ‘B’ from ‘B-‘ and improved its projected GDP growth in 2019 to 3.4%.

As for which parts of the Ukrainian economy will suffer with that integration, every single part that is unable to compete with EU companies

Integration has already been happening for 4 years. It’s why Ukraine’s economy has shifted to the country’s West and Center and away from its East, and why it has shown consistent overall improvement. This, naturally, has been very upsetting to Soviet nostalgists and Russian nationalists, and those who believe what they claim. Some of them retreat into desperate fantasies of Ukraine being a Somalia, of its economy still collapsing, etc. Such specimens are often found on Saker’s blog.

I found the complete statistics of American shipments to the USSR.

Among other things the USA shipped 700,000 tons of sugar and 520,000 tons of vegetable oil to the USSR.

Clearly Operation Barbarossa was a benevolent invasion meant to protect Russians from dental decay and type 2 diabetes.

Clearly Operation Barbarossa was a benevolent invasion meant to protect Russians from dental decay and type 2 diabetes.

Based, redpilled, powerful, and also believed by Wally.

So in your world all of those factories that Europeans have built in Ukriane in the last 3 years will be torn down

Sorry but you lost the plot badly here. As I tried to explain to you, those are the companies that will not close down (if all goes well but I’m sure that any serious investor in Ukraine today is provisioning funds for the event that things turn sour).

I forgot to mention that the men in black suits from Brussels will want to make sure that Ukraine is really meeting the inflation, deficit and debt targets that they will also impose and the austerity measures needed to meets those goals will cull a good batch of Sovok-style managed companies too.

But I’m probably wasting my time here, since you believe in growth happening because a somewhere-oriented government takes seat and in Trump fending-off the next global recession (through Twitter?).

I really hope that Ukraine does well. Nobody has anything to gain from a country of its size and location continuing to live in poverty and turmoil (and I have a very personal interest in Ukraine not sending too many engineers to Poland). But I’ve done my best to explain what the realistic prospects are for the integration in the EU of a 40-million country with a per capita GDP of ~$7,000 that is starting the process 25 years late.

Believe whatever you want.

Ukraine is not going to be in EU, not like this.

I’m not sure what terrible Russian threat elites in Brussels are afraid of.

The EU (and to a more modest extent the Common Market before it) was all about the economic and political union of peaceful, democratic and prosperous European countries. I don’t see how a country like present-day Ukraine could fit in that original project without the whole idea being based on some kind of antagonism against Russia.

…That was Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Sure it was, he probably stole it from someone. You are wrong about my education, I only got a tail end and we didn’t get anywhere close to Marx. I am also not nostalgic and have never been to Soviet Union. Projecting on others is tricky, you end up creating a false stereotype.

Prior to Maidan Ukraine had 0% and 1% growth.

How much of this was due to Yanukovych versus the lingering aftereffects of the Great Recession, though?

In 2016, 2017 and 2018 Ukraine’s per capita GDP growth of about 3% has surpassed that of Russia and Belarus, essentially erasing the increased gap following Maidan. It is on track to do so in 2019 which means Ukraine will have a slightly improved position to those countries than it had in 2013. And keep in mind – this is Ukraine minus its wealthiest parts in 2013 (the steel and coal exporting Donbas).

IMHO, we should continue looking at long-term trends here. As in, just how much smaller will the Ukrainian-Russian GDP per capita gap going to be in, say, 2025 or 2030 in comparison to 2013?

Corruption has held it back. If reforms go through growth may be 4% to 5% per year and last quarter’s 4.6% growth won’t be such a fluke.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/a-unique-chance-for-change/

In the article above, Anders Aslund about Ukraine’s potential to grow by 7% a year.

Also, AP, do you think that Russia should formally annex the Donbass after Ukraine joins the European Union? I mean, it does seem like Russia owes it to the people of the Donbass (well, the rebel-controlled part) to do that considering that it encouraged them to rebel and thus caused them to lose thousands of lives. 🙁

Prior to Maidan Ukraine had 0% and 1% growth.

How much of this was due to Yanukovych versus the lingering aftereffects of the Great Recession, though?

Ukraine bounced back in Yanukovich’s first year, then stopped growing in his second and third years.

Post-Maidan, Ukraine bounced back early this year but keeps growing.

IMHO, we should continue looking at long-term trends here. As in, just how much smaller will the Ukrainian-Russian GDP per capita gap going to be in, say, 2025 or 2030 in comparison to 2013?

It is so far behind it will not close the gap any time soon.

Ukraine had 33% of Russia’s per capita GDP PPP in 2013, 34% in 2018.

Back in 2009 the gap was only 37%. So prior to Maidan Ukraine just kept falling further and further behind. Now it is finally moving forward. It is now relative to Russia where it was in 2010, erasing the gap that had grown under Yanukovich.

Ukraine is predicted to have 2% higher growth than Russia in 2019 and 2020.

Obviously if Ukraine’s economy starts growing at 7% a year, convergence would be faster.

And keep in mind that post-2013 Ukraine doesn’t include steel and coal-exporting Donbas. This makes the improvement larger than it seems (because it is the formerly poorer parts of Ukraine that are doing better now, than Ukraine with its richer parts had been doing in 2013).

Sure it was, he probably stole it from someone.

Marx was making a sort of cheeky remark based on a reference to Hegel, whom Marx was immensely influenced by.

From the start of first chapter of The Eighteenth Brumaire:

Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

I am also not nostalgic

Czechoslovak communism was also quite mild with low costs and substantial country building and social benefits.

—-

I think of the socialist-Soviet era as just another time in our history. It wasn’t great before that, and it hasn’t been all bed of roses since. If one tries to evaluate it objectively – based on simple data – the achievements between 1945-1990 were very substantial: all nations there grew quite a bit, became much more homogenized, prosperous, healthier, better educated, etc… The two arguments against are that it would had happend anyway and that it was achieved at too high a cost. In reality the costs were comparable to what happened previously in that region, and there is no way to know if the elites (including in the West) would had done the positive things after 1945 without a threat of socialism-communism. Ukraine, by the way, prospered enormously under Soviets and reached an apogee if its development roughly around 1990 (50 million+, industry…).

Nostalgia can be either neutral, detrimental or beneficial, I am not making a value judgement in this specific case but to deny that you are nostalgic for the previous social regime is a peculiar trait you are exhibiting.

have never been to Soviet Union.

You yourself describe the Communist era of your country as “socialist-Soviet”.

may never happen, since that area is receiving lots of non-EU immigrants

In Basque country, we saw a lot of non-EU immigration too.

However, I guess they will nonetheless learn euskera – especially as it is necessary for government jobs there.

historic separation of Basques between France and Spain: we are also separated in two entities in Spain.

Isn’t it more of a continuum, than simple separation?

For example, do you view people from La Rioja as being foreigners, because they are not Basques, even though they are touching the region? Is Miranda de Ebro, so different to Vitoria?

Also surely Miranda de Ebro and Vitoria are more similar to each other, than either to Biarritz?

Isn’t it more of a continuum, than simple separation?

In the case of the Basque Autonomous Community and Northern Navarre it is an administrative boundary that separates people speaking the same old dialects of Basque, have the same last names and often are members of the same blood family. And, again, this was a deliberate decision of Basque maximalist patriots.

do you view people from La Rioja as being foreigners, because they are not Basques, even though they are touching the region?

Foreigners is a bit of a strong word, considering the centuries we’ve spent under the same kingdom and empire but, well, yes. Our languages are less related to each other than Russian is to Spanish, for example. And genetic studies show a distinct cluster separating Basques from their neighbors as much as Finns are separated from Russians, or thereabouts (although the latest research suggests that this separation is basically due to Basques not having received any significant admixture since the late Bronze – Iron age).

Is Miranda de Ebro, so different to Vitoria?

No, not at all. But you need to bear in mind that ~75% of people in Vitoria have their roots in different regions of Spain, typically much further south than Miranda. In fact, when I talk about genetic studies showing this or that about Basques I’m talking about geneticists having to find examples of ethnic Basques in rural mountainous regions to conduct their studies on them.

Inhabitants of the current Basque Country being a separate ethnic group is a fiction. The Basque Country was swamped with immigrants from Spain since the end of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution took hold in our lands and in Catalonia but not elsewhere in Spain. This is an irreversible process under any realistic scenario but Basque language and traditions will hold on in rural areas, as it has done for millennia.

…it is justified to state that the East Bloc states had their flaws.

Who are you arguing that point with? I explicitly stated above the same thing. You invent a straw-man and then argue with it.

I have no idea what a ‘Crystal Palace’ is or was, and I have no desire to build it. All I know is that life under socialism in Czechoslovakia in the 80’s was not some unredeemable hell: nobody was shot, we travelled to the West fairly easily if one had money, churches were open – I was baptised, education was high quality, people didn’t work too much, food was plentiful – even bananas occasionally. It was inefficient and stagnant, but the idea that it was some totalitarian hell is so far from reality that one always wonders about the ‘intellectuals’ in the West who go on and on about ‘totality’ and ‘Stalin’ – from what I recall, Stalin was openly denounced and Mao was ridiculed, although not as much e.g. Pinochet.

I have no desire to go back to it because I dislike inefficiency and enjoy luxury. But if that is ‘nostalgia’ than what wouldn’t be? You use words that your don’t seem to understand.

So basically like Yugoslavia, except Yugoslavia was also mass murderous (for a bit)

The passport was withdrawn in the case of people who criticized the government, or who were suspected of wanting to defect to the West. Traveling abroad wasn’t that easy.

While we idly discuss ww2, minorities in the US are making history! According to CNBC’s lede on Facebook, at least, that’s what “history in the making” looks like.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/11/minorities-ages-25-to-54-make-up-most-new-hires-in-workforce.html

It’s interesting that you place so much hope for Ukraine’s future with the EU lol.

You must’ve missed when Dutch voters overwhelmingly voted in advance to block and veto any potential future Ukrainian membership in the EU. You also must’ve missed when Macron stated that there would be no more EU enlargement before thorough internal reforms. Of course, there’s also the fact that Ukraine is still in the middle of a war that is unlikely to end anytime soon because the EU obviously does not accept countries which are in the middle of a war.

At this rate, it’s much more likely that the EU collapses or fragments than it is that Ukraine joins the EU.

As an example he cited the (somewhat dubious, OBOR and China related) railroad development between Budapest and Belgrade.

Perhaps Epigon could inform us more properly about this railway, but from what I’m aware, it functions perfectly fine on the Hungarian side of the border while it is in complete dysfunction and disarray on the Serbian side of the border lol. I think Vucic mentioned something about how the state of the railway will be improved in the future.

Is it really a Greek Pony when the enemy already knows it’s a ruse?

Well it took Stalin until around 1948 to realize that Tito was a Trojan horse. The Soviets seemed to genuinely trust the Yugo-Communist Partisans for some time until they realized post WW2 that they were untrustworthy. This is why it always struck me as strange that after the Red Army liberated Serbia east of the River Drina in 1944, the Red Army just left to go north and fight in Hungary instead of at least keeping some form of more permanent military presence.

Stalin and Churchill agreed on a 90/10 split in Yugoslavia in favor of Britain when they were carving up Europe

Wasn’t it more 75/25? At least that was the impression I had when I read about Churchill and Stalin dividing up East Europe.

The Eurozone just erodes national sovereignty further and harms the economy of a given state.

Depends who you ask, but it was clearly Sofia Gov goal to enter the Eurozone for a good while now, failure to achieve it diminishes trust in the system
Kiev is wasting it’s time trying to join NATO/EU, as the West will sell them out just like they sold them out during literally every other conflict, sorry AP

I think the best solution would’ve been to create an independent Galicia which would join EU/NATO and turn the rest of Ukraine into a Belarus sort of affair

It’s interesting that you place so much hope for Ukraine’s future with the EU lol.

It’s not hope, it’s reality. Ukraine’s economy has been steadily growing since linking to the EU and the central and western parts are probably more prosperous now than they had been since independence (this is not saying much but it is a fact).

Obviously full membership would be at least 20 years away but the links are already paying off.

At this rate, it’s much more likely that the EU collapses or fragments than it is that Ukraine joins the EU.

Intermarium would be better than EU.