GMG Classical Music Forum

Politics has obscured the debt the West owes to the Russians for defeating Nazi Germany

Quote22 June 1941. 3:15 AM.

Darkness shattered in an onslaught of noise and light.

The krump of 155 mm. heavy artillery pieces resonated, their lethal rounds exploding several kilometers ahead with a sudden flash, a concussive blast, and a fountain of dirt, debris, and blood. The growl of twelve-cylinder Maybach engines accompanied the squeal and klank of the treads of Panzer III tanks spearheading the armored assault. The staccato clatter of MG 34 machine guns erupted, spraying 7.92 millimeter, tracer-illuminated morsels of death into the darkness beyond. Stuka dive bombers buzzed overhead, sirens wailing as they plunged toward their targets.   And there was the sound of men:  weapons clattering, equipment clanging, boots pounding one in front of the other in the dark Russian soil. Millions of men.

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was officially underway.

The Eastern Front campaign of World War II was the most massive military engagement in history. The German forces, including their Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian allies, numbered 166 divisions, 4.4 million troops, 42,000 artillery pieces, 4,000 tanks and assault guns, and 4,800 aircraft. This incredibly lethal force was deployed along a thousand mile front, from the Baltic to the Black Seas, a distance equivalent to that between New York City and St. Louis, Missouri.
Aligned against them were the forces of the Red Army. One hundred and ninety divisions, 3.3 million men, 59,700 artillery pieces, 15,000 tanks, and 10,000 aircraft were deployed across the frontier.

Despite their nominal superiority on paper, the Soviets were badly overwhelmed by the German blitzkreig. From a lack of quality leadership due to Stalin's 1937 political purges to a thorough lack of preparation for the invasion despite numerous warnings to poor command and control and virtually no combat experience in the front-line divisions, the Red Army was outmatched, and the results showed it.  But as the invasion dragged on across the vast Russian landscape with no end in sight, Stalin's men regrouped and showed their true mettle.

The German Army advanced on three broad fronts toward their targets:  Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) in the north, Moscow in the center, and Stalingrad (Volgograd) and the Caucasus oil fields to the south. Although there would be a gruesome siege of Leningrad that isolated the city, it never fell. Units of the German 2nd Panzer Division drew to within sight of the spires of the Kremlin, but Moscow never fell. And, although the German Army occupied all of Stalingrad save for a handful of factories in the center of town for a time, Stalingrad never fell.

The Russian Front saw some of the largest and most vicious battles of the war, with some of the worst atrocities committed by both sides, and loss of life on a scale not seen before or since. In a sense, it was World War II; the North Africa campaign, the invasion of Italy, and the opening of the Second Front at Normandy were but sideshows to the main event of horror and destruction unleashed on this day sixty-eight years ago.

http://carolinablue50.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/barbarossa/

Perhaps that has something to do with the war that started 2 years earlier, on September 17th?

Quote from: Maciek on June 22, 2009, 10:37:25 AM
Perhaps that has something to do with the war that started 2 years earlier, on September 17th?

of course, the point though is that the Russian-German war on its own was the largest in history

No, no, I was referring to what you wrote in your post, not the title of the thread:

Quote from: bwv 1080 on June 22, 2009, 10:20:39 AM
Politics has obscured the debt the West owes to the Russians for defeating Nazi Germany

Quote from: Maciek on June 22, 2009, 11:06:46 AM
No, no, I was referring to what you wrote in your post, not the title of the thread:

note I said Russians plural, as in individual citizens, not the government

I'm not sure I see what you're getting at. The Russians who fought in 1939 were probably individuals as well, not the government.

Thankfully Hitler invaded Russia, but what a cost the Russians paid defeating the Germans in the Eastern Front!   :'(

I'll always pay my respects.   :)

And what a cost Eastern Europe paid for it when Russia won through. The UK went to war because Germany invaded Poland and in the end, Poland was traded away into a slavery they possibly could not easily distinguish from the Nazi one in terms of the lack of freedom and misery caused.

It took over a generation for Eastern Europe to begin some form of recovery from the nightmare Russia visited upon it.

Mike

Quote from: knight on June 22, 2009, 12:49:21 PM
And what a cost Eastern Europe paid for it when Russia won through. The UK went to war because Germany invaded Poland and in the end, Poland was traded away into a slavery they possibly could not easily distinguish from the Nazi one in terms of the lack of freedom and misery caused.

It took over a generation for Eastern Europe to begin some form of recovery from the nightmare Russia visited upon it.

Mike

all you can say is that it would have been worse under the Nazis who planned to starve out the majority of the Slavic populations to make room for German colonization

 ???  Is there any classical music out there written about war or either World War?  Like a "War" Symphony?  Prokofievs piece "The Year 1941" has a great representation of war and its gathering, but music written to specifically reflect wartime mindsets and action...I'd be very interested to hear.   :)

Quote from: knight on June 22, 2009, 12:49:21 PM
And what a cost Eastern Europe paid for it when Russia won through. The UK went to war because Germany invaded Poland and in the end, Poland was traded away into a slavery they possibly could not easily distinguish from the Nazi one in terms of the lack of freedom and misery caused.

It took over a generation for Eastern Europe to begin some form of recovery from the nightmare Russia visited upon it.

Mike

Excellent book --
http://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/030740515X

Quote from: bwv 1080 on June 22, 2009, 10:20:39 AM
Politics has obscured the debt the West owes to the Russians for defeating Nazi Germany

Though a ruffian may help you in a bar fight, you wouldn't necessarily want to bring him home to your wife and children...

I always felt it a little like poetic justice that Germany invaded Russia. After all, Stalin spared no expense at carving up Poland - with a little help from his former buddy Hitler.

Not that the civilians deserved the beating they took - so perhaps justice wasn't served after all...

Quote from: bwv 1080 on June 22, 2009, 01:00:37 PM
all you can say is that it would have been worse under the Nazis who planned to starve out the majority of the Slavic populations to make room for German colonization

No, it is not all I can say. We went to war in part to liberate them and then through realpolitik, shamefully traded that freedom and allowed them to be supressed for a further generation.

That is not to take away from the millions of Russians who fought. Stalin used his own people as inexhaustable cannon fodder.

But he developed a cruel endgame and got what he wanted.

Mike

Quote from: knight on June 22, 2009, 02:04:59 PM
No, it is not all I can say. We went to war in part to liberate them and then through realpolitik, shamefully traded that freedom and allowed them to be supressed for a further generation.

That is not to take away from the millions of Russians who fought. Stalin used his own people as inexhaustable cannon fodder.

But he developed a cruel endgame and got what he wanted.

Mike

What realistically could have been done, especially at the risk of nuclear war?

Britain went to war to protect its empire, not the people of Poland.  The US entered when it was attacked.  There were no humanitarian motives relative to the people of Eastern Europe, nor should there have been

At the war end, Stalin had swallow half of Europe. Only way to stop him and make him retired was to declare war to him (that was the ever present hope of Hitler at to the end), but that was absolutely impossible at that time. So, US and Russia were the real and unique
winners; all the rest, and certainly the UK, were losers.

No bwv that is not true. If it was just about protecting ourselves, we could have done a deal that would have allowed the UK a lot more time to prepare in case the deal fell apart. Read your history.

I can see how we ended up as we did, exhausted and unwilling to use the bomb on Russia. Economically also, it might have been impossible. But that is all beside the point. You started off congratulating the Russians. I believe they were absolutely crucial to winning, but it was not an unmixed blessing for those countries the USSR took over and terrorised.

Mike

I am not clear how the UK were losers here. For sure economically, we were almost bankrupt, many lives were lost, but we had no desire to take over bits of Europe.

Mike

Quote from: bwv 1080 on June 22, 2009, 02:10:39 PM
What realistically could have been done, especially at the risk of nuclear war?

Was that a factor taken into account at all? I seriously doubt it...

QuoteBritain went to war to protect its empire, not the people of Poland.

Actually, they declared war to honor the Polish-British Common Defence Pact of August 1939 (which was an expansion of the British pledge from March 1939 to guarantee Polish independence). You're right though, they didn't really act on it right away. The French did, though not to a massive extent (they were honoring the Franco-Polish Military Alliance).

QuoteThe US entered when it was attacked.

Well, Soviet Russia started its war against Germany when it was attacked too. So what's that "debt" you were talking about earlier? But then, the fact is that Soviet Russia did not "enter" the war in 1941 and no new war started that year, since Soviet Russia had been one of the countries that started it back in 1939. In 1941 the country simply changed allegiance, so to speak. What's more, the Red Army did not fight "for" the Western allies. They were fighting for new territories for the Soviet Union: countries where Soviet-controlled puppet governments were soon to be installed (the entire so-called "Eastern bloc"). Effectively, these countries became Soviet colonies. Obviously, no altruism in that (to say the least). So what exactly does the West "owe" to Soviet Russia? Which Western territories (countries??) did the Red Army liberate? Were there any at all? (I'm not sure, I'm sincerely asking.)

QuoteThere were no humanitarian motives relative to the people of Eastern Europe, nor should there have been

Really? You should tell that to the Eastern European Jews...

Quote from: Maciek on June 22, 2009, 03:05:11 PM
So what exactly does the West "owe" to Soviet Russia?

(In case you were wondering: I do acknowledge that they had a crucial role in overthrowing Hitler. But, well, it's not like they were doing the West a favor of any sort. They did it for themselves.)

Like Maciek, I have no wish to diminish the heroism of the Russian soldiers who fought against the German army between 1941 and 1945 or to minimise the absolutely crucial role which Russia played in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The scale of fighting on the Eastern Front was immense and easily dwarfs the numbers who fought in other campaigns.

The proposition that Soviet Russia only got involved in World War Two in 1941 when the Germans invaded Russian territory is however dubious. Russia had invaded Poland on September 17, 1939 as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed with Germany on 23 August. Following that invasion Soviet Russia annexed Eastern Poland. In November 1939 Soviet Russia invaded Finland('The Winter War' of Nov.1939-March 1940). In June 1940 Soviet Russia invaded and annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The same month Soviet Russia annexed Bessarabia and the Upper Bukovina from Rumania. In each case brutal repression and mass deportations of civilians followed the annexation. Russian exploitation of the wartime situation between 1939 and 1941 to enforce and extend domination over Eastern Europe should never be forgotten...just as we should never forget the suffering of the Russian people between 1941 and 1945.

QuoteQuote from: Maciek on 22 June 2009, 23:05:11
So what exactly does the West "owe" to Soviet Russia?

Shostakovich?   ???

Quote from: Maciek on June 22, 2009, 03:05:11 PM
So what exactly does the West "owe" to Soviet Russia?

Nothing to Soviet Russia per se, only respect to the individuals who were responsible for the defeat of Hitler

Also a correction of the emphasis given to the Western powers accomplishments in comparison to the Russian that is nearly a mirror image of the actual contribution the two sides gave to the effort towards Germany's defeat.

Quote from: Dundonnell on June 22, 2009, 04:30:26 PM

The proposition that Soviet Russia only got involved in World War Two in 1941 when the Germans invaded Russian territory is however dubious.

Its a bullshit proposition, but it was not made here

The war to end all wars ...

Just a couple of points to the above:

People are referring to "Russia," which is a bit annoying, since no country of that name existed between 1922 and 1991. Rather, there was something called the "Council [Soviet] Union," a multinational entity consisting of various republics, of which Russia was the largest.

Of those republics, Russia didn't suffer the worst from the war. The hardest-hit republics were Ukraine and Belarus, which lost something like 25-30% of their population. I think they deserve some mention as well.

Quote from: bwv 1080 on June 22, 2009, 01:00:37 PM
all you can say is that it would have been worse under the Nazis who planned to starve out the majority of the Slavic populations to make room for German colonization

I have met plenty of Poles, Russians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Lithuanians et al. who maintain that life was better under the Communists (for ordinary people at least) than it is now. However, I have never met anyone in these countries who wanted to live under Nazi rule again.

http://www.memo.ru/daytoday/5katyn_eng.htm

Try reading this. At almost one blow, the male intelligentsia of a nation was massacred by Russians. Officers in the Polish forces were mainly drawn from that class.

Not quite the act of liberators; rather of ruthless landgrabbers

Mike

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 22, 2009, 10:19:36 PM
I have met plenty of Poles, Russians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Lithuanians et al. who maintain that life was better under the Communists (for ordinary people at least) than it is now. However, I have never met anyone in these countries who wanted to live under Nazi rule again.

Globalization is a very brutal game.  Most western industrilaized nations are now feeling the effect of job losses and decline in living standard ...

Quote from: Coopmv on June 23, 2009, 05:16:20 PM
Globalization is a very brutal game.  Most western industrilaized nations are now feeling the effect of job losses and decline in living standard ...

Sure. But my larger point was that most people who lived under "actually existing socialism" (to use a popular dissident term) do not view it as an unalloyed evil akin to Nazism, but as something with both positive and negative aspects. When the system collapsed, they gained something, but they lost something too.

Maciek, Mike, Dundonell --- Thank you so much for expressing my views and thoughts on the matter.

Spitvalve --- I am curious about "the positive" aspects of Communism: is there anyone of them that would have not been achieved had Communism never took over this or that country?

Quote from: Florestan on June 24, 2009, 02:25:36 AM
Spitvalve --- I am curious about "the positive" aspects of Communism: is there anyone of them that would have not been achieved had Communism never took over this or that country?

I have no idea - that's hypothetical history.

Don't get me wrong, I think Communism was a disaster in many ways. It is noteworthy, however, that there are plenty of people in various countries who lived under the system itself (i.e. not campus lefties who have never experienced it firsthand) who find things to praise about it. For this reason (among others), I find the "Communism was just as bad as Nazism" argument dubious.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 02:51:49 AM
Don't get me wrong,

Don't worry, I don't.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 02:51:49 AMI think Communism was a disaster in many ways. It is noteworthy, however, that there are plenty of people in various countries who lived under the system itself (i.e. not campus lefties who have never experienced it firsthand) who find things to praise about it.

Tell me about that! :) The nostalgia of Communism is rather strong here in Romania especially among older people , but their reasoning is flawed. They praise Communism for building block of flats, hospitals, subway, factories, schools etc, as if had Romania remained a Westernized Kingdom at the end of WWII all these would have never been built. Furthermore,. they praise Communism for providing each and every citizen with a job and a home and for imposing fixed prices on everything --- i.e, they praise it for exactly the things that spelled ruin to the Communist economy and resulted in a general and unprecedented impoverishment of Romanian society. (It is true that anybody had a job --- but the money he earned were worthless since there was (almost) nothing to buy. The years 1981-89 have been particularly appaling, with hundred-meter long queues for everything, with severe shortages of, among others, basic food, toilet paper, razors, with daily cutoffs of electricity, heating, water, gas... anyway, I don't even want to remember all that).

Whatever the Communists boast of having achieved, it was achieved in the free world better, with less human and financial cost and without ruining the economy.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 02:51:49 AM
For this reason (among others), I find the "Communism was just as bad as Nazism" argument dubious.

But why? Exactly the same arguments made by those who nostalgically praise Communism have been advanced by those who nostalgically praise Nazism.

IMO, Communism was not "just as bad" as Nazism --- it was much worse, if only for killing far, far more people. It was also much more hypocritical: Nazi never made a secret of their doctrines and plans and acted them out accordingly. Communism, on the other hand, preached universal fraternity and liberation while acting out hatred and enslavement.

I take them both in absolute horror.

Quote from: Florestan on June 24, 2009, 03:29:54 AM
Whatever the Communists boast of having achieved, it was achieved in the free world better, with less human and financial cost and without ruining the economy.

Agreed.

QuoteIMO, Communism was not "just as bad" as Nazism --- it was much worse, if only for killing far, far more people.

The numbers game is a slippery one to play. For one thing, Nazism lasted 12 years and was confined to Europe; Communist regimes have existed since 1917, all over the world, and still exist in some places (including the world's largest country). So I don't think this comparison is valuable (and if we're doing body counts, I suspect the one from Western imperialism and colonialism beats them all). Furthermore, on a personal level, I have met Communists who I thought were decent (if misguided) human beings; I can't say the same for Nazis (and I have met a few).

But to speak only for myself (and I do have some firsthand experience living in a commie country, so I'm speaking at least partly from personal experience), not all Communist countries have been the same in practical terms, and if I were forced to make a choice, I would much rather live in one of the more moderately authoritarian countries (like Hungary or Poland post-1956, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, or Yugoslavia before it started to break up) than in any country ruled or occupied by Nazis.

But, of course, liberal democracy beats them both.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 04:21:18 AM
The numbers game is a slippery one to play.

True. However, I didn't imply that Nazism was somehow more humane than Communism, but just that, history being as it was, bottom line the death toll of Communism is heavier than that of Nazism.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 04:21:18 AMI have met Communists who I thought were decent (if misguided) human beings; I can't say the same for Nazis (and I have met a few).

Are you talking about pragmatic Communists who were members of a Communist party just because they were compelled to be, in order to advance their career or to provide for their families, or about hard line aparatchiks and politruks?

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 04:21:18 AMnot all Communist countries have been the same in practical terms

Agreed. Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia were, economically speaking, better off than Romania, Bulgaria or Albania and the cult of the party and its leader never attained the delirious and megalomaniac level attained in the latter countries. I am not sure about repression, though --- I suspect it was just as tough.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 04:21:18 AMand if I were forced to make a choice, I would much rather live in one of the more moderately authoritarian countries (like Hungary or Poland post-1956, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, or Yugoslavia before it started to break up) than in any country ruled or occupied by Nazis.

Well, yes and no. Both in the former and in the latter cases, if you kept your mouth shut and pledged allegiance (if only symbolic) to the party line you would have lived a relatively safe life (except if you were a Jew in the latter). But no sooner had you begun to grumble or openly protest than you'd have run into trouble in both cases.

Culturally speaking though, I agree with you. The atmosphere in Nazi Germany must have been more sinister than in the counter-examples you provided.

Bottom line, I would have had any country west of Hungary over them at anytime after the WWII.  ;)

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 04:21:18 AMBut, of course, liberal democracy beats them both.

Absolutely.

Quote from: Florestan on June 24, 2009, 04:46:55 AM
Are you talking about pragmatic Communists who were members of a Communist party just because they were compelled to be, in order to advance their career or to provide for their families, or about hard line aparatchiks and politruks?

I'm talking about 1) pragmatic Communists; and 2) a more rare group - idealists who may or may not have belonged to the Party, but believed in "socialist principles" and tried to follow them in their own lives. Such people struck me as naive, but I did not find them to be evil or malevolent. I'm definitely not talking about "hard line apparatchiks."

QuoteAgreed. Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia were, economically speaking, better off than Romania, Bulgaria or Albania and the cult of the party and its leader never attained the delirious and megalomaniac level attained in the latter countries. I am not sure about repression, though --- I suspect it was just as tough.

Here I will be lazy, and link to a short article I wrote several years ago, dealing with these particular issues:

http://www.nypress.com/article-8535-lessons-from-around-the-bloc.html

Quote
Bottom line, I would have had any country west of Hungary over them at anytime after the WWII.  ;)

Sure. But sometimes history gives us only bad choices, and we have to play the hand that's dealt to us  :D

Quote from: Dundonnell on June 22, 2009, 04:30:26 PM
Like Maciek, I have no wish to diminish the heroism of the Russian soldiers who fought against the German army between 1941 and 1945 or to minimise the absolutely crucial role which Russia played in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The scale of fighting on the Eastern Front was immense and easily dwarfs the numbers who fought in other campaigns.

The proposition that Soviet Russia only got involved in World War Two in 1941 when the Germans invaded Russian territory is however dubious. Russia had invaded Poland on September 17, 1939 as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed with Germany on 23 August. Following that invasion Soviet Russia annexed Eastern Poland. In November 1939 Soviet Russia invaded Finland('The Winter War' of Nov.1939-March 1940). In June 1940 Soviet Russia invaded and annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The same month Soviet Russia annexed Bessarabia and the Upper Bukovina from Rumania. In each case brutal repression and mass deportations of civilians followed the annexation. Russian exploitation of the wartime situation between 1939 and 1941 to enforce and extend domination over Eastern Europe should never be forgotten...just as we should never forget the suffering of the Russian people between 1941 and 1945.

Yes, I agree. I have always had an interest in the historical significance of June 22nd as it is my birthday (but not in 1941) ;D

France also surrendered to Germany on 22/6/1940.

The real point is that by acknowledging the fact that the USSR is almost entirely responsible for destroying Germany's military, the whole narrative of WW2 changes.  No longer can it be spun as a triumph of "citizen-soldiers" mustered from freedom-loving liberal democracies over totalitarian oppression. Rather it is a sordid struggle between two more or less equally brutal totalitarian systems, one of which we allied ourselves with for self-defense and then engaged in a permanent war footing for 45 years, which created (at least in the US) a bloated military-industrial complex that now has to continually find new threats to justify its existence. 

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 02:51:49 AM
I have no idea - that's hypothetical history.

Don't get me wrong, I think Communism was a disaster in many ways. It is noteworthy, however, that there are plenty of people in various countries who lived under the system itself (i.e. not campus lefties who have never experienced it firsthand) who find things to praise about it. For this reason (among others), I find the "Communism was just as bad as Nazism" argument dubious.

There are two main reasons why the Chinese Communists are still around while the Russian Communists are not.

1) The myopic American policy makers somehow thought Russian Communists were evil while the Chinese Communists were not.

2) The overseas Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan have helped build up the economy of Communist China from next to nothing to something meaningful.

Quote from: Coopmv on June 24, 2009, 05:48:12 PM
There are two main reasons why the Chinese Communists are still around while the Russian Communists are not.

You forgot:

3) The Chinese Communists themselves recognized the system wasn't working, and decided to liberalize the economy without liberalizing the political structure. (Had they done it the other way around, they would be where the Soviet Communists are now.)

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 24, 2009, 10:22:30 PM
self loathing liberals who rail against their own nation and culture

Jeez, am I one of those? Thanks for a good laugh  :D

Quote
What if you were German?

Talk about missing the point. You have totally missed mine, which was a practical one relating to the actual experience of living in different types of societies.

Since I'm not German, I can't really answer your question. But being who I am, I would rather live in West Germany than East Germany, and I would rather live in East Germany than Nazi Germany.

QuoteNazism = protected their own nation at the expense of the innocent life of others.

Except of course for those members of their own nation who happened to disagree with Nazism.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 10:53:03 PM
Except of course for those members of their own nation who happened to disagree with Nazism.

How many Germans did the Nazi kill?

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 24, 2009, 10:59:26 PM
How many Germans did the Nazi killed?

I don't know precisely, but the first victims of the Nazis were their political opponents, plenty of whom were ethnically German. In fact the first concentration camp, Dachau, was specifically set up to deal with political opponents and anti-Nazi dissidents.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 05:32:07 AM
Here I will be lazy, and link to a short article I wrote several years ago, dealing with these particular issues:

http://www.nypress.com/article-8535-lessons-from-around-the-bloc.html

I agree. In the same vein of comparing dictatorships I draw your attention to the outrage Solzhenitsyn caused among Leftists in 1974: when visiting Francoist Spain, he said something to the effect that had the Soviet citizens enjoyed the freedom the Spaniards did enjoy, they would have been much better off. He was blasted for being a fascist --- yet he was just honest and plain right.

The Franco analogy is interesting, because as I understand it there is still a significant amount of "Franco nostalgia" in Spain, analogous to the situation in Eastern Europe. One of my favorite books is My Last Sigh, the autobiography of the film director Luis Buñuel. In it he recounts how he saw a group of left-wing demonstrators walking through Madrid (this was about 1980) carrying signs that said "Contra Franco estábamos mejor!" ("We were better off against Franco!"). I particularly like the use of "against," implying that opposition to Franco gave their lives some meaning.

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 24, 2009, 10:59:26 PM
How many Germans did the Nazi killed?

165,000 (or more) German Jews, just for a start.

Quote from: Wendell_E on June 25, 2009, 03:27:22 AM
165,000 (or more) German Jews, just for a start.

Only the "euthanasia" killings are estimated in between 65 and 90.000.
That includes wounded and crippled soldiers.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 11:09:16 PM
I don't know precisely, but the first victims of the Nazis were their political opponents, plenty of whom were ethnically German. In fact the first concentration camp, Dachau, was specifically set up to deal with political opponents and anti-Nazi dissidents.

Yes, but they were doing it for the benefit of Germany. This is the difference between the far right and the far left spectrum. The first brings order and strength for the group using any means necessary (including mass murder), the latter seeks the dissolution of oder by any means necessary (including mass murder). We already know that morality in either case is not a factor (that's the very definition of an "extremist" ideology after all), but both Nazism and Communism offer interesting psychological insights into the nature of those who ascribe to right or left ideologies. It also explains why conservatism is becoming stronger in Europe just as the EU is attempting to dismantle all European nations and cultures in favor of a globalist, multicultural "free for all". Fellini did an interesting study of the events that led to the wars of the 20th century in Prova d'Orchestra, and i have a feeling history is about to repeat itself. Right wing extremism is a response to left wing extremism.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 11:09:16 PM
I don't know precisely, but the first victims of the Nazis were their political opponents, plenty of whom were ethnically German. In fact the first concentration camp, Dachau, was specifically set up to deal with political opponents and anti-Nazi dissidents.

don't forget the euthanasia programs - the nazis began by murdering disabled children

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 24, 2009, 10:59:26 PM
How many Germans did the Nazi kill?

you can start with about 250,000 German Jews

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 09:50:11 PM
You forgot:

3) The Chinese Communists themselves recognized the system wasn't working, and decided to liberalize the economy without liberalizing the political structure. (Had they done it the other way around, they would be where the Soviet Communists are now.)

Sure.  But Gorbachev recognized that too.  Without Hong Kong or Taiwan, China would NEVER reach the position it is in today.  There is no such thing as free capital.

Quote from: Coopmv on June 25, 2009, 05:38:45 PM
Sure.  But Gorbachev recognized that too. 

Gorbachev recognized that too, but followed a completely different policy. From early on, he liberalized the political environment, while only making a few half-baked adjustments to economic policy. The result was economic decline and political collapse.

Deng Xiaoping did the opposite. He liberalized the economy, while retaining tight controls on politics and allowing no challenges to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. The result was economic growth and something that looks like political stability, at least from where I sit.

Quote from: Wilhelm Richard on June 22, 2009, 01:05:29 PM
Excellent book --
http://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/030740515X

...

Hummm ... I don't generally look to Pat Buchanan for helpful insights.

As juveniles I think most of us have wondered, 'Would it not have been a good idea to let the Nazi and Soviet Communists fight it out?'  I believe the answer is 'No' because one or the other brutal dictatorship would have totally dominated all of Europe, (not just half of it which was the actual result), and that would not have boded well for the rest of the world.

Quote from: Feanor on June 26, 2009, 05:41:50 AM
Hummm ... I don't generally look to Pat Buchanan for helpful insights.

As juveniles I think most of us have wondered, 'Would it not have been a good idea to let the Nazi and Soviet Communists fight it out?'  I believe the answer is 'No' because one or the other brutal dictatorship would have totally dominated all of Europe, (not just half of it which was the actual result), and that would not have boded well for the rest of the world.

Yeah, i suppose the rest of the world is boding fairly well now that Europe is dying.

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 26, 2009, 05:49:06 AM
Yeah, i suppose the rest of the world is boding fairly well now that Europe is dying.

Major parts of it not so badly.  Read, for example, Farid Zakaria's book, The Post American World (http://www.amazon.com/Post-American-World-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/0393334805/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246025405&sr=1-1).

On the other hand Europe is far from dead.  I'm actually more concerned about the United States than Europe where the rest of the world is concern, but then the U.S. isn't dead yet either.

The biggest problems of the world today are climate change and the accelerating scarcity of exploitable natural resources.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 25, 2009, 09:48:06 PM
Gorbachev recognized that too, but followed a completely different policy. From early on, he liberalized the political environment, while only making a few half-baked adjustments to economic policy. The result was economic decline and political collapse.

Deng Xiaoping did the opposite. He liberalized the economy, while retaining tight controls on politics and allowing no challenges to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. The result was economic growth and something that looks like political stability, at least from where I sit.

You overlooked the importance of the overseas wealthy Chinese businessmen who were instrumental in starting China down the capitalist road.  Russia had nothing comparable - St Petersburg was not exactly Hong Kong.  Deng Xiaoping was only successful in liberalizing the economy because he convinced the overseas Chinese businessmen to invest in China.  Those businessmen struck deals with American companies to provide cheap labor and inexpensive goods.  Before long, WalMart followed and many multi-national American corporations started to set up shops in China as well and the rest is history.

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 26, 2009, 05:49:06 AM
Yeah, i suppose the rest of the world is boding fairly well now that Europe is dying.

Where is the evidence?  I would not go that far though Europe does have its shares of problems.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 02:51:49 AM
there are plenty of people in various countries who lived under the system itself who find things to praise about it.

The director of Wiener Staatsoper, Ian Hollender, who grew up in Timisoara (Romania), says he would prefer Stalin to Bush. But overall he seems to have pro-Soviet views and is not particularly thrilled with the American values. So, he is clearly biased, and we wouldn't trust him.

Quote from: Coopmv on June 23, 2009, 05:16:20 PM
Globalization is a very brutal game.  Most western industrilaized nations are now feeling the effect of job losses and decline in living standard ...

That has nothing to do with globalization. It has everything to do with the sudden collapse of a repressive empire that left a kleptocracy and virtually no civil society in its wake. For the avoidance of doubt: note that I am not saying that globalization is uniformly great, I am just correcting the warped causality you ascribe in your statement.

Quote from: Florestan on June 24, 2009, 04:46:55 AM
True. However, I didn't imply that Nazism was somehow more humane than Communism, but just that, history being as it was, bottom line the death toll of Communism is heavier than that of Nazism.

You still can't compare the two because Nazism at its root was a suicidally military expansionist system that was unsustainable even in the short term, whereas Soviet communism was a new brutal face for an old empire and its main objective was to keep the elites in power for as long as possible. The death toll numbers are meaningless in any case. The number of killed says nothing about the level of daily suffering of the individual, says nothing about the loss of dignity. That sort of ranking only invites the sort of revisionism that seeks to reduce those numbers as if that makes any difference either.

Quote from: Florestan on June 24, 2009, 04:46:55 AM
Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia were, economically speaking, better off than Romania, Bulgaria or Albania and the cult of the party and its leader never attained the delirious and megalomaniac level attained in the latter countries. I am not sure about repression, though --- I suspect it was just as tough.

Well, Yugoslavia was completely different as it wasn't part of the Warsaw Pact. Repression was very brutal in the early years of the regime when the interior ministry forces systematically tried to eliminate anyone who was associated with either the Serbian royalist Četniks or the Croatian fascist Ustaše who both fought the Communist Partizans (and each other) during the brutal civil war that raged mostly in Bosnia during the war. There were dispossessions of industrialists and large landowners and the like and repression continued against anyone who voiced any secessionist, nationalist, royalist etc. sentiment. In the early years of the regime public religious worship was restricted, if not outright forbidden. But that became quite loose very quickly. E.g. my mom recalls that in the early 50s when she was a kid she could not tell anyone in school that her family celebrated its patron saint day (the biggest Serbian orthodox holiday) for fear of reprisals against her family. But a few years later, it had become common practice that you would announce at work in advance that you would be 'out sick' on a particular date, and that meant that that person would be celebrating patron saint's day on that date and that everyone was invited to the party. Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 (and the reason he could do so was that he had such an effective secret police that they managed to corner the KGB!) and Yugoslavia was no longer part of the Cominform and never became part of the Warsaw Pact. It was open to trade and tourism with the West, while curiously also being open to tourism and trade with much of the neighboring Warsaw Pact countries. So in sum, while there was very heavy repression in the early years, from the 50s onwards life in Yugoslavia was several notches above that in most Warsaw Pact countries. It was still run by incompetent, inefficient, abusive idiots who set the country up for violent disintegration and you still had to watch what you were saying. But it wasn't Soviet Russia by a long shot.

Quote from: bwv 1080 on June 24, 2009, 10:48:27 AM
The real point is that by acknowledging the fact that the USSR is almost entirely responsible for destroying Germany's military, the whole narrative of WW2 changes.  No longer can it be spun as a triumph of "citizen-soldiers" mustered from freedom-loving liberal democracies over totalitarian oppression. Rather it is a sordid struggle between two more or less equally brutal totalitarian systems, one of which we allied ourselves with for self-defense and then engaged in a permanent war footing for 45 years, which created (at least in the US) a bloated military-industrial complex that now has to continually find new threats to justify its existence.  

I largely agree with this. The contributions of Soviet (i.e. not exclusively Russian) soldiers is very much under-emphasized in Western historiography. But it would be going a little too far to say that the USSR is 'almost entirely responsible' for the destruction of the Nazi regime. The main credit goes to the Nazis themselves for a patently idiotic war strategy. Their rational objective always the fertile plains of the Ukraine. But in their megalomania they lost sight of that objective very quickly. Had they just occupied and held onto the Ukraine for a few years, they could have starved Russia into submission. The attacks on England and France were just an invitation to be defeated by otherwise uninvolved Western powers who probably wouldn't have lifted a finger to save Eastern Europe otherwise; Nobody needed to waste men and materiel over a bit of useless desert in North Africa; and the idea of marching to Moscow... well, let's just say Napoleon sends his greetings; finally: which moron bothers to invade the Balkans? What was that good for? Nobody with half a brain and with all the technological superiority of Nazi Germany would have fought a war that stupid.

Secondly, while the USSR certainly exacted the heaviest toll on the Wehrmacht, the ultimate invasion of Germany proper would not have succeeded at least at that pace had Germany not already been bombed to bits by the RAF and USAF and had Hitler not wasted a whole bunch of units on the Western, Italian, Balkan and African fronts.

Quote from: Spitvalve on June 24, 2009, 09:50:11 PM
You forgot:

3) The Chinese Communists themselves recognized the system wasn't working, and decided to liberalize the economy without liberalizing the political structure. (Had they done it the other way around, they would be where the Soviet Communists are now.)

Bingo!

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 25, 2009, 06:48:06 AM
Yes, but they were doing it for the benefit of Germany.

OK, this post is so fecally plenary that it requires more patient dissection. You know, if you delimit so narrowly the group for whose benefit you are supposed ruling, then any repressive regime is beneficial, for it always benefits at least the clique in charge and their friends. Sure, the Nazis benefited Germany... that is, if you don't include in your definition of 'Germany' anyone with physical or mental handicaps, Jews (who had fought for Germany in WWI!), anyone with a different political opinion, anyone who doesn't want to submit to 'Gleichschaltung', anyone who disagrees with the Nazis' boneheaded war strategy, all the young Germans the Nazis sent to the front as pure cannon fodder who were forced to fight pointless and unwinnable battles to the last man in the final months of war at the threat of a death penalty for desertion, etc. Sure, they benefited Germany by starting a multi front war that inevitably resulted in a loss of traditional German homelands in both the east and the west and the total destruction of a vast percentage of Germany's architectural, sculptural and artistic heritage. My, what a benefit it was, indeed!

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 25, 2009, 06:48:06 AM
This is the difference between the far right and the far left spectrum. The first brings order and strength for the group using any means necessary (including mass murder), the latter seeks the dissolution of oder by any means necessary (including mass murder).

This is nonsense. Both rely on violence to suppress dissent and achieve a redistribution of wealth, either from minorities and neighbors to the elite, or from the wealthy elites of the previous regime to the new elites. Both bring order in a limited sense, as long as the regime is capable of enforcing order by violent means. It is incorrect to say that Communism seeks the dissolution of order. Both fascism and communism seek to dissolve the existing order and replace it with their own. While utopian communism dreams of a final stage of ultimate equality without much of a state-enforced order, that is not what communist regimes that actually existed ever were about. As the late Goerge Kennan said, "the thing about the historical inevitability of the final stage of Communism is that there is no hurry about it". In other words, while the Socialist elites were in power, they had no incentive whatsoever to hasten their demise by actually creating the kind of communism envisioned by Marx. Thus, the sort of historic communist dictatorships of the USSR, Maoist China and their satellites was never systemically geared toward an actual achievement of ultimate communism, but was instead always geared towards the preservation of their empire and the preservation of power of the existing elites. In that sense it is no different at all from fascism. The true difference between Nazism (not generic fascism) and communism is that Nazism was from the outset an explicitly expansionist militaristic beast that had its eyes on the resources of its neighbors. This is not to say that the Soviet Union did not have appetite for control of its neighbors, but the Nazi regime was uniquely geared towards war and indeed started a world war within less than a decade of assuming power.

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 25, 2009, 06:48:06 AM
We already know that morality in either case is not a factor (that's the very definition of an "extremist" ideology after all), but both Nazism and Communism offer interesting psychological insights into the nature of those who ascribe to right or left ideologies.

Pray tell, what could you possibly mean by that?

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 25, 2009, 06:48:06 AMIt also explains why conservatism is becoming stronger in Europe just as the EU is attempting to dismantle all European nations and cultures in favor of a globalist, multicultural "free for all".

Except that it isn't and that the EU is not doing any such thing. Your ideological blinders are blocking your view once more. You have to be exceptionally myopic to imagine the EU to be such an animal. All the EU is is an attempt to level the economic playing field, standardize laws and give a group of relatively small countries better political and economic bargaining power, while joining them in a common cause which keeps them at peace with each other. The EU subsidizes so many efforts to preserve cultural heritage that your statement is beyond absurd.

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on June 25, 2009, 06:48:06 AM
Fellini did an interesting study of the events that led to the wars of the 20th century in Prova d'Orchestra, and i have a feeling history is about to repeat itself. Right wing extremism is a response to left wing extremism.

Except that there is no actual left wing extremism worth speaking of in Europe today. You make it seem that leftist extremism is the cause and right-wing extremism the Pavlovian reaction to it. That is utter nonsense. Firstly, there hasn't been any serious left-wing extremism in Europe for the past thirty years or so. It disappeared once the last RAF and Red Brigades were locked up or disappeared never to be heard from again. Secondly, the rise of Hitler was no reaction to left wing extremism, but a reaction to the humiliation of WWI and the subsequent French occupation of the Rhine and Alsace and the economic crisis caused by the reparations payments. Yes, the Nazis were also anticommunist, but this was done in order to co-opt the industrial elites into siding with their cause. In many other parts of the world, leftist extremism was a reaction to brutal colonialism and a method for obtaining foreign sponsorship for a war of liberation, yet contrary to your hypothesis it did not necessarily provoke a fascist backlash.

The right wing extremism we see today is a reaction to structural economic change. It is mainly centered in rural regions that have suffered from what the French call the éxode rural, the movement of populations from declining rural areas to the cities. Often women leave small towns in greater numbers, leaving disproportionately more frustrated young males behind. In Germany it is exacerbated by a lack of education among those who grew up under Communism and never really properly studied the rise of Hitler. This social stratum provides a hotbed of dissatisfied youth with little opportunity. I did a study of right-wing extremism in Europe a few years ago and the paradoxical result was that the neo-fascists are particularly strong in rural areas that actually have very few foreigners. Most skinheads have had far too little interaction with foreigners to justify their hatred. Goes to show that scapegoats are all the better, the less you actually know about them.

Quote from: knight on June 22, 2009, 12:49:21 PM
The UK went to war because Germany invaded Poland and in the end, Poland was traded away into a slavery they possibly could not easily distinguish from the Nazi one in terms of the lack of freedom and misery caused.

It is called Western Betrayal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal)

QuoteWestern betrayal or Yalta betrayal are terms often used in many Eastern and Central European countries but especially in Poland and the Czech Republic which refers to the foreign policy of several Western countries, which violated allied pacts and agreements during the period from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 through World War II and to the Cold War, as rooted in hypocrisy and betrayal.

The "betrayal" refers to the fact that the western Allies—in spite of having promoted democracy and self-determination, signing pacts and forming military alliances prior and during World War II—nonetheless betrayed their Central European allies by abandoning these pacts, for example by not preventing Nazi Germany from invading and occupying Czechoslovakia (Munich Betrayal) or abandoning its Polish ally during the Invasion of Poland (1939) and 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Western powers also signed the Yalta agreement and after the World War II did nothing or very little to prevent these states from falling under the influence and control of Soviet communism. In addition, during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Hungary received neither military nor moral support from the Western powers during the uprising, which was eventually suppressed by the Soviet Army. The same scenario was repeated in 1968 when communist armies of Warsaw Pact nations led by the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring changes in the governing Communist system.

Though I wouldn't blame Churchill or FDR for their "cowardice" in Yalta, I am surprised to know that none of the Western countries intervened with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. :o It was plain violation of the country's sovereignty and the human rights. From very recently Stalinism is officially recognized as a crime against the humanity (it was on BBC news a month ago), though sometimes it seems to me that he was the only one to confront Hitler. Thankfully, they are both dead. What we can do now is to respect the victims of the war and those who died fighting for freedom. It is all over, and now I am more concerned about current events, such as the war in Iraq.

And again I see Florestan confusing socialism and communism with Stalinism. Ugh, let me write something on it.

Not so sure that Stalin was the only one to confront Hitler. Remember there was the pact they had together that allowed Stalin some land grabs of his own. Eventually Stalin confronted Hitler by throwing millions of his people into certain death and operating a scorched earth policy. He was as brutal with his own people as he was towards his enemy.

The allies were much more careful not to go down the cannon fodder route and I think it fair to say that a number faced Hitler down. What do you think D day and the subsequent months was all about?

However, by 1956 I believe there was no stomach for yet more war in Europe. So, then indeed, the new Stalin got his way.

Mike

Quote from: Florestan on June 24, 2009, 02:25:36 AM
I am curious about "the positive" aspects of Communism: is there anyone of them that would have not been achieved had Communism never took over this or that country?

Oddly enough, my ethics teacher here, in the US, told us that communism would have been the best system ever, had it not been for the human greed and desire to possess.

Many people (like you) instantly connect socialism to Stalinism, which was neither communism nor socialism, but rather a total abuse of power and the desire to spread his rule over neighboring regions. It only bore the name of "socialism," whereas it was not. Note that many European countries, Canada, and Singapore are mixed economies (a mixture of capitalism and socialism). Besides, social democratic parties are dominant in the UK, second-placed in Italy, Germany, and Sweden. Sweden by far has the higher standard of living. In a socialist society you are taken care of and are not left without a job. One of the suggested flaws of socialism is that you can not actually become extremely rich. But this is not true, just look at the founder of IKEA, a Swede. Besides, I haven't hear of any major economic crises in Europe over the past sixty years.

As we all saw last fall, free market economy can not exist on its own. Well, it can, but how long might it take to self-heal? The unemployment rate in California is 11.6%, or somewhat over 4 million people. I bet you wouldn't want to be one of those poor fellows who have degrees but can not find a job. Some of them are so desperate that they shoot their families and themselves. It is clear by now that the government has to step in and to a certain extent regulate the economy. Mr.Obama seems to understand this, ans his new reforms are quite socialist. As for Europe, the world economic meltdown did not strike it as hard, since it is more socialist. One more difference is that socialist countries provide free education and medical assistance for the people. In the American model you have to pay for everything yourself. I wanted to start a little argument about which model is better, but it seems that both are flawed ;D, so I'd rather wrap up. There are just people who love independence, and there are people who favor socialist views... can't do anything with it.

Again, it is understandable that you react on the word "socialism" in such a way, but it is a purely economical model, not political, and what was executed in the Soviet Union was not socialism, it was a distorted version of it in economics and something different politically.

Quote from: knight on August 15, 2009, 10:29:05 PM
Eventually Stalin confronted Hitler by throwing millions of his people into certain death and operating a scorched earth policy. He was as brutal with his own people as he was towards his enemy.

Well, you can't say "his own people," since he was Georgian by nationality (and born in Georgia), and his people would be the Georgians. Maybe that is why he did not care about the Slavs? >:D

And I probably need to note that I am not advocating for the "pure socialism," but it seems that a droplet of it in the economic system of any country is beneficial.

There is just this confusion of terms...maybe I should've used "welfare states" instead. Here:

QuoteSocial democrats propose selective nationalization of key national industries in mixed economies, while maintaining private ownership of capital and private business enterprise. Social democrats also promote tax-funded welfare programs and regulation of markets. Many social democrats, particularly in European welfare states, refer to themselves as "socialists", introducing a degree of ambiguity to the understanding of what the term means.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 15, 2009, 11:08:29 PM

Well, you can't say "his own people," since he was Georgian by nationality (and born in Georgia), and his people would be the Georgians. Maybe that is why he did not care about the Slavs? >:D

If he ruled them, they were his people. He may have shown some favour to specific Georgians; but was quick to have them shot when his paranoia set in.

Mike

Quote from: knight on August 15, 2009, 11:53:35 PM
If he ruled them, they were his people. He may have shown some favour to specific Georgians; but was quick to have them shot when his paranoia set in.

However, Stalin is regarded as a great national hero in Georgia even today, for reasons that are probably tribalistic and have nothing to do with communism. There are Stalin streets, parks, and statues. And be sure to check out the Stalin Museum, in his hometown of Gori:

http://www.stalinmuseum.ge/museumeng.html

Yes, cue for a diatribe on the machostic nature of some peoples and the craving for the firm smack of a Tsar in particular by this people.

Mike

Quote from: knight on August 15, 2009, 10:29:05 PM
However, by 1956 I believe there was no stomach for yet more war in Europe.

What about the Prague Spring in 1968? Same scenario.

Besides, although

Quote from: knight on June 22, 2009, 12:49:21 PM
The UK went to war because Germany invaded Poland

but

QuoteFrance, Britain, and the countries of the Commonwealth declared war on Germany but provided little military support to Poland other than a small French attack into the Saarland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II#Course_of_the_war

So, it is really unclear to me what were the real reasons, if after the war for many years the human rights defenders did nothing for the human rights just there in Europe. Thankfully, they liberated many African states, as well as India and Latin America...but that did not require any military action, I suppose?

You view history as black and white, which it is not. I am not happy that so much of Europe disappeared into a repressive mist. But, economically, I don't think that the UK could have sustained a war much beyond what they did.

I believe a lot has to be read from older history. Dealing with Russia has always been a thorny matter. Napoleon failed, Hitler forgot that lesson and stretched his supply lines way too far, experiencing the debilitating Russian winter, where the land being invaded had been substantially stripped of supplies and deserted.

That lesson sat fresh for those who might have been hungry for more fighting. There was ample proof that the Russian hierarchy was prepared to sacrifice its citizens en masse in a way the democracies were not. It was a bit like the suicide bomber attitude writ large. There is no way to deal with such an attitude in the short term.

Prague Spring in 1968 was deeply shocking. But the 'invasion' was one of a satellite state of the Communists, not an invasion of fresh territory. Just last year Ossetia was invaded and we did very little...being already stretched by involvement in two separate conflicts that we ought never to have been involved in.

Mike

Quote from: knight on August 16, 2009, 01:52:52 AM
There was ample proof that the Russian hierarchy was prepared to sacrifice its citizens en masse in a way the democracies were not. It was a bit like the suicide bomber attitude writ large. There is no way to deal with such an attitude in the short term.

I would not call this a "suicide bomber attitude" but the stance of people who were involved in a brutal struggle for survival. Nazism was a genocidally anti-Slavic ideology. This is why the situation in Poland and the USSR was so much harsher than in places like France, Denmark, and Belgium. The non-Jewish population of the Western countries was not targeted for mass extermination.

What the Nazis envisioned for the East:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

Well, reading other than Wyki........the Russian way to defeat Germany was mainly centred on sacrifice of enormous number of people....because they could spare them. This was the ideology there. Of course, it was a struggle for survival. Who would deny it. But rather as in WW1, the generals would sacrifice enormous numbers, because they could. Stalin in WWII because he could.

Mike

Quote from: Sarastro on August 15, 2009, 10:03:57 PM
Though I wouldn't blame Churchill or FDR for their "cowardice" in Yalta, I am surprised to know that none of the Western countries intervened with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. :o It was plain violation of the country's sovereignty and the human rights.

It's very simple, really. It's called the age of nuclear weapons. Nobody in the West considered either the fate of Hungary or the principle of national sovereignty important enough to risk nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 15, 2009, 11:08:29 PM
Oddly enough, my ethics teacher here, in the US, told us that communism would have been the best system ever, had it not been for the human greed and desire to possess.

Yes, but that is a very big qualifier. So big as to render the concept unworkable. If communism is a system that can only work for a society of hypothetical, utopian humans devoid of desires and egos, then it is of little practical use. The problem is that Marxism is so utopian that in order for any form of communism to be implemented it necessarily requires the violence and repression of some form of Leninism/Maoism/what have you. Where Marx really jumped head first into bullshitland was when he ascribed some 'scientific' methodology to his completely fictitious idea of the 'inevitability' of the demise of capitalism and the eventual victory of communism. This had two problems: firstly, there is no science to predicting the future and anytime you have millions of disparate individuals working on bringing the future about, you will have millions of possible outcomes. Inevitability, my left foot. This whole communist fascination with pseudo-science has given science all over the eastern block a bad name and is co-responsible for the rise of mysticism, sects and all sorts of other mistaken pseudo-religious worship in eastern Europe since the wall came down. Secondly, humans are by nature impatient. This is due to their mortality. If they are promised radical social change, they will want to see it within their own lifetime. So if someone tells you that capitalism is digging its own grave and that eventually communism will come about quite naturally, there will be this inexorable urge to assist the natural process by speeding things up a bit. Enter Leninist Bolsheviks. You see, this whole idea of perhaps waiting a few generations for capitalism to finally finish digging its own grave is massively unappealing and just not a great way to rally the masses politically. (I mean, what's their slogan gonna be: We demand social change! ... but we're not gonna do anything about it until whenever Capitalism finally commits suicide?) So the combination of a righteous conviction that communism is the 'inevitable' ultimate stage of human social development plus a revolutionary urge to end social injustice in the present produces a lethally dangerous combination of severe zealotry: communist revolutionaries convinced that they are doing the right thing will walk over bodies to achieve their aims. Because of its teleology, communism is inherently a kind of religion (any ideology that promises a kind of ultimate salvation in the form of utopia achieved is inherently dangerous in the same way, whether from the left or the right end of the spectrum). It leads by nature to the sort of abuses we have seen in every country that has ever used that label to ideologically describe itself.

The social market economies of Western Europe you describe are really neither here nor there. It would be wrong to label them socialist. In essence, they are non-ideological, pragmatic constructs evolved from decades of political compromises. That is difficult to grasp for the ideologically blind, like JDP or Coopmv, but modern Europe really has nothing to do with socialism. Their current system is merely the latest answer to the question of how to harness the market for the greatest social good. The free market ideologues all fail to grasp that there is by nature no such thing as a completely free market. All markets inherently require regulation, to ensure enforceability of contracts, prevent abuse, sanction uncompetitive and other behaviors that undermine the functioning of the market, etc. Without regulation the market is too volatile and unpredictable and the risks and costs of doing business are too high. The recent crisis illustrates precisely these dangers of an underregulated market: when risks aren't disclosed and disclosure isn't adequately monitored by a regulatory body, when corporate interests are permitted to consolidate to such an extent that they occupy a market dominant position, when lending and borrowing aren't monitored to ensure risk is minimized or at least adequately hedged, then the market risks devastating collapse. You are right that the free marketers are also mistaken to think that the market will self correct. This is untrue. What the un- or underregulated market does is to swing from one extreme to the other. Huge bubbles are followed by huge busts. The problem is that in an underregulated market these 'corrections' may take a generation or more to occur, leaving many people unable to control their economic future. This is neither morally just nor macroeconomically efficient.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 06:50:07 AM
This whole communist fascination with pseudo-science has given science all over the eastern block a bad name and is co-responsible for the rise of mysticism, sects and all sorts of other mistaken pseudo-religious worship in eastern Europe since the wall came down.

Although I agree with your analysis of Marxism and the flaws thereof, I want to take issue with this statement.

1. I don't think science has ever had "a bad name" in the Eastern Bloc; rather the opposite. First, educated people in those countries knew the difference between real science and ideological claptrap, because they saw the difference between the two in their everyday lives. Since real science could cure diseases and shoot rockets into space, it was highly prestigious. Sciences were also popular areas of study because it was difficult to ideologize them, unlike such subjects as economics and philosophy. If science has lost some of its prestige in those countries, it is mainly because the whole state support system for science collapsed along with the socialist system. In short, there's no money left for scientific research, so people have to do something else.

2. The rise of "mysticism" et al. actually predates the collapse of the system by a couple of decades at least; it is rooted above all in the failure of communist ideology to deliver the goods, and in the destruction of traditional religion. (You might want to track down the Latvian documentary Is It Easy to Be Young?, which was made in the mid-1980s and shows this phenomenon in some detail.) There was also a much stronger novelty value to these beliefs than in more open Western countries. But continuing adherence to mystical beliefs is also a result of the difficulties and disappointments of the post-Communist transition period.

Quote from: knight on August 15, 2009, 10:29:05 PM
Not so sure that Stalin was the only one to confront Hitler. Remember there was the pact they had together that allowed Stalin some land grabs of his own. Eventually Stalin confronted Hitler by throwing millions of his people into certain death and operating a scorched earth policy. He was as brutal with his own people as he was towards his enemy.

The allies were much more careful not to go down the cannon fodder route and I think it fair to say that a number faced Hitler down. What do you think D day and the subsequent months was all about?

However, by 1956 I believe there was no stomach for yet more war in Europe. So, then indeed, the new Stalin got his way.

Mike

by 1943 the soviet army became the most effective of the war.  It was not solely a matter of numbers or willingness to take casualties, the Soviets had the best tanks, the largest quantity of artillery and operational strategies that did the blitzkrieg better than Germany.  D-Day was june 1944, by that time the Soviets had won Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk, each of which was larger than Normandy.  In 1944 they launched Bagration which was the largest defeat suffered by Germany in the war.  80% of German casualties occurred on the Eastern front

Not sure what you are trying to prove here. Look at the comparative casualty figures. I don't think I have said anything at all that is less than true, though as I think I indicated, it is always complex and I am not writing a treatise.

Mike

Edit: Some stats from everyone's favourite source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_dead

Quote from: knight on August 16, 2009, 01:52:52 AM
But, economically, I don't think that the UK could have sustained a war much beyond what they did.

I don't think it was necessary to declare a war, but what shocked me is that it was not even voiced, and none of the Western countries expressed their concerns publicly. So the bully felt more freedom... As for Ossetia, everyone knows now what was the reason for the invasion. There have been theories that actually state it was prepared by the US and negotiated when Bush visited Georgia, but to now nothing makes sense to me. And I am not much into conspiracy theories.

I certainly don't view history as black and white. It just makes little sense to me that the countries which signed the Pact and, as you say, went to liberate oppressed nations under the human rights flag actually did nothing or very little.


PS: Interestingly, before I came to this board, I knew a little about WWII, but the continuous battles over "who was the worst" which rise frequently here prompted me to read more on the subject matter. My views have changed since, though I see other haven't.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 06:50:07 AM
Yes, but that is a very big qualifier.

I know. It was an irony. I should have rolled my eyes. ::) ;D

Quote from: Spitvalve on August 16, 2009, 07:27:41 AM
Although I agree with your analysis of Marxism and the flaws thereof, I want to take issue with this statement.

1. I don't think science has ever had "a bad name" in the Eastern Bloc; rather the opposite. First, educated people in those countries knew the difference between real science and ideological claptrap, because they saw the difference between the two in their everyday lives. Since real science could cure diseases and shoot rockets into space, it was highly prestigious. Sciences were also popular areas of study because it was difficult to ideologize them, unlike such subjects as economics and philosophy. If science has lost some of its prestige in those countries, it is mainly because the whole state support system for science collapsed along with the socialist system. In short, there's no money left for scientific research, so people have to do something else.

2. The rise of "mysticism" et al. actually predates the collapse of the system by a couple of decades at least; it is rooted above all in the failure of communist ideology to deliver the goods, and in the destruction of traditional religion. (You might want to track down the Latvian documentary Is It Easy to Be Young?, which was made in the mid-1980s and shows this phenomenon in some detail.) There was also a much stronger novelty value to these beliefs than in more open Western countries. But continuing adherence to mystical beliefs is also a result of the difficulties and disappointments of the post-Communist transition period.

I don't disagree with your points. Note that I said 'co-responsible', not exclusively responsible, in my original post. However, I would want to modify your first point somewhat. It is true that there was superb scientific work done in the Soviet bloc and that the educated knew the differences very well. But it isn't the educated who flock to the gurus. It is the uneducated who feel betrayed by the collapse of a system in which they believed and which extolled atheism and science, but which failed. As science and atheism were an explicit part of that system, they turned against both when they collapsed. It's not the only cause of it, but one of them. Plus, the educated people who understood the difference were among the first to leave and seek better lives in the US, Canada, Western Europe and Australia.

Back on topic, this is a very worthwhile article about a different aspect of our general ignorance in the West of what went on in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe during WWII:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875

This is also a great article on the brutality of the Eastern Front, but unfortunately only available to subscribers:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=22613

Quote from: Spitvalve on August 16, 2009, 07:27:41 AM
In short, there's no money left for scientific research, so people have to do something else.

An in the US, unfortunately, degrees in sciences (though very valuable) are not encouraged... people think it's hard, but they don't want to be blue collars, so they get diplomas in finance. ::)

I work as a math tutor and once was mightily shocked when I saw the lady who had prepared my income tax come with her Beginning of Algebra textbook to our Center.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 10:54:54 AM
This is also a great article on the brutality of the Eastern Front, but unfortunately only available to subscribers:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=22613

Could you copy and paste the text? :D I am not going to sell it...

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 10:45:13 AM

I certainly don't view history as black and white.

Actually; I think that is exactly what you are doing. We both agree, what happened should not have happened, but your seeming shock at inaction needs to be tempered with some more reading about the complexities of the situation. One point was that Russia acted like a bully, other countries did not have the stomach or the capability to take Russia to the line. There were diplomatic efforts, brushed off by Russia, exactly as it did last year.

There is also the consideration that the countries who would have to have acted, because anything short of action would have been pointless, were either involved elsewhere already, don't forget Korea, or would not have found the popular support for round two.

Mike

Sarastro,

I think you're too hung up on the human rights issue. That is a postwar concept and in any case played no role whatsoever in any country's entry into WWII. No country fought Germany to save the Jews or the Eastern Europeans. It was all about destroying a nascent new empire that severely undermined the status quo of the world system. England, Russia and the US would all have tolerated a mildly more powerful Germany, perhaps one that occupied half of Poland, annexed Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia, perhaps even more. But Russia was not going to tolerate having its buffer zone invaded, not to mention its territory proper, the UK and the US were not going to tolerate an occupation of France and continued bombing of the UK proper. It had nothing to do with human rights or democracy. Remember that the war allies were themselves at the time colonial powers occupying and suppressing other nations or upholding a system of racial segregation within their borders.

Even after the war, it took a very long time for human rights to play a major role. Really only Somalia, Kosovo and Bosnia could be properly counted as interventions primarily justified for human rights issues (and even then, we all know how well Somalia turned out...). Practically speaking, no country will risk blood and treasure for others alone. They usually need some additional motivation. That's why we will never have a system for redress of human rights violations until there is some kind of standing international force with police authority to intervene, national sovereignty be damned.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 11:07:38 AM
An in the US, unfortunately, degrees in sciences (though very valuable) are not encouraged... people think it's hard, but they don't want to be blue collars, so they get diplomas in finance. ::)

No, the really smart people get undergraduate degrees in  science (preferably some kind of engineering) and then go to law school and take the patent bar and become patent or IP lawyers. Those are just about the only people getting jobs in this market right now. ;-)

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 11:12:12 AM
Could you copy and paste the text? :D I am not going to sell it...

No, I can't. I have the paper copy, not the electronic subscription. Check your local library for that issue.

Quote from: knight on August 16, 2009, 11:15:38 AM
We both agree, what happened should not have happened, but your seeming shock at inaction needs to be tempered with some more reading about the complexities of the situation.

Well, I already wrote that I can not accuse Churchill and FDR for the Yalta Treaty, just for the complexities there were, but as for last year crisis I don't see any obstacles in boycotting Russia, since it "attacked" the ally and a EU candidate Georgia. We well understand that there even more complexities, such as oil and gas exports that Europe needs. Then why to hypocritically condemn those who violate human rights but do nothing? It seems that the West does not really care about Georgia, though everyone felt this urge to express how a young democracy should not be suffocated.

As Mensch pointed out to you: the world does not run on the principles we would like it to. Though, right now I listen to a daily death toll of British soldiers in Afghanistan, caused in part again by an inability to understand ancient or even recent history. There has is seems been mission creep there. The public here is very unclear why those soldiers are there. My own opinion is that we could have had more effect by using the invasion money on bribing those we wanted to influence. No soldiers would have died.

People do care, but countries cannot really rush about sorting things out, even if occasionally they try. Don't underestimate that gas threat. Billions of Euros are being contemplated in building an alternative pipeline to prevent Russia maintaining its energy stranglehold.

Mike

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 11:17:36 AM
It had nothing to do with human rights or democracy. Remember that the war allies were themselves at the time colonial powers occupying and suppressing other nations or upholding a system of racial segregation within their borders.

That's what I am trying to point out... I remember Florestan (in other threads) picturing the evil Soviets and the fluffy cute liberating West which fought for human rights and liberty. Well I hope they had some kind of spreading liberty in thought, but on the other hand they themselves had many things to be ashamed of. It is just a nice way of running things: picture an evil rival, and be friends against him, brainwashing people that they have to work hard against the common enemy. In some ways it is like religion, where there is the Devil, and you have to live good life and work hard in order to get to Heaven. Just make people believe it. The West pictures evil Russia, the Russians in their turn don't trust the West. Maybe I am being too naive, but I just can't understand why the governments can not stop this rivalry and let it be. For instance, like Canada.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 11:45:33 AM
That's what I am trying to point out... I remember Florestan (in other threads) picturing the evil Soviets and the fluffy cute liberating West which fought for human rights and liberty. Well I hope they had some kind of spreading liberty in thought, but on the other hand they themselves had many things to be ashamed of. It is just a nice way of running things: picture an evil rival, and be friends against him, brainwashing people that they have to work hard against the common enemy. In some ways it is like religion, where there is the Devil, and you have to live good life and work hard in order to get to Heaven. Just make people believe it. The West pictures evil Russia, the Russians in their turn don't trust the West. Maybe I am being too naive, but I just can't understand why the governments can not stop this rivalry and let it be. For instance, like Canada.

Well, that's the point. The whole human rights and good vs. evil rhetoric comes in very handy when troops and civilians need to be mobilized for battle, but it is never the casus belli in and of itself.

Re: stopping the rivalry, sure we can try. The EU is the best effort yet, quite frankly. None of its members will ever go to war with each other as long as the entity exists. It is borne from the realization that the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Of course, there are always the old nationalists like the Kaczinskis in Poland and other who just don't get it. What the world needs is more regional EU style arrangements. It would bind neighbors closer together in a common cause and create larger, more powerful markets that can resist one-sided exploitation by otherwise larger external powers, which has been the cause of so much resentment and violence.

PS: re: Canada, well that is a really unique case. It's such a small population with so much natural surplus, yet whose survival depended for so long on the benevolence of the US and its former colonial overlords in the UK. Even so, it's hardly always been a fluffy happy place. You may want to read up on Canada's relationship with its indigenous peoples even in recent times.

Re: Georgia, yes there is a Western plan for the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline which is a sore point for the Russians, as it will end their stranglehold on the EU whose natural gas supply they otherwise control almost entirely. Russia is a one trick pony. Its entire political muscle and economic growth in the Putin era is based on Russia's domination of European energy markets and on its oil fields being some of the very few with remaining output growth potential in a world that is otherwise past the peak of global oil production. Take the energy monopoly out of the equation and Russia becomes an unimportant backwater. Russia has long harrassed and tried to control Georgian domestic politics, from mobilizing the Abkhazians and Ossetians against them (never mind that this backfired because it ended up stirring Islamic Caucasian separatism which came to haunt Russia in Chechnya), to assassinating its first elected president and nearly doing so as well to Shevardnadse after he signed the first pipeline deal (and that was despite the fact that Shevardnadse was an old member of the Central Committe under Gorby). It's a sordid old story. I wrote about it at length here (http://tonicblotter.blogspot.com/2008/08/national-sovereignty-in-age-of.html). You make a very common mistake in your analysis, however: you assume that because you see one result, that result necessarily must have been someone's objective. You completely discount incompetence. It is not that the Georgians and the US had some rational plan and that the US then abandoned Georgia when things heated up. Saakashvili simply completely miscalculated the situation, was way too aggressive and nearly lost his country over his blunder. Life on the edge require much finer skills in brinkmanship than he displayed.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 12:33:58 PM
What the world needs is more regional EU style arrangements. It would bind neighbors closer together in a common cause and create larger, more powerful markets that can resist one-sided exploitation by otherwise larger external powers, which has been the cause of so much resentment and violence.

I am sure it's a good idea, however, I don't think it is achievable. Many EU companies like to outsource in other countries, and creating unions with powerful markets is an impediment in exploitation of those countries. Although formally there is no colonization any longer, financial colonization is still around. I read an article, which talked that it is simply not beneficial for the EU or US to help Mexico's free market development. Moreover, many American employers enjoy paying low wages and providing no benefits for their illegal employees, and EU manufacturing gets much cheaper if outsourced to Mexico. For once, capitalist slavery is probably better than other kinds of it.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 12:33:58 PM
PS: re: Canada, well that is a really unique case. It's such a small population with so much natural surplus, yet whose survival depended for so long on the benevolence of the US and its former colonial overlords in the UK. Even so, it's hardly always been a fluffy happy place. You may want to read up on Canada's relationship with its indigenous peoples even in recent times.

Well, no country is perfectly fluffy, especially if you take into account crime rates, etc., but what I meant is that it never had any imperial claims, never attacked the imaginary straw man of socialism, although was the only country to become genuinely concerned with the Hungarian uprising.
Another example that comes to my mind is Latin America. Though I know very little about them, it seems that they don't have any major issues, rather than civil wars, with the world or each other. Or, India does not seem to be concerned with Chinese growth, although many people here think of how to contain giant China and that China strives in the pursuit of driving out the US and becoming the only world's superpower. Well, is that true??

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 12:33:58 PM
Its entire political muscle and economic growth in the Putin era is based on Russia's domination of European energy markets and on its oil fields being some of the very few with remaining output growth potential in a world that is otherwise past the peak of global oil production. Take the energy monopoly out of the equation and Russia becomes an unimportant backwater.

I wonder if Putin and others ever realize what screwed policies they have. Probably, they do, but just don't care. It is unfortunate that most of the Russian export depends on natural resources, whereas the US conserves its oil and imports it from other countries. (Well, no, the US exports its oil to Japan.) I wonder if there will ever be a sane leader who will restructure the system. :(

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 12:33:58 PM
Russia has long harrassed and tried to control Georgian domestic politics, from mobilizing the Abkhazians and Ossetians against them (never mind that this backfired because it ended up stirring Islamic Caucasian separatism which came to haunt Russia in Chechnya)

Yes, and the terrorist attack on 9/11 played a role, so that now those wars are said to be "against terrorism". This is quite hypocritical. But now, there is a common "bad guy" Afghanistan to be friends against, so it works out.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 12:33:58 PM
It is not that the Georgians and the US had some rational plan and that the US then abandoned Georgia when things heated up.

No, this is not what I believe. However, quite recently I went to a party, where the youth watched conspiracy videos about 9/11 and others and condemned the American government. ;D I just remember this one about Georgia.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 01:30:36 PM
I am sure it's a good idea, however, I don't think it is achievable. Many EU companies like to outsource in other countries, and creating unions with powerful markets is an impediment in exploitation of those countries. Although formally there is no colonization any longer, financial colonization is still around. I read an article, which talked that it is simply not beneficial for the EU or US to help Mexico's free market development. Moreover, many American employers enjoy paying low wages and providing no benefits for their illegal employees, and EU manufacturing gets much cheaper if outsourced to Mexico. For once, capitalist slavery is probably better than other kinds of it.

That is an argument for, not against, regional EU-style arrangements, from the perspective of the relevant nations at least. The reason it is not feasible at the moment is the lack of a critical mass of stable governments in most regions and lots of unfinished business from the cold war era when many of those countries were pitted against each other in proxy wars by the two superpowers. Africa, for example is pretty hopeless at the moment, with Kenya in disarray and even South Africa's political leadership in a bit of crisis. South East Asia is structurally not ready with too many autocratic regimes, in east Asia, South Korea and Japan are the only nominal democracies and they are not too fond of each other because the latter never apologized for colonizing the former. South American in due course may have some potential with many of the economies having stabilized and featuring broadly aligned left-of-center governments. We will see...

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 01:30:36 PM
Well, no country is perfectly fluffy, especially if you take into account crime rates, etc., but what I meant is that it never had any imperial claims, never attacked the imaginary straw man of socialism, although was the only country to become genuinely concerned with the Hungarian uprising.

...and did absolutely nothing about it. It's easy to wag the moral finger if you have no wherewithal to back up your rhetoric, if you will never be asked to let actions follow your words. The Canadians can hide behind the American nuclear umbrella and pontificate all they want. Fact remains their existence is dependent on the US and UK and they did not intervene anytime their two sponsors didn't.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 01:30:36 PM
Another example that comes to my mind is Latin America. Though I know very little about them, it seems that they don't have any major issues, rather than civil wars, with the world or each other. Or, India does not seem to be concerned with Chinese growth, although many people here think of how to contain giant China and that China strives in the pursuit of driving out the US and becoming the only world's superpower. Well, is that true??

No. Central America is still largely a mess (Costa Rica being a notable exception) due to the mess caused by the proxy wars of the Cold War and the ongoing narco business. China and India are very much in competition for regional hegemony among their neighbors. That is also what the whole mess in Myanmar is all about in part. China is currently on a course for unsustainability. Unless it changes its ways, nature will end its superpower ambitions faster than any other powers could.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 01:51:49 PM
China is currently on a course for unsustainability.

I thought they had the one child policy, which is supposed to cause reduction in population in the mid-century. Besides, some analysts say that with lack of food China will just invade other nations. >:D >:D It has the largest standing army in the world.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 02:20:43 PM
I thought they had the one child policy, which is supposed to cause reduction in population in the mid-century.

That doesn't matter. At current levels of industrial development, there won't be sufficient resources for their industry to keep going and then it is irrelevant if they have the largest army because they won't have fuel for their planes and tanks. They are investing in renewable resources (and are on the verge of possibly eclipsing the West as the largest producer of solar panels), but it remains to be seen how committed they are to that and how effective they will be in curbing their population's appetite for more consumption.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 02:42:38 PM
That doesn't matter. At current levels of industrial development, there won't be sufficient resources for their industry to keep going and then it is irrelevant if they have the largest army because they won't have fuel for their planes and tanks. They are investing in renewable resources (and are on the verge of possibly eclipsing the West as the largest producer of solar panels), but it remains to be seen how committed they are to that and how effective they will be in curbing their population's appetite for more consumption.

I am quite surprised that you posted this, after the "I feel ashamed in being human" thread. ;D Don't know about you, but I certainly can not see the future. Maybe next year half of China's population will die out from a new disease, like two thirds of Europe died from plague, or something else will happen... I am quite optimistic about China's future, though, -- it is the oldest civilization and has been around for a while.

It is a very profound note, though, that no system can go on forever -- the bubble has to eventually burst. And nothing will last forever.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 12:33:58 PM
assassinating its first elected president

Isn't this just speculation on your part? There are a bunch of theories about Gamsakhurdia's death, including suicide; none have been proven.

Also, he died in a village in Georgia, not in Chechnya as your blogpost states (though he was buried in Chechnya). As to the post itself, it is certainly interesting, and I find points of both agreement and disagreement, but am too lazy to do a detailed critique of it.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 01:30:36 PM
I wonder if Putin and others ever realize what screwed policies they have. Probably, they do, but just don't care.

There is ample evidence that they know and care; they just don't know how to fix the situation. Medvedev has decried "legal nihilism" (i.e. the weakness of the country's legal system) and corruption; he gave a speech (which you can find on the Kremlin website) attacking the historic Russian tendency to build up the state at the expense of the individual. Putin has a very clear idea of how Communism screwed up Russia, and a reasonably good idea of how successful modern countries work (this is particularly clear from the collection of interviews with him called First Person). But how to get there from here is a problem they haven't solved, despite some obvious improvements in recent years. It reminds me of the statement by the Polish dissident & editor Adam Michnik, that going from capitalism to socialism was like turning an aquarium into fish soup, and going from socialism to capitalism was like doing the opposite. 

Quote from: Sarastro on August 15, 2009, 11:08:29 PM
Oddly enough, my ethics teacher here, in the US, told us that communism would have been the best system ever, had it not been for the human greed and desire to possess.

etc.

etc,

etc.

Although I don't find myself too often in agreement with O Mensch when it comes to politics, this time I have to admit that he corrected your distorted views, and refuted the fantastic claim of your ethics teacher there in the US, in a superb way. I have nothing more to add in this respect.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 16, 2009, 11:45:33 AM
I remember Florestan (in other threads) picturing the evil Soviets and the fluffy cute liberating West which fought for human rights and liberty.

I'd like to see the proof for this assertion, please.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 16, 2009, 06:50:07 AM
...

The social market economies of Western Europe you describe are really neither here nor there. It would be wrong to label them socialist. In essence, they are non-ideological, pragmatic constructs evolved from decades of political compromises. That is difficult to grasp for the ideologically blind, like JDP or Coopmv, but modern Europe really has nothing to do with socialism. Their current system is merely the latest answer to the question of how to harness the market for the greatest social good. The free market ideologues all fail to grasp that there is by nature no such thing as a completely free market. All markets inherently require regulation, to ensure enforceability of contracts, prevent abuse, sanction uncompetitive and other behaviors that undermine the functioning of the market, etc. Without regulation the market is too volatile and unpredictable and the risks and costs of doing business are too high. The recent crisis illustrates precisely these dangers of an underregulated market: when risks aren't disclosed and disclosure isn't adequately monitored by a regulatory body, when corporate interests are permitted to consolidate to such an extent that they occupy a market dominant position, when lending and borrowing aren't monitored to ensure risk is minimized or at least adequately hedged, then the market risks devastating collapse. You are right that the free marketers are also mistaken to think that the market will self correct. This is untrue. What the un- or underregulated market does is to swing from one extreme to the other. Huge bubbles are followed by huge busts. The problem is that in an underregulated market these 'corrections' may take a generation or more to occur, leaving many people unable to control their economic future. This is neither morally just nor macroeconomically efficient.

Even so, O Mensch.

All so very true.  What appalls me as a Canadian observer of the U.S. situation, is the inability of American voters and polititians to perceive and acknowledge these things.  The fact is that Europe, in general, has been a lot more successful at mitigating the nastier market realities in the interest of the majority of citizens than has the U.S.

How many time during and since the Presidential campaign have I heard some conservative politician there say in effect, "we don't want that do we? It would be copying the Europeans and therefore Un-American"; (with respect to the current healthcare issue there, for example).  Americans, of course, will point out that theirs is the most successful, (not to mention the most free & just, blah-yada), country in the world.  To which I respond the most successul so far, but you are loosing momentum very fast.

Quote from: Florestan on August 16, 2009, 10:44:28 PM
the fantastic claim of your ethics teacher

If you haven't understood, it was an irony . . . . . . As for the rest, you can read wikipedia on social democracies, and again it was corrected that the term "socialism" is often used incorrectly. It is not about politics, it's about economics.

Quote from: Florestan on August 16, 2009, 10:44:28 PM
I'd like to see the proof for this assertion, please.

I don't have the time for the moment, but I'll go back (a year or so) to find your posts on that matter and your bias.

the caveats about regulation and government intervention is that people often fall into a fallacy that government is a disinterested player who can act impartially, when in fact government policies are the result of politicians and bureaucrats acting in their own self interest which may or may not coincide with the interests of the majority of citizens.  The greater the power of government to regulate and micromanage the economy, the greater the rewards to unions and corporate interests to sway the process to get regulations written in a way to benefit themselves.  The funds spent on lobbying and swaying legislators contribute nothing to the national wealth.  The sugar and ethanol industry in the US is the poster child for this.  In the private sector, bad business models do not survive.  However the pork-barrel economics of concentrated benefits vs. diffuse costs are extremely difficult to get around. For example, everyone in the US pays a few dollars more per year for sugar than they would without the tariff, and a few sugar farmers in Florida make millions from it.  The average citizen has no incentive to lobby to change the policy but the beneficiaries of the policy will hire lobbyists, contribute to campaigns, offer lucrative consulting jobs to former gov officials all to preserve their handouts.  Europe and Japan have a corporatist economies, not a socialist ones. 

Quote from: bwv 1080 on August 17, 2009, 09:47:38 AM
the caveats about regulation and government intervention is that people often fall into a fallacy that government is a disinterested player who can act impartially, when in fact government policies are the result of politicians and bureaucrats acting in their own self interest which may or may not coincide with the interests of the majority of citizens.  The greater the power of government to regulate and micromanage the economy, the greater the rewards to unions and corporate interests to sway the process to get regulations written in a way to benefit themselves.  The funds spent on lobbying and swaying legislators contribute nothing to the national wealth.  The sugar and ethanol industry in the US is the poster child for this.  In the private sector, bad business models do not survive.  However the pork-barrel economics of concentrated benefits vs. diffuse costs are extremely difficult to get around. For example, everyone in the US pays a few dollars more per year for sugar than they would without the tariff, and a few sugar farmers in Florida make millions from it.  The average citizen has no incentive to lobby to change the policy but the beneficiaries of the policy will hire lobbyists, contribute to campaigns, offer lucrative consulting jobs to former gov officials all to preserve their handouts.  Europe and Japan have a corporatist economies, not a socialist ones. 

A good deal of truth there, BWV 1080.  But you assume too much of the private sector and the efficiency of market to week out bad business models.  The whole sub-prime/derivatives market fiasco was a bad business model the endured far too long largely due to deregulation, and when it was finally "weeded out", it took the world economy down with it.

Quote from: Feanor on August 17, 2009, 09:58:05 AM
A good deal of truth there, BWV 1080.  But you assume too much of the private sector and the efficiency of market to week out bad business models.  The whole sub-prime/derivatives market fiasco was a bad business model the endured far too long largely due to deregulation, and when it was finally "weeded out", it took the world economy down with it.

well the bad business models got weeded out didn't they?

think about the politics of doing something in, say, 2005 to prevent the panic of 2007-2008.  The remedy would have caused 1) dramatic decline in residential construction, throwing people out of work, 2) the tightening of access to credit for low income home buyers and 3) a falloff in underwriting profits for the banking industry (which had huge influence and lobbying efforts with both the democratic and republican congress).  Can anyone really believe that any government official would take the political fallout from 1-3 over what at that point was only a concern that things were getting out of hand?

and why was a housing bubble across Europe?

(http://collegeanalysts.com/images/europe_housing.jpg)

Quote from: bwv 1080 on August 17, 2009, 10:59:42 AM
well the bad business models got weeded out didn't they?

think about the politics of doing something in, say, 2005 to prevent the panic of 2007-2008.  The remedy would have caused 1) dramatic decline in residential construction, throwing people out of work, 2) the tightening of access to credit for low income home buyers and 3) a falloff in underwriting profits for the banking industry (which had huge influence and lobbying efforts with both the democratic and republican congress).  Can anyone really believe that any government official would take the political fallout from 1-3 over what at that point was only a concern that things were getting out of hand?

and why was a housing bubble across Europe?

(http://collegeanalysts.com/images/europe_housing.jpg)

Here again, your logic per se is impeccable, but ...

Effects (1) and (2) might not have been so drastic as you suggest, especially if remedy had been undertake earlier than 2005.  Meanwhile a effect (3), roll-off of the profits of the banking industry, might not have been such a bad thing, after all it would have forewarned of trouble to come.  The whole evolution of the mortgage derivatives market due to deregulation -- a mistake, as Greenspan admitted -- artificially inflated banking profits while obfiscating the underlying risk associated with the sub-prime mortgage market.

There is not denying the power of corporate lobbies, (especially in the US), but the financial collapse is precisely the consequence of listening to "the market can't be wrong" ideology and doing what the lobbies are paying you to do instead of having active, intelligent regulation.  Canadian and Indian banks, (for example), where vitually unaffected by derivative defaults because regulators in their countries didn't permit these investments.

The underlying problem with the US ecomony is that it has attempted to ignore global realities -- while at the same time, ironically, the global economy attempted to ignore US realities.  The reality is that the globalization and ever scarcer resources undermined the prosperity of the US consumer -- upon the world trade has relied heretofore.  The standard of living of the US consumer, and his purchasing power while real wages declined, were kept afoat by borrowing: a thing that couldn't go on forever.  Sub-prime defaults were only the tip of the iceberg of the grossly over extended US consumer, but they were sufficient to kick off the current crisis.  Incidentally, only a fool would believe that long-term US prosperity can be restore solely by tax cuts and encouraging consumers spending (in reality, consumer borrowing) -- but there are plenty of fools in Congress, or maybe they are less fools than greedy for lobbiest payoffs.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 08:12:31 AM
As for the rest, you can read wikipedia on social democracies, and again it was corrected that the term "socialism" is often used incorrectly. It is not about politics, it's about economics.

If you really believe that the economics of USSR was the same as that of Sweden and Brezhnev was a kind of Olof Palme you're truly delusional.

Besides, you keep extolling Sweden and lambasting US yet you didn't go to Uppsala but to California. Rather strange...

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 08:12:31 AMI don't have the time for the moment, but I'll go back (a year or so) to find your posts on that matter and your bias.

By all means, please do. As for my "bias" against anything that has to do with "communism" or "socialism" or whatever you'd like to call the system that ruled East of the Iron Curtain from 1945 to 1989, I never disguised it --- I just call it by the real name: common-sense.

Quote from: Spitvalve on August 16, 2009, 10:16:19 PM
Isn't this just speculation on your part? There are a bunch of theories about Gamsakhurdia's death, including suicide; none have been proven.

Speculation, admittedly, though quite credible, IMHO.

Quote from: Spitvalve on August 16, 2009, 10:16:19 PM
Also, he died in a village in Georgia, not in Chechnya as your blogpost states (though he was buried in Chechnya).

You are correct. My mistake.

Quote from: Feanor on August 17, 2009, 07:31:48 AM
All so very true.  What appalls me as a Canadian observer of the U.S. situation, is the inability of American voters and polititians to perceive and acknowledge these things.  The fact is that Europe, in general, has been a lot more successful at mitigating the nastier market realities in the interest of the majority of citizens than has the U.S.

How many time during and since the Presidential campaign have I heard some conservative politician there say in effect, "we don't want that do we? It would be copying the Europeans and therefore Un-American"; (with respect to the current healthcare issue there, for example).  Americans, of course, will point out that theirs is the most successful, (not to mention them most free & just, blah-yada), country in the world.  To which I respond the most successul so far, but you are loosing momentum very fast.

Well, that view is understandable, though distorted. The US political system is a very bad representation of its present population. It is an ancient constitution that hasn't been substantively reformed since the Civil War at least. It gives disproportionate representation to underpopulated rural states, and even within more populous urban states, the rural areas are overrepresented. The reasons for this are manifold, but the result is that it is still easy for moneyed interests to sponsor politicians through donations who then spout age old appeals to American Western myth and prevent an effective discussion of the actual issues. On the substantive issues, US public opinion generally is not nearly as divergent from Canada or Europe as the stereotypes would make it seem. There is a very deep dichotomy between rural America and urban America, and population-wise urban America is outgrowing rural America rapidly. Sooner or later this will require some significant structural adjustments to be made to the constitutional order of the country. I don't think there is another democracy in operation today that has not substantively overhauled its constitution in so long of a time.

Quote from: bwv 1080 on August 17, 2009, 09:47:38 AM
the caveats about regulation and government intervention is that people often fall into a fallacy that government is a disinterested player who can act impartially, when in fact government policies are the result of politicians and bureaucrats acting in their own self interest which may or may not coincide with the interests of the majority of citizens.  The greater the power of government to regulate and micromanage the economy, the greater the rewards to unions and corporate interests to sway the process to get regulations written in a way to benefit themselves.  The funds spent on lobbying and swaying legislators contribute nothing to the national wealth.  The sugar and ethanol industry in the US is the poster child for this.  In the private sector, bad business models do not survive.  However the pork-barrel economics of concentrated benefits vs. diffuse costs are extremely difficult to get around. For example, everyone in the US pays a few dollars more per year for sugar than they would without the tariff, and a few sugar farmers in Florida make millions from it.  The average citizen has no incentive to lobby to change the policy but the beneficiaries of the policy will hire lobbyists, contribute to campaigns, offer lucrative consulting jobs to former gov officials all to preserve their handouts.  Europe and Japan have a corporatist economies, not a socialist ones. 

I don't really agree with that. The problem in the US is the two party system and the campaign finance system. Eliminate those (and they don't exist in this form anywhere else) and you don't have nearly as corrupt a system. If political campaigns are publicly funded, or funded only by natural individuals up to a cap, then it becomes nearly impossible to exact the level of influence over politics that corporations do (and unions used to but no longer really do in any meaningful way) in the US. And if you have multiple parties, then you can no longer afford to do this sort of ruinous politics where each side, when in the minority, seeks to ensure that the other side's projects fail in order to win the next election. Multiparty systems have a way of engendering more long term thinking and cooperation because you never know who your next coalition partner may have to be, so you can't afford to completely torpedo their efforts all the time, the way Republicans have been doing to Democrats at least since 1994. Japan with its zaibatsus and LDP hegemony over politics is a unique case. Western Europe with its powerful unions and semi-state-owned or state-sponsored companies used to be very corporatist until about twenty years ago or so, but today the model has been very much watered down. The main left-of center and right-of center popular parties all over Western Europe are struggling in the polls precisely because their old support structure no longer exists the way it did from the 50s to the 80s.

Quote from: bwv 1080 on August 17, 2009, 10:59:42 AM
well the bad business models got weeded out didn't they?

think about the politics of doing something in, say, 2005 to prevent the panic of 2007-2008.  The remedy would have caused 1) dramatic decline in residential construction, throwing people out of work, 2) the tightening of access to credit for low income home buyers and 3) a falloff in underwriting profits for the banking industry (which had huge influence and lobbying efforts with both the democratic and republican congress).  Can anyone really believe that any government official would take the political fallout from 1-3 over what at that point was only a concern that things were getting out of hand?

and why was a housing bubble across Europe?

Adding to Feanor's comments, I don't think the political fallout would have been as problematic if this had been done a little earlier. The main thing to do would have been to raise interest rates maybe some time in 2003 or 2004 when the economy seemed to have recovered from the 2001-2002 recession.* That would have curbed the bubble greatly in and of itself, in addition to giving the Fed some actual ability to respond better in 2008 had the market still declined in some form. Secondly, there really needs to be some shift away from the mythology of home ownership. Americans move so frequently on average that for many people home ownership is simply not an economically sensible choice, even with all the built-in government support through tax subsidies for developers and tax deductions for home buyers. There are also no excuses for the various regulatory oversights that enabled the bubble.

*Of course, the real problem with my suggestion is that in 2003 nobody wanted to admit that the majority of the growth at the time came from the multiplier effect from increased security expenditures post-9-11 and that the economy wasn't really out of its first Dubya-recession yet.

PS: I love it how the topic of these threads just meanders gently.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 12:51:44 PM
If you really believe that the economics of USSR was the same as that of Sweden and Brezhnev was a kind of Olof Palme

Actually, I don't. Re-read my post carefully:

Quote from: Sarastro on August 15, 2009, 11:08:29 PM
Many people (like you) instantly connect socialism to Stalinism, which was neither communism nor socialism, but rather a total abuse of power and the desire to spread his rule over neighboring regions. It only bore the name of "socialism," whereas it was not.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 12:51:44 PM
Besides, you keep extolling Sweden

I mentioned Sweden only once as an example.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 12:51:44 PM
and lambasting US

I like the US, but certainly there are things that could be better. And as you may see many people from the US are quite critical of the government. That is normal.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 12:51:44 PM
Rather strange...

Rather strange is your remark. I was brought here when I was underage. Apparently, I could not decide where to go. And even if I could, I would choose California for its weather.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 12:51:44 PMAs for my "bias" against anything that has to do with "communism" or "socialism" or whatever you'd like to call the system that ruled East of the Iron Curtain from 1945 to 1989, I never disguised it --- I just call it by the real name: common-sense.

You are missing the point. You are confusing the terms, and I am trying to point this out. Once again: stalinism is no socialism (nor is it communism). Your bias certainly manifests itself in the wording.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 06:49:24 PM
You are missing the point. You are confusing the terms, and I am trying to point this out. Once again: stalinism is no socialism (nor is it communism). Your bias certainly manifests itself in the wording.

Well, to be fair, I think Florestan has a point. See my extended response to you on the inevitability of moral disaster inherent in communist revolution. You can't really have communism without it leading to the kind of Leninsm/Maoism/Titoism etc. that we have seen in each instance where such ideology was attempted to be applied to a nation-state. It's perfectly fair to call the historic manifestation of communism that existed from 1918 to 1989 'communism' for lack of a better word. I'll grant you that Stalinism is quite a different animal, not necessarily one borne from the socio-political trajectory of the October revolution, but a phenomenon unique to his person and the Russian situation at the time. That being said, it is indeed patently wrong to call European social-democracy 'socialism' in the sense that this word was used behind the Iron curtain. It never was that and never sought to achieve that.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 17, 2009, 07:02:53 PM
the inevitability of moral disaster inherent in communist revolution

But my point isn't about that! My whole point is that Florestan calls stalinism socialism/communism. The former is not an economic system but a political doctrine.

Quote from: Florestan on August 16, 2009, 10:44:28 PM
I'd like to see the proof for this assertion, please.

Oops, sorry, I confused you with Bunny. :o Just looked in the "Russian attacks over Georgia" thread. 

But still, I think we should distinguish socialism as the economic system and the governments that evolved from it, which used this word as to disguise their intents. I am anyway no fan of socialism or communism per se, though there are some good points in socialism. People are different: some of them like entrepreneurship and competitive market, others are fine with just holding a position, walking to work and back and care less, so an economy should be balanced for them all. You can't change the human nature (yet). And again I am not defending the Soviet system but rather point out how it distorted the original theory that had something positive in it.

O Mensch

Quote from: O Mensch on August 17, 2009, 07:02:53 PM
Well, to be fair, I think Florestan has a point.

Thanks.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 17, 2009, 07:02:53 PM
See my extended response to you on the inevitability of moral disaster inherent in communist revolution. You can't really have communism without it leading to the kind of Leninsm/Maoism/Titoism etc. that we have seen in each instance where such ideology was attempted to be applied to a nation-state. It's perfectly fair to call the historic manifestation of communism that existed from 1918 to 1989 'communism' for lack of a better word.

Precisely. Not only for lack of a better word, but also for what they called themselves.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 17, 2009, 07:02:53 PMI'll grant you that Stalinism is quite a different animal, not necessarily one borne from the socio-political trajectory of the October revolution, but a phenomenon unique to his person and the Russian situation at the time. That being said, it is indeed patently wrong to call European social-democracy 'socialism' in the sense that this word was used behind the Iron curtain. It never was that and never sought to achieve that.

Agreed on all points, but especially on the highlight. Politics aside, equating the economic "socialism" (or "whatever it is called") practiced east of iron curtain with the economic "socialism" (or "whatever it is called" --- I think "social-democracy" is indeed the more apt term) practiced west of it is plain wrong. That is my whole point and you understand it correctly (not that I expected otherwise).

Sarastro

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 08:23:53 PM
Oops, sorry, I confused you with Bunny. :o Just looked in the "Russian attacks over Georgia" thread. 

I expected something like that...  :D

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 08:23:53 PMBut still, I think we should distinguish socialism as the economic system and the governments that evolved from it, which used this word as to disguise their intents.

What we should distuinguish, and I apologize for repeating it, is the "socialism/whatever" east of iron curtain from the "socialism/social-democracy/whatever" west of iron curtain. Two totally different systems, with totally different goals and totally different policies to achieve them. (Incidentally, it was a social-democrat government that crushed the communist uprisings in Germany in the aftermath of WWI). Can we agree on this point?

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 08:23:53 PMI am anyway no fan of socialism or communism per se,

I hope so.  0:)

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 08:23:53 PMPeople are different: some of them like entrepreneurship and competitive market, others are fine with just holding a position, walking to work and back and care less, so an economy should be balanced for them all.

I certainly agree on that, but again: such a balance was sought for and maybe achieved in western-style social-democracy and purely on pragmatic grounds, as O Mensch aptly noticed; eastern-style socialism completely eliminated one side on purely ideological grounds.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 08:23:53 PM
You can't change the human nature (yet).

You'll never be able to change human nature, period.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 08:23:53 PM
And again I am not defending the Soviet system but rather point out how it distorted the original theory that had something positive in it.

This distortion was not an accident: it was the very nature of the Communist political system to do so. Re-read the excellent analysis of O Mensch regarding the inevitability of the communist disaster.

Once again: Sweden was no Socialist Republic of Romania and France was no USSR.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 11:00:07 PM
That is my whole point and you understand it correctly.

That was my point, which you did not get before. You called the Soviet government "socialist" and "communist" because you lived under the regime and thought it was socialism and communism, but never knew what real socialism was about. The philosophy of those systems is quite a different topic, though, and again it has nothing to do with my point -- explaining what socialism is, i.e. the socialism used in the West.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 11:00:07 PM
I certainly agree on that, but again: such a balance was sought for and maybe achieved in western-style social-democracy and purely on pragmatic grounds, as O Mensch aptly noticed; eastern-style socialism completely eliminated one side on purely ideological grounds.

Again: what was in the east, was not socialism, although they called it that way.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 11:00:07 PM
You'll never be able to change human nature, period.

Who knows . . . . . evolution continues.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 11:00:07 PM
Re-read the excellent analysis of O Mensch regarding the inevitability of the communist disaster.

I was not talking about the nature of communism, rather about what socialism really means. :) But either you are trying to distort my post in your favor, or don't read carefully, or I have troubles expressing my point of view.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 17, 2009, 11:33:15 PM
That was my point, which you did not get before. You called the Soviet government "socialist" and "communist" because you lived under the regime and thought it was socialism and communism, but never knew what real socialism was about. The philosophy of those systems is quite a different topic, though, and again it has nothing to do with my point -- explaining what socialism is, i.e. the socialism used in the West.

It looks like the only issue we have is a terminological one.

Let's not stumble on words. I ask you once again: do you agree that the economical system practiced in Western Europe under the banner of "socialism" was completely different and yielded completely different results than the economical system practiced in Eastern Europe under the banner of "socialism"?

If yes, do you agree, furthermore, that this difference follows from the difference in the political philosophies of, say, the German Social-Democrat Party and the Communist Party of USSR?

If yes again then we are in agreement. But I will still use "communism" for what happened in Eastern Euriope and Russia 1918-1989: that's what most ruling parties called themselves and that was the official ideology. Why it is so hard for you to accept that is beyond me. Be it as it may, this is going to be my final post on the issue. I made my points as clear as I could.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 11:48:12 PM
I ask you once again: do you agree that the economical system practiced in Western Europe under the banner of "socialism" was completely different and yielded completely different results than the economical system practiced in Eastern Europe under the banner of "socialism"?

I wrote about this in my first post.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 11:48:12 PM
It looks like the only issue we have is a terminological one.

And I wrote about this, too. Many times. :)

If our points are the same, why are you arguing and restating posts over and over again?

I don't want you guys to backtrack to when this was said (especially since it doesn't matter for the discussion at hand) but I just wanted to point out that comparing Hitler's and Stalin's regimes makes more sense (or at least is more valid) if you're talking about similar situations. Eg. peacetime Nazi Germany with peacetime Soviet Russia. Or: living in a country occupied by the Soviets in the period 1939-1941 to living in a country occupied by the Nazis in same period. Poland is actually a very good case to study, simply because it was occupied by both the Soviet and German forces. If you look at it in those terms, the only striking difference is the approach towards Jews. But that doesn't mean Jews were "safe" on the other side of the line. In the Eastern terrains they weren't singled out for persecution and extermination but did that make them safe? While Jews weren't singled out, the Red Army did employ ethnic cleansing and incited ethnic hatred (leading, for example, to mass killings of Poles in the Ukraine - all this while Ukrainian and Belorussian national leaders were being arrested too). Life under Soviet occupation was terrifying. Mass executions (of both soldiers and civilians) and deportations (to camps or sites of mass execution). Everything and anything of lasting value was stolen and transported deep into Soviet territory (entire factories, machinery, trains, cars, livestock, museums, libraries, private art collections etc.). Churches were closed down and changed into storehouses, cinemas etc. And how could there have been significant differences? The NKVD and the Gestapo were close collaborators! Their actions were actually coordinated (cf. the simultaneous realization of the AB-Aktion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_AB-Aktion_in_Poland) and the Katyn-Kharkiv-Tver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn) massacre). In fact, they held several (at least four) conferences together - these were devoted to improving methods of extermination! According to the minutes of one of these conferences, the plan was to completely eliminate, through joint effort, the Polish nation from the face of the earth by 1975. That sort of makes the whole exercise of comparing the two regimes rather pointless...

So, if you asked me where I'd rather be living in 1939-1941, I wouldn't find the choice all that obvious. Or, actually, I would. America! ;D

Quote from: Maciek on August 18, 2009, 12:35:27 AM
I don't want you guys to backtrack etc.

Excellent post, Maciek!

Quote from: Sarastro on August 18, 2009, 12:00:18 AM
If our points are the same, why are you arguing and restating posts over and over again?

For you to finally understand and not take me to issues every time I write about Communism (not that I shall respond anymore :) ).

Quote from: Maciek on August 18, 2009, 12:35:27 AM
In fact, they held several (at least four) conferences together - these were devoted to improving methods of extermination! According to the minutes of one of these conferences, the plan was to completely eliminate, through joint effort, the Polish nation from the face of the earth by 1975.

Am curious - do you have an informative link or article about this? I've tried to find some info, but I keep getting basically the same Wikipedia page in different forms (and the Russian-language page appears to be exactly the same as the English one). Even if your source is in Polish, I would be glad to see it.

Quote from: Maciek on August 18, 2009, 12:35:27 AM
I don't want you guys to backtrack to when this was said (especially since it doesn't matter for the discussion at hand) but I just wanted to point out that comparing Hitler's and Stalin's regimes makes more sense (or at least is more valid) if you're talking about similar situations. Eg. peacetime Nazi Germany with peacetime Soviet Russia. ...

Maciek, you hint at an interesting topic.  Comparatively for the average, non-political citizen, which place was the preferable place to live while peace persisted: Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR?  Doubtless Germany.

Quote from: Spitvalve on August 18, 2009, 01:29:55 AM
Am curious - do you have an informative link or article about this? I've tried to find some info, but I keep getting basically the same Wikipedia page in different forms (and the Russian-language page appears to be exactly the same as the English one). Even if your source is in Polish, I would be glad to see it.

Well, the Wikipedia articles have footnotes with outside links (some of them to Polish articles, which seem to be the most informative material on the matter available on-line).

Two examples from google books:
Radio London and resistance in occupied Europe by Michael Stenton (http://books.google.com/books?id=iQg3yRz6TYoC&pg=PA277&dq=gestapo-nkvd+conference#v=onepage&q=gestapo-nkvd%20conference&f=false)
Stalin: breaker of nations by Robert Conquest (http://books.google.com/books?client=opera&id=KV1pAAAAMAAJ&dq=Stalin%3A+Breaker+of+Nations&q=zakopane#search_anchor)
You can also go here (http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/wwii/special.studies/katyn.massacre/katynlrc.txt) (someone's masters thesis, so perhaps not a reliable source in the strict sense) and search for Zakopane (where the 3rd conference was held).

(The easiest way to get more information about this is to go to google books and search for nkvd gestapo zakopane (http://books.google.com/books?q=zakopane+nkvd+gestapo&btnG=Search+Books))

In case someone got me wrong: My point was not to say that one of the sides was worse or better than the other. I just felt that the atrocities committed by Soviet forces in the years 1939-41 were being a bit downplayed. I don't think seriously comparing these crimes (how? by comparing body-counts? brutality?) would be appropriate (how can you say that one serial killer is "better" than another?). They are unimaginable, that's all I would say.

Quote from: Maciek on August 18, 2009, 06:51:42 AM
I just felt that the atrocities committed by Soviet forces in the years 1939-41 were being a bit downplayed.

It is true, but I think that is so due to the passing of time. During the Spanish Conquista, around 25 million of Amerindians were killed, died from the diseases the Spaniards brought and civil strife. But do you care? Even my generation does not know much about WWII, and certainly does not go deep into details. But "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." :(

Quote from: Feanor on August 18, 2009, 05:54:07 AM
Comparatively for the average, non-political citizen, which place was the preferable place to live while peace persisted: Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR?  Doubtless Germany.

Actually, kind of a hard question to answer. First of all, the period of "peacetime" in Stalin's USSR lasted a lot longer than in Nazi Germany (about 22 years as opposed to only 6), and there were various twists and turns in Soviet policy during that time. Hardcore Stalinism (i.e. the state's attempt at total control) didn't really get consolidated until the mid-1930s.

Also, in terms of execution, Nazi policy seemed a lot more concise, efficient, and concentrated, whereas Soviet policy was often sloppy and ineffective.

Richard Overy's book The Dictators (a fairly recent comparative study) points out that in both countries, if you weren't a member of a targeted group (e.g. Jews, kulaks), life could seem fairly normal for long stretches of time. There were occasional reminders of totalitarian policy - your Jewish neighbor might suddenly not be there one day, or you might see a work-gang of slave laborers repairing a local road - but otherwise, if you kept to yourself, things didn't seem so bad.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 18, 2009, 07:47:57 PM
It is true, but I think that is so due to the passing of time.

Absolutely untrue, sorry. The same time has passed for Nazis as for Soviets yet the crimes of the former are still exposed and the perpetrators are still hunt while the latter benefit from a strange amnesia. The West might have won the cold war economically, but communism won it ideologically.

Quote from: Spitvalve on August 18, 2009, 09:42:30 PM
Richard Overy's book The Dictators (a fairly recent comparative study) points out that in both countries, if you weren't a member of a targeted group (e.g. Jews, kulaks), life could seem fairly normal for long stretches of time. There were occasional reminders of totalitarian policy - your Jewish neighbor might suddenly not be there one day, or you might see a work-gang of slave laborers repairing a local road - but otherwise, if you kept to yourself, things didn't seem so bad.

Can't really agree with that, unless you have very loose definitions of 'normal', 'occasional' and 'totalitarian'. With the institution of Gleichschaltung in Germany in 1933/34, totalitarian Nazism became a cradle-to-grave way of life. From nursery to old people's homes it was nonstop totalitarian indoctrination and service to the Reich. That does not necessarily mean being in plain view of atrocities being committed or some such thing. BUt 'normal' it is not in any way.

Quote from: Florestan on August 17, 2009, 11:00:07 PM
Precisely. Not only for lack of a better word, but also for what they called themselves.

Yes, but that is rarely a good enough reason in and of itself. E.g. East Germany was the German Democratic Republic, but we would hardly accuse them of being 'democrats' (lower case 'd' for the avoidance of doubt among US readers).  ;)

Quote from: O Mensch on August 19, 2009, 07:18:20 AM
Yes, but that is rarely a good enough reason in and of itself. E.g. East Germany was the German Democratic Republic, but we would hardly accuse them of being 'democrats' (lower case 'd' for the avoidance of doubt among US readers).  ;)

True, but in the case of "democratic" we had other ruling parties who called themselves as such and acted quite differently. In the case of "communism" the behaviour was strikingly uniform for all ruling parties who identified as such.  :)

Quote from: Florestan on August 19, 2009, 08:08:58 AM
In the case of "communism" the behaviour was strikingly uniform for all ruling parties who identified as such.  :)

Not entirely. The Italian 'Communists' were actually quite effective and competent in regional and municipal governments in Italy and exhibited none of the behavior otherwise 'uniform' to those in Eastern Europe or East Asia. (There may be other examples that I am unfamiliar with, but this one  just off the top of my head.)

Quote from: O Mensch on August 19, 2009, 07:16:08 AM
Can't really agree with that, unless you have very loose definitions of 'normal', 'occasional' and 'totalitarian'. With the institution of Gleichschaltung in Germany in 1933/34, totalitarian Nazism became a cradle-to-grave way of life.

I may have been misrepresenting the book somewhat, since it's been a few years since I read it. Most likely his observations applied more to the USSR than to Germany.

Quote from: O Mensch on August 19, 2009, 11:56:41 AM
Not entirely. The Italian 'Communists' were actually quite effective and competent in regional and municipal governments in Italy and exhibited none of the behavior otherwise 'uniform' to those in Eastern Europe or East Asia.

True, but they had only regional and municipal power and as such they were checked and balanced by other authorities and parties; they never had full and exclusive control of both the central and the local governments, as the Communist Party of Romania had, for instance. In France there were also a number of municipalities that had Communist mayors and councils, but similarly to Italy, they shared the power with other parties. In both cases, the communists were turned into left-wing social-democrats by force of reality: free elections never gave communist majorities at country level.

In those unfortunate countries where there were no checks and balances whatsoever to their power they unleashed hell.

Quote from: Florestan on August 19, 2009, 10:34:44 PM
True, but they had only regional and municipal power and as such they were checked and balanced by other authorities and parties; they never had full and exclusive control of both the central and the local governments, as the Communist Party of Romania had, for instance. In France there were also a number of municipalities that had Communist mayors and councils, but similarly to Italy, they shared the power with other parties. In both cases, the communists were turned into left-wing social-democrats by force of reality: free elections never gave communist majorities at country level.

In those unfortunate countries where there were no checks and balances whatsoever to their power they unleashed hell.

Sure, but in those unfortunate countries they were beholden to the diktat from Moscow. My only point is that behavior isn't quite as uniform as you say, especially once you look outside of the Warsaw Pact.

But your implicit point is a good one: democratic competition over time has a de-radicalizing effect. 'Communists' become social democrats just through necessity of pragmatic political compromise. Another example would be the Greens in Germany which turned from radical student fringe in the 60s to probably the most responsibly run and inclusive political party today. That effect is precisely why a well-balanced representative democracy still is the best system.

Quote from: Florestan on August 18, 2009, 10:46:33 PM
Absolutely untrue, sorry.

What is "absolutely untrue"? That people tend to forget things over time? Well, in my case it is very true. ;D Do you often talk to younger generations? Maybe it's different in Romania, and children there are brought in full awareness of the atrocities and crimes of the Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, but here, the former and the latter are somewhat remote irrelevant countries. Besides, all of the crimes of the Soviet Union have been publicized by the Russian Federation government in 1991, and now are in free access in the Internet. Everyone who has interest in it, can find out.
In Russia, though we heard stories from our grandparents about how life was going during the War (in fact, my great grandmother was almost killed by a fascist, but escaped by providence), this conflict seemed so ancient... and although Russia was opposing Germany in the War, people barely say anything about the crimes of the Nazis. Are they downplayed? I think everyone knows, but is polite enough not to touch sore topics. And in fact I don't care too much as well -- it had happened in the past, and it can not be changed. I am more concerned with what's going on in the world now and how do avoid new conflicts.

Coincidentally, just yesterday I had two occasions with socialism being mentioned. First, when my philosophy teacher was talking about the meaning of the words, he said that many people misuse the word "socialism" and that he would go with the definition proposed by Marx. Maybe, it makes the most sense. And secondly, I talked to a person who actually lived under the system itself, and he also said, that it was in no sense socialism.

Quote from: Sarastro on August 20, 2009, 09:30:38 PM
Besides, all of the crimes of the Soviet Union have been publicized by the Russian Federation government in 1991, and now are in free access in the Internet. Everyone who has interest in it, can find out.

Personally, I don't think that settles matters in any meaningful sense. As far as I know, the perpetrators of these crimes have never been tried or sentenced (let alone punished, which I'd think is actually less important). I don't think they've even been publicly condemned. And that would be an important prerequisite of rehabilitating the victims. Also, contrary to what you're saying, there are lots of details which still haven't been disclosed. One would think that it is in modern-day Russia's best interest to reveal everything, condemn it, and thus safely seal it off (a "lets leave the past behind us" attitude would be justified then). By doing the opposite, Russian authorities are making themselves ideological heirs to murderers from the past (after all, they are apparently trying to maintain a 70-year old cover up). It's an odd situation, where - unofficially - they're not denying it. They're even admitting it happened. But officially: practically nothing has changed.

Katyn is a case in point. Not only is Mukhin constantly publishing his inanities (which is OK, I guess, as long as no one calls him a "historian"), but the Katyn massacre has never been officially classified as a war crime or a genocide (and that in turn prevents a proper trial from being held). Here's a quote from a 2008 news item (http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2008/11/russia-court-denies-rehabilitation-of.php), which gives an overview of the situation:

QuoteThe Polish Institute of National Remembrance has long sought to convince the Russian government to apply its 1991 law "On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression" to the Katyn victims, but suits have so far been unsuccessful. Russia's own 10-year investigation of the massacre ended in 2005 when the government closed its classified files and said the crime's statute of limitations had expired. In July, the Moscow City Court blocked an attempt by family members of the victims to renew investigations into the killings. In 2006, the families filed a complaint with the Court of Human Rights, asking it to classify the incident as genocide and compel the Russian government to disclose its information. In October the Court of Human rights agreed to hear a plea from family members asking that the victims of the Katyn massacre be classified as war crimes victims.

So, when you say that a lot of time has passed and it's time to move one, well, I would agree with you if the matter had been settled. If that was the case, then, indeed, why keep droning on about it? The problem is that practically none of these issues have been settled and heaps of information still haven't been made available by the Russian authorities. (There's a similar case with the British, who 66 years after the death of general Sikorski (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Władysław_Sikorski) are still refusing to declassify the files which could shed some light on his death - and here, too, the propable reason is their complicity. This is actually closely linked to Katyn, since the British were probably taking part in the Soviet cover up - at least to the extent that they did not want Sikorski to stir things up.)

Quote from: Maciek on August 22, 2009, 12:07:33 AM
Personally, I don't think that settles matters in any meaningful sense. As far as I know, the perpetrators of these crimes have never been tried or sentenced (let alone punished, which I'd think is actually less important).

The obvious problem with this is that the vast majority of serious Communist/Bolshevik crimes took place in the period 1918-1953, but it was impossible to deal with them until after 1989. By then, due to either old age or Stalin's charming habit of eliminating the people who did his dirty work, very few of the movers or shakers were around.

Regarding "details not disclosed," I don't know the specifics of this, but it seems to me the vast majority of pertinent information is available. I can walk into any decent bookstore in Moscow and buy a copy of The Gulag Archipelago (and probably any other classic of anti-Communist lit you could name).

Historian David Glantz, perhaps the foremost authority on the Russo-German writing about myths and realities of WW2:

http://www.strom.clemson.edu/publications/sg-war41-45.pdf

German Losses:

QuoteSeptember 1939-
1 September 1942 922,000 (Over 90 % in the East)
1 September 1942-
20 November 1943 2,077,000 (Over 90 % in the East)
20 November 1943-
June 1944 1,500,000 est. (80 % in the East)
June-November 1944 1,457,000 (903,000 or 62 % in the East)
30 December 1944-
30 April 1945 2,000,000 (67 % in the East)
=====
Total Losses to
30 April 1945 11,135,500
3,888,000 dead
3,035,700 captured
=====
Total Armed Forces Losses 13,488,000
10,758,000 (80 % in the East
From September 1939 to September 1942, the bulk of the German Army's
922,000 dead, missing, and disabled (14% of Germany's total armed force) could be
credited to combat in the East. Between 1 September 1942 and 20 November 1943, this
grim toll rose to 2,077,000 (30% of Germany's total armed force), again primarily in the
East. After the opening of the "second front" in Normandy, the Wehrmacht suffered
another 1,457,000 irrevocable losses (dead, missing, or captured) from June through
November 1944. Of this number, it suffered 903,000 (62% of the total losses) of these
losses in the East. Finally, after losing 120,000 men to the Allies in the Battle of the
Bulge, from 1 January to 30 April 1945, the Wehrmacht suffered another 2 million losses,
two-thirds of which fell victim to the Red Army. Today, the stark inscriptions "Died in
the East," which are carved on countless thousands of headstones in scores of German
cemeteries bear mute witness to the carnage in the East, where the will and strength of the
Wehrmacht perished.
In addition, Germany's allies also suffered mightily, losing almost 2 million men in
less than four years of war

On the relative contributions of the USSR and Western Allies

QuoteOn the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion of 1944, a U.S. news magazine
featured a cover photo of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was labeled as the man
who defeated Hitler. If any one man deserved that label, it was not Eisenhower but
Zhukov, Vasilevsky, or possibly Stalin himself. More generally, the Red Army and the
Soviet citizenry of many nationalities bore the lion's share of the struggle against
Germany from 1941 to 1945. Only China, which suffered almost continuous Japanese
attack from 1931 onward, matched the level of Soviet suffering and effort. In military
terms, moreover, the Chinese participation in the war was almost insignificant in
comparison with the Soviet war, which constantly engaged absorbed more than half of all
German forces.
From June through December 1941, only Britain shared with the Soviet Union the
trials of war against the Germans. Over 3 million German troops fought in the East, while
900,000 struggled elsewhere, attended to occupied Europe, or rested in the homeland.
From December 1941 through November 1942, while over nine million troops on both
sides struggled in the East, the only significant ground action in the Western Theater took
place in North Africa, where relatively small British forces engaged Rommel's Afrika
Corps and its Italian allies.
In October and November 1942, the British celebrated victory over the Germans
at El Alamein, defeating four German divisions and a somewhat larger Italian force, and
inflicting 60,000 axis losses. The same month, at Stalingrad, the Soviets defeated and
encircled German Sixth Army, damaged Fourth Panzer Army, and smashed Rumanian
Third and Fourth Armies, eradicating over 50 divisions and over 300,000 men from the
Axis order of battle. By May 1943 the Allies pursued Rommel's Afrika Corps across
northern Africa and into Tunisia, where after heavy fighting, the German and Italian force
of 250,000 surrendered. Meanwhile, in the East, another German army (the Second) was
severely mauled, and Italian Eighth and Hungarian Second Armies were utterly destroyed,
exceeding Axis losses in Tunisia.
While over 3.5 million German and Soviet troops struggled at Kursk and 8.5
million later fought on a 1,500-mile front from the Leningrad region to the Black Sea coast,
in July 1943 Allied forces invaded Sicily, and drove 60,000 Germans from the island. In
August the Allies landed on the Italian peninsula. By October, when 2.5 million men of
the Wehrmacht faced 6.6 million Soviets, the frontlines had stabilized in Italy south of
Rome as the Germans deployed a much smaller, although significant, number of troops to
halt the Allied advance.
By 1 October 1943, 2,565,000 men (63%) of the Wehrmacht's 4,090,000-man
force struggled in the East, together with the bulk of the 300,000 Waffen SS troops. On 1
June 1944, 239 (62%) of the German Army's 386 division equivalents fought in the East.
With operations in Italy at a stalemate, until June 1944, in fact, the Wehrmacht still
considered the west as a semi-reserve. In August 1944, after the opening of the second
front, while 2.1 million Germans fought in the East, 1 million opposed Allied operations
in France.
Casualty figures underscore this reality. From September 1939 to September
1942, the bulk of the German Army's 922,000 dead, missing, and disabled (14% of the
total force) could be credited to combat in the East. Between 1 September 1942 and 20
November 1943 this grim count rose to 2,077,000 (30% of the total force), again
primarily in the East. From June through November 1944, after the opening of the second
front, the German Army suffered another 1,457,000 irrevocable losses. Of this number,
903,000 (62%) were lost in the East. Finally, after losing 120,000 men to the Allies in the
Battle of the Bulge, from 1 January to 30 April 1945 the Germans suffered another 2
million losses, two-thirds at Soviet hands. Today, the stark inscription, "died in the
East," that is carved on countless thousands of headstones in scores of German cemeteries
bear mute witness to the carnage in the East, where the will and strength of the
Wehrmacht perished.
The Role of the "Second Front" in Allied Victory:
During the war and since war's end, the Soviets have bitterly complained since the
war about the absence of a real "second front" before June 1944, and that issue remains a
source of suspicion even in post Cold War Russia. Yet, Allied reasons for deferring a
second front until 1944 were valid, and Allied contributions to victories were significant.
As the American debacle at the Kasserine Pass in December 1942 and Canadian
performance at Dieppe in 1943 indicated, Allied armies were not ready to operate in
France in 1943, even had a sufficient number of landing craft been available for the
invasion, which they were not. Even in 1944 Allied success at Normandy was a close
thing and depended, in part, on major German misperceptions and mistakes. Once in
France, after the breakout from the Normandy bridgehead in August, the 2 million Allied
troops in France inflicted grievous losses on the 1 million defending Germans, 100,000 at
Falaise, and a total of 400,000 by December 1944. In the subsequent battle of the Bulge
(16 December 1944-31 January 1945), the Germans lost another 120,000 men. These
losses in the West, combined with the over 1.2 million lost in the East during the same
period, broke the back of the Wehrmacht and set the context for the final destruction of
Germany in 1945.
In addition to its ground combat contribution, the Allies conducted a major
strategic bombing campaign against Germany (which the Soviets could not mount) and in
1944 drew against themselves the bulk of German operational and tactical airpower. The
strategic bombing campaign did significant damage to German industrial targets, struck
hard at the well-being and morale of the German civil population, and sucked into its
vortex and destroyed a large part of the German fighter force, which had earlier been used
effectively in a ground role in the East. Although airpower did not prove to be a warwinning
weapon, and German industrial mobilization and weapons production peaked in
late 1944, the air campaign seriously hindered the German war effort.
Equally disastrous for the Germans were the losses of tactical fighters in that
campaign and in combat in France in 1944. So devastating were these losses that after
mid-1944 the German air force was no longer a factor on the Eastern Front.
The Role of Lend-Lease in Allied Victory:
Another controversial Allied contribution to the war effort was the Lend-Lease
program of aid to the Soviet Union. Although Soviet accounts have routinely belittled the
significance of Lend-Lease in sustaining the Soviet war effort, the overall importance of
this assistance cannot be understated. Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient
quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941-42; that achievement
must be attributed solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov,
Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates. As the war continued, however, the
United States and Great Britain provided many of the implements of war and strategic
raw materials necessary for Soviet victory (Se Figure 7).
Without Lend-Lease food, clothing, and raw materials (especially metals), the
Soviet economy would have been even more heavily burdened by the war effort. Perhaps
most directly, without Lend-Lease trucks, rail engines, and railroad cars, every Soviet
offensive would have stalled at an earlier stage, outrunning its logistical tail in a matter of
days. In turn, this would have allowed the German commanders to escape at least some
encirclements, while forcing the Red Army to prepare and conduct many more deliberate
penetration attacks in order to advance the same distance. Left to their own devices,
Stalin and his commanders might have taken 12 to 18 months longer to finish off the
Wehrmacht; the ultimate result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet
soldiers could have waded at France's Atlantic beaches. Thus, while the Red Army shed
the bulk of Allied blood, it would have shed more blood for longer without Allied
assistance.

What-ifs and other controversies:

QuoteThe Myth of Stalin's Preventative War:
On 15 May 1941, General G, K. Zhukov, then Chief of the Red Army General
Staff, sent Stalin a proposal for a preventative offensive against German forces
concentrating in Eastern Poland. Although Defense Commissar S. K. Timoshenko
initialed the proposal, there is no evidence either that Stalin saw it or acted upon it. The
proposal and other fragmentary evidence provides the basis for recent claims that Stalin
indeed intended to conduct a preventative war against Germany beginning in July 1941
and that Hitler's Operation Barbarossa preempted Stalin's intended actions.
Current evidence refutes that assertion. As subsequent events and archival
evidence proves, the Red Army was in no condition to wage war in the summer of 1941
either offensively or, as the actual course of combat indicated, defensively.
q The Timing of Operation Barbarossa:
Hitler commenced Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, after delaying his
invasion of the Soviet Union for roughly two months so that the Wehrmacht could
conquer Yugoslavia and Greece. Some have claimed that this delay proved fatal for
Operation Barbarossa. Had Germany invaded the Soviet Union in April rather than June,
they state, Moscow and Leningrad would have fallen, and Hitler would have achieved his
Barbarossa objectives.
This assertion is incorrect. Hitler's Balkan diversion took place at a time of year
when the spring thaw (the rasputitsa [literally, "time of clogged roads"]) prevented
extensive military operations of any scale, particularly mobile panzer operations, in the
western Soviet Union. Furthermore, the forces Hitler committed in the Balkans was only
a small portion of his overall Barbarossa force, and it returned from the Balkans in good
condition and in time to play its role in Barbarossa.
A corollary to this issue is the thesis that the Wehrmacht would have performed
better if Hitler had postponed Barbarossa until the summer of 1942. This is quite
unlikely, since Stalin's program to reform, reorganize, and reequip the Red Army, which
was woefully incomplete when the Germans struck in 1941, would have been fully
completed by the summer of 1942. Although the Wehrmacht would still have been more
tactically and operationally proficient than the Red Army in 1942, the latter would have
possessed a larger and more formidable mechanized force equipped with armor superior
to that of the Germans. In addition, Hitler would have invaded the Soviet Union with the
full knowledge that he was then engaging in a two-front war with the United States (and
perhaps Britain) and the Soviet Union.
q Guderian's Southward Turn (Kiev)
In September 1941, after Red Army resistance stiffened east of Smolensk, Hitler
temporarily abandoned his direct thrust on Moscow by turning one half of Army Group
Center's panzer forces (Guderian's Second Panzer Group) to the south to envelop and
destroy the Soviet Southwestern Front, which was defending Kiev. By virtue of
Guderian's southward turn, the Wehrmacht destroyed the entire Southwestern Front east
of Kiev during September, inflicting 600,000 losses on the Red Army, while Soviet forces
west of Moscow conducted a futile and costly offensive against German forces around
Smolensk. After this Kiev diversion, Hitler launched Operation Typhoon in October,
only to see his offensive falter at the gates of Moscow in early December. Some claim
that had Hitler launched Operation Typhoon in September rather than October, the
Wehrmacht would have avoided the terrible weather conditions and reached and captured
Moscow before the onset of winter.
This argument too does not hold up to close scrutiny. Had Hitler launched
Operation Typhoon in September, Army Group Center would have had to penetrate
deep Soviet defenses manned by a force that had not squandered its strength in fruitless
offensives against German positions east of Smolensk. Furthermore, Army Group Center
would have launched its offensive with a force of more than 600,000 men threatening its
ever-extending right flank and, in the best reckoning, would have reached the gates of
Moscow after mid-October just as the fall rainy season was beginning.
Finally, the Stavka saved Moscow by raising and fielding 10 reserve armies that
took part in the final defense of the city, the December 1941 counterstrokes, and the
January 1942 counteroffensive. These armies would have gone into action regardless of
when Hitler launched Operation Typhoon. While they effectively halted and drove back
the German offensive short of Moscow as the operation actually developed, they would
also have been available to do so had the Germans attacked Moscow a month earlier.
Furthermore, if the latter were the case, they would have been able to operate in
conjunction with the 600,000 plus force of Army Group Center's overextended right
flank.
q "What if" Moscow had Fallen:
The argument that Hitler would have won the war if the Wehrmacht had been able
to capture Moscow, a corollary to the arguments described above, is also subject to
serious question. If Hitler's legions had actually reached and tried to capture Moscow, it
is likely that Stalin would have assigned one or more of his reserve armies to fight and die
in its defense. Although the Germans might have seized the bulk of the city, they would
likely have found themselves facing the same lamentable dilemma that the Sixth Army
faced at Stalingrad a year later. More ominous still, had it captured Moscow, the
Wehrmacht would have faced the daunting task of trying to winter in Moscow, with the
inherent danger of emulating the fate of Napoleon's army in 1812.