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The Secret Back Story to Russia and Ukraine that Americans Never Learned In School
Preface: We believe that Soviet communism was an abomination. Stalin was certainly a tyrant: he killed countless political enemies or threw them into insane asylums. We also have littler tolerance for useful idiots who defend communism as a force for good. In short, we hate Soviet era communism.
And Putin also runs Russia like it’s his plaything, with little regard for the desires of his people.
But U.S. warmongers have also been hyping the Russian threat with self-serving lies – and committing atrocities and telling lies – for some 70 years. As an American, my concern is keeping America from destroying itself. And – unless we learn our history – we could get in a lot of trouble.
America Launched the Cold War Even Before World War II Had Ended
Joseph Stalin and the Soviets were key in helping the U.S. to defeat the Nazis. 20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis in World War II.
And yet the U.S. started competing against Stalin – and treating him like an enemy – before WWII had even ended.
Specifically, dropping atomic bombs on Japan had a duel purpose: defeating the Japanese, and sending a message to Stalin that the U.S. was in charge.
History.com notes:
In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.
New Scientist reports:
The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.
***
[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.
***
New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.
“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.
John Pilger points out:
The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.”
University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz says:
Increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.
***
Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.
***
The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.
***
Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.
General Dwight Eisenhower said, “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary” and “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
And Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, who chaired the meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claims:
The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
America Has Waged a Brutal Dirty Tricks Campaign for 70 Years
Right after the end of WWII, the U.S. backed Nazi fighters in Ukraine in an attempt to dislodge Soviet control of that country.
In late September 1947, [George] Kennan urged Forrestal to establish a “guerrilla warfare corps”—a suggestion Forrestal heartily endorsed—although the [Joing Chiefs of Staff] recommended against establishing a “separate guerrilla warfare and corps.” In December, Truman approved secret annex NSC 4-A, authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations. He had dismantled the OSS’s covert parmilitary operations capabilities in September 1945, but now he brought them back in force. In the summer of 1948, he approved NSC 10/2, which called for “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” These activities were to be done in a way that would always afford the US government plausible deniability. In August 1948, Truman approved NSC 20, which authorized guerrilla operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe ….
***
Beginning with Truman’s first day in office, his receptiveness to the views of hard-line anti-Communists, his denial of Roosevelt’s understanding with Staling, the provocative and unnecessary dropping of the atomic bombs, his spreading a network of military bases around the world, Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Truman’s call for fighting Communism in greece, the division and remilitarization of Germany, the continued testing of bigger and bigger atomic and hydrogen bombs which he used to threaten the Soviet Union, Truman’s deliberate exaggerations of the Communist threat both overseas and at home and his persecution and silencing of those who challenged these distortions. In all these matters, with few exceptions, the United states, after successfully liberating Western Europe, was now signaling fear and aggression ….
The U.S. also admits that the U.S. and NATO also used false flag terror attacks to discredit the Soviets. For example:
- The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister
- The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special
- As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960′s, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
The U.S. and NATO Have Been Trying to Encircle Russia Militarily Since 1991
President George H. W. Bush promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that – if the Soviets broke up the Soviet Union and dissolved the Warsaw Pact – then NATO would not move into those former Soviet countries. This assured the Soviets that NATO would not encircle Russia.
Similarly, Germany promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east.” As Andrew Gavin Marshall explains:
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 prompted the negotiated withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe. The ‘old order’ of Europe was at an end, and a new one “needed to be established quickly,” noted Mary Elise Sarotte in the New York Times. This ‘new order’ was to begin with “the rapid reunification of Germany.” Negotiations took place in 1990 between Soviet president Gorbachev, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and President Bush’s Secretary of State, James A. Baker 3rd. The negotiations sought to have the Soviets remove their 380,000 troops from East Germany. In return, both James Baker and Helmut Kohl promised Gorbachev that the Western military alliance of NATO would not expand eastwards. West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, promised Gorbachev that, ” NATO will not expand itself to the East.” Gorbachev agreed, though asked – and did not receive – the promise in writing, remaining a “gentlemen’s agreement.”
But Bill Clinton broke America’s promise, and the U.S. has pursued a campaign of encircling Russia ever since:


And NATO has also broken its promise, and now largely encircles Russia:

In 1997 – as part of the strategy of encirclement – former U.S. national security advisor and high-level Obama policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called for the U.S. to take Ukraine away from Russia.
Cheney Has Controlled U.S. Policy Towards Russia with a Strategy of Global Domination For Decades … And Continues to Do So Today
The U.S. has also long exaggerated the “Russian menace” in order to justify its military spending and expansion.
For example, Dick Cheney made false claims exaggerating the threat posed by Russia’s weapons in the 1970s to ramp up cold war fears and justify huge increases in military spending.
Subsequent instances of fear-mongering by Cheney and his subordinates include:
- New York Times and Wikipedia, 1992: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere .… We do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others.”
- Toledo Blade, 2006: “Vice President Dick Cheney accused Russia of pursuing antidemocratic policies and using its vast energy supplies to blackmail neighboring countries”
- Wall Street Journal, 2008: “The vice president … accused Russia of seeking to reinvent the old Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, and beat back the advance of democracy in Eastern Europe …. ‘Let us make clear that the enlargement of NATO will continue as and where the allies decide,” Mr. Cheney said. ‘Allies agreed that those nations will be NATO members, and the time to begin their membership action plans has come.’ “
- Telegraph, 2008: “We believe in the right of men and women to live without the threat of tyranny, economic blackmail or military invasion or intimidation …. Ukrainians have a right to choose whether they wish to join NATO, and NATO has a right to invite Ukraine to join the alliance when we believe they are ready and that the time is right”
Todd E. Pierce – Major (ret.) U.S. Army Judge Advocate General – notes in a must-read article that “Cheneyism” has driven U.S. policy towards Russia for decades:
Dick Cheney’s ideology of U.S. global domination has become an enduring American governing principle regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, a reality reflected in the recent Ukrainian coup ….
The final form of this ideology took shape in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union when the world was then to be subjected to eternal U.S. military dominance, as revealed in the leaked “Draft Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG) devised by Cheney’s subordinates when he was Defense Secretary under President George H.W. Bush.
Since then, Cheney has been so successful in propagating this ideology of permanent U.S. domination abroad and rule by a “unitary executive” at home that it has now survived multiple changes of U.S. presidents largely intact. It is so much attributable to Dick Cheney that it merits his name: Cheneyism.
As unprecedented as Cheneyism may be – not even history’s most power-mad conquerors ever envisioned anything like “full-spectrum dominance” – President Obama has cemented Cheney’s ideological legacy by continuing his unilateralism and even expanding it ….
Cheney’s ideology combines militarism under a state of permanent war with an un-American, anti-constitutional authoritarianism. It also embraces an aggressiveness toward past, present and possibly future adversaries, especially Russia.
Robert Gates, who was CIA director in 1991, has written in his memoir Duty that with the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Cheney “wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire but of Russia itself,” so “it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”
Little wonder that Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded that denying Russian access to Crimean ports via the coup in Ukraine was just one step in a larger U.S. plan to deny Russia a means of naval defense, just as he might have seen the Kosovo War in the late 1990s as a move against a Russian ally.
***
There is virtually no deviation in the United States from the core of Cheney’s ideology. That is, the unrelenting pursuit of total U.S. global military domination as outlined in the Defense Planning Guidance.
This February’s successful subversion of Ukraine’s democratically elected government by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland is merely the latest example of U.S. policies first conceived and promoted by Cheney and like-minded ideologists, including Nuland’s husband, renowned neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century.
If there was any doubt about the continuation of Cheneyism under Obama, the activities of Nuland – a Bush-43 holdover who was promoted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then Secretary of State John Kerry – shows there was no real break in foreign policy with the change of administrations in 2009.
As revealed by Nuland, there has not been a Russian policy “reset” by the U.S.; it was a mere subterfuge. And as Putin is learning, any objection to U.S. strategic expansionism is treated as “terrorism” or “aggression” and becomes a pretext for U.S. diplomatic, economic and military suppression of the “threat.”
In 1991, as conceived by Cheney and other Pentagon ideologues, such as Paul Wolfowitz and David Addington, this strategy of constantly violating other nations’ sovereignty has been waged both by military and political means ….
***
For Cheney, it was as if he saw the Cold War as having been a winner-take-all contest for global domination. When the U.S. “won,” the countries of the world were to submit to global U.S. domination. As stated in Harper’s Magazine, the United States would move from “countering Soviet attempts at dominance to ensuring its own dominance.”
***
Clinton preserved the general outlines of the force structure and strategy that had been worked out under Cheney and Wolfowitz. Cheney’s ideology of permanent U.S. dominance achieved its purest form under President George W. Bush, with Cheney as his influential Vice President. But Cheneyism also has maintained a strong foothold in the five years of the Obama administration.
***
Cheney’s geopolitical ideas have become the consensus of both Republicans and Democrats and have assumed a permanent place in “mainstream” American political thought and governance under Obama.
***
For a foreign government to anticipate how the U.S. will act, their analysts need to understand Cheneyism as a controlling ideology in U.S. policy, just as American intelligence analysts were steeped in theories of Marxism and Stalinism during the Cold War. U.S. citizens should understand the tenets of Cheneyism, too, since this arrogant ideology has the potential
for disastrous consequences.
***
Indeed, there is a German precedent for Cheney’s ideology that is not Nazism. Following the failure of the Imperial German Army in World War I, philosophical militarists such as Ernst Junger and authoritarian legal philosophers like Carl Schmitt came together in the “Conservative Revolutionary Movement.”
Celebrating war and authoritarianism, they believed that Germany was the “exceptional” nation of Europe, deserving of military expansion in both eastern and western Europe. The German Conservative Revolutionaries didn’t all become Nazis, but they created a hospitable culture for them. With hindsight, they could have been called proto-Cheneyites.
Not only are Cheney and Neocons back … they never actually left.
The neoconservatives planned campaigns of destabilization all over the world 20 years ago, and Obama is implementing the same plans today.
The Bottom Line: Putin’s No Angel … But Americans Need to Gain a Little Perspective
Putin is no angel, and Stalin really was a murderous tyrant.
But Americans also need to understand that the U.S. and NATO have been seeking domination even before WWII ended.
Dick Cheney has dominated U.S. policy towards Russia for decades, and Obama is following Cheney’s playbook.
America needs to gain a little perspective.
See this for other interesting and little-known facts about Russia.
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IndianaJohn - I like to pick up the phone and ask people with money to part with it. I give them vakue in return and innovate something better on there behalf. Not coincidentally these are a generation older than me the Boomers. Older people don't want change. So you have to invest on there behalf. Alternatively, one could pick up weapons and start killing sociopaths.
That may be an outcome at the end of this cycle but it isnt for me. I am a reformed sociopath. My methods with the latter option would be as RM states based on better death controls if I attempted politics or dethroned them (assuming that was possible).
I would not spare woman or children of these individual families at BIS, Rothschilds. This is why they keep doing it because nobody has slaughtered there family members like the mob of old. Could I really kill little Johnny of 2 years old to make daddy reconsider global slavery? Nah, I cant. I have no qualms about self-defense. However, I would be a demon that replaced the old demons.
So I choose to pick up the phone and try to add value. I also educate best to my ability. I think it is getting time to leave America. These rulers to me have no problem literally burning the entire place down if they lose power which is a certainty to me.
History has a lot of examples of scorched earth on the way out. Since War of 1812 was mentioned look at what the British did to Washington on the way out. I strongly feel the same kind of history is going to repeat. Maybe Russia and America destroy each other because there both gettting uppity to the bankster overlords and then there new pet China gets to mine Russia while the American people worry about day to day survival and for compliance get bread and water in return. That is how I think as a sociopath. Both nations would hate each other and not blame banksters but the politicians on each opposing side that would be underground then in another sovereign. As a sociopath understand a binary system, pyramiding and triangulating, I could get awful creative.
#twatter will do the trick
Solution:
Break the Dick Chain
It is really too bad Cheny was allowed 5 draft deferrments to escape the VN war. How much better it could have been for him to come home in a body bag instead of 5 others who served in place of this morally bankrupt character. Literally hundreds of thousands of lives wasted byt this arrogant clown. He is the opposite of a patriot - he is a traitor and a war criminal.
...switch to a Cock Ring.
And Putin participating in a Victory Day parade in Crimea is highly symbolic.
The U.S. and Europe has no business being involved in Ukraine, yet history and common sense are abandoned by our "leaders".
Au contraire, mon frere. Any U.S. involvement in Ukraine is ALL business. The buck stops and sniffs wherever resources are lying about, unencumbered.
As for the common sense of our 'leaders', one cannot abandon what one never possessed.
Can't agree more. "Common sense, stupidity, weakness", easy fall guys for executing the plan by the numbers. It's about resourses and control. Full spectrum dominance is the term I've heard from big MIC, which really means slave planet for just about everyone. Does anyone really think Obummer leads big MIC?
"the Soviets were key in helping the U.S. to defeat the Nazis"
Today is not right time for such statements. Americans have no shame. Please at least today respect the Great Russian Victory Day over nazi Germany. Please respect those millions of Russian people who gave their lives, so you can enjoy yours.
This is typical of "instant experts" like George Washington, who can afford 15 minutes to plagiarize some ignorant blogs before he starts 'explaining" things to you. It is revoltingly stupid, of course. The Sovients won WW11; period. We arrived to do a little mopping up on the Western Frontier after Germany was already strategically defeated. We didn't "win" anything; nor could we have.
You're correct SAT, but don't forget the massive material support given to the Soviets by the USA.
The USA paid for victory with its dollars, the Russians with 20 million dead.
SAT 800 (is that a combined score?) Are you forgetting it was a 2-front war? Had Hitler focused all his attention on Russia, no one knows what the final result may have been.
Classic example of how multi-tasking makes you less effective.
You still can't print people.
not even 3-D?
in the current system, people are becoming redundant.
Thiese are words. Very clever, but words. The facts are:
1) US has removed most of its troops from Europe.
2) European NATO members cut military spendings relative to GDP to the lowest since... the fall of Holy Roman Empire?
3) Europe is completely dependent on Russia's resources and cannot respond to russian aggression and/or provocatiosn neither militarily nor economicaly.
Would 1#, #2, and #3 happen if NATO still considered post-1991 RUSSIA a threat? Think about it!
So, dear Prof. Washington, you got it all backwards: after 1991 it is the USA and rest of NATO that STOPPED CONSIDERING RUSSIA as a military threat. On the other hand, it is Russia that has been rebuilding its military and waiting for a moment to strike back. It is RUSSIA that NEVER stopped bellieveing that all its domestic ills come from the West, caused by the West and that the West is the enemy.
Tell my, Professor, if the West wanted to dismantle Russia, why the West spared no expense not only to preserve Russian Federation from further dismembermentt in 1991-93, but also negotiated to move all nuclear warhears from Unraine to Russia? If the West was so keen to dismember Russian Federation, wouldn't they support nuclear-armed Ukraine on Russia's border AND wouldn't supports Turks, Tatars, Chechens, ingushs, Ossetins, and dozens of other ethnic groups from breaking away from Russian Federation?
Thanks for the laugh. No, really, that was hilarious.
I could say volumes, literally volumes, in response, but I will resort to one word, and one word only: Fallujah
Here I thought the word was going to be Hegel.
Here goes:
"The spirit of a nation is reflected in its history, its religion, and the degree of its political freedom. The improvement of individual morality is a matter involving one’s private religion, one’s parents, one’s personal efforts, and one’s individual situation. The cultivation of the spirit of the people as a whole requires in addition the respective contributions of folk religion and political institutions.
Prospects for a Folk Religion (1793)"
Huh?
Tell me what does the Truman using the nuke in japan 70 years has to do with Ukraine now?
And what does it have to do with the ambitions of the russkies there NOW?
You didn't just ask that did you?
history don't matter dude.
#NOW
(ever-present time-loops minds pre-occupied)
[sigh]
Ground Hog Planet.
long alarm'd clocks.
". . .then put yer lil hand in mine. . ."
"Just one word...plastique".
"HUH?" What happened - U lost ability to read, to type, or to think? Or simply don't like to deal with FACTS?
You are not entitled to your own facts.
I can not assess the pay rate for your work but I can tell your employer is overcharged.
Them Russian are like Indians...
Nothing but trouble if you let them off the reservation.
“You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security”
I'm shocked...completely shocked! I didn't think governments would do such things. har har
"And yet the U.S. started competing against Stalin – and treating him like an enemy – before WWII had even ended."
Poland alone is reason enough to treat the Soviets as enemies. The Soviet military would have folded if not for lend lease from the United States. In case however you need more reason let's start with Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and that is just Europe. Hump.
Ssssh, people here seem to miss the old Imperial CCCP.
'Instead of dropping the bomb we should have allowed the Soviets to invade, conquer, and keep Japan. Say nothing of the fact that dropping the bomb saved potentially millions of Russian and Japanese lives because this would break the narrative.'
People, you have to face it. When you go to war you go to win. If you fail to win you have committed the single most important ethics violation, against your own people, of humanity and evolution and that is losing. Losing means you do not control your own fate and you must become subservient so some degree to the victors. That is fine for slaves. We are not slaves.
The usual caveat: When should be defined as defensive or necessary. Defensive means you have been attacked first. Necessary means you will cease to exist. When you fight you go all in, win or die there is no try.
Japan attacked us first. Boohoo about trade policies. You don't see US talking about attacking China over their trade policies. The Russia-Ukraine thing is dispicable in that it isn't defensive and only intellectual laziness on the part of EVERYONE in the west makes it necessary.
The teutonic order failed to win the wars with the russians.
the poles failed to win the wars with the russians.
napoleon failed to win the war with the russians.
hitler failed to win the war with the russians.
if you think about the winter, here is a clue: the swedish king (and they know something about the winter, don't they ?!) entered russia with about 80K soldier and left after a couple of months with about 20K.
the only people that defeated and occupied the russians for about 300 years were the mongols.
as of hitler, the war was lost when his blitzkrieg did not materialize in 1941 (one of stalin's tactics was to let hundred of thousand of prisoners in the hands of the enemy), and at that time the american supply was not yet working. in '42 stalin gave the germans again 2 million prisoners in the summer only (humans did not matter for stalin), just to guard 2,000,000 people you have to have a lot of resources out of fighting duty.
so the only solution against russians are the "big" weapons. but big weapons they have too. using them means no victors when the radioactive dust settles.
putin knows this and he forces the game.
You really believe that Stalin, who ordered that retreating troops should be shot, intentionally gave up millions of men thinking the Germans would do anything kinder and therefore be slowed down? Supply logicistics and environmental conditions defeated the Nazis as much as anything else. Most prisoners were turned to slave labor and starved to death. Instead of being a liability they became a resource for the manpower lacking Germans. Some Russian POWs actually ended up fighting against the western allies in France. Some of those were conscripted and some were voluntary.
Stalin was an utter fool as a war leader. Because of him, millions upon millions more Russians died than needed to in order to defeat Hitler.
"humans did not matter for stalin"
You make it sound as if they matter for other 'leaders'
I think that is rarely the case.. Just take a look at geopolitical and economical events in the last decade..
If you consider all of the countries on the planet for all of time you will find that the majority are not very evil. Everyone has weakenesses and nobody is perfect but in the main, people are decent. Afterall, the population keeps going up.
You say, "if you think about the winter, here is a clue: the swedish king (and they know something about the winter, don't they ?!) entered russia with about 80K soldier and left after a couple of months with about 20K."
To what Swedish king do you refer? Charles XII had far fewer troops than you claim, won the initial encounters (despite being outnumbered) against Peter the Great, and was only finally defeated after years of campaigning. So he certainly does not fit the description. If you mean someone else, please name him.
Sounds like you are shooting from the hip, even though your overall point about the difficulties involved in taking on Russia is correct.
You'll need to keep serving up that crap for the boys on the front lines even when the going gets tough. BTW the Afghanies seemed to do well enough againt the invincible Russians, knuckle dragging and all...
Yes but that was a defensive war on the Afghanistan side, and it was on their turf.
How could anyone with a smattering of knowledge give you a down arrow for stating absolute fact.
Was the war fought on Russian or Afgan soil?
Did Afghanistan invade Russia?
Home team advantage.
The 'exceptional' US forces are doing no better.
Any pre pubescent Afghan boy could face down most anyone.
Their 3rd Century mindset is overpowering.
It isn't that they seem primative that gives them an advantage. They are true believers who are not afraid to die. Fear of death makes you that much easier to defeat, all else being equal.
I'm going with the Japs, they whipped the Russians in the War of 1905.
Crazy spiritual/ritual moozies and samurai with a will to win against reluctant conscripts in a relatively low tech war.
My money would be on the crazies.
The crazies and the ignorant.
Its rather like the pope (who I think is a humble man, although he is saying some incredibly stupid hypocritical things) opining on how governments world wide should get involved in moar "wealth redistribution"...while sitting on a mountain of wealth inside the vatican and holding title to properties across the entire globe.
Yes, of course, lets "sanction" a bond between church & state...what could possibly go wrong?!?!?...lol.
Always like your posts NM, make me think.
IMO, "church" always communistic from time immemorial (fox in hen's suit), also always hypocritical "do as I say not as I do". I don't subscribe to the aphorism "they mean well"... it's just another power center.
The "church" has from time to time (historically) aligned its interests with the states.
And just so I'm clear, I am not anti-religion, I am (as if no one ever suspected...lol) a baptized a Christian. But I am also pro individual liberty, we can never allow the melding of the soul to the state, these are completely separate things...one of man, the other of God.
Charity will forever be the opposite of taxation or confiscation, always ;-)
The beastly Americans started it all by being mean to the peace loving Soviets. Yeah sure.
Things are working out so much better now that nobel peace prize winner Choomboy has pushed the reset button.
The Soviet people were as peace-loving as any other people, including the Americans. Which is to say, it's not about the people at all but who controls them:
"Why, of course the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. … But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same in any country." — Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering
"[I]t is immaterial for the citizens of any nation where the frontiers of their country are drawn. It is of no concern for anyone whether his country is big or small, and whether it conquers a province or not. The individual citizens do not derive any profit from the conquest of a territory.
It is different with the princes or ruling aristocracies. They can increase their power and their tax revenues by expanding the size of their realms. They can profit from conquest. They are bellicose, while the citizenry is peace loving." — Ludvig von Mises, "The Economic Causes of War"