Putin, the Russian president, moves to ban gay marriage and add references to God in constitutional amendments

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Exactly. That was my point. Though I would say the ‘democracy’ we export is fictitious.
 
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And the Bolsheviks were the sworn enemies of the West starting in 1945. The United States, and no one else, had the power to intervene so that Russian tanks did not begin moving West starting in that year. What happened in 1949? In August, the Russians detonated their first atomic bomb. In September, the Chinese Civil War was over. Who won? The Communists. As in Russia, the fight was between two groups identifying as Reds and Whites. Now the West had the Red Chinese to worry about. In 1950, the Russians enable the Korean War. China stays out at first but joins in.

What about Castro declaring himself a Communist as leader of Cuba in 1959?
 
The relationship between Russia and Western Europe (and later the West in general) has always been replete with hypocrisy on both sides. So I’m not saying the West is blameless. But that peculiar dynamic where Russia waxes between enemy of the Liberal West (however that has been defined over the last three hundred years) and ally is peculiar in that it has survived multiple regime changes and multiple general wars in which Russia was either involved or was the target, to the point that I would almost call it a geopolitical structural phenomenon. The problem, at its core, is the long standing distrust of the Slavic peoples by Western Europeans, and in equal measure the pretty firm belief in Russia that it is the protector of all things Slavic (whether individual Slavic and Baltic peoples that have fallen into its sphere necessarily agreed that they wanted or needed the Muscovite Princes’ protection or not).

In geopolitics, there’s no such thing as purity. All sides play a dirty game against the other. But the fact remains that, despite a great wealth of natural resources, Russia is not the USSR. Not only has its empire shrunken, but so has its economy. Putin has redirected a vast amount of resources to its military machine, and funded it largely by oil and gas, but even so, it’s still an economic midget compared to the EU and the US, and in the long run its economic model won’t be sustainable. Menacing its neighbors is at best a medium term strategy. Sooner or later Russians are going to have to figure out just what their place is in the world, and in particular what their relationship with Europe will be. Yes, I can condemn the US and the EU for taking advantage of Russian weakness in the 1990s, and using it to dismantle Russian influence in Central and Eastern Europe, but let’s be blunt, Russia had earned the enmity of Baltic peoples, the Poles, the Czechs, Slovaks and yes, even many people in Ukraine. Heck, these days even Lukashenko is spooked by Putin.
 
Imagine being in a refugee camp in 1945. You are Polish, do you return home? I personally knew people who did not. And where did the Polish government go at the start of the war? To Great Britain. The flag of the Polish Air Force was taken there. I watched Russian tanks fire on a particular building as the Soviet Union fell. As the machine-gun rounds hit the outer brick, I could see brief bursts of flame. This meant those tanks were firing depleted uranium. Brick walls, and anything else, were not going to stop those.

The Russians, or Rus, protecting all things Slavic? That’s a laugh. After his capture, the Blessed Virgin Mary pin worn by Polish General Anders fell to the ground. The Russian soldiers taking him to Lubyanka prison told him, “Do you think that *itch is going to help you in here?”
 
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Sure, honor their memory. They fought in the Great Patriotic War. They were doing their duty. Just as my father was doing his duty when he fought for Poland. There is zero shade of gray.

A book should be written: Russian Aggression in the 20th Century.
 
And that is tragic. As I believe Witold Gombrowicz said regarding the transfer of Poland from Nazi to Soviet control, “the cigarette passed from one hand to another.” He meant a cigarette used to torture people with burns.
 
Graphic comments don’t matter. I saw a painting at a store run by Poles. It showed a map of Poland covered in flames. General Patton did not like the Russians. He stated the US should be prepared to fight them. His comments were dismissed at the time.
 
All politicians are. Obama’s administration praised the Arab Spring until it came to Bahrain. Then it was “oh this is an important dock for us. We support the government.”
 
Why did Hitler send troops and equipment to Spain before the start of World War II? Who was he fighting? Bolsheviks/Communists. The Communists lost. Spain would be neutral but a good number of Spanish volunteers fought for Germany on the Eastern Front.

The Russians invade Finland in November 1939. Why?
 
If I remember correctly (read a book on it years ago), the only side who came out looking relatively good were the Basques.
 
The big picture cannot be lost here. Russia invades Finland in 1939 because they had nothing better to do or for some other reason. I will go for Russian aggression and expansion. Just as in World War I, the goal was control of land and resources by whoever could kill enough of “the enemy.”

General Patton was right. Much like World War I, and the Dough Boys, the US invades in 1944. Russia gets the help Stalin asked for. And what about those Conferences in Tehran and Cairo? Who was there to decide how the world would be carved up after a war that was not yet over? In photos from the time, it is rare to see Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, whose brother was the richest man in the world at the time.
 
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There is the theory by Viktor Suvorov that Stalin was planning to invade Western Europe. I know it’s controversial and not widely supported, I don’t believe it myself entirely, but it is interesting.
 
My own side? I had nothing to do with it. Yes, the United States took over the Western world while realizing that the Russians also had captured examples of the world’s first cruise missile and ballistic missile, which could not be shot down (the V-1 and V-2). The Russians got right to work with their captured German scientists. The Russians also had examples of the world’s first combat jet aircraft, the Me 262. The British could not bring themselves to field their Gloester Meteor. And the world’s first jet bomber, the Ar 234.
 
gama232 said:
Graphic comments don’t matter. I saw a painting at a store run by Poles. It showed a map of Poland covered in flames. General Patton did not like the Russians. He stated the US should be prepared to fight them. His comments were dismissed at the time.
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They weren’t dismissed, and Patton was hardly the only person in the US or Britain who thought we should immediately move against Russia. Heck, Admiral Donitz, the last leader of the Third Reich, thought he could get off easy and retain power by trying to offer the Western Allies what was left of Germany’s armed forces to go after Russia. There was even preliminary planning, at least in the UK, for WWIII.

From a military point of view, it was insane. There were hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops parked in Eastern Europe. Patton, I’m sure, would have had no problem flinging every available American, Brit, Canadian and every other allied soldier at Russia, and yeah, he probably would have won that war just by the pure resources available to the US which the USSR couldn’t have matched. But it would have been a bloody war, and one that could not hope to ever really take down the Soviet government (Hitler had tried that, and the Eastern Front is a good part of the reason the Third Reich collapsed). Eastern Europe would have been freed, or as free as a blood-soaked crater could be.

No, the Truman Doctrine was the surer course. Yes, it lead to all sorts of other wars and crises, but it contained Soviet expansion and made sure no more mushroom clouds appeared over the great cities of the world.
 
Of course Patton was dismissed. The published suggestion was that his mind had failed. Doenitz? Who was the head of State in Germany at the end of the war? Doenitz. After his capture and interrogation, he was in no position to dictate terms to the Americans or British. What actually happened was a joint plan to reactivate part of the German Army and the Waffen SS should the Russians decide to move West in 1945. At least the Germans had some experience fighting the Russians.
 
“routinely”? What routinely? In the London area, over one million homes were destroyed or damaged.
 
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