Well, I’m just acknowledging that someone who really did believe that totalitarianism was desirable would pretty much have to do all the mental backflips and pretzel-thinking that Commissar seems to be doing, just to sustain that belief.
Basically, we’ve no good way to distinguish between someone who tells lies and doesn’t believe them, and someone who tells lies and does believe them.
Commissar didn’t mention Hungary in particular, but those of you who haven’t should really read James Michener’s The Bridge at Andau. He does those super-long historical fiction epics, right? (Actually, the one about Poland talks about the Soviet invasion, IIRC, but I digress.) Anyway, The Bridge at Andau is a short, non-fiction book about the refugees he met as they fled into Austria, escaping the Soviet crackdown after the Hungarian Revolution. It’s not as disturbing as Elie Wiesel*, but it’s heading in that direction. Really a must-read if you’re interested in what Soviet “liberation” looked like.
*If you’re reading this thread and you’ve never read Night by Elie Wiesel, read it. Little to do with the topic of this thread, but it’s a book that everyone ought to read at least once in their life, and it only takes a couple hours.
Oh. Since I’m getting on a book recommendation tangent, obviously it’s a good idea to read some Solzhenitsyn. Commissar thinks it’s propaganda, which is probably the best recommendation you could get. I’ve only read the first book of The Gulag Archipelago, but I keep meaning to read the rest. Some of his other books are much shorter and, I think, much more digestible.
Not that you wouldn’t have guessed as much, but for the record Estonia went to the USSR’s sphere of influence and annexation along with the rest of the Baltic states in one of the secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I’m sure our fearless comrade knows the pact, the one where the Soviets went to bed with the Nazis to divvy up Eastern Europe between them and let Germany invade Poland without fear of a two front war.
Bulgaria had a more complicated situation; they sided with the Axis before the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, but did not declare war on the USSR when Germany invaded them. For what little it meant, they made the gesture of declaring war on the US and UK after Pearl Harbor. In 1944 when the USSR was sweeping through the Balkans they tried to remain neutral and inter any German troops that crossed their border once Romania collapsed, but the Soviets were having none of that bullshit and declared war on Bulgaria and invaded once they reached the border. Bulgaria faced reality and folded, surrendered to the USSR and declared war on Germany.
The way you phrase this seems to imply that you expect me to be ashamed of the Non-Aggression Pact. Well, screw that. There was nothing inherently wrong or blameworthy with the agreement between our two nations; we wanted a peaceful, stable Europe, and so we signed a long-term memorandum of understanding with a major regional player in order to help us better achieve our goals.
The fact that the NAZIs turned out to be vile back-stabbing little fuckers hardly means that our initial diplomatic ties should be tainted by association. That’s how such things work: sometimes the relationship matures and develops into permanent friendship, and sometimes it collapses into loathing and warfare. The USSR was hardly alone in experiencing the latter outcome. For instance, I seem to recall this one minor Islamist movement that the Empire coddled, loved, and fully supported during the Soviet attempts at Afghan liberation… Yeah, that relationship didn’t work either. Several decades later and a couple skyscrapers fewer, you’re still doing your damnedest to eradicate your prior friends from the face of the Earth. Hindsight is always 20/20, eh?
This has got to be the best bit of trolling yet.
“Who, I say oh who could possibly have predicted that the Nazis were not good?”
I also enjoy the lie that the M-R pact was about “stability” rather than the Soviet Union simply sitting on the sidelines while Hitler’s war in Europe ramped up and more nations were drawn into combat.
“Soviet attempts at Afghan liberation”. Hilarious. Do keep 'em coming.
He might, perhaps, have a semblance of a point if the USSR had sat on the sidelines. Unfortunately for his point, it didn’t. It gobbled up the Baltic States and split Poland down the middle with those trustworthy Nazis. And invaded Finland, though that didn’t work out so well.
Who were the Afghans being liberated from?
Yah, I realized that my gloss was a little bit too simplistic after the edit-period had passed, but decided to leave it as it was. Of course, Commy would just troll about how those were “good faith wars” (whatever those are) but the Empire Empire Empire Empire engages in “bad faith wars”, so the Finns just had to suck it up and accept that it was time to learn Russian.
But even if Russia hadn’t gotten a little trigger happy, the M-R pact wouldn’t have been about stability. It was about allowing Hitler to conquer as much turf as he could grab without worrying about Russian interference, hardly a picture of European stability all in all.
I’ve argued, and would still maintain, that the distinction between fascist regimes and communist regimes is like the difference between coke and pepsi. The M-R pact was essentially a deal between two aggressively expansionist tyrannies to divvy up their spheres of influence and not fight amongst themselves while they were busy savaging the people around them. I’m a bit curious, in an alternate-history sort of way, as to how long the Soviets would have been happy to deal with the Nazis if the Nazis didn’t invade them. The Russian people themselves actually seemed to be less afraid of the Nazi invaders, at first, than they were of their own tyrannical masters; the first wave or so of invading Nazi forces were met by peasants offering bread and salt as a welcoming gift.
Bryan: the Afghans were being liberated from not having the freedom to be oppressed by the Soviets. Duh.
How ironic.
At the explicit request of our friends and allies in the rightful socialist government of Afghanistan, our glorious Red Army was order into the country in order to liberate its citizenry from counter-revolutionary, CIA-financed, treacherous terrorist elements. Make no mistake about it: the intervention was a just one. Still, we should probably have allowed the Afghans to work their issues out on their own. As things turned out, we lost a lot of good men for little return… That’s what you get when you try to magnanimously help others, I suppose. Sigh…
Ok, so he’s a troll.
Comedy gold! 
Tell me again where you live and which country you are a citizen of?
And if your friends asked you to throw someone off a roof, would you?
True. But, he is funny. 
No I don’t expect that you have any sense of shame whatsoever.
Hey look, I was right, you don’t. Thanks for the laugh though.
As his friends would be reliable KGB/FSB agents and the person targeted for the freefall would certainly be an Hitlero-Trotskyst prurient viper (his dossier would attest to that), of course he would.
The comedy gold for Commissar is when he enters high school and his teachers demand citations in his papers to back up his drivel. Maybe that will be in college, though, as a number of high school teachers aren’t as rigorous as they should be. The most comedic part will be when he explains to his English teacher how such a job is beneath the poster we’ve come to know here.