I am putting this is in the pit because I can’t be the only one (I hope) who wants to call Putin an asshole.
Mr. Putin, sir, you are an asshole. Your attempt to retrospectively whitewash the egregious machinations of Stalin, and implicitly excuse the mass murders and horror that resulted from the Pact, are beyond, way beyond, the pale. That you can overlook the MR Pact and accuse the allies of ‘allowing’ Hitler to do what he did proves what so many people already know (at least outside of the sycophantic obsequious Russian population): that you are a fascist fuck.
Gee, I’ve never heard anyone in the West question the Munich agreement!! :dubious:
I’d thought the idea that the Soviet Union was just trying to buy time in making a pact with the Nazis had been disposed of long, long ago - seeing that the Soviets eagerly participated with Germany in the carving up of Poland.
There is revisionist, and then there is shithead. Putin falls in the latter camp.
To be fair to the shithead, I think his point was that we shoulda coulda woulda stopped Germany as soon as they took… I 'unno, the Sudetenland, or Gdansk or something.
But as I said, his point is pretty counterproductive in the modern context. He’s essentially arguing we should flatten him right now if we don’t want to have to flatten him later.
I’d buy that.
He’s not entirely without a point. The Soviets tried repeatedly to get the western powers interested in an anti-German pact in the run-up to the war – they were more frightened of renewed German military might than anyone else, with good reason – but were continually rebuffed. Stalin probably could see the writing on the wall a little clearer than others, so finally in 1939 he replaced his Jewish, pro-western Foreign Minister (Litinov) with one who help him strike a deal with Germany instead (Molotov). From a self-interested point of view it wasn’t unreasonable, even if it didn’t work out in the end.
Of course, at the end of the day you’re still striking a deal with the Nazis, and carving up Eastern Europe in the process is despicable no matter what.
Pfft, what a lightweight, “suggesting” Britain and France were to blame for Adolf Hitler’s march into Europe. He should take lessons from Pat Buchanan: Hitler was a man of peace, Churchill was to blame for the war and forced poor little old Hitler to perpetrate the holocaust.
I could not find it in a quick search, just now, but there was a news article discussing the Russian public a few weeks ago regarding what they will believe. (It was prompted by various polls of Russians following their government’s claims regarding Ukraine–such as claims that Russia had nothing to do with various events in which Russian soldiers were captured or photographic claims that troops moved into Ukraine wearing Russian uniforms and military insignia.)
The basic thrust of the story was that after 80 years of Pravda and Izvestia followed by the turmoil of the last twenty years, Russians generally are paradoxically more cynical and more gullible about nearly all news. It sounded as though they treated all news as though they were reading Globe, Weekly World News, or similar publications. They do not trust government statements, but they seem willing to believe rather outlandish claims from odd sources. How this translates to comparing a war or words between Putin and the West, I have no idea. I’m still trying to find the article.
I had never actually read that Buchanan piece before. Sure, I’d heard of it, but I had not bothered to peek at it myself.
Having now, belatedly, read it, I will say that what Buchanan wrote may be about the most uninformed, ignorant, and absolutely absurd piece I’ve ever encountered. It’s just ludicrous, and on multiple levels. Was he trying to be provocative (and willing to sacrifice a bit of credibility for the sake of publicity)?
My gawd! Could he really have been unaware of Hitler’s long-term goals? You know, the ones that included allowing the Poles, Slavs, and other untermenschen to exist only insofar as they could continue work for the Reich (as slaves)?
For a few seconds, I actually considered rebutting his article point by point. It then occurred to me that he must have been simply trolling, so why bother. In fact, knowing how much publicity his piece would surely generate, it’s a given (I would think) that he had it vetted by others before it went to press; others who, presumably, were more knowledgeable than he (or who at least weren’t as stupid as he seems to be). If he published that shite even after having it vetted, there can be no doubt that he did so fully cognizant that it was shite, absolute horseshit. IOW, a troll.
FTR, it is well established from Hitler’s writings, particularly his unpublished “Second Book”, that his war-aim from the beginning, while falling well short of world conquest, was still plenty aggressive: He intended all along to destroy the nations of Poland and Russia – not merely conquer and exploit them like a colony in Africa, but to destroy them utterly as nations, and build a greater Germany on their bones, colonize their territory with Germans, exterminate the Slavs or reduce them to slavery, and make Germany into a continental-scale power like the United States. Then, in the next generation, he envisioned a final conflict with the U.S. for world domination.
He might have succeeded, if the U.S. could have been kept out of the war.
That’s consistent with what was taught in Russian schools during the Soviet Era, when Putin was himself a kid. He might or might not believe it, but it isn’t a new idea in Russia.
That’s understandable while Stalin was alive – one couldn’t very well say he had made a mistake – but after Stalin, and after everything the Germans had done to them, I can’t see how the Soviets would cling to the notion that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was ever a good idea.
That’s understandable while Stalin was alive – one couldn’t very well say he had made a mistake – but after Stalin, and after everything the Germans had done to them, I can’t see how the Soviets would cling to the notion that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was ever a good idea.