Neapolitan

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Paul Smeenus

They absolutely were, no doubt, and Stalin knew perfectly well that Hitler would turn on the Red Army. Stalin was baiting Hitler, as no one has ever (even to this day) successfully invaded Russia, it's so vast that all they had to do was keep pulling back and let the Siberian Winter win the war for them, which is exactly what they did in WWII. Yes, that action cost them millions of lives, but Stalin didn't care. He knew that he would come out the victor of the spoils.

And there was never going to be a "merger" of Poland. Anymore that he intended to "merge" the Sudetenland without taking over in Czechoslovakia. If it was handed to him like Czechoslovakia and Austria were, well he'd have taken it, but he'd played one too many "no more land demand" cards with the Sudetenland

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John Wilkes Booth

i want to correct this after having googled the figures. clearly i was wrong about them being nearly equivalent. i'd say instead that a huge portion of the dead in ww2 were civilians murdered in genocides instead of just soldier deaths. so to be honest i'm not sure the millions of soviet murders of their own civilians for ideological, nationalistic and economic reasons should be blamed on germany for starting the war in europe. nor the millions of dead in the asian theater.

John Wilkes Booth

i remember reading that stalin was actually in denial about the prospect that hitler was going to attack him prior to operation barbarossa. that he was actually warned about the attack on good intelligence and ignored the warnings because he didn't think hitler would be that foolish.

but yea i've also read they both ultimately expected to clash eventually. they were diametrically opposed in ideology and both had their eyes on the same land in eastern europe to feed/fund their respective empires.

edit: also, i think the soviets had a good reason to agree with the invasion and dismantling of poland, even if the 'agreement' was only to be temporary. the poles were one of their main perceived threats at the time to such an extent that pole within the soviet sphere were persecuted as possible subversives and agents of the polish state.

Lord Larehip

Ah, I see. The swastika earned its bad rap. Maybe you could explain to us lesser beings exactly how that happened. Did the swastika attach itself to the Nazi banners and armbands despite all their attempts to remove it? Or perhaps it handed Hitler a typed thesis clearly explaining how to implement the Nazi ideology. As hard as I've looked I cannot find any information on exactly how the swastika earned its bad rap. As far as I can see, it did nothing.

So, then, are we all in agreement--even if somewhat grudgingly--that there isn't any credible reason why the swastika should be reviled in the West?

DwnWthVwls

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...

Lord Larehip

Someone seems to doubt the swastika below is an Aztec calendar so I include an excerpt from the website I got it from.


We find here the Aztecan calendar cycle of 52 uncorrected years represented in the form of a left rotating "swastika". The wheel starts with the year 1 Acatl, then turns left to 2 Tecpatl, 3 Calli, 4 Tochtli, 5 Acatl, etc. There is a good explanation of the whole composition in Duran and Seler. The question is, did the Hopi have a real writing system like the Aztecs and did they share the same calendar around the year 1000? Why do they not have a developed writing in the 17th century?
ABOUT SWASTIKA - Esoteric Online

GuD

It's really not your place to be telling people what they should and should not be shocked and offended by. The symbol was given a bad reputation because a regime of people who tried to completely erase another group of people from the planet for arbitrary reasons used it on their flags. Being offended by something associated with something that horrible is a completely understandable reaction and you're kind of being a douche for saying it isn't.

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I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc

Lord Larehip

What about Mao and his "Great Leap Forward" which lasted for 3 years and killed 15 million people by starvation and that's the Red Chinese govt's own count. Historians both Western and Chinese put it far higher than that. A Chinese journalist put it at 36 million. A Western historian put it 45 million. Even the most conservative estimates by scholars place it at 20 million. A good round number would be about 30 million people that died under the Maoist regime in only 3 years.

But we don't care about that because the media doesn't shove it down our throats all day with movies and books and songs and articles about it. The Chinese-Americans, after all, don't run our media.

John Wilkes Booth

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