Was World War II Worth It?

[gmc]

posted by scrat

First off what does the term "Gulags" mean? Since you don't know what it means or how to use it in a sentence it simply tells me that all you have to go on is what you have had fed to you in the western media.

You surprise me. As someone who purports to know about Russia you must surely have heard the term. You can't really pass it off as nasty biased western propoganda and pretending it is a made up word and that they didn't exist is not worthy of you. Probably the most famous use of the term in literature is the Gulag Archipeligo by Alexander Solzenhenitsyn, interesting read if you like such stuff.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSgulags.htm

In the 19th century the Russian government deported around 1.2 million prisoners to Siberia. Most of the revolutionary leaders in Russia spent time in Siberia. This included Lenin , Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.

After the Russian Revolution the labour camps in Siberia were closed down. These were later reopened by Joseph Stalin and opponents of his regime were sent to what became known as Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagere (Gulag).

Probably the worst of the labour camps was at Kolyma. Located in north-eastern Siberia, temperatures drop to -90 degrees during the winter. About 30 per cent of the prisoners in Kolyma died each year.

People sent to the Gulags included peasants who were accused of "individualistic tendencies" and opposed the establishment of collective farms. Large numbers of Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Mordovians and Caucasians fell into this category.

You may not like it but stalin was a dictator to whom the description totalitarian was most apt. Assuming that all I have to go on is what has been fed to me in the western media would be a big mistake. Living in a free country, as I do, if I want to I can obtain the writings of both Lenin and Stalin- Hitler Mao Tse Tung and any other political philosophy I care to look in to-and see what they had to say for themselves and also look at the history of post ww1 russia and see how stalin got control and the way he shaped the nation. On the face of it it would appear you need to do some objective research yourself as what actually happened. The kulaks-as I am sure you are aware are the landowning peasant class owing their origins to land reforms earlier on in Russias history. Stalin wiped out 5 million of them no doubt all richly deserved their fate as all class enemies do-even the women and children just as all the returning former POW's after ww2 interned by their countrymen should really not have surrenderd and got themselves killed instead. After all if you end up in a concentraion camp as an enemy of the state you must be mustn't you.

Arguably Roosevelt was a bit of an innocent in believing Stalin would pull back and leave what would become the soviet bloc countries to their freedom-whether it would have been practical to stop him is rather a moot point. The war in the east was still going on and without the use of nuclear weapons would have probably lasted for some years longer than it did.

Many people of the pseudo intellectual left tend to assume that those who disagree with their point of view do so out of ignorance and fall in to the arrogant trap of would be revolutionary socialists everywhere of assuming people need to be led by none other than their enlightened selves. Inconvenient facts are ignored or given a gloss to make them more palatable so they fit in with their beliefs-bit like religious fundamentalists in a way. People are either misguided by evil forces/class enemies or simply non humans whose fate doesn't matter so long as the end is achieved and the glorious state/religon rule comes out on top. Give me habeous corpus and liberal democracy every time

If you want to pick me up on factual errors by all means do so, I would be the first to concede the point if wrong or if I am unsure of the facts. Interpretation of why things happen is a different thing altogether.

Occasionally I might misspell a word and even more frequently the keyboard keys relocate while I am typing but I am not in the habit of using words I don't know the meaning of or how to use it in a sentence.

posted by jives

I think the best thing that could happen to any country is to be defeated by America in war. It's a free ticket to a better economy.

All wars have their roots in the past and there is never any single cause or reason whatever politicians would try and have us believe. The best thing that could happen to any country is not get involved in warfare at all.

[stewartcumming]

Originally Posted by Jives

Considering how we treated Japan, a country with which we had infinitely more reason to be brutal to, I doubt your logic. We rebuilt their economy and infrastructure. We redesigned theri government and now they are powerful allies and an economic power.

I think the best thing that could happen to any country is to be defeated by America in war. It's a free ticket to a better economy.

I think the Iraqis might disagree with you there, Jives?

[Galbally]

Put simply, as the question was, without the revisionism and tautology, "was WWII worth it?"

Unequivocally, Yes.

[randall]

randalls two bits,
I believe that I read fairly recently that the Japanese who have never admitted doing anything wrong between 1937 and 1945 jailed one of their history professors in one of their universities because he dared to say that all of the Japanese history taught to their school children was santitised?
Is this true?
I personally am very ashamed that the British prisoners of war of the Japanese were given a £57-00p settlement per man for all that they had been through - and some of them in my home town are still suffering from it in their old age.
The same Allied governments had no quams about using the research of the infamous "UNIT 731" under Shiro Ishii - all of whom received carte blanch immunity for all the experiements they did on all prisoners of war including British and American somewhere in Manchuria - as long as they handed over all the research notes they had and did not destroy them.
It was so secret that its name was not found out until after the war ended and prisoners began to tell their stories.
Yet the British and American governments had no qualms about using the information and especially in the the British Porton Down reasearch facilities which developed most of the horrible bacterial and chemical warfare weapons which the American Military further developed and was used to spray in undergound stations and over towns in Britain and America "to see their effect.?"
It is too long for me to go into the subject further but it is well worth researching for those interested in the subject.
It also makes a mockery of claims that the moral future of the world lies in western hands.
God bless.
randall.

[Scrat]

On the face of it it would appear you need to do some objective research yourself as what actually happened.

I have, and the biggest factor in all of the mess is the number of supposed people offed by Stalin is subject to much conjecture. It without fail gets higher the more rabid/fanatical the editorialist/writer is towards communism and Stalin plus the other concerns. Such as the fact that Russia was in a state of tremendous change in the first half of the century, the fall of the Tsars, WW1, the revolution, the five year plans for industrialization, WWII and many other factors.

For anyone to take for truth the opinions of what happened there then is to devoid oneself of critical thought. In the most extreme writing about him and the murders he supposedly ordered if it were real there would be no Russians left on earth. Russia could not have lost 100 million people in 20 years to wars and Stalins "atrocities" and survived as a nation or a people. People simply don't breed that fast in an enviornment of extreme deprivation, starvation and other sadistic things that were supposedly done to the Russian people.

Do some objective research yourself. Toss in some commonsense while you're at it.

The kulaks-as I am sure you are aware are the landowning peasant class owing their origins to land reforms earlier on in Russias history. Stalin wiped out 5 million of them no doubt all richly deserved their fate as all class enemies do-even the women and children

Alot of what happened to the Kulaks they brought on themselves. Aside from their land grabs from their fellow peasants by just about every means imaginable (even terrorism) including the "legal" sales of land from women whos husbands had died in the war by all forms of coersion you have to throw into the mix the people who carried out the orders of Stalin.

They were mostly young people. Communist youth who grew up in the cities of Russia. Did you ever read about the Moscow famine in 1920? Many of these children watched their parents starve and starved themselves because of the Kulak farmers who refused to plant crops. They went about their business with zeal (too much) because they felt they could do away with the injustices they had seen and had suffered.

These children had at best poor judgement on how orders were implemented. And to what ends.

Now throw into the mess all of the people who were leaving Russia at the time. Many millions did, my siggos grandmother being one of them with her whole family. Nobody knows how many left for sure. Nobody knows how many were deported to the east. The records are just not there and the ones that are found cannot be that accurate. Many records from the Ukraine were destroyed in WWII in Kharkov which was the main Soviet statistics bereau for the souther part of Russia. There are huge inaccuracies in the Russian censuses even to this day.

Nobody knows what happened there, I have never found any accurate information on it. Not even in the library in Moscow. It is a big question to me that why would the Russian government freely write about the deportations of the Chechen peoples to the east but not write about what happened in the Ukraine?

I think that they simply don't know a lot about it. There is noe thing Ihave found though that may be a link to those "millions" that Stalin supposedly killed in the Ukraine.

The sanitation services in WWII in the region, top notch. Beyond even the west. There was an outbreak of influenza in the Ukraine in the late 20s and 30s. I think that this outbreak has something to do with it. That and the fact that the Russians (then) were caught flatfooted by it . The sanitation service in WWII was the response to this outbreak.

Disease is a bigger killer of people than any human ever was.

just as all the returning former POW's after ww2 interned by their countrymen should really not have surrenderd and got themselves killed instead.

No time tonight.

[gmc]

posted by scrat

Alot of what happened to the Kulaks they brought on themselves. Aside from their land grabs from their fellow peasants by just about every means imaginable (even terrorism) including the "legal" sales of land from women whos husbands had died in the war by all forms of coersion you have to throw into the mix the people who carried out the orders of Stalin.

They were mostly young people. Communist youth who grew up in the cities of Russia. Did you ever read about the Moscow famine in 1920? Many of these children watched their parents starve and starved themselves because of the Kulak farmers who refused to plant crops. They went about their business with zeal (too much) because they felt they could do away with the injustices they had seen and had suffered.

Yes, but I also read how lenin ordered that the troops got first call on any food and what was left went to the cities, I also read about the new economic policy adopted by the communists in 1921 in an attempt to encourage food production by allowing peasants to grow and sell their produce and keep the profit giving them an incentive to improve production. Don't forget he also found it expedient to promise land to peasants in order to get their support against those of the white russians that wanted to turn the clock back. It was a successful policy at first and it wasn't till later in the decade that resentment against the more affluent farmers spilled out and stalin brought in the five year plans and collectivised the farms. Cynically you could also suggest that by that point any hope the white russians might have had was dead along with the tsar and the western powers had their own problems to distract them and had lost interest, he was in a position to tighten his grip and go after class enemies and consolidate his power. It was by no means certain that the communists would succeed, it was always on a knife edge. It is one of the ironies of communism that the only two successful communist revolutions should took place in illiterate uneducated peasant based economies.

Stalin was a flawed character which lenin seemed to come to appreciate later on after he made the mistake of appointing him his deputy.

As to how many he killed there is no accurate information but then he did not have the German sense of efficiency that kept the records up to date. So I don't really find it surprising that there are no accurate records.

Post ww2 the british handed over thousands of ukrainians that had fought with hitler against the russians as part of one of the treaty agrements-I forget which one-knowingly sending them back to their deaths, that's something that was kept secret until very recently and we have a supposedly more open society. I would be curious if you have come across any reference to what happened to them. We have a new freedom of information act and also many of the time barred records are now available to historians and all sorts of interesting things are coming out.

Looks like Putin is tightening his grip on Russia. I'm curious-since you are in Russia, how do ordinary russians view what is going on in Iraq and elsewhere?

[deckard]

I have read the `heated` debate that has ensued in this thread, but I seem to be missing the point. The original question ` Was World War 2 worth it? has only one answer. NO. Is any war worth it, worth what I ask? All the millions of people being killed, the destruction of towns and cities it is pure madness. The 2nd World War should have been the end of wars. It may have went on for a lot longer and many of us wouldn't have even been born as a result but in a sense we still have a World War it just takes place in many diffrent countries all at the same time. The End of all Wars is something I thought our world would be free of by now. It's a bloody shame that it isn't and most probally it never will be.

Perhaps Wars are a business lead thing as it keeps the nations that build the weapons in the first place very wealthy.

I'm a bit confused about the question but the thread has been an interesting read. No war is "worth it" but some are necessary. WWII was necessary.

[Scrat]

Post ww2 the british handed over thousands of ukrainians that had fought with hitler against the russians as part of one of the treaty agrements-I forget which one-knowingly sending them back to their deaths, that's something that was kept secret until very recently and we have a supposedly more open society. I would be curious if you have come across any reference to what happened to them. We have a new freedom of information act and also many of the time barred records are now available to historians and all sorts of interesting things are coming out.

Just what happened there is unclear. Many things must be considered when it comes to Vlasov, the RNNA, Crimean Cossacks (Don Cossacks also but they were very small in numbers), Crimean Tartars, Galacians and others. It was not just Ukrainians.

If you consider just what went on in European Russia, the Baltics, Belorussia and the Ukraine under the Nazi occupation it becomes a quagmire. The people that were found in Germany were there for many reasons. Some were forced to join Vlasovs army under the "starve or fight" program. Some were deported to Germany for purposes of slave labor from all over European Russia some came willingly at different points in time. Some of these people committed no crimes, some did in order to survive, some did for fun.
There was a group of Don Cossacks from the Kuban region who greatly enjoyed all manner of atrocities in the Rostov and Mius river regions. I can't remember the name of the group but I hope they died horrible slow deaths considering what I have read about their "exploits" in the fight against communism.

Just who did what to whom is a matter of conjecture all the way around. In the city of Orel for example when the Germans rolled into the city there was about 124,000 people there. When the Russians liberated the city in 1943 its population was less than 20,000. Some joined the partisan bands, some were deported as slave labor and a lot of the old and children died of disease and starvation under the German occupation.

I'm not going into detail about what happened to the civilians in the occupied areas. Suffice to say that there was people with guns and people without guns trying to survive BUT...........

Vlasov, Rodionov, Kononov and the people in the RNNA, ROA and the Boyarskis and other groups took a big gamble for whatever reason.

The Germans lost. The Russians won.

The Russian people were in no mood to show mercy to people who made the wrong choice. NOTE WHAT I SAID.

THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE.

In this light I suppose the Russian government was supposed to just let these people go back to where ever they came from, without knowing who they were whether or not they would cause trouble?, what they were guilty of?, if they were guilty?

If a Belorussian that fought for the Boyarskis under the Nazis went back to Minsk how long do you think he would live walking down the street? How many steps would he take?

If you look deep enough you will find alot of these people showing up elsewhere. Australia, the French Foreign Legion, Israel, Turkey and America, some were freed and remained there along with a lot of German POWs. They started over. Many emigrated to other places, many were exiled. Many died in the Gulags.

Once again, nobody really knows. I have only a little vague material FROM THE RUSSIAN point of view. The rest is mainly "toe the line" drivel from the west.

[Scrat]

Looks like Putin is tightening his grip on Russia. I'm curious-since you are in Russia, how do ordinary russians view what is going on in Iraq and elsewhere?

Most Russians (northern Great Russ blue eyed types) I know think that not only the Iraqi "war" is stupid but also the Chechen conflict. The single person I know in Vladikavkaz is all for the Chechen conflict. It depends on who you talk to.

They know all about "Трусливая техника собаки". In english it means "cowardly dog technique", when it comes to the wests trying to gain influence in the region.

Russians think that what the western powers are doing in the world is basically wrong. They know America, Britain and others are basically trying to dominate the world in one form or another. They seem conflicted though on what stance Russia should take. Many Russians simply want to be Russians, who needs the Far East? Sell it to China they say, everything east of Ekaratinburg is worthless anyway.

Russians do like the west but fear it all the same. There are too many people out there who simply want to see Russia become nothing. I agree with them, Russians have sacrificed too much and have been Russians for too long to become someone/something else.

As for Putin it seems most Russians like him. His popularity is over 70%. I think that the Russians are like Danes Brits ect in many ways when it comes to nostalgia. They don't like "democracy" American style when it comes to leaders. They seem to want a king or someone close to a king, someone who can take charge. Before you start slinging the drivel about Putin being an autocratic dictator read about the Nordic "Allthing" and learn about Russian people and exactly what the Russian government has done in relation to what Britain has and South Africa has done in the last decade.

Putin is in charge. As long as the Russian people believe he has their best interests in mind, I'll trust their judgement.