On 3/9/2022 at 6:40 AM, Oplet said:OK, on Ukraine Invasion.
I fundamentally disagree almost everything you've said here. The write up on WW2 is especially... colorful. I'm not going to nitpick and challenge all your points, I'll just say on a very high level that you're taking individual truths and half-truths and coming to narrow but also all encompassing forgone conclusion.
I think broad conclusions require broad strokes, so here is how I see it:
Russia industrialized far too late because of its unfavorable geography- it was too widespread, open to constant invasion, and had no warm water ports. Given that it was too late the colonization game which the other empires were playing, Russia instead resorted to cannibalizing itself and its bordering neighbors. This was further accelerated by utter devastation of the Russian civil war and WW2, which also prevented Russia from cultivating strong social institutions, resulting in a corrupt landscape that only ruthless thieves and marauders could navigate and thrive in. Other countries developed relatively peacefully and gradually moved away from subjugation by force, but Russia lacked and still lacks the stability to project any type of soft power, so it resorts to old fashioned brutality to keep its population in check and hang on to its perceived vassal states.
You can get more granular and talk about the collapse of the USSR, the overthrow of Yanukovich and draw up ten million conclusion from 10 million different factoids, but i think can all be funneled back to what I typed above.
On 3/9/2022 at 9:36 AM, 1000 Gibibit said:Damn, that's a pretty good writeup, it gives a lot of context. The history you described of 17th century and before is kind of hard to picture since I don't know a lot about Europe in that time (and afaik Europe changes quite a lot in those pre-1700 periods you describe).
The history of lend-lease by the US to USSR surprised me. Kind of understandable that they used this strategy, helping the USSR saved the Allies a lot of manpower.
Will definitely take a look at that video by Andrius Tapinas, the subtitles seem alright.
By the way, I think your mention of Flight MH370 is supposed to point to MH17. MH370 was lost, MH17 was shot.
One point a lot of fail to talk about when it comes to lend-lease is the years when the bulk of the aid arrived
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
The bulk arrived in 1943 and beyond. By then the Germans were already routed in the Stalingrad and the caucuses. I don't think the USSR would have capitulated without it. Although things would have most likely turned out differently- at worst, a peace treaty with the bulk of the Soviet territory still under German control and a much lengthier Western Front. It's a bit pointless and tedious to speculate what ifs though. History is history, and the whys and hows are open to conjecture.