Oh come on, the entire world is shocked at the crimes of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, but you felt the need to be a contrarian.
Freedom of speech ends where hurting another person begins. We cannot show tolerance for intolerance. I know it's a clichéd comparison, but the pattern is the same as with Germans during the Second World War: Germans were taught that they were Übermensch, which meant every other "race" was inferior. Not just Jews, but also Slavs. Germans planned to totally wipe out Jews and greatly reduce the population of Poland to make it a nation of enslaved serfs.
Similarly, Russians have been taught that they are the greatest nation in the world and that everybody else is inferior and against them. Everybody is a Nazi or an American spy, according to Russian information sources. This is the actual line of propaganda in Комсомольская Правда and РИА Новости articles, among others. I'm not going to link to these articles so as to not spread bull propaganda. You don't speak Russian? Thankfully, some of these articles have been translated to English just to point out how delusional Russian state propaganda is. You can find them if you want to.
Fair enough, but you are deluded if you don’t think your entire spiel/tone of every single comment of yours isn’t ideologically coloured. Everything is ideologically coloured
This is a rhetorical distraction often used by Russian trolls to take everybody's eyes from what really matters:
1. Russia attacked a sovereign country.
2. Russia is raping, torturing, and murdering civilians.
How do you ideologically color the tying a person's hands behind their back and shooting them in the head from behind? How do you ideologically color the torture of a person in the basement? How do you ideologically color the rape of women and children? None of these acts have anything to do with ideology. Unless your ideology allows these things.
In Russia, there is no talk about Russian crimes, which were aplenty in its long and turbulent history. State propaganda convinces people that it is not a war crime if you murder a "Nazi". Even a ten-year-old "Nazi". After all, to this day, Russia takes pride in winning over Nazism and ending the war. Of course, this is greatly exaggerated. Americans would've won anyway. It'd just take more time. And less suffering in Poland and Germany, as once the Germans ran away, Russians came in and murder started again, this time spiced with rape and stealing LITERALLY everything.
If you don't think Russians are brainwashed on average, just try telling one that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were once friends and had signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that described how Poland will be divided between these two countries. Tell them that the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the East on June the 17th 1939 only 16 days after Germany attacked from the West. If you tell them all that and they say "you are right" then you have been lucky. Because my experience is totally different.
I still haven’t seen any evidence of your credentials to make any such claims
Just watch the pictures from the Bucha Massacre. I'm not going to post these disturbing pictures here. You can find them in many ways, e.g., by going to Twitter and typing "Bucha graves" in the search box.
Do you have a postgraduate degree in Russian history from a respectable international institution, did you do a secondment there?
Do you? We can start exchanging ad hominem retorts if you want. But I don't think it would contribute to this thread as a whole. If anything, it'd only derail it and force
Yoda to close it.
Or isn’t it that, oops, you just live roughly in the vicinity of Russia? That alone means that your perception of Russia is coloured by the post-Soviet dislike and resentment of the country which is so typical of ex-Soviet republics and surrounding areas.
There is a reason for that. But I wouldn't call that resentment. It's a rational fear of Russia; that Russia will attack other countries, again with the excuse of denazification. And that they will somehow still try to pose as liberators.
We saw that happen in Poland during the Second World War, and unfortunately, little has changed. I heard many stories from my grandma and dozens of other people's grandmas. Russians would steal toilets and women's underwear, rape and torture women that were still children as well as older women, saw off their breasts, etc. They'd dig up raw potatoes from the fields. They'd steal everything they could and set fire to whatever was left. This is happening again, on a smaller scale, yes, but maybe only because this war is a smaller war, too.
When she was still alive, my grandma would tell me a lot of stories about the war. She said that when the Germans entered her village, they have killed a few people there, and they took a few to the Treblinka Extermination Camp, including her father. But she somehow spoke flatteringly about the Germans anyway. She said that she was sitting somewhere hidden in a ditch and a German saw her, walked over, looked, and walked on. And besides, the Germans gave chocolate to children, etc. Yes, she admitted Germans too murdered people and some of them were scary monsters, but the main difference was that Germans did everything in a very routine and orderly way. By the way, I'm not trying to perpetuate the "good Wehrmacht" myth because Wehrmacht committed a lot of war crimes, too. But Russians were feared more than Germans were. And that says a lot.
When the Russians came to my grandma's village, they started from digging up raw potatoes. The women started hiding because Russians had raped some women before. My grandmother's mother was caught by a Russian soldier with an ax in his hand who entered their house uninvited. The soldier grabbed her by the hair. She fell. Then, my grandma threw herself on her knees in front of him and begged him for mercy. Miraculously the Russian soldier left the house. But other women in the village weren't so lucky. They were raped, mutilated, or murdered. Some women had their breasts cut off with a saw or ax.
Imagine how evil must've been the Russians who entered my grandma's village that she, whose father was taken to Treblinka by the Germans and died there, still thought that Russians were worse.
And I spoke to numerous people from all around Poland. Their grandparents had very similar stories to tell. Then, the Russians moved on to Germany and did similar, if not the same. They were fighting Nazis. By raping women and murdering children.
If accounts of survivors are not enough for you, you can look at the thing in a wider scope by googling "soviet war crimes" or something. And then googling "Bucha massacre" and reading what Russian troops are doing in Ukraine. The similarities are scary. The thing is, googling it may not be enough. You need to spend more time reading about all that.
What with your suggestions of exaggerating the figures for Russian casualties and minimising those for Ukraine
There are definitely wars where one side has a huge moral advantage over the other and the war in Ukraine is such a conflict. If you compare these two things:
- Ukrainians might've overestimated Russian losses, delibaretly or not.
- Russians attacked an independent country. They raped, tortured, and murdered civilians in Bucha, Irpin, and other cities (I fear to think what is happening in Donbas).
You will see how inane your allegations sound.
And that’s pathetic and a case of blinding hypocrisy at that.
I don't mind you saying that. It's a very good example of how most Russians and pro-Russian people react when they see what Russian troops are doing in Ukraine. Denial is one of the most basic defense mechanisms. And that refers to every nation. The thing is, most intelligent people accept the truth sooner or later. It's the uneducated who keep being stuck in their ignorance.
Closed Thread
