Is "Civil Disobedience" a legitimate tool to effect government change?

Jredbaron96 said:

http://www.melgrosh.unimelb.edu.au/documents/CREES_SIPS-20.pdf

Demographic data shows that the casualties from the Holodomor were between 2-5 million. Anything higher or lower isn't supported by the evidence. This also includes the lesser known famine of 1948 (which was obviously not the fault of the Soviets).



No, it really wouldn't have. D-Day was launched against a very lightly defended sector of France where in some cases German defenders numbered less than 800 against 125,000 allied soldiers. Can you imagine trying to secure that beachhead against say 100,000 German mechanized and Panzer forces?



The US demonstrated quite clearly it was willing to use an atomic bomb to avert further American casualties. It would've been ready in time to use on Nazi Germany in this scenario.

Click to expand...

What is your basis for this statement? Bolded above^^^


Don't mean to intrude......

phattonez said:

This sounds absurdly low.

Click to expand...

To someone who's never studied it, perhaps.

Paul Kengor: Death what communism did best | TribLIVE

Click to expand...

And that number is right in line with Solzhenitsyn.

Click to expand...

Which is absolutely retarded. The population of the USSR on the eve of the invasion was 196 million. ~27 million Soviets were killed during the war (8 million military personnel, 17 million civilians, and 2 more million to starvation due to food shortages (see Leningrad). The Soviet population didn't recover these losses until roughly 1955 when the Soviet population neared 200 million.

We can see from demographic trends such as birth rates and match it with losses from the war and determine that population of the USSR in 1946, a year after the war ended was 170 million and rising, thanks to USSR steady birthrates in the years before 1941.

So tell me; how in the **** do you fit in almost a third (60 million is roughly 30% of 190 million) of the USSR's population being killed by Stalin?

You're again acting as if there would be no Eastern Front. Of course Hitler would still be busy trying to invade Russia. D-Day is harder, yes, but it's not as if Hitler can ignore the east.

Click to expand...

But the Eastern Front isn't going to be anywhere near as dangerous for the Germans. The Red Army can't conduct the operations like Bagration and Vistula-Order without the Lend Lease Aid supplied trucks and supplies.

Which while awful, wouldn't have allowed Stalin to dominate Eastern Europe.

Click to expand...

At this point between extending the war and involving the bomb, you're going to end up killing more people than the communist regimes in Eastern Europe actually killed.

phattonez said:

Great, but from what I can tell most of the people conflate anti-semitism, ghettos, and internment with actual industrial scale killing.

Click to expand...

Because that's what it leads to. You don't just wake up one day and decide that millions of Jews need to die. Antisemitism in Germany before 1935 wasn't even that terrible, although it was more prevalent than France and the UK. But when they came the targets of the Nazis that suddenly changed. It's really easy to justify genocide when you dehumanize the victims.

Jredbaron96 said:

To someone who's never studied it, perhaps.



Which is absolutely retarded. The population of the USSR on the eve of the invasion was 196 million. ~27 million Soviets were killed during the war (8 million military personnel, 17 million civilians, and 2 more million to starvation due to food shortages (see Leningrad). The Soviet population didn't recover these losses until roughly 1955 when the Soviet population neared 200 million.

We can see from demographic trends such as birth rates and match it with losses from the war and determine that population of the USSR in 1946, a year after the war ended was 170 million and rising, thanks to USSR steady birthrates in the years before 1941.

So tell me; how in the **** do you fit in almost a third (60 million is roughly 30% of 190 million) of the USSR's population being killed by Stalin?

Click to expand...

Why are we limiting this solely to Soviet citizens? Hitler (rightly) gets blame for killing foreigners under his occupation. Holocaust numbers include Soviet POWs. Why do we not include the German POWs that Stalin killed?

But the Eastern Front isn't going to be anywhere near as dangerous for the Germans. The Red Army can't conduct the operations like Bagration and Vistula-Order without the Lend Lease Aid supplied trucks and supplies.

Click to expand...

And what did Bagration accomplish? It got the Soviets into Poland and Eastern Europe. I'd rather have Hitler fighting Stalin deep in Russian territory instead of letting Stalin get anywhere into Eastern Europe. Hitler still has to keep up those supply lines and divert precious resources into a futile Russia campaign.

At this point between extending the war and involving the bomb, you're going to end up killing more people than the communist regimes in Eastern Europe actually killed.

Click to expand...

All it does it make the Western Front tougher and the Eastern Front less brutal. In the end it's probably a wash in terms of deaths, but the outcome is way better.

Jredbaron96 said:

Because that's what it leads to. You don't just wake up one day and decide that millions of Jews need to die. Antisemitism in Germany before 1935 wasn't even that terrible, although it was more prevalent than France and the UK. But when they came the targets of the Nazis that suddenly changed. It's really easy to justify genocide when you dehumanize the victims.

Click to expand...

So Americans should have just assumed that our government was conducting industrial scale murder of Japanese?

phattonez said:

Why are we limiting this solely to Soviet citizens? Hitler (rightly) gets blame for killing foreigners under his occupation. Holocaust numbers include Soviet POWs. Why do we not include the German POWs that Stalin killed?

Click to expand...

Well, for a number of reasons.

380,000 German POWs died in Soviet captivity, but that number doesn't seem so bad when you remember that 3.5 million Soviet prisoners died at German hands. Even if you accept the claim that 1 million German POWs died, that's still barely 1/3rd. That number means a lot less when you realize a large number of German POWs died due to starvation, not deliberate, just the fact that the Soviets for several years were so desperately short of food that they could barely feed their own soldiers.

And lastly, the Ostheer carried out some of the most horrific war crimes of the war, murdering millions of Soviet civilians, Jews, and prisoners. I have little sympathy for war criminals starving to death in the GULAG.

And what did Bagration accomplish? It got the Soviets into Poland and Eastern Europe. I'd rather have Hitler fighting Stalin deep in Russian territory instead of letting Stalin get anywhere into Eastern Europe. Hitler still has to keep up those supply lines and divert precious resources into a futile Russia campaign.



All it does it make the Western Front tougher and the Eastern Front less brutal. In the end it's probably a wash in terms of deaths, but the outcome is way better.

Click to expand...

No, it doesn't. The advantage of a wide operational offensive is that it rapidly transfers a pitched battle into a route where one side simply runs over the other instead of both sides trading blows. By removing the Soviet operational capacity, you're actually making things worse, because not only are less German soldiers dying, more Soviet troops are, which makes the Red Army less of a threat, which means less Germans are required on the Eastern Front, which means a harder fight for the Western Allies.

So in order to prevent a communist rule of Eastern Europe, you've ended up killing even more people than would've died if the Communists took over Eastern Europe, and replaced Hiroshima with Berlin. Way to go.

phattonez said:

So Americans should have just assumed that our government was conducting industrial scale murder of Japanese?

Click to expand...

Many Americans would actually have preferred that. Wartime sentiment against the Japanese was so extremely negative it made the German-American hostilities seem like a minor confrontation.

But of course the United States didn't, unlike Nazi Germany, and like how most Americans knew about the internment camps, most Germans knew about the concentration camps.

phattonez said:

Hitler convinced them that German minorities in Poland were being persecuted. They had no knowledge of the Holocaust. How guilty were the civilians really?


Quit thinking only of the US and British. We had no business allying with Stalin.


That is bonkers. Why does Stalin get a pass for what he did before we allied with him? Why do you ignore his domination of Eastern Europe after the war?



Meanwhile, the Soviet Union enslaved Europe and exterminated millions more people.

Click to expand...

Hitler was a pathological liar who staged an incident to justify his invasion of Poland using murdered prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms. Even then the German people knew full well that ole Adolf was going after the Jews. Your argument fails to work....again.

Hitler had no business brutally attacking his neighbors and murdering millions of innocent people. We had every right to ally with whoever else he was fighting. And no, even Stalin never committed anything close to the level of atrocity which took place in Nazi Germany.

No, it's not "bonkers"; Stalin's aggression occurred before he was allied with the West, and occurred with Hitler's agreement. That's historical fact.

Considering the fact that the states he dominated were largely former Axis members....they made their bed, they can lay in it.

No, actually, half of Europe was still free thanks to the Allies. All of Europe would have been enslaved to white nationalist thugs had we not helped fight Adolf.

phattonez said:

The biggest contributor to getting the Nazis away from Moscow wasn't allied aid, it was Soviet intelligence assuring Stalin that Japan wasn't going to invade.

Click to expand...

Russian forces in the Far East remained at a sizable level throughout the war, so no, Allied aid was rather more important--- especially given the need to move troops from one part of the USSR's vast empire to another.

Jredbaron96 said:

Many Americans would actually have preferred that. Wartime sentiment against the Japanese was so extremely negative it made the German-American hostilities seem like a minor confrontation.

But of course the United States didn't, unlike Nazi Germany, and like how most Americans knew about the internment camps, most Germans knew about the concentration camps.

Click to expand...

And I agree that everyone knew about the concentration camps. Where we disagree is on how widespread was knowledge about industrial scale killing.

phattonez said:

And I agree that everyone knew about the concentration camps. Where we disagree is on how widespread was knowledge about industrial scale killing.

Click to expand...

Oh, it was pretty common. Tens of thousands of Germans took part in the killings directly, either as local police, the Gestapo, the SS, the Einstatzgruppen, or the Ostheer. The Germans were very blunt when it came to discussing their war against the Soviets. After all, in their mind it wasn't just another war, it was a war of annihilation in which they felt necessary to exterminate the "Jewish-Bolshevik" threat. In their letters and tours back home, German soldiers were hardly reluctant to discuss how they had helped to eradicate the "great Asian horde that had for so long spoiled Europe."

The simplest proof of this of the Germans who fled East Prussia as the Soviets reached the Vistula in late 1944, with thousands of them explaining their exodus because they were aware the Soviets were looking for revenge for all the killings that had occurred in the USSR.

Jredbaron96 said:

Oh, it was pretty common. Tens of thousands of Germans took part in the killings directly, either as local police, the Gestapo, the SS, the Einstatzgruppen, or the Ostheer.

Click to expand...

So less than 0.1%.

The Germans were very blunt when it came to discussing their war against the Soviets. After all, in their mind it wasn't just another war, it was a war of annihilation in which they felt necessary to exterminate the "Jewish-Bolshevik" threat. In their letters and tours back home, German soldiers were hardly reluctant to discuss how they had helped to eradicate the "great Asian horde that had for so long spoiled Europe."

The simplest proof of this of the Germans who fled East Prussia as the Soviets reached the Vistula in late 1944, with thousands of them explaining their exodus because they were aware the Soviets were looking for revenge for all the killings that had occurred in the USSR.

Click to expand...

Just as easily referencing the millions of war casualties.

phattonez said:

So less than 0.1%.

Click to expand...

Who clearly existed in a vacuum and were in no way connected to the rest of German society or it's people through family, friends, or simple acquaintances.

Just as easily referencing the millions of war casualties.

Click to expand...

Except the explicit references to the mass killings carried out against the Jews and Communists, both of which were well known to the German public.