131–140 of 156 posts
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Of course leaders have enormous powers. But it was never like comrade Stalin waves and everything stops.
Hm, I guess I don't buy that at all. Stalin in particular.
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Hm, I guess I don't buy that at all. Stalin in particular.
then you have oversimplified view of the world and I don't. let's agree to disagree.
Books have been written about the "Stalin Personality Cult", his enormous personal power and his perfect control over all matters of state. And you dismiss this with a few cute remarks.
For your remarkable claims, you will have to provide MUCH more evidence. Try this: google Stalin and start reading.
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You need to read more fiction :).
Good fiction, then. I suppose you may argue that bad fiction need not make sense.
Of course, what qualifies as 'good' is subjective, and to get a little meta, fiction doesn't make sense - we make sense of fiction, just as with life. See also: religion vs. science.
interesting view on the history. Of course, over here in Europe, we go into great detail when looking at WWII in history at school (at least the European part) and to be honest, I have to agree with the poster - all this feels kind of surreal and inaccurate. I guess this is already some consequence of history-rewriting going on in some parts, combined with strange coincidences. But in general, yes, the whole story, e…
B5 has to be the best mix of great writing and proper execution I have ever seen. Had to have lots to do with Straczynski doing stuff his way.
On this note - what are other similarly well executed series that I'm unaware of, genre is irrelevant?
interesting view on the history. Of course, over here in Europe, we go into great detail when looking at WWII in history at school (at least the European part) and to be honest, I have to agree with the poster - all this feels kind of surreal and inaccurate. I guess this is already some consequence of history-rewriting going on in some parts, combined with strange coincidences. But in general, yes, the whole story, e…
Well S1 is "just" about introducing characters and setting up scenery and context - which are broad indeed. Covering such ground while trying to create an engaging experience would be very hard. Something had to give - story or spectacle and decision was made (I guess). B5 has to be the best mix of great writing and proper execution I have ever seen. Had to have lots to do with Straczynski doing stuff his way. On thi…
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But in the Soviet Union the arrests were made to quota to feed the slave labor camps of the gulag - not because of anything the prisoners had actually done (of course, they had to confess). There were some courageous Germans who chose to defy the Nazis (e.g. the White Rose group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose ) but that to me is quite different. The overwhelming majority of Germans, if they didn't belong to…
I had not heard of a "arrest to quota" design in the USSR, could you point me to a relevant source so I can read about it? I still disagree on the main point that to be at risk in nazi germany you had to somehow defy the regime. Your view seem to be that in nazi germany you could simply comply with the ruling ideology and be fine, but as I said above, you can think of the killings and arrests by the thousands of the…
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"these guys are worse or on a par for atrocities with anyone ever, real or imagined" If you look at the total number of people killed, hitler's atrocities pale in comparison with those of Stalin and Mao.
The total numbers pulled from Reagan's imagination? edit: I'll post some sources when I get home
This includes the best available numbers on the people imprisoned and executed for counter-revolutionary (political, kulaks, etc.) crimes from 1921 to 1954 in the entire Soviet Union (includes republics annexed in 1939) from a report ordered by Khruschev (ie - the real numbers, not speculation), as well as an analysis of the commonly published speculative numbers:
http://www.thewalls.ru/truth/repress.htm (Russian)
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h... (Google English translation)
642,980 executed, 2,369,220 imprisoned, 765,180 internally exiled over a 30-year period. That is 21,433 people receiving capital punishment each year, and 78,974 imprisoned per year. To put it in perspective, 89,000 people were sentenced (up to a maximum term of 5 years) for cannabis possession in the UK in 1998.
If you include the number of excess deaths from the Ukrainian and Kazakh famines of 1932, the direct and excess deaths from the civil war and the civil war famines, there's still no comparison to the Third Reich.
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> One in which Chamberlain and Halifax are statesmen who might have been successful in avoiding armed conflict, but for the determined war party of Churchill. No one disputes that it would have been possible to avoid armed conflict with Nazi Germany. The relevant question is "at what cost?" Given Hitler's ambitions, do you really think that he'd have stopped at the channel? It is reasonable to suggest that Chamberlai…
Obviously we'll never know, and we can speculate all day. But I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that yes, Germany would have calmed down eventually. Empires have a tendency to reach their zenith and slowly recede after that. When you have occupying powers like Nazi Germany they're likely to fall apart eventually due to internal strife. The Roman Empire did, so did the Soviet Union, partly. Had WW2 not happene…
The Roman Empire didn't "calm down" for hundreds of years. Even the USSR took a couple of decades. And in both cases, they ran into opposition.
If you're going to argue that a legacy-obsessed Hitler would have calmed down within a year or so despite encountering no significant opposition, you need something more than "it could happen".