RE: 10 Million Russians March - Crickets in Western Media
A thoughtful piece. An angry piece. A defensive piece. The value of alternative news sources, whether they be Steemit, Reddit, or Mother Jones, is that these are alternatives. To accept at face value anything we read is to become tools of someone's agenda. This is true in any country, at any time. Skepticism is the only filter through which we should receive information. I'm well aware of Russia's--the Soviet Union's--loss in WWII. Whatever the national banner, it's the same people who died, in numbers we cannot grasp in the US. Without the Eastern Front, without Soviet forces, Nazis could well have prevailed in 1945.
The one thing you say in your article that I accept without question, without skepticism, is that we all want the same things. If we remembered this when the drumbeats of war begin to sound, all of us might find it more difficult to pick up guns and join in the battle.
I wish you good day, and always have respect for the Russian people and the battle they waged in WWII.
Thanks for your very thoughtful comment. I agree wholeheartedly with the how we need to react when the drumbeats start sounding.
I was a bit angry and defensive. I was about to write a completely different post and was looking for drone footage online of the march when I came upon the NYT piece. After nearly vomiting, I changed the focus of my post. Today, I will write the more heartwarming story of how children viewed the march in St. Petersburg. Their answers are touching in their innocence. Talk to you soon.
I cancelled my subscription to the Times last year.
Yes, focus on the children, and the history of the moment. Celebrate the people. I'll look for that piece.
And Peace to all of us.
the western allies let Russia carry the weight of war, the long-awaited western front arrived quite late
In my opinion, the Nazis were going to lose anyway. They were never going to match Russia and the USA in the manufacture of tanks and aircraft
I don't think anybody held back. It was a two-front campaign for the Western Allies, with the Japanese holding on in the Pacific, fighting for every inch of territory. Which is why Russia was so essential to victory. With Russia's entry into the war, Germany now had two fronts to battle. As you rightly explain, from that moment, the war was lost for Germany.
I agree here. The Japanese owe their defeat to the U.S. for the most part. This is especially true because of the industrial might of American industries. The same can be said of the Russians. Huge amounts of manufactured goods and human capital.
However, the Allies did delay on a 2nd Front in Europe. It can be debated why, but the strategy was much different than in the Pacific where the U.S. "hopped" Japanese occupied islands to cut them off. Whereas, an invasion of France instead of North Africa and Italy from the beginning would have placed a much bigger burden on the Germans.
It seems to many that GB and the U.S. were more interested in controlling the Mediterranean than opening a 2nd Front. The motives behind this will always be questioned, but most importantly the perception of the Soviet leaders was that GB and the U.S. were hanging them out to dry.
I don't know, of course. There will always be revisions and re-revisions of history. I find the truth of the past, especially the truth about motive, to be elusive. The war was an all-out effort, on all sides. We forget sometimes that this wasn't a war over pieces of territory, but for existential survival. The war shaped the modern world. It redrew maps and shifted global power. I'm sure, as millions died in the Soviet Union, the Allied concentration elsewhere must have seemed wrong--but I couldn't begin to comment on the strategy, from the Allied perspective.