>>What did FDR or Churchill do that was so evil?

I’m glad you asked.

You should really try asking Indians and Australians about Churchill. They love him over there. He is to blame for the Bengali Holocaust,a massive famine that claimed millions of lives. And that was only one of many cases of British colonial atrocities,because under Churchill,all of the territories under the rule of the Empire were pillaged and sacked as he saw fit. He was a racist and a bigot who openly referred to the non-anglo-saxon subjects of the empire as subhuman,saying that they should,in fact,be grateful that a civilized,advanced European nation is in control of their savage lands. And,in the most emblematic display of his true nature,he masterminded Operation “Unthinkable”, the point of which was to basically let the Soviet Union do most of the dirty work pushing the Nazis back to Berlin,and then bring all the might of the Allied forces,including several captured German divisions,on the battle-weary Red Army. Thankfully,the Soviet push towards Berlin was faster than anyone had anticipated,so the backstabbing fucknugget’s plan never came to fruition.

FDR? Japanese internment camps. His complete inability to lead the country out of the Great Depression,which only ended after WWII began (the excessive government spending strategy employed at the time was actually very similar to the one America is trying to pull off right now,and failing miserably). And before you speak of Stalin’s collectivization strategy,you should really take a look at the complete and total clusterfuck that was the Dust Bowl famine. Let’s not even count all those people who lost everything they ever knew and had to simply take their surviving family members and go somewhere where there’s a chance there might be food,leaving ghost towns behind. We still don’t know how many millions of people died back then,because the US census bureau simply doesn’t provide the demographic data for those years. Convenient,ain’t it?
I could go on,but the best part of it all is that FRD is still widely considered to be one of America’s greatest presidents and was reelected three times.

>> Give Britain hope against the German horde bearing down on them

Stalin did the same for the Soviet people,but who cares about that,right?

Oh,and speaking of unneeded sacrifices, it really doesn’t get any more atrocious than senselessly throwing troops wave after wave into the grindhouse of a mad suicide charge up a well-fortified beach covered with machine gun encampments until the enemy runs out of bullets. And yet somehow the D-day invasion gets the misty-eyed Spielberg treatment,while the heroic stands at Moscow and Stalingrad are met with “BUT COULDN’T THEY HAVE SARCIFICED LESS TROOPS HERPA DERP”. Funny how the world works.

>>Also, Stalin was the one to screw up the Soviet Union, collectivization of the farms was idiotic and killed millions of people and disrupted the peasantry, more so when famine struck.

Dead wrong. Collectivization was absolutely essential to,you know,not having major cities starve to death. In order to stand a chance in the war that was already looming on the horizon,the USSR would have to become an industrial giant overnight. Industrialization and the war effort would be impossible without a reliable agricultural support. Stalin understood all of that. And because of his foresight,the war was won.

>>Russians would have stood their ground no matter what.
…
You can’t be fucking serious.
Are you seriously suggesting that Stalin should’ve thrown the battle of Moscow and let the Germans pillage,scorch and rape their way into the heart of the country,because Soviet partisans would’ve eventually defeated the Germans anyway?

…Wow.

There is so much wrong with that statement that I don’t even know where to fucking start.

>>it worked against Napoleon
No. You can’t compare those. These are completely different conflicts,fought on different terms,utilizing completely different technology,strategy and kinds of warfare. If Hitler’s blitzkrieg didn’t choke,the German would’ve marched across the entire USSR in a matter of weeks. Let’s see Napoleon’s cavalry do that.

>>I could argue all day about the absurdity of conquering all of Russia and then policing it. Germany would have been stretched to the breaking point policing such a large area.

Ah,but you forget one crucial detail.

This was not a civilized European war. This was a Total Annihilation war. It didn’t matter if the enemy was a POW or a civilian,if they were children,women or elderly – German soldier were under the specific orders to not fuck around with the Soviet Untermenschen. Soviet people were to ultimately meet the same fate as the Jews. Hundreds of millions of them were to be put to death,and the remaining couple of millions were to be either sterilized,brainwashed since childhood and basically turned into a race of braindead morlocks to help mine the Soviet resources. And the vast Soviet lands,now free of the Bolshevik scum,were to be settled by superior,civilized Europeans. That was Hitler’s plan.

tl;dr If the Germans actually took over,there would soon be nobody left to police.

>>His New Deal worked, people were working again, it didn’t work as fast as new factories with new contracts opening but they did work.

Spoilers: New Deal didn’t really work because all it pretty much was was the extension of Hoover’s failed policies. The joke at the time was that WPA actually stood for “We Piddle Around”,because just like its immediate predecessor,the CWA,it was basically hiring people to do the most pointless,inconsequential chores ever. This is the organization that hired librarians to organize the archives and put men on public payroll to chase around stray tumbleweeds on windy days. I mean what the shit.

Like I said before,it took WWII to actually pull the country out of the economic bombdive it was in.

>>The first plan was the collectivization that killed millions, forcing a famine.

The famine wasn’t really as much “forced” as it,you know,sorta happened. Some years,crops just fail. What really matters in those situations is what the government does to alleviate the situation. The Soviet famine was relatively quickly resolved,and while it probably could’ve gone better,now the country soon had an agricultural system strong enough to support the frontline in case of the inevitable war. And compared to the 6-10 years of hideous ineptitude and incompetence that were the Dust Bowl years,Stalin is really starting to look like a chap.

>>I refuse to accept any plan that sells one’s soul for a victory (and I know Lenin would tear me apart for that statement, just read ‘Left-Wing Communism, an infantile disorder).

He did what had to be done under the circumstances. After looking at the habit Hitler was making of breaking international treaties left and right,even a complete idiot would realize that the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was only a temporary stopgap. Say what you want about Stalin,if there’s one thing he definitely was not,it’s stupid. War was imminent,and the USSR was in no way ready for it. If Stalin had a couple of years of preptime,collectivization would’ve probably went far smoother. But he didn’t have the time to fuck around when the whole country was at stake.

tl;dr Millions died,but billions lived as a result of their sacrifice. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few,no?

>>old Bolsheviks, dissidents or what have you in the gulags

Protip: 99% of the inhabitants of those gulags ended up there not because they were suffering,unjustly repressed poets,but because they were thieves,burglars,murderers,rapists… You know,the usual prison population who undoubtedly deserves to be there.

>>Oh my goodness, an old man who believed in old fashion ideas such as the white man’s burden.

That’s no excuse for his bullshit bigotry. It’s like Manifest Destiny – you can’t really defend it.

>>Before the war, Stalin didn’t care about nationalism in any sense.

Well,of course he didn’t. Soviet Union was multinational and multiethnic. For all of those people to live in peace,all forms of nationalism had to be suppressed. In my mind,that was one of Soviet Union’s greatest achievements. Racial and ethnic equality and tolerance was infinitely more pronounced than it was in the US. Look what happened after Gorbachev took over and fucked everything up – there were immediately pockets of nationalism-driven insurgency springing out in the Caucasus.

>>suddenly declaring Russian greatness

What? No. He was declaring the greatness of the entirety of the Soviet people,not Russian. Listen to his wartime speeches on Youtube.

>>He also seemed (and wanted the Russian people) to forget the whole invasion of Poland thing that the Soviets did with Germany and the non-aggression pact.

Hmm. Sounds suspiciously like…pretty much any other leader in history who wants to present his county in the best possible light.

And what about that non-aggression pact? Stalin wasn’t the one who broke it,for one. And like I said before,it was just a stopgap measure in order to buy the USSR some time before the Germans zergrushed it.

>>At the risk of this going on for the next year, I offer my hand for a worthy argument and it is good to know there are others who care so strongly about what they believe.

Touche. Me,I still can’t get over the novelty of having a relatively civil discussion about Stalin. Normally it’s all HERPA DERP DERP and BUT HE PERSONALLY ATE A BILLION ZILLION BABIES. Even if we don’t completely agree,my hat is still off to you,comrade.

You guys had a great, civil, and intelligent discussion.

…and on the internet, no less! That truly warms the cockles of my heart.

Well done, both of you.

However, I do have to voice my disagreement on one score in particular: there is much evidence to make a very strong argument that the Holodomor was not simply a natural consequence of bad planning or lack of resources, but an engineered famine designed to kill as many peasants as possible to eliminate those who Stalin believed were a threats to his power (some might even call it an “ethnic purge”). I recommend reading Adam Jones’s “Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction” or Steven Rosefielde’s “Red Holocaust”.

Rosefielde in particular says the following:

“Grain supplies were sufficient enough to sustain everyone if properly distributed. People died mostly from terror-starvation (excess grain exports, seizure of edibles from the starving, state refusal to provide emergency relief, bans on outmigration, and forced deportation to food-deficit locales), not poor harvests and routine administrative bungling.”

Make no mistake: there were no saints in that terrible time. Humans have always, and will always destroy each other. There is no cure for that. Sometimes we can justify it to ourselves. We whisper “It was a necessary sacrifice.” to the shadows in our rooms in the silence of the night, hoping against hope that one day we’ll believe it against our better conscience.

But all the same, there are times when evil is evil and must be called as such. 64,000,000 civilian deaths during one’s reign is not an accident or a necessary factor to save others. It is an atrocity.

>>What did FDR or Churchill do that was so evil?

I’m glad you asked.

You should really try asking Indians and Australians about Churchill. They love him over there. He is to blame for the Bengali Holocaust,a massive famine that claimed millions of lives. And that was only one of many cases of British colonial atrocities,because under Churchill,all of the territories under the rule of the Empire were pillaged and sacked as he saw fit. He was a racist and a bigot who openly referred to the non-anglo-saxon subjects of the empire as subhuman,saying that they should,in fact,be grateful that a civilized,advanced European nation is in control of their savage lands. And,in the most emblematic display of his true nature,he masterminded Operation “Unthinkable”, the point of which was to basically let the Soviet Union do most of the dirty work pushing the Nazis back to Berlin,and then bring all the might of the Allied forces,including several captured German divisions,on the battle-weary Red Army. Thankfully,the Soviet push towards Berlin was faster than anyone had anticipated,so the backstabbing fucknugget’s plan never came to fruition.

FDR? Japanese internment camps. His complete inability to lead the country out of the Great Depression,which only ended after WWII began (the excessive government spending strategy employed at the time was actually very similar to the one America is trying to pull off right now,and failing miserably). And before you speak of Stalin’s collectivization strategy,you should really take a look at the complete and total clusterfuck that was the Dust Bowl famine. Let’s not even count all those people who lost everything they ever knew and had to simply take their surviving family members and go somewhere where there’s a chance there might be food,leaving ghost towns behind. We still don’t know how many millions of people died back then,because the US census bureau simply doesn’t provide the demographic data for those years. Convenient,ain’t it?
I could go on,but the best part of it all is that FRD is still widely considered to be one of America’s greatest presidents and was reelected three times.

>> Give Britain hope against the German horde bearing down on them

Stalin did the same for the Soviet people,but who cares about that,right?

Oh,and speaking of unneeded sacrifices, it really doesn’t get any more atrocious than senselessly throwing troops wave after wave into the grindhouse of a mad suicide charge up a well-fortified beach covered with machine gun encampments until the enemy runs out of bullets. And yet somehow the D-day invasion gets the misty-eyed Spielberg treatment,while the heroic stands at Moscow and Stalingrad are met with “BUT COULDN’T THEY HAVE SARCIFICED LESS TROOPS HERPA DERP”. Funny how the world works.

>>Also, Stalin was the one to screw up the Soviet Union, collectivization of the farms was idiotic and killed millions of people and disrupted the peasantry, more so when famine struck.

Dead wrong. Collectivization was absolutely essential to,you know,not having major cities starve to death. In order to stand a chance in the war that was already looming on the horizon,the USSR would have to become an industrial giant overnight. Industrialization and the war effort would be impossible without a reliable agricultural support. Stalin understood all of that. And because of his foresight,the war was won.

>>Russians would have stood their ground no matter what.
…
You can’t be fucking serious.
Are you seriously suggesting that Stalin should’ve thrown the battle of Moscow and let the Germans pillage,scorch and rape their way into the heart of the country,because Soviet partisans would’ve eventually defeated the Germans anyway?

…Wow.

There is so much wrong with that statement that I don’t even know where to fucking start.