Best we can do is import millions more low value slaves from the butthole of the world.

Gonna need to see some figures on that Clive.

I know plenty about WW2 because it interested me. Germany sent tractors and other agricultural equipment to Russia in exchange for raw materials and a lot of it. So what you just said only supports what I said.

Why betray your trade partners, Germany could just kept trading for the food and resources it needed. Lebensraum? They just got Sudetenland, Austria and half of Poland

Attacking the USSR made no sense, it was foolish and the battle for Britain hadn't even finished. And I repeat, operation Barbarossa cost Germany the bulk of their manpower and materials.

A quick victory was never possible and the Germans weren't even prepared for winter. No winter clothing for the troops in the field and no lubricants for their tanks that could handle the Russian cold.

In fact the Western allies were mighty pleased when Hitler attacked the USSR.

The Baltics, Poland, Romania, and lately Ukraine, have all aligned with us voluntarily, in no small part based on a century of abuse they endured at the hands of the Russians. SK, Japan and the Philippines were US allies long before China became a legit geopolitical rival. Iran has constantly meddled with Iraq's internal affairs just as much as we did. Our outpost on their eastern side in Afghanistan was abandoned, they can now deal with the Taliban instead.



No, it's not the same logic. If Russia achieves a full victory on the battlefield in Ukraine, there is nothing stopping them from a full occupation of the country and subsequent purges other than Russia's will. Any push further into Western Europe, by contrast, is totally unrealistic because they lack the means, even if they wanted to.



Well, pre-2022, Ukraine was still a sovereign nation, so of course there was no slavery, large-scale oppression etc.
Since then, the UA-RUS relations have deteriorated dramatically, the Russian population has been riled up by years of constant propaganda about the "genocidal nazis in Kyiv", a six figure number of Russians lost their lives and many members of Russia's ruling class lost billions in assets and access to many of the world's finest destinations.

Will all Ukrainian men be put in chains and toiled to death in the quarry while their women become sex slaves if Russia wins? No, of course not. But it is absolutely realistic to assume that there will be a hefty price to pay if Russia accomplishes a comprehensive victory. At the very least, Russia will want to secure its victory, secure its gains and take precautions to ensure that something like this never happens again. I really don't think it's a stretch to say that there will no longer be a free press and no fair elections in which a majority of the Ukrainian people has a chance to vote for pro-Western forces. Just like it's no stretch to say that many pro-Western politicians or activists will be heading to the gulag.



The rules-based world order laid out by the United Nations assumes that sovereign nations actually are sovereign and free to choose their allies. You seem to assume an imperialist world order in which the world is divided up between a handful of great powers which all have a historic sphere of influence to which they're eternally entitled, plus a bunch of smaller nations which are all ultimately unfree vassals/satellites/colonies of the aforementioned great powers.

The bigger problem was the huge deficit spending/looming hyperinflation. Normal trade couldn't get them out of that predicament. The tldr is basically that the Nazis had set up an economy geared toward, and hinging on, aggressive expansion and exploitation of conquered territory since the day they took power. They had wanted the war all along, and by 1939, war was the only way to avoid collapse anyway.

There was no guarantee that the Soviets would buy German tractors and equipment indefinitely. They were already setting up factories with machines which they had, ironically, also bought from Germany.
Austria is mountainous and doesn't contain that much arable land. Sudentenland and Bohemia were relatively densely populated and had a similar population density as the rest of the Reich. The territory gained in Poland was substantial, but not thaaaat huge relative to the size of the bloated German Reich at the time.




Which is why I said that trying to go for Britain was a mistake to begin with. After taking France, they should have wasted no time and resources on the Battle for Britain, or the expedition in northern Africa, and prepared for the assault on the USSR right away. In 1941, they should have struck in late April or early May, rather than late June. This way, they reach Moscow before the onset of winter, with fresher troops and material and with less time for the Soviets to prepare. Then and only then would they have had any chance of succeeding with the decapitation strike against the Soviet capital. And even that's not a given, considering how fortified and huge Moscow was.

If they succeed in taking Moscow and Leningrad, Stalin would have had no other choice than to retreat behind the Ural Mountains, and take the Soviet arms industry with him. From that point, capturing Stalingrad and the oil fields of the Caucasus would have been a breeze. That's the point when the Nazis could have consolidated their position, not just militarily but also economically, and begun massing troops for the invasion of Britain. Due to its formidable geographic defensibility and its limited natural resources, Britain should have been the last target in Europe.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 11 2024 11:35am

I disagree. Germany could've kept trading with the USSR just like they can trade with Russia today if it wasn't for the sanctions.

I pointed out Sudetenland/Austria/Poland but let's not forget the Germans had also taken Norway/Holland/Belgium/France in a lightning campaign.

That's quite a bit of territory to secure and to use for lebensraum. Imagine the Nazis had stopped right there, dug in and simply waited for the Western allies to move without the Easter front burning up massive amounts of troops and materials.


And I fully agree that helping the Italians in North Africa and the Balkans was a complete waste of time and resources.

Italians were useless. Fascist Italy was all pomp, no substance.

Even if you were right on the food security/Lebensraum point, the more salient and pressing concern still stands: the looming hyperinflation.

Iirc, Europe was also kinda starved for fuel at the time because most of the global production came from the Middle East and the US & the Brits still controlled the seas. Which is also why the Nazis were so hell-bent on securing the oil fields of the Caucasus. And yes, who needs enemies when you have allies like the Italians?




Going back from this tangent to the present-day situation: Germany was very willing to continue some degree of trade with Russia, they were the ones who shut down the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and throttled the other two land-based pipelines. And that was before NS2 was blown up. Even if Germany or some other country had refused to go along with the Western sanctions in March/April of 2022, chances are high that the Russians would eventually have used this leverage to weaken Europe's economy and unity.

And that's when I have to reiterate that Russia had already begun strategically letting European gas storages run low since the summer of 2021, then begun the invasion a few days after the construction of NS2 was complete. This was before Western sanctions and strongly suggests that Russia had intended to leverage Europe's dependency on its gas supplies all along, so the "they only retaliated against Western sanctions"-talking point imho doesn't pass the sniff test.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 11 2024 02:07pm

Voluntarily meaning overthrowing a pro-Russian president in a coup to install a pro-western anti-Russian government? That's the type of 'voluntarily' you saw during the cold war with us and them funding respective proxies, they're called colour revolutions.

There is nothing stopping them but that doesn't mean they would drive all across Ukraine. Again that's pure speculation. You want for a bloody war to continue and tens of thousands to die on a possibility of relatively unlikely event? Ukrainians aren't threatened with slavery, genocides, whatever other maximal sadistic fantasies, that's pure nonsense. Russia didn't all of the sudden become crazed maniac psychopaths.

Rule based world order means no countries should have the right to invade others. But when certain countries go into other countries unjustified i.e. Syria, Iraq, Libya, and leave hundreds of thousands dead without any UN resolution, without any global consensus, doing as they please, without any global sanctions or international courts arrests, then you can't expect other actors to behave. Where are the EU sanctions on the US or UK for invading Iraq on a lie? This whole rules for thee but not for me mentality is part of the reason why so much of the global south that's been colonized is either explicitly or implicitly rooting for Russia, despite western pressure.

Big countries have influence and spheres on their borders especially with smaller ones, i live in a reality where i understand that fact and I'm cognizant that if another outside actor tries to disrupt or interfere with that, it's destabilizing and leads to conflict. We can all get on a soapbox and talk about how the Kurds or the Uyghurs, Chechens, or Taiwan or whatever other regional populace deserves sovereignty and we all need to fight to the death for it, but that's not how the world operates.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Sep 11 2024 04:50pm

Somebody has been brainwashed.