this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Everybody was quite awful with targeting Civilians during WW2. By far the worst was obviously Nazi Germany and they murdered about 19 million Sowjet Citizens. For instance also Ukraine was hit particularly bad by Germanys "Lebensraum" fanatism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. What came back to Germany was the total war that they brought over the world.
Stalin did a lot of heinous shit, but WW2 is a very bad argument against the former Sowjet Union or todays Russia.
Sure until the Soviets started pushing the Germans back, and then the Soviets started pillaging and raping everything on the way to Berlin .
WW2 is a very good argument against the Soviet Union. They started it with Nazi Germany in fact.
You're right that Nazi behavior was horrible. However, please don't try to justify war crimes with whataboutisms and reciprocity.
I am not trying to justify war crimes. However the notion that the actions during WW2 would be indicative of any countries current military behaviour, seems not to hold up. Making such a claim also in reverse risks downplaying Nazi atrocities, as the current German military is not committing such acts anymore.
Russia is murdering civillians in Ukraine today. That in itself is to be condemned. tying it so some historic observation does not fulfill any purpose in my eyes except of trying to create an image of an "always evil Russian", which again whistles some problematic historic tunes.
All of which makes sense. However, that's not exactly what your previous comment seemed to say. I also still find the idea of justified reciprocity ("got back total war") objectionable. Modern society doesn't usually sanction this kind of eye-for-an-eye retribution.
Finally, the way this thread started was the idea of Putin being "a Soviet" , supposedly as in being KGB-trained, and thus having a penchant for "Soviet" tactics. That's a totally different thing than claiming modern Germany acting in line with Nazi-era Germany, because there was a pretty thorough break in between.
(I do find it debatable whether terrorizing civilians is legitimately a particularly "Soviet" tactic though.)