Originally Posted by
keesje
Don't have an agenda.
Right.
You have a rather selective view of history, or are perhaps are simply ignorant. (I also note that you hail from one of those little protected countries who rely on big friends ... interesting at whom you throw stones. Full disclosure: I served served with some superb Dutchmen - Navy, AIr Force, and Marines - in NATO ops and assignments; good eggs and good people).
1. Stalin signed a ten year non aggression pact with Hitler, and participated in the partition of Poland. He had previously purged a good many of his military as being "politicaly unreliable" and made a variety of other cock ups. They made their own bed and you complain that they had to sleep in it. They are "grumpy," and it is someone else's fault, of course.
You seem to be an easy mark for their rhetoric. you might want to go back and read the red rhetoric of the 1920's and 1930', and the stated goal of tearing down the world order of the time to be replaced with a utopia. Same blinkered ideals as the French revolution, similar flaws in execution ...
2. The Chinese were engaged in a war with the Japanese already in 1937, though you can argue that it began in 1931 with the occupation of Manchuria. If you check a bit of history, you'll find that Chiang and Mao spent as much effort, or more, fighting each other as they did the Japanese. (Granted, their civil war had been going on for some time, and the Japanese took full advantage of that in their decision to take over substantial portions of China). The Chinese 'being grumpy' with the West is a very different matter than with the Russians, particularly in the post war years (1945-1949) when the KMT got kicked off of the mainland. You, and your postulated Chinese, seem to forget why Japan attacked the US and the other Western folks in the "Greater Asian Co Prosperity Sphere" region: the US in particular had been leaning on the Japanese politically and economically for a number of years because of Japan's war making in China. (And various atrocities, Chunking was quite celebrated as an outrage in the Western press when it was China vs Japan with none of those nosy Westerners involved yet). There is an entire class of revisionist history that blames the US for Japan attackin Pearl Harbor due to the embargo/blockade that was implemented due to Japanese aggression and militarism in China.
Maybe the US should have just stood back and let the Japanese have their way with China, and not interfered.
Then the Chinese would have no cause to be "grumpy."
Sure.
Despite my jaundiced view of your line, thanks for that nice graphical representation of the human costs in WW II. Human beings have developed a remarkable talent for destroying each other; the industrial age simply increases the order of magnitude. Jan Bloc wrote about that in the late 19th century, and well predicted the kind of slaughter industrial age was bringing to us. He argued that this made war a non solution to political problems. He was ignored, regardless of how right he may have been. ( I'd say he called WW I pretty much on point, aviation excepted).
The slandering of Bomber Harris in this revisionist, deconstructionist clap trap of a thread premise (the article that the OP refers to) is a bucket full of swill - FFS, it's in the Daily Mail - and your position isn't much better.