Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Tangentially connected: I recently tried to read Sean McMeekin's Stalin's War, since I had read some other earlier works of his and found them interesting, but he made several basic errors regarding Finnish history and I couldn't just Gell-Mann through the rest of the work after that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
No, it is simply the functionalism-intentionalism debate of the Holocaust, or the bottom-up approach of the Holocaust. It's been debated by historians for decades without, as far as I know, anyone being convicted of Holocaust denial charges simply for advancing a functionalist perspective.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Would you be equally liable to support a similar solution of removal of Jews from Israel, if the Arabs were powerful enougt to do it?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Or perhaps just a typical politician.
What, he was making stump speeches for the Führeral election of 1948?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Germany actually recently did criminalize denying genocides in general and has also recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.. Holodomor denial is, unsurprisingly, already directly criminal in Ukraine, and the general denial of Communist crimes is criminalized in several Eastern European countries. By your logic, this should make you equally, or almost equally likely, to question whether the said Communist crimes happened.
I knew someone would ask so I just went through it to find them again. I will keep to the Winter War chapters since that's where I first spotted them.
p. 126. "The Russian Imperial Navy had once placed its headquarters in the Finnish port of Helsinki (then Helsingborg)." Helsinki was never known as Helsingborg. It's Swedish name is Helsingfors - both this and Helsinki are official names for the city. I think that McMeekin is confusing this with the fortress of Sveaborg/Viapori (now Suomenlinna) which is right next to Helsinki and did indeed serve as a Russian naval base during the Grand Duchy era, though I'm not sure if it can be described as "the headquarters".
p. 127. " Had Mannerheim’s connections with the Germans not been so strong, the British might have lent his Finnish guards more support in the critical days of fall 1919, when Petrograd nearly fell to the Whites." This makes hash of the post-Civil-War era events in the recently independent Finland. Mannerheim, who had been a general in the Czar's army, was actually one of the less pro-German White Finnish figures of the era. Though the English had doubts about the general pro-German tendencies of Finns in general, what really happened was that Mannerheim tried to convince the Finnish establishment to attack Petrograd in aid of the Whites, but the Finnish government (probably wisely) refused, believing that the Russian Whites might very well not recognize Finnish independence and considering that Soviets, if victorious, would never forgive Finns for getting Petrograd ransacked.
p. 130 "The Finnish Army had a few 1914-era water-cooled heavy machine guns, a few light machine guns (the twenty-three-pound Lahti/Saloranta), and handheld submachine guns or koonipistolit (machine pistols, known as the Suomi)." The Finnish word for machine pistols is "konepistoolit", it's like writing it "masheen pistols". "Konepistoolit" literally means machine pistols and "Suomi" (Finnish word for Finland) was the name of the well-known Finnish machine pistol brand, making this something of a dumb sentence anyhow.
p. 137 "The idea was that this new “Democratic Government of Finland,” headed by the fifty-eight-year-old Finnish politician Otto Kuusinen (a Stalin stooge and resident of Moscow since 1920), would invite in the Red Army in order to, as Molotov’s communiqué put it, “establish good relations between our countries and, with united forces, protect the security and inviolability of our nations." Minor points, but Kuusinen's government was called as "People's Government of Finland" (Suomen kansanhallitus), and Kuusinen had been secretly in Finland 1919-1921, so he couldn't have been a resident of Moscow since 1920.
p. 162 "Stalin did gain a bit more than he had demanded before the war. In addition to Petsamo, Hanko, and various Baltic ports, Stalin acquired the entire Karelian Isthmus, where the most bitter fighting had taken place, now styled the “Karelo-Finland SSR.” Soviet gains neutralized the Mannerheim Line and provided strategic depth for Leningrad, though, as one Soviet officer lamented, “we have won just about enough ground to bury our dead.” But Viipuri (Vyborg) and Helsinki were still Finnish, and there would be no Soviet military occupation." Probably the most egregious errors are found here. Finland dind't lose Petsamo (Pechenga) in Winter War but only after 1944. The Karelo-Finnish SSR (note the misspelling) didn't consist only of the Karelian Isthmus but was in fact the previous Karelian ASSR with the (now emptied) newly conquered territories attached. And saying that "Viipuri (Vyborg) was still Finnish" is not just erroneous - Viipuri was ceded after the Winter War - but also nonsensical, since Viipuri is on the Karelian Isthmus.
There were some minor points I considered including (like whether Enso, mentioned by McMeekin as a town bombed by Soviets in the early days of war, was actually a town at the era), but they're debatable. In general, McMeekin presents the thesis of Winter War ending due to Soviet fear of Allied invasion (and also throws in Turkey there since he's McMeekin) rather confidently, considering that it's still a major and not completely resolved debate in Finnish historiography.
I took Greenwald's comment mostly as a reminder that it was Trump admin who did prosecute Assange, since Greenwald has a lot of followers/fans who love Trump and also love Assange, and since Trump fans have often demonstrated a particularly remarkable talent for ignoring actual stuff that Trump does/did (which isn't that different from your standard "swampy" Republican) and supporting Trump on the basis of some fantasy version of Trump in their heads.
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed. We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities.
If this did happen this way - millions of Jews were killed by disease and starvation, the Germans would absolutely be culpable for all of these deaths beyond what might be calculated an expected amount of disease deaths in a non-locked-up population, since they had spefically closed the Jews (and others) in these camps and were thus liable for their general welfare. This would end up being simply another Holocaust narrative. Gulag camp deaths caused by starvation and typhus are generally counted as Gulag camp deaths just as much as the shooting deaths, indeed many of the most notorious cases involve starvation.
Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.
So basically we should expect camp guards with dementia to be truthful (despite having probably spent decades justifying and minimizing their crimes, at least in their own heads), but all these Jews would stridently hold on to their assimilated identities despite at least many of them being at some point eligible for Holocaust victim compensation and basically having a free pass to get the hell out of the collapsing post-Communist Eastern Europe by moving to Israel?
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews. This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable, (2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen. I don’t know, can you imagine hundreds or thousands of Russian soldiers putting family after family of innocent Ukrainians to death by gassing, women and children in all? None of them leaking or whistleblowing? And most of them, even when age has taken away their inhibitions, maintain that it didn’t happen? This is improbable to me.
Some of the most popular "alternative theories" offered by denialists in past discussions have involved the Soviets conducting a genocide of deported Jews exactly like this - killing (perhaps not by gas but otherwise) hundreds of thousands of Jews in Central Asian camps with zero historical record, zero or close to zero camp guard memories of precisely this sort of an event happening (particularly risible since these guards would not be the most virulent 20th century European racists and indeed, as anti-Semites remind us, a number would have been Jews themselves) etc etc. Just vague gesturing that this must have happened since there has to be some, no matter how threadbare, explanation to the everpresent "Where did the Jews go" question, and we know it can't have been that they were killed in the Holocaust, and the Holocaust didn't happen.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
Ugh, I thought that there was something wrong with that spelling but didn't bother to check. To be honest I haven't followed or thought about Greenwald for some time.
Trump himself probably doesn't care one way or another.
Even that would be quite a different stance from those who somehow think that Trump and Assange are on the same side (against the globalists or whatever).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
There are others here with a lopsided posting history. No one is going after @Stefferi for being a single-issue Suomiposter
I post about a variety of other topics. Neither of my March AAQC's, for instance, were related to Finland.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
There's basically no real need for landfills, either, if you just incinerate enough. (Of course burning is particularly useful in cold countries with common heating needs).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
So they were placed in camps, like Japanese in America and like the Palestinians tomorrow.
According to Wikipedia, out of the 100,000+ Japanese interned during the Japanese internment, about 1 % died, which presumably is not that far off from the amount that would have died anyway. Even this is generally considered to be a black mark on American history and particularly on FDR's record; I can only imagine how it would be treated if it had been more like 80 % dead, even if the deaths weren't done directly. And it has been a popular argument that Gaza is a concentration camp/on the verge of megadeaths already before the current operation, if it turned out that 80 % of Gazans were dead (again, for any reason) after the operation is finished... well, it would at the very least create considerable troubles for Israel in the court of global opinion.
The whole idea that "well, the Germans just had to put the Jews in the camps" seems to be based on an assumption that Jews are some sort of a self-evident, ontological evil. The largely assimilated German Jews had not hindered the German WW1 effort in a material way, as far as I know (the revolutions that you refer to, which had both Jewish and gentile participants, happened after the Germans had already lost in the field of battle). Rather more importantly, the vast majority of Jews put to camps weren't German, they were Polish and Soviet Jews that Germans wouldn't have needed to bother one bit with if they hadn't decided to invade half of Europe. Hell, the Germans were specifically procuding Jews from other countries to put in the camps - they were actually temporarily importing Jews to their temporarily occupied territories!
If they started families and have a new life, the isn’t an easy decision, and once old age hits that becomes harder. And do you expect the demented to fill out a complicated holocaust victim compensation plan? This isn’t a reasonable comparison. However, from my hypothesis we would see them remembering their Jewish adolescence and heritage, 100%. But I don’t know how we could measure or catalog such cases which occur in the armchair of an Eastern European home.
When it comes specifically to immigration to Israel, they could bring their families along, and their children - who presumably would be privy to such memories from old-age people - would be the ones hearing such stories and being able to use them to justify immigration. Also, people who would have been, say, 12-18 years old around 1942-1944 would have been 58-66 in 1990, when the fall of the Soviet regime would have presumably allowed freer movement and claims application (was it possible for Soviet block citizens to apply for Holocaust compensation from West Germany anyway?) - hardly the age where most of them would have been demented.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
The issue is not that he posts a lot about it or only about it or anything like that, it's that there's a distinct feeling of a missionary attempting to convert the ignorant heathens. Same talking points over and over again in a somewhat different garb, strict keeping to apologetics considered favorable to one's cause and handwaving or ignoring of those who don't fit the narrative (such as there is), eventual fading away and restarting of the same cycle some time later. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Combatted as much as possible at the source, as regulated by local decrees in accordance with EU directives on incineration. It's a remarkably clean process, cleaner than landfills and certainly cleaner than using fossil fuels to produce the same energy for heating etc.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d ago
Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
Every major character apart from Chani was white (as in, portrayed by a white actor), though.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d ago
This frankly seems like a bit of an overthink. The Fremen (canonically originating from Egypt or the general Nilotic area) are black or brown. The Great Houses, again canonically distantly from Greece and Russia (though it would be amiss from me to not to mention that the surname Harkonnen originates from Finnish), are white. Most of the nonwhite characters died in the previous film.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
This would seem like a question not only for progressives but pretty much every other ideology in society as well, considering that approximately none of them are striving to replicate the Amish lifestyle, and whatever back-to-landers there are tend to be eclectic enough to not fall into readymade progressive-conservative categories.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
There was also a baby boom in countries like Sweden and Switzerland that stayed neutral.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
The baby boom really defies easy explanations. In many countries it didn't even really peak with the immediate post-WW2 period but around the late 1960s - the UK, for example.. "A combination of sustained economic growth, hopeful prospects for the future and a strong family-based culture" would probably be the best explanation, since all of those are cultural trends that would cover all of (Western, perhaps in some ways even Eastern) Europe at this time - around the 70s you really start getting the fear of nuclear war and environmental crisis, societal atomization, and the waning of immediate post-war growth period in.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
Will countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia truly remain neutral if there is a full-blown war between Shia Muslims and Jews?
Jordan allowed Israel to use its airspace to counter Iranian drones and shot some drones down itself. I'm not really sure how neutral that counts as, at this point.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20d ago
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not the same as the ethnic Russians, especially now. My anecdotal experience and what I've heard of Ukrainian refugees in Finland is that clear majority speaks Russian (they're usually from Eastern areas since that's where the fighting is) and a clear majority also firmly supports the Ukrainian war effort. The actual ethnic Russian areas (ie. the separatist-controlled areas before 2022 and Crimea) had already been detached from Ukrainian control before 2022.
Nobody thinks that the Irish speaking English means they consider themselves English, but for some reason the idea of someone speaking Russian yet not being Russian seems very hard to understand for many.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20d ago
If there's not enough food coming to your country due to external factors then you basically have to ration food or you start getting starvation and mass deaths.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20d ago
Sure, there are all sorts of people. The point is that Ukrainian-speaking Russians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine are two wholly different categories, and even if someone was applying some sort of "liberating the ethnic Russians" logic to pre-2022 conquests, it no longer would apply to the post-2022 conquests basically in any sense.
My understanding is that adoption of Catholicism and Spanish went pretty much hand in hand during the Latin American colonization, and the Jesuit missions spread both.
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