WW III....

Really good stuff in this thread, but I've had to stop reading for a bit, the stark realities of the massive suffering and death starts to give one a heavy/aching heart. Just need to read in moderation I think, all excellent posts, not enough gold stars or bacon rewards for this kind of discussion. I wish they'd turn you guys loose at my daughters high school history class for a day or two.

Well done.

Thanks Peter, American ignorance of history, even current history is appalling. I do regular Vietnam War presentations at area high schools and I am shocked every year.
1. Only 45% of Americans were able to correctly identify what the initials in GOP stood for: Grand Old Party. Other popular guesses were Government of the People and God's Own Party. Republicans obviously scored much better than Democrats did on this answer.
2. 55% of Americans believe that Christianity was written into the Constitution and that the founding fathers wanted One Nation Under Jesus. This includes 75% of Republicans and Evangelicals.
3. Although a "relatively" high 40% of people were able to name all three of the United States branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — a far lower percentage knew the length of a Senator's term. Just 25% responded that a Senator's term stretches for six years. Even less, 20%, knew how many Senators there were.
4. Americans are known to pick recent heads of state as among the best president in history, which is why Clinton and Reagan regularly rank higher than Lincoln, FDR and Washington (20% said Reagan, 15% Bill Clinton, 12% John Kennedy, 5% George W. Bush. Only 14% picked Lincoln and only 5%, Washington). However, Hoover used to routinely top polls of the worst, but today, just 43% of Americans knew who he was, according to statistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
5. When asked on what year 9/11 took place, 30% of Americans were unable to answer the question correctly, even as few as five years after the attack. This was according to a Washington Post poll conducted in 2006. .
6. It's not shocking that 80% of Americans believe that there is life out there somewhere, because it's hard to look at a vast universe and think we're completely alone. But another 1 in 5 allege that an alien life form has abducted a friend or family member of theirs, which based on population estimates of around 300 million means that a lot of forking people have been probed.
7. When looking at a map of the world, young Americans had a difficult time correctly identifying Iraq (1 in 7) and Afghanistan (17%). This isn't that surprising, but only a slim majority (51%) knew where New York was. According to Forbes and National Geographic, an alarming 29% couldn't point to the Pacific Ocean.
8. 25% of Americans were unable to identify the country from which America gained its independence. Although 19% stated that they were unsure, Gallup findings indicated that others stated answers varying from France to China. Older folks scored much better than young people on this question, as a third of those 18-29 were unable to come up with the correct answer.
9. Despite being a constant fixture in school curricula, another 30% of Americans didn't know what the Holocaust was. Despite being some of the worst devastation in human history, Americans were unable to identify the country responsible.
10. Even though we are a predominantly Christian country, only half of Americans knew that Judaism came before Christianity, because the words "Old Testament" are apparently very confusing in that regard.
11. A surprisingly high percentage of Americans, 20%, believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth, instead of the opposite, aka. the correct answer. This is despite the fact that centuries of science have consistently proved otherwise.
12. In 2011, Newsweek found that 29% of Americans were unable to correctly identify the current Vice President, Joe Biden, when asked to take a simple citizenship test. Although a relatively low 6% didn't know when Independence Day was, a much, much higher percentage (73%) had no idea why we fought the Cold War.
13. According to most polls, Americans didn't know that Obamacare was scheduled to go into effect. Kaiser puts the number at 64%, whereas others say as few as 1 in 8.
14. 2006 AP polls showed that a majority of Americans were unable to name more than one of the protections guaranteed in the first Amendment of the Constitution — which include speech, assembly, religion, press and "redress of grievance." Just 1 in 1000 could name all of these five freedoms. However, 22% were able to come up with the name of every member of the Simpson family.
15. 70 per cent of Americans do not know what the Constitution is, and six per cent don't even know when Independence Day falls.
16. 63 per cent did not know how many justices are in the Supreme Court? Those who did (presently nine) thought the number was fixed by the Constitution (it's not Congress decides).
17. Who said the "world must be made safe for democracy"? Just 14% know it was Woodrow Wilson.
18. Only 49% knew it was the United States that dropped the first nuclear bomb?
19. 16% did not know what happened at Pearl Harbor. 19% did not know who Lee Harvey Oswald was and 19% could not identify Martin Luther King, Jr.
20. Only 34% know that it is the Congress that declares war (which may explain why they are not alarmed when presidents take us into wars without explicit declarations of war from the legislature). Only 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto. Some 49% think the president can suspend the Constitution. Some 60% believe that he can appoint judges to the federal courts without the approval of the Senate. Some 45% believe that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution.

Michael, post #40, as always, it seems, you and I are +90% in agreement. I was with you until your last paragraph. Historically the Russian Kulaks were a class of peasant farmers who owned their own land. The term "Kulak" was originally intended to be derogatory. Soviet propaganda painted these farmers as greedy and standing in the way of the "utopian" collectivization that would take away their land, livestock, and produce. "Kulak" means "fist" in Russian and may have had something to do with the supposed tight-fistedness of the Kulak class which is probably how they managed to buy the land.
Peter Stolypin a minister under Czar Nicholas II undertook agrarian reform in 1906. His program was to dissolve peasant communes and buy land from the nobility, then to divide the land among the peasants. This actually increased efficiency and boosted food production in the country-side by over 40%. Stolypin felt that by making peasants actual owners of the land and the product of their labor they would take a keener interest in land improvement and productivity. He felt that these peasants would also be more supportive of a stable Czarist state.
During the Russian Civil War (1918-21) the Kulaks generally supported the White Russians who were fighting to restore the Czarist regime. The Kulaks in general understood that the Bolshevik government was antithetical to property ownership and would strip away the rights and land the Kulaks had worked so hard to acquire and maintain. Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks won the Civil War.
After the Russian Civil War there was widespread famine throughout Russia. This was partly due to the war and partly due to the inefficiencies of collectivization. To relieve the hunger, Lenin attempted to confiscate grain from the peasants, including the Kulaks. Because not enough grain was collected he blamed the Kulaks and ordered not only that the Kulaks be deprived of grain themselves, but also any seed grain. He declared "Merciless war against the Kulaks! Death to them." This, of course, only had the effect of making the shortage more severe.
After Lenin's death, Stalin took power in the Soviet Union. He continued the policy of collectivization. But the repeated failure of communist policies continued, and supply problems became even more endemic as the policies were more rigidly enforced. A scapegoat had to be found. The Kulaks were blamed for recalcitrance and a campaign of deportation was begun that amounted to wholesale slaughter. Kulaks were transported to Siberia, which was bad enough. However, they were simply dumped off in the middle of nowhere, without food, supplies, or resources of any kind. Many more were forced to work their farms but not allowed to keep any of their production - even for sustenance. Literally millions of Kulaks died.
Once dispossessed, the Kulaks no longer existed, except as an excuse to be used by the communist regime to attack the peasant class whenever it seemed convenient. Many of the people who died as "Kulaks" were shocked to find out that this accusation had been laid upon them and that they were to suffer or die for it.

How about "Creationism"

A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students, Zack Kopplin recently reported in Slate. Creationist teachers don't even need to be sneaky about it—the Texas state science education standards, as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school teachers to teach "alternatives" to evolution. Meanwhile, in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, taxpayer money is funding creationist private schools through state tuition voucher or scholarship programs.

OMG

"... Stalin was a man with no conscience in that regard. But the question that circles that basic fact is what was the motivation or reason for such murderous behaviour."

He didn't believe in 'nations'. Estos, Balts, Tartars etc. and believed that 'nationalism' obstructed the goals and fulfillment of the international worker soviet state. Thus he squashed little nations .... and some not so little

Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953 ruled the country with an iron fist. According to Professor Harold Shukman of all the dictators the world endured in the twentieth century, Joseph Stalin was unquestionably the mightiest. Nisbet (1986) describes Joseph Stalin as a low-born revolutionist and bandit from early years, successor by sheer ruthlessness to Lenin as absolute ruler of the Soviet Union, liquidator of the Kulak class in the Ukraine, purger of his own party and totalitarian to the core.
Stalin feared his alcoholic father who physically and verbally abused him and his mother. The neighbors long remembered Vissarion's brutal beatings of the boy and on one occasion out of rage Vissarion threw a hammer at the boy, barely missing him. Stalin frequently witnessed family violence. At the age of nine Stalin was sent to a workshop to work as a child laborer by his father. When he refused to work he was severely punished by Vissarion.
Stalin never received the love that he expected from his mother. His mother Yekaterina Geladze was an illiterate woman. She wanted Stalin to become a priest. He was sent to a Seminary in Tbilisi. But young Stalin was expelled from the Seminary due to his poor performance and for reading Marxist books.
The Seminary life made a huge impact on his life in the later years. He frequently underwent physical beatings by the priests. He saw their double standards and found nothing sacred in life.
Stalin had attachment problems with his mother. According to some sources Stalin's mother had an affair with his God father Yakov Egnatashvili and Stalin's real father was not Vissarion Djugashvili.
Stalin gradually distanced himself from his mother and hardly visited her. When Stalin got angry he often used derogatory names to insult her. Stalin's mother Yekaterina died in 1937 Stalin did not attend the funeral and he only sent a wreath.
Young Stalin had a negative self image and was plagued by the inferiority complex. His face was badly scarred by smallpox. He had a defect in his left arm. The left arm was shorter than the other and it was half-paralyzed. The toes on his left foot were fused due to a congenital defect. These physical defects gave a bizarre "Stalin" gait. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall (Napoleon was 5 foot 6 inches) and looked even shorter. To compensate he wore built-up shoes. When his first wife Ekaterina Svanide (Stalin called her Kato) died of Typhus Stalin was emotionally devastated. After this heartbreaking event Stalin became emotionally numbed and said to his friends "my last warm feelings for humanity died". This emotional numbness became the central feature of his character.
Stalin organized a number of armed robberies to raise funds for the party. Some unofficial reports concur that Stalin cold-bloodedly killed people in armed robberies. After he came in to power Stalin wiped out most of his old gang members. Hence he erased his criminal history from the records.
Stalin was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia. There he underwent awful human conditions which further deteriorated his emotional wellbeing. But he managed to escape in 1904.
Stalin was able to win Lenin's trust. He had organizational skills and worked with an iron will. He knew the importance of terror in achieving the goals and defending the Revolution. Stalin used ruthless measures during the Russian Civil War earning a fearsome name.
In 1922, Stalin became the Secretary General of the Party. Stalin was rude, intolerable and had a bad temper. Lenin denounced him when Stalin verbally abused his wife Krupskaya. Lenin demanded an apology from Stalin.
Shortly before his death in 1924 Lenin wrote to the Central Committee that Stalin must be removed from the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR and be replaced by another who was "more loyal, more courteous, and more considerate of comrades, less capricious. But this decision was overruled by Stalin with the help of his supporters in the Politburo. As the General Secretary Stalin could control the party members. Thus he was able to put his own supporters into place and establish himself a strong base for support.
After Lenin's death Trotsky's position became vulnerable. As Trotsky's political prowess decreased, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and later was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico on Stalin's orders.
Sergey Kirov was the Leningrad Party chief. In 1934, Kirov was assassinated by a lone gunman. Many suspected Stalin behind the assassination. Immediately following the death of Kirov, Josef Stalin unleashed one of the greatest political purges in history. The show trials organized by the Communist Party implicated thousands of political opponents in the conspiracy to kill Sergey Kirov. Stalin arrested two prominent Politburo members- Zinoviev and Kamenev on false charges. They were tortured heavily by the Stalin's Secret Police. Kamenev and Zinoviev confessed that they were the key conspirators behind the murder of Sergey Kirov. Although Stalin gave them a personal assurance that their lives would be spared both were shot in 1936.
Following Stalin's terror Mikhail Tomsky who was the leader of the trade union movement committed suicide in 1936. Mikhail Tukhachevsky –the former Red Army chief-of-staff was arrested in 1937 and shot. Sergo Ordzhonikidze – Commissar for Heavy Industry ended his life in 1937 as a result of forced suicide instigated by Stalin. The Politburo member Jānis Rudzutaks was accused of Trotskyism and espionage for Nazi Germany and was shot in 1938. Stalin purged more than 40, 000 Red Army Officers. Some of them were active participants of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and were heroes of the Russian Civil War.
According to some reports Stalin actively engaged in signing death warrants. Stalin personally ordered and signed tens of thousands of death sentences. On just one day in December 1937, he approved 3,167 death sentences, and then watched a movie.
In his young days he adopted the name Koba (a Georgian fictional hero) then Stalin (man of steel), Thavarish Stalin (Comrade Stalin), Vileki Stalin (Great Stalin), Nash Vilekei Voshd (Our Great Leader) and finally Otsa Narodov (Father of the Nation). He was troubled by his Georgian heritage while ruling the Russian masses. He spoke Russian with a thick notable accent. He launched anti-religious campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church. Stalin's picture replaced the God's image and he became a Demigod. He destroyed churches and religious monuments to proliferate Cult of Stalin, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times. Soviet public spaces were saturated with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world.
By the time of the Teheran Conference, Stalin felt confident of victory. The German Army had suffered defeat at Stalingrad and had been driven from the Caucasus which opened the route for delivery of aid through Iran by his Western allies. On 6 March 1943 Stalin bestowed upon himself the rank of 'Marshal of the Soviet Union', and he was proclaimed 'the greatest strategist of all times and all peoples. But Stalin never had any military training and never served in the Army.
Stalin severely mistrusted doctors. He ignored medical advice, listening to a veterinarian instead and started treating his hypertension with iodine drops. His mental and physical health started to deteriorate rapidly. He became more suspicious, irritable and paranoid.
On the 1st of March 1953 Stalin's inner circle were invited to dine with him as usual. During the dinner Stalin got drunk and chased all the guests including Lavrenthi Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Vyacheslav and Molotov from the dinner table saying "It's over for all of you". Then Beria knew that they were doomed. He realized that Stalin was planning another purge. After this incident Stalin suffered a stroke and became unconscious. He was lying on the floor helplessly. Beria did not call the medics. At the last stage the Doctors wear called but it was too late. Stalin died. Later Beria said to Nikita Khrushchev that I saved all of you from Stalin's final blow. Considering all these accounts its possible suspect that Beria had poisoned Stalin but by having Stalin embalmed, Beria destroyed any traces of poison in Stalin's body.

Those are only the highlights, STALIN was NOT his actual name but one of the titles he bestowed upon himself, i.e. Man of Steel. His birth name is/was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Born December 18, 1878, his official birthday was 21 of December 1879 over a year later, an invented date. He generally stuck to 6 December 1879 until an interview in 1920 with a Swedish newspaper. In 1925 he ordered his secretary Tovstukha to formalize the 1879 date.

The General Georgy Zhukov who planned the major military strategy to defeat Hitler's forces had to fight two war fronts simultaneously. He fought one against Hitler and other one against Stalin's ego. However Hitler's Moscow invasion made the man of steal nervous and the General Zhukov was given more power and liberty to control the armed forces. But soon after the war General Zhukov was sidelined and sent to Odessa. He was partially denounced using the term Bonapartism of Zhukov. If not for his popularity Stalin would have purged one of the proficient military generals of all time.

In 1932 Martemyan Ryutin – Russian Marxist revolutionary wrote a thesis titled Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship. Ryutin argued that the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat have been led into an unknown blind alley by Stalin and his retinue and are now living through a mortally dangerous crisis. Martemyan Ryutin was shot in 1937 with his two sons.
Stalin arrested Molotov's Jewish wife Polina Zhemchuzhina for greeting in Yiddish to the first Israeli ambassador to Moscow- Golda Meir at a Kremlin reception.

The Great Russian Psychologist Vladimir Mikhailovic Bekhterev (1857–1927) was ordered to examine Josef Stalin in December 1927 during the First All-Russian Neurological Congress in Moscow. Vladimir Bektharev found psychopathology in Stalin. Bekhterev said only one word "paranoiac". After making this diagnosis Bekhterev had less than 24 hours to live. He died mysteriously and without a post mortem his body was cremated.
The Kremlin doctor – Professor D. Pletnev knew Stalin for a long time. According to Professor Pletnev Stalin had a snake mind, strong tendency to adventurism and delusions of persecution. Professor Pletnev was arrested in 1937 on Stalin's orders. He was tortured and his tormentors forced him to sign a false confession stating that he was involved in the murder of Maxim Gorkey. Pletnev was shot in 1941 in Medvedevsky forest.

There is ample evidence to show that Stalin was behind the Katyn Forest massacre in which the NKVD killed 22,000 Polish officers who were taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland.
It was estimated that nearly three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II. In the Battle of Stalingrad Field Marshal Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus surrendered to the Soviet forces with 91,000 German soldiers. But only 6,000 returned home.
He drove his second wife Nadia Allilueva to commit suicide. He had shallow feelings for his son Yakov from his first marriage. When Yakov became a POW during the Battle of Smolensk in 1941 Stalin did not make any attempt to release or comfort him. Yakov committed suicide at the Sachsenhausen death camp in 1943. Stalin's malevolent attitude towards his other children affected them detrimentally. Vasily Stalin died of chronic alcoholism. Svetlana Allilueva (Lana Peters) defected to the West in 1967.

After removing Yagoda (Director of the NKVD appointed by Stalin) Stalin appointed Yezhov as the NKVD chief showing him friendship and brotherhood. He was known as Stalin's faithful friend. In December 1938 Yezhov was removed accusing him as an enemy of the people. Yezhov was shot in 1939. Stalin made his old Georgian friend Alexander Egnatashvili his personal bodyguard. He served Stalin with utmost loyalty. He disappeared somewhere in 1953 shot on Stalin's orders.

Late in 1951 Stalin had a regular checkup by his personal physician- Professor V.N.Vinogradov. During the examination Stalin said that the Politburo members A.S.Shcherbakov (in 1946) and A.A.Zhdanov (in 1948) had been poisoned by Kremlin doctors. Stalin mentioned the names of the doctors, all of whom were Jewish. Vinogradov knew them well and said he had absolute trust in their honesty and professional competence. After the checkup, Vinogradov advised Stalin to rest more and work less. To Stalin this advice had a familiar ring: three decades earlier, plotting to hasten Lenin's death and pretending to worry about his health, he had insisted that Lenin be kept from his daily duties. Stalin at once suspected Vinogradov of conspiring against him and ordered his arrest

Excellent information, a little I knew but this is way beyond the norm, many thanks

Mike, can I ask a small favor? Not to be critical or anything but could you pop the <ENTER> key twice after every paragraph to get just a little space in there? I'd appreciate it as there's sooooo much good info here, but it's coming off as a wall of text that's tiring to read, at least for my middle aged eyes.

I've taken to copy/pasting your posts into Word and getting a little white space in there. Again, not trying to be a jerk, just a little hard to read.

Cheers

Peter, no problem Sir, just trying to condense and not take up so much space in the thread.
That History repeats itself and that History never repeats itself are equally true

Interesting information here. The irony of the second world war is being allied with one war criminal against another. Having allowed the Soviets to participate in the Nuremberg trials was something akin to putting Jack the ripper on a Judicial bench. Perhaps that is why I see Putin as Stalin light. Each time I see old news reels from WWII supporting "our brave Russian comrades", I nearly barf. I used to work with a woman from Germany. She was six years old in May of 1945 and lived in Berlin when the Red army marched in. They were looting and raping their way through the city. A Russian soldier had his rifle pointed at her mother demanding valuables while they hid a young girl under the bed to protect her from such "brave liberators". If it hadn't have been for a Russian officer entering the room at that moment, her mother would have most likely been raped and murdered.

mikewint said:

He was 5 feet 4 inches tall

Click to expand...

And he continues to shrink...

Joseph Stalin: height | History of Russia

There are no official reports about the Joseph Stalin height because Stalin was sensitive about his height, his pockmarked face and his withered left arm. In fact, he went to great lengths to conceal his lack of stature from the Soviet people and the world. Contemporary reports of the exact Stalin height vary. At the lower end, people report that he was 5 foot 4 inches (163cm) tall and, at the higher end his height shoots up to around 5 foot 8 inches (173cm). The general consensus among historians seems to be that Stalin was about 5 foot 5 tall (165cm).

Many who met Stalin in their lifetime were said to have been shocked by his diminutive, real-life presence. US President, Harry S Truman once dismissively referred to Stalin as a "little squirt". Both Truman and Winston Churchill found the lengths Stalin went to make himself appear taller amusing when they met with him. Grigol Uratadze, a man who was imprisoned alongside Stalin during his time as a revolutionary, described him as unassuming with a "creeping way of walking, taking short steps…", while Milovan Đilas, a former Yugoslavian politician mentioned that he was "small" with an "ungainly build" in a later book describing their encounters.

To maintain the illusion of height in face-to-face meetings, Stalin also took to wearing boots with cleverly masked, significantly raised heels and would often pose for photos while standing on a raised platform or positioned well in front of or above those around him. Besides the high heels, platforms in photographs, and exaggerated stature in paintings, Stalin's private residence in Sochi was specially constructed with his frame in mind and everything in it, from the chairs to the staircase were made slightly smaller than usual so that Stalin could use them perfectly comfortably and otherwise appear especially tall in stature. Even his pool was only a little over four feet deep at its maximum depth because he couldn't swim (he did, however, enjoy taking little walks back and forth in it) and didn't want to be submerged if he ventured into the deep end.

Other features of Stalin's mansion, which you can still tour today, include a smaller than regulation size billiards table complete with a smaller than average, weighted cue the dictator used to make his shots more powerful. Stalin reportedly never lost a single game of billiards against any of his guards… it no doubt had something to do with the fact that Stalin could have any of his guards killed if they displeased him.

Winston Churchill (5 ft 6 in.), Harry Truman (5 ft 8 in)

Mike, as Patton would say... "Many Tanks"...

Coat, Sir?

No problem sir...spaced as you requested, hope that helped.
History would be a wonderful thing....If it were only true