harryeagar is mostly full of it. 1942 was the critical year: Stalingrad, El Alamein, Torch, the 'Canal campaign in the PTO. The NAZI armed forces manpower increased from 1941 to 1943 and only slightly decreased in 1944.
A handy man at the University of Chicago is alleged to have said to Dr. Fermi when he accidentally met him "Doc are you making an atomic bomb"? That was at the time when Fermi was in charge of the first operating nuclear reactor ever at the University.I was told that the issue of what to do reached all the way to President FDR. Get him into the know or do nothing? Apparently it was decided to do noything.
One of the guys involved in the transfer of those TOW missiles stopped flying. He was in fear that instead of just using them to shoot down Iraqi planes they could just as easily smuggle them into Europe or North America and start downing commercial flights.
Stalin would have been executed for being a war criminal had he been investigated. His attempted genocide of Poland after having invaded it with Hitler would have done for that. He committed a long list of crimes against humanity for which the world of 1945 would have executed him, but "being a 'communist'" is not on that list. Quite a lot of communists in the US managed to avoid any official punishment for having an opinion, even if they were Stalin's useful idiot followers. The Rosenbergs are a clear exception.
I think any argument would founder on the difficulty of defining the parameters of a comparison. You would have to assign quantification and relevance to colonial expropriation being foundational to British capital formation feeding industrialization, for example, or slavery to American capital formation feeding industrialization. Those are fraught calculations and assignments of relative importance.It's an important comparison (Russian vs Western industrialization), in order to counter self-congratulatory and obfuscating narratives of Western or American or British industrialization that might be used to highlight the particular horrors of Russian or Chinese industrialization, but it's not a useful comparison beyond that end. It's actually sufficient to note in detail the human costs of each discrete historical case.
Well, there was a lot of industrialization in tsarist Russia, too. Relative to population, not much, but in total output of basic industrial goods, Russia in 1914 ranked in the top 5 in important categories. So that is an easy comparison to make.
Anyhow, you said the USSR was worse but you say I cannot say it wasn't. Hardly seems fair.
I'll just add an obscure book that raises all the points you make in a context not many know about.:
I always felt bad for the Rosenbergs' kids. They spent decades trying to prove that their parents weren't Soviet spies and traitors, and then at the end of the Cold War they at last found out that their dad at least was one, and their mom probably knew about it even if she wasn't directly involved.
John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, was approached by a fed after his mag ran a story about how both sides of a world war developed a "radioactive dust" that could poison whole nations, and settled into an uneasy standoff. Campbell was asked not to run stories on the theme of radioactive weapons any more. He replied that this was stupid: the disappearance of such stories would immediately tell every science-fiction reader in the country that there was a real project to develop such weapons.
Greetings from the bosky dells of Katyn! (Oh, did I say something wrong? I tried to ask Leon Trotsky for clarification, but I found the conversation a little one-sided.)
Robert Oppenheimer had some youthful encounters with teh commies. It was known before his work at Los Alamos, but the government didn't seem to care when his expertise was needed.It was when he started advocating against development of the H bomb that the Republicans had him humiliated and taken out of the scientific loop on atomic weapons.
Some are & some aren't (see: Mittens).
Henry was a huge fan of the Okhrana's magnum opus, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
harryeagar is mostly full of it. 1942 was the critical year: Stalingrad, El Alamein, Torch, the 'Canal campaign in the PTO. The NAZI armed forces manpower increased from 1941 to 1943 and only slightly decreased in 1944.
A handy man at the University of Chicago is alleged to have said to Dr. Fermi when he accidentally met him "Doc are you making an atomic bomb"? That was at the time when Fermi was in charge of the first operating nuclear reactor ever at the University.I was told that the issue of what to do reached all the way to President FDR. Get him into the know or do nothing? Apparently it was decided to do noything.
One of the guys involved in the transfer of those TOW missiles stopped flying. He was in fear that instead of just using them to shoot down Iraqi planes they could just as easily smuggle them into Europe or North America and start downing commercial flights.
True, but the vast majority of them were no more threatening to this country than a grape.
Ta, Erik.
??
Stalin would have been executed for being a war criminal had he been investigated. His attempted genocide of Poland after having invaded it with Hitler would have done for that. He committed a long list of crimes against humanity for which the world of 1945 would have executed him, but "being a 'communist'" is not on that list. Quite a lot of communists in the US managed to avoid any official punishment for having an opinion, even if they were Stalin's useful idiot followers. The Rosenbergs are a clear exception.
I think any argument would founder on the difficulty of defining the parameters of a comparison. You would have to assign quantification and relevance to colonial expropriation being foundational to British capital formation feeding industrialization, for example, or slavery to American capital formation feeding industrialization. Those are fraught calculations and assignments of relative importance.It's an important comparison (Russian vs Western industrialization), in order to counter self-congratulatory and obfuscating narratives of Western or American or British industrialization that might be used to highlight the particular horrors of Russian or Chinese industrialization, but it's not a useful comparison beyond that end. It's actually sufficient to note in detail the human costs of each discrete historical case.
Well, there was a lot of industrialization in tsarist Russia, too. Relative to population, not much, but in total output of basic industrial goods, Russia in 1914 ranked in the top 5 in important categories. So that is an easy comparison to make.
Anyhow, you said the USSR was worse but you say I cannot say it wasn't. Hardly seems fair.
I'll just add an obscure book that raises all the points you make in a context not many know about.:
https://www.amazon.com/Grea...
I always felt bad for the Rosenbergs' kids. They spent decades trying to prove that their parents weren't Soviet spies and traitors, and then at the end of the Cold War they at last found out that their dad at least was one, and their mom probably knew about it even if she wasn't directly involved.
John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, was approached by a fed after his mag ran a story about how both sides of a world war developed a "radioactive dust" that could poison whole nations, and settled into an uneasy standoff. Campbell was asked not to run stories on the theme of radioactive weapons any more. He replied that this was stupid: the disappearance of such stories would immediately tell every science-fiction reader in the country that there was a real project to develop such weapons.
Greetings from the bosky dells of Katyn! (Oh, did I say something wrong? I tried to ask Leon Trotsky for clarification, but I found the conversation a little one-sided.)
Robert Oppenheimer had some youthful encounters with teh commies. It was known before his work at Los Alamos, but the government didn't seem to care when his expertise was needed.It was when he started advocating against development of the H bomb that the Republicans had him humiliated and taken out of the scientific loop on atomic weapons.
The only reason I focused on Stalin’s crimes was because of the original subject matter- the Rosenbergs.
I think you are confusing Ethel Rosenbrg with Ruth Snyder.
https://time.com/3808808/fi...