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Okay I'm open to it - let's say you're right - doesn't that make US the bad guys?
Wrong question. Ask: Were US good or bad players of the great game?
Look at the game board. At the beginning of session, there were seven players. At the end, only two were left.
The Red player who held one sixth of the board at the start, succesfully defended himself and was able to snatch few more squares.
While the Blue player beat and outmaneuevered all others and owned or controlled everything else.
Some people who are never satisfied might bitch that Blue victory should be even more lopsided, that if Blue optimized his play to perfection he might prevent the Red from taking the few squares he gained.
Or team color one could've teamed up with other color and the communists could have not won and their cities could've been firebombed into ashes instead.
On Earth 2 we're not surrounded by soul-sucking Brutalist architecture that seemingly popped out of nowhere and DEi tribunals that no one can remember voting for
I see what you were going for, but no, at the end of the war everyone like me had their both-metaphorical-and-often-much-more-literal dicks smashed into the dirt by the communists and their allies
...you think that Nazi architecture was any less brutalist?
Speaking plainly, this mockup does not make me despair in the same way modern drop down florescent lights and cheap thin plywood does. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1986-029-02%2C_%22Germania%22%2C_Modell_%22Gro%C3%9Fe_Halle%22.jpg
But I live in a nice house on a hill with some land where I don't have to deal with any of that day-to-day. Maybe I would feel differently if I did? (This sentence was facetious - meant to be playful - was not speaking plainly)
Thin plywood and fluorescent lights aren’t products of brutalism though; the former long predates it and the latter are popular because they’re much cheaper to operate than the previous incandescent bulbs.
Yeah, most of the stuff that people deride "brutalism" for is less a conscious choice of some boutique architechtural style and more just wanting to do stuff for cheap, something many countries particularly did in the 60s-70s when urbanization was in the full swing and housing needed to be created fast for millions of rural workers moving to the cities.
A lot of people want "prettier housing" but it's much rarer to actually want to pay the cost - one can see it in how often such desires are phrases like "they should have built that like this [decades ago]..."
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Like 3 days ago I made a scripturally-based crack at you for acting smarmy - went over like a lead balloon, kings to you Mondego - but plywood and fluorescent aren't brutalist?
Technically correct, the best kind of correct. Rather than waving around us all like a caveman, please permit me to ask how many friends did that win you, and how productive was this exchange?
I really don’t see the connection between fluorescent lights and brutalism other than that, because they became the dominant lightbulb type in the mid century, most brutalist buildings used them (but so did every other kind of building).
They all suck and only came about after the war
We used to build Cathedrals
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If the US is seen as the civilizational inheritor of the British Empire and French Empire, though (which collectively birthed it), then the map is less impressive, though.
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No, because Stalin, bad as he was, was not as bad as Hitler. If Germany had not attacked the USSR, chances of the Red Army taking even half of Europe (let alone all of it) are basically zero. He did attack Soviet Russia, which in a roundabout way, led to Soviet domination over half of the continent, which they never would have achieved otherwise, and yet was still a preferable outcome to Nazi domination over the entire continent. Hitler did far more damage to Poland in four years than the Soviets did in forty.
I'm not sure I agree, but I think he was more easily contained than Hitler. Effectively, appeasement worked with Stalin: the US and UK granted him dominion over Eastern Europe, but unlike Hitler, Stalin didn't try (through direct force) to advance further.
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Considering that the Soviets built up an armored force and a bomber force larger than that of the rest of the world combined, plus trained and fielded more paratroopers than the rest of the world combined as well, I wouldn't be so confident in this view.
The idea that the Soviets could have defeated a combined Anglo-Franco-German force fighting a total war for national survival with the cooperation of all the anticommunist CEE governments is ridiculous. Most of what ultimately fell behind the Iron Curtain would have been beyond Stalin’s wildest ambitions before the German invasion and subsequent alliance with the British and Americans eventually allowed him to march to Berlin. And I also think it ignores internal developments in the Soviet Union and growing hostility to the previous internationalist Trotskyist era of Soviet policy.
In what universe was a "combined Anglo-Franco-German force fighting a total war for national survival with the cooperation of all the anticommunist CEE governments" ever going to exist? Where did I even imply that? Of course that's ridiculous! And its' not what I meant.
When Operation Barbarossa took place, the Red Army was undergoing a long and tedious process of reorganization and rearmament. This was due to be completed in 1942, and was started years earlier under the obvious assumption that it'll be possible to provoke long attritional wars between capitalist regimes both in Europe and Asia*, leaving enough time for such a long-term program. Such a fresh and regenerated force, not mauled by a German surprise offensive, was going to be able to make short work of the Baltic, Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian armies for sure. The same applies to the puppet state of Manchukuo, and more or less to Poland as well. France and Britain were never going to get involved in such wars, and the Central Eastern Europen nations were never going to merge into an anti-Soviet alliance. And if the Germans were to get involved, nobody was going to ally with them.
*In Asia, we know that this worked; in Europe, it didn't, due to the French army folding.
Because the whole genesis of the question is VinoVeritas belief that Hitler was cool because he fought the bolsheviks, and that without Hitler the Red Army might have marched to the English Channel. But without Hitler causing WWII in the first place, a Soviet invasion of Europe would have faced an Anglo-Franco-German (and everybody else in Europe) alliance, with no aid from the US or anyone else, and been completely screwed.
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Hard disagree but thank you for sharing your thoughts candidly
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