Feel free to circumvent also these questions !

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Jan 13, 2012 at 11:18

BB King wrote :

<< Ianus you wrote <Are you really serious about making me believe that 15-10% comes close to 85%?>

I will answer that question with a question: How could the Red Army beat the Germans WITHOUT FDR's Lend Lease Act?

Historians call the Lend-Lease Act Russia's life-savior. See for yourself:

http://www.historynet.com/russias-life-saver-lend-lease-aid-to-the-ussr-in-world-war-ii-book-review.htm

My source claims: "The victory over Nazi Germany was achieved through the economic power of the United States and the lives of millions of Soviets."

And also before that: "Lend-Lease provided vital help for the Soviet Union when the country was in desperate straits and made a significant contribution to the final victory."<<

You initially claimed that the US helped win WWII and "liberate" my country. I made a reality check of your statement and it turned out that the German losses up to the 31.12.1944 on the Eastern front had amounted to 85% while the remaining 15% were on the Western/African front.The actual losses inflicted by the US troops form just a small section of 15%.

But numbers don't makes you change your mind at all and admit an evident mistake. I suspect you're too dogmatic and ensnared in your larger worldview to ever admit mistakes and correct wrong opinions.It's so common in this age when ideology and propaganda replace reality and reduce minds to mere relay stations for others' interested views, isn't it?

So you refuse to admit the obvious point and running away from the obvious conclusion you bring up the lend-lease supplies to the USSR as a way to defend the refuted point.

By no means do I wish to play down even that contribution to the allied war effort , yet even here a rigid sense of proportions (which I find so desperately missing in all you write) is required. This sense of proportions tells me that before I can subscribe to the triumphalist statements you quote we must see in what relation the land-lease supplies stood to the real output of the Soviet military and industrial complex between 1941-1945. Without knowing the proportions all conclusions are mildly speaking build on quick sands.

There is an interesting Russian article that explores this topic in some details.Your foreseeable argument that it's "invalid" because it's written in a language you don't know will be humbly accepted by me in full knowledge that , stunningly enough, you can even turn your ignorance into a "proof". Let me nevertheless sum it up briefly in numbers

The USSR had during the war :

Tanks - 81 100 out of which 12199 were those lend-lease tanks, i.e. 12,3% compared to the total Soviet output.

War planes - 138 000 - 18 297, i.e. 13%

anti-aircraft/anti-tank artillery - 38 000/54000 -8000/5000 ,i.e. 21%/9%

all artillery and mine launchers - 526 200 units -13000 ,i.e. 2,7%

firearms -19 850 000 - 150 000 ,i.e. 0,75%.

automobiles - 744 000 - 480 000 , i.e. 64%.

etc.

Now these numbers need two important clarifications. If all factors of economy (raw materials,machine tools,foodstuff, equipments etc.) are taken into account all the lend-lease supplies to the USSR during the war equal roughly 4% of the total output of the Soviet Union's war time economy. One could argue though in some critical areas this is evidently wrong. Well, the overwhelming majority of supplies came to the USSR between 1943-1945, i.e. at a time when the situation on the front changed dramatically in favor of the USSR. In 1941 when the Russians were suffering the most appalling losses they received supplies for just 100 000 000 dollars, i.e. 1% of the total value of the lend-lease supplies. In 1942 the percentage rose to 26,7%. In other words more than 70% of wartime supplies came in 1943-1944 while in the most critical period the Russians had to rely on their own forces and resources. In the article there is a diagram that illustrates this development. 64% of available vehicles is an impressive number, yet up to the 30.04.1944 the USSR received only 215 000 vehicle units which mean than more than a half of all the automobiles arrived at their destination during the last year of the war. Second, not all of the supplies were actually used on the front. E.g. out of 202 torpedo boats received by the USSR 118 never saw action because they came too late. The situation was similar concerning other kinds of weaponry and equipment.

To make a long argument short, there is little statistical and factual evidence to corroborate the grandiloquent claims you grandiloquently subscribe to , viz. that "The victory over Nazi Germany was achieved through the economic power of the United States and the lives of millions of Soviets." or "Lend-Lease provided vital help for the Soviet Union when the country was in desperate straits and made a significant contribution to the final victory."<

The historical truth is harsher and less flattering than the ideologues you quote make us believe.The Soviet Union did achieve its greatest victories at Moscow and Stalingrad without essential allied help.What the allied did was to help accelerate the final defeat and collapse of Nazi Germany but not to turn the tables on Germany on the Eastern front that determined the outcome of the war in Europe.This is clearly seen from objective data I have very briefly outlined.

Now I have two question to you which you may well feel free to either ignore or circumvent with another question. First, do you really never check your "sources"? Second, why are you distorting a clear historical record? Is your motivation the same as with others? Why others do it I know very well. Since your country is going to do to Russia what it has done to Serbia, distorting historical reality is a first and necessary step. Before the NATO fascists started bombing Belgrade in 1999 I heard the same incredible lies and distortions of Serbia's history and silencing anything that exposed these official US/NATO/EU lies . When I hear them again and again about another country and Serbia's erstwhile ally I have a presentment that NATO rockets and planes are getting ready to bomb St. Petersburg and Moscow soon and create a few Moslem states there as they did on the bones of dead Serbian patriots.

>Do not just thank your Soviet occupiers for Poland's liberation Ianus.<

I am confident to say that "the Soviet occupiers" as you call them have done not so much harm to Poland between 1945-1989 as the new American occupiers and our local quislings during the last 22 years. Poland's population rose between 1945-1989 and I don't remember beggars in our streets during my childhood and my youth. Now we are a rapidly dying nation and tears come to my eyes when I see helpless beggars in the streets and rage overcomes me when I learn that murderers and thieves enjoy a much higher living standards in prisons than people who have honestly worked hard all their lives!

And about you I can say only one thing. You no doubt believe that you have a beautiful worldview , but alas as I show you time and again this worldview has no relation to reality. But you don't care about reality. You don't need it unless as a minor annex to your doctrine.

> Thank American charity as well. That charity continued until 2000 might I add. My source that I am about to cite claims this aid was able "to achieve in bringing this country of almost 40 million inhabitants from economic collapse and totalitarian rule in 1989, to NATO membership and the brink of membership of the European Union in 2000."

You can read about the precise data here

http://www.usaid.gov/pl/ <

I know our government's lies well enough just I think I know your government's lies. And the only thing I won't do is repeating its semantic tricks and semantics games and using your newspeak of "totalitarian rule" etc. which I find so obviously misleading and harmful to sound thinking. Just a few facts on the grounds.

James Baker solemnly promised Gorbachov that after the Soviet withdrawal from the GDR and Eastern Europe NATO would not move eastwards under any circumstances. He lied of course and NATO troops are some 50 miles from St. Petersburg now. And the organization that is responsible for breaching international law, attacking and bombing Serbia and arming and using as its ground troop terrorist Moslem organizations like the UCK with its drug-dealers and human traffickers does deserve to be disbanded forthwith and its heads to be tried in a Nuremberg-type trial and not to join it and brag about this shameful act ! As to the EU the less is said about this hyper-corrupt and hyper-dysfunctional and tyrannical organization that serves exclusively the interests of big business and big bureaucrats the better.

> You're a very ungrateful Pole, Ianus. Perhaps you should've spent some time in Stalin's Gulag. NY books claims Stalin/Nazis killed About 200,000 Polish civilians between 1939 and 1941

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/?pagination=false

Whereas American aid saved 40 million Poles.

If you ever care to look at Poland's demography , you will learn that making a demographically sound nation a dying nation doesn't look like saving this nation but like exterminating it. And to exterminate a nation you don't need concentration camps or round-the-clock bombings like in Serbia. You just send a few economic hitmen like John Perkins or Geophrey Sachs, make the nation cut ties with its biggest markets in the east telling how bad Stalin was, you import your heroin from Afghanistan whose poppy fields and heroin laboratories work under your supervision, you make minimum wages below survival level justifying this heinous crime with your happy-making neo-liberal orthodoxy, you destroy the nation' education and health system and introduce laws that protect and favor criminals at the expense of the victim and first of all you create a predatory system where 95% of the country's wealth is concentrated in the hands of a class of professional thieves, fraudsters and criminals that due to their criminal past and instincts are sure to do the rest of dirty job of reducing a country to a third-world colony and your protectorate while relocating their stolen wealth on Western bank accounts. And while promoting regress and hidden but systematic decline and decay of the nation you hoodwink everyone with your favourite stories from the distant past as you know how to abuse and distort history to reinforce and underpin your long-term objective of world hegemony cost what it may! And I should be "grateful" for all this evil I see around me according to you ?

> It's absurd to compare Soviet oppression to rare and sporadic American injustice. So drunk American soldiers beat up a taxi driver. WOW! How does that compare with 200,000 dead Poles at the hands of the Soviets and Nazis?<

If you say so - "the Soviets and Nazis", then may I humbly ask you how many Jews did the Soviets and Nazis saved or not saved respectively? May I also draw your attention to the fact that most Jews saved by the Soviets were Polish citizens, i.e. my countrymen, as Poland was by far the biggest center of world Jewry before 1939. I knew a few Jews that became completely upset or furious when they heard about dismantling monuments to the Red Army and replacing them with monuments of former anti-Semites spreading and with discourses and equations between the Soviets and the Nazis like you love doing. I understand them quite well and see clearly their point. I remember reading German documents about Jewish resistance where the hunted Jews were said to die with the words "Long live Stalin" in their mouth. You're too blinded by your worldview to know or even admit that as you're not interested in historyat all. What you're interested in is spreading a definite political point. At any event you won't succeed in fooling me or them so easily. Think about that next time you engage in favourite anti-Soviet rant. Without the USSR not a single Polish Jew would have survived and most Poles as well.

Now violence of US soldiers stationed abroad towards casual passers-by is very widespread and common and proportional to numbers of troops stationed. It includes beating, theft, rapes, robberies,armed assaults, murders, verbal assaults etc. The worst situation is in Japan and the number of incidents involving US soldiers is incredible there so that it's no longer possible to hush them up.The fact that the US soldiers abroad enjoy diplomatic immunity seems only to encourage them to behave like masters in a conquered land. And you wonder why they are perceived as such by the local population irrespective of what the quislings say in public statements?

Now a thought experiment may explain why it's not so absurd to be worried about such incidents. Imagine that unlike in Sopot where the black US marines beat up a white Polish driver, a few white Polish soldiers in uniforms beat up a black US taxi driver in -say- Boston. Would the police drive our bandits in uniforms back to our Polish ship and then back home or rather to the nearest custody and then to prison where they would have to spend many next years of their lives ? I know the thought experiment is lost upon you. You make none. If you did , you wouldn't propose more mature arguments.

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