Britain's 'concentration camp' in Russia

The West had many reasons to believe the USSR was stronger than it was, hawks on the right wanted to believe it, fellow travellers on the left wanted to believe it, the Russian political system wanted to believe it (and lied to itself repeatedly).

That is a whole lot of fighting to leave out.

In any case, these things compound. Immediately after WW2, the USSR still felt threatened by the West, which was not an unfounded fear. Multigenerational paranoia about being invaded by more powerful nations is precisely the kind of thing that damages institutions to the point where they no longer serve any purpose but preserving themselves.

Under the accounting methods used, capitalist systems of government would dwarf that number. Of course, uneven standards are par for the course.

> It was always the plan of the Marxists to grab all the power and run a dictatorship.

"The Marxists". Do you know how many groups participated in the Russian civil war, how many of them considered themselves Marxists, and how many of them were purged by the sole political entity that seized power? Since you uncritically cited that 100 million figure, I'm going to guess no.

Why do you think treasures were involved is beyond me.

US sent soldiers to secure shipments sent to Tsarist Russia. And surprisingly bolsheviks declared themselves "free" of any Tsarist Russia financial burden(s), so allying with Whites was logical.

So it wasn't hostile at that time.

The Russian state has always had a fraught and conflicted relationship with the West. It had a fairly unique place in being geographically situated to avoid economic and political domination by the West, but being less developed and near enough that its interactions with the Western powers led to a persistent inferiority complex. The court ladies excitedly took up the latest fashions and fads from Paris, while the political leadership attempted difficult reforms, partially to ensure their continued ability to resist Western domination and partially because they wanted approval of the more cosmopolitan powers. (The quasi-apocryphal Potemkin villages were built in order to impress Catherine II and a group of Western ambassadors.)

Pan-Slavism emerged in the 19th century. Instead of focusing myopically on aping Western powers, its intellectuals wanted to build a pan-Slavic identity and nationalism, centered around the Slavic folk, the Orthodox church, and the Tsar. This naturally led to conflicts with the more-Westernized countries that dominated Slavic peoples, as well as the Ottoman Empire. The people who questioned religion and the Tsar, for their part, were filthy liberals who were stooges of Western intellectuals (sound familiar?) And, for what its worth, most of the liberals were relatively privileged folk who looked down on the idiocy of the countryside, who made up the heartland of Russia (sound familiar?) It formed a useful dialectic for everyone involved.

Revolution and war come. Through an unlikely series of (un)fortunate accidents, the Bolsheviks come into power. They were a very funny set of people to rule over Russia, but they ruled. Their opinions of the Western ranged from (at best) negative to incredibly bitter and angry. But some compromises were made, in the first decade of Soviet rule. Ultimately, though, Stalin came to power. Mostly because he was the most ruthless autocrat. But he was more than happy to deploy xenophobia and the trope of his enemies being stooges of foreign powers when it suited him, as it often did. The scars of WW2 made him and Russian society even more sclerotic, leading to the present day.

Not to defend the US actions in the slightest but their 1940s internment camps were similar to the "villages" they used in Viet Nam in the 1960s (a technique also used by the British during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s BTW). In a hierarchy of brutality: less than the ones in Russia and South Africa).

(You can be just as brutal without corralling people -- Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee, or Gengis Kahn come to mind as being as evil as, say, Guantanamo. But people have found many ways to be mean to others, and I agree with you that taking one step down that path doesn't automatically make you equivalent to those who have taken many).

But "camp" is like so many things more obvious in retrospect than at the time so be careful of accidental anachronistic bias. In part it exists thanks to technology: it used to be expensive to keep prisoners, so unless they could pay their way (i.e they were nobility) it was simpler just to kill them. The invention of barbed wire and practical guns, as well as, ironically, changing views of the moral worth of people (an increase in valuing life) lead to their development.

You can see the technological aspect in Russia itself: when the Tsars wanted to get rid of someone but not kill them, the victim was simply sent to Siberia. Getting back was so hard they were for all intents and purposes interned there. The Soviets, being more industrially minded, were the ones who set up the Gulag system. (And though it would be facile at this point to say "...and so clearly they got the idea thanks to the British counterrevolutionary efforts" I think that would be an unnecessary stretch).

Or, as one of the great chilling quotes of the 1960s put it: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it"

[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=ZzBkAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT1096&dq=...

That seems reasonable. A country's government and its population or cultural identity are different. Especially as time goes on.

This book has received a lot of criticism from historians but it contains a lot of fascinating information.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioner...

Source? I really don't think anything like this is taught in German schools.

Yes, Nazis are mentioned when that time is discussed, but never in my experience to avoid a connection between this country and the deeds done.

German national pride, patriotism, is very very low (I personally don't feel any attachment to this country apart from the fact that I know some places and speak the language).

> "For example, average Dutch will not tell you"

How are the Dutch involved now? Is that a weird "I know 'German' is 'Deutsch' in German" mistake? Or are you randomly talking about people from the Netherlands at that point?