While often disparaged these days, the US has long been one of the most charitable countries in the world both in terms of private citizen contributions and public government aid. Glad to see some of the good deeds finally being recognized!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...
Just Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg together will give away over 3x more than all the OECD countries on that list combined (on an annual basis). Or roughly equivalent to what Japan - the world's third largest economy - will do every ~35 years total.
Gates, Buffett, Zuckerberg, Bezos = plausibly $450 billion in combined charity over time (assuming Bezos spends ~$20 billion on space). France at the government level does $9 billion per year by comparison; it'll take France 40-50 years to match just those four private US citizens.
No other nation in world history has seen its richest citizens routinely give the bulk of their wealth away (from Carnegie & Rockefeller, to Howard Hughes, to Gates & Buffett). The scale of private US charity is unprecedented and amounts to trillions of dollars over a century of time.
Contrast that with eg Germany, where 65% of their billionaires inherited their wealth, or Europe broadly where dynastic wealth is extremely common:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/10/10/where-...
Meanwhile in the US, over a hundred billionaires sign on to the Giving Pledge:
A very small contingent of US soldiers is involved in an allied invasion of Russia. Mostly those US soldiers do nothing, two hundred die (half from disease), they go home a very short time later having done almost nothing at all in terms of conflict. Then in this thread, that is being blamed for the forced Communist famine deaths of millions of Russians and Ukrainians.
It's the ultimate combination of Communism apologism (apologizing for the mass genocide and slaughter of millions of people under Lenin's policies), and blame America for everything'ism. And all of that is happening in the thread for an article that is about how Americans altruistically contributed historically vast quantities of food to keep millions of other people from starving to death.
That sounds more like the famine of 1932 rather than the famine of 1921 being discussed here. In 32, you can directly point to policies put in place responsible for the famine. In 21, much of it was due to civil war that the US participated in by providing troops and resources.
US didn't provide any troops or resources to Russian Civil War. A few clashes with pro-Bolshevik bandits were from Japanese forces.
And again, this is not all the actions taken by America in the conflict.
There were a lot of leaders in the movement that had no problem with autocracy as long as it was their autocracy.
Even assuming high-end range for White Terror and low-end range for the Red one, it is not a given that whatever White faction might have theoretically won would continue to engage in persecution. For bolsheviks it is a given fact. By the 1920s they were happily gassing peasants.
And by the mid-40s USSR was quite antisemitic anyway, so I find it rather doubtful that a victory by any other party would have been worse than bolsheviks.
You really think a Soviet textbook mentioned the Red Terror?
>Even assuming high-end range for White Terror and low-end range for the Red one, it is not a given that whatever White faction might have theoretically won would continue to engage in persecution. For bolsheviks it is a given fact. By the 1920s they were happily gassing peasants.
Yes, there are hypotheticals that play out better than actual events. There are also many that play out similarly or worse.
Given the main warlords controlling the White forces, winning the war probably starts with a massive purge, fairly common in those situations. Those warlords would also have more in common with Facist Italy and Nazi Germany, leading to a potentially terrifying thirties.
Russian history is filled with tyrannical cruelty, before and after the Soviet era too. That wasn't likely to end with a civil war.
Main warlords were generally tsarist generals who may or may not have went to the Provisional Government side, but at least they were generally somewhat educated and somewhat reasonable people. Which, of course, never stopped anyone from committing all kinds of atrocities, but at least one could expect that they would not, after the war was over, engage in mass slaughter for no logical reason whatsoever, which is what bolsheviks did.