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Comment by TomMarius | Hacker News Reader

We don't feel the US did more in terms of quantity of dead men, we know more Soviet-affiliated troops died there. However with hindsight we now know the real plan of the Soviet Union - it never was to help Europe, but to conquer it. So in conclusion the US government helped us more (and not just during the war), while the SU government sent more people to die for their shady goals here. Nobody is discounting the heroism of the individual soldiers. The sad thing is that the current Russian government is using their legacy to pursue their shady goals again.

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That needs some serious citations. If you're saying it's evidenced by the soviet military in the Eastern block I encourage you to look at the US presence in Nato countries. I know that history in the US is largely a picture of American exceptionalism and "we were always the good guys", but actual history has many more shades of gray. This is one thing that the allies (in both parts of Germany) did reasonably well, break the circle of history as a means for teaching patriotism.

I know of the US presence in NATO countries and we welcome it. It is absolutely incomparable to the Warsaw Pact occupation of our country (for example, the US forces didn't shoot anybody nor ran over people with a tank) which is the reason why we welcomed the US forces and joined NATO as soon as we could after 1989. Not sure what citations should I send you, I live here (Czechia). You can probably read about it on Wikipedia, I'd do the same.

US forces tend to do their shooting and running over in Central/South America and the Middle East. Many countries in those areas are less impressed by US benevolence.

The US is an empire. So was the USSR. So are China and modern Russia. Some provinces are treated better than others, but empires are empires, and propaganda, political manipulation, corruption, violence, and torture are how they roll - together with resource capture, labour management, and various levels of market development.

Europe had a notable level of propaganda and political manipulation, and still does, and not so much of the overt violence. But just because the corruption, violence and torture were happening elsewhere doesn't mean they weren't happening at all.

I do not say that it's not happening. That does not mean we do not welcome the US, or that its actions here are comparable to the actions of the SU, or that the SU, a comparably much worse regime which caused dozens of millions deaths after the war (many in the SU itself, but not only), helped Europe more.

I guess I should thank the SU for stealing our uran, making my fellow citizens forcibly work in the mines as a punishment for not being communist enough, and for hindering our economical development by decades (of the country that used to be one of the most advanced European states before the war, and got destroyed AFTER the war so much that it fell below Africa in HDI)? Well, thanks...

Was getting invaded by Germany part of their master plan too?

I don't know, why does it matter? How does it change their final goals, visible from their political actions since around 1943? Why do you think I claim they had a master plan from the beginning?

> However with hindsight we now know the real plan of the Soviet Union - it never was to help Europe, but to conquer it.

I think you don't even need the hindsight, just look at history: Soviet Union and Nazi Germany started the war as allies, their first action was splitting Poland... why would anyone expect they would have stopped there?

So, essentially, we are supposed to thank Russians for liberating us from their former allies (and even that only happened because their former allies stabbed them in the back first). I don't know... after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, what options had Soviet Union left other than fighting back?

If you become friends with the Nazis, start a war together as allies, then you get betrayed by them, then you defend yourself successfully (with help of many other countries) and finally defeat them... that doesn't really make you a textbook example of a good guy. You need a lot of propaganda to make people forget how this all started.

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