Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "“IT WASN’T A REAL CRIME!” The Counter-Arguments to Operation Keelhaul E3" video.

@aleksazunjic9672 Athletes? Are you unaware that the US won more of every medal in the 2021 Olympics than any other country, even a China with three times its population? And it's doing a hell of a lot better demographically than China, Japan, or anywhere in Europe is.
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@TheAircool1 Norway isn't a Marxist country. i agree that it is silly to equate democratic socialism with Marxism-Leninism-Communism.
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@aleksazunjic9672 Wait, when did the US fall?
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This is more of a cultural problem than a legal one. De-Nazification was for Germany and Austria, not the US or UK. Domestic culture discredited Nazism unofficially. the problem is that the left int he west went from Stalin shills to denying they had ever been Stalin shills rather than admitting their mistake.
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@aleksazunjic9672 Don't bet on it. Unless you're betting bitcoin. 🤣
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I think this ignores the larger context. The Western Allies had to cooperate with the USSR to defeat a worse threat in Hitler's Germany. After that war appeared to be won, but before it even ended, the overriding concern became creating a postwar order that avoided another world war. They succeeded in this. The alternative to cooperating with Stalin was a high risk of another world war, only this time with nuclear weapons, resulting in tens or hundreds of millions more people killed. People like Patton may have been right about the nature of the USSR but it was insane to think another war was a better alternative.
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But there wasn't a next war. The value of that cannot be overstated. The main problem with appeasing Hitler was that it didn't work - and Churchill knew it wouldn't because he alone (in the West) understood Hitler. If Hitler had been anything approaching a reasonable man, it would have been a wise policy. The Sudetenland wasn't worth 50 million dead. The mistake was in imagining that Hitler was anything approaching a reasonable man given the copiuos evidence to the contrary - all you had to do was read his book or listen to his speeches. Whereas Stalin, evil as he was, was at least rational enough that he'd abide by a compromise rather than starting a war just because he thought war was such a splendid thing.
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Is that you, Ronald Reagan? Is that me? [/Private Joker voice]
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More after 1945 than before, and only because the Nazis lost the war. If they'd won and carried out their plans for the east, they would have eventually murdered hundreds of millions of people. But the biggest difference was less the extent of Nazi crimes than the loose cannon Hitler was on the world stage - Stalin, for all his crimes, never deliberately started a world war, and for the most part was very careful to avoid letting local crises like Berlin and Korea escalate to world war. He might not be entirely honest, but he could generally be counted on to keep agreements as long as they were to everyone's benefit - for example, he gave the British a free hand in Greece in return for having a free hand in Poland, which, if not great for the Polish, was FAR better than provoking the West to war over it. He stole nuclear secrets from the US and UK, but used them for deterrence, not to launch a nuclear war. Hitler had no such scruples and deliberately sought a rematch of WW1 and a struggle to extinction with the USSR. And we can only imagine the horror that would have resulted had Hitler gotten his hands on nuclear weapons.
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At 4:27, you are ignoring the key words "sick or injured". The provision does not apply to healthy prisoners. it's not about repatriation per se being a crime, it's about kicking sick or injured prisoners out of hospitals for a long journey. Also, wasn't the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk abrogated in 1919? In any case it wasn't binding on the US or UK, which were never parties to it and never recognized its validity. I think you have a much better case that forced repatriation was highly unethical than that it was a crime.
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Not having another war with 100 million people killed or more was the main thing they got. They also got more or less a free hand in western and southern Europe - for example, Stalin left the communists in Greece hanging for the British to suppress. The absolute, overriding concern of Allied policy from the time the defeat of Germany seemed assured was founding a postwar order that prevented another world war from breaking out. Sometimes this involved appeasing the Soviets, sometimes (as in Korea) it involved confronting them. The strategy may not have been perfect or pretty, but it ultimately succeeded, and if it hadn't, neither of us would likely be in a position to have this discussion today.
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