Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"In school, boys who play war games with model soldiers aren’t viewed with suspicion by their teachers, whereas boys who carry knives into the playground are likely to be reported to the police. This may be wise, but the boys with knives understand something about war that the boys with model soldiers don’t: war is an intimate business. Some of the nastiest things happen close up, between individuals. Sometimes they don’t involve weapons. At dinner parties, journalists back from war zones are occasionally asked what it was really like. Perhaps the most accurate answer would be to rape the hostess, murder the host, cut the children’s throats and set fire to the house, without any explanation. There is much talk of war crimes, as if all war was not a crime." Nuremburg rally, invasion of Poland, Dunkirk

" The most cherished myths of American culture tell us that, while war is terrible,  our  wars are noble, fought only under duress, and in the service of freedom, human rights, and democracy. If we fail in our ventures, as we did in Vietnam and Iraq and probably will in Afghanistan and Syria, that failure was not in our intentions, which were righteous, but merely in our execution. Our worst sins, in these myths, are not ambition, cruelty, or greed, but hubris and lack of foresight. Against such myths, which can be found articulated in the latest Hollywood movies, in the editorial pages of  The New York Times , in Brookings Institution essays, and in Amazon’s “Hot New Releases in World War II History,” Brecht’s ideological critique, which is founded in its own mythology of good and evil, can do little or nothing. Indeed, it’s not clear what one can do about such myths at all, since the power they have is precisely that which deforms and obscures reality into something co...

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction,"  writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans  suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses  fighting the Red Army. "It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings. Don't forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler (the Washington Post) Yes, that happened despite Stalin's crimes and blunders.