SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: We saved the world once. We are the kind of people who save the world. Therefore when we intervene, we are saving. The 27 million Soviet dead do not fit into that template. So they are omitted.

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2047391202929234250

Sony Thăng

You said America "entered a war that was not theirs."

Operation Barbarossa began June 22, 1941.

Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1941.

For the first six months of the most destructive military campaign in human history, America was not in the war at all.

The Soviet Union was bleeding out against the full weight of Nazi Germany while America was still neutral.

Then you said America "helped turn the tide."

Let's be precise about what the tide looked like before America arrived on the Western Front.

Stalingrad: July 1942 to February 1943. The destruction of the German 6th Army and its allies. Somewhere between 800,000 and 1,500,000 Axis casualties.

The strategic turning point of the European war.

Americans were in North Africa.

Kursk: July 1943. The largest tank battle in history. The German offensive capacity on the Eastern Front was permanently broken.

Americans were in Sicily.

By the time American and British forces landed in Normandy in June 1944, the Soviet Union had already been fighting for three years, had already absorbed the worst the Wehrmacht could deliver, and had already broken the German Army's back.

On a scale of destruction with no equivalent in Western European military history.

Then you said America "rebuilt Europe" with the Marshall Plan, as if "generosity" in 1948 is a response to a question about who defeated Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1944.

These are different questions.

America's postwar economic leadership is real. It is also separate from the military history of who bore what cost in actually defeating fascism.

My point, and I notice you asked "your point?" as if there wasn't one, which is itself interesting, is this:

American children learn that America won World War II.

They do not learn that the Soviet Union suffered 27 million dead.

They do not learn the scale of Stalingrad.

Not as a number. Not as a feeling.

They do not carry it the way they carry Pearl Harbor and D-Day.

So they grow up believing, in their bones, that when the world needed saving, America showed up and saved it.

That belief then becomes the psychological template for every subsequent intervention.

We saved the world once. We are the kind of people who save the world. Therefore when we intervene, we are saving.

The 27 million Soviet dead do not fit into that template. So they are omitted.

Not from every textbook, the numbers exist, they can be found, but from the felt, emotional, cultural understanding of what that war was.

You just demonstrated this in real time.

You responded to "the Eastern Front was the decisive theater of World War II" with "America entered a war that wasn't theirs and helped turn the tide."

You re-centered America. Automatically. Without noticing you did it.

That's not an argument.

That's the curation working exactly as designed.

Quote

Knowing

@Knowing14557733

Replying to @nxt888

Of course Russia paid a major toll. Most of Europe had been conquered. Yet America entered a war that was not theirs and helped turn the tide. 

Then had to fight Japan. The British Commonwealth, was our primary ally in the Pacific. 

Then rebuilt Europe.

Your point?