scrim

I'm thinking this would be a great opportunity to Tomahawk the hell out of the Syrian regime, and various other Russian friendly regimes around the world. Considering that Putin seems to be looking for more Lebensraum, sorry, I mean, protect Russians from persecution abroad, he can't really complain too much about NATO being aggressive. Maio: Fine, I'm just sort of miffed about seeing the world take one giant step back towards the Cold War because a certain Russian dictator doesn't understand the meaning of "sovereign state".

Yeah, the Berkut has been disbanded. And what we've seen isn't local militia, it's one or two civvies with AKs, and a shit tonne of soldiers wearing the latest Russian uniforms, armour, helmets and AK-74Ms, with traces off ripped of insignia on some, driving around in Russian military vehicles, occupying airports and government facilities. In other words, at the least a very clear provocation, if not an outright attempt at occupying and annexing the Crimea. And as we all know, invading and annexing a sovereign nation is the crime for which several Germans were hung for after the war.

Just have an open mind for a second or two (I know it's hard, but try just this once). If Germany was a country bordering to you, was vastly superior, and apologetic about their Nazi past and their crimes in Russia, and were more prone to celebrating Hitler than despising him, how would you react? Yes, poor shame about me repeating the Holodomor, the Holocaust made by the USSR. I'm ever so ashamed about that. The discreet signs, such as the Ukrainians overthrowing their president and driving him into exile when he started turning Ukraine into a Russian lackey again may be interpreted as the Ukrainian people not agreeing about the whole "let's subject ourselves to Moscow rule again" idea. Am I saying that every single Ukrainian loathes every single Russian? No, I'm saying that for very good reasons, most Ukrainians don't want to go back to being ruled by Russia, and for good reasons. Set aside the past, and the present wouldn't be a good alternative either, seeing as how Russia is anything but a human rights respecting democracy at present. The Russian "covert" invasion just goes one step further to show what human waste Putin is. This is not one step above how the Nazis took over territory before WW2 proper started. Militia my ass, which militia is wearing the latest standard issue Russian uniforms, body armour, helmets, and modernized AK-74Ms?

Probably not. History clearly indicates a dictator/regime negative ending trend as a result of employing a conscript military against demonstrations and popular uprisings. Replacing the head of the army was probably to avoid having the army put itself between the protesters and the riot police in a chicken game of "riot police vs. Main Battle Tank" like in Egypt.

Though many if not most of those in the SS were Nazis, joining the SS per se didn't mean you were one. And given how the Ukrainians had been treated by the Russians, I wouldn't have given a damn about how the uniform the Germans would give me looked if I was a Ukrainian back then and wanted to get back at the Russians for the Holodomor. Just how well educated do you think the average Ukrainian was about the politics and branches of the German military? I'll tell you: "FASCIST AGGRESSOR EVIL! STALIN AWESOME GOOD SAVIOUR OF US ALL!!!" is what would've been blasted at him by Communist party members and the propaganda films, if he'd been privileged enough to visit a cinema, and he'd be very well aware that the people spouting this propaganda at him were the ones who'd caused 7.5 millions of his fellow Ukrainians to starve to death, had blown up the churches, arrested and killed the journalists, the opposition, the even moderately wealthy/not starving land owners, the clergy, those the NKVD and Communist party members didn't like, the nationalists, and all those who had been arrested and executed just because of the institutionalized paranoia of the NKVD. Sorry for the post, started writing it before the moderator notion was written.

No, did I write that? No. To state it painfully clearly: The reason Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis is solely due to how extremely, horribly treated they had been by the Russians for centuries. What harm they did to Russians in the short time the collaborations occurred isn't even a fraction of what what Russians had done to Ukrainians for centuries, or even just during the lifetime of those who collaborated, so throwing a "THEY IZ NAZIS" fit about the Ukrainians for collaborating is BS if you don't then proceed to get a heart attack when you think about what Russians have done to Ukrainians. Considering what you've said, your comparison with Africans shouldn't be that it'd be absurd for them to fight against white people for enslaving them, but that it'd be absurd for them not to "move on" from the enslavement, suppression, apartheid and various other versions of racism that they still encounter in places today.

Yeah Ukrainians, stop faking, it was just a massive genocide! And hundreds of years of oppression and starvation. And tens of thousands of nationalists murdered. Do you really think it is strange that some Ukrainians did work alongside the Nazis? They had been subjected to Russian rule for centuries, their quests for independence crushed time and time again brutally, the Czars had spent almost 200 years whipping up such extreme antisemitism that they can be directly credited with inventing the Pogroms, to be able to blame someone else for the never ending starvations. Then another massive genocide that the world ignored, along with many local Jews welcoming Communism because they were finally protected from being dragged out of their homes and bludgeoned to death over a trivial, or fictional matter. Then all of a sudden along comes the Germans. The Red Army is swept aside by them in humiliating defeats, the NKVD hauls ass out of town after throwing grenades into their over crowded prison cells, and the German military doesn't immediately round them up and shoot them, which by the standards they were accustomed to, meant the Germans seemed all right. And then they present the Ukrainians with offers such as not shooting nationalists by the thousands, and the opportunity to take revenge at the Russians. And tragically enough, they both hate the Jews. Not until a while later do the Germans start treating them badly. Given those circumstances, if anything it's to the credit of the Ukrainians that not every single one of them volunteered to collaborate. Does this give them a reason to detest Russia? Well, let's put it like this: If Germany from day one had been acting towards Israel the way the Russians have to the Ukrainians since their indepence, I'm pretty sure the entire world would've stood on the side of Israel. The Ukrainians don't need the past to have a deep sense of mistrust against their neighbour; They only need the present.

Yes, how very generous. You "gave" some land to the people you were ruling. Most cultures say that in order to give something away, you can't still have it afterwards. No, you didn't co-exist. You ruled them with an iron fist. Saying you co-existed is like saying that Nazi Germany and Poland co-existed. Ooh, you're brothers now, because while the rulers in Moscow were starving the Ukrainians for hundreds of years, Russian peasants would also starve. Sounds legit. Yeah, no. While others certainly didn't have it easy at the time to put mildly, once again thanks to Moscow, it was 7.5 million Ukrainians who starved to death. That's more than how many Jews the Nazis managed to kill during the Holocaust. Starting to understand just why Ukrainians don't consider you a brother? Yeah, after hundreds of years of oppression, genocides, etc., you can't say that they were treated equally because, at the eve of Russian oppression, two Ukrainians ruled for a fraction of the time during your "brotherly co-existence". The bullshit is strong with you.

Yeah, she's your motherland. But she's not Ukraine's motherland, something a lot of Russian speaking people in the Ukraines and Russia seem to have trouble comprehending. And yeah, you co-existed. As in, you forced them to be part of your "brotherly" union, you murdered thousands of Ukrainian nationalists, drove them to cannibalism with genocidal famines, looked upon them as second class citizens, etc. Maybe that's why the Ukrainians don't remember your co-existence with the same fondness, who knows?

Nice! Will the scope be 2D or 3D? Hoping for the former, the 3D ones tend to ruin the reticle in my mind as everything becomes smaller, and thus the finer details are left blurred or invisible.

Not submitting to Russia as a second class state =/= Nazis.

As it is they've already risked all of those things by ousting their president. Why stop now and make all those risks for nothing by allowing things to revert back to their previous state? Now is the best chance they've had for literally hundreds of years to take another large step away from the Russian yoke, towards becoming a sovereign, independent state.

Why? It's not Russia, it's the Ukraines. Throughout history, no nation had oppressed the Ukrainians more than the Russians, with the possible exception of the Nazis, solely due to their cruelty. It's a nation that is threatened by Russia via immigrants moved there by the Soviets who are now calling for things such as separation, merging with Russia and a Russian invasion. They're threatened by financial punishments for ousting their unconstitutional Russian lackey of a president, and they are still effectively occupied by tens of thousands of Russian soldiers. Saying that they are making a mistake is like saying that a victim of kidnap is making a mistake by trying to escape because it doesn't bode well to reconciliation with their kidnapper.

Yes, trauma plates don't cover every inch of your body, breaking news. You could potentially create a body armour vest that renders the wearer immune to even main gun rounds fired from MBTs, but at the small expense of also making the wearer 100% unable to move. There will always be a balance between the amount of armour you throw on a soldier, and his ability to still move around sufficiently well that his armour doesn't turn into a threat to himself. And yes again, SAPI plates and similar plates are very well known to shatter when hit by assault rifles and various other weapons. Because that is what they are designed to do. They are literally speaking designed to shatter as means of absorbing the power of the bullet hitting the plate. Otherwise they'd just have made trauma plates out of steel, not ceramics.

Of course they're not, but you'd have to be incredibly narrow minded not to understand that there is a fundamental difference between the actions taken by the secret services' of democracies, and those of totalitarian regimes.

A word of advice (no, I'm not bothering attempting a dialog with someone who is too occupied with his monologue, like you and tonci): Just stop it. I've been there many years ago myself, and I can honestly tell you I was making a clown out of myself back then. Now you are doing exactly the same thing. You come of as a complete and utter idiot the way you're "debating". Do you even think about the things that come out of your head? Of course it's not the same! Christianity is a religion that has existed for 2000 years (or far more, depending on how you chose to view the connections to Judaism), and has made an incredibly large imprint on Western and Eastern countries and cultures. One simply cannot hijack it by something as incredibly minimal as you suggest. Communism on the other hand is a political ideology that has solely been used by totalitarian, genocidal, persecuting, democracy loathing and utterly violent states during the 20th and 21st centuries. That is why there is nothing stopping sane and mentally capable people from calling it by what it has done. Wow, just wow. Can you even begin to comprehend just how incredibly offensive that is towards people who actually survived what a 30 year Gulag imprisonment constitutes? It's like a feminist saying "I have slightly lower wages than my male coworkers, what's the difference between this and apartheid, or the Holocaust?".

Which is more commonly known as "high treason".

Case in point. Instead of trying to think about it, or making a half arrsed attempt at responding in a manner that potentially disprove anything I wrote, you kept writing the same old insults, utterly idiotic points, assumptions and more insults, that are very obvious despite the fact that you think you are so intelligent and I'm so stupid I won't see them. There's being a stupid, dickish teenager, and then there's just being pathetic.

You're right, I wouldn't have written it unless you'd written you were 15. Before you wrote that, I just believed you were genuinely stupid. Now though I know that you're actually 15 years old, which means A, there's a high chance you'll have turned around in a few years time, and B, there's without a doubt no need trying to explain anything to you, because you like all 15 year olds know that you are the smartest individuals that exist on this planet, and everyone who disagrees with you about something is without a doubt wrong. At best you can explain to them the error of their ways, but you will not once actually consider the fact that you are wrong. You have touted these opinions for far too long, and you are far too stubborn to consider that you may not be right, because you think that would be to lose face, as opposed to actually learning something. I could explain to you what I don't consider even remotely logical, but I won't, because I know you will disagree. This sort of plea that you've written is because you really deep down think you can guide a lost soul to the path of understanding, not so that you may be faced with an argument that you can consider proving that you were wrong about something. And yes, I also know that my refusal to keep arguing with you in the light of this will by you be considered a Trafalgar size victory, and I don't give a hoot, because I know there's no point arguing with you for about another half dozen years.

Bwahahahaha! That's amazing!

Hmm, I remember being a 15 year old kid, a long time ago, despite the nonsense vilas makes up. His statement about teenagers mistakenly said a lot about you though. I too thought I was at the top of the world when I was 15, that the "evil West" was the sole cause of everything bad, and that Communism was "really just misunderstood", so considering the massive hubris and general assholeness that characterizes essentially every 15 year old ever (not an insult, or solely directed at you. I don't think I know anyone who wouldn't go back in time and beat their teenage selves to a pulp if they could), I'll let you slide, because I know that no matter what I tell you, you already know you're right, and you will not for anything in the world consider that you may be wrong, and is picking a fight about something that is simultaneously a trivial and horribly offensive matter that will make you embarrassed of yourself in less than a dozen years from now, if you can remember it from all the other similar incidents. You like most people will end up genuinely rethinking a lot of things, trust me. Then there's people like vilas of course, who, despite being old enough to have children of their own, still haven't grown up to understand that they're spouting a load of BS, irrelevant anecdotes and fiction to appear as though they are at the top of the world's intellect.

+10^. I'm sorry vilas, but are you actually thick? I wrote quite clearly that I am not an American. In fact, I've never even set foot on the continent. Not that I see what that has to do with my knowledge of history. Saying that an American is narrow minded because he's an American is exactly the same thing as saying that someone is a drunk because he's a Pole, a Nazi because he's a German, etc. And yes, Stalin was indeed a very naughty man. But just like Tonci, you appear to be under the impression that traits such as dictator, psychopath, liar, murderer, etc. can be considered political ideologies. The rest of your post is just outright embarrassing to read. I don't think I've ever seen such a long post on these forums filled with nothing but OT rantings, straw man arguments and completely illogical assumptions about people.

If they sell that toilet, I will totally put down an entire month's worth of pay on it!

Which takes us right back to what I wrote when you first jumped me: If we are to judge political ideologies based on what they theoretically revolve around, then every single political, religious and economical ideology throughout history is fake. Then there has never been a fascist, communist, capitalist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, democratic, socialist or even Nazi state (Hitler, Goering and Goebbels hardly look like tall, blond and fit Aryans, right?). Me on the other hand, and most others, judge political ideologies based on what they actually do. Every single political ideology has its own motives, that are not always honestly displayed. Why is it that some people lose all capacity for critical thinking when it comes to their own precious political beliefs?

And just since when was "dictator" a political ideology? You know what, never mind. If that's how stupid the arguments to defend Communism are going to get, please, by all means, revert back to shouting "God mom, you don't understand!".