[color=#000000
ost_uid0](This is what I was afraid of. Warning: this message is not intended to offend. I have nothing against Americans, my problem is with the current government.)
CG, do me the respect of actually READING what I wrote.
I never called America barbaric. I said RUSSIA has a barbaric history with landmines. And China's record with human rights isn't exactly stellar either, as I note below.
Re: mines.
Yes the States DOES use mines. LOTS of them.
In fact, FRANCE signed the anti-landmine treaty. Cheese-eating surrender-monkey France.
And speaking of France, here's a hypothetical situation for you.
CGland is invaded by a neighbour with, lets be conservative, four times your arms capability and NO qualms about killing civilians. You resist. This neighbour decides to demoralize your country by lining up and shooting civilians for each soldier killed.
In Belgium it was three per soldier. 500 dead soldiers = 1,500 dead women and children.
Continue to resist and your army will be cut down by advanced technology you can't match. Crops are destroyed by bombing raids, hospitals have no supplies and simple infections become deadly.
Your enemy takes your country. Your people are starving and there's no way to help them. Abuses by your enemy's soldiers go unanswered, and the abuses are many.
It doesn't stop there.
Later, your people will be relocated to death camps, where they will be systematically worked to death. The children will be seperated from their parents, and put on trains to munitions factories where they will be worked to death. Usually, they are simply put in the gas chambers. The women will have their hair shaved off for stuffing mattresses and be worked to death. The men do hard labour until they die.
Those who die will have their jaws removed from their skeletons so their gold fillings can be pried out later. Welcome to "liquidation," when the body is stripped for anything useful and then burned.
That's what my uncle lived through. He lived long enough to be liberated. Grey at twenty. Stood at attention by his bedside in his sleep, as the Nazis made prisoners do during spot checks, often leaving them there all night out of spite.
That's what HAPPENED, and that's not the worst. Hitler's plan was to first exterminate the Jews and Gypsies. Then the Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would be slaughtered and their countries plowed under and turned into farmland, the breadbasket of the Third Reich (the first two being the Byzantine and Roman "reichs"), which was to last a thousand years.
You can avoid these atrocities, at least for a while, if you surrender. You can maintain some semblance of order, even as the enemy occupies your nation.
So, what'll it be? What do you [i
ost_uid0]honestly[/i
ost_uid0] think you'd do? Political sentiment goes out the window when faced with your own death and the ruin of your nation. I reject political party alignments for that reason.
I have a different perspective, because members of my family were murdered, starved, and abused because of the Nazis. My grandmother, who is French, suffered so badly from rationing that she had to bind her ankles to be able to stand upright. My father's family is Polish, and a number of his relatives were in the underground. THEY were either killed, or arrested by the Russians after the war when THEY took over. And Stalin killed more people than Hitler! China's Great LKeap Forward left millions starving and thousand executed for being "counter-revolutionary". Both the Russians and Chinese used secret arrests. The Chinese still deny that Tiananmin Suqare ever happened. In fact, the Chinese STILL arrange for the murders of political prisoners by bribing their fellow prisoners with reduced sentences. The Russians killed dozens of people with an experimental gas with nary an apology.
Those are the governments who refused to sign the treaty.
And I'd really like it if we could get back to actual BaW fivers before this turns into a screaming match and one of the moderators is forced to THWACK us all...?[/color
ost_uid0]