Folks would be well advised to stop sniping each other and play the ball.

Yeah I don't mean to grip but HL & ON have hijacked several threads recently. I'm inclined to say GET A ROOM, but that may not help. When you guys take each others paragraph into 10 segments dissecting each one..... I cant read it. Its too easy for things to be taken out of context and communication always breaks down.

It could be worth a try to limit that type of posting and just pick one or two segments to focus on at one time. Its not like the thread has an expiry date and will disappear?

I actually wanted to respond to this thread but lost the various tracks half way through reading it. Maybe I'll 'take another kick at the can' tomorrow.
 

CalBear

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They were called in by the Amin government. However this government had proven very incompetent in countering the islamist extremists and avoidung civil war before, so (after being called in) the soviets overthrew the Amin government, replacing it with Karmal government. The soviet intervention began on December 25., while the overthrow took place on December 27. On December 25., Amin even greeted the soviet troops and met with the command for dinner. The coup that took place two days later, was more of a palace coup of factions inside the Democratic Peoples Party of Afghanistan, enacted by KGB-unit ALFA, the GRU and the SpezNas. How many palace coups did the US support/instigate?
Still, you could say that the coup was
not legitimate. However the interventiln surely was. All 4 governments of the DRA asked for soviet help. And it was mostly afghan forcea fighting the islamists, with the soviet forces having support roles.

On why the war happen at all, well you can hardly blame the government. While there were exesses og the Taraki and Amin governments, the deaths were in the 10s of thousands maximum. I don't want to legitimize these purges, I just want to show that they were limited in scale. Also agricultural collectivisation hadn't begun yet. What really enraged coservative islamists in the countryside was, that the new government had implememted women rights, education and alphabetization campaigns and and a secular state (yes secular. For example Karmal was a believing muslim himself). So, I can't see all that much wrong with all these things.

Furthermore, the scale of soviet war crimes in Afghanistan is widely overstimated. A large part of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan was caused by the islamists. See 'Triumph of the Evil', by Allan Murphy. The chapter about Afghanistan.

No, the soviets were no angels. But american crimes and mass murder of unarmed civilians were nowhere near any other nation in human history (except maybe nazi Germany).
I actually missed the apologia for genocide first time I reviewed this post since it was buried in typical Soviet denialism. Fortunately another member hit the report button with a more detailed complaint.

You actually just tried to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent usage of CHEMICAL WEAPONS against civilian targets, including the use of booby trapped toys specifically designed to cripple or kill children.

You DO NOT get to do that here. We are sort of against supporting genocide and mass killing of civilians by using chemical weapons by a country that has signed a treaty outlawing them and pledged NOT to use them.

We divorce you.

To Coventry with you.
 
I feel bad for the poor netrual countries that get invaded like Austria Yugoslavia Scandinavia turkey all those places
 
I actually missed the apologia for genocide first time I reviewed this post since it was buried in typical Soviet denialism. Fortunately another member hit the report button with a more detailed complaint.

You actually just tried to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent usage of CHEMICAL WEAPONS against civilian targets, including the use of booby trapped toys specifically designed to cripple or kill children.

You DO NOT get to do that here. We are sort of against supporting genocide and mass killing of civilians by using chemical weapons by a country that has signed a treaty outlawing them and pledged NOT to use them.

We divorce you.

To Coventry with you.
While some of Althistory Bavaria's statements are at best extremely problematic ("only" tens of thousands purged?!), it should be pointed out that a) however brutal the Soviet actions in Afghanistan, they are not usually considered to have been a genocide and b) he didn't deny or support any Soviet crimes, only disputing their scale. Based on this, it seems that this was worth a kick at most. Of course this depends on whether supporting an invasion during which war crimes were committed, without explicitly supporting those crimes should be considered a bannable offense. But I have the feeling that the number of banned users would have to be substantially increased if this is the case...
 
Yeah I don't mean to grip but HL & ON have hijacked several threads recently. I'm inclined to say GET A ROOM, but that may not help. When you guys take each others paragraph into 10 segments dissecting each one..... I cant read it. Its too easy for things to be taken out of context and communication always breaks down.

It could be worth a try to limit that type of posting and just pick one or two segments to focus on at one time. Its not like the thread has an expiry date and will disappear?

I actually wanted to respond to this thread but lost the various tracks half way through reading it. Maybe I'll 'take another kick at the can' tomorrow.

Well, I guess you'll be happy to know that the forum ate my most recent post and I'm in no mood to reconstruct it, so I'm gonna have to concede to HL for this go around so your pretty free to engage yourself without worry over that for now.
 

CalBear

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While some of Althistory Bavaria's statements are at best extremely problematic ("only" tens of thousands purged?!), it should be pointed out that a) however brutal the Soviet actions in Afghanistan, they are not usually considered to have been a genocide and b) he didn't deny or support any Soviet crimes, only disputing their scale. Based on this, it seems that this was worth a kick at most. Of course this depends on whether supporting an invasion during which war crimes were committed, without explicitly supporting those crimes should be considered a bannable offense. But I have the feeling that the number of banned users would have to be substantially increased if this is the case...
Okay. we'll forget about the specific of genocide (although the action absolutely fit the definition of intentional effort to wipe out an ethnic group/religion or large number of people in a specific area. Not a problem.

We'll just go with overt war crimes apologia and support for mass murder.

Same result.
 
Okay. we'll forget about the specific of genocide (although the action absolutely fit the definition of intentional effort to wipe out an ethnic group/religion or large number of people in a specific area. Not a problem

The "international" definition has serious problems that render it too broad in theory, too narrow in practice, and analytically useless. That said, I'm not gonna dispute the rest of your post or your ruling...
 
Okay. we'll forget about the specific of genocide (although the action absolutely fit the definition of intentional effort to wipe out an ethnic group/religion or large number of people in a specific area. Not a problem.

We'll just go with overt war crimes apologia and support for mass murder.

Same result.
Again, I don't see any specific support of war crimes here or support for mass murder (though there is certainly trivialization of Soviet war crimes). So it can indeed be assumed that supporting an invasion during which war crimes were committed is a bannable offense on its own?
 

CalBear

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Again, I don't see any specific support of war crimes here or support for mass murder (though there is certainly trivialization of Soviet war crimes). So it can indeed be assumed that supporting an invasion during which war crimes were committed is a bannable offense on its own?
Assume whatever you choose.

News Flash: The Soviet Union committed MASSIVE and ongoing War Crimes, not through some dumb ass interpretation of what is/is not a lawful combatant, but with INTENTIONAL placement of booby trapped toys meant to maim children (might kill them, but the actual preference was to simply blow off a hand or blind) and proceeded to use lethal CHEMICAL WEAPONS (not something that folks who live to "whataboutism" every thing, like WP smoke rounds or napalm, nerve agents, i.e. bug spray for humans) against civilian targets. Not "collateral damage" or mis-targeting, or a smart bomb going dumb, or even hitting a hospital or religious site because the OPFOR was using it to store munitions, but straight up attacks on civilians designed to inflict excessive pain and sufferings.

Y'all might not like that being presented as fact, but it is. Supporting or justifying war crimes of that kind is a Bannable offense. Always has been.

You going to make this issue your hill?
 
Well, I guess you'll be happy to know that the forum ate my most recent post and I'm in no mood to reconstruct it, so I'm gonna have to concede to HL for this go around so your pretty free to engage yourself without worry over that for now.


Many posters on many forums dissect previous posters paragraphs, don't worry you are not alone. However this dissecting of paragraphs sentence by sentence -ad infinitum- isn't helping any one. Any point made is quickly taken out of context and lost. None of us were there, so we don't own this information. The best we can do is just present info and sources and move on - maybe revisit it later?

Some of the links- that both you and HL have presented - are priceless -so please continue.
 
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