re: #282 wheat-dogghazi

I’ve been reading Barbara Tuchman’s history of WWI, on the recommendation of another lizard. I had no idea how rapacious the Germans were as they marched through Belgium toward Paris. If any Belgium sniped at them, the Germans would kill most of a town’s population and burn it to the ground.

I have a better understanding why the Allies imposed such punishing postwar restrictions on the Germans. It was retribution for barbarism.

They pulled the same shit again, though in the East, in WWII. It’s a large part of the reason why they had to devote so many resources to keeping order in the countries they’d conquered, because the locals who were happy to see the Bolsheviks pushed out were either executed for being Slavs or pressed into service as slaves. In many ways, it’s not surprising that when the Soviets finally returned the favor, they did it with a fervor that is still shocking to this day.