Stalin monument to be built??

[Solomwi]

Originally posted by Pekka

An example. A man kills 3 people point blank in street, cop comes in, pulls his gun out, and they are at a staredown. The killer aims his gun to the cop, the cop shoots him. Should the cop have let him shoot him, or did he do the right thing, even if it meant killing the killer?

Own goal, Pekka. This is analogous to what Che has been saying, since the cop is still responsible for the death of the scumbag. It may have been a good thing overall, and certainly nobody's condemning the cop for it. Everybody understands why he did it, but he still killed the guy.

Everybody understands why Finnish forces were where they were, and nobody's condemning them for that, but they were still partly responsible for the starvation of the city because of it.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Pekka
You make it sound like we had options, lots of good ones.

No, I didn't. I'm not engaged in that disussion at all.

Though you did have one better option than the one you took, and that was a defensive pact with Sweden.

[laurentius]

Whats the use of naively separating actions from their contexts? There is no what-if here.

We barely had food for ourselves at the time. The soviets had destroyed tens of percents of our best cultivated land, we only dreamt of real sugar. All things were rationed. The only place we could do business with were the Germans. Even if we would have completely surrendered to the Soviets there would still had not been anything we could have helped them with. Continuing this is completely useless...

[Pekka]

" A second front was opened after the Soviet bombing on June 25 of several towns in Finland, leading to the Soviet-Finnish Continuation War. By August, the Finns had reconquered the Karelian Isthmus, threatening Leningrad from the West, and were advancing through Karelia east of Lake Ladoga, threatening Leningrad from the North. The Finnish headquarters rejected however German pleas for aerial attacks against Leningrad (with the exception of a sole incident by a single aircraft which killed a lone elephant at the Leningrad Zoo) and did not advance further south from River Svir in the occupied East Karelia. "

From the same wikipedia page.

Now, how do you interpret this? If you want, send the cheque for the elephant.

Look at the map again. Look at the old borders etc. Then go learn military strategy, any basic will do, and you will learn that we got ours back, and then created A MODERATE buffer zone, not like the SU style buffer zone, half Europe. And the troops stopped there, voluntarily. Now when SU starts pressuring, you have some game, and you are not in Helsinki after day of retreating. Mostly our own lands. If you deny our rights on those lands, then you justify the first war, which is basically, scavenge hunt, kill people and take what you want type of a deal. Troopers who advanced actually you knwo got their real homes back a lot of them, that were still warm.

"Unable or unwilling to press home their advantage, and with a hasty but brilliant defence of the city organised by Marshall Zhukov, the German armies laid siege to the city for 900 days. They largely surrounded the city, blocking off all supply routes to Leningrad and its suburbs except for a single corridor on Lake Ladoga named the Road of Life (Дорога жизни in Russian, Laatokan elämänlinja in Finnish). The carnage in the city from shelling and starvation (especially in the first winter) was appalling but Adolf Hitler was never able to hold his proposed victory party in the city, nor carry out his planned destruction of this jewel of European civilisation."

now, do you realize this life road and what it means? Hitler demanded we cut it, but we didn't, and that was a statement also from Mannerheim to declare that we ar enot part of Hitlers attack in the eastern front. If you want to be simplistic about it, yeah there were Germans in Finland. But then again, anyone with more than 1 brain cell can come up with more scenarions than one.

"In the chaos of the first winter of the war no evacuation plan was available or executed and the city and its suburbs quite literally starved in complete isolation until November 20, 1941 when an ice road over Lake Ladoga, the so-called Road of Life was established. One of Nikolai I. Vavilov's assistants starved to death surrounded by edible seeds so that the seed bank (with more than 200 000 items) would be available to future generations."

Now do you realize, that we didn't cut it? Of course if you want to deny it, well the world at war docu series disagrees with you. But I guess we should all turst your word over every documentary, book etc historian?

Do you comprehend, look at your own maps. You let Germans virtually alone in here. We got ours back and didn't cut your life road even if it would have been extremely easy and cheap.

Hitler attacked you on the eastern front. Look at the maps.
You see one group dug in, in their lands. You see bunch of a big army attacking on the other spot on the map. Bah, it's not really worth it.

[Pekka]

"Everybody understands why Finnish forces were where they were, and nobody's condemning them for that, but they were still partly responsible for the starvation of the city because of it."

It seems some don't really know why we were at the exact locations. And other circumtances. Partially responsible? So Stalin is only partially responsible too? <- Stalin apologists. Was it partly Jewish people fault that holocaust happened? of course it wasn't.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by laurentius
Whats the use of naively separating actions from their contexts?

It's not naive. Your points are merely irrelevent. First you claimed you did no such thing. Now you are claiming, well, okay, we did, but we were justified. The discussion isn't, were you justified. The discussion is, did you do it. Yes, you did it. Yes, you were probably justified, all things considered. That doesn't mean you didn't do it. You did.

[Pekka]

OK let's look at the analogue again, might be a bad example but I explore it more, the cop analogue.

Now, the cop shoots the baddie. You say he is partially responsible where I say the baddie brought it upon himself. You might say, yeah, those two don't really block each other. So I ask you, was it justified that the cop shoot the killer, in order to a)do his job (protect the citizens) and b) to save himself in a do or die situation he did not create himself? Was it justified?

[Pekka]

No, we didn't cut the life road or what ever it was called. You know, the one that was the only workign one in front of us? We didn't cut it.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Pekka
From the same wikipedia page.

I know, I quoted it in my post.

Look at the map again. Look at the old borders etc.

Look at the map again. Your armies are far beyond the (twenty year) old borders.

Hitler attacked you on the eastern front.

We fought Hitler on the Western Front.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Pekka
Now, the cop shoots the baddie. You say he is partially responsible where I say the baddie brought it upon himself.

No, I say "the cop shot the baddie." End of sentence. I don't say who's fault it was. That's what you're trying to do, and at the same time, saying you didn't do it at all.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Pekka
No, we didn't cut the life road or what ever it was called. You know, the one that was the only workign one in front of us? We didn't cut it.

It wasn't in front of you. It was across the lake. You had no navy in Lake Ladoga, AFAIK.

[Pekka]

Let's make it more simple. do you think it was our lands to take back, and it was justified? If your answer is no, then you justify Stalin's imperalistic invasions.

If your answer is yes, then do you recognize our right to defend those lands? If your answer is no, then you are saying country can not defend its lands.

If your answer is yes, then we are at a situation where we are in our soil, defending it. Now, just because of the geographical location (near leningrad), you tell me how it makes us responsible for the siege, when we didn't even cut the road of life, and in fact refused to do so?

Because.. ????

Even wikipedia does not suggest it, unless you REALLY take it out of the context and do some wild interpretations.

[Pekka]

No navy in there, correct, but come winter and it would have been easy. Are you suggesting we didn't have the capability to do it? Teh truth is, Mannerheim refused it, several times. It would have been EASY.

Yeah look at the map. Do you know it's a matter of kilometers?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Pekka
Let's make it more simple. do you think it was our lands to take back, and it was justified?

What difference does that make to my point, Pekka? I don't care is my answer.

My point is, Finland helped the Germans starve Leningrad. So you could have made it worse. That doesn't mean you didn't do what you did. All this other discussion is irrelevent to my point. If Solomwi, someone who hold diametrically opposed views to me, can easily see what I'm saying, why can't you?

[Pekka]

I don't have a problem with most of your posts in this thread. But you start it with:

"Why. Don't Finn's like remembering their part in starving Leningrad?"

Now, the part is that we were in geographical location near Leningrad. Please expalin how we starved Leningrad, not cutting the support lines?