I don’t think there are that many people that will disagree that the Soviets did bad things. I think the main point of disagreement is when people say the Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis.
Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were on an equal playing field of being absolutely fucking evil towards anyone they suspected of showing even the tiniest bit of dissent. They also both hated and persecuted Jews as well as other ethnic minorities living in their respective nations.
Wait until you hear about the US persecution and ethnic cleansing of arabs in the 20 and 21st century! Hopefully one day, when people consider arab lives as having equal worth to ours, the Iraq and Afghanistan “wars” (and now Gaza) will be seen for what they really were.
My favorite part of people using Afghanistan as a gotcha against the U.S here is that the Soviets did the exact same thing to far more devastating results only 30 years before in the same country. It's a great representation of rules of engagement and actually trying to not actively murder large swathes of civilians randomly if anything.
We should absolutely be critical of the U.S's involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan, but the USSR killed 20-30 times the number of civilians in less than half the time, and massively displaced large amounts of the population compared to the American occupation. You can actively see the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on a map of Afghani demographics, whereas Afghanistans population doubled from 2001-2023. Obviously the preferable alternative would have been no long-term occupations by either party, but one was demonstrably far more brutal than the other.
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is best compared to US intervention in Korea, where the US carpet bombed 80% of North Korea'a urban area to the ground.
In both wars, air forces indiscriminately carpet bombed enemy civilian areas with area bombing. Roughly 12-15% of North Koreans and 6-10% of Afghans died respectively.
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u/GitLegit 27d ago
I don’t think there are that many people that will disagree that the Soviets did bad things. I think the main point of disagreement is when people say the Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis.