Obama: Russia doesn't make anything

[Igel]

84. Ah. The standard Soviet line.

"The" nation was the USSR. Not Russia. It's a nice bit of revisionism--Putin's, actually--that it was all Russia's doing. That's mostly because it's necessary to say everybody else is either useless and Russians did all the real work or they're dangerous and Russians tolerated them.

Moreover, if Hitler hadn't had a lot of his forces tied up in the West and in N. Africa, Russia would have had a harder time.

And a second "moreover," the West while it was doing nothing was shipping food, supplies, and armaments to Russia at precisely the time Russia's western side was occupied and their industries were being dismantled and reassembled or when they were building capacity to produce all those katyushas and tanks that they'd have come on line ... years after the war started.

It's a bit of chauvinism and paranoia that says the West helped Hitler in order to destroy the Soviet Union, and sat back until it was clear they needed to fight if only to keep the West out of the Russians' hands; and more chauvinism to utterly dismiss the millions of non-Russian "Soviet citizens" killed, many of them in battle against fascism, in order to make themselves look good and those they consider inferior look, well, like inferiors.

Russia did suffer immeasurably. Ukraine lost a greater percentage and possibly number of people, between civilians and soldiers, even discounting the raging hordes of thousands of anti-Soviet fighters. (Out of a population of what, 25 million? Sorry, that's a rounding error.)

Obama not infrequently gets his historical facts wrong. When speaking off the cuff, he's even gotten facts about the Constitution wrong. And for the economy he often speaks in bullet points lacking a lot of useful detail to place them in context, but with anecdotes so you think you have a lot of context. He likes anecdotes.