PugJesus

Not releasing an additional 5000 veteran Taliban fighters would have been a good start. Not going above the Afghan government to negotiate directly with the Taliban would've been a good second step.

It was never going to be pretty, but it didn't need to end as badly as it did.

Sounds like a win-win. Speaking as a non-vegan and non-vegetarian, meat should be less ubiquitous in our diets anyway.

The recent history of Afghanistan is complex, but "Pulling out haphazardly after releasing thousands of Taliban fighters against the will of the national government" is, at the very least, a very strong contributing factor to the current state of affairs.

"Wait, what if she... LIKES me? No, that's crazy. We got married as friends. Besties, even."

"We have the ~~best~~ only civilization in the world. Because of (plant) slavery."

100% accurate, no English castle was complete without its Mot

You would think it would be easy to find some poor conscript fuck who didn't run over civilians in a bulldozer struggling with the fact that they were coerced into being part of a genocide, but no, CNN goes with the guy who crushed human beings. Even as attempted hasbara, that's some high-level incompetence in CNN.

There was a lot of deep apprehension about the Nazis at the time, but also, within living memory, a war which killed some 15% of the military-age men of the entire continent because no one knew when to back down. Poland searched desperately for friends, France attempted to make anti-German alliances of deterrence with the Sovs and Britain; even the isolationist US regarded the pro-German Bund, Silver Shirts, and America First movements as absurdities.

The thing is that the only cure for fascism is to break fascism - utterly. No half-measures. So all of that was pointless in the end.

Explanation: The national mythology of Russia in the modern day is very heavily based around how they 'defeated the fascists' in the Great Patriotic War (WW2).

Of course, one shouldn't look too deeply into how eager and helpful they were to the fascists before Nazi Germany invaded them...

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1923-0116-1

You’d be better off pointing out that the President and fascist sympathizer that enacted that alliance was put on trial when the Finns swapped sides after they saw the Nazis were losing and convicted for his crimes,

The idea that Risto Ryti was a fascist sympathizer is... a reach.

and that they, like Franco and some nations in the Balkans, mostly didn’t comply with Nazi demands to hand over their Jewish population, so in terms of “Aiding the Holocaust” guilt they’re somewhere between Vichy France and Fascist Italy.

Finland is... between Vichy France and Fascist Italy in Holocaust guilt?

Vichy France and Fascist Italy both gleefully shipped off their Jewish populations to be murdered. The Finns took a horrific side, but at no point did they give up their own Jewish citizens to the Nazis.

Vichy France and Fascist Italy were both much more gruesome and eager collaborators.

Finland is slightly better than the Soviet Union in that their Nazi collaboration was in response to a mass campaign of ethnic cleansing (of almost half a million Finns expelled by the Soviets after the unjustified aggression of the Winter War) rather than preceded by a mass campaign of ethnic cleansing (of Poles in the USSR by the Soviets before the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland). Both remain unconscionable.

ACK