Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
PVC, I'm afraid it takes a fanatical ideologist to imagine one.

Lean back and take a sober look at the picture. From my view, the only thing informing your hawkishness is delusions of glory and grandeur.

There is little evidence that significant national leaders have your mindset.
No, I don't think they do agree with me. Like I said, I didn't think he'd annex Crimea, I didn't think he'd instigate a war in the Donbas but there you go.

Also, Hitler is irrelevant to the conversation as external factors had already determined Germany's path to war in the context of that time. Germany as a state had no option other than to fight. Likewise with France, the UK, the US, the USSR, Japan, and all the rest.

In the contemporary context, Russia has nothing to fight for such as was driving states in the 1930s. War now would be a desperate last resort for Russia's very survival as a unified political entity, or at least Putin's own survival, as it were.
Germany didn't HAVE to go to war, it didn't benefit the country in the slightest. Germans just believed they had to go to war. I'm surprised you can make the comparison and not see that, increasingly, Russians believe they need to go to war. We must fight for Donbas, we must recover Russia's honour, fatherland this and that.

Putin and his ilk look at a map of the former USSR and see it overlaid in one colour, must like a Byzantine looked at a map and saw SQPR overlaid.