Jacek - you should read _both_ versions to get to the truth. Of course, Communist textbooks gave no reference to the US-Japan war, or to the fact that occupation of Eastern Europe wasn't really on friendly terms, or that the "cleanings" of 1937-41 left the Red Army without trained commanders, most of whom were shot as "traitors", most likely increasing human costs by ten or so millions. I'm no big fan of Communists. However, if you noticed the refence I gave has no relation to communist sources; and it's kind of hard to hide the reality from the population of a country where nearly every able-boded male was participating in the war. They had little reason to rewrite history significantly in that particular aspect. What i'm trying to say that all that Pearl Harbour jingoism has little relevance to what happened. Of course, with communism being the main boogie in US, it was more than inconvinient to give communists the credit for defeating Nazis. And with majority of population having no direct contact with the events, rewriting history was relatively easy to pull off. (It was funny to watch the PBS series tellingly called "The Unknown War" explaining what was going on on the Eastern Front - it was like authors couldn't make their minds on which slant to use :) Realpolitik is dirty. I do not think there's any party which comes out being clean and shiny. But i think that what US did in WWII was close to the best-case scenario for the Western civilization. It is quite cynical and not at all pretty, though. --vadim On Sat, 15 Sep 2001, Jacek Ponarski wrote:

why does this sound so familiar? oh yeah, it reminds me of something what I read in my history book in the former communist block... I guess in general our history views are strongly influenced by whose history interpretation we were exposed to.. :-)

no further comment (although I'm really tempted to; this is nanog afterall) :-)

take care

j.