The poor Soviets, how they were "forced" to sign the damn pact with the Nazis, a pact that saw them get a huge chunk of Poland not long after that and some other part of Romania (my country) in June 1940. If these are the pacts that they were "forced" to sign I'm really wondering what were those pacts in which they had the strong hand.
Also, for those HN-ers who want to really get a good, more truthful look at the causes behind WW2 I heartily recommend Ernst Nolte's "European Civil War". From the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Nolte):
> Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, communism's twin, arose as a desperate response by the threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called the “Bolshevik peril”.
You're entitled to your opinion, but posting that thesis and saying it's "more truthful" is tremendously silly.
You should be able to understand that it's a hypothesis you find convincing without evangelizing it as "truthful."
This was never the case for me. When I learned trig ratios, I always understood some basic things that trig ratios could be used for. The teacher always introduced some applications, we always had a lot of word problems, and I could fill in the gaps myself.
Same for calculus. When I learned calculus, I always understood some things that calculus could be used for.
So I understood how those things could be applied to general, everyday sorts of problems. What was missing, though, was that I had nothing to which I could apply those techniques, besides homework.
Learning math (and reading STEM papers) has become easier for me since I now have actual problems to solve. Don't get me wrong: I'm not solving particularly challenging problems or using particularly advanced math. Nothing that tens of thousands of people haven't done before me. But I do need to understand the problems, solutions, and some of the context in order to successfully implement them. This provides a motivation that was always missing before.
I suspect this general narrative is true for a lot of people: that having an actual problem to solve is almost necessary to get a student to really learn the material, instead of just coasting along for a grade.