Kurt

Really? I've only seen good reviews of the stuff as served by restaurants.

It was Eva Saxl. She had fled the Nazis from Czechoslovakia only to find herself under Japanese occupation in Shanghai. From the Wikipedia article, it seems like she extracted the insulin from water buffalo pancreas. I'm not sure if that counts as homebrewing. When I think of homebrew insulin, I think of actually manufacturing it by fermenting specialized yeast as opposed to harvesting it from animals. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it isn't really the same.

Oh that sounds fascinating. I'll have to search for that.

There's not really a problem with meat either. You don't have to eat it and if you do, you don't have to feel bad about eating animals.

That said, there is kind of a problem with insulin manufacturing in that it's kind of centralized and distribution can be difficult, especially in remote areas with unreliable electricity. If insulin manufacturing could be done at the garage or shipping container scale in the places where it's needed, it would help a lot of people.

Calling the relationship between those countries an alliance is a big stretch. For all its leniency towards Germany during the interwar period, you'd have to call the US an ally to Germany as well, nevermind its infamously conciliatory treatment of the Nazis after the war (ie Operation Paperclip and the relatively rapid abandonment of denazification in West Germany). Furthermore, the US did not begin actually fighting the Nazis until after the USSR, and not until they were compelled by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Regardless, we know what the Nazis did while they were in power and, as I previously cited, we know what they were going to do if they had prevailed. The fact is that after about four decades of Soviet rule, the Poles and other Eastern European peoples still exist and have thrived in comparison to the ethnic cleansing and extermination they would have faced under a victorious Nazi regime. Anyone whose family actually had an unfairly difficult time under the USSR has my condolences, but at least you're still around to express your resentment!

You're the one discounting lives. The murder rate for the Holocaust was at least 1.25 million per year and they had plans to keep going. The dubious allegations in the Black Book of Communism don't even come close to that kind of efficiency and completely discount the lives saved by having defeated the Nazis, which would not have been possible without the USSR's incredible sacrifice. It's one thing to have resentment for communism. It's just incredibly messed up to say that it's as bad or worse than Nazism.

The way the VOC people count them, yes. They include Nazis as victims for goodness sake. You can't take it seriously.

You can indeed describe something as incomparably worse when it is so bad that a comparison doesn't make sense or there's no point to making one. I really don't think I'm the one who's out of line here.

Anyway, the whole "victims of communism" trope you're invoking is just embarrassingly facile. The numbers are contrived and no consideration is ever given to the terrible conditions out of which the various revolutions came or the horrible forces they were subsequently up against, let alone comparative conditions in the so-called free world. Everyone who ever lived and died in a communist state is a crime against humanity, but whenever someone dies in the US because they had to choose between medicine and rent it's their own damn fault. Give me a break.

Sorry that your family had a bad time. It's still wild that you don't think the Nazis were incomparably worse.

Uh huh, and how many of those "victims of communism" were actually some of the worst people in the world at the time, like Czarists and Nazis? Sorry your grandfather is bitter that he didn't get the dacha he wanted or whatever.

Yes, war crimes are bad, but you are a sick puppy, or hopefully just very mistaken, if you think that or any other Soviet atrocities puts the USSR on par with Nazi Germany.

We should always be suspicious when someone starts both-sides'ing Nazis and Communists. Only one side was killing Nazis, after all.