Interesting pieced on WWII. Fits well with the loathe thread below.

I knew the Russians bore the brunt of the fighting, but hadn't realized how much bigger the scale was on the Eastern front. Germany lost 4 million men on the eastern front and only 200,000 in the west.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/a...ar?pg=full

The Russians lost around 10 million in the military and 10 million civilians during WWII. No other nation comes close to those numbers. As brutal as Stalin was, the sheer scale of battles and death on the eastern front eventually wore Germany down and ultimately cost Hitler his regime. I don't know that I ever thought of WWII or any of the great wars in history as "good" in a romanticized way. War is not glamorous or always driven by ethics but it is mostly about survival often regardless of the costs. I think the last sentence of the article sums it up aptly:

No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.