od Really this is getting a bit silly no You clearly stated Truman killed more Japanese innocents that Stalin killed Balts The context of your comparison is immaterial Your comparison itself is ipso facto most unfortunate As for conscripted victims versus heroic fighters against Soviet occupation it is only your personal contention that there is a choice of one or the other but not both In the face of Soviet and Nazi and Soviet invasions the one constant is victims By your logic you contend that fighting against Soviet re occupation absolves the Soviets of victimizing the Latvians since they can no longer be victims if we call them heroes Your tertium non datur is fundamentally biased and misconceived as the Latvian Legion were both victims and heroes You ignore that a week after Stalin s mass deportations the Devil incarnate would have been welcomed as a liberator Stalin s use of Jews to replace Latvians in clerical posts put them in the cross hairs of anyone whose family or relative disappeared without a trace I do not condone vengeance however the dynamic at work where collaboration was concerned was not as is contended centuries old anti Semitism waiting for an opportunity to kill neighbors Another conversation for another time To the topic at hand your central thesis is that the Nazis weren t as bad ergo cooperation including let s go out and murder Jews If you have a source making this outlandish claim please start a new discussion section My response is that the Nazis were just as willing to shoot you as the Soviets ergo cooperation It s easy to judge others and ascribe imagined motives based on one s own prejudices when you yourself haven t already spent a year going to work every day with a rifle pointed at your head being told what to doand I don t mean that as a figure of speech Perhaps you can clarify this apparent double standard for me someone with a gun pointed to their head who cooperates with Russians is an OK person but the same person with a gun pointed to their head who cooperates in exactly the same way with the Germans is a Nazi collaborator You now prattle on about things completely unrelated I originally stated that the Soviet occupation victimized Baltic innocents to which you responded that Stalin treated everyone equally badly so what Bad treatment does not an occupation make As for labels for your contentions as I said I have no insight to your motivations so I can t call you a Baltophobe or characterize you as being anti Latvian I can only tell you the repugnant net effect of your contentions