re: Do Russian history students learn about WWII the other way around?

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Western students are generally taught that the most important point of the war was Dday and basically Russia helped in keeping Hitler occupied while the Westerners ran through Europe and won the war.

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Whatever money was spent on your history education was wasted. you should seek a refund.

I was NEVER taught that Russia kept the Germans occupied while the Westerners did all the damage. I simple accounting of units/deaths form the Eastern/Western fronts should reveal that fallacy.

Let's slow down and clarify what we are debating here. The original contention was that the US was justified in fighting the war as brutally as we did because we were "fighting for our survival." My response to that is that our survival as a nation was never directly threatened. Yes, Japan launched incendiary balloons, but they were never going to attack the mainland in a way that would threaten "our very survival." Germany was flummoxed by the English Channel, so they were never going to try and launch an invasion across the entire Atlantic. Would we have come into conflict with them again in the future had they won? Almost certainly, yes. But to say that German and Japanese aggression in Europe and the Far East respectively was an immediate threat to US survival is patently false, and so should not be used as a blanket defense for why we prosecuted the war against civilian as well as military targets.

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Let's slow down and clarify what we are debating here.

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Let's break it down.

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The original contention was that the US was justified in fighting the war as brutally as we did because we were "fighting for our survival."

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We were fighting for our survival because a hemisphere controlled by Germany and Japan left us in a world of hurt. You may think isolation works, but history has shown that both nations were militaristic and were unreliable and not to be trusted. They were both lead by a war mongering govt. who would do anything necessary to defeat their rivals.

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Yes, Japan launched incendiary balloons, but they were never going to attack the mainland in a way that would threaten "our very survival." Germany was flummoxed by the English Channel, so they were never going to try and launch an invasion across the entire Atlantic

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So you do understand how devious and relentless these people were. And you do understand that had Russia been defeated and all resources turned against Britain, she would have fallen sooner or later when Germany rebuilt its air force, improved their navy, and starved her out.

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Would we have come into conflict with them again in the future had they won? Almost certainly, yes. But to say that German and Japanese aggression in Europe and the Far East respectively was an immediate threat to US survival is patently false, and so should not be used as a blanket defense for why we prosecuted the war against civilian as well as military targets.

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Good to see you do understand my point, in time we would have faced them "for all the marbles" which begs me to ask, why wait? Why not respond to their threat (Germany declared war on us and Japan attacked us) instead of pulling for Britain and Russia to win?

Obviously that's exactly what we did. Again, the question wasn't whether we should have been in the war at all. I think history puts us in the right on the decision to join in. The question was, did we have sufficient justification for using the extreme measures that we did to win the war? That's a murkier question. Is it right to kill women and children because their government is doing some reprehensible things? We are still wrestling with that question today. We see it in the way we have responded to the threat of Islamic terrorism, just posed a little differently. If we know, in a city of ten thousand, that there are a couple of hundred jihadists, and we know that, left unchecked, those jihadists may cause the death of several hundred to a few thousand Americans, how many of those ten thousand can we kill in pursuit of the jihadists before we are no longer justified? All of them? A thousand? A hundred? One? It's a question without an easy answer.

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The truth is basically the other way around, Russia did way more damage to Hitler than all the other Allies combined

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Well, it's somewhat more complicated than that. The Russians caused a lot of German casualties - it can be argued that the war was over after the Battle of Stalingrad.

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Hitler was close to defeat by the time Dday happened.

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This isn't really true - many of the Third Reich's best military units, both Wermacht and Waffen SS were tied up in the occupation and security of France and Italy - if there had been no threat of a Western power invasion, he could have done a lot with those units and those resources. The fact that the U.S. and Great Britain made good on that threat of invasion only made everything easier for everyone, particularly the Russians.

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I'm guessing for them the "turning point" of WWII would be Stalingrad?

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Arguably it was.

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Do they even learn or care about Dday?

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Still the largest amphibious operation in history - whether or not they think it is significant is another question.

I would be more interested in what (if) they're taught about the massive Western logistical support that kept the Russians alive and rolling during the tough times from 1940 to 1943 before they finally recovered from the German invasion, defeated the first echelons and went back over to the attack. If not for that support, Russia could have (would have, IMHO) easily collapsed and been forced to terms.

We would all most certainly be learning German in elementary schools today if that happened.

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Obviously that's exactly what we did. Again, the question wasn't whether we should have been in the war at all. I think history puts us in the right on the decision to join in. The question was, did we have sufficient justification for using the extreme measures that we did to win the war? That's a murkier question. Is it right to kill women and children because their government is doing some reprehensible things? We are still wrestling with that question today. We see it in the way we have responded to the threat of Islamic terrorism, just posed a little differently. If we know, in a city of ten thousand, that there are a couple of hundred jihadists, and we know that, left unchecked, those jihadists may cause the death of several hundred to a few thousand Americans, how many of those ten thousand can we kill in pursuit of the jihadists before we are no longer justified? All of them? A thousand? A hundred? One? It's a question without an easy answer.

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It's not an easy question, but for those who believed it was a war of attrition and that we could bomb the enemy into submission then it was the logical thing to do.

We dropped the atomic bomb knowing it would kill thousands, but we believed that it might save thousands on our side so we did it.

As for the terrorists living among civilians, my question is are the civilians aiding the terrorists, are they protecting the terrorists, and are they on the terrorists side? If they are you take more extreme measures than if they weren't.

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I'm guessing for them the "turning point" of WWII would be Stalingrad

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I'd say the battle of stalingrad was the point they hit the ropes and regained their posture. The battle of kursk, some months later. THAT was the right hook that truly swung the momentum the other way.

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FDR had our interests at heart.

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Through jis own personal political prism and worldview. In this respect, he was no different than Churchill, Chamberlain, Hitler, Stalin, etc.

There were many prominent Americans (former President Hoover among the most established) and the majority of the American people alike who didn't agree with him. History is politics.

And my statement never called into question what FDR had as his motivations, it regarded his methods and deceptions.

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Do you think we should not have aided Britain and Russia by providing weapons and food?

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The issue predates Lend-Lease Aid. American posturing and influence dates back to the 1930's. Many similar arguments were put forth as to why America needed to jump into WWI as well. I consider that war likewise none of our business.

And I don't think the British losing a war with Germany is somehow some cataclysm that throws America's sovereign security into doubt. Though that certainly always seems to be the suggestion. The British Empire were big boys and they can be responsible for going to war and settling wars on their own.

And no, I don't think the United States should have aided Russia prior to our entry into the war. Our aid of Britain likewise made it quite clear to Germany and the world that we were no part of "neutral" in the conflict.

And there were lots of ways to handle the Japanese situation. With WWII, people take this silly position that had we done anything different it would have catastrophic. We had no choice, they were evil! No, I don't buy that line of thinking and find it rather silly. The Japanese did not want war with the United States. Any fool with a lick of common sense could see that our policies in respect to Japan and the embargo would lead to absolutely no other result in due time. I'm not going to get into the details of the negotiations because they are extraordinarily tedious, but you can research them and see how close we were to finding agreeable terms outside of hostilities with the Japanese at this time.

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Do you believe if we had stayed on our side of the water, Germany and Japan would have let us be?

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Yes. Contrary to popular culture storylines (and fake documents fed by the British and spread to the American people by FDR in the media) like the Man in the Castle on Amazon, the Germans and Japanese weren't on some quest for global domination. Both were playing foreign politics by the rules of the day, which was power politics and empire expansion, not some sinister global ambitions.

We would have been as likely to go to war with them in the future as we were with the Soviets, Chinese, etc. Perhaps even less so.

I remember reading that, according to a Gallup poll, 70% of Americans wanted to stay out of the war in November, 1941.

He violated the frick out of the Neutrality Act, if that's what you mean.