It's Memorial Day. We remember all the War dead of all the nations of all the Wars, them, and the so many COVID dead...or that's what we should be doing. You're suppose to remember them guys'n gals that got their arms legs balls faces, and tits shot off for you in past, and current war, and them dying in crowded under supplied pandemic hospitals today this moment.. 

The beer, and Bar-B-Q plus ignoring pandemic cautions isn't really the point of this.
Not them sales or fireworks neither. ...it's About Them.

The below is a FB rant of mine last year on the Memorial Anniversary.

Sidney Smith: The Russians with allied supplies won WW2. It also helped that Stalin never got around to shooting his best general,...Georgy Zhukov. If Normandy failed or never happened Russia would have finished Germany,...it would have taken an extra two or so years. They took the brunt of the Nazi war...they bled the most. 

They, and almost 'all' the Jews of Europe, and millions more in Poland which was made near extinct took the big hits. The Cold War land grabs was Russia making sure their land would never be a battlefield again. They made Eastern Europe subject client states to that end. This was never explained to us in school. 

That 26,000,000 Russians, 6 million Jews, and a further 6 million Poles were killed by Germany. 

So Russia in a brutal way built a buffer of states to take the punishment if there were another war. 
It wasn't right, but it would have explained why they did what they did. Other than they were just evil communists that didn't like Jesus. 
In reality they didn't want another 20 Million+ dead on their hands if there was yet another round. 
Their oppression of the East with two generations brutal puppet governments is part of that legacy. The 20th Century was the 2nd Hundreds Year War. 
The first in the 14th century ours the 2nd in the 20th from 1914 to 1991. 

From the Trenches of France to the final fall of the Soviet Union. 

We seem already at work on the Third.

Sidney Smith: The Russian betrayal of Poland...which I overlooked In my rant was part of Stalins pre-war plans regards Germany. 

He expected to fight them. 

However thought that Pact with Hitler would give him at least five years to get ready. ...not just one. 
The Russo Germanic destruction of Poland to Stalin was just a strategic detail. 

One hopes that Hitler Stalin Mao are the last of the Imperial Warlords. There were are, and will be 'local' genocidal generalissimo's. However perhaps no more continental personality cult Warlords. This since they're just so bad for business. 

The new Warlords are interlocking transnational corporations. The don't exterminate people they buy sell, and employ them. They sell us stupid useless junk we don't need or want, and make really bad movies. No more jack boots or weird flags. Just new apps, and cars that not only speak to us, but drive themselves too. 

If that isn't frightening I don't know what is.