During his early life Stalin was a choirboy, poet and trainee priest.
Should we give him credit for his kinder past?

Also, perhaps the main reason for the Indians' contempt for Custer came from the military strategy he sometimes used against them. While he drew the braves away from their camps into battle he would send in other troops to take the unguarded women and children hostage and force an Indian surrender under the threat of their deaths.

Paul,
The only answer to your question must be that the Japanese were correct in their treatment of POWs BASED on their code of military conduct, based on our code it was wrong.
Following unlawful orders is never a defence for a soldier, that’s one of the first things that one learns when studying Military Law.
German soldiers who refused to obey illegal orders were simply transferred to other units, this came out at the Nuremberg trials,

rache,
Of course Stalin should be given credit for good things that he may have done, credit where credit is due and as I said, the future cannot alter the past.

Rache,

Stalin's kinder past? you must be kidding these are no evidence that he was anything but the psychopath he grew up to be.

"Stalin was of Georgian—not Russian—origin, and persistent rumours claim that he was Ossetian on the paternal side. He was the son of a poor cobbler in the provincial Georgian town of Gori in the Caucasus, then an imperial Russian colony. The drunken father savagely beat his son. Speaking only Georgian at home, Joseph learned Russian—which he always spoke with a guttural Georgian accent—while attending the church school at Gori (1888–94). He then moved to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he secretly read Karl Marx, the chief theoretician of international Communism, and other forbidden texts, being expelled in 1899 for revolutionary activity, according to the “legend”—or leaving because of ill health, according to his doting mother. The mother, a devout washerwoman, had dreamed of her son becoming a priest, but Joseph Dzhugashvili was more ruffianly than clerical in appearance and outlook. He was short, stocky, black-haired, fierce-eyed, with one arm longer than the other, his swarthy face scarred by smallpox contracted in infancy. Physically strong and endowed with prodigious willpower, he early learned to disguise his true feelings and to bide his time; in accordance with the Caucasian blood-feud tradition, he was implacable in plotting long-term revenge against those who offended him."

shonkyminister,

What are you trying to do, deflect the discussion away from your beloved folk hero's Hitler and Goering, and onto another mass murderer in the shape of the despised Stalin. Keep trying.

PaulNazi,

Don't be such a w@nker. You love the fuhrer and Stalin and all despots that kill millions.

The Gangreens love despots just see how they fawn over the Chinese killers.

Just stop posting crap.

shonky,

Anyone with half a brain can see you are a NAZI apologist doing your best to deflect criticism on this thread away from Hitler and Goering and onto another evil monster Stalin. A favourite tactic of the far right whenever the likes of Hitler is mentioned and the uncomfortable truths come out, DEFLTION through mitigation. You are a classic.