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FollowingSome3237 t1_itu0rzu wrote

As well as the strength of the Swedish at the time and how things could have turned out very different for them.

I spent a long time researching this and felt as if I didn't even touch the surface!

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TheRed_Knight t1_itu0y36 wrote

RIP Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North

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24benson t1_itulio1 wrote

yeah, burning and pillaging my home town, raping the girls and killing the men by force feeding them excrements. A true gentleman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwedentrunk

​

Rest in peace my ass.

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smalltowngrappler t1_ituzzx2 wrote

That was most likely German mercenaries under Swedish pay actually, only around 10% of the Swedish army were Swedes/Finns. So your own countrymen were probably the ones pillaging, raping, torturing and murdering their fellow Germans.

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24benson t1_itv18qc wrote

Doesn't make it better for Gustav Adolf, does it?

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smalltowngrappler t1_itv7jo1 wrote

I mean he died like two years into the involvement of the Swedish army and they stayed involved for 16 years after that so more than likley it was the commanders after him that might have perpetrated it.

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Ghost652 t1_ituuq5i wrote

I did NOT know Swedes were so into inflation. Also that's damn horrific.

Would you rather get Schwedentrunk'd or Scaphism'd?

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1945BestYear t1_ity2ztd wrote

That's unfortunately what war has been for most of human history, and still is in some parts of the world. Today in developed and democratic countries, soldiers are in most ways like any other kind of employee in the public sector; they get paid decently or even well and the state, which is answerable to civilians who care about human life even if it's on the 'other' side, has extensive power to punish them if they break the rules. In times like the Thirty Years War, you often even need to let your soldiers loot, rape, and pillage just to keep your army intact; that is how you're repaying them for risking their lives for your cause.

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WhapXI t1_itvrep6 wrote

I don't really think they could have, in the grand scale of historical inevitability. Within a few centuries, united Germany and modernised Russia would have been as issue for them, and at that point it's just an issue of sheer demographics. They didn't have an open frontier to expand into, and instead would have to rely on conquest of their direct neighbours, which isn't really terribly effective. And their position in the Baltic means they couldn't really have leveraged their naval strength into a colonial empire since a single blockade of the straits between Denmark and Sweden would have completely dismembered them.

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