Reposting this from the Hexbear news mega because i think that it deserves more attention and it may not be entirely clear to people outside of Germany exactly what this means. I made the following comment there:
He’s wrong of course. Poland is not as great a threat as Russia, it’s actually a way bigger threat to Germany than Russia.
Russia keeps asking for a thorough investigation into the Nordstream terrorist attack. Poland keeps justifying the attack and defending the (alleged) perpetrators. Their FM even celebrated it on Twitter and thanked the USA for it. Poland lobbied hard against Nordstream from the very start. Why? Because Poland is an aggressive competitor whose long term strategy is replacing Germany as the EU’s industrial powerhouse.
Russia doesn’t view Germany as a competitor in the same way Poland does. Russia has much more global interests and is not interested in these European power struggles. For decades Russia always had a symbiotic relationship with Germany, subsidizing German industry with cheap energy. Destroying German energy supplies is tantamout to destroying German industry. And who benefits? USA of course but also Poland. Not Russia.
The AfD are fascist scum but they are also politically savvy. They are not wrong to point at how Poland is damaging German interests. They will absolutely win support with this from people who are sick and tired of this German government acting against German national interests to please their Washington masters. I don’t think people here realize just how popular the AfD is in Germany, simply because it is often the only real opposition to the “Systemparteien” (establishment parties).
The more that the establishment continues to destroy Germany’s economy for the sake of this insane anti-Russia crusade that is being now waged by the European elites, the more ground the AfD will gain from disaffected German citizens. Despite the overwhelming propaganda in the establishment media a lot of Germans are not stupid and they can see that the current government’s policies are actively hurting the German economy.
The German left needs to undercut this maneuver by the far right by coming out clearly in favor of a much more transparent Nordstream investigation, and pushing back strongly against continuing down this suicidal path of confrontation with Russia! Else we are just giving the far right a free win when we allow them to monopolize the “sane” (in the eyes of many Germans) position of standing up for German interests against the insane, warmongering EU elites.
Another thing to add is that in the broader picture we should expect to see more of this kind of European infighting. As the overall economic and political situation in Europe deteriorates, the contradictions between EU countries' national interests will become more pronounced.
Whereas when times are good you can paper over these mutually antagonistic interests and keep some kind of "EU consensus" by distributing the wealth, when the overall pie shrinks and competition increases over scarce resources we see more and more nationalistic animosities emerge in Europe.
Whether or not the iron fist of Brussels alone, as the US is now disengaging, is strong enough to repress these national interests and keep the whole artificial construct together is questionable. Already for years we've been seeing the perennial dissenter Hungary at odds with the bloc. Now you can probably add Slovakia and Czechia.
As conditions continue to deteriorate, more and more countries, including eventually also Germany, will inevitably start to reassert their national interests against their neighbors. The crumbling establishment will not be able to keep the lid on the boiling fascist pot down for much longer.
The social democratic consensus is dead. The neoliberal path is a dead end. It is up to the socialist left to present a real alternative to the fascist vision for Europe.
Exactly as Polish communists were warning for like last 70 years based on historical precedence from last 1000 years. Yet another time trying to became west backfires on Poland and no one ever learns anything from it.
I don't understand the Polish political elites. How many times in history does Poland have to be partitioned before they understand that it is a bad idea to simultaneously antagonize both of the big powers directly to the West and East of you?
The Intermarium is gone and it's not coming back. Time to enter the acceptance stage of grief.
The Polish history is a series of unforced errors of whatever Polish state existed at the time followed by the Polish people bearing the cost of those unforced errors
Poland had an incredible opportunity for a Polish-Russian personal union in 16th and early 17th century like they had with Lithuania, and Poland managed to repeatedly miss it by stubbornly insisting on Catholic supremacy.
This feels similar.
It was never gonna work out. Russia even back then was too big and had too much of a sense of unique cultural and religious identity to be subordinated to a Catholic European power.
An interesting episode in history nonetheless. Known as the Time of Troubles in Russia.
Yeah but they could accept foreign tsar, especially a child one like Władysław (hell, they ultimately elected Romanov). Poland was elective monarchy so it's not like he was automatically heir to Polish throne and in fact if he would convert to orthodoxy he wouldn't get elected in Poland no matter what. So there would be no personal union but it could be an alliance against Sweden and setting some mutually agreeable border.
Problem was that Poland was at the height of its power then but with worst possible government, powerful and mostly independent magnates drunk on power but incompetent at using it and at the same time hungry for conquest and hungry for increasing their own power at the cost of central power. That's why they elected such an absolute fuckworst moronic revanchist shithead as king, Zygmunt fucking Vasa.
Result was literal catastrophe and crippling of economy when multiple hard wars coupled with natural climate changes. All that having also disastrous consequences for society. And this later birthed probably the most nonsensical and harmful idea in entire Polish history, the messianic idea which is basically doubling down on "we want to be west".
Fascinating. I'm not that deeply versed in internal Polish politics of the late middle ages/early modern period beyond the Polish-Lithuanian union episode and the whole Jadwiga story, but it sounds really interesting and like something i need to learn more about.
Most of what I know about Poland in that period is through the lens of Russian but mainly Romanian history, especially Poland's involvement in the various conflicts in and around Moldova, Transylvania, Hungary, internal Romanian succession disputes, wars with the Ottomans, etc.
Yeah, Polish politics was often torn between factions preferring different directions of attempted expansion, southeast and northeast were the usual ones.
In fact, majority of boyars were okay even with Catholic tsar as long as he didn't try to push Catholicism and didn't try to curtail their privileges. The problem was that Polish candidates wanted both.
It is pretty funny to compare it to policies of Ivan the Terrible, who was ultra-religious, but readily granted protection to religions, languages and cultures of conquered and kept his word. The most prominent example would be Kazan, where his policies allowed him to have more Tatars in his army than the entire army of Kazan Khanate.
Yeah, Zygmunt was really insufferable asshole and it translated to his politics very often.
Also, Ivan's historical role is very underrated in historiography, there isn't even afaik any attempt at revision, the shitty biography by Troyat is still circulating widely.
Also 2, happy Marie Antoinette's day.
Yeah, almost every book on him is pushing either "bloody tyrant" or "genius statesman" angles without really analyzing his achievements and mistakes, which were both enormous. Even Soviet historians tended to fall into either of those angles.
Yeah, I'm five years on Hexbear already, I can't believe it survived for so long.
It was the last serious attempt, but there were many previous attempts during the 16th century, with the religious differences being literally the most contended point. And both sides saw it as a union of closely related people, there weren't much animosity or cultural differences between Poles and Russians compared to today.
Religion mattered a lot at that time. Also, both Poland and Russia already had many centuries of history existing as culturally distinct realms, Poland since the Piast kings in the 1000s and Russia under the Rurikids since the 800s, though not always united.