It’s funny that you should mention that, because the main reason that I educated others on the subject was that I saw a Polish anticommunist trivializing the Fascist occupation just to make the Communists look worse.

https://lemmy.ml/post/14133689

I have never seen any outspoken anticommunists make an effort to properly educate others on the Fascist occupation. You just mention the ‘splitting of Poland’ over and over again like that’s good in its own right and we’ll automatically download all of the details from that fact alone. This isn’t how education works.

[+] sunzu@kbin.run -6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I repeat it because guy I was chatting with acts like USSR didn't ally with Germany and didn't split another country. If invading and splitting a country supported by a treaty is not an alliance, I don't know what else is.

[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Then you don't know what is. Now it's time for you to learn.

The Nazis invaded Poland and dissolved the Polish government. The Soviets knew that the Nazis were going to attempt to invade Russia over the Ukrainian border, just like Napoleon did. In order to delay this, they needed Soviet troops on the ground to slow down and monitor Nazi movement, but they had no pretext for doing so. Because Germany had not yet declared war on the USSR, the solution was to create a peacetime non-aggression treaty that allowed Soviet troops to be deployed to Poland. This had the effect of getting Soviet troops on the ground without starting the hot conflict. It also had the effect of taking a portion of Poland away from the Third Reich.

You make it sound like M-R was the Soviets conspiring with the Third Reich to divide up Poland and then invading it, but that's not actually what happened. Ultimately what made the USA enter the war was that the USSR was the only country willing to liberate Europe from the Nazis, and what happened in half of Poland during M-R then happened in all of Eastern Europe - the Soviets occupied territory that would have been occupied by fascists. You can't paint occupation by the Soviets as equivalent with occupation by the Nazis when literally the only alternative to occupation by the Nazis.

[–] sunzu@kbin.run -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You make it sound like M-R was the Soviets conspiring with the Third Reich to divide up Poland and then invading it, but that's not actually what happened

Not just Poland baltics too....

And yes that's what happened. Why are simping for a fallen empire anyway?

People who lived under Soviet rule don't earn for it.

[–] AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 year ago

It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.

Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.

The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.

— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262

When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.

This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.

— Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145

@freagle@lemmygrad.ml and others are ‘simping’ for the USSR because that is the price that you have to pay for capitalism’s structural defects: it leaves us, the lower classes, in such destitute positions that we have nothing to lose by seeking alternatives.

[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago

In fact for 30 years after the dissolution of the USSR polling indicated that well over 50% of people living in the former republics adjacent to Russia believed that the loss of the USSR was a net negative.

[–] polskilumalo@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Poland joined in on the Anschluss of Czechoslovakia and were the first to sign a pact with Germany before the war.