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Like, it's no great shakes to say that this argument is a house of cards built on pretending governments-in-exile weren't an acknowledged concept, but it's worth noting how it uncritically accepts that Poland's government should have surrendered rather than organizing refugees in conjunction with their French and British Allies, a common, crude propaganda slur.
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Apr 5, 2016 03:57
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The thing that gets me about this conversation is that I'm not some flag-waving USA USA chanting idiot who thinks the Soviet Union was some evil empire that was just as bad as Nazi Germany. It was a complex society that had its own positives compared to the west in addition to its many systemic flaws. I'm not sure if you can even categorize Stalin as purely evil-yes, he was responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not millions of his own people, and created a horrific culture of fear and paranoia. And yet, it's unquestionable that under his rule, the USSR rose from a backwards, agricultural society into a modern superpower that stood toe-to-toe with the West, and without his horrific industrialization policies there's a good chance that the Soviet Union could have never survived its war against Germany. He was unquestionably a monster-but without a monster such as him in that time and that place, would the world be even worse off? As someone with an interest in history, that's the kind of critical analysis and discussion that interests me. By waving away-or even worse, denying completely-his horrific actions, not only are you disrespecting the lives of his victims, but in a way you disrespect the man himself-for if nothing else, Stalin is a man who deserves to be studied, to see both the good and the bad in the man who condemned millions of his own to die but may have ultimately saved Europe. Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 03:59
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It's a pedantic point that since the Polish government was technically interned in Romania there was no Polish state to invade. It had only been a week or so and there was still an army in the field that the USSR had to fight when they passed over the frontier. But I do agree with Furr's overall point, that the Soviets and Nazis weren't allies, and there was no "joint" invasion of Poland. I'd never read that Churchill endorsed the invasion before either.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:00
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swampman posted:As a practical matter Poland as a state had ceased to exist when its government abandoned governmental functions. It ceased to exist in a legal sense when its government interned itself in Rumania without appointing a successor government, even one in exile. Do socialists/communists actually want to endorse this reasoning? (Obvviously swampman does.) If a government abdicates it gives license to neighboring states to carve it up?
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Apr 5, 2016 04:04
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Acebuckeye13 posted:I'm not sure if you can even categorize Stalin as purely evil-yes, he was responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not millions of his own people, and created a horrific culture of fear and paranoia. [quote]Citation needed
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Apr 5, 2016 04:10
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"Napoleon has abdicated, time for us Prussians to annex Strasbourg or whatever. This is completely legitimate since the French government has ceased to exist." -- Things
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Apr 5, 2016 04:11
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Jack of Hearts posted:Do socialists/communists actually want to endorse this reasoning? (Obvviously swampman does.) If a government abdicates it gives license to neighboring states to carve it up? This is a distortion of what you've just read. The USSR did not "carve up" Poland. They entered ungoverned territory, with its government incommunicado, to defend their own borders and to retake territory stolen in 1921. The government did not just abdicate, it vanished. I don't know if you comprehend what a crime against the Polish people that was.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:13
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swampman posted:truly democratic workers' state. pppppfpfpfffhfhahhahahahahahahahhaha
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Apr 5, 2016 04:13
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swampman posted:Nice point about The Big Lie in this part - notice that some posters in this thread are autistically repeating mantras like "Stalin is evil, the sun is hot, water is wet" Huh, I had no idea that Poland just magically ceased to exist at some point in late 1939, for reasons we'll never understand but obviously had nothing whatsoever to do with the invasion of two hostile powers from east and west. Oops! I meant to say, "two totally not aligned armies that just sorta happened to be nearby and wandered in more by accident than anything else, and by utter happenstance happened to meet up and exchange intel on their completely innocent romp through the countryside, which I repeat they never once coordinated together beforehand. Also, what is "Poland," anyway? Sounds like a totally made-up name for something that rightly belongs to other nations I'm just saying here."
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Apr 5, 2016 04:16
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swampman posted:This is a distortion of what you've just read. The USSR did not "carve up" Poland. They entered ungoverned territory, with its government incommunicado, to defend their own borders and to retake territory stolen in 1921. The government did not just abdicate, it vanished. I don't know if you comprehend what a crime against the Polish people that was. The Polish government should have all died in extermination camps? Very caring of you.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:17
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Jack of Hearts posted:"Napoleon has abdicated, time for us Prussians to annex Strasbourg or whatever. This is completely legitimate since the French government has ceased to exist." -- Things What do you think of the British sinking the French fleet after they surrendered?
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Apr 5, 2016 04:17
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Flocons de Jambon posted:What do you think of the British sinking the French fleet after they surrendered? I don't really see how this is comparable. Perhaps if the RKKA had destroyed the reserves and supplies of the Polish Army to prevent them from falling into Nazi hands and then withdrawn?
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Apr 5, 2016 04:19
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Flocons de Jambon posted:What do you think of the British sinking the French fleet after they surrendered? I think I understand this reference, but I'm not sure, and if I understand it, I don't see how it's relevant. Maybe be more explicit for us dimwits.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:21
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You can make an argument that seizing Polish territory was good both for the survival of the people in the USSR and in the annexed regions, because the Nazis planned to exterminate most of Poland. But that requires accepting it was a seizure and annexation.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:23
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-K%C3%A9bir
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Apr 5, 2016 04:24
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swampman posted:
Hey hey hey just a question was the war for Danzig just then?
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Apr 5, 2016 04:25
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swampman posted:They entered ungoverned territory, with its government incommunicado, to defend their own borders and to retake territory stolen in 1921. I understand "workers of the world unite" and all, but you understand that Russia was an empire which occupied a big chunk of Poland, right? Ah, you don't. That's good, then.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:26
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Brainiac Five posted:I don't really see how this is comparable. Perhaps if the RKKA had destroyed the reserves and supplies of the Polish Army to prevent them from falling into Nazi hands and then withdrawn? The Allies later invaded Vichy Algeria.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:27
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Lack of government and replacement of government aren't the same thing though?
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Apr 5, 2016 04:28
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The Soviets can't invade the remenants of the Polish state, but the British can sink the French fleet. It's a perfect bizarro Saltwater Fallacy.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:37
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Flocons de Jambon posted:The Soviets can't invade the remenants of the Polish state, but the British can sink the French fleet. It's a perfect bizarro Saltwater Fallacy. The British committed a clear act of aggression, which most consider tolerable because the French were allied with the Nazis. Furr claims that the invasion of Poland wasn't an invasion, because Poland no longer existed. That is, Furr is making the utterly bizzaro claim that the Soviets did not make an act of aggression. This isn't that complicated.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:41
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Jack of Hearts posted:The British committed a clear act of aggression, which most consider tolerable because the French were allied with the Nazis. Furr claims that the invasion of Poland wasn't an invasion, because Poland no longer existed. That is, Furr is making the utterly bizzaro claim that the Soviets did not make an act of aggression. Just because you want to make this thread all about that point, which I agreed was pedantic, doesn't oblige me to ignore everything else Furr says. "Tolerable" is how you characterize the Allied attacks on Vichy? Well then, "Tolerable" is how I characterize Soviet attacks on Poland. Tolerable. Not an alliance with the Nazis, or a joint invasion like Snyder claims.
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Apr 5, 2016 05:14
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The French fleet represented an existential threat to Britain had it been taken and used by Germany, which was feared by the British leadership to be a distinct possibility. It was an act of desperation in a desperate war. By contrast, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland was anything but an opportunistic land grab in even the most favorable light.
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Apr 5, 2016 05:25
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Winston Churchill posted:Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian Armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland. But that the Russian Armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.
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Apr 5, 2016 05:41
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Of course, what Churchill didn't know was that by invading Eastern Poland, the Soviets abandoned all of their border fortifications and actually made themselves easier to invade, soooooo
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Apr 5, 2016 05:49
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Of course, what Churchill didn't know was that by invading Eastern Poland, the Soviets abandoned all of their border fortifications and actually made themselves easier to invade, soooooo Obviously the half million troops replacing them got lost and ended up in a disastrous vacation to Finland for some odd reason.
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Apr 5, 2016 06:03
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Stalin must have had awful publicity if he didn't actually do any of the awful stuff he gets accused of. What's the point of people thinking you're a cruel murderer if you don't even get to cruelly murder anyone?
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Apr 5, 2016 06:06
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Stalin must have had awful publicity if he didn't actually do any of the awful stuff he gets accused of. What's the point of people thinking you're a cruel murderer if you don't even get to cruelly murder anyone? Oh but you see that most of them were "Class enemies" or some such thing, so they completely deserved to be put in Gulags or beaten to death. I hate this line of reasoning that somehow there is a justification for acts of mass murder if they are against the "right" people. I mean even the ultra rich whose grasp is a horrific abuse on countries laws and peoples I don't think that it behooves people to round them up and subject them to torture and death in a frozen wasteland.
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Apr 5, 2016 07:35
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You have to send a few eggs to sibera to make a socialist omelette.
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Apr 5, 2016 07:45
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And we get to the meat of why being a Stalin apologist makes you either stupid, or a bad person. You either ignore that Stalin murdered people and committed ethnic cleansing (they never invaded Poland!!!  )Or you justify his actions in murdering people for political game (actually the show trials were a good thing) The second option makes you a deplorable piece of poo poo. 
Famethrowa fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 07:51
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Swampman, if the USSR didn't invade Poland, how do you excuse the 1940 Soviet occupation of Romania, an event which was an act of aggression and a Secret Protocol collaboration with Nazi fascists, with widespread ethnic cleansing and political repression - and wasn't enabled because of an "abdicated" government?
kapparomeo fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 08:04
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Stalin must have had awful publicity if he didn't actually do any of the awful stuff he gets accused of. What's the point of people thinking you're a cruel murderer if you don't even get to cruelly murder anyone? Again, it boggles my mind that you can believe that the concerted effort by the US government which included the CIA spending millions of dollars on front companies to fund academic anti-communists to create propaganda and overtly shape our current ideological discourse about russian history has nothing to do with that "awful publicity". Apparently you think that despite the well-documented and now declassified evidence which shows this self-declared effort to publish negative history about the USSR, current historical academia exists in some unbiased vacuum where self-described anti-communists who write about communism do so without bias or skin in the game and can therefore be trusted about Stalin because in the capitalist nation of the USA their view is orthodoxy. That no skepticism is warranted especially when, as in Snyder's case, their sources are woefully misinterpreted or outright false as Grover Furr took great care to show with exhaustive evidence. I believe there's a word for when you give anti-communists the benefit of the doubt when they write about communism, but are quick to dismiss as biased a communist writing about communism.
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Apr 5, 2016 08:32
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A human heart posted:They are, the nazis used early punch card systems to keep census data on all the people to be sent to extermination camps, and the Khmer Rouge had extensive records of the people killed as well(e.g. at the S-21 torture centre). On the other hand, Indonesia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Bosnia, the Herero and Namaqua, Sudan, Armenian massacres, Armenian genocide, umm I can give more if you want. Record keeping is an anomaly, and the Holocaust is extremely weird in its organization. It's a problem that every genocide gets compared to the Holocaust because it's so unique. Also, afaik the records in Cambodia aren't that great?? I mean I know some of the major prison camps had some records, but uhhh when they emptied the cities and purged the vietnamese I don't remember there being a ton of records kept on that?
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Apr 5, 2016 08:42
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1mpper posted:Again, it boggles my mind that you can believe that the concerted effort by the US government which included the CIA spending millions of dollars on front companies to fund academic anti-communists to create propaganda and overtly shape our current ideological discourse about russian history has nothing to do with that "awful publicity". Apparently you think that despite the well-documented and now declassified evidence which shows this self-declared effort to publish negative history about the USSR, current historical academia exists in some unbiased vacuum where self-described anti-communists who write about communism do so without bias or skin in the game and can therefore be trusted about Stalin because in the capitalist nation of the USA their view is orthodoxy. That no skepticism is warranted especially when, as in Snyder's case, their sources are woefully misinterpreted or outright false as Grover Furr took great care to show with exhaustive evidence. I believe there's a word for when you give anti-communists the benefit of the doubt when they write about communism, but are quick to dismiss as biased a communist writing about communism. some historians were bad=stalin isn't such a bad guy after all???? also, sources on this "concerted effort"
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Apr 5, 2016 08:48
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kapparomeo posted:Swampman, if the USSR didn't invade Poland, how do you excuse the 1940 Soviet occupation of Romania, an event which was an act of aggression and a Secret Protocol collaboration with Nazi fascists, with widespread ethnic cleansing and political repression - and wasn't enabled because of an "abdicated" government? Swampman, what about 1939-1940 annexation of Baltic States (Winter War also broadly falls into this category?)? How are they and the following deportations justified?
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Apr 5, 2016 08:54
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1mpper posted:Again, it boggles my mind that you can believe that the concerted effort by the US government which included the CIA spending millions of dollars on front companies to fund academic anti-communists to create propaganda and overtly shape our current ideological discourse about russian history has nothing to do with that "awful publicity". Apparently you think that despite the well-documented and now declassified evidence which shows this self-declared effort to publish negative history about the USSR, current historical academia exists in some unbiased vacuum where self-described anti-communists who write about communism do so without bias or skin in the game and can therefore be trusted about Stalin because in the capitalist nation of the USA their view is orthodoxy. That no skepticism is warranted especially when, as in Snyder's case, their sources are woefully misinterpreted or outright false as Grover Furr took great care to show with exhaustive evidence. I believe there's a word for when you give anti-communists the benefit of the doubt when they write about communism, but are quick to dismiss as biased a communist writing about communism. The CIA wasn't even established until after World War II, and their counter-cultural efforts long after that. Yes, their efforts may have cast a more negative light on the Soviet Union, but people were writing about how horrifying Stalin's regime was long before then.
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Apr 5, 2016 12:49
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The CIA wasn't even established until after World War II, and their counter-cultural efforts long after that. Yes, their efforts may have cast a more negative light on the Soviet Union, but people were writing about how horrifying Stalin's regime was long before then. Didn't you read what Grover wrote? That was all Nazis, you don't want to be a Nazi do you?
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Apr 5, 2016 12:52
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Famethrowa posted:also, sources on this "concerted effort" quote:The Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA's more daring and effective Cold War covert operations. It published literary and political journals such as Encounter, hosted dozens of conferences bringing together some of the most eminent Western thinkers, and even did what it could to help intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain. Somehow this organization of scholars and artists--egotistical, free-thinking, and even anti-American in their politics--managed to reach out from its Paris headquarters to demonstrate that Communism, despite its blandishments, was a deadly foe of art and thought. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol46no1/article08.html http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/09/06/history-cia-funded-foundations/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/04/07/the-cia-is-back-on-campus/ swampman fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 12:53
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Acebuckeye13 posted:but people were writing about how horrifying Stalin's regime was long before then.
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Apr 5, 2016 12:55
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Apr 5, 2016 12:58
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