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the idea of poland proper has definitely shifted west over time, look at the First Partition when it controlled vitebsk, minsk and vilnius. in its maximalist claims, it probably wanted more to the east, but newly communist poland wasn't about to get much out of the victorious ussr
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Apr 4, 2022 06:25
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Your definition of whether Poland grew or shrank, and whether Poland lost or won, or should be happy with what they got, or should be considered sore winners after WW2, everything in your post seems to hinge on whether or not the Curzon Line was a right and proper border. It wasn't. okay, I acknowledge that the Poles didn't actually get a say on the Curzon Line to begin with
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Apr 4, 2022 06:30
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The idea of who had the right to the kresy, the borderlands, is really incredibly hard to pick apart. Historically, ethnographically, everything. Wilno/Vilnius even more so. Stalin "fixed" everything by simply deciding he got to keep the 52% of 1939 Poland he got after invading the place with Hitler and then brutally ethnically cleansing everybody until the populations matched the borders. That was one way to do it. It still loving sucked for all involved, however
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Apr 4, 2022 06:56
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Obviously it belongs to the Duchy of Warsaw
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Apr 4, 2022 07:34
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danzig is serbian, friend
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Apr 4, 2022 10:58
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:The idea of who had the right to the kresy, the borderlands, is really incredibly hard to pick apart. Historically, ethnographically, everything. Wilno/Vilnius even more so. Stalin "fixed" everything by simply deciding he got to keep the 52% of 1939 Poland he got after invading the place with Hitler and then brutally ethnically cleansing everybody until the populations matched the borders. That was one way to do it. It still loving sucked for all involved, however This is an important thing to remember any time you're talking about borders and borderlands in Eastern Europe. Up until 1945, there were basically no homogeneous nation-states in the region. Long periods of rule within the borders of a few large, contiguous empires with porous borders, much of which happened before the advent of modern nationalism, had led to extremely high levels of inter-ethnic mixing and migration throughout the entire region, and especially in cities. There was a large Jewish population throughout what's now Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania, and even if you only focus on the ethnic groups that today have nation-states to call their own, the spread of these groups across modern boundaries was immense. Nineteenth-century nationalism led to the idea of national homes for sufficiently large ethnicities, and Wilsonian approaches to peace after WWI led to the idea of creating nation-states for them in Eastern Europe, but there's no way to draw a clean, ambiguity-free border across a place where ethnic groups have been migrating and intermingling for decades, if not centuries. No matter where you drew Poland's borders, they were going to include not just Poles but Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, Lithuanians, and so on. And vice versa: no matter where you drew the borders of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, the USSR, they were all going to include Poles. Here's a 1912 map showing the proportion of Polish population around this region, showing both the heavy concentration in what everyone agreed was Poland but also the substantial minority populations outside those borders and, in the process, also revealing the substantial minority of non-Poles within majority Polish areas:  One good example of how these kinds of dynamics could play out is given by how the USSR treated Central Asia in the 1920s. Based on Lenin's approach to the national question, which was that nations needed to go through a period of nationalist development before they could do real socialist development, the USSR tried very hard to draw ethnically-based borders for the national republics in Central Asia so that the Central Asian republics would more or less correspond to the major ethnic groups in the region:  Doing so took years of on-the-ground research by Soviet ethnographers to map which ethnic group lived in which village and painstakingly plot that on the map of the USSR so that when they drew the republic boundaries they would more or less correspond to the major ethnic groupings. The result can be seen on any map of Central Asia's borders. Straight lines only ever appear where there are big patches of desert with no people living in them, and borders aren't neat or tidy, they're squiggly and broken and irregular:  That's the level of painstaking work it took to try and establish borders based on ethnicity in the 1920s. And even then, this process primarily served the interests of what are referred to as the "titular nationalities," i.e., ethnic groups demographically large enough to get their own national republics. Smaller ethnic groups ended up contained within or across republic boundaries and were often discriminated against by the emerging elites within national republics. If this is something that interests you, there are two really eye-opening books on the subject: Francine Hirsch's Empire of Nations is about the ethnographers who helped the Soviets come up with this system in the first place, and Krista Goff's Nested Nationalism talks about the tension between titular nationalities, sub-national ethnic groups, and the national republics. So, even the most painstaking efforts to establish ethnically-defined borders around this era both required massive investment of time and resources, and still left behind problems afterwards because it's basically impossible to actually draw a delimited boundary around an ethnicity and say "this is now a nation-state". There's a dead giveaway in the name of the Curzon Line that it wasn't in any way close to this kind of painstaking process, in that it's named after George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, because he's the person who, as British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1919, proposed it as Poland's boundary to the assembled powers at Versailles. You can think of it more like the Sykes-Picot lines than a reflection of reality on the ground. The Curzon Line was intended to fix Poland based on one of Wilson's Fourteen Points: quote:XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant. But how the hell do you establish which territories are "inhabited by indisputably Polish populations" in a region that has had enormous levels of migration and inter-mixing over the past centuries, and when any definition is by necessity going to either include significant non-Polish minorities or exclude significant Polish populations or both? You can't, and that's why Curzon basically drew a line on a map and said "this is where Poland should begin" without knowing anything about the region or talking to any of the people involved. As Teriyaki Hairpiece said, this problem was essentially "solved" through massive ethnic cleansing starting in 1939 and ending in the late 40s, when through a combination of wartime genocide and demographic annihilation and wartime and postwar forced migration and expulsion, the ethnically-intermingled former imperial borderlands were turned into more or less homogeneous nation-states by killing, deporting, or forcing into exile all the minority populations, at enormous cost to human life and wellbeing. Basing any moral judgement about what modern countries do or don't deserve on any of this is extremely fraught and dangerous, for what I hope are obvious reasons. vyelkin has issued a correction as of 16:06 on Apr 4, 2022 |
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Apr 4, 2022 14:36
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vyelkin posted:Here's a 1912 map showing the proportion of Polish population around this region, showing both the heavy concentration in what everyone agreed was Poland but also the substantial minority populations outside those borders and, in the process, also revealing the substantial minority of non-Poles within majority Polish areas: Thanks for this post. Just to add a personal anecdote, my family was from the rural area east of Lviv. My family was brought there from the Austrian empire to farm. They called themselves Poles, but spoke German in their home, Polish in their village, Ukrainian and Russian in nearby villages, and also some Yiddish when making deals. Of course their town was wiped out by WW2, but boys from the village ended up in the Polish, German, and Russian militaries. To just call the area as belonging to a specific nationality would just be wrong.
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Apr 4, 2022 23:06
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vyelkin posted:That's the level of painstaking work it took to try and establish borders based on ethnicity in the 1920s. And even then, this process primarily served the interests of what are referred to as the "titular nationalities," i.e., ethnic groups demographically large enough to get their own national republics. Smaller ethnic groups ended up contained within or across republic boundaries and were often discriminated against by the emerging elites within national republics. If this is something that interests you, there are two really eye-opening books on the subject: Francine Hirsch's Empire of Nations is about the ethnographers who helped the Soviets come up with this system in the first place, and Krista Goff's Nested Nationalism talks about the tension between titular nationalities, sub-national ethnic groups, and the national republics. I’ll definitely add one or both of these books to my list; thank you for this really insightful post 
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Apr 5, 2022 00:15
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 have i answered all of your questions in a satisfactory way?
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Apr 5, 2022 01:51
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vyelkin posted:But how the hell do you establish which territories are "inhabited by indisputably Polish populations" in a region that has had enormous levels of migration and inter-mixing over the past centuries, and when any definition is by necessity going to either include significant non-Polish minorities or exclude significant Polish populations or both? You can't, and that's why Curzon basically drew a line on a map and said "this is where Poland should begin" without knowing anything about the region or talking to any of the people involved.
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Apr 5, 2022 08:10
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:The idea of who had the right to the kresy, the borderlands, is really incredibly hard to pick apart. Historically, ethnographically, everything. Wilno/Vilnius even more so. Stalin "fixed" everything by simply deciding he got to keep the 52% of 1939 Poland he got after invading the place with Hitler and then brutally ethnically cleansing everybody until the populations matched the borders. That was one way to do it. It still loving sucked for all involved, however Did it suck for Stalin?
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Apr 5, 2022 14:31
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Orange Devil posted:Did it suck for Stalin? Stalin had nothing but fun from 1943 to his death.
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Apr 5, 2022 15:05
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So it loving sucked for most involved then. I care deeply about accuracy in C-SPAM posting.
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Apr 5, 2022 15:26
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Orange Devil posted:So it loving sucked for most involved then. Ah, okay, I see where you were going with that. My apologies for my too-broad historical generalization. Yes, at least one person was having lots of fun during all the post-WW2 population transfers.
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Apr 5, 2022 15:46
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St_Ides posted:Thanks for this post. Just to add a personal anecdote, my family was from the rural area east of Lviv. My family was brought there from the Austrian empire to farm. They called themselves Poles, but spoke German in their home, Polish in their village, Ukrainian and Russian in nearby villages, and also some Yiddish when making deals. Of course their town was wiped out by WW2, but boys from the village ended up in the Polish, German, and Russian militaries. To just call the area as belonging to a specific nationality would just be wrong. Thanks for this, yeah that's a really excellent example of the phenomenon I was talking about.
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Apr 5, 2022 15:57
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Apr 10, 2022 05:10
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i say swears online posted:my ignorant knee-jerk take is that the chicago democratic machine worked to keep many jobs whites-only during the first great migration The Chicago democrat machine didn't really start monopolizing power in the city down until the 1930s. The Republicans closely competed for city positions pretty consistently until the New Deal there's a wild wikipedia article on the successful 1927 mayoral campaign William Hale Thompson, a Republican who was an ally of Capone. He basically ran an anti-British monarchy campaign quote:"America First" and allegations levied by Thompson of a British conspiracy
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Apr 10, 2022 08:03
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i can think of worse single issue campaigns to be honest
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Apr 10, 2022 08:09
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 The man on the left is Kaiser Wilhelm II, wearing the full uniform of the Russian tsar circa 1905. On the right is Tsar Nicholas, wearing the full uniform of the German emperor circa 1905. And from what I've read, yes, they did swap uniforms at other occasions IRL and would pretend to be the other monarch just for the sake of screwing around with the general staff and court officials. Both monarchs spoke with a marked German accent making the swap even harder to spot.
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Apr 10, 2022 08:21
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Apr 10, 2022 11:04
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Some Guy TT posted:i can think of worse single issue campaigns to be honest The British had just lied and manipulated us into WWI, something that was definitely a vast conspiracy, something Americans were still pretty salty about. Also something that would have terribly sad consequences in the early 1940's.
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Apr 10, 2022 11:09
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bedpan posted:And from what I've read, yes, they did swap uniforms at other occasions IRL and would pretend to be the other monarch just for the sake of screwing around with the general staff and court officials. Both monarchs spoke with a marked German accent making the swap even harder to spot.
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Apr 10, 2022 12:13
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Ahh, early 20th century European royalty, just going around having a laugh, all good fun in the family, occassionally kill 20 million people when things get out of hand.
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Apr 10, 2022 13:19
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hey mods can we give up on the double history thread scheme i want to post these mugs here
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Apr 11, 2022 05:52
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whoa whoa whoa this thread is for midcentury modern dishware
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Apr 11, 2022 05:53
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i say swears online posted:whoa whoa whoa this thread is for midcentury modern dishware bedpan has issued a correction as of 06:11 on Apr 11, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 05:56
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Apr 11, 2022 14:31
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question coming from preparing to paint up miniatures for a ww1 strategy game: which powers used colonial forces in Europe? I think the French used African troops, the British used Indian troops but mostly used Africans in the colonies (?), German had African colonies but idk if they got troops from them to Europe
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Apr 13, 2022 03:37
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StashAugustine posted:question coming from preparing to paint up miniatures for a ww1 strategy game: which powers used colonial forces in Europe? I think the French used African troops, the British used Indian troops but mostly used Africans in the colonies (?), German had African colonies but idk if they got troops from them to Europe british indian troops were the backbone of the mesopotamia campaign
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Apr 13, 2022 03:44
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StashAugustine posted:question coming from preparing to paint up miniatures for a ww1 strategy game: which powers used colonial forces in Europe? I think the French used African troops, the British used Indian troops but mostly used Africans in the colonies (?), German had African colonies but idk if they got troops from them to Europe The French and British literally brought Chinese people across the globe to dig mass graves.
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Apr 13, 2022 05:04
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StashAugustine posted:question coming from preparing to paint up miniatures for a ww1 strategy game: which powers used colonial forces in Europe? I think the French used African troops, the British used Indian troops but mostly used Africans in the colonies (?), German had African colonies but idk if they got troops from them to Europe Canadians and Australians were both brought over to support the BEF. But seriously I don't recall ever hearing about German colonial troops in Europe, it was mainly the British and French
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Apr 13, 2022 05:16
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Dreylad posted:Canadians and Australians were both brought over to support the BEF. germans, especially in hanover, were more likely to be used as colonial troops by the english than having colonies themselves. by unification in 1871 it was a little too late and only had access to less profitable places. they lost everything in wwi, which means their overthrow doesn't resonate as much since nearly the entire continent of africa revolted against the english, french and portuguese in the 60s and 70s
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Apr 13, 2022 05:25
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I don't know if revolted is the right word since they mostly ended up under American hegemony
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Apr 13, 2022 05:31
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i say swears online posted:germans, especially in hanover, were more likely to be used as colonial troops by the english than having colonies themselves. by unification in 1871 it was a little too late and only had access to less profitable places. they lost everything in wwi, which means their overthrow doesn't resonate as much since nearly the entire continent of africa revolted against the english, french and portuguese in the 60s and 70s
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Apr 13, 2022 05:56
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Stairmaster posted:I don't know if revolted is the right word since they mostly ended up under American hegemony britain and france are still more entwined with africa than the US could ever hope to be. most importantly, banks aren't as integrated, but culturally the premier league is literally a million times more important than the NFL
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Apr 13, 2022 05:57
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Hanover was fully separated from the UK when Victoria ascended the throne because it operated under Salic Law: no girls allowed that's hilarious, i never read up on what happened there. from school i just remember hanoverian mercenaries being super important in the french and indian and the revolutionary wars so the timeline works
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Apr 13, 2022 05:59
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i say swears online posted:that's hilarious, i never read up on what happened there. from school i just remember hanoverian mercenaries being super important in the french and indian and the revolutionary wars so the timeline works But again, in Hanover, you can't rule if you've got ladyparts. So the next person in the line of succession, Victoria's uncle Ernest, a man who was born in Buckingham Palace, a member of the House of Lords, ascends to the throne of the Kingdom of Hanover. Then an even dumber situation arose where if Queen Victoria had suddenly died before she gave birth to a new human, old uncle Ernest, King of Hanover, would've become King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
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Apr 13, 2022 06:10
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Which is still less stupid than how the Kings of Hanover became Kings of England in the first place. Monarchy is loving stupid
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Apr 13, 2022 06:11
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Apr 13, 2022 06:35
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a training video on how to use a suitcase nuke from Sandia National Lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zBhtFFkUDI
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Apr 13, 2022 08:25
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