I fucking wish US politics didn’t affect the rest of the world and they didn’t take up 99% of the discourse online, but sadly that’s the state of affairs, go to a general purpose instance like lemm.ee or like reddthat.com, browse by all federated instances, and tell me how many of the posts are about US politics.
Ending conversations with people because they’re not from your country, when your country projects its power and its politics outwards overwhelmingly, isn’t productive
The fact that you even had to ask illustrates my point
There is more than one ongoing genocide, it’s just that the one in Palestine is the one the US is most obviously funding and supporting, which makes it relevant to USian politics.
Finding out about genocide, and using as leverage in an election where the collapse of democracy is on the table are not even remotely similar.
Finding out about genocide and being able to tell your representatives that you won’t vote them if they go on genociding people because that doesn’t represent you, seems pretty coherent and moral to me.
suddenly you all cared so much that it was worth sacrificing your own country
I’m not USian btw, I’m not sacrificing my own country. Arguably the ones sacrificing the country are the ones putting only unelectable candidates who run a campaign of genocide against literal fascists. If the Trump administration was so patently fascist and the Democrats, with full presidential power (and immunity as proven by Trump), did nothing to stop them, the fault is every bit as much in the Democrat camp as in the Republican.
Refuse to act against fascists while in government -> run a campaign on genocide and the “most lethal armed forces in the world” with a non-electable candidate changed 3 months before the election -> lose elections to fascists -> blame the voters
I mock it because before the genocide in Gaza, there was another genocide that NONE of you gave a shit about.
Care to elaborate?
Is even go so far as to wager that most of you couldn’t have pointed to Palestine on a map prior to last October
Even if you were right, what’s the point of that argument? “Increased sensibility to genocide as a consequence of people being able to learn from it from non-US-controlled outlets and social media because of the new availability of smartphones all over the world” negates being able to care about genocide? People 10 years ago couldn’t open their smartphones and see live footage of children being bombed to death by Israel, and being able to see that despite the mass media apparatus in the US being entirely pro-Israel is a new thing. Surely more people finding out about the genocide isn’t a bad thing?
I don’t know why you went out of your way to use the mocking “gEnoCiDe sUpPoRtErS” while, when, an actual genocide was being committed. You can disagree with the strategy of not voting for genocide supporters in elections, and there may even be compelling reasons when the alternative is trump, but mocking the people who prioritise not supporting genocide isn’t a very high moral ground in my opinion.
More than attempting for third parties to win, the whole “conditioning the vote on an end to genocide” was attempted at forcing the democrat administration to end the genocide under threat of losing the elections, not “let’s make sure that X third person gets elected”. The democratic party was clear: we will not compromise in our support of genocide even if it costs us the elections. So they lost.
It most certainly includes direct casualty numbers as well
Good, then we both agree the source doesn’t support the “hundreds of thousands murdered in Poland” claim.
For the last time: I have asked at this point in 4 different occasions what was the desirable alternative to a Soviet military occupation of eastern Poland after the Polish, English and French rejection of a mutual defense agreement with the USSR.
The fact that you fail to provide an answer after being clearly prompted 4 different times to give one, is enough evidence to me that you simply don’t have one. I will then state the obvious: the Soviet military occupation of Eastern Poland likely prevented hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Roma and other ethnicities from being genocided by the OTHERWISE INEVITABLE Nazi invasion.
You really, really cannot imagine not having to do
No, I really cannot pretend knowing more about defeating fascism in Europe that the nation which ultimately defeated fascism, at the IMMENSE cost of 25 million lives in the struggle against Nazism. It’s easy to go with our hindsight and categorise the oppression of bourgeois and nationalist elements of Poland as unnecessary and “barbaric”. But you known what, I’m not Polish, I’m Spanish. I’m from the country where the communists did not go far enough, and the result was losing a preventable civil war against fascists which murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents, and the 4 decades of fascism that followed. So, no, my claim is NOT that I know more about fighting fascism than those who actually defeated it.
even though everyone knows that’s not true
Source: it is known
There are relatively few comments in the thread talking about Russia at all, and calling the Euromaidan a US coup is not Russia apologism, it’s literally discussion about US+Ukraine.
You can’t see a post about the two-sidedness of US policy without invoking the Russians.
it’s clear they wanted to keep him [Hitler] on a leash and have him serve as a first line of defense
This is basically the thing I’m arguing. The Soviet Union was never an expansionist project in the military sense (they wanted to spread the revolution abroad, such as by assisting the Republicans in Spain and giving weapons to the Vietnamese in their anti-imperialist struggle), never projecting their military force outwards except as a response to serious provoking by third party foreign actors (such as in the case of the funding and arming in Afghanistan of radical theocratic militias by the US).
The fact that all of these western leaders talk of the USSR using the Molotov-Ribbentrop as an “odious but necessary defensive measure”, proves to me that they understood that the USSR wasn’t something they needed to be militarily defended of by a weaponized Germany acting as a buffer, hence that can’t be understood as Germany’s role in the situation in my opinion.
Whataboutism? This post is about the US and Ukraine, not about Russia
I did a little writeup brainstorm the other day, om which I reached the same conclusion, that “Russo/Sino-Tankieism” is to Lemmy what “Judeo-Bolshevism” was to Nazi Germany. I’m glad to see you’re reading the words out of my mind
I’d dispute that based on the fact that they declared war on Germany immediately when Hitler invaded Poland
They already had a mutual defense agreement with Poland, that’s why they intervened at that point. Additionally, they didn’t want Nazis to get too big because they were competing for resources and markets, as are all capitalist nations.
I find it very easy to believe that the very nations that invaded the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war and supported the tsarists with no other reason than to attempt to destroy communism, would be happy to see Germany destroy the Soviet Union which, as a nation which had only began to industrialise in the late 1920s (compared to the extra century that Germany and England had had to industrialise), was very weak in military industrial capabilities.
In any case I understand that that’s just my opinion based on historical precedents, and there may be more nuance. However, I seem to share the same point of view of many western allies from the period:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
“One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ” Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
“We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ” Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)
“It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)
There were several alternatives, actually
Great, please name one of them that doesn’t imply complete occupation of Poland by Nazis, I’ve asked you already several times to do so and you keep avoiding it.
Yeah sure, here’s one that estimates between 250k and 1.5m
That’s a book on migrations and deportations, not a book on casualties, it doesn’t seem to support a claim of “hundreds of thousands murdered” which you made in your previous comment, could you please elaborate?
already convinced themselves that all these murdered Poles
Again, you’re conflating murdered with deported.
“must have deserved it”
I explicitly mentioned in my previous comment that there were innocents caught in this process of class war and collectivisation of the economy in times of war, which I deeply lament. I just can’t envision an alternative reality where, after a decade of denying mutual defense agreements with the Soviets, there was a better alternative to Soviet occupation as opposed to Nazi occupation.
Stalin could have not promised the nazis to attack the Poles from the rear not attacked the Poles from the rear
Again, please tell me what was the alternative to Soviet occupation in Eastern Poland, once Poland rejected a mutual defense agreement against Nazis with the Soviets.
murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles
I don’t think those numbers are honest, can you provide a source for that? I know about the Katyn massacre and about other events in which Nazi collaborators/Bourgeois Polish nationalists were killed (as well as some innocent civilians), but AFAIK the numbers don’t go that high
I think all of these alternatives would have been more desirable
Again, how is tens of thousands of deaths in occupied Poland (many of which were Nazi collaborators and bourgeois Polish nationalists) preferable to Nazi occupation? Or can you think of an alternative to either of these two options?
In my humble opinion, this is nothing like the Molotov-Ribbentrop. Molotov-Ribbentrop gets a lot of bad advertising due to cold war propaganda, but even western leaders in the west at the time like Churchill admitted that the Soviets had no other option (if you want evidence I have plenty of reference, feel free to ask :)
The Soviets spent the entire 30s warning of fascism and trying to build mutual defense agreements with France, England and Poland and they refused systematically, even when in 1939 the Soviets offered to send 1 million troops together with artillery, tanks and planes, to the Polish and French borders on exchange for a mutual defense agreement, but the French and English ambassadors received orders not to engage in actual negotiations and just to postpone the agreement, since they wanted the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union.
Either way even if you fundamentally disagree with what I’m saying, what was the alternative? Poland was going to get steamrolled by the Nazis with or without the soviets controlling the eastern part of it (as proven by the fact that soviets started invading some weeks after the Nazis). What’s more desirable, half of Poland having concentration camps, or the entirety of Poland having concentration camps?
All of this could have been prevented in my opinion if western countries agreed to engage the Nazis together with the Soviet union, as the soviets suggested as an alternative to the Munich agreements. So the lesson in my view is: to fight fascism, listen to socialists (who are the ones who actually defeated most Nazis in the eastern front)
Our conservatives aren’t literal Nazis
That’s not a very strong argument when they enable the Nazis, and I say this as a European. In my opinion we should all organize, and fight fascism the way it’s historically defeated: unionisation, mutual aid, and socialist organization.
That would be a compelling argument (unpredictable policy shift) if it hadn’t been predicted by socialists all over the world when the war started
I’ll give you a hypothetical: a company is to hire someone for coding. They can either hire someone who writes clean code for $20/h, or someone who writes dirty but functioning code using AI for $10/h. What will many companies do?