In 1939 the Soviet Union were too busy facing an even worse threat than Nazi Germany - the evil capitalist imperialism of Finland.
Ukraine
- Thread starter Silvanus
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The Soviet Union overtly had the idea that Western Europe would collapse or destroy itself, and actively intefered to help this come about by destabilising them.
Effectively, the policy of the USSR was encourage Germany, France and Britain to go to war, and it would mop up afterwards. When it failed to get France and Britain to go to war with Germany, instead it got Germany to go to war with Britain and France.
The article of course addresses this, by pointing out that STWC is perfectly happy to protest foreign states engaging in war and human rights abuses... just so long as that foreign state is the USA, Israel, or various other countries perceived as Western allies. The hypocrisy of writing that a no-fly zone should not be enforced for fear of loss of life, allowing Assad and the Russians freedom to use their air force to bomb the smithereens out of opposition cities and civilians.
Thus what they mean by "Stop The War" is stop Western war, whilst any other mass murderers are free to slaughter and invade their neighbours with little more than a shrug and statement of how regrettable it is. As Ukraine indicates, even invade and slaughter democratic countries willing to integrate more with our own - if not especially democratic countries willing to integrate with the West, because it doesn't matter how much of a dictatorial, authoritarian, nationalist, murdering scumbag Putin is, the West are the real bad guys.
But really, where many people hit their limit with the anti-Western war left is their willingness to indulge the propaganda bullshit from the worst regimes on the planet. How we might note that STWC barred Syrians from speaking, and let a series of non-Syrians uncritically repeat pro-Assad and pro-Putin versions of events. We might note your repeated dismissals of Chinese and Russian human rights abuses. The logic here is depressingly simple: any outrage by a non-Western country must be trivialised, minimised or denied, because it might provide a motivation or justification for Western action. If that means uncritically sucking on the teats of Xi and Putin's propaganda, then enthusiastically do it.
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Being pro oppressive dictatorships isn't though
Except you are not even trying to understand the true motivations of your enemies. You are just accepting their propaganda like a good little plebeian. The fact you get your propaganda from RT instead of CNN doesn't make you any better informed.
Doesn't matter, this is about your hypocrisy not the "MSM". We don't need you to echo or care about anything, we're just pointing out your obvious double standards. And tbh, we don't need you to echo China's or Russia's official propaganda either, yet you feel the need to. What we're pointing out is that you like to pretend you care about victims while you have shown us very clearly you don't. You don't care about the people who are being bombed by the US or Saudis, what you care about is the fact it's the US or one if its allies doing it.
To be fair, that is the history of Antifa. They were very literal German Stalinists. They coordinated with the Kremlin under Stalin.
Not quite. The modern Antifa don't really have anything to do with the original group bar the name and anti-fascism. If the Antifa of ~1930 Germany became anything, it was the government of East Germany.
The US did not get a free pass. People complained a lot about their actions and still do. It you were to start a thread about US foreign policy you would notice that. But here it is pretty off topic.
The US could do what it did because it was too powerful for most nations to meaningfully impact. Also in part because Russia let them do it. Russia was always able to block any UN resolution to allow the US to interfere. Don't complain that countries that don't even have a veto and/or are more dependend on the US didn't do more.
And that should be enough about the US here.
Do you own a mirror ?
Given how little you seem to understand the obvious implications of what you've written, your doubt is fairly insignificant to me,
Russia is justifiably threatened.
Russia has thousands of nuclear missiles ready to launch at a moment's notice.
This is exactly how the defenders of Israel think and speak. Israel is simultaneously weak and strong, defenceless and incredibly powerful. The weakness justifies Israel's aggression towards Palestinians, the power makes it possible. Defending Israel requires a belief that weakness and power can coexist.
Heck, the current political consensus towards US intervention in the world is largely the result of 9/11. The USA is justifiably threatened. It is weak and vulnerable to terrorism and the actions of foreign regimes. The fact that is it the most powerful military force on the planet is only relevant if you choose to think about it. If you don't, then weakness and power can coexist and everyone becomes justified in whatever they want to be justified in.
The same is true of Russia.
You think Crimea's Russian majority happened by magic?
Because you're literally throwing away any political credibility you had to defend and support Putin and his government against any and all criticism, and you're trying to convince everyone else to do the same. So yes, you kind of do kind of need to elaborate on why Putin is better than the United States.
Why is Russia worth the sacrifice of your, or my, integrity? That is the actual question you should be answering.
..just like Israel.
What train would that be?
Can you genuinely not tell the difference between not supporting a fascist regieme that, for propaganda purposes, likes to imagine itself as a rival to the "most powerful country in human history" in order to justify internal repression and exploitation of its population and being ride or die for US imperialism. Because that explains a lot.
This isn't fucking Star Wars. Putin isn't Luke Skywalker fighting the evil Empire. If you want to base your political opinions off the mentality of Hollywood movies, this is Alien vs. Predator. Whoever wins, we (and the people of Russia and Ukraine) lose. I'm confused as to why you struggle with the reality of that as someone who seems to be pretending to have a problem with fascism. But it leads me to the opinion that, in typical American fashion, your problem is less that fascism is bad but that some fascists might be bad people.
I guess fascism really is a matter of taste..
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The iconography, the street violence, half the ideology. Regardless, you said "not quite", and then proceeded to talk about things that are unrelated by your own description. Antifa in pre-WWII Germany directly allied with Stalin. There's nothing "not quite" about that.
You're talking about the "the history of Antifa". But if there are two separate organisations with the same name, the history of one is not the history of the other.
Please show me exactly where in the Treaty of Versailles that Russia -- tsarist or Soviet -- was signatory. Or even active participant in the Paris Peace Conference.
But I mean, it's not as if this brazenly mistaken commentary isn't hilariously ironic or timely. After all, which country made an unsuccessful bid for independence supported by the Allied powers during the peace conference which went entirely ignored, leading to its descent into civil war and later absorption into the USSR?
It was...Ukraine! So what was that about history being unimportant to the current conflict?
And by the way, just so we all remember...Stalin wanted and tried to resurrect the Triple Entente as an anti-Nazi alliance. The former allied powers decided they preferred that nice-sounding Hitler chap to the commie, and therefore declined despite Germany being well in the process of gobbling up smaller eastern European countries left and right, and already looking westward. Hence the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
Because literally nothing happened in between the Treaty of Versailles and Hitler's election to Chancellor that the Soviet Union might have had something to do with.
Doubly failtastic given that the ways it did interfere are already mentioned in this thread.
Yeah, and I get that too, and had the Soviet Union just did a little shrug and went "Oh geez, would you look at that, those Nazis we said were evil were indeed evil. We warned you, you didn't listen, oh well." while sitting in their borders sharpening their knives for the coming war I wouldn't have thought less of them.
They however decided to join in with the people who very publicly called for their extermination so they could retake some lost territories while the Nazis decimated Europe, after of course helping to destroy Poland. The Soviet Union could have achieved what it wanted (control over Poland and the various Baltic states again) without aiding the Nazi war machine had they came to Poland's and eastern Europe's defense.
France was more concerned with setting up their own defenses and Britain being slow with their response, they could have came right over and started fighting the Nazis (especially since, you know, they said they were going to destroy them and they are Nazis) with a "why do you want to enter into defence agreements with these baby men when you could throw in with a real bear?"
If your understanding of the origins of the conflict provides no greater justification for the actions Russia is undertaking, then how does it serve the point you're trying to make?
Handing full control of Ukrainian foreign policy to Russia would not bring about "peace" for Ukraine. It's annexation with an extra step.
Were you not aware that the Soviet Union carved up Poland under a mutual agreement with a fascist dictatorship? Facilitating imperial expansion is almost the diametric opposite of "isolation and containment"-- those principles mattered to Molotov riiiiight up until he was offered a slice of another country.
America Could Have Done So Much More to Protect Ukraine
The paths to deterrence were not taken.
www.theatlantic.com
"All the while, the Biden administration failed to pair diplomatic overtures with sufficiently powerful, credible military pressure, perhaps over fears of a bilateral conflict with Russia. These fears were misplaced. I can say from my significant experience dealing with the highest levels of Russia’s military leadership that it has no interest in a bilateral confrontation with the U.S. Russian leaders have zero desire for nuclear war, and they understand that they would inevitably lose in a conventional war. However, Russia excels at compelling the U.S. to self-deter."
A few points of contention with this article. One is that the Europeans are also somewhat to blame. Despite having a larger population than the US, and a larger GDP than Russia, while having the backing of the US a country with nuclear parity with Russia. Why didn't they do something about Russia? Why didn't Macron, and Merkel stand up to Putin more when it come to energy, defense, and commerce. While did Germany spend less than 2% of GDP on its military.
The US isn't the only one that is reacting to this without being proactive so are the Europeans, and given climate change, covid, and wars in the middle east, it's kind of understandable the US didn't want to get involved.
Also if we had gotten into a war with Russia with security commitments to Ukraine, then China could have sized the advantage in Taiwan.
I would argue this was one of the few cases where you can react to it, but you don't have the resources to be proactive about it.
Yes, but does he have significant experience of the guy who actually decides whether to invade, i.e. Vladimir Putin?America Could Have Done So Much More to Protect Ukraine
The paths to deterrence were not taken.
"All the while, the Biden administration failed to pair diplomatic overtures with sufficiently powerful, credible military pressure, perhaps over fears of a bilateral conflict with Russia. These fears were misplaced. I can say from my significant experience dealing with the highest levels of Russia’s military leadership..."
Although I can sympathise with the idea that NATO might have dissuaded Russia by promising to guarantee Ukraine's integrity with armed force, I can also appreciate that a primary aim and responsibility of NATO politicians is to avoid direct conflict with Russia, and that threatening military involvement posed a significant risk of escalation. Furthermore that the US public have placed exceptional pressure on their presidents of late to scale back involvement in international conflicts, and heeding that is also a responsibility for US politicians.
...you mean like an unsustainable and inherently unstable circular flow of capitol, mandated by unpayable reparations demands, matched with largely arbitrary formal structural limitations to German reindustrialization which precluded long-term economic health, which created the circumstances into which an extremist revanchist political party could step and gain near absolute power? I mean, sure, the Soviet Union absolutely, positively, had lots to do with that, if by some circumstance I have teleported into the alternate dimension in which Wall Street is in downtown Moscow.
I mean, I may as well be at this point. As far as I can tell, at this point you're seriously trying to argue the Soviet Union are actually the bad guys for supporting partisans in opposition to Nazis.
Didn't the Labor senator who just died of a heart attack introduce something like that in Australia?
Oh, for Germany that is easy to explain. Germany has lost WWII and taken some lessons. They don't want to fight in wars and especially don't like fighting Russian to whom they lost last time.
Furthermore, Germany has been 40 years the designated battlefield for WWIII with 2 German armies expected to be forced to fight the other Germans first and really really are sick of that. So much so that after reunification many wanted to leave NATO and being done with the superpowers.
There is also that fact that East Germans see Russia more favorable than most other Warshaw pact nactions, because the Soviet Union graciously allowed the reunification when it didn't have to according to the old post-war treaties. Because of the war, being under foreign occupation/influence was seen as justified punishment and not something to be angry towards Russia. As Russia had no such justification for any other of its pawns/annexed nations, those are all more hostile.
This left to Germany trying its hardest to build peaceful relations to Russia and prevent a revival of Cold War antagonism. Leading to close economic ties with Russia, allowing many Russian immigrants, doing exchanges and collaborations etc. I must say that Germany was several times quite upset about the US antagonizing Russia during the 90s/early 2000s.
And yes, Germany spent less than 2% to defense. But only after the Cold War had ended and there was no perceived enemy around anymore. Defense spending was not seen as a viable or even remotely useful tool to deal with Russia.
In the end it didn't work out as Germany hoped and with this last invasion Germany has finally given up and cut the ties, taking more economic hits than most other Western nations through sanctions (because of the previously built close economic ties and all the lost investment). But after trying so long and so hard for a peaceful Russia, it certainly should not be blamed as not doing enough.
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You need to do some reading up.
The USSR exercised a lot of influence over the KPD (Communist Party), and pretty much directly controlled it from the mid-late 20s onwards. Official policy was that the biggest enemy was the SPD (Social Democrats), and so the KPD spent much more time disrupting them than the Nazis, in fact at times allying with Nazis against the SPD. The KPD only really turned on the Nazi Party after the Nazi Party achieved electoral breakthrough in 1932.
Most European Communist Parties took direction from Moscow, and one of the aims of the USSR was to foment disaffection and disorder in Western countries to hasten the supposed imminent demise of capitalism. Thus in Germany and other countries, Communists attempted to sabotage the political and economic function of their own states. In Germany, this contributed significantly to the persistent sense of disorder that the Nazis ultimately exploited to achieve electoral success.