“Espouses but fails to uphold” sounds more like negligence to me. Negligence would be allowing fascism through inaction (like democrat administration). But the US does far worse than that (funding genocide and propping up fascism elsewhere)

While I agree, the discussion in other instances like .ml or hexbear is much more nuanced IMO (plenty of critical voices against Russia too, just not based on US State Dept. propaganda)

Seeing as you’re radicalised against Russia to that degree, any further discussion is useless, I won’t change your mind and you won’t change mine by making false claims of genocide and failing to understand the slightest nuance beyond US state department propaganda

I don’t defend the uncritical banning of non pro-western outlets or viewpoints carried out by .world mods, I’m asking them that if they ban comments for it, they should be open about it and admit that they will censor non-pro-western voices.

If attacks to civilian infrastructure and election interference are enough to claim war, Germany should be in the first instance at war with the US and Ukraine according to that logic, given the explosion of the Nordstream (much more important and evident than reported drinking water alteration or whatever you claim of DHL planes with incendiary devices). Also, Ukraine should be at war with the US for its interference in the election process in 2014, where the democratically elected leader was toppled in a blatant west-backed coup.

You know what Georgia and Ukraine have in common? They’re in the Russian sphere of influence area and have been for the past century. What’s happening is that the west keeps meddling in the Russian sphere of influence and Russia responds in the only way it can: militarily. Russia exhausted the possibilities of diplomacy with the west, warned repeatedly of the consequences of western-alignment of Ukraine (which, again, was done antidemocratically in 2014). That’s the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine, because its diplomacy, soft power and interference were weaker than those of the west in maintaining a sphere of influence. Believe it or not, history didn’t begin in 2022.

The EU should stop the US-directed meddling in Russia’s sphere of influence, and start building relations with the countries that are actually sharing a continent with it. It’s just too racist and too subservient to US interests to do so.

Putin is our fascist problem and people appeasing Putin are also a part of the problem.

Putin is a fascist and that’s a problem, but he’s not the one pushing to cut our healthcare and education and pensions budgets, he does that in Russia. He’s not the one threatening our minorities and our women, he does that in Russia. Europe is more than capable of having fascism by itself without the help of Putin, and blaming everything on a Russian conspiracy is, well, a conspiracy. Russia isn’t nearly powerful or influential enough to be mostly responsible for the fascist problem in the EU, there are a lot more material conditions thst give raise to that.

Stop fucking cheering for war. Stop your warmongering attitudes, stop presenting Europe as the fighting ground for WW3, you DO NOT WANT to see war in the EU, and it’s absofuckinglutely not too late to go back.

Insignificant compared to west germamy

How is Putin the biggest fascist threat for Europe? Fascism was literally born in Europe and exported elsewhere, we have Nazi and fascist parties getting consistent growth election after election in basically every EU country.

Believe it or not, Europe isn’t at war with Russia, we should be struggling in favour of diplomacy to reduce both our and their military expenditure… which is hard to do when riding hard the NATO wave. Ffs Europe was building gas pipelines with Russia 3.2 years ago, we’re really still capable of separating ourselves from fascist US, reduce military expenditure with fascist Russia, and take care of our own fascist problems.

The best way to fight fascism is with meaningful policy thay helps the working class. The best way to help it is proving that liberal democracy consists in getting to choose which party gets to enforce austerity this term

Without meaning this as a defense of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine: go check .world mod history, every other deleted comment is “Russian troll” or “disinformation” or equivalents. If you defend a policy of censoring points of view more charitative to Russia than western narratives be open about it, it’s fine, just be aware that you’re actually doing it

*in west Germany

Lol, if you want to try and move the goalposts from my “murdered Poles”

No, my claim is that you’re equating deported with murdered when you quote said book talking about “hundreds of thousands of murders”, not that murdered after deportation don’t count.

Yet again you fail to provide an alternative to the military occupation of Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union. The only possible alternative was Nazi occupation. I’m not trying to justify Katyn, I’m saying that the invasion itself was justified and that’s proven by the fact that you cannot even theoretically come up with a better alternative with 80 years of hindsight.

Imagine how we would look at the US if they had decided it was more profitable to just team up with the nazis instead

I don’t have to imagine, the US not only teamed up with but propped up fascism all over the globe. I’m Spanish myself, the Franco dictatorship was legitimised by the USA for its entire existence, but I could bring up Suharto in Indonesia, Pinochet in Chile, or an endless list of fascists supported by the USA. Invading eastern Poland and preventing it from being invaded by Nazis isn’t “teaming up with the Nazis”, I’m sorry that you can’t see beyond cold-war propaganda.

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 because of 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. To me, a great alternative would have been the mutual defense agreement that the Soviet Union spent the entire 30s pursuing with England, France and Poland, which the latter countries repeatedly rejected. What’s your alternative?

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?