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Comment on Hexbear federation megathread

It’s not inarguable, it just isn’t worth the effort when someone drops a nugget like that to take the time to write out “why two countries that wanted to destroy each other made this agreement” because you are going to just dismiss it out of hand anyway. Most of us have had this stupid argument multiple times and even though neoliberal historians agree with us, ignorant Redditors to the right of Robert Conquest still treat it as self-evident that their harebrained interpretation of history is true.

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Cleverdawny@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Idk man if you partition Poland with a country and sign a non aggression pact with them, they’re military allies. Idgaf what mental gymnastics you use. Authoritarians collaborate until it becomes time for them to fight with each other over the rubble and fields of slaughter that they have divided amongst themselves. It is the way of history.

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- autismdragon@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You know the western powers signed non agression pacts with Nazi Germany too right? And then did appeasment?
  
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  - Cleverdawny@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    And those pacts were mistakes. But when the Soviet and German Empires invaded Poland jointly, the Western European liberal democracies went to war. While the Soviets only did so after two years of happily dividing the people and treasure and land of Poland with their Nazi friends and allies, and supplying them in their efforts to complete the rape of Europe.
    
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    autismdragon@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    telegraph.co.uk/…/Stalin-planned-to-send-a-millio…
    
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- Awoo@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This is historical revisionism. The soviets did absolutely everything they could to try and convince France and the UK to take action against Hitler but they were hoping Hitler would attack the USSR.
  
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  The ACTUAL historic timeline is like this:
  
  1: The United States Bourgeoisie bankrolled the rise of fascism in Europe.
  
  2: The bourgeois leaders of England, France, Poland, Finland and other Western European nations either ignored, enabled, or appeased Hitler’s worst behavior in the buildup to WW2.
  
  3: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, England in particular, pushed for disastrous bilateral security arrangements which created a domino effect leading to war, while ignoring the USSR’s suggestion of collective, anti-fascist security arrangements.
  
  4: The bourgeois leaders of these countries pursued a policy not of containing fascist aggression, but of diplomatically isolating the USSR, in the hopes that Hitler would go East and carry out an anti-communist genocide on their behalf.
  
  5: The bourgeois leaders of these countries, having ignored or stalled collective security proposals from the USSR, actively made bilateral non-aggression pacts with Hitler before Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed, making the USSR the last in a long line of nations to sign non-aggression pacts with Hitler, after the USSR’s collective security proposals fell through.
  
  6: The USSR only signed Molotov-Ribbentrop to buy time. The USSR only invaded East Poland to prevent a German front from forming right at the Soviet border. This is because attempts to make mutual security arrangements with Poland fell through. The Soviets only moved into the region after the existing government had literally fled the country, leaving it ungoverned. 2 million jews in eastern poland were saved from the nazis by this action.
  
  7: The USSR tried to purchase a strategic corridor of land from Finland that the nazis could easily use to invade the USSR. The USSR not only wanted to legally purchase this land from Finland, but to trade Finland more acres of land in exchange. i.e. an asymmetrical trade that would have ultimately benefited Finland. Finland refused because the fascist leadership of Finland wanted to see Germany invade the USSR through this strategic corridor. This led directly to the Winter War. The Finnish lost the winter war but used their intelligence that they gathered during it to collaborate with the nazis.
  
  8: When the North Atlantic allies finally teamed up with USSR after their strategy of appeasing Hitler backfired, they immediately attempted to make asymmetrical security arrangements that would have obligated the USSR to commit far more troops and resources to the war than any other ally, essentially using the USSR as a shield against the very fascist powers they had spent the better part of a decade appeasing. The British in particular kept stalling on arrangements and pretending to be confused.
  
  9: When the war was over the North Atlantic allies, led by the USA, who came out of the war richer than any other country on Earth, immediately committed to rehabilitating nazis, blaming the USSR, who was decimated by the war, for causing the war, and created NATO to begin encircling the USSR, 6 years before the creation of the Warsaw pact.
  
  10: The North Atlantic allies immediately set to using the Marshall plan to rebuild the fascist German, Italian, and Japanese economies, indebting them to the United States, and orienting them towards anti-communist policy.
  
  11: The North Atlantic allies to tried to use the Marshall plan as a proto-IMF to privatize and deregulate the economy of the war-torn USSR, and open it up to foreign capital. That the USSR rejected this was framed as aggression and used as a justification for beginning the cold war.
  
  But hey, don’t just take my word for it, or this rough outline of what is contained in well regarded books (I implore you to read some). How about we read Albert Einstein’s words spoken at the time these events actually occurred?
  
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  A lot to unpack in this speech but the basics of what Einstein says are:
  
  The USSR made all efforts to stop the war happening.
  
  The western powers(UK, France, US, etc) shut the USSR out of European discussions and betrayed Czechoslovakia.
  
  Molotov-Ribbentrop was an unhappy last resort that they were driven to, that the western powers were attempting to drive the nazis into attacking the USSR and that’s why they would not help the USSR stop them.
  
  The USSR supported everyone while the other powers (UK, France, US, etc) strengthened the nazis and Japanese.
  
  The appointment of Hitler as Germany’s chancellor general, as well as the rising threat from Japan, led to important changes in Soviet foreign policy. Oriented toward Germany since the treaty of Locarno (1925) and the treaty of Special Relations with Berlin (1926), the Kremlin now moved in the opposite direction by trying to establish closer ties with France and Britain to isolate the growing Nazi threat. This policy became known as “collective security” and was associated with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister at the time. The pursuit of collective security lasted approximately as long as he held that position. Japan’s war with China took some pressure off of Russia by allowing it to focus its diplomatic efforts on relations with Europe.
  
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