I will not defend Stalin and I will not defend the CCP. Just because capitalism isn’t good doesn’t mean that we have to glaze imperialist states. Ask Ukraine and the Baltic states how good they had it during the USSR; my point being that pro-USSR sentiments are largely just pro-Russian propaganda.
China is doing some good nowadays, but it still definitely has corruption. There are still billionaires, polluted air, capitalistic factories—which have terrible working conditions and sell cheaply made carcinogenic products, they’re building AI data centres—some of which will boil the water temperature, bans citizens from accessing a lot of websites, etc.
I even decided to join a solidarity website and it mentioned f**cking Kim Jong-Un as a leftist figure ffs 💀. Literally, ANY North Korean defector will tell you how bad the North Korean regime is. The site had no mention of actual decent examples like Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Martin Luther King Jr, or even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Edit: did not know that Proudhon was a bigot. My bad; thanks immensely for telling me.
I agree with the sentiment, absolutely, but I have to say I snorted a bit when I read ‘leftist spaces have a lot of red flags’ lol. Yea, kind of the flag of choice here lol (though I prefer Anarchist black or a combination of the two)
Humanity is a red flag, left, right, middle; what community of size isn’t full of deceit and violation? Many people use organizations as tools to get what they want, regardless of what the cause is; religion, political, financial, it’s always a fight against corruption, lies, and incompetence that never ends.
Not one passes its own purity test.
I concur.
You’re a liberal. Of course there are red flags in leftist spaces.
“Everyone I make myself mad at is a liberal”
I am unabashedly mad at capitalists. If you want to fuck around and play word games while Marxists dominate the conversation, be my guest.
“Everyone I make myself mad at is a
liberalcapitalist”
According to some (including you):
Failing to unconditionally defend any and all wrongdoings of any socialist(s) means you are a liberal.Obviously this flies in direct contradiction to the definitions set by any sensible human being, but… that doesn’t discount the fact that many agree with you.Are you following me around? Don’t do that. The big bad admins at .world will ban you.
Nah, I just remembered you from how nasty you were to me recently.
But fair point, I should block you. Enjoy your whatever your problem is!
When we see a tankie, we laugh and point, then we move on. There’s no talking them out of it. I grew up in the USSR, they don’t believe my experience. Laugh then ignore.
The problem with the “laugh then ignore” philosophy is that many who are attracted to power do so to abuse that power.
As such, I keep running into moderators of leftist spaces on Lemmy who smack me for calling out abuses of the CCP, USSR, and DPRK. Specifically, lemmy.world/c/latestagecapitalism, lemmy.ml/c/memes, and one other that I can’t remember and can’t find because they deleted all of my comments on their community.
When you have seas of downvotes and bad faith arguments combined with moderators brutally cracking down on dissent, it makes leftists look ridiculous to most. I (and apparently OP) are then frustrated enough to be compelled to spread the word that not every socialist is engaging in good faith. I don’t know if that’s more damaging to socialism than what they do or not, but it’s the truth.
TL;DR: Echo chambers suck.
There’s nothing a woker-than-thou hates more than someone speaking from their own lived experience.
I try to point out the errors, block and move on. I usually only succeed after a round or three.
Personally I don’t consider authoritarians to be “leftist”.
Tankies and libs are both right-wing just with different imperial branding.
I don‘t think that this attitude is productive. Every school of thought has the potential of turning authoritarian and attract people who just want power and influence over people.
This fact is why anarchism is so appealing to me, they don’t have all the answers but they’ve at least identified the problem: Authority.
That’s the edge democracy has, you can kick the motherfucker out.
After Lenin positioned himself as opposite to “left-wing communism” and called it an infantile disorder, I guess Leninism being right-wing became explicit.
Left and right are economic vectors up and down (authoritarian and freedom) are the ones to plot.
“up and down” is a very recent thing
Id respectfully argue that freedom vs tyrany is a very old concept and this is just another way to express that
I mean, in the context of 100 years ago, up and down weren’t directions considered in the political spectrum
What do you think that book is about?
Those aren’t leftist spaces. They’re propaganda places for China etc
A leftist place doesn’t magically become a chinese propaganda place whenever a few chinese propagandists show up there and raise their red flags. It’s just an aspect of the whole thing.
This sounds kind of like the “Nazis at a bar” problem.
If you let ‘a few’ start hanging out at a bar, it becomes a Nazi bar.
So, what’s the solution? Ban them all?
At least when they start being the stereotype, that’s where that goes.
also helps to remind those folks china and russia are capitalist.
I got banned from lemmy.ml for pointing out that the Dengists are state capitalists who literally came to power by repressing actual communists.
A lot of people aren’t aware of who won the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t the people calling for worker ownership of the economy.
Because dengists unabashedly adjusted the economy to material conditions as suggested by prominent thinkers advancing the cause of checks notes Marxism.
No, it doesn’t.
Hard one.
I thought the title was a pun lol
My biggest growth with leftism was just learning to let other well meaning people be wrong. I’m wrong most of the time but inviting other people to dunk on me never really fixed any of my issues so it probably wouldn’t help anyone else either.
There’s plenty of online space for people who think capitalism has to go but maybe we shouldn’t slob off mass murderers and imperialists to make that happen. It’s not a worldview we actually have to fight other internet leftists for. Especially since nothing done online is praxis.
While I appreciate the sentiment, how can we form cohesive organizations without cohesive ideas and policies? The Bolshevists struggled with this and took a lot of ideas into consideration, while forging policy. It doesn’t mean we automatically kick people out of dialogue, until it threatens the developed anticapitalist policy forged through these struggles among ourselves. It’s not that “not everyone has a voice,” as much as "certain policies take precedence in order to stop the advancement of capitalism that directly, indirectly, and more importantly, intentionally harms the many for the insatiable greed of the few.
Well, I’d argue that the cohesive ideas already exist within people’s consciousness in a serviceable state, even as wrong minded as we can be. What doesn’t exist is a directive within us to turn morally good ideas into actions that we take. And we just can’t get that from online, being here talking with eachother like this is too emotionally rewarding whether or not we’re arguing.
If you live in a place where you have a community that can act against capitalism in any particular way, doing that would probably be more effective than checking online with strangers like me or the .ml 社会信用体系 farm for alternatives. You know, it just doesn’t feel like there are any wrong answers now. Also me being here talking is 100% a part of the problem.
No they most certainly are not cohesive, if certain leftists insist on clinging to mis- and dis- information, especially when certain leftists know that Western media is consistently and constantly carrying water for the same system that oppresses us with:
- Surveillance state
- Media lies
- Violent police action
- Embracing fascism while criminalizing even right wing Democrats, let alone leftist thought, writing and discussion
- Creating mental illness to justify incarceration
- Creating more criminal categories to justify concentration camps (homelessness, peaceful protests, mutual aid, feeding the homeless in the park)
- Debanking
- Desnaturalization
- Declaring natural born citizens non-citizens
- Disappearing citizens and noncitizens
The same leftists, I might add, that DV comments that discuss Gell-Mann amneaia,
whinewhile refusing to consider just maybe accusations lobbed in this very thread just may be more psyop lies, or at the very least, gross misrepresentation, like- Operation Condor
- Operation Gladio
- Palestinian Genocide
- Data centers don’t consume too much water, pollute water, increase global warming
- Clean Carbon
- CO² tax credits
- Plastic Recycling
- Asbestos safety
Edit to add: and while I admit I’m woefully inadequate in my knowledge of history, we deal with individuals like this, in 2h and 3D who prefer to feel clever with reactions line this: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/27196446 rather than do the briefest cursory search to actually learn a fact it two, even casually.
You should have that growth looked at.
doc says it’s benign
i would pay to unsee this
All I can see is pizza and french fries, weird.
Just an fyi, and speaking as an anarchist, I would NOT consider Proudhon a good example. Bro was a supporter of the Confederacy, as well as quite a few other very problematic stuff.
Noted! Thanks.
MLs don’t have much love for anarchists or any other sort of anti-authoritarians. Never had, looking back at history.
Literally, ANY North Korean defector will tell you how bad the North Korean regime is.
Okay, but to be fair, you’re never going to hear positive things from a defector about the country they defected from.
It’s not that the defector has negative things it’s what those negative things are about.
There is a big difference between “healthcare system sucks” and “we are being taken, raped, tortured, and/or murdered for not loving dear leader.”
Because these people were never, ever paid to say these things.
This feels like victim blaming. If you literally aren’t allowed to leave your country, that’s a sign that things are dire.
Thousands of people have escaped and told their stories.
Who said they aren’t?
You serious?
Yes I am.
Nice double entendre.
Stalin literally defeated the Nazis lol
Edit: The downvotes tell me y’all aren’t big on history around here, lol.
Stalin started WW2 together with his buddies the Nazis.
This is PragerU propaganda. Anarchists keep drifting farther to the right every day it seems.
Who the fuck is “prageru”? Go eead a history book lol!
Can’t even bother to look that up either.
Blocked
Literal nonsense lol
Aah, then you must be right. I can smell a scholar from afar; “no no literaly nonsense” is the most fantastic rebuttal.
Lol
Buddy I don’t know what history books they have in your country but I can assure you Russia did not start WWII, lmfao
Well I don’t live in Russia so…
Check out the molotov ribbentrop pact if you can read where they, URSS +NAZI Germany split up poland and thus starts the WW2 when invading.
Lol or is it the USA who did it 😆😆😆😂😂😆
Yeah dude you’re blocked.
Are you unaware that the US and Great Britain actually failed to check Hitler because he was “good for business,” and businessmen liked his policies? Thru Emily got involved because the fascists threatened Western business hegemony.
Sure buddy, sure. Is this “business” with you right now?
Check out the molotov ribbentrop pact
via this comment (which, if your request above for a serious rebuttal is sincere, you should read)
Oh no there was a trade agreement 😔
Grasp at straws, grasp at straws…
Yeah it was just a non aggression pact. Stalin begged Britain to form an alliance because he saw what the Nazis were gearing up for. Britain told him to fuck off. Stalins only option was to form a non agression pact, and attempt to rapidly industrialize in preparation for the obvious Double cross by the Nazis.
Then Stalin beat the Nazis lol.
Yeah dude you’re blocked.
Uhh… Good?
The famous non aggressive invasion of Poland by the USSR. Right.
And the Czar defeated Napoleon… so fucking what?
Show some fuckin respect.
+ 50 .ml credits
Good job, Comrade. Nutomic is proud. /s
Thanks, I’m glad your mom still accepts .ml credits 😩
Stalin literally made a deal with the nazis to divide a country and paraded his army side by side with the nazis and ignored everything the nazis were doing and even when he was literally attacked by the nazis he delayed response because he didn’t believe his pal could have betrayed him
This isn’t my write-up but it’s such a good summary that I have it on stand-by to repost everytime this comes up.
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“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)
These types of effort posts are always sort of exhausting. There’s a mixture of truths, lies, and sort of true but devoid of context that allows the poster to steer the claim in a direction that is supported. So I’m going through claim by claim to assess how true it is.
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR.
This is true. Well… sort of. They did offer to do this, but materially were in no position to fight the Nazi invasion. The Red Army purges of 1937 and 1938 left the high command hollowed out. 35-40,000 officers had been either executed or imprisoned.
At the same time, the Red Army was in a massive recruitment drive. They have new untrained soldier from across the country. Their communications systems were substandard still and their heavy weaponry and armory were breaking easily and weren’t well maintained along with a shortage of spare parts.
From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.”
Bessarabia had been annexed in 1918 after they declared independence and joined Romania. Along with the offer by the Soviet Union, both Czechoslovakia and France urged Romania to allow passage. Romania was concerned that if they let the Red Army pass through, the Red Army wouldn’t leave. Despite this pressure, Romania doesn’t allow the Red Army through. Fast forward two years and the USSR annexes Bessarabia.
The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. … he Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics.
This is true. But with a huge caveat. What we consider Poland today is radically shifted after WWII. The western border was shifted 200 or so miles which includes the former German lands like Silesia and Pomerania to compensate the Poles for lost land in the east. The notable exception was Białystok. Białystok was occupied by the Red Army and is now part of modern Poland. This is noted in the above as “a small chunk”.
The claim that this was just “returning” stolen land treats history as a series of arbitrary, frozen snapshots. Why freeze the map at 1918? Why not look at 1772, before the Russian Empire forcibly annexed these exact lands during the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?
And my biggest issue is how this narrative focuses on land and not the people of those lands and the effects of the invasion. Soon after the control of the area, Poles of any standing in the the urban centers were massacred. This gets framed as class warfare. But it didn’t stop there. They continued to execute or deport hundreds of thousands of Jews, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. This is omitted because it’s easier to not share than to have to reframe this as a necessary. The mortality rate during transit and the first winter was staggering, effectively shattering the community structures of the Kresy.
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration.
This misses the important pieces of the timeline. I’ve constructed the timeline as best as I could.
August 23rd
- Russia and Germany sign the Non-Aggression Pact, a public document
- This is the culmination of five months of talks
- They also sign the Secret Additional Protocol which states spheres of influence of each country which carves of the region before any invasion. The Soviets also declared their interest in annexing Bessarabia.
September 1
- Nazi Germany invades
- Polish military actively resists retreating eastward toward the “Romanian Bridgehead” to regroup and wait for promised French and British offenses.
September 3–5
- Ribbentrop pressures Moscow to start their invasion to tie down Polish forces
- Molotov delays, stating the USSR needs more time to prepare the political justification for the invasion
September 10
- The Germans suggest a pretext for the invasion that the USSR is protecting the Belerussians and Ukrainians from the Germans
- The USSR rejects this as it undermines the work they had done showing their friendship
September 14
- Molotov informed the German ambassador that the Red Army was ready
- He also informs them that the Soviet government intended to justify the intervention by arguing that the Polish state had disintegrated, leaving a political vacuum
September 15
- The Red Army begins amassing troops on the border
September 17 2 am
- The Polish President, Prime Minister, and Commander-in-Chief are still physically inside Poland, operating from the southeastern town of Kuty near the Romanian border.
- They are actively trying to command remaining forces and organize a prolonged defense.
September 17 4 am
- The Red Army invades eastern Poland
- Soviet authorities hand a diplomatic note to the Polish ambassador in Moscow, declaring that the Polish state has “ceased to exist”
September 17 Late Night
- The Polish government flees to Romania
September 17-22
- The KOP (Border Protection Corps) fiercely engage the Red Army holding several columns off for several days.
- The Battle of Grodno is defended by local law enforcement, teenage cadets, and voluteers
September 22
- Joint military parade to celebrate the successful capture and partition of the territory
- Soviet forces executed hundreds of the captured defenders in Grodno
- Polish commander, General Władysław Langner, surrenders Lwów as they were being shelled from the west by Germans and advanced upon from the east by the Soviets. He surrenders to the Soviets in exchange for the officer’s safe passage. They were not granted safe passage and were executed at Katyn.
Now, the post concludes by saying the pact was a masterstroke of defensive planning to buy time and space. But the geographical and economic realities prove otherwise.
By liquidating the buffer states, Stalin brought the Soviet border directly in contact with the Nazi war machine on a completely unfortified line. The Red Army abandoned their deeply entrenched, heavily fortified defensive network (the Stalin Line) to rush-build an incomplete layout (the Molotov Line) in a hostile territory with poor infrastructure and incompatible railway gauges by poorly trained new recruits and a decimated officer core. When Operation Barbarossa was launched, this forward deployment became a logistical death trap, allowing the Germans to rapidly encircle and capture millions of Soviet troops in the opening weeks of 1941.
During this “buying time” period, the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement turned the USSR into Nazi Germany’s primary economic lifeline. Stalin shipped massive, highly punctual quantities of oil, grain, rubber, and iron ore directly into Germany. This neutralized the British naval blockade and actively fueling the Nazi conquest of Western Europe.
In return, Stalin demanded German military hardware and heavy industrial machinery. But while the Soviet supply trains ran flawlessly until the day before the invasion, Germany intentionally dragged its feet. What the Soviets actually received were delayed orders, single prototypes, and incomplete projects like the uncompleted hull of the cruiser Lützow.
You do not need to secretly partition five neutral nations, launch unprovoked invasions, and economically sustain a fascist war machine just to “postpone a war.” The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact didn’t protect the USSR. It made the USSR less positioned to deal with the inevitable invasion.
This doesn’t diminishes the monumental reality of how the war ended. The Soviet Union bore the overwhelming burden of destroying the Nazi war machine. Once Operation Barbarossa shattered the pact, the Eastern Front became the primary site of Germany’s defeat. The Red Army inflicted roughly 80% of all German military casualties. The Soviet mobilization and sheer scale of the sacrifice after 1941 were indispensable, achieving a victory over Nazism that the Western Allies quite literally could not have accomplished alone.
Oh cool an actual serious response. Instead of putting it all in one ginormous comment I’d like to try spreading this out over a couple replies if that’s ok with you in order to keep track of everything and as I get around to responding to more stuff. I also know that getting into the details of things is time-consuming which is why I might not respond to everything.
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR.
This is true. Well… sort of. They did offer to do this, but materially were in no position to fight the Nazi invasion.
I don’t understand this as a counter-point to starting a collective offensive. The whole point of seeking allies and making a collective offensive is to join strength against a superior foe. They sent aid to Spain in their fight against the Francoist, I don’t see a reason to disbelieve this.
Along with the offer by the Soviet Union, both Czechoslovakia and France urged Romania to allow passage. Romania was concerned that if they let the Red Army pass through, the Red Army wouldn’t leave. Despite this pressure, Romania doesn’t allow the Red Army through.
Romania was ruled by fascists. They openly sympathized and collaborated with Hitler. This was the flag of the national christian party which was in power at the time:
Their coming to power was remarked by Hitler as the “first happy event of the New Year”[1]. Of course they didn’t let the Red Army through, I don’t care what reason they gave.
Białystok was occupied by the Red Army and is now part of modern Poland. This is noted in the above as “a small chunk”.
I mean compared to all of Poland and compared to what the Red Army took I think this can be noted as a small chunk. Białystok is also colored in the map directly above that statement as “Territories of modern Poland under Soviet occupation”. I thought that part of the response most transparent of all.
The claim that this was just “returning” stolen land treats history as a series of arbitrary, frozen snapshots. Why freeze the map at 1918? Why not look at 1772, before the Russian Empire forcibly annexed these exact lands during the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?
I mean it’s part an ad absurdum argument using the liberals framework of todays european borders as “correct and natural”. I don’t remember exactly the context that reply got made in (I could look it up if you want) so the audience might have been a bit different. There’s this thing that a lot of people hear that Germany and the USSR partitioned poland and they do think of modern poland and don’t know that it mainly involved territories that most people living there wouldn’t consider part of poland. Which is why the Curzon Line had been suggested multiple times as the Soviet-Polish border 10 years prior to Molotow-Ribbentrop.
Soon after the control of the area, Poles of any standing in the the urban centers were massacred. This gets framed as class warfare. But it didn’t stop there. They continued to execute or deport hundreds of thousands of Jews, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. This is omitted because it’s easier to not share than to have to reframe this as a necessary.
Are you suggesting ethnic cleansing or what do you think happened? I’m gonna admit I’m not terribly knowledgeable about the soviet-polish war but I believe that the area east of the Curzon Line was established as an anti-communist buffer and had a lot of anti-communist troops stationed there. That this was untenable for the Soviets who were preparing to fight the Nazis seems plausible to me, but this is indeed a huge blind spot of mine so please do elaborate on the soviet’s reasoning here if you want.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-230-59818-8 43–5 according to wikipedia ↩︎
Well… That’s a relief that you are taking this seriously. I’m always unsure if people want to engage in a serious discussion of the facts. I’ll order my response with the easiest to address to the hardest.
Białystok, Not Focusing on the People, and Historiography
Yes, the map called it out. I didn’t need to drive it home. But I thought it was important to name it and not let it dangle as “one small chunk”.
My larger issue with the original post is how it systematically shifts focus away from human beings to just lines on a map. Doing so allows for the construction of a clean narrative that begins to crumble when you look at the actual people of the land and their treatment under occupation.
I’m not making a claim of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Rather, I’m pointing out that we are always caught between two ways of ordering history. We can look at the facts and build a narrative that honestly accounts for them, or we can start with a rigid narrative and deliberately dim the facts that don’t serve it. History requires a constant, dialogical relationship between the two: testing our overarching narrative against the raw, uncomfortable facts at hand. If you only start with a rigid, pre-determined narrative, vital human realities get left completely out of focus. If you only start with events, it’s hard to pick out what’s important.
Romanian Rulership
That flag is indeed of the National Christian Party. But they were not in power in September 1939. The quote you cited is from 1938.
1935: The National Christian Party (PNC) is formed and that flag is created
December 1937 – February 1938: December 1937 elections, the ruling liberals lose their majority. The Iron Guard, a paramilitary fascist group, is growing in power. To keep them at bay, King Carol II appoints the PNC’s Octavian Goga as Prime Minister. The PNC were fierce opponents to the Iron Guard whom they regularly battled in the streets. However, Carol also suspected they were administratively inept. He anticipated that their radical, chaotic governance would provoke a severe domestic backlash, creating the perfect pretext for the crown to dissolve parliament and tighten absolute control.
Hitler sends a New Year’s telegram describing their appointment as the “first happy event of the New Year”.
This government is a total disaster. The economy panics, violence erupts in the streets between the PNC’s paramilitary forces and the Iron Guard.
February 10, 1938: King Carol II fires the government, bans all political parties, suspends the constitution, and establishes a royal dictatorship. The PNC is dissolved, and the swastika flag is banned from public life.
The paramilitary wing of the PNC joined the Iron Guard. The administrative apparatus join the royal dictatorship serving in the Front of National Rebirth.
1938 – 1939: King Carol II’s regime spends the next 18 months ruthlessly suppressing fascism inside Romania. The state focus turns heavily against the Iron Guard, who are seen as a genuine threat to the crown. They capture and execute the leader of the Iron Guard, Codreanu. The SS and SD begin to funnel money to the Iron Guard.
March 1939: Hitler tears up the Munich Agreement and occupies the rest of Czechoslovakia without Britain or France doing anything.
April 1939: Britain and France guarantee Romania’s independence and territorial integrity. Hitler thinks this guarantee is weak.
September 1939: This is the time of the invasion and Polish government that goes into exile in Romania. The prime minister, Armand Călinescu, is an explicitly pro-Western Prime Minister. They accept Polish refugees and smuggle the Polish gold out of Poland.
September 21, 1939: The Iron Guard assassinate Călinescu.
June 1940: France falls to Germany.
September 1940: Carol appoints General Ion Antonescu backed by the Iron Guard as his prime minister. The Carol royal dictatorship loses popular support. He abdicates the throne. This clears the way for Antonescu to take power and the National Legionary State is formed. Horia Sima, the leader of the Iron Guard, was appointed Vice-Premier. The Iron Guard was declared the sole legal political movement in the country. Nazi Germany officially supported the Iron Guard as a legitimate partner in government.
I want to emphasize again that I’m not trying to build a narrative, just show that there are events on the ground that complicate any narrative. Because they were complicated times being led by individuals who didn’t know how to address the novel events. I gloss over September 1939 to September 1940, not out of concern that it undermines any narrative, but because it doesn’t address the role of fascism in the government at the time. There are several complicating events during this time. What you won’t see is a heroic display of resistance against the Nazi war machine. Instead, you’ll see small compromises and political maneuvering hoping desperately that the tides will change to keep Romania independent.
Do these fucking people not know this??
No I don’t think so. It seems few people even know there were wars between the two world wars. Anyway another good graphic that I meant to post:
The USSR was shopping all around europe to put up a defense against the Nazis because they knew what was coming because Hitler wrote about it in the most famous of all german books: “Mein Kampf”. A book that is supposed to be really good about this, but I haven’t gotten around to reading is “The soviets expected it” by Anna Louise Strong https://archive.org/details/SovietsExpectedIt/page/n1/mode/2up
Also missing from the write-up is that the Soviets were already at war with Japan when they signe the non-agression pact with Germany. When Germany attacked they signed a non-aggression pact with Japan, they didn’t want to fight on two fronts, all by themselves. This is a nation that had thrown of the yoke of feudalism 22 years ago, had fought bloody wars already, was in the process of industrializing and catching up to the rest of the world. Criticise them all you want, but the heroism of the Red Army and the USSR in general in their fight of the Nazis has only very very few parallels.
I think Americans are just fucking brainwashed to think they won WWII. When in fact, they did fuck all in terms of the way WWII turned out.
It’s definitely also west e*ropeans.
Lol. Yes.
Lenin sold Ukraine for a train ticket and then had the audacity to tell the Ukrainians to not resist the German occupation, and when the Ukrainian left organized itself and fought back and got their country back, the Soviets came and massacred them, including treacherous tactics of inviting socialist leaders to meetings just to arrest and kill them, which historically is what the bolsheviks have done to every socialist organization that didn’t want to be ordered by them (including the example you mentioned of Spain, were, after stealing the country gold reserves, they decided to fund a fight against other socialists in the middle of the fight against the fascists… everyone is an spy, right? Even most of their own party leaders, gotta purge them, and even the purgers turned out to be spies too! Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria… if the Party told it must be true, and the funniest part is that right after the Molotov-Ribbentrop the Comintern literally instructed commies to consider the conflict against Germany to be just an imperialist war and ignore it and stop supporting the war against the nazis, the propaganda machine only turned it into The Holy Patriotic War Against Fascism when Germany broke the treaty lol). I guess it’s also important to the party narrative to believe these soviet states weren’t puppet states and they were restoring Ukraine somehow, even though in reality they sold the country and then killed their socialist leadership… but anyway, it requires an incredible amount of party brainwashing to believe the Soviets were going to just pass through Poland with their army, I wonder if you were ever curious about they all decline? Everyone knew it was occupation… but hey, there is also people who believe the USA went to Afghanistan to fight Taliban, to Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction, etc etc, so its fair to believe the Soviets wanted to “pass” through Poland to protect Czechoslovakia because they loved their capitalist government or something… they are always rewriting their history, from literally telling Ukrainians to just accept they now belong to Germany and destroying the Ukrainians that dared to fight the Germans to somehow being the country restorers taking land back from Poland or something, and from literally telling commies in other countries to not support the war against the nazis to then pretend they were against the nazis from the start. It’s really sad how people fall for it.
that sure is a lot of stuff you said, care to go in depth on anything or are we just throwing historical tidbits around with no context to smear the country that saved europe from fascism?
I’m particularly interested in how you came to this conclusion:
it requires an incredible amount of party brainwashing to believe the Soviets were going to just pass through Poland with their army, I wonder if you were ever curious about they all decline? Everyone knew it was occupation…
but any other one of your conjecture’s would be interesting to examine as well
No, I believe you know the context of all of it (Pravda against the withdraw [Stalin was one], Germany sponsors Lenin and put him on a sealed train to go back to Russia and he immediately starts saying Germany is too strong and can’t be defeated therefore they must give a whole country, containing a huge percent of their mineral riches, to Germany [I wonder, from everyone accused of being a German spy, why Lenin wasn’t ever one, no one helped Germany more than him… the subtle suggestion of the section is that giving them Ukraine was the condition of the travel] - As part of the treaty, resistance in Ukraine was discouraged and every organization linked to Bolsheviks stood down - non-Bolshevik communists in urbanized areas as well as anarchists in rural areas formed a resistance and started fighting the Germans while still fighting the White army, and let neither take the country - Ultimately the Red Army, like an imperialist power, and completely disregarding the right of nations to self-determination [bet you know who wrote this one], came and arrested/killed their leaders, disbanded those groups, and took the Ukraine - which I expanded to a commentary about Spain, which also all non-Bolshevik socialist groups were outlawed during the Civil War and their leaders were arrested, killed, and the resistance disbanded - then I joked about bogus accusation of one anarchist leader being a spy, because they also accused half of the Bolshevik leaders of being spies, and then they accused the guy that led the Great Purge of being spy as well, and then they accused the guy that was put on his place of being a spy as well, and, not surprisingly, they did it again with the next guy, and it just baffles me how people eat up that brainwashing propaganda without a second thought and believe everything the party says - I came back to Pact, this thing of saying they only came in two weeks after when there was no more government to make it sound like they were just taking territories that were lost without direction is BULLSHIT, the division was agreed before the invasion, it doesn’t matter if they didn’t invade together, and then pointed out that the narrative of Russia wanting a united-front against fascism blah blah blah is also BULLSHIT because the Comintern literally told communists to not get involved in the war against Germany, and every Bolshevik puppet-party repeated the exact same words, that this was just an imperialist war, and most notable examples would probably be the PCF and KKE, who actively disavowed resistance against the Axis repeating the Comintern dogma even when they were literally occupied by nazis and only AFTER Barbarossa they changed it to “we must all unite against fascism”, up until that point it was just an imperialist war and communists were actively told to not fight the nazis, but the rewritten history want us to believe the opposite - the last part is just about eating up all the party says, even when it’s openly blatantly contradicting itself and all conveniently serves political gains.)
Oh, I also love the “saved Europe from fascism” narrative, that despite the original order being “don’t get involved in the war against fascism”, Europe wasn’t saved at all, unless you believe Portugal, Spain and Greece weren’t part of Europe because 30 years later they were still under fascist regimes - Greece is one particularly funny case. USSR refused to back the KKE on the Civil War so Yugoslavia backed then, and when Tito and Stalin had their fallout the KKE decided to reject Yugoslavia because their party was expelled from the Comintern CULT, and the KKE was defeated a year later because Stalin still refused to help them lol
But all history must be rewritten to make the party look good, who’s in the cult won’t question it anyway.
Wtf lol. To deny that the USSR quite literally saved Europe from a total German fascist takeover is wild to read in 2026.
I see it changed from “saved Europe from fascism” to “saved Europe from Germans”
Knowing history is incompatible with internet purity leftism.
Ahistorical at best.
Stalin begged Churchill for a defense pact against the Nazis and was rejected again and again and was forced to make one with them instead.
Then he defeated the Nazis… Sooo…
“Churchill, can you look away while I take Poland?”
“What? No!”
“I’m being forced to divide it with Hitler then.”I guess they should have just been conquered by the Nazis then, since England and the US saw communism as a bigger threat to their interests than Hitler, and dreamed they’d let Hitler take care of the communists, so they didn’t have to use their own resources, while they worked out plans for Operation Paperclip, and generally hiding Nazis in states besides their own.🤷♀️
LMAO.
…not until they invaded to USSR to depose him and conquer the land.
And not before he begged Churchill for a defense pact. Like I said, not big on history around these parts.
So how many did he kill personally?
Do you not understand how the leader of a country works, lol?
How many Iraqis did George Bush personally kill?
Oh, so Bush was a great leader. Got it.
JFC these people.
Bush was a terrible leader. But people still attribute the deaths of ~ a million Iraqis to him, despite him having never personally killed an Iraqi.
Do you not understand what I’m trying to say here?
Yeah, that Stalin and Bush were vile leaders with zero regard for human life.
So then Stalin is responsible for defeating the Nazis.
In the same sense that Bush was responsible for defeating the Taliban and all these Islamic extremists, I suppose.
Ukrainians have historically had positive opinions of the USSR, especially the older generations that actually lived through it. It’s only recently, due to American propaganda, that the younger generations have negative views of the USSR.
That is very much not true. The older generations that lived through it had no idea you can live better than on the edge of poverty.
Except that there’s published surveys with the data.
I’d like to see those surveys with the data. Got a link?
I don’t see you providing any source other then pulling it out of your ass.
You go back to around 1938 and you won’t find any criticism of the USSR coming from those territories.
