- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
A Palestinian man was found dead in a park in the Belgian city of Antwerp with his hands and feet tied, leaving the cause of his death a mystery amid authorities’ suggestion that it may have been a suicide.
“Suicide.”
The right outcome of that war would have been both Germany and the Soviets getting rolled by everyone else for invading Poland. But authoritarians were appeased, and thus we got the Soviet-Western alliance.
So, no, I wouldn’t have because the need would never have arisen.
I suppose the lives of the entire Polish nation are a small price to pay for moral purity?
How many more years do you think WW2 would have went on had the Soviet Union collapsed in the absence of American lend-lease, and the UK and US been left to fight the Axis on their own? How many more years of the Holocaust burning ‘undesirables’ in the furnaces are acceptable to not have to sully your hands by joining with the Reds?
I have no doubt that the US and UK retained the material capacity to win (the will? That’s a different question). But there’s a multi-front, multi-million soldier deficit to be made up there, and the Nazis aren’t going to be idle in their new lebensraum. How many lives are worth playing “Both Sides” games with two legitimately gruesome but-in-no-way-reasonably-comparable authoritarian states?
The Soviets invaded Poland, remember. Maybe you’re blanking out on that one, somehow under the impression that the Soviets “freed” Poland from the Nazis or something.
At that point in the war there were no multiple fronts, there was no lend-lease, there were the Nazis and the Soviets getting away with carving up a sovereign country.
So don’t fucking “Polish lives” me here. If you care about Polish lives you hate both Nazis and Soviets.
No, I’m under the impression that the Polish nation survived under Soviet oppression; something which would not have happened under Nazi oppression. Do you not know what Generalplan Ost entailed?
I do hate them both. Just not equally. The Nazis are worse, without ambiguity.
With time, they would’ve killed it, with deportations, settlements, language policy, etc. Poles are more numerous than e.g. Lithuanians but Russia has wanted to Russify the whole area for centuries now. And the Soviets were nothing but the continuation of the genocidal, colonial, Russian empire with a different coat of paint.
They probably would’ve treated Poland like Ukraine and worse right from the start if the Nazis hadn’t tried a very similar thing directly beforehand: Poland had a very active and well-organised resistance, had the Soviets started out with their usual genocidal programme the Polish resistance would’ve fought right back. So they bid their time, first carefully cultivating an image as liberators.
The Soviets had 50 years, and didn’t manage it. The Nazis had five years and managed a fifth of the fucking population.
Pretty sure the Nazis put a higher priority on genocide than the Soviets did. Guess what? That makes them worse. And looking at those numbers, considerably worse.
They did treat Poland like Ukraine.
The Polish Home Army was a nonentity by the end of the war due to the Sovs stabbing them in the back, and the Cursed Soldiers of the next decade achieved little. It wasn’t that the Polish people just suddenly ‘forgot’ about what the Soviets had done to them - it was that the Nazis were unamfuckingbiguously worse.
Did you blank out on the Holodomor or are you denying it?
We’re talking about Soviets vs. Nazis here, not “Who did worse, specifically, in Poland”.
Neither. The looting of Poland by the Soviets post-WW2, the export of foodstuffs under famine conditions, and the repression of Polish political organs is well-recorded. The death toll just wasn’t as high.
Famine in Poland? You’re referring to the Warsaw Ghetto famine (that was the Nazis) or the shortages in the early 1980s? The GDR sent a lot of stuff over back then.
…frankly speaking looking through lists famines in Poland are historically about as astonishingly rare as plague outbreaks.
My point still stands, though: The Soviets were absolutely willing to do worse, it just wasn’t opportune at the moment. And this isn’t about “What either side did in Poland, specifically”, but whether there’s a point at which evil is so bad that it’s pointless to make distinctions. And the Soviets crossed that line.
You can also find people the Nazis treated way better than Poles, Slavic people: The Sorbs (mostly innocently). Or Croats (because Ustaše). That doesn’t suddenly make the Nazis less evil.