The Polish armed forces are training citizen volunteers how to be armed partisans, firing rifles and donning gas masks.
That’s… not great. The program is apparently popular, so they are expanding its capacity so that every adult male receives the training.
“I’m not going to engage with most of what you wrote, here are two sensationalist pictures without context as a rebuttal of your well-sourced historical analysis” isn’t the own you think it is. I already graced you with more of my time than you deserve, people who come across the post will be free to judge the quality of my analysis vs yours and form their own opinions.
Btw, you accuse me of “Russian Imperialism”? I clearly and loudly condemned the horrors of the Russian Empire, what the heck are you talking about? If you’re reducing the USSR to a single nationality, I have bad news for you: you’re disregarding the struggle of millions of people from non-slavic-Russian ethnicities who participated in the Soviet project.
By the way, it is RICH that you call the USSR (which saved Europe from Nazism) an imperialist nation, while your comment history is full of support for meaningful pro-democrat anti-Trump protests and respect for “due process”. Showing a total lack of disrespect towards the tens of millions who actually gave their lives in the struggle against fascism while getting to feel good going to peaceful, non-disruptive, meaningless, oligarch-organized political protests that happen within the Overton Window of the most murderous empire to ever exist: the US empire. Wanna fight fascism? Join an actual socialist organization in your area, socialism is historically the only force that has been powerful enough to defeat fascism. Good luck otherwise operating within the framework of the same democrats that funded the turn-to-the-far-right of the GOP over the past decades.
Sensationalist? They give a very clear picture of what the orders were and are a perfect microcosm of how Stalin’s regime operated with the violently anti-communist Nazi’s.
As your well sourced historical analysis states there are plausible reasons for the policy but that doesn’t change the fact that the USSR acted to project and protect its own influence. You don’t get to dress it up as “saviors of Europe” or “benevolent protectors of Poland”.
As for using Russia and USSR interchangeably, I pretty obviously use it due to the outsized russkie influence on USSR policy. Stalin’s USSR was a hard turn from Lenin’s korenisatsiya, Russian culture and interests were first among “equals” (from Stalin’s own mouth). Waxing lyrical about the USSR’s diversity is pretty irrelevant in most conversations and especially here.
And next time you stalk someone’s post history, use a little more critical thinking. In no way do I support just about any of the USA’s foreign policy. I call a spade a spade and operate in real life, outside the confines of internet ideology. You have no clue what I do or don’t do in real life, regardless of what I post. Keep fighting that strawman, trooper, maybe it will go better for you than this thread.
You’re saying this to a Spaniard. From 1936 to 1939, during the Spanish civil war (which the fascists ended up winning thanks to the inaction of western powers and the military intervention of fascist Italy and Germany), the Soviet Union was openly against fascism in Spain. They delivered weapons, troops, planes and tanks in the antifascist struggle on the opposite end of the continent, and were the only country to do so. Three pictures you’ve pulled out of CIA-sponsored anticommunist sources don’t change the material and historical reality that the Soviet Union was staunchly antifascist, both in rethoric and in action. This is 3 years before Molotov-Ribbentrop. Why did the Soviet Union support antifascist Spain on the opposite side of the continent?
Well… Obviously? If my country was communist and antifascist, and was threatened by a fascist country, I would think it morally correct to extend the influence and projection of my country. Do you disagree with this?
Almost as if the experiences from the Civil War and the historical and material conditions of 1939 were different from those of 1917… Granting independence to Poland and seeing it immediately invade Ukraine and Belarus must have been a kick in the balls to Marxists believing in idealistic approaches to the question of nationalities, and that’s just one example of many. If you again don’t see how unity was important (and actually achieved) in a country which managed to maintain social cohesion and a functioning economy during the loss of 27 million people in the struggle against Nazism, I tend to think I’m arguing against an idealist who doesn’t analyse the material and historical constraints of policy.
My whole point with this is: what makes you think yourself more intelligent, well-versed and moral than the Marxist revolutionaries who achieved the first successful collectivisation of the economy of a country, the lasting elimination of the bourgeoisie, and ultimately the defeat of Nazism in Europe which saved millions if not tens of millions of lives from extermination? And also importantly, why are you so intent in conflating Socialism with some sort of Russian Imperialism as if the Bolsheviks weren’t the greatest possible break with Russian Imperialism that could be achieved in Russia?