Moscow, my family, and me
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
The USSR signed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 because England signed the Nazi-UK pact of 1938 in Munich. Molotov wanted and would have preferred a pact with the UK and the west, and had made such diplomatic offers and was rebuffed. Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home. If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?
To be fair, he is (now) widely derided for his policy of appeasement.
Also, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had the little caveat of partitioning Poland... To the benefit of both signatories. Not to mention the invasion of the Baltic states.
The attempted tripartite alliance between the UK, France, and the USSR would have also given up Eastern Poland to the Soviet Union. If the UK and France drew the line to Hitler's aggression in Poland, it would have been quite hypocritical to agree to give it to Stalin, instead.
The Munich Agreement explicitly excluded the Soviet Union because the Western Allies hoped that Hitler would set his sights on the Communists and leave the West alone. By the time of the Molotov pact the USSR really had little to no choice.
The invasion of Poland by the USSR was criminal but whether Poland got divided or not was probably going to have little impact on the more general course of WWII at that point, in 1938 perhaps it still could have been averted (at least at the scale at which it occurred). Actually up until the pact in 1939 Stalin was still hoping for an alliance with the West.
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/map-russian-empire-191...
If you look at the 1914 map you see that Churchill and co bundled up a bit of three former empires to build out this new nation. I imagine if there was some conflict in America and Texas was bundled off with a chunk of Mexico to form 'Greater Texas' as a new sovereign state, with the borders being drawn up by Russia and China, then I imagine it would not take much for the U.S.A. to 'invade' this 'Greater Texas' and to collaborate with Mexico to restore the borders.
Note the first picture in 1772 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland#/media/Fi...), showing a Poland that looks remarkably like the Poland of 1939.
But looking at the American Indians' situation, I'm not entirely convinced. The descendants of the expropriated Indians are strangers in their own country just like their ancestors were -- the effects of a land grab or whatever don't end with the deaths of the perpetrators and victims. If handing the land back isn't possible (too many whites, blacks, and others for everyone to emigrate, and not nearly enough Indians to inhabit the country afterwards), then giving the dispossessed tax exemptions and other privileges is certainly a good idea.
As far as Serbia, I was going to disagree with the particulars of your example until I realized that you meant the Kosovo War, not the Yugoslav Wars. That's a related but at least equally thorny question, I think: is there a point at which facts on the ground can override historic rights? My instinct is to say no: if the Serbs can't grab the parts of Bosnia inhabited by Serbs, the Albanians can't grab the parts of Serbia inhabited by Albanians. I think that should be uncontroversial in this context, but it gets more troublesome when you try applying it further back in history...
So, I guess the smartest thing you can do when conquering a region is to allow and encourage the conquered people to join the conquerer's society, and to treat them as first-class citizens when brought on board. That worked for the Roman Empire -- and it's honestly not a bad way to treat conquered peoples.
Should we also recreate the Southern kingdom of Ancient Egypt (a country that can probably make a claim of being the first state on that piece of land), defeat Egypt, throw out all Egyptians and Sudanese, and give the land back to whomever makes a reasonable claim of descendence from the last king of the Southern Kingdom ?
You guys talk about Indians as if they're the only ones that were displaced, but they're hardly the only ones that got displaced. The truth is pretty close to that none of the ethnic groups currently in control of territories originate there.
Hell, the truth is that most Indian tribes are not the original colonists of North America. Most Indian tribes are groups of people cast out (left ? it's unclear) of the Mayan empire who decided to conquer those lands North, displacing others. Should the Native Americans give privileges and land to the ones they displaced as well ?
And if the Indians themselves were not shy of displacing others when they had the means, why do they get special treatment ? Frankly, since I'll be downvoted anyway, allow me to add another politically incorrect tidbit: if the records we do have of inter-clan warfare tactics are true (they are not written by independent observers, so you can argue otherwise), then Indians were not exactly shy about using genocide-and-mass-rape tactics to expand their own tribe's influence.
I've actually visited "original" villages in Africa, and if what's happening there is anything like what has happened in America long ago, here's how displacement happens : the people in those villages do not want that life. The life civilization provides in cities is far superior, and far more reliable. As soon as enough locals know about it, those villages suddenly bleed dry. Why ? Because for instance such a village has a "beer" culture. Now native beer, well it sucks. It's slightly alcoholic, very acidic and bitter, incompletely fermented and has quite a few toxins (in other words, it's a slightly alcoholic drink that you can only drink one cup of without getting ill. Even teenagers one-upping eachother do not drink more than 3) (great curiosity for tourists, not so great as an actual drink). Then one of them finds out that 250km from there, there's a brewery. More than that: it's hiring people, which means that if you work there ~6 hours loading trucks, they'll give you enough money to buy 4-5 cases of beer. For just one day ! You have to understand that these villages have their culture centered around that bad drink they have. It's their definition of luxury, "wealth", desirability, (wo)manhood, etc. Other villages have a culture of wood sculptures (they use wood sculptures as pillows. Amazing but yes, you can make a halfway comfortable pillow out of wood. And, for women, it keeps their hair out of the dust so they can make it beautiful, and work for weeks on their hair without it turning into a dirty mess) ... and then someone brings back a plastic power rangers doll (that in 2 decades somehow made it's way into rural Africa). Well, good luck stopping the kids from going to the cities and getting more of those. Or there's a famine in the village, and there's a monastery in the city that will provide food. Well they'll move the village to right next to the monastery. Or there's an outbreak of disease and a monastery with a hospital. Or or or or or ...
Best of all, most of them will speak a language that resembles arabic, and have notions of French, so a French speaking guide is not hard to find. All government employees will speak French, for instance. So you can understand them and talk to them.
Yes there's cruelty. Yes, there's displacement. Yes, there's even killings (even though it's 99.9% village-on-village violence, 0.1% things like the government forcing them off the land for a mine). But they don't matter. Natural human population replenishment (ie. fucking and babies) will rapidly make up for those. It's the fact that civilization is vastly superior and allows them to join. I understand that "superior" is a sensitive description, but I guarantee that's how they see it. Hell, population replenishment almost makes up for the vast number of people those tribes "lose" to the cities. In some ways it's about every 80s movie teenager having the same wish: getting out of whatever "godforsaken" hole they were born into and into the cities. These villages don't have traditional parent-children relationships so it's a bit hard to tell what the fertility rate is, but a village will have 20 or so women and often close to 100 children of various ages, so probably 5 children per woman is a minimum. They essentially have a kid every year and a half starting at 14 or so until they die (which is at age 35 or 40 or so). Only two things allow for this culture to survive (perhaps better: decay only slowly): ignorance, on the part of the people stuck in those villages, and their massive population growth, producing massive numbers of new ignorant humans.
But their culture and the memory of genocide isn't.
Once things settle down like that it's been too long and practical assimilation into the victors has long happened.
There are a few exceptions when the people are too dissimilar and assimilation has not completed as in Turkey and the Kurds.
The islamic conquest started in a small village near Mecca, more like a square with some tents. Big tents, but tents. This is according to their own legend. Now on the lands they conquered and massacred their way across, there is about a billion people that are very different from the original inhabitants of those lands.
Let put em back in that small village and give Saudi Arabia back to the Jews (the south) and recreate the Eastern Roman Empire and give the North to them !
The same modulo historic details is true for Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, even Africa. The group currently living there either fought or massacred it's way to control of those lands.
The Islamic conquests are the same situation as the American conquests: numbers make it impossible to give the land back to the surviving descendants of the conquered, but they shouldn't be treated as second-class citizens of their own countries. The conquerors' descendants should stop celebrating the conquest; they should acknowledge that what their ancestors did was profoundly wrong; and they should give the conquered peoples more privileges and social prestige than the conquerors, not less.
Also, for those HN-ers who want to really get a good, more truthful look at the causes behind WW2 I heartily recommend Ernst Nolte's "European Civil War". From the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Nolte):
> Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, communism's twin, arose as a desperate response by the threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called the “Bolshevik peril”.
You should be able to understand that it's a hypothesis you find convincing without evangelizing it as "truthful."
We always tell people that HN threads should be like good conversation, but there's one way in which that isn't true. When we're sitting around talking about intense stuff with friends or compatriots, there's a latitude for intense expression that we don't have here. That's because in a large internet community like HN, the bonds between members are much weaker, and there are many tribes and competing loyalties among us. Talking about, for example, how the British never really suffered, is the kind of thing that can stir up conflict all over again (albeit, fortunately, in a trivial teapot). In such a place, we all need to bring our diplomatic skills. I'm sure you can use those and still share your historical insights.
This is just historical revisionism. The Soviets didn't care about Czechoslovakia. Stalin decided to throw his lot in with Hitler for three reasons:
1) He wasn't happy with the way troop commitments were shaping up were the USSR to help the allies resist a German invasion of Poland. The UK and France were only pledging a handful of divisions and apparently expecting the Soviets to do most of the bleeding.
2) The government of Poland was divided among a coterie of "colonels" who weren't unified enough to provide a robust defense, but they were mostly unified in their reluctance to allow Soviet troops into Poland on the way to the German border, fearing (quite reasonably, as it turned out) the Soviets would never leave. So even assuming they didn't just gobble up Poland, Soviet troops would be out of position when the war started.
3) Greed. Pure, unadulterated greed. It was an easy way to snatch up half of Poland while France and the UK were busy dealing with Germany. If all went well the three countries would fight to an exhausted standstill, leaving the Soviets in a very strong strategic position.
>Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home.
You might be able to make the case for this if the USSR hadn't invaded Poland, but that's not what happened.
>If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?
That's false equivalence. Chamberlain and Daladier certainly sold the Czechs down the river, but they weren't busy dividing up Europe with the Germans like Stalin eventually did.
Stalin's deal with Hitler had to be one of the biggest blunders in world history, which he compounded by ignoring obvious increases in German troop strength in the spring of 1941. The USSR was very, very lucky the Brits didn't sue for peace after the fall of France.
Communist project probably cost more to the lands of ex-Russian Empire, in lives, than the total population of the UK today.
Then there's all the crypto colony stuff.
There are various strains of Communists who either (i) believe that the actions of those 20th c. regimes were failures, and the points of failures must be investigated and fixed or (ii) believe that the approach taken by these nations (Marxism-Leninism) was not based on sound principles or (iii) are not proponents of orthodox Marxism at all, such as anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists or to some extent anarcho-Communists.
To lump all Communists together as a monolithic block which supports those actions of past people is ahistorical and wrong. Many do support the actions, though many also do not.
I always find it fascinating that, when defending failed Communist states, Communists tend to revert to a variation of the No-True-Scotsman. The previous Communist regime, with all its murderous barbarism, simply wasn't Communist enough or was the "wrong" Communism to begin with!
There are a few discourses with much better traction than Marxism, why not stick to those?
It's basically a request to produce Failblog-grade falling-on-a-face-while-smashing-your-balls results. Maybe you will be able to do what noone could before you, but chances are, you will just hurt yourself. And your society.