‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024
‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970
Generally anticommunists insist that the German–Soviet Pact of 1939 was vastly more important. The most important event of the twentieth century even, if not the single most important event in the universe’s roughly 13.7 billion years of existence, period.
I am not kidding when I say that I have seen far more equivalences made between communism and German Fascism than I have seen references to the Axis’s atrocities on the Eastern Front.
A user just moved the goalpost to the time when the U.S.S.R. traded some raw materials in exchange for firearms and other machinery (which it later used to help defeat the Axis). One can imagine another counterarguing that this credit deal hardly enabled the Third Reich’s bellicism; that, if anything, it likely only lead to the Axis’s defeat as it allowed the Soviets to prepare for the armed conflict. Ask yourself if that sounds identical to the liberal bourgeoisie’s appeasement.
The Third Reich’s trade with the Kingdom of Romania between January and November 1940 surpassed its trade with the Soviet Union. I would be surprised if the Soviets did indeed deliver ‘about 75%’ of the Third Reich’s imports: only 34% of the Third Reich’s oil came from the Soviet Union; it looks like the Kingdom of Romania was a much more important source of Fascism’s black gold.
The non-aggression pact that was signed well after Nazi germany had signed pacts with Britain and France?
While not directly related to the pacts, the British Empire exported significant quantities of scrap to the Third Reich. In fact, the British Empire served as the Third Reich’s primary source of imported raw materials in the 1930s. I cannot say much about pre-1940 France’s economic relations with the Third Reich, but you sparked my curiosity on that subject.
fuck anyone who diminishes the sacrifices of the Soviet Union against the Nazi tide, it’s barely notch above outright holocaust denial.
Added to this, 75.3% of Europe’s Jewish refugees found refuge in the Soviet Union during World War II, Lithuanian Jews welcomed the Red Army in 1940, which had the highest number of Jews of all the Allied armies, and (my favourite) Soviet policies lead Transnistrians to resist antisemitism, even during Axis occupation.
Oh. That is a good point. You really showed me how wrong I was. I wish that I were as smart as you.
It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.
Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.
The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.
— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262
When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.
This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.
— Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145
No, the relations between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich were an alliance. The relations between the Slovak Republic and the Third Reich were an alliance. The German–Soviet Pact was 1.8 years of neutrality, which the Western Axis broke by launching the largest and deadliest invasion in all of history, yet for some reason antisocialists seem far more interested in the Pact than the invasion.
We can spend all day condemning the German–Soviet Pact to the lowest depths of Hell and overrate its importance to be greater than every other event in history combined. It won’t get us a damn bit closer to understanding the circumstances that made it a likely outcome. Because unlike you, I take tragedies seriously by thoroughly examining their causes as well as their effects. That is why I taught people about the Pact from the Fascist bourgeoisie’s point of view whereas generic antisocialists have bupkes to say about that subject.
Oh come on. You already know what they are going to say to all of this.
Hint: it is a pentasyllable.
All alone without help.
U.S. capitalism was far more useful to the Fascists than to the Soviet Union.
And they didn’t start the whole thing together with Nazi Germany in the first place.
The Empire of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 would be a better starting point, but other candidates include 1935, 1937, 1938, and 1941. There was significantly more fighting throughout the 1930s than the 1920s. An important reason (if not the most important) for WWII was the Great Depression. See the link for details.
You should reread that reply.
Talkies like to act like they’re the left, but really they’re the bottom of the spectrum.
It was about talkies, not tankies.
I’m confused. Are you saying that big business institutionalized militant, petty bourgeois movements in the Russian Federation and the PRC with the intention of securing capitalism at any cost?
Ukraine never had a Nazi problem.
…wow.
That is the flag of the Russian National Union, a neofascist party that has been defunct for twenty-six years.
My guess is that their thinking is based on the sunk cost fallacy. The Western ruling class has been wasting everybody’s tax dollars on this conflict for several years now and nobody wants to see all of that dosh go to waste by letting Kiev and Moscow sign a peace treaty that inhibits NATO expansion.
What I find upsetting is how so many people can dismiss the antisemites in the Ukrainian military and other institutions with half-baked excuses like ‘it’s okay because the neo-Nazis are all gone now’ (which they aren’t), ‘it’s okay because they have a Jewish president’ (who isn’t fixing the problem), and ‘it’s okay because Russia’s got neo-Nazis too’ (which is irrelevant; they aren’t the ones benefitting from our tax dollars). I know that it doesn’t bother neoclassical liberals to keep beating their war drums, but that they can gloss over Ukrainian antisemitism as a nonissue and an open and shut case… just astonishes me.
Soviet policies lead Transnistrians to resist antisemitism, even during Axis occupation.