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"while the communist movement actively tried to fight". They also allied with them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact https://en.w

"while the communist movement actively tried to fight". They also allied with them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... Remember this stuff also : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_French_Communist_Party#Before_Operation_Barbarossa_(1939_%E2%80%93_June_1941) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_French_Communis...

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
The history is complicated. The Ribbentrop pact was within the Communist parties seen as necessary to bide time, since the USSR knew Germany was going to invade them. But I would agree, it's inexcusable in retrospect. I am not an apologist for Stalinism, I am not saying any of this was a good thing. I am mostly accused of being a Trotskyist, or whatever. But the role of the Communist movement in resisting Nazism in Europe is something not widely understood in the Anglo-American sphere. To the point where some on the right in the US have now started to conflate the two. Which is... nonsense. Anglo-American post-war triumphalism is/was ridiculous. My father grew up in the rubble of the end of the war. There were no winners, it was tragedy all around.
- kragen 5y ago
  It's sort of ridiculous that this conversation has degraded into debating who to blame for World War II and what was or was not excusable. Listen, all those people are fucking dead! Hirohito was the last surviving World War II leader; he died in 01989, 33 years ago, at which point the other leaders had all been dead for decades. There's nobody left to blame or punish! The youngest WWII soldiers were born around 01930, which is 91 years ago; there are very few of them left alive either. I have the unpleasant feeling that some people are commenting on this thread because they support one or another of the belligerents in that bloody slaughter, as if it were a sportsball game, rather than because they are interested in what is true and what is false. How could you go about debugging a program if you had to argue with advocates of one subroutine or another, intentionally feeding you unreliable information so you'll blame a different subroutine for the bug? How could you go about analyzing a chemical reaction if you had to argue with people who were fans of one or another chemical compound, and tried to argue that their favorite compound would be produced from any reaction, whether or not the necessary elements were present? This is an excellent example of what I mean when I liken HN to the intellectual equivalent of the impoverished slums where I used to volunteer. The relevant point to the factual question being discussed is that the European Resistance was, as you say, led by people who supported Stalin, and they had largely been put in charge of their various countries under the occupation of the United Nations. At the point that we're talking about, in 01945, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had been dead for four years, and Europe was full of the tales of noble sacrifices and terrible suffering the Russians had experienced in order to resist the Nazis. So Stalin could reasonably anticipate a lot more popular support and a lot less government resistance for setting up Communist governments in them, should he push his military advantage further, than Hitler ever had for setting up Nazi governments.
kragen 5y ago
Yes, but the actual alliance was in a secret codicil to the pact; the public face of the pact was just a truce between enemies. Both Hitler and Mussolini came to power largely on the strength of their opposition to Communism, which is why even a pact of neutrality was so scandalous to French Communists.
byroot 5y ago
> They also allied with them As your own link states, this wasn't an alliance. Also if you read the "background" section of the article, you'll see that they very much saw Nazi Germany has a major threat and wanted to contains them early by allying France and Britain. But France and particularly Britain instead prefered trying to appease Germany until the last minute with the results we know. The non-agression pact might seem cynical from the west point of view, but if you put yourself in the soviet shoes for a second, it was a logical move. As for your second link it's really not very assertive, most of the claims made early after the war were rebutted by historians later on.
- drocer88 5y ago
  It says it wasn't a "formal alliance". The Nazi-Soviet pact was alliance for practical purposes as seen with joint "victory parades" with the Wehrmacht and Red Army and expanded trading. I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about. There were disclosures about Nazi-Soviet secret protocols in 1946 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#Discovery_of_the_secret_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... though Soviet attempts to deny this were not credible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#Denial_of_the_secret_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
  - byroot 5y ago
    > was alliance for practical purposes as seen with joint "victory parades" Alliance would mean joint fighting, not joint parading. Yes they secretly divided Europe on a map, and agreed not to fight over it, that not an alliance. > I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about Your second link on the French communist party activities during 39-41. It's like you didn't even read what you linked as source: > but later historians have downplayed the PCF's role in any such actions, stating that they were isolated cases

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

The history is complicated. The Ribbentrop pact was within the Communist parties seen as necessary to bide time, since the USSR knew Germany was going to invade them. But I would agree, it's inexcusable in retrospect. I am not an apologist for Stalinism, I am not saying any of this was a good thing. I am mostly accused of being a Trotskyist, or whatever. But the role of the Communist movement in resisting Nazism in Europe is something not widely understood in the Anglo-American sphere. To the point where some on the right in the US have now started to conflate the two. Which is... nonsense. Anglo-American post-war triumphalism is/was ridiculous. My father grew up in the rubble of the end of the war. There were no winners, it was tragedy all around.

kragen 5y ago
It's sort of ridiculous that this conversation has degraded into debating who to blame for World War II and what was or was not excusable. Listen, all those people are fucking dead! Hirohito was the last surviving World War II leader; he died in 01989, 33 years ago, at which point the other leaders had all been dead for decades. There's nobody left to blame or punish! The youngest WWII soldiers were born around 01930, which is 91 years ago; there are very few of them left alive either. I have the unpleasant feeling that some people are commenting on this thread because they support one or another of the belligerents in that bloody slaughter, as if it were a sportsball game, rather than because they are interested in what is true and what is false. How could you go about debugging a program if you had to argue with advocates of one subroutine or another, intentionally feeding you unreliable information so you'll blame a different subroutine for the bug? How could you go about analyzing a chemical reaction if you had to argue with people who were fans of one or another chemical compound, and tried to argue that their favorite compound would be produced from any reaction, whether or not the necessary elements were present? This is an excellent example of what I mean when I liken HN to the intellectual equivalent of the impoverished slums where I used to volunteer. The relevant point to the factual question being discussed is that the European Resistance was, as you say, led by people who supported Stalin, and they had largely been put in charge of their various countries under the occupation of the United Nations. At the point that we're talking about, in 01945, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had been dead for four years, and Europe was full of the tales of noble sacrifices and terrible suffering the Russians had experienced in order to resist the Nazis. So Stalin could reasonably anticipate a lot more popular support and a lot less government resistance for setting up Communist governments in them, should he push his military advantage further, than Hitler ever had for setting up Nazi governments.

kragen 5y ago

Yes, but the actual alliance was in a secret codicil to the pact; the public face of the pact was just a truce between enemies. Both Hitler and Mussolini came to power largely on the strength of their opposition to Communism, which is why even a pact of neutrality was so scandalous to French Communists.

byroot 5y ago

> They also allied with them As your own link states, this wasn't an alliance. Also if you read the "background" section of the article, you'll see that they very much saw Nazi Germany has a major threat and wanted to contains them early by allying France and Britain. But France and particularly Britain instead prefered trying to appease Germany until the last minute with the results we know. The non-agression pact might seem cynical from the west point of view, but if you put yourself in the soviet shoes for a second, it was a logical move. As for your second link it's really not very assertive, most of the claims made early after the war were rebutted by historians later on.

drocer88 5y ago
It says it wasn't a "formal alliance". The Nazi-Soviet pact was alliance for practical purposes as seen with joint "victory parades" with the Wehrmacht and Red Army and expanded trading. I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about. There were disclosures about Nazi-Soviet secret protocols in 1946 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#Discovery_of_the_secret_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... though Soviet attempts to deny this were not credible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#Denial_of_the_secret_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
- byroot 5y ago
  > was alliance for practical purposes as seen with joint "victory parades" Alliance would mean joint fighting, not joint parading. Yes they secretly divided Europe on a map, and agreed not to fight over it, that not an alliance. > I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about Your second link on the French communist party activities during 39-41. It's like you didn't even read what you linked as source: > but later historians have downplayed the PCF's role in any such actions, stating that they were isolated cases