RE: Putin's lies about Poland in the interview with Carlson.
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
This is also not true. Hitler signed a pact with the Soviets simply so as not to have two fronts, but that did not make them allies. Then he attacked them. He also signed a pact with Poland, as I said, and also attacked them, does this make them allies?
There are different types of alliances - long-term and ad hoc. The fact that they planned to attack each other in the future did not prevent them from forming an alliance against another country in 1939.
Germany and the USSR attacked Poland together, in agreement - this makes them allies at least for the purposes of the war with Poland. The USSR later falsely claimed (and still do) that "they were only protecting the people in eastern Poland", but they were attacking and disarming Polish troops whenever they encountered them. If their intentions were as they declare, they would not use force against Polish units.
Poland did not agree with Germany to attack Czechoslovakia, but used the situation to its advantage to annex the disputed area without the use of force.
In fact, they signed a pact in 1934.
Hitler's 1934 pact with Poland was a non-aggression pact and nothing more. The Hitler-Stalin Pact (Ribbentrop-Molotov) was a pact on joint aggression against another country and the division of that country's territory.
as far as I know, the government of Poland at the time, then a military dictatorship, tended ideologically towards the Third Reich.
That's not true. The political situation in Poland was complicated and thick books were written about the politics of that time. Although it was not the same democracy as in Western countries, it was certainly not a totalitarian system based on racial hatred, chauvinism and the desire to take revenge for the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles.
The ideological sources, the practice of the state, the economic model and the values that guided the authorities were certainly different. From today's perspective, the authorities of that time are often criticized, including: for limited parliamentarism, excessive centralism and too large a role for the state, but no serious person compares the Polish authorities of the 1930s to the Nazis.
I think it is a mistake for Putin to defend the Soviet Union as if it were something patriotic.
Love for the USSR and its supposed virtues and glories is common among Russians today, it is almost a paradigm. Despite everything, Putin has to strive to be popular among Russians, and he himself is also subject to the distorted perception of their history that is common among Russians.
But Germany attacked the USSR practically in the course of the same war. And the Soviet Union did not help Germany to fight with the nations that were at war (namely England and France). Even though, by the time the USSR invaded Poland, the Allies had already declared war on Germany.
So I think to say they were allies is, at the very least, misleading. But it's a purely nominal question.
You're right. Although the German-Soviet pact was initially and primarily also a non-aggression pact that later evolved into something more. In the original pact there was no hint of the invasion of Poland by the USSR, that is something that, due to circumstances, happened later.
I don't. However, I do believe that it had inclinations, at least, greater toward the Axis than toward any other power center. The same as with Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and/or Yugoslavia (the latter at the beginning of the conflict). Are all these governments comparable to Germany? Of course not, yet they allied with it.
But I don't think we disagree much either.